How I 3x'd my newsletter subscribers
I've been writing a newsletter about early stage MIT startups for a few months now. I had decent / modest growth initially by sharing it through friends and classmates at MIT.
https://seamuscassidy.substack.com/
At the end of the semester, I realized I had information on over 100 of the earliest stage startups at one of the most innovative universities in the world. I thought this was pretty cool, and figured others might be interested in seeing this info in a database rather than learning about them in long form articles.
I spent a few hours manually typing the info for each of these startups into an Excel spreadsheet. I then pulled in even more MIT startups that I knew of through classmates but hadn't yet written about in Recap.
I then saved this database in Dropbox, and created the simple landing page below on Umso (probably should have used Carrd). I then created a quick automation in Zapier so that any time someone adds their email through the landing page they get an automated email from me with the database attached to the email.
After doing this, I shared the landing page in a Slack channel with incoming MIT students basically saying "I know it can be hard navigating all the startups at MIT, so I created a database with all of them here." This lead to a few hundred subscribers from that channel alone. Over the next few weeks I shared the landing page in other Slack / WhatsApp groups, and have just started sharing it in forums like this as well. This simple free resource, more than tripled my subscriber count and it was so easy to do.
If you have any feedback on the resource or my landing page please let me know. Would love to know where else I can share this to continue to grow my audience. Thanks in advance!
Nice one. Free resources are underrated.
Thanks, totally agree!