ccantana

Typo aside, that does not materially affect the point. “Management” in this case appears to be every other team at the company...

> What's wrong with the UX of IRC?

One sentence later:

> ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).

Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it?

This place is a parody of itself sometimes.

I run a popular weekly newsletter that makes fun of the tech industry. Think: The Onion meets TechCrunch.

Newsletters can generally charge a much higher CPM than a social media accounts or even podcasts in some cases. You can start making beer money with only a few thousand subscribers.

We’re also thinking of hosting a few live events as well once our audience is large enough.

(P.S. for the curious, the newsletter is called TechLoaf: https://techloaf.io)

Hey, that's my newsletter!

Glad you're a fan, and always excited to see my extremely lo-tech baby get love on HN.

I'll send you some swag - reply to any of the emails.

Proud you're standing with The Loaf in this crowded Weekly Newsletter as a Service (WNaaS) space.

Lo-tech archive:

https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977...

"...aged for 12 years in Mezcal barrels to give it a smoggy aroma and a robust gunpowder-magnesium chloride finish."

That is legitimately brilliant.

+1 on your point about marketing. I also deeply undervalued how much goes into a great/thoughtful marketing plan, all the way from choosing the broad messaging and distribution channels through the “tiny” details like nailing the copy on your landing page (this may seem easy or straightforward, but it took us a while to truly understand what worked).

At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc...

And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.

About 30% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing, which is drastically higher than what we saw earlier iterations do.

(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)

Absolutely. Beyond the “obvious” stuff like getting an early look at what people in the heart of the tech universe are working on, I’ve found the community to be very supportive and willing to help on promising ideas.

For example, I shared an early version of TechLoaf on here last year (https://TechLoaf.io — think: The Onion meets TechCrunch) and a) received super precise feedback on our landing page and newsletter format and b) recruited a few writers who now actively contribute each week.

I’m very grateful for this wonderful corner of the internet.

I realize this would probably be a last resort, but I’ve heard success stories of companies rallying their user bases to personally email the App Store on behalf of the company (“hey, I love x app. It makes my experience with Apple products so much better...”).

This could be a call to action included in the Rescuetime newsletter.

Despite their occasional authoritarian moments, Apple generally listens to enough frustrated customers.

They’re one and the same for us; our core product is a weekly newsletter.

Thank you! Nice to see a few early supporters on here :)

Exactly, we have the luxury of being able to show a single, clear example of essentially the entire product. I realize that most SaaS companies probably don’t have that luxury, as each customer’s use case will be slightly different.

A couple for you that I found invaluable as I taught myself programming:

1. Team Treehouse. They now have a huge library covering just about anything he could imagine wanting to learn, mostly geared towards beginners. Much of their work is a) project-based so students can understand the practical implications of what they’re learning and b) split up into short videos/sections to help keep their attention.

2. App Academy Open. App Academy just opened up their introductory curriculum in a series of short-form videos and programming exercises that are highly-entertaining and practical.

Once he’s graduated from those, I’d second the recommendation here to check out techyourselfcs.com. Bradfield is a fantastic resource for self-taught programmers who want to build up their CS fundamentals.

Bradfield is an excellent resource and Oz and his team are fantastic.

The only caveat would be that a lot of Bradfield’s curriculum assumes that students have some programming background already, so it might make sense as a secondary resource after starting with some more basic programming courses.

You should come write for us :)

For what it’s worth, we’ve had a lot of success with a strategy not mentioned here: hosting a site that’s intentionally mysterious, if not slightly provocative.

About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.

We’re not a SaaS company, so I realize this may be comparing apples to oranges, but we had experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that were similar to a few encouraged here.

And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.

(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)

100% is. We’ve mostly done super targeted, smaller scale marketing. When we have something get huge on Reddit, for example, conversion drops off because it’s a general crowd.

About 50% of visitors click either the “preview” or “archive” link

Open rate: 60% (+- 5%) Click through: 7% (+- 2%) Unsubscribe rate: <1%

Glad you dug it :)

And agreed, conversion numbers are highly dependent on how thoughtful our targeting is. We generally shoot for almost laughlibly small, but super targeted, outreach. Certainly factors into our unusually high conversion.

Great insight. Only caveat would be that our core product is the email newsletter (not sure if that was true of rent.com back in the day).

Exactly. And if somebody subscribes, you have the chance to reach (and thereby help) them many more times in the future than a fairweather fan who forgets you as quickly as their feeds refresh.

Good catch, thanks :)

I wish I had saved them — but, essentially, our early landing pages were feeds of content that were restricted after x stories at which point you were prompted to subscribe.

They were very similar to the CNN or NY Times home pages, but with less content visible and more (obnoxious) calls to subscribe to the email.

We also experimented with a minimalist landing page similar to the current one, but with screenshots of the email in the background. In hindsight, it was distracting and slightly confusing.

Exactly. It’s also kind of jarring in a world where content is unlimited, free, and available on every channel. It piques some people’s curiosity to land on a site where it’s semi-restricted.

Couldn’t agree more regarding his point on landing page optimization.

At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc...

And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.

About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.

(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)