Hi Everyone - I’ve decided to start publishing this Saturday mornings instead. I look at this like my week recap, so this makes a bit more sense logistically. I hope that is ok with you!
This week:
A current status update for the week
Our logic behind adding a second day
Ad test for next week
What we are working on
Weekly Update
This week we added 197 subscribers, up 38 from last week. I stopped running the Meta ads that weren’t performing and we got a little uptick. We also launched our second day of the newsletter. Our CTR is artificially low in this image because we just launched the new newsletter this morning. It should creep back up to close to 50% by the end of the weekend.
We held our first local event. It was a coffee get-together this past Wednesday morning. We had 25 people sign up and about 12-14 actually showed up. I think this is a pretty decent start. I’m spending a lot of time going to events and I think building trust in person will lead to more people attending our own events.
We also created a few more guides. I finished a networking guide and Warren is working on one for growing your business on LinkedIn. We are still figuring out if we should just give these away or start charging something small for them. They are quite high quality (if I do say so myself).
Adding “Founder Fridays”
This week we started writing a Friday edition of the newsletter. We started doing this for a few reasons:
1) We had a lot of content and wanted to spread it out over more days. We started doing interviews of local founders, and this allows us to have a slightly longer form section.
2) More ad inventory. Writing another day allows us to have more sponsor slots for our supporters.
We are still working through this, but so far it appears to be successful. Our open rates and CTR on the Friday version are definitely lower, but that is to be expected. As long as this edition doesn’t harm the overall product we are quite happy to publish it.
We also may experiment with segmenting our list allowing people to opt out if they don’t want the Friday edition.
Would you charge for guides in our position?
Meta Ads Update (New creative strategy)
Our Meta ads have been pretty static after the last test. Warren and I scripted some new ones that I plan to record early next week. We will also be experimenting with setting up sparkloop and running ads direct to the landing page instead of using lead forms.
I will let you know how that goes. Hopefully we can make back some of our ad cost.
Next Week’s Initiatives
This week we are focusing on:
Creating a storefront for our products
Running ads to our landing page and setting up sparkloop
Landing another sponsor
Thanks for reading. Feel free to respond to this email with any advice or questions!
Until next week,
Ken