I run a small Product Hunt alternative called Tiny Startups.
I've been running it as a newsletter for a few years and have grown it to around ~20k subscribers but I decided to go ahead with a soft pivot and build it into a "launch platform" in April to try and compete with the big boys like Product Hunt.
I made $4.9k in revenue in April - my first month as a launch platform.
In May revenue jumped from $4.9k to $5.6k -- most of this is from promoted submissions, even though a very high majority of submissions (~98%) are free submissions.
Costs me ~$200/month to run the site + newsletter, the rest is profit.
May saw over 12k unique visitors visit the tinystartups.com website.
I'm mainly just promoting this via my newsletter (~20k subs) and X. Word of mouth does the rest.
Looking to grow this project to a stable ~$10k/month but not sure how it'll get there yet.
I don't know if this is inspirational or helpful for anyone, just thought I'd put it out there and hope for the best.
Interesting. I'd be interested in testimonials alongside the options for promotion/putting it in the newsletter/etc. E.g. how many people actually read that newsletter?
How did you start/grow the newsletter?