Hi Everyone - Welcome back. I hope you had an awesome week!

We made some really awesome progress with the newsletter in the past few days. We would consider our second day a success, and we are looking forward to building on that momentum.

This week:

This week we added 184 subscribers, down 13 from last week. This appears to be the normal ebb and flow of subscribers. Our open rate and CTR are both down a bit. The Friday edition has slightly lower open rates and lower CTR for us. This isn’t a major concern for us. Fridays don’t have events which are the #1 driver for regular clicks for us.

Last Friday’s edition still hit > 40% open rate, and the one we launched this morning is trending in that direction as well. We still consider this a success. As long as we are over 40%, and have the extra ad inventory from a second day, we are happy. As a matter of fact, the ad CTR is equally good if not higher on Fridays, so that is a net win.

We also launched our networking guide. We are giving the first 20 away for free, and so far people have downloaded 10. This is a little less than we hoped, but we are adding this to the onboarding flow which we expect will increase volume (more on this later).

We also have been having success onboarding sponsors. We recently just passed the profitability mark on the life of the newsletter (Revenue - (total ad spend + operating costs), and we are quite excited about that! I want to be fully transparent with our earnings, but I also want to balance that with respect for our sponsors. I will likely do a roll-up at the end of 6-9 months so no one can be singled out.

At New Media Summit, the founder of MarketBeat (Matt Paulson) gave a really compelling talk about new subscriber funnels. He said that the moment a new reader subscribes is when they are likely the most engaged with your content that they will ever be.

Following this logic, he believes it is the best time to show them offers and send them emails. He is sending 10+ Welcome emails and showing them 10+ offers during this time. We are absolutely not doing that, however, we are 100% increasing our onboarding experience.

This is the onboarding flow that we are building:

Subscribe —> Beehiiv Boosts —> Survey —> Our Products —> Our Offers

Our hope is that we can provide new readers with value up front while also making back some of our advertising costs.

Let’s walk through this flow.

1) User subscribes - Self explanatory

2) Beehiiv Boosts - If a new reader also subscribes to another newsletter that we recommend, we get a referral fee. These can range from $1-3 and could completely offset the cost of the new subscriber for us.

I would also like to get SparkLoop going as well. They run a similar service, but they are a bit more optimized for recommendations. So far, I have not been able to add this here as well.

3) Survey - This data is very useful for us. Our current monetization is primarily through sponsors. On this survey we ask the readers if they are interested in advertising with us. The demographic and business data are also useful for us when approaching new sponsors to work with.

4) Our Products - This is a thank you page for completing the survey. We give the subscriber a free guide as well as a heavily discounted paid guide. A sale of the paid guide $2-4 would also offset the acquisition cost of the new subscriber for us.

5) Offers - for this, we just have a relevant affiliate link page. I got these from signing up for Impact. Many people work out special deals here, but for now affiliates are a good first step for us.

We will be rolling this out this week. I’ve designed the flow, but we are not running traffic to it yet. Also, there are some bugs with my boosts, so I’m waiting to get those resolved.

The last step in this is to start running our Meta ads to our landing page instead of using lead forms.

As I mentioned above, one of our major initiatives is to start running ads directly to our landing page. I’m interested to see the cost difference from there.

I have 4 new creatives that I’m going to experiment with:

1) Long text over a static image or video - I’ve seen some people be very successful with a massive text block on screen. Not sure why this is, but it seems to have worked with multiple people.

2) Using a lead magnet in the ad - We have a free business resources guide that we are giving away. I’ve been wary to try this because my hypothesis is that people from these ads won’t be engaged readers, but many more experienced people tell me this isn’t the case. I guess I have to test it myself.

3) Founder led ads - This will be me talking on screen about what Austin Founders Feed is. I’ve seen this work well with CPG, and figured I might as well give it a shot.

4) Different font on successful ads - A friend connected me with Dara Denny, who is a wizard with Meta ads. She took one look at my top performing ad and asked me “Why did you choose such a masculine font?”. I did not know that font could be masculine or feminine, but this was really great feedback. The little things like font can have a massive impact on results.

Dara also recommended I change up my campaign structure a bit. I had been running all my ads under one campaign. Each week I would make a new ad set and let them run wild.

She recommended I make another campaign with one ad set that just has my top performing ads in it. This should get my most budget, and I should use the other one as a testing campaign. If one wins there it gets moved to the winning campaign.

I’m going to try this out. Will report back with results!

This week we are focusing on: