On August 2020 I posted a fairly successful Show HN[0]for a service[1] that I had just built: "Serial Literature - Literature in weekly installments delivered to your email inbox".
Just last week I got a nice email of appreciation by a subscriber, which prompted me into look how it is doing. Something that I hadn't checked for more than an year, I think. So I decided to share, just out of curiosity, same data about its traction.
A relevant info is that I only promoted the service on the mentioned Show HN and, I think, on Reddit around that time, without much traction there though. Then I did a few updates adding more books. Then... I just left it there, working. Without worrying about maintaining it or marketing it. Which shows in the data below.
Another note for the HN crowd, the tech stack is a static site built with Eleventy, hosted on Netlify; using its Lambda Functions to save the data on FaunaDB serverlessly; then an AWS lambda function with a cron job to schedule the email delivery every night, using Mailgun. All of it on these services' free tier plan (so I could set and forget).
So, some limited analytics data (since I dind't set up any tracking).
Revenue : $0 (I never charged or intended too, I did built another site, kind of similar, but for new writers, with more for-profit goals[2])
Total subscribers : 1012 (the last one just yesterday, more than two years after any promotion).
Active subscribers : IDK (the query is a bit tricky, so I am just guessing from email delivery data, I think between 100 and 200 as of last December).
Emails sent by month since launch :
(emails can be sent from 1 to 7 times a week for each book a subscriber is currently reading)
2020 September ..... 4675
2020 October ....... 8021
2020 November ...... 5664
2020 December ...... 4660
2021 January ....... 3884
2021 February ...... 2809
2021 March ......... 2430
2021 April ......... 2145
2021 May ........... 1927
2021 June .......... 1441
2021 July .......... 1374
2021 August ........ 1191
2021 September ..... 1054
2021 October ....... 1156
2021 November ...... 801
2021 December ...... 751
2022 January ....... 1024
2022 February ...... 781
2022 March ......... 770
2022 April ......... 827
2022 May ........... 870
2022 June .......... 755
2022 July .......... 795
2022 August ........ 721
2022 September ..... 660
2022 October ....... 723
2022 November ...... 740
2022 December ...... 564
Emails delivery metrics: 98.59% delivered, 0.45% suppressed, 0.96% dropped (I don't track opening rate)
[0] Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752
[1] Site link: https://www.serialliterature.com/
[2] My for-profit, kind of similar site, but focusing on new writers wanting to publish original fiction: https://www.confabulists.com
by Andrey
Azimov