<@U0A68ATKR> i’m hav
[2022-08-25 09:41:41 AM] : alex i’m having a little bit of trouble and could use some guidance if you don’t mind.
i have a concern around the growth rate of my email subscribers. it’s a concern i’ve had for a long time now.
currently i get about 500 net new subs a year (900 gross), a rate that has not changed in years. at this rate, even if i had a very successful product, e.g. a $1000 product that sold at a 5% conversion rate, that’s only $25K/yr. i don’t think it’s really realistic to expect to have much of a better product situation than that in terms of price and conversion rate, so it seems to me that a path to income replacement must include a higher subscriber rate in addition to a good product offering. (income replacement for me is about $230K/yr btw.)
to try to put it concisely, i’ve been ebombing aggressively for the last few years and i’ve been having great success with my ebombs judging by how well they’ve been received in the watering holes and other outlets where i’ve shared them. but despite having the knob cranked roughly to the max on ebombs, i still don’t feel like i’m getting enough subscribers.
i don’t know if it’s because i’m not doing a good enough job or because the subscribers just aren’t there to be had, or both.
so my questions are: it looks to me like i need to increase my subscriber rate by ~10X in order to get to income replacement. if that’s true, does it seem realistic that i can get there despite how much i’m already doing, and if so how? and is there a way for me to be reasonably sure that the subscribers are actually out there to be had? i have a fear that i’m wasting my effort because the audience of rails developers just isn’t big enough.
1 Reply
[2022-08-25 03:27:15 PM] : Looking at it from another perspective: are there other people targeting the same audience who make that kind of money?
[2022-08-25 03:30:07 PM] : that’s a good question and i’ve thought about that one myself. as far as i’m aware, there are exactly two people who make a full-time living off of rails info products: michael hartl and chris oliver. and i’m actually not sure that they are because they both have other products that aren’t rails info products
[2022-08-25 03:32:39 PM] : Since you seem to have a name in those community and they probably know you could you maybe reach out to them? They might have interesting insights around this topic
[2022-08-25 03:32:41 PM] : that raises the obvious question of “why can’t i replicate their success?” it seems to me that michael hartl had good timing. he created “the” rails tutorial. probably no replicating that now, or competing with it. the chris oliver case i’m less sure about. could i replicate gorails and have similar success? i don’t know.
[2022-08-25 03:36:23 PM] : i’ve talked to both of those guys before, including about their businesses. not really any super enlightening info there
[2022-08-25 04:08:51 PM] : having said that, i’m not sure what the small number of successful info product people tells me or doesn’t tell me. the number could be because rails is a small or tough market. OR it could be because there aren’t many people who are savvy enough or industrious enough to make something work. although i suspect it’s actually both. i’m hesitant to try to draw any super strong conclusions though.
[2022-08-25 04:31:26 PM] : I feel like every time my growth rate was slow, it's because I wasn't distributing my content effectively to get eyes on it. So that's the first thing I'd look at.
How are you currently distributing content?
What promotions are you doing prior to the ebomb coming out?
What about after?
[2022-08-25 04:35:35 PM] : good questions. for each post i go through roughly this process:
1. complete post
2. submit post to /r/ruby (which i understand to be the main source for what ends up in the ruby weekly newsletter)
3. send the post to my email list
4. share the post on twitter
i don’t usually do anything to promote a post before it comes out, only after.
[2022-08-25 04:42:50 PM] : Gotcha. I think you can build on this!
Here's what mine looks like to give you some ideas:
1. Post a teaser on Twitter on what's to come
2. Follow up with a 2nd post confirming it's been scheduled with a screenshot that includes sub #s
3. Send post to email subs
4. Convert email post to blog and medium article
5. Share the article to relevant communities (Slack, forums, etc)
6. Post snippet on LinkedIn with link to article
7. Turn article into Twitter thread that links to post at the end
8. Link to previous article in latest article for new subs
I do these items spread out over 3 weeks.
The prep items are to keep my newsletter top of mind when I'm releasing something (increases open rates) and helps add new subs. I think prep items are underused.
For post items, I think it's underrated not to pull apart the content and redistribute without the link being the main focus (ex. Twitter thread).
I'd recommend experimenting with your distribution process. That's where a majority of my new subs come from.
[2022-08-25 04:43:56 PM] : those seem like they would certainly help! thanks
[2022-08-25 04:45:42 PM] : Here's an example of a Twitter teaser I've done: https://twitter.com/mar15sa/status/1551722398277423105?s=20&t=3i7FaPAfTYxr0mfyl8RZXA
[2022-08-25 04:46:53 PM] : Notice how the 2nd tweet is a screenshot of ConvertKit's send confirmation page. Very simple to grab and post but something I don't miss because of the positive results
[2022-08-26 10:00:54 AM] : I think https://rubyflow.com is also a source for Ruby Weekly. That's where I posted articles that ended up in Ruby Weekly, and I didn't post them in Reddit or any other Ruby channel if I recall. I also got some sales for Ruby on Mac by posting on rubyflow.
[2022-08-26 11:09:18 AM] : Another thing to think about is whether the income replacement figure is a want or a need. In my case, my spouse has a stable job, and I need to get to $100K/yr by the end of 2024 to cover our costs comfortably, while having some left over for retirement savings. This is about half of what I used to make, but I don't need to replace my full previous salary.
My plan is to reach that goal with Ruby on Mac, small free side projects to promote Ruby on Mac, Rails app maintenance contracts, and growing my automation newsletter to one or more of: subscription, done-for-you automation services, workshops, an ebook, a course.
Can you think of other products/services you could offer in addition to your book and course? And +1 to Marissa's suggestion about additional marketing.
[2022-08-26 11:17:56 AM] : my situation is a little tough in that regard. my “disadvantage” is that my salary is quite high, $230K, and my wife would not tolerate a downgrade. my income is also the only income in the household.
[2022-08-26 11:19:15 AM] : ah yeah, that's definitely harder with a single-income household
[2022-08-26 11:20:28 AM] : I think it took Chris Oliver 7 years to reach $1M revenue (not profit) across ALL his projects, so that's about $143K/year
[2022-08-26 11:21:18 AM] : > Can you think of other products/services you could offer in addition to your book and course?
regarding products, sure, probably. but as i said, even if i had a really expensive product to offer that sold at a good conversion rate, i’m quite sure that i would need a higher subscriber rate in order to get anywhere near income replacement.
regarding services, unfortunately i have an agreement with my boss that i won’t do any outside consulting. but i’m looking for a new job, preferably one that doesn’t restrict me in that way.
[2022-08-26 11:21:59 AM] : yeah, i did the math on chris oliver’s money when he first shared that. i remember thinking to myself that it was not that much money
[2022-08-26 11:24:00 AM] : How much organic traffic do your ebombs get? Is there a way to reach more people through SEO so you're not relying on just your subscribers?
[2022-08-26 11:25:06 AM] : well it of course varies quite a bit but over the last year my site overall gets about 10K uniques per month
[2022-08-26 11:25:57 AM] : > Is there a way to reach more people through SEO so you’re not relying on just your subscribers?
i think this is a worthwhile thing to think about but i would maybe reframe it as “is there a way to reach more people through SEO so i can get more subscribers”
[2022-08-26 11:26:50 AM] : i think there’s a good chance i could write a lot more ruby/rails articles and create new lead magnets that align with the popular ones
[2022-08-26 11:29:47 AM] : i am hesitant about that though because, again, i’m very unsure that there are enough subscribers out there to get
[2022-08-27 05:03:52 PM] : just purely in terms of numbers, is this about right?
10k visits/month
900 subs/year, 75/month
0.75% conversion rate
out of those, the 10k visits seems low and kinda surprising to me, given how long your site has been around and your quality of writing. I agree about looking into how to optimize the posts you already have for SEO
[2022-08-27 07:03:37 PM] : correct!
[2022-08-27 07:04:51 PM] : and yes, i think there probably is still quite a lot of meat on the bone for writing more articles that well drive more traffic per article (whether it’s search traffic or other kinds of traffic)
[2022-08-27 07:39:50 PM] : More articles wouldn’t hurt, but there are probably some optimizations you can make to your existing ones to better match what people are searching for. Google Search Console is helpful for that - one easy-ish win is to see which queries your pages are ranking for, and apply some tweaks to headings to make sure the search terms are in there
[2022-08-29 11:42:09 AM] : Coming in here after seeing some good stuff added to the thread over the weekend.
[2022-08-29 11:42:17 AM] : I do have a few thoughts!
[2022-08-29 11:42:35 AM] : 1 - it seems like the underlying concern is "are there actually enough people out there?"
[2022-08-29 11:45:12 AM] : if the question is "are there enough ruby developers out there to add more than 500 subscribers a year" then my first question is - what evidence exists that could help you answer this?
[2022-08-29 11:45:48 AM] : I've spent about 10 minute doing a little research and the answer seems to be an unequivocal yes. but I want to see what you can think for ways to answer that question yourself, first!
[2022-08-29 11:53:35 AM] : 2 - I was going to ask about traffic and subscribers too. All numbers are relative, but I'd say that a <1% conversion rate of traffic -> subscriber means you have a TON of headroom to grow subscribers without changing how you get traffic.
If a point of reference would be helpful:
• You already get more traffic that we do at Stacking the Bricks. by quite a bit! that's def a result of your active ebomb efforts working.
• But we get more subscribers than you do from a fraction of the traffic you get.
With only that information, my primary recommendation would be to focus on improving conversion rate before I tried increasing traffic.
[2022-08-29 11:58:00 AM] : 3 - once you have your conversion rate improved, I think Marissa Goldberg's notes about increasing your distribution efforts make a LOT of sense as ways to maximize the impact and reach of each ebomb. You have a good system, and it works! Building on won't just bring you more visitors, but likely help you reach new places where people aren't already familiar with you.
but doing the conversion rate first means you aren't "wasting" that new traffic on opt-ins that are less likely to convert
[2022-08-29 12:00:14 PM] : 4 - in terms of reaching your financial goal. I like that you started doing some math on how many people would need to buy at a certain price point to figure out what's possible.
So far it sounds like you're thinking about ways to increase your list size, and your price point. What other factors could you influence to increase the potential value of each subscriber?
[2022-08-29 12:04:52 PM] : 5 - full income replacement is an obvious thing to work backwards from, but IME can be a frustrating and demotivating frame for setting goals especially for relatively high earners.
one of the ways that I encourage folks to rethink this is in terms of setting goals to cover individual expenses, or groups of expenses.
that way, instead of arbitrary number goals, you can begin to actually feel how your revenue progress has impact on your life.
this is a brick-stacking mindset to financial goals, and in addition to the functional achievement, helps you think in terms of how to build the business to achieve the life you want.
[2022-08-29 12:19:36 PM] : alex thanks for this! reading/thinking/digesting…
[2022-08-29 12:22:30 PM] : you're welcome! :smile:
[2022-08-29 01:13:45 PM] : alex's advice is always the best. Love how you think!
[2022-08-29 01:44:25 PM] : okay, addressing these comments in order…
1 - correct regarding “are there enough people out there”. regarding what evidence could help me answer, i have a bit of a hard time with that. the things i can think of include: a) the size of certain communities like the ruby and rails subreddits, b) the size of ruby/rails conferences, c) the email list size and twitter follower count of “big people” in the ruby community, d) the number of people having success selling to ruby devs and the degree of their success. none of these seem to point to an “unequivocal yes” that i could get substantially more than 500 subs per year, so i feel like i must be not seeing something you’re seeing.
[2022-08-29 01:45:16 PM] : 2 - roger that. i certainly have some ideas for things i could do in this area.
[2022-08-29 01:46:04 PM] : 3 - roger that also
[2022-08-29 01:50:29 PM] : 4 - as far as i can think, the only 3 ways to increase revenue are to increase the number of customers, increase the average sale size, or increase the frequency with which people buy. so it seems like that last one, increasing the frequency, is the answer to your question. this could of course be achieved by adding more product offerings. i could also offer services, although my current job prohibits me from doing any sort of moonlighting, but i’m working on getting a different job, and maybe offering services will be a possibility after that.
[2022-08-29 01:53:43 PM] : 5 - this makes sense. maybe i’ll try to think of some intermediate milestones like mortgage, car payments, etc.
[2022-08-29 02:29:54 PM] : I'm in a similar situation as Jason. I'm particularly curious in increasing conversion rates. So you have any specific advice when it comes to creating better lead magnets alex? I'm struggling with that as I just created a new lead magnet (an email course) that's unfortunately not performing as well as I hoped.
[2022-08-29 02:33:29 PM] : for #1, have you tried googling something like "how many people are ruby developers"? :wink:
[2022-08-29 02:33:39 PM] : sometimes you don't have to be clever to get a good answer to a specific question!
[2022-08-29 02:35:11 PM] : have not, but doing that now
[2022-08-29 02:35:13 PM] : Johannes it's very tough to give general advice that's useful, if you want to start a separate thread or something with some specific details and the stats you're seeing, I'm happy to take a look and make some concrete recommendations
[2022-08-29 03:11:12 PM] : Will do. Could you share an ebomb/lead magnet that performs well just as an example?
[2022-08-30 10:45:57 AM] : I lived off of a business teaching Elixir from 2018-2020, albeit not at your current salary. From my POV, the market of Rails devs is vast. You just have to break through the noise.
I've emailed with Chris quite a bit and almost did a podcast with him at one point. I think one thing he did a great job of (and encouraged me to do) was to pay close attention when anything was difficult to figure out or took a lot of googling. He plugged a lot of those gaps to get traction and then his forum (modeled after Laracasts's) kept compounding the wins.
What do your current customers want and struggle with? For mine, it's Phoenix LiveView, but due to some visa issues I had to move and take a FT job and haven't had the time or energy to put into growing the business recently.
[2022-08-30 02:01:56 PM] : hmm, i appreciate that, although to be frank i don’t see how any of that gives me a credible answer to the question of “is the rails market big enough to support me?”
[2022-08-30 02:02:49 PM] : I think it definitely is. It just might take some harder effort to "get over the hill"
[2022-08-30 02:03:24 PM] : The hardest/best? thing is just that you have such a great day job
[2022-08-30 02:04:56 PM] : whatever work you do on your business now will early less than your hourly rate, and it will take a lot of work before it becomes the obviously better place to put your time
[2022-08-30 02:05:42 PM] : but I'd bet almost anything that the rails market is 10x bigger than enough to support you and replace your job salary if you hustle
[2022-08-30 02:05:50 PM] : i’m looking for reasons to believe the rails market is big enough
[2022-08-30 02:06:36 PM] : well, the fact that I could support myself on the Elixir market, despite it being about 1/20th the size of the Rails market should be an encouraging data point
[2022-08-30 02:07:32 PM] : also, I was never #1 and there's a way higher ratio of books/courses/conferences/etc in Elixir for its size than other languages
[2022-08-30 02:10:28 PM] : > despite it being about 1/20th the size of the Rails market
i think this implies you know the size of the elixir market and the rails market. if so i would love to know!
[2022-08-30 02:11:27 PM] : I mean, of all the top 50 YC startups with one initial back-end language, Ruby accounted for over 50% of the market cap overall. There's a mountain of money in that tech stack
[2022-08-30 02:11:31 PM] : https://twitter.com/logicmason/status/1371255029412233218
[2022-08-30 02:12:26 PM] : I might be overestimating Elixir's... I was going off of how many people are in the subreddits and discords at any given time
[2022-08-30 02:12:43 PM] : but both of those metrics favor newer languages
[2022-08-30 02:24:53 PM] : so when I went to google with "how many people are ruby developers" I got a number of references to a 2019 report from Jetbrains/Rubymine that said 300,000 professional Ruby developers, 1MM total.
[2022-08-30 02:25:01 PM] : that's 3 years ago, so I expect those numbers have changed some
[2022-08-30 02:25:22 PM] : but one of the references is this reddit thread:
[2022-08-30 02:25:23 PM] : https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/bxjjma/how_many_ruby_programmers_are_there_in_the_world/
[2022-08-30 02:25:44 PM] : i found that one too after we talked the other day
[2022-08-30 02:25:55 PM] : Andrezej is also a 30x500 alum
[2022-08-30 02:25:57 PM] : :wink:
[2022-08-30 02:32:46 PM] : the closest thing to a red flag I've seen is concerns about Ruby usage declining for other languages, but given the size of the professional Ruby audience, even that is an opportunity to help a TON of ruby developers either transfer their skills, or to improve their career while staying in Ruby. Or both!
[2022-08-30 02:33:19 PM] : hmm
[2022-08-30 02:33:52 PM] : even if Jetbrains is off by a lot, or the audience shrank by half since 2019, that's still a much, much bigger audience out there than 500 new subscribers a year.
[2022-08-30 02:34:52 PM] : i asked a question on twitter yesterday and i was surprised how many replies said “Rails” https://twitter.com/dceddia/status/1564275932625600513
[2022-08-30 02:39:07 PM] : i’ve heard about Ruby’s usage declining too, and i think something else that might affect is how many of the audience are newbies vs. peers/experts. It might mean there’s less demand for newbie-level material but more for advanced stuff.
[2022-08-30 02:40:07 PM] : yep, "X is declining" should usually be read as a pain or set of pains, rather than actual data.
[2022-08-30 02:40:29 PM] : cuz if it's big enough, declining doesn't mean vanishing, and can create a HUGE number of expensive problems for people and businesses.
[2022-08-30 02:43:09 PM] : > even if Jetbrains is off by a lot, or the audience shrank by half since 2019, that’s still a much, much bigger audience out there than 500 new subscribers a year.
obviously this much is very believable
[2022-08-30 05:33:18 PM] : > cuz if it’s big enough, declining doesn’t mean vanishing, and can create a HUGE number of expensive problems for people and businesses.
i debate if this is a useful comment, but… anecdotally i’ve experienced exactly this.
if i were to self identify my engineering work, i’d say i’m a Rails dev. it’s how i present the technical side of what i do. But over the last 5+ years whenever i get Rails work, Rails is the least of what I do day-to-day (even though that’s what i’m hired for). as only one example, the popular architecture today is a JS frontend (React, Ember, etc…) with a Rails API. time and time again i’ve experienced (again, anecdotally) companies put themselves into expensive, painfully time wasting situations with this setup, but happily continue to do so. from what i’ve seen, this won’t change anytime soon.
[2022-08-30 05:38:29 PM] : a couple more data points to get a sense of market size. when opening up VS code and searching through the extensions: [File hidden by Slack limit] [File hidden by Slack limit] [File hidden by Slack limit]
[2022-08-30 05:40:52 PM] : this one is also pretty big. interesting that it’s like 3x the size of the rails-specific ones [File hidden by Slack limit]
[2022-08-30 05:42:00 PM] : i do get the sense that people who use Rails generally love Rails and want to keep using it (which hints at some pains too)
[2022-08-31 08:05:05 AM] : the vscode metric is interesting. i was hesitant to go off of the one single number from reddit because it’s just one source, but if it’s roughly corroborated by the vscode numbers, then that adds to the credibility
[2022-08-31 10:26:18 AM] : anyway, thanks alex and everyone else for taking the time to talk through this with me. i’m not sure yet exactly what i want to do next, but i have some ideas, and i can at least say that i don’t plan to throw in the towel yet.
[2022-09-09 10:32:48 PM] : jasonswett Something else to look at is: how many people pay to attend Ruby and/or Rails-specific conferences (limited to before 2020). This tells you at least how many people paid a non-trivial amount of money (and time) to learn about some aspect of the topic.
I've been thinking about similar things for my niche: Java devs who want to write better tests more easily. Reddit numbers for the Java-related subreddits don't help as they're all pretty much filled with novices who haven't yet learned enough to care about testable code. (Yes, there's a lot of pain there, but few want to pay for anything.)
I then looked at other communities such as Domain-Driven Design (high overlap with my audience), which has 1.2K members (and only a few posts per month). Software Architecture has 21.7K and has posts almost every day, though the overlap is much lower. IntelliJ IDEA has 17.2K and has medium overlap, and at least some of those have paid for IntelliJ, so there's something there (though not really for my current product).
Finally, I looked at QCon (not a perfect match to my audience, but definitely related) and the attendance is hard to figure out, but at least 800-1,000 (QCon is expensive). Devoxx (more my target) says "11,000 attendees each year", which is much higher than I thought! Devoxx is Europe-only, which is in line with my sales being heavily European (and informs when I schedule things like live streams and webinars).
[edit: just realized you did say conferences, but didn't mention which ones are free vs. paid. What numbers for those confs did you find?]
[2022-09-11 12:26:46 PM] : that’s a good question and i have thought about that a bit. for the two main conferences are railsconf and rubyconf, which i understand to be attended by about 2000 and 750 people, respectively, last time i checked