September 24, 2024 | Read Online

Build in public | A year in review

Launch Key insight after 1 trip around the sun

In partnership with

Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community!

Thanks to you, this week we celebrate 1 year of these weekly missives.

Beehiiv : dashboard widget

It's just a milestone - but it comes with some solid growth, plenty of mistakes, and new ideas to improve based on your feedback.

Let me know what you think.

Read online

Pull to Eject
- Growth Planning
Modern Tools
Old School Wisdom
Free Knowledge
Recommendations
Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Against my natural tendency to build in stealth, a newsletter shows flaws and change all at the same time. But, as we turn over the Launch Key calendar, today I'll share a little behind-the-scenes about what's worked, what's changed and what's next.

The 30,000 foot view is gratitude.

Thanks to you, this little venture is growing and you've given me enough feedback that I want to continue to improve it.

If you're new here – and the majority of you are since June – this old guy side hustle germinated Summer 2023.

My last startup held a few patents but wasn't getting commercial traction, so I had a little time on my hands. I managed a few select consulting gigs. I helped my middle son add subscribers to his VC newsletter (shameless 🔌 for Confluence.vc)

Like many subscribers, I was over 60, but I felt like I wasn't quite finished.

I was still being asked for tech advice
I was being pitched startup ideas
I had encouragement from some trusted friends
And I was hobbled by an upcoming hip replacement

So I started writing in a journal every morning.

That morning mini habit made me think through things I might still create. Before I completely lose tech relevance, I wanted to build something else. And it wasn't another agency. I wrote ideas about codifying product innovation, consulting practices or creating my own digital products.

I have a number of friends who have written books, but I didn't really have one of those in mind. I have more of a 'face for radio' than for podcasts or video shorts. And I didn't know how to beat the algos for one of those anyway.

I needed better distribution than my 1200-person LinkedIn network.

So I started a small newsletter - for free - on Beehiiv. I targeted others, over 50, experienced pros who might finally be ready to start a late-career venture. The Week 1 version (Genesis Block) was sent to 32 friends and family.

Then I recruited peers who I thought might confirm this idea. I sent LinkedIn messages to business connections I'd known for a long time. I added emails from college friends, youth sports coach peers, parent friends from my boys high school and college teams. One at a time, we got up to about 600 subscribers by the end of the year.

Growth Planning

With proof that at least friends would read my stuff, in January I moved up to the paid version of Beehiiv and set a 2024 goal of 10,000 subscribers.

I focused on the business audience of LinkedIn and started posting multiple times a week. The content was about late-career entrepreneurs. Facts that the average startup age is 45 (not 25). Success stories about older business owners. I invited 2nd and 3rd connections to sign up. It's been slow and steady on LinkedIn but I gained another 500 followers.

In Beehiiv, I created a subscriber Poll asking what type of content you were looking for. I ran it on the Welcome page for new subscribers and in weekly diatribes. I built a referral hierarchy and gave away a few Launch Key keychains as referral merch.

You asked for case studies so I created a monthly subscriber story, highlighting readers who have built interesting career portfolios. I added additional recommendation links and articles. We cover Creator Economy, digital products and modern software tools most weeks.

Sadly, the memes trend last. But that won't dissuade me! 😉

I added a Table of Contents and improved the Welcome Page with context and links getting almost 60% open rate today.

I built a couple of very good partnerships within Beehiiv. But made the mistake of accepting too many boosts and paying too much per subscriber. Many newsletters (written by AI) just scrape emails and sell them as their entire business model. Lesson learned.

Gross subscriber number is the wrong metric. Getting engaged subscribers is the right one. So I had a lot of churn in the Spring, but now I'm getting more qualified readers and cleaning out low engagement emails. As a result I've improved open rates over the past few months.

Beehiiv dashboard

In June I opened an account on Refind and only pay for engaged subscribers. I randomly saw the first unpaid promotion for Launch Key in a Refind email (below). I'm experimenting with other outlets now for similar growth from outside the Beehiiv network.

Beehiiv does a solid job of verifying emails, so it typically takes a week or 2 to sort out legit addresses. Today I always have a few hundred pending subscribers from all of the above.

I made another mistake by not creating one simple Launch Key brand. I was smart enough to have the talented Gale Haruta design the logo type and cool rocket icon. But it was stupid planning Launch Key as just a newsletter underneath a different named umbrella LLC. I overthought that.

So I need to revamp with a Launch Key web site - just for the findability of search engines. Beehiiv is great, but my year of newsletters resides in a subdirectory of their site resulting in mediocre organic search results.

#olderpreneur

I didn't design this as a money maker, but as a resource for other olderpreneurs - a hashtag I employ frequently on posts.

But a few revenue things have naturally fallen out of growing an audience.

The most obvious is advertising. I'm still experimenting with Beehiiv ads, but am now making enough to pay my monthly SaaS bills. I'm aiming to target outside advertisers that make sense for our audience instead of just accepting or declining the network ones. Look for more targeted advertisers interested in an engaged, experienced, financially fit, older audience.

I did create a few digital products - some free, 1 low cost - and sold a few of those. There will be more as I aim to help answer new subscriber survey responses.

And affiliate marketing for relatable collaborators : books, services, pods, courseware etc., all make logical sense as this audience grows. Stay tuned.

I'm also flirting with a low cost ad-free Launch Key version. Let me know your opinion on that idea in this weeks Poll.

I have built some great new connections who have their own audiences. And we are working to try to help each other grow. Look for infrequent guest authors, cross promotions and recommendations that give you additional insight.

I'll close like I opened – with a sincere Thank You.

Thanks for answering polls and surveys. Thanks for sticking around to open a few of these missives. Thanks for referrals and recommendations.

Most importantly, Launch Key has given me a great reason to reconnect with many business friends.

No matter how much we all believe in technology – the phone calls, in-person coffees, lunches or happy hours have been reinvigorating. Plus, I'm even more convinced that our late-career cohort is far larger than I thought when I started.

The in-person meetings have also been great for topics, recommendations and feedback. Continue to send ideas for other subscriber stories, tell me when I'm wrong and push to make this better. It's your community after all.

And, if you're in North Carolina, that lunch calendar isn't going to fill itself. Let me know what works for you! 🥪

Now go launch something 🚀

❝

Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Jim Rohn

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