Show HN: Village – Everything to know about Toronto, in your inbox
itsonvillage.com
itsonvillage.com
You can see a sample of the newsletters here: https://mailchi.mp/224bac98aac1/saturday-edition-june-15-260...
I was inspired by Jessica Lessin (The Information) who's been adamant that the secret to building paywalls is building a great product. Village is my attempt at creating a great local news product.
In the last 2 months I've been able to sign up a little over 100 subscribers— but they were all previously subscribed to a free version of the newsletter I ran from 2016-2017 (it had over 4,000 subscribers). I've already emailed the free version list 3 or 4 times so I'm reticent to keep selling to it.
Newsletters take me about 13 hours each week (10 hours curating / writing and 3 hours taking photographs around the city).
My biggest challenge is marketing. I've priced it at $3 / month because that's what a price-point people have told me they are comfortable with (which I know, conventional wisdom is INCREASE your price). $3 / month makes it hard to get a positive ROI on things like Facebook Ads (though even at $3 / month I'm not having much success converting cold leads to warm leads).
Would love to know your feedback.