Here's what I promised you — my journey so far

So here I am. On October 4th I launched elyfornoville.com. I know it's not rocket science, it's nothing dramatic, new or sexy. But who cares! I made it to motivate myself and I'm proud of it.

Here's a a quick recap of the past month

Two days after I launched the website I reached 162 visitors and 12 subscribers. I was happy and never thought I would get this many so quickly. But at the same time I felt anxious. "People are following my journey. I need to create content and give them updates." How was I going to achieve that?

I was a bit shocked when @tobiashikari mentioned me in a Tweet. He published a post on growthhacklist.com about bootstrappers documenting their journeys.

During the first week I posted regular updates on IndieHackers, tweeted status reports and made a post on Hacker News. I gained new Twitter followers and more subscribers.

Results so far

One week after the launch I had promising results that motivated me. This could work out great ...

• Visits: 452
• Subscribers: 24
• Conversion rate: 5,3%

Two weeks later I hit 33 subscribers ... and they kept coming.

Growth

One full month after the launch I'm really excited about the results so far.

• Visits: 692
• Subscribers: 47
• Conversion rate: 6,8%
• Featured on Growth Hack List
• First page on Hacker News 'HN:SHOW' for a day and 7 upvotes

Chat with Corey Gwin of Blurt.app

But there was still something wrong. I had not written anything for my newsletter. Why do I need subscribers if I don't take the time to write something for them? I kept putting it off. I had a talk with @coreygwin, the founder of Blurt.app. We had a great talk about work and life. He shared some nice resources on how to start writing and finding your way as an Indie Maker. I start using Blurt and wrote short pieces of text that eventually lead to this newsletter. Thanks for the motivation, Corey!

After two days of writing it felt good to have my story on paper. It was a relief and I had something to share with my audience that was real. The real me.

Lessons Learned

My personal website kept me motivated to work on my projects, and along the way I learned some lessons I want to share.

• Always set up and automated thank you email for your subscribe form. I forgot to do that and had to write to each of my first subscribers individually.
• Don't wait too long to start writing your newsletter. Even it's a few lines of text each day/week of what your current journey was. This will help you get to a full newsletter.
• Try to catch your users before they leave the site. One week after launch, I created a popup that asked users to subscribe before they left. It actually worked. Seven subscribers signed up via the popup form.
• Be open and real about your story. It reads better and people actually follow you for being the real you.
• At first I had a feeling I was not spending enough time on my projects. But I realised that generating subscribers is a project on its own where you create content for your website and newsletters.

Next Month?

I will get into more detail about existing and future projects.

• Two new clients via landing-page-specialist.io
• Started a new project Diabetic & Me

I was able to make it this far through your support, opinions and advice, so…

Thank you!

Ely Fornoville