This is the first milestone for my newsletter - I reached 100 subscribers last week, after launching it 2 months ago.

Here’s what I learned during the last 2 months:

  1. Events drive the engagement. When I look at my subscribers graph, the two events that I ran, generated big bumps of new subscribers. Another source of subscribers, although smaller but more consistent, is publishing to my LinkedIn network, where I have 1,500 followers.

  2. Organic discovery is slow. The goal for me was not to grow it as quick as possible, but rather to learn the skills required to run the newsletter and a promote it and just to have fun sharing my knowledge. I also realised how important the discovery is and how slow is organic growth, without social media.

  3. Even at small scale, publishing online can drive a lot of networking opportunities, sourcing great ideas and finding leads. I’ve never had so many people, who I know and strangers, reaching out with ideas, leads and interesting connections.

  4. Social media consumes a lot of time, so prioritising it is vital when you don’t have a team to rely on.

  5. Ask for feedback proactively. As with any product or service it is almost impossible to get it right the first time. On the other hand, over-planning is also counterproductive. So, from the beginning I decided to prioritise action over planning, just give it a crack and just fix based on user feedback.

  6. I learned heaps by just writing a newsletter every week

    • Writing with the help of GPT-4 is much easier but a bit of an art. You do need to provide your original ideas first.

    • Optimising my time to write weekly edition of newsletter based on my learning routine is important

    • Refreshed my skills on running and optimising a website in the cloud, as well as automating my workflow through scripts and storing content in git

    • SEO optimisation is an art

    • Audio editing skills and working with professional microphones is an entire new world for me

    • Voice training. By hearing your own voice gives a lot of room for improvement. I also discovered that voice training is a thing not only for actors but also for business professionals.

    • Understanding the social media ecosystem that I have never tapped into in the past

    • Overall structuring of my thoughts and knowledge

Next milestone is 500 subscribers!

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Photo by Mike Enerio on Unsplash


This article reflects my personal views and opinions only, which may be different from the companies and employers that I am associated with.