1/ Come for the Content, Stay for the Community. A thread.

I don’t buy into “you should have a cofounder”

I think investors are just hedging their bets on the team

Actively finding a cofounder seems odd and forced to tick a box ✅

If you (potentially) have one, great!

💰Pay amazing folks (contract/FTE/PTE)

One pro is to share the burden with someone who cares as much about the business as you do.

Going looking for a cofounder (whether you’re pressured to or not) seems like a disaster

Let's talk about defining a price for one-time payment products.

When I saw that @gumroad supported Pay What You Want, I had no doubt that this would be the pricing strategy for CSS Scan.

I'd always recommend PWYW with a minimum price instead of a fixed pricing. Why? [...]

It turns out that some people just value your product more than others!

👉 With PWYW you're not only receiving the value that you expected but also donations for a good work.

Plus, with a minimum price, you'll at least earn the same amount you were supposed to if it was fixed.

💡 You only need 1 person paying more to already make it worth.

It's not easy, though. CSS Scan started at $1.99. It was selling like water, so I raised the price to $2.99, and after that, $3.99 - in about 3 days.

❗️ What I didn't expect was that 30% of people were paying more!

I realized that the price could still be higher by looking at the average of the sales prices. E.g., when it was $3.99, the average price of it was actually at $4.69!

I left it at $3.99 for 3 months. Based on the $4.69 average, 1 week ago I decided to raise it again to $4.99.

🧐 Now let's look at the data!

📈 Previous conversion rate: 6,5%
📉 Current conversion rate: 5,7%

It received 1403 views this month. Doing math:
(1403*6,5%)*3,99 = $363
(1403*5,7%)*4,99 = $399

🤔 So there's actually a growth in revenue
⬆️ $363 to $399
🎉 +$36 or +10% per month

How Morning Brew grew to 2.5M subscribers in 5 years ☕

Here are the early growth tactics used to reach 20M+ revenue in 2021

A thread👇👇

1) In 2015, Founders Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief started the Morning Brew, an email newsletter with the purpose of making business news more interesting for young people. Students wanted something to keep them informed in a more engaging and fun way

2) They noticed students felt the need to follow business news but found current media dry and difficult to read.

Current outlets like the Wall Street Journal lacked the high level roundup that most young people needed to quickly stay informed and not put them to sleep

3) Strategy 1: Pure hustle
At 20 years old, Alex created a PDF newsletter (originally called the Market Corner) and sent it to 45 friends and family. They then got their first 300 subscribers by putting out flyers and speaking at lectures to fellow students at Michigan University

4) They spoke at 50 business classes/clubs explaining what they’re doing, the problem they solve, and that it’s free to join. Students gladly joined and word of mouth spread fast. After 4 months the list grew to 1000 people, eventually reaching 1M in 2019. 15% from word of mouth

This is the blueprint I've followed to build my own business/income in ~4 years. This is how I learned to make websites + apps, learned SEO, learned how to write well, and how to grow my SaaS product.

👇

Get your time right by eliminating most entertainment and leisure.

Produce (work) more than you consume (watch/read/listen to entertainment).

Work intentionally, have fun intentionally, create a balance that you control. Free up a few (3-4) hours a day.

Use that new time to build new skills + knowledge by doing work for free for other people.

Do free work that helps save them time, make them money, or save them money (things that people will pay for).

Do a bit every day. Because it's free, there's less pressure to perform

Enhance learning by purchasing courses, reading books, and taking action to learn those skills by applying them to the free work you're doing.

Figure out what you like to do and what you don't like to do (do more of what you like to do and less of what you don't).

Figure out what works and what doesn't work (there's definitely a lot of advice out there that doesn't work or is contextual to the environment it works in).