Hi Everyone - Very excited about some of the new changes we’ve made this past week.

On a whim, I redid our whole website (more on this later).

This week:

This week we added 212 subscribers, up 28 from last week. This is mostly from us increasing our ad spend per day from $25 to $40. We are running some tests and changing up our ads, so it makes sense to do this. We also landed another sponsor so we have the funds to pour into growth. Warren and I have agreed to funnel all profits into growth for the next 2 months.

Unfortunately, our open rate and CTR are still both trending down. I think this could be because of South by Southwest. I bet many people are pretty tired of events and meetups, there may be a bit of a hangover. We are doing some polling to improve our content and we are also looking into some list segmentation.

Our guides aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, but we are comfortably in the double digits for downloads. We did some polling, and it seems like people are most interested in a guide on how to grow their business with newsletters (duh). Will be working on this and a LinkedIn guide in the next few weeks.

Austinfoundersfeed.com is now live. I got a bit frustrated with the limitations of the website builder on Beehiiv, and I kinda went crazy.

These are the things that I prioritized:

1) Signup flow. Beehiiv didn’t let me have all the sign up flow features that I wanted. I was able to build out the exact pipeline that I had in mind. Currently it goes:

Signup —> Sparkloop —> Survey —> Our Products —> Partnered Offers —> Beehiiv Boosts.

Honestly, I may drop the survey and send that out as an email. I’m tracking the flow and it seems like people are kind turned off by it. While data is great, I think it is a higher priority to sell the networking guide or an affiliate than get a survey response.

2) Business Directory - One of our most important features has been our business directory. This has indirectly lead to 100% of our revenue.

If someone wants to add their business to the directory for free, they have to fill out a survey. In that survey we ask if they are interested in advertising with us. This is our #1 place for warm leads.

We revamped this and also added the option for a paid feature for $19 per month. Interested to see if anyone bites on this.

3) Sponsorship Page - I think this is good for social proof. The first pass of the website was really a placeholder, but we were seeing way more traffic to it than I expected. I ramped this up and added more details on what sponsorship could look like. I also added in a sponsor interest form.

I honestly just love building, so this was a fun project for me. Next up is the events page (this is a pretty big project).

I only got to test a few of the creatives that I launched last week. I did the long test over static image / video and different font on successful ads.

Both of these didn’t perform better than my existing ads.

I did end up sending ads to the landing page with somewhat expected results. On our page, we are seeing about 2x the cost of using the lead forms. We are getting some back with Sparkloop, but I’m interested to see if this is a better strategy long term.

If the engagement, willingness to purchase, or offset cost of the new subscribers going to the website is better, it will be worth it.

I’m going to monitor this for a month and will let you know how it goes!

This week we are focusing on: