Hey Everyone! Excited to publish this first real episode of the Growth Account. This week, I’ll breakdown:

It has been exactly one month since we started the Austin Founders Feed. In a month, we have reached 500+ subscribers and kept a solid open rate and CTR.

This is really good signal for us that we are on the right track. We have seen some minor drop off in open rate and CTR. As our list grows, this is normal, but we are working on ways to improve these (mostly by just improving our content).

Our subscriber growth has come primarily from 3 sources:

Let’s dive into each of these channels to look at the anatomy of what worked and didn’t work.

Direct Reach out - This is usually the lowest hanging fruit for newsletters. To grow our first 10-15 subscribers I reached out to my friends who are business owners in Austin and asked them to subscribe. I also asked them for early feedback on the concept.

Many told us that the strongest angle of our newsletter was the event aggregation. This actually has been proven true based on our marketing metrics (more on that next).

I actually think it would not be a good idea to start a newsletter if you don’t have people that you could reach out to like this. If you don’t have 10 people you know who are the target market of your newsletter, you probably don’t know enough about your audience or the industry you’re talking about.

This first group of people is very important to helping shape the vision, the voice, and the success of the newsletter you create.

Paid Marketing - I have never run paid ads before starting this newsletter. AFF was a great excuse for me to learn this skill. I committed to spending $25 per day to grow the newsletter for the first 3 months of this project.

My hypothesis is that if I put in this amount of money in the early stages, we could get this to a point where sponsors are covering the ad spend by month 3 (TBD if this will be true).

For the ads, I targeted a radius of 40 miles around Austin and started running mostly text ads. I tried a few variations, some text on image and others that were screenshots of the notepad app with varying success.

Our early attempts were getting subscribers from $1.75 - $2.50 on average. I thought that this was decent considering our target customer is a business owner themselves.

This was all until last week, our ads this Friday took off. We switched to a simple video with text format and our ads dropped all the way down to $0.45 per lead. This was amazing, with the $25 spend, this got us up to 60 new subscribers in a single day. The price is going up a little bit, but this has stayed fairly consistent for the last 4 days.

I can’t express to you the type of dopamine I felt from this. Holy cow, I 100% recommend.

I’m going to do a future post on my entire Meta Ads strategy in a few weeks because this is already getting kinda long. Just know that meta ads work if you’re willing to pay.

Referrals - I got pretty lucky with this early on. I joined a newsletter discord group via reddit, and it just so happened that the admin runs What’s Weird ATX. Highly recommend if you’re looking for unique things to do in Austin! I met up with her for lunch and we agreed to exchange referral links.

I kinda made my own luck here though. I had been posting questions on reddit and being fairly active in the newsletter space for a while. I actually posted this github of all the lessons that I accumulated studying newsletters the last 6 months. To me, a lot of getting referrals is about creating surface area and social proof.

This worked out really well I think. What’s Weird ATX is way bigger than us, but we were running Meta ads growing at a fast pace. They get to catch the tailwind of our ads, and we get to benefit from their existing presence. Win - Win.

We actually just got our second referral from Texas Operator just recently. This one likely came about from all the success we had been having referring to What’s Weird ATX and my other newsletters. To date, we’ve already referred 50 subscribers. This shows up on your beehiiv account, and lets others know that it could be useful to create a referral relationship with you.

Overall, we are very happy with this growth. It seems like we are creating an engine for this to continue in the future.

Something we’ve been struggling with is getting engagement on our polls and surveys. These are a great way for us to learn about our audience so we can produce a better product for them. They are also super useful to our sponsors for demographics.

To date, like 3/500+ people have clicked into our polls and 6/500+ have responded to our onboarding survey.

Last week, we tried asking people to fill out the poll. We mentioned how it helps us improve the product. We got on average an even worse response (if normalized by our total number of subscribers).

We have similar results on our entry survey. So far, 6 people have filled that out.

Anyone have thoughts on how we could improve this?

I’m going to offer an incentive (chance to win a gift card to a nice Austin restaurant) and see if that works for the Survey.

One of our goals for this month is to get at least 1 sponsor. This goes a long way for proof of concept and for my wallet that is bleeding cash for Meta ads.

We have two approaches that we are taking:

1) Cold reach out - We are dming and emailing accounting firms and business service firms in the local Austin area. It is almost tax season, and I think that this group would be reasonably likely to be interested in partnering.

2) Inbound. In our onboarding survey, we ask people if they would be interested in advertising with us. A few so far have said yes. I think these warm leads will be the most compelling for us. My focus is on improving response rate on our survey.

I think incentives or lead magnets could go a long way here.