We hit 100 signups — here's what we learned
The channels that worked, the ones that didn't, and the one thing I'd do differently from day one.
A hundred people signing up for something you built is a weird feeling. It's not a lot by most startup metrics — but when each one is a real person who read your words, decided they wanted more, and handed over their email, it hits differently.
Here's the honest breakdown of how we got there, what surprised us, and what I'd change if I was starting again tomorrow.
The channels, ranked by actual signups
I tracked every signup source manually for the first 60 days. Here's what the data actually showed — not what I expected it to show.
1. Direct mentions in Slack communities (41 signups)
Not blasting channels. Not self-promotion threads. Just being genuinely helpful in conversations and mentioning the newsletter when it was directly relevant. The conversion rate on these was absurd — roughly 1 in 3 people who clicked actually subscribed.
2. One tweet that hit (28 signups)
I posted a thread about replacing our analytics stack with a $0/month setup using Plausible, Cloudflare, and a single Supabase table. It wasn't viral. ~4k impressions. But the people it reached were exactly the right people.
3. The subscribe page itself (18 signups)
People found it directly — bookmarked it, shared the URL with a friend, came back weeks after seeing it once. The copy on that page is doing real work.
Everything else (13 signups)
LinkedIn posts, a guest appearance in someone's newsletter, a ProductHunt comment. Combined. These felt like they should work better than they did.
What I'd do differently
Start building the list before you have anything to send. I waited until I had two posts drafted before opening signups. That's the wrong order. The list-building is the product, not a distribution channel for the product.
The second thing: I underestimated how much the confirmation email copy matters. The first version was generic. After rewriting it to sound like a human sent it — specific, direct, no filler — the confirm rate went from 61% to 84%.
What's next
The next milestone is 500 — and I'm going to get there differently. More on that in the next update.