3 Tactics Unique to Growing Your Crypto-Specific Newsletter

‍Welcome to a new issue of Swapstack newsletter Founder Stories, where we connect with and share the origin stories of hot, up and coming newsletters in all different industries. Each issue of this series will consist of a deep dive into a different newsletter, and give you insight into how they launched, grew, and sustained their growth. Of course, we’ll also touch upon sponsorships and monetization strategies as well 💰. Let’s get to it!

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Today’s publication:

Name: Web3 Daily

Published by: Seb Lindner & Chevy Cassar 

Launched: February, 2022

Current Sub count & open rate: 15k subs / 61% ave open rate

Topics covered: Web3 and crypto news

1-line description: Web3 and crypto news, translated into plain English.

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Some background on Web3 Daily:

When we started Web3 Daily in February 2022, the market was hot. Crypto.com had recently purchased the naming rights for Staples Center in a $700M deal, Beeple’s ‘Everydays’ NFT had sold for $69.3M USD, and it seemed that even the craziest of Web3 projects were getting funded.

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My cofounder and I were interested in crypto, and we knew that we wanted to build a community before launching any sort of paid consumer product. What better time to start a newsletter explaining Web3 and crypto news in plain English?

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What we didn’t expect, was that Bitcoin would fall from ~$47k in March, down to ~$20k over the first few months after starting the newsletter. To make matters worse, while we were growing in subscribers quickly, we were still too small to find sponsors before many companies (especially crypto-related companies) significantly reduced their marketing ad spend.

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Many would see the timing as unfortunate. But we take a more optimistic view. We’re busy building the most engaged community that we can, as quickly as we can, before the next bull run. We predict that there’ll be a lot more money flowing into marketing for Web3 and crypto companies at that time.

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(It’s all very ‘Bane,’ à la The Dark Knight - “I was born in the dark.”)

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Plus, it has also forced us to come up with new and creative approaches to building our audience. If it weren't for the bear market, we would probably have stuck to more traditional approaches like paid ads and our subscriber referral program.

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Crypto newsletters are a unique beast because their audience is more correlated with the market than most topics. Plus people interested in crypto all seem to hang out in similar places. 

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‍A few unique tips from Web3 Daily to grow your crypto-specific newsletter:

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1. Discord. “It’s no secret that a lot of Web3 projects build their communities in Discord servers. It’s a valuable place to get your first, loyal newsletter subscribers. But you can’t (usually) just jump into a Discord and start promoting your newsletter. That might even get you kicked off of a server. You’re better off adding as much value as you can, in the shortest amount of time, and then mention that you have a newsletter.
   
   While it’s not a super scalable solution, Web3 Daily gained a lot of subscribers in our early days by posting in Discord servers. One hack we found was that some Discords have a channel called ‘Shill’ which is short for ‘shilling’ (aka ‘promoting’) your project. While those channels are often pretty active with bots, and your project will certainly get lost in the sea of content quickly, it may help in the short term.
   
   
2. Crypto Twitter Spaces. This one has a two-fold positive effect. In order to stay up to date with all of the latest crypto news, it’s useful to follow some of the thought leaders and builders on Twitter. This will fill your news feed with valuable information on new projects and news in the space.
   
   It will also allow you to see lots of Twitter Spaces, at the time that they are happening. By jumping into those spaces, and contributing something valuable to the conversation, it will get you more Twitter followers, and in turn, new newsletter subscribers.
   
   
3. Newsletter cross-promos. While this may not be a new tactic to many, we have tested a lot of different newsletters and there is one topic that strongly stands out. Stock investing newsletters.
   
   Okay, so here’s how it works: we do cold outreach to a bunch of newsletters in the stock market investing space, asking if they’re interested in doing a cross-promo. We will try to target newsletters which have a similar sized audience if possible, and we’re also happy to work with newsletters who have a smaller but highly engaged audience. It seems people who are interested in investing in the stock market are much more likely to subscribe than people who are interested in, say, business or tech news (we’ve tried them all!).”

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Rising tides raise all ships:

While this article might give our ‘competitors’ some ideas on how to grow bigger, faster; we have a strong belief that this is not a zero-sum game. There can be multiple winners in the crypto newsletter space. In fact, it’s more beneficial for our readers to be subscribed to Web3 Daily, in addition to other newsletters, to get a wider range of news and perspectives.

If you want to stay up to date with Web3 and crypto news, without your eyes glazing, come join the mailing list at Web3 Daily. It’s free and you can unsubscribe any time (no hard feelings).

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Want to Work with Web3 Daily? Find them on Swapstack.

Do you have a founder story to share? Email us at: hello@swapstack.co