I had fun writing this. https://tfos.co/p/onboarding-flow/

Neat! I’m really curious how this helps the doability of growing Yakread—I’ve never launched anything before, but really want to, so I’ve been following the Yakread product news pretty closely such that I can get some ideas. You said a while ago something to effect of “ads are a pretty mindless way to grow a product, as long as you ignore the amount of money you’re spending”—does this mean that you’d recommend new products with decent pockets try out at ad-first marketing strategy?

I am a big fan of ads--if you're ok spending at least, say, $500/month, then IMO it's definitely worth considering. A big transition in thought I've had is that before I ever launched anything that got a decent number of signups, it felt like getting new users was this impossibly difficult task, and I thought/hoped that once I figured that out, the rest would be golden. Sure, I'd have to keep developing the product and stuff, but at least the "hard" bit would be over. I have since discovered that the "hard" bit is actually building a product that retains users. That was The Sample's existential problem--it actually did wonderfully in terms of new signups, but churn killed its growth. Yakread also has a big churn problem--I'm guessing most products do at first--but in Yakread's case I'm more confident that I'll be able to improve retention, whereas with The Sample it felt like a more fundamental problem with the core product. So IMO perhaps the biggest benefit of ads is that they help you start focusing on the really hard thing first, i.e. building a product that retains well. Then once the product is solid you can put more focus on top-of-funnel growth, whether that's by continuing with ads or by using some other method. I think of ads as having two main potential uses: (1) as a way to get data to help you iterate on creating a high-retaining product, (2) as an ongoing source of growth. Either way you definitely want to have proper analytics in place so you can measure and analyze results. But for #1 it's OK if you're losing money overall--that's what I was referring to by the "ads are great as long as you don't care about losing money" thing. You just need to get enough data so you can get an idea of e.g. what's your landing page conversion rate, what's your activation rate (this is a big thing I learned from Vikram), what does ongoing retention look like etc. You want your ad spend to result in actionable insights.

Appreciate the response! That gives me some good tangible numbers. By “newsletter ads”, do you mean that there are other advertising systems you’d use over Google/Facebook? (and how did you find them?)

yeah, I just book ads in random newsletters now. imo it's an especially good fit for yakread since "newsletter readers" is the target audience. I think google/facebook would be worth focusing more on once I get to #2/growth stage. I tried doing facebook ads with the sample but never got it to work that great. > and how did you find them? This is the downside of advertising in newsletters; it's kind of a pain.

How embarrassing, just re-checked “Help Me Sponsor Your Newsletter” and you literally already linked a directory, how did i miss that 😑

I know a handful of newsletters that run ads just from my time working in this space over the past couple years 😉 ha ha I was about to link that

It’d be a little less exhausting than what I’ve read in MAKE by Pieter Levels—which is just to post relentlessly on Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt every time you have a major-ish release. I’ve always felt a little too internet-shy to be that brazen, would much rather just pay people for straightforward ads.

yeah same, dealing with reddit mods is pretty far down on my list of things I enjoy doing ha ha

For my own current product I’m unsure if there’s justifiable HN overlap, but I’ll keep that in mind (+ it is funny to hear of yet another instance of how dang single-handedly holds that entire website together)

it's great for practicing having a thick skin lol

My one thought would be to write a blog post that could incidentally be HN-appropriate, like “How can we ethically monetize web fiction?” and then slip in a little product promo like ya do

I even had someone send a weird long screed to my email address after that one, which I ignored here ya go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30270450 > 457 comments

Would dovetail nicely with blog posts about Biff that I’ve been meaning to do 🤔

🙌 yes, please write posts about biff ha ha!

I’m trying! I’m just still too bad at webdev lol