Hey everyone - We did it! We got to our first 1000 subscribers this week.

Now what…

This week:

This week we added 247 subscribers to the newsletter. We also saw our CTR stay high after making our calendar clickable in the intro and launching our business directory. Unfortunately, we are still bleeding open rate a little bit. I think it may be time to clean our list of people who haven’t opened any of our stuff yet.

Our main focus for the next few weeks is on getting sponsors. That will be the secondary proof of concept that this can be profitable for us (more on this below).

1000 subscribers is a nice milestone for us to tell sponsors, but it is just a part of the process. What is more exciting is that we reached this benchmark with far less spend than we expected.

Based on the niche (Austin business owners), I was expecting to get subscribers for around $1.50 - $2 per subscriber. With our ads, we have been able to do this for around ~$0.70.

This gives us signal that there is demand for what we are offering, and hopefully there is matching demand to advertise to this group.

We designed Austin Founders Feed with the idea that portions of it could be automated. The event and news aggregation are the first that we will be looking to create systems for.

Automation doesn’t necessarily mean that we won’t write it anymore, it means that we are getting more systematic about how we consolidate the resources and find our stories.

This past week I created (vibe coded) an event aggregator and a news aggregator. It is a GitHub action that scrapes multiple websites and stores all of this in an Notion database.

I think we will try to eventually fully automate the events, but there will likely always be a little bit of our spirit in the writing.

We are also exploring some interviews with founders, and will be letting that loose in our issue on Monday. (Not sure how we would automate this… yet)

To date, we have sent out about 20 cold emails and 10 warm emails (thanks Warren). We have received 2 responses from each, one of which is leading to a call.

I’m not surprised by this. I think this is a decent hit rate, but there is definitely room for us to improve. Neither Warren nor I have any real experience in cold email/sales so this is a fun chapter.

Honestly, cracking the sponsorship game is our #1 priority right now. I know multiple other local media companies (newsletters, meetups, etc.) that are also hunting for sponsors. If we can get good at bringing these in, we can also forward them along to this broader group.

Our goal is to get 1 locked in before Feb 1. Will let you know how that goes next week!

Ads from last week were a flop unfortunately. The user profiles didn’t meet our cost expectations, and that is totally OK. Part of the fun of this is the experimentation, and when trying new things of course you’re going to have some things not go your way.

This week, I am going to let our ads sit. I have a few tests I want to run, but I also want to see how long our current ad set can have legs. I have been releasing new ads every Friday, but maybe a better cadence is every two weeks.

Sometimes there is a season in a business where it is time to put your head down and get to work. That is the case with sponsors this week.

Our goal is to identify 60 more businesses locally and send them out by the end of next week. We will also test a few different email approaches and see what works best.

I also have a plan to get a nice gift card to use as an incentive to fill out our onboarding survey. I haven’t gotten around to doing this yet. If I haven’t at least bought the gift card by next week’s edition, please yell at me. Thx.