Black Swan Street: Building in Public - Week 4

Gather around readers from across the internet because today’s going to be a heater. This was the best week in Black Swan Street’s history regarding growth. We’ve been trying a new growth hack, and let’s just say… it’s working.

Welcome to Black Swan Street: Building in Public - Week 4

The weekly series where we go behind the scenes and show you everything we’re doing to grow the business. Ladies and gentlemen, grab that coffee, maybe a snack, and get ready to peel back the curtain and take a look.

For context: What is Black Swan Street? Black Swan Street is a financial media company that’s built on the back of a free email newsletter that provides an in-depth rundown of the most important news throughout the week in the stock market - blah blah blah. You get the point.

Why are we building in public? We are doing this series to show you that growing a business isn’t like social media makes it look. We want to give you a realistic lens to look at business. It’s trial and error. It’s discipline. And most important, it’s consistency. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Per usual, this week’s article will be divided into two sections

• Overview of this Week

• Growth Strategies

Overview of this Week

First off, sorry. I know the numbers might be small and hard to read. We’re going to fix this for next week.

As you can see:

• Twitter: 228 followers → 239 followers

• Newsletter: 619 active subscribers → 713 active subscribers

The Twitter grew by 11 followers, while the Newsletter grew by 94 subscribers this week.

Wow. That felt good to just write: 94 new subscribers to Black Swan Street, aka, BEST WEEK EVER 🎉

So, how did we do it?

Growth Strategies

Before we get into it, let’s show you something crazy.

Last week in our building in public post, we shared this:

Last week, we set a record for Black Swan Street. 17 new sign-ups in one day. Well, let’s just say we crushed that previous record:

This was yesterday:

Previous one-day sign-ups record: 17

New one-day sign-ups record: 51

As you can see, our new growth hack is working.

What is it?

Reddit Comments.

In the past, I’ve gone into why I love Reddit so much, but for those who are new: SubReddits are communities of your exact target market that anyone can post in. It’s truly awesome.

The problem is most SubReddits are strict on ‘self-promotion’, so you have to get creative. In the past, I’ve typically just created my own posts and posted them in SubReddits and included sneaky link to a landing page sign-up for the newsletter. It works, but people aren’t dumb, they can realize it’s self-promotion.

This leads to a lot of deleted posts, unclicked links, and overall missed opportunities.

The new strategy: Commenting on popular posts, providing an authentic valuable response, while cleverly embedding a link to the landing page within the response.

It comes off less ‘self-promotional’ and converts more. Let’s show you an example:

Here was the Reddit post:

Here was our comment:

My comment provides genuine value while also sneaking in a link to our landing page. This was the main driver of the 94 new subscribers this week.

When it comes to advertising through free platforms, like Reddit, it is important to get creative and not come across as “This is our newsletter. Sign up for it”. No one will. You have to convince them to check it out.

As for Twitter growth this week, it was slower. This is because we focused mainly on the other platforms like Reddit. Nothing more to say about that.

The Wrap-Up

Amazing week for Black Swan Street. Set records, learned new growth hacks, and much more. We will be continuing this series until the newsletter reaches our goal: 100,000 subscribers.

We’re doing this to help you. Please take what you learned today and implement it. If you don’t implement it, you’ll just forget about it, and it’s as good as useless.

As I said, we won’t stop until we hit 100,000 subscribers.

So, if you want to help us do that while also receiving the best stock market coverage on the web: Subscribe for free below ↓