u/CourtzSGD

Many people feel sad about their growth. They see others with massive growth and tons of subscribers. Then when they examine those people's work they find it to be the same quality as their own.

Niche matters.

If you are growing slowly, you may be in a "boring" niche. You will never grow as fast as someone writing in health, money, growth-hacking or relationships. Sure there are definitely things you can do to improve, but you will likely never be a rocket.

And that's ok.

You might make more money from a smaller, wealthier audience. You may enjoy a small audience more.

Everyone's journey is different.

(And this is from me, writing in the boring niche of project management. It's taken me 3 years to get to my current 2500 subscribers.)

Is there an app that you use to create your HTML for your newsletter where you can just paste your text and have it edit the HTML for you and paste it back into your newsletter tool?

I use Kit.

At the moment I'm just using Claude to write my HTML, but it's a back and forth process and I run out of credits quickly.

I wanted to share a few reflections from having my app up and running for a week now. I’m still genuinely shocked that people actually cared enough to sign up for this thing I built.

And even crazier that four people have actually paid me money.

We launched expecting basically nothing. My best guess and hope was that I'd get one customer in my first month. Instead, we’ve now had 11 brands sign up and we’ve already closed 4 deals from it.

That’s honestly way more than I expected this early on.

What’s been interesting is realizing how different reality is from the “build it and they will come” idea. Organic traction helped us validate the concept, but we learned we’d need to run ads if we want to grow properly.

And to be transparent: the ads aren’t profitable yet.

But we can see the path now. We know people want it. We know businesses will pay for it. Now it’s about improving the funnel, tightening the offer, and learning how to acquire customers sustainably.

As a small team/solo builder, that feeling is hard to explain. Internet strangers pulling out their wallets for something that started as an idea in your head is wild.

If you’re sitting on an app, SaaS, website, or idea because you’re worried nobody will care; launch it anyway.

I wanted to share a few reflections from having my app up and running for a week now. I’m still genuinely shocked that people actually cared enough to sign up for this thing I built.

And even crazier that four people have actually paid me money.

We launched expecting basically nothing. My best guess and hope was that I'd get one customer in my first month. Instead, we’ve now had 11 brands sign up and we’ve already closed 4 deals from it.

That’s honestly way more than I expected this early on.

What’s been interesting is realizing how different reality is from the “build it and they will come” idea. Organic traction helped us validate the concept, but we learned we’d need to run ads if we want to grow properly.

And to be transparent: the ads aren’t profitable yet.

But we can see the path now. We know people want it. We know businesses will pay for it. Now it’s about improving the funnel, tightening the offer, and learning how to acquire customers sustainably.

As a small team/solo builder, that feeling is hard to explain. Internet strangers pulling out their wallets for something that started as an idea in your head is wild.

If you’re sitting on an app, SaaS, website, or idea because you’re worried nobody will care; launch it anyway.

I've written this as a reply in so many comments, so I thought I would just make it a post.

My top tip for Substack is to write notes, but there's an important caveat. Writing notes using voice dictation is by far the best way to do it.

1. It's much, much quicker.
2. You sound like a human and not like an AI.

People want to hear from other people. They want to know that people feel their pain and connect with them in some way.

When you type, it just makes you more robotic and less relatable somehow. This is pretty much how I'm able to create so many notes every day and grow subscribers much more quickly.

Has anyone tried to run ads to get subscribers to their substack account?

I sell five dollar digital products and so for me getting more subscribers would mean getting more sales. But I'm not sure exactly how to rank out what the best format is or what the best platform would be.

I doubt that my ads would be profitable also, unless I could get lots of subscribers for less than the five dollars that I occasionally get back from a sale. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is lots of money to be made this way.

Does anyone use any of the free models in OpenRouter with their n8n workflows? I don't see why we should only use the paid OpenAI models even for simple things like writing emails.