Earlier this month, I launched the Blogging for Devs paid community. How it's going so far:

82 paid members
$6.1K revenue
1 bitcoin transaction
$618 MRR
25% chose lifetime deal

Here's the behind-the-scenes of the launch week: revenue, learnings, & next steps

Facts first: I bootstrapped the community off of a newsletter I started in May & invited 100 beta members back in July.

It took a month of extra prep to go paid for new members.

The *public* launch was Nov 2nd, the day before the US elections, but... https://twitter.com/monicalent/status/1323333859111510016

I'd already been quietly inviting people from the waitlist over the weekend via personal emails.

In the first week, 39% of new members came from a waitlist of about 126 people, which I grew by building in public

BUT over 72% (!) came from my free, weekly newsletter

Out of 69 new paying members in the first week, only 3 were unattributable at least one of three sources:

1. Waitlister
2. Newsletter Subscriber
3. Twitter Follower

People often look at Twitter followers and assume that's why a launch succeeds. Here, not as much.

Actually, only about 1/3 of paid members even follow me on Twitter! I'm not offended, to the contrary — I prefer it.

Now I know that if I want to grow the community, the best thing I can do is have more of the right people *join the newsletter first*.

Back to that in a second.

Let's look at revenue. For the first 250 people to join, it'll costs $12/month, $96/year, or $180 once.

In the first week, about half of the new members chose monthly vs. a longer-term commitment.

But more than any amount of revenue, I'm *thrilled* at the cool people who've joined.

That’s why my biggest launch fear wasn’t that no one would sign up.

It was that openly launching would mean spammers or low quality signups. So far, no problems at all

To top it off, the next steps are clear: Grow the newsletter in order to grow the community with great people.

Marketers might call this a "funnel". I think about it more like concentric circles approaching a core.

Now I need to expand the outer rings.

Here are the main things I've learned as a newbie community builder so far:

• Newsletters = proto-communities
• Individuals > Automation
• Qualified waitlist = better connections
• Landing page may not matter much
• "Paid" can work as a filter
• Nothing's perfect, it's OK!

Above all else, the second point is most important:

Focusing on individuals and personal connections is what makes it all work. People are *shocked* when a human personally replies to their questions.

Same principle held for the #1 Product Hunt launch: https://bloggingfordevs.com/product-hunt-launch/

Later this week, I'll post a blog post with more details and my plans to grow from here. Launching something new very soon

Hope this was interesting or helpful for anyone thinking of launching a paid community!

If you have questions / feedback, I'd love to hear it :)