Client/Server newsletter
Money Stuff for software engineers
My subscriber count flatlined around 230 for a week, and then I got another popular post on Hacker News that pushed me over the edge, seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994765
Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible... without wearing out my welcome in any of them
My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.
I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618 . A lot of the subscribers weren't directly coming from Hacker News, but several daily newsletters picked me up because of the Hacker News exposure. And obviously someone who subscribes to a newsletter has a higher-than-average chance of subscribing to another newsletter!
The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google. And then this final post pushed me over the edge.
I've gotten no traction from the programming and technology Reddits (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (I think I'm too small to try pay-to-play at this point). I've also not gotten any traction on IndieHackers, but I still like posting the milestones to have a developer log of the milestones that I've reached.
I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.
See you at 2^9
I crossed 100 subscribers for my newsletter, Client/Server, on Thursday! This came off the back of making the Hacker News frontpage on my Monday post.
Before that, I had gotten a lot of positive feedback from my subscribers but hadn't had a post stick on the frontpage of something yet. It had mostly been friends and friends-of-friends. So it's nice to see some validation that I'm on the right track (and the huge bump in traffic that I've gotten across the board)
This pushed me over the threshold where Substack started recommending my newslewtter on its widgets, so I've been seeing a steady trickle of new subscribers over the past few days.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618
The post: https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever
I've been working on my newsletter for 2 months, and my newsletter post from yesterday was the first to reach 1000 views!
My goal has been to make the Money Stuff for software engineering (where I explain current events in the tech industry through the lens of a software engineer).
So far, I have come to the following conclusion about what people want to read, from most-important to least-important:
Non-political current events in the tech industry, reinterpreted from the bottom-up perspective of a software engineer.
Explaining how company dynamics lead to insane-sounding decisions or unforced errors.
Straightforward news pieces.
Politics. It's going to be extremely important this year, but people don't want to read it. Or maybe I'm bad at writing it.
Naturally, sharing it widely was really important. This was the first piece I wrote that seemed reasonable to share on Reddit AND Hacker News AND LinkedIn. Here was the post that hit 1000 views: https://www.clientserver.dev/p/create-react-app-is-a-zombie-application
I hit 20 free subscribers, and 4 of them are people that I don't know.
Since I only have a few issues written so far, I'm experimenting with different topics.
So far, politics of working at tech companies is the topic that has gotten the most interest, the most fun are where I get to rant about technologies that have given me grief
My worst-performing post was the one I liked the least
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