Black Swan Street: Building in Public - Week 3

A warm welcome to my beloved readers of Black Swan Street… and a cold, heartless welcome to people that aren’t subscribed to Black Swan Street. I mean, how could you not subscribe? We are literally building a media company in front of your eyes, hence the name: Building in Public. I guess that brings me to my next point…

Welcome to Black Swan Street: Building in Public - Week 3

As I said, we are building a media company from ground zero and you get the joy of seeing it all unfold. Every week we are documenting everything that happened throughout the week as well as revealing strategies and challenges we face.

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.

Alright. Grab that cup of coffee, put those reading glasses on, and get ready to read about the amazing week that Black Swan Street had.

This week’s article will be divided into two sections

• Overview of this week

• Growth Strategies

Overview of this week

The metric we focus on as of now is: Follower growth on Twitter and the Newsletter

As you can see:

• Twitter: 196 followers → 228 followers

• Newsletter: 588 active subscribers → 619 active subscribers

The Twitter grew by 32 followers, while the Newsletter grew by 31 subscribers this week.

Solid week for the crew at Black Swan Street: Growth across the board.

How did we do it? Let’s get into it…

Want to help us reach our goal, while also simultaneously receiving the best stock market coverage on the web?

Join Black Swan Street for free ↓

Growth Strategies

On Wednesday, we had our best day ever, 17 new sign-ups to the newsletter.

What was the most successful driver of growth? Sneaky Reddit Advertising.

Think about it - SubReddits are communities filled with your exact target market. The problem: Most are very strict on self-promotion, which is why you have to get creative with how you’re promoting.

Here’s how we did it:

First and most important: Provide real value. Then sneak in a link to your landing page.

For example: We made a post covering all the most important news in the stock market throughout the day, then linked to ‘BSS’ aka Black Swan Street, which took traffic to our landing page.

As I said earlier, this led us to have our best day in terms of overall growth for the newsletter.

That’s the newsletter, but what about the Twitter growth?

Commenting.

Commenting isn’t some groundbreaking way to get seen, but it works. Here’s an example from one of the comments we left this week:

This one comment which took me maybe 30 seconds to write, led to 24,000 impressions. Over 24,000 people saw the logo and name: Black Swan Street. If people continuously see you on their timeline, best believe they will check out your profile. And if they find value on your profile, best believe they’ll follow you.

The key to effective comments:

• Finding popular Twitter accounts in your niche

• Being one of the first comments

• Taking a view on something (opens up the potential for discussion)

The Wrap-Up

Engaging is key. Find communities, creators, whatever, and engage with them. Become a part of the niche you are trying to grow in.

You may be asking: Why are you doing this whole ‘build in public’ thing anyways? The answer: Transparency. Because the truth is, growing a business is not at all like TikTok makes it seems.

Growing a business is all about consistency. Being able to show up day in and day out. It’s not an overnight thing. And that, my friend, is why we do this. We want to give you a realistic lens of what it’s like to build a company from the ground up.

We won’t be stopping until we hit 100,000 subscribers. If you want to join the journey and help us reach our goal. Join for free below ↓