Hey everyone! Loving the growth we are seeing with AFF. We are on pace to hit 1000 subscribers by the end of the month. Before we get there, we would love to have our first sponsorship deal in place. If you know anyone who wants to reach 800+ Austin entrepreneurs, let us know!

This week:

This week we added 224 subscribers to the newsletter. We also saw an uptick in CTR after we launched the business directory (more on this later). Unfortunately, there was a minor drop-off in viewership (~5%). I don’t think this is very worrisome, more likely, we could have optimized the subject line better.

I’m really excited about the growth we are seeing. The first video set of ads that I put out is still doing well, and we are making constant iterations to reduce our cost of acquiring new subscribers.

I think we are at the point where we can add real value to local businesses in the form of sponsorships.

To date, we have made $5.61 in total revenue from the newsletter. $3.36 is from boosts on Beehiiv and $2.25 is from one of the ads that we have run so far (through the Beehiiv ad network).

We have spent $831.48 on the newsletter ($25 per day on ads, and subscriptions to Beehiiv, Zapier, etc.). If it isn’t obvious, I don’t see a path to profitability via the monetization from Beehiiv alone.

The good news is that there are plenty of real ways that we can create value for our subscribers and also earn some money along the way.

The main path that we will take for this is direct sponsorship, not through the platform. One of the reasons that we chose to create a newsletter for Austin founders is that they likely are interested in growing their business, are willing to spend money on growing their business, and also have the money to invest in their business. Very fortunately, this demographic is quite appealing to advertisers of local business as well as business-focused products.

From our polling, many of our readers are interested in paying for accounting and marketing services in the new year.

While our list isn’t huge, I believe the quality of our audience and the clear demand for specific tooling will be appealing to advertisers.

So how are we finding sponsors?

Right now we have two paths towards finding sponsors:

Direct reach-out - I send an email to local businesses that would be a good fit for our audience. I do a ton of due diligence to make sure they are good businesses that we would want to partner with (arguably the most important part). I expect this will be a fairly low hit rate, but it is still worth pursuing.

Our strategy is to look to explore two places (1) services that our audience would like based on our polls (2) companies who have advertised with local print or other digital media platforms in Austin.

We have started sending these messages out (no responses yet).

Inbound - I think this is likely the highest ROI for us. In all of our surveys, we ask if the subscriber is interested in advertising with us. We will be reaching out to this group if they have said yes.

This group already knows who we are and sees the value we provide. I will let you all know how this goes!

Although our audience is fairly small now, I think we have a strong offer.

For our early sponsors we are offer $75 per placement, generally looking to lock in contracts for 2-3 months. Assuming we grow at the same rate we currently do, they will be getting a pretty big discount in the last month for taking the leap to advertise early.

If most businesses that advertise with us are local, many will break even on just one customer (think an accounting firm, dentist, lawyer, even a day spa).

I would love any feedback on our process here if you have it!

I guess I didn’t really mention it here, but we did roll out a big initiative this past week. We were thinking about ways to create more value for our readers aside from news and events.

One thing that all of them likely want is more traffic to their business. To target that desire, we created a business directory. Basically, they could fill out a form and have their business added to our list of Austin Founders Feed- owned businesses.

For the readers it is free promotion and a place to find local businesses. For us, it was a nice way to get a better understanding of our customers and find potential sponsors.

I would say that this was moderately successful. We got about 10 people who signed up and put in their business. From those there are 3 or for that I would actually use myself (relevant to my work or interests).

Of this group, about 6 people said they would be interested in advertising with us and the remaining 4 said “maybe”.

I’ll be reaching out to them this upcoming week.

I think this is a new section I’m going to add.

I’m pushing to do a new meta ad set every week. I think it is interesting to share what I’m learning so far.

To lay some groundwork, I started running meta ads early and it is our primary medium of user acquisition. You can see all our ads we have run here, feel free to copy (unless you’re in Austin directly competing for spend pls). This is the progression so far (to catch you up):

Week 1: Text on a still image of a landmark in Austin. Calls to actions were things like “Tired of Missing Events for Austin Founders?” and “Never miss an opportunity to grow your Austin based business”. These did ok, we were getting new subscribers for around $2.

Week 2: Simple note app ads. Similar copy, but just took a picture of the notebook app on the iPhone. I’ve seen other companies do this well (morning brew, I think). This was about the same $2-2.50 per subscriber.

Week 3: Meme ads. My best one was one of the car turning off the highway towards Austin Founders Feed. This got us in the $1.80-$2 range per sub.

Week 4: Simple video ads. This is what really kicked us off. I ran a simple video of someone walking along the river with text on screen. We were getting subs for this at around $0.50. This was a massive lift.

Week 5: Another set of Video ads. I tried a few different combinations of different backdrops and colors. None performed as well as the original one from Week 4. We were still getting leads from this set for ~$1 though.

This week, I’m going to do one more pass at a non-video ad. Our core audience is 35-55, so I’m experimenting with a few different images of men and women in that age range in the photos. They will be accompanied by a quote “I always know whats happening in the Austin business scene”.

I’m interested to see if these ads do well with meta’s direct targeting of these groups. I’m not expecting anything crazy, but it is an interesting test. I got this idea from a friend Rajiv… I literally hijacked it from his ad set (thanks for the inspiration)!

So far, the event angle has been the strongest, way more compelling for clicks and signups than local news.

I’m still very new to this, but I feel like I’m learning a ton very quickly.

One of our goals for this month is still to get at least 1 sponsor. Honestly, I haven’t been as on top of this as I would have liked.

I got a little discouraged from cold outbound, so I shifted more of my focus to getting warm leads via our surveys. It is still on my agenda to do more of this cold outreach though. I think it is an important skill to develop, especially as we grow.

This week I’m also focusing on some automation. It takes Warren a lot of time to sift through all the events each week, so I’m going to try to help automate that process. I experimented briefly with Zapier and n8n, but it looks like they don’t have connections with the platforms that we pull from.

I’m going to try to vibe code a scraper for this use case. I’ll let you know how it goes!