Grow No Matter What
Week 3 of Founding Typogram
Greetings, friends! I can’t believe another week flies by!
Over the past week, I have been obsessed with the Y Combinator application status. I wrote about our application on Day 26’s newsletter, and I have been chill about it since, well, until now. Last Monday, I saw on Reddit that some applicants were getting interview invitations, and on Wednesday, some got accepted! The fact that I haven’t heard anything makes me worried. There is still time and chances left for us; I am not losing hope yet. Either way, one thing is clear: our startup is moving forward with and without getting into an accelerator. We will grow no matter what.
This week’s newsletter is focused on the theme of “growth.” Two reasons behind it:
Growth is a forever theme of startup life. Aside from developing the main SaaS app, I have also been working on a few growth hack projects, and I would like to share the results with you.
My cofounder Hua has cooked up a cool new project on the side to help people grow social media engagement.
On Day 13’s newsletter, A Day in the Life of a Growth Hacker, and on Day 17’s, Entrepreneur’s Last-mile Problem, I shared my growth hack project to create a promotional pop-up modal for this newsletter. The concept was simple: add a pop-up modal to my other sites with consistent traffic, such as CSS Icon, to lead visitors to my newsletter to gain subscribers.
I was nicely surprised when I found out this growth hack has been the second-biggest source of subscribers of all time, the first source being “direct.” In recent 30 days, the performance has been even more stellar: CSS Icon alone is the top 1 source, followed by “direct,” followed by two other sites I also did the hack with, Font Playground and Type Detail.
In A New Beginning, I shared opinions about keeping sites up even when it is not an active project anymore:
“…stumble upon an old posting of an interesting product that linked to a dead URL. It is a shame and a missed opportunity; even if the project is dead, it could showcase the archived project and lead traffic to your latest project.”
My growth hack is a living example of this. My “new beginning” is built on top of past projects. Keep them alive; they are our babies.
My cofounder Hua is launching a new initiative to help makers stay active and grow engagement on Twitter. When I started my journey, she helped me grow my Twitter engagement by sending me three Twitter threads to reply to every day, and it helped tremendously! She is now planning to expand that into a free service to help everyone stay active and grow on Twitter! If you find that intriguing, take a look at her launch alert tweet and sign up:
Founders’ Besties List
- a weekly listicle of helpful links for startup founders!
redditlist.io
Link: https://redditlist.io/
Reddit’s home page is fun, but subreddits are more fun and a great place to find new audiences. redditlist.io provides a great way to discover subreddits by category.
Rad Letters
Link: https://www.radletters.com/
Rad Letters is a newsletter directory. You can discover newsletters from others or post your own. A pro tip: they have a beta program to match newsletter creators for cross-promo, which is a great growth hack technique.
Figma Snacks
Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWlUJU11tp4cBWlUZYumVp99dhjx1OyNU
A playlist of 20-sec video tutorials about Figma.