Launch update – Growth Spurt!

After a slow but steady start, and a huge increase over the past few days, I am happy to say I have already beat the goal I set of finding 1000 subscribers by February 1st by three-fold!

Finding my subscribers
I was happy with the growth over the first few weeks, and the great feedback from subscribers. It was just right to start small as I worked out the kinks. I experimented with a few types of ads to get the word out.

Google PPC was not very effective, I could not find a keyword/ad combination that would achieve overall conversion rates of over 1% without spending way more per click than I could ever justify. This was not a surprise as The Startup Daily is not solving a problem that people are actively searching for a solution to—and that’s where Google PPC shines.

StumbleUpon is somewhat better, but conversion rates were still at about 2%. Not a sustainable way to grow at $.05 a page view, but good for seeding to some blogs and starting to build momentum.

Natural Coverage
The Startup Daily was featured on a few smaller sites before being mentioned with a nice writeup on the German site Forderland.
According to my “Google German” they liked it. This was the first nice free boost and probably sent over 150 signups my way, cool!

The real growth spurt started Tuesday when The Startup Daily showed up on Springwise and Hacker News at the same time. While traffic levels were close to even from these two sites on Tuesday, for visitors arriving from Hacker News the sign-up rate was 4%. Springwise folks signed-up at a rate of 41%, Wow!

I got another big boost when the Springwise Newsletter went out yesterday.

Springwise Folks, I love you!
I mean it, I have received so many supportive emails and comments over the past few days. Many people were kind enough to share great new ideas with me on how I can make things better, more useful, etc.
I had not even heard of Springwise until last week, but I can guarantee I won’t soon forget them. I am a huge fan now and I already spent too much time on the archive page reading old newsletters.

Some Great Ideas
I have had a lot of great ideas proposed over the past few weeks, and I’ll be prioritizing them but here is a quick list:

• Suggestions form for Books and Ideas
• Kindle/e-book links
• More countries (I added Amazon links to the Canadian, German, and United Kingdom stores on new volumes)
• Make better use of the Facebook Page
• A great idea about user submitted write-ups

Summary
Overall it’s working, and I haven’t made any major errors aside from some less than perfect grammar and a mistyped word or two. Amazon affiliate links are working too, but it’s a bit early to know how well. I only see commissions show up after the item ships and they are a few days behind in reporting. In total I have earned commissions of about $40. Over the next week or so I should get a real idea of how well that will work as it scales. My primary focus now is to work on improving my writing skills. That and catch-up on all the tweets and emails.

As always, any feedback is appreciated, and thank you all for helping me get off to great start. I have so many great books piling up, and even some new ones on the way from some of you. I’m looking forward to sharing them and seeing where this goes!