How To Get Your First 1000 Subscribers

Today I came across a very interesting video on YouTube by Ali Abouelatta. I will link it below so that you too can watch it and learn from it.

The video intrigued me so much that I decided to learn more about its maker Ali Abouelatta.

Ali is a young man from Egypt who writes a weekly newsletter on Substack about how founders got their first 1000 customers.

Interesting concept!

Especially when Ali shared the growth strategies he himself used to find the first 1000 subscribers for his own newsletter which he did in 79 days.

He didn’t stop just there, he took those numbers to 20K in less than a month.

I decided to check him out at Substack. I was blown away by his content. He has written stories about almost every company that I could think of.

Did you know Uber got its first 1000 customers just by the word of mouth? Read the full story here.

Did you know that Nike sold its first 12 pairs of shoes to Oregon University track coach, Bill Bowerman?

Nike was not Nike then, it was called Blue Ribbon, and Bill Bowerman was no ordinary coach, he was obsessed with giving his players a (legal) edge in whatever shape or form he could.

Phil Knight, the owner of Blue Ribbon did a smart thing, he gave two pairs to Bill Bowerman for free. Bill liked those shoes so much that he became a partner with Phil and together they founded Nike.

But here is the real twist — the shoes were not even made by Blue Ribbon. Phil was just importing them from Japan.

But Ali Abouelatta’s own growth story is most interesting. When he started his newsletter his first two subscribers were his friends. He wrote his first newsletter and kept waiting for his friend's feedback.

The Journey from 2 ->10 was relatively swift. After not getting any feedback from my 2 subscribers, I wanted to expand the test. What I did was going through my email history ( I think I went 2 years back) and saw who I interacted with that fits into the “early startup founder” archetype.

He then wrote them an email saying that “he started a newsletter that talks about how companies got their first 1000 customers. You can checkout the first issue here.” He emailed 217 people and got 11 new subscribers.

He was now ready to release the second issue of the newsletter.

Which he did.

And he posted the link to Hackernews. Because it was just something he read other newsletter writers do.

When he woke up, his article had gone viral.

He got tens of thousands of views, but only 117 subscribers.

You can read the rest of his story in the articles below.

What I learned from his story is that growth doesn’t happen accidently.

You got to apply a strategy and you have to work on it.

I have been writing on Medium for two and half years and on Substack, for about eighteen months. During this time I concentrated on developing my writing skills and ignored the growth altogether.

This year I am focusing on growth.

And I indeed to do that with your help.

At the moment my Substack subscriber numbers are 146.

I want to grow them to 1000 subscribers by the end of 2022.

This means I need 95 subscribers each month.

Which in turn means about 3.2 subscribers each day.

It is an achievable goal if I work on it. I am developing a strategy on how to achieve it which I will share here, on Authorpreneurs.

Starting today, I ask for your help.

Please check out my publication A Whimsical Writer, read a few articles, and subscribe if you like what you read.

Here is what it looks like.

Next week I will write about what strategies I have employed and how many people subscribed.

Please help me succeed by subscribing.