u/Ok_Parfait_4006

Gonna be honest, I didn’t expect to be sharing numbers this small. But small numbers with context are more useful than no numbers at all.
Week 5 update on The AI Edge, a free weekly newsletter reviewing AI tools for freelancers and solopreneurs.
Subscribers: 11
Open rate: 41.38%
Industry average open rate: 20-25%
The subscriber number is humbling. The open rate tells a different story.
The people who do subscribe are actually reading it. That’s the only metric that matters at this stage. If the open rate was 10%, I’d be questioning the whole thing. At 41%, the product is working. The distribution isn’t.
What I’ve learned in 5 weeks: most AI tool content is either hype or YouTube summaries. Nobody is testing tools for 3+ weeks and writing honestly about what broke, what got dropped, and what’s still open in their tabs. That’s the gap I’m filling.
What’s not working: converting any of this into subscribers fast enough. Reddit has been the best channel so far. LinkedIn had one post hit 6,500 impressions.
What’s next: staying consistent, one issue every Friday, and figuring out distribution before the content.
If you’re running a newsletter or building something similar, curious how you’re thinking about early growth.

Gonna be honest, I expected most of these to end up uninstalled after a week.

I've been running my freelance operation solo for a few years now and i test a lot of tools. Most of them sound great in a YouTube review and then just... sit in a tab i never open.

These ones didn't.

Fathom AI - completely free meeting recorder. Summary hits your inbox 30 seconds after the call. I haven't taken a single note in 3 weeks. Didn't expect to actually trust it but here we are.

NotebookLM - this one surprised me the most. Had a client project with 6 documents, 2 PDFs and a handful of articles i needed to pull insights from. Uploaded everything, started asking questions, and it gave me cited answers pointing to exact pages. The thing that got me: it refuses to pull from the internet. Only answers from what you give it. No hallucinations.

Tango - client handoff was coming up and I needed SOPs. Hit record, clicked through my workflow, done. Screenshots, annotations, everything. What I'd normally spend an hour on took maybe 6 minutes.

Descript - had a recorded presentation that was a mess. Edited the whole thing by just editing the transcript text. Removed every filler word across 40 minutes in one click. Still kind of can't believe that's real.

HoneyBook - client asked for a proposal same day as our discovery call. Fed it my notes and had a full draft in under 10 minutes. Scope, pricing, timeline. I changed maybe 3 lines.

What i dropped: Gamma is genuinely cool but i give maybe 2 presentations a year so it's not sticking. Napkin AI I just kept forgetting existed, which probably tells you something.

The ones that stuck all had one thing in common - they handled stuff I was already avoiding doing. The ones i dropped needed me to build a new habit first. That's too much friction.

If you're starting from scratch, Fathom and NotebookLM are both free and both worth it immediately.