Email list

Your first 100 email subscribers, four ways

The page is live and the welcome email is written. Nobody has read either.

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of a mailing list is the beginning, when there is no list. Below are the four routes people actually use, with the real cost of each. Two of them cost no money and plenty of time, which is the trade you should be weighing.

1. Ask people you already know

Costs: nothing except the discomfort of asking.
Gets you: usually under 30 people, and the friendliest 30 you will ever have.
Catch: they are not a market. They will open everything and buy nothing, which reads as success and is not. Do it anyway, because a list of zero cannot teach you what a welcome sequence does.

2. Swap with someone at your stage

Costs: time finding people, plus writing for someone else's audience.
Gets you: readers who already opted into something adjacent.
Catch: you need something to trade. At zero subscribers you are asking for a favour, which works occasionally and does not scale.

3. Search ads to an opt-in page

Costs: per click, at whatever your topic goes for.
Gets you: people who typed a question you can answer, which is the highest intent on this list.
Catch: the arithmetic only works if the subscriber is worth more than the click, and at the start you do not know what a subscriber is worth. This route is better once you have data than as a way of getting data.

4. Buy a send to someone else's list

Costs: per click, at a price the seller lists.
Gets you: volume quickly, and a real test of whether your page converts.
Catch: quality varies more than in any other route here, so the first order is a test of the seller. This is what solo ads are, and the checks worth doing are in the three numbers.

What to measure from the first 100

Opt-in rate on the page, open rate on the welcome email, and replies. Replies are the one people ignore, and they are the only signal at this size that tells you whether you wrote to a person. Sales at 100 subscribers are noise. Do not tune anything on them.