Hi Everyone - I’ve been traveling for work this week, so Warren is stepping in to share our biggest lesson from the week: how consistent organic content helps us get more value from our paid advertising.

This week:

This week we added 109 subscribers, down 21 from last week. Our ad rates have really stabilized around $1.40 per sub. We are starting to see more organic traffic which is really exciting.

Last week I mentioned we are switching to lemonsqueezy from beehiiv. We are slowly rolling this out, but it will take some time and serious testing. I’ve migrated 3/5 of our guides so far and hope to get to the rest this week.

I’m by no means an Instagram expert.

But since we’ve been running Meta ads for the past seven months, I’ve tried to post consistently so we can capture as much value as possible from every dollar we spend.

An ad might introduce someone to Austin Founders Feed, but our organic content helps determine what happens next. When they visit our social media profiles, do they see something active, useful, and worth following?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that templates are the key to consistency.

Create a strong format once, then reuse it again and again. This makes it possible to produce consistently engaging content without rebuilding every post from scratch.

We currently have templates for:

Carousels have worked especially well for us. They give people multiple slides to swipe through, which keeps them engaged longer than a typical single-image post.

This week, I created a new carousel template for repurposing the top story from our Monday newsletter.

The first post performed better than our average, generating more than 1,000 views, 16 likes, and 3 comments.

It was a small win, but it reinforced the larger lesson: paid distribution works better when it leads to a profile filled with engaging organic content.

So far, the results continue to be pretty inconclusive although it seems the hero_split page is decisively worse. We will run this for one more week and hopefully have enough data to decide which landing page performs best.

Current Results:

What we're working through this week: