Day #0 of $100 MRR Challenge

The last challenge was to come up with, build, and validate a SAAS under 30 days.

On Day 20, I realized SAAS was not my cup of tea.

So I’m back in the media business - building my old newsletter (ostradis.com).

What is Ostradis? 🧐

Ostradis was a newsletter I started working on back in November of 2022.

I would personally interview or find the podcasts, blogs, essays, etc of successful entrepreneurs than study them to find lessons on how they succeeded.

My goal was to take their decades of business experience and distill it for newer entrepreneurs.

While Ostradis is a newsletter - I did charge a $1 subscription fee for anyone interested in it when I first started.

Eventually I ended up increasing that to $5 a month and $10 a month at some point.

Newsletters usually don’t charge anything but I wanted to do something unique - I didn’t want people signing up just because.

I’d rather have them make the commitment & show me they value what we’re working on.

The Challenge & Our Numbers 💸

Ostradis is at $27 of MRR right now with $110 in total revenue ($89.81 net revenue after fees).

There are 6 active customers / subscribers right now.

• 3 paying $5 a month

• 1 paying $10 a month

• 1 paying $1 a month

The challenge is to get to $100 MRR in 30 days.

We’re selling memberships through Gumroad for now.

I would switch over to Beehiiv but I don’t have the money to pay the premium $49 a month.

The Strategy 🧩

There are 2 sides to the newsletter:

• Content

• Customer Acquisition

The content is straightforward, we play around with format & frequency until we find something subscribers are happy with.

As for customer acquisition:

The first step is to think about the right demographic.

So far we’ve made sales through 3 ways:

• Friends & Family (High Churn)

• Communities for Indie Hackers & Entrepreneurs (Low Churn)

• Twitter Cold DMs (High Churn)

The common pattern for a person who buys into our subscription and doesn’t churn is:

• Early to mid twenties

• United States or Australia

• New to business or less than 5 years of experience

• Building a digital / tech company

I found these people mostly in digital communities like slack groups.

There are a couple of other customer acquisition methods that come to mind:

• Twitter (Cold DMing)

  • This method got me one subscriber that ended up churning. I still think if I do it right I could get high quality subscribers.

• Quora 

  • A lot of people ask questions about entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship. It’s possible to inject a promotion of Ostradis into some of the comments.

• Affiliates 

  • I made one sale that did not churn at all using affiliates. Could just find more affiliates.

• Reddit (DMs & Content)

  • Share free newsletter issues and add link to the end.

  • DM people in relevant subreddits

• Events

  • Specifically, organize events with people with an audience then use their audience to promote the event. Then promote Ostradis during the event.

• Communities & Forums

  • Posting free newsletter issues and snippets with links attached at the end.

  • Posts requesting feedback to subtly promote Ostradis

  • Posts sharing wins of the newsletter to subtly promote it

  • DMing members

  • Options: Indie Hackers, Hacker News

• Guest Posting & Cross Posting

  • Partnering with other newsletters and writing an issue for them or cross promoting each other

The strategy is to pick three acquisition strategies & stick to it.

If they work, great.

If not, we can always extend the challenge to try other acquisition methods.

The Plan ⌛️

I’m going with the following acquisition channels:

• Twitter

• Indie Hackers

• Reddit

First 10 days of the challenge will be dedicated Twitter.

The next 10 days of the challenge will be dedicated to Indie Hackers.

And the last 10 days to Reddit.

Tomorrow I start marketing & creating content.

Till the next time folks ✌️