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by Jacob O'Bryant

A question for people who run newsletters

I would like to try marketing Findka via email newsletters. If you run a newsletter and you think your audience would be interested in Findka, would you send me an email? Perhaps we can work something out, like a paid ad or cross-promotion. Alternatively, if you have relevant marketing experience and you want to give me some advice, I'd appreciate that too.

Background information

Findka is doing pretty well. We just passed 400 total subscribers and we've been holding steady at 50 - 60 daily active users for several weeks now. User feedback is generally positive. The most common request is for more variety in the essays that Findka recommends.

For the past few weeks I've been mulling over various changes I could make. However, I'm starting to think that the best way to improve Findka is just to get more users. The more users we have, the more diversity we'll have in our article corpus and the more ratings we'll have to train the recommendation algorithm. And this way, we can keep the user experience simple.

I had a chat with someone a few weeks ago who mentioned that newsletters might be a good user acquisition channel. People who have already signed up for one newsletter are more likely to sign up for another one. So I'd like to try building a strategy around that. (I'm also going to resume blogging regularly).

I'm pretty ambitious about Findka's future, but the first step is ramen profitability. I want to make a job board, kind of like how Hacker News advertises positions at YC companies—but Findka will target the job ads using your article preference data. I'd probably include a single job link at the top of each email. I'll also provide a paid option for those who don't want ads. To keep things interesting, maybe we'll only have remote jobs, or only part-time/freelance or something.

Anyway, if you think you might be able to help make this happen, please get in touch!

Published 5 Jan 2021

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