I’m Janel, I created Newsletter Operating System, AMA 🔥

@5harath Thank you Sharath! You've always been supportive to me & other makers. There's so much to unpack in that question. 1. Be passionate about something and learn as much as you can about it. 2. Build up your knowledge, create systems that work for yourself. Save the content that helped you learn in a database. 3. Structure this neatly for your personal use. 4. Be active, curious and engaged in the communities around your niche. 5. Have an idea of what you want to create and think of a name for it, and a rough structure 6. Write copy and pull together a landing page / @gumroad page for a pre-order. Price low and ladder that pricing. You can do this very cheaply. Don't waste money on hiring fancy website builders - use no-code tools like Carrd, Dorik, Softr or even Gumroad's native product page to do this. 7. Post on social and wherever relevant. Collect pre-order $. That stuff serves as a forcing function and motivates you to create immense value when building your product 8. Get beta readers / users for your product to check your products, point out errors, and make sure whatever you're writing is understandable. 9. Launch on the social media network you're most comfortable with. Raise prices if necessary. 10. Collect feedback. Build a wall of love. Shoutout.so is a good option! 11. Launch on Product Hunt 12. Ride the wave, share your lessons, help your customers, lift them up!

@kyleighsmith Thanks Kyleigh! 1. Pre-sale | I wrote a super long thread on Twitter detailing the problem, how it solves the problem, and what the contents were. I included screenshots of the unfinished product! Used laddered pricing (inspired by @stephsmith) where I started off lower and increased my prices as more people bought. 2. Launch on Twitter | Did something similar! I also got a few people who purchased it early to do beta-reads and framed their feedback on my landing page as social proof 3. Launch on Product Hunt | Did this I think one month after my pre-launch, when I already had a ton of customers who were actively using. They came to support me on my PH launch day and it gave me another huge boost. So grateful! https://www.producthunt.com/post... 4. Promoting it on relevant communities that I was already active in | I was able to share my journey on Indie Hackers, WINC, Trends.vc and Ness Labs and they were very supportive. By the way, I do not endorse joining communities just to spam them. Make sure you actually provide value to others before you start trumpeting your own product! (But of course, Kyleigh, you're the sweetest and most helpful everywhere you go, so this comment is not for you, but a general word of warning for anyone who might be reading this) 5. Doing AMAs in some communities | I don't really measure sales from this. Just happy to help others create. A byproduct of that is sometimes sales, which is cool. Most effective: - Twitter - Product Hunt - My own newsletter - Communities I was active in Least effective: - Few paid ads

@janelsgm That's a helpful exp sharing. Level up+++

@harinivas_p Thanks for reading!

@daniel_chenzw So happy to hear Daniel!

@shashcoffe Thank you so much Alexey! Love Notion products. It's exciting that you want to start a newsletter in English and share your knowledge! 1. Start simple - write a weekly newsletter somewhere. Doesn't matter which platform. But make sure you add value. 2. I don't know if money is your main thing, but honestly, I think Don't charge first until you build out a base of loyal subscribers. You can monetize via ads, your own products or charging people for subscription.

@janelsgm Hi again, Janel. Thank you so much for your tips. 🙏🙂 You're inspiring me.=)

@teddy_be First of all, welcome to the no-code community. It's a wonderful, friendly place full of people who are excited and ready to help each other. Love seeing so many positive-sum people all around. 💪 Getting Through Tough Times Know your North Star, aka, your guiding "why" and stick to it. If you are clear about why you're doing something, it's harder to give up. Having a circle of close friends you can count on is so important. Find a group of others who have similar goals to you, and be accountable to each other, share tips, work through problems together. It's ok to feel writer's block. It's ok to feel that your content is going into the void, because anyone starting out will have these feelings. The important part is to look back at your North Star and work towards tiny habits and actions that help you achieve it. 🐦 Twitter Tips This thread that I wrote when I hit 500 followers still rings true: - Optimize your profile - Write valuable content - Make it easy to read - To be interesting, be interested https://twitter.com/JanelSGM/sta...

@janelsgm Thanks a ton, Janel! You're awesome!

@ujjwal_sukheja Twitter, Cross-Promotions and being an active member in a number of communities with like-minded individuals (Indie Hackers, Ness Labs, Trends.vc)

@mfgonz Hey María! Great question. I used to be a serious lurker. Read tweets and never said or did anything. I started a newsletter, started to discover no-code and eventually got in touch with @thisiskp_ who I ended up working with. He thought me everything I needed to know about Building in Public and playing positive-sum games. I decided to share what I learned with others too! How did I start? Honestly, just sharing what I learned, cool snippets from books I read, interesting finds from the Internet, thoughts and ideas. I engaged with people publicly, made friends in the DMs. All this stuff is life-changing. Highly recommend doing it if you haven't already started.

@nicwondering Thanks so much Nic, have enjoyed growing alongside you and have learned a ton from you in the process. Proud to call you a friend and thankful for your constant encouragement and support!

@kunalmishra What an interesting problem you're tackling. There are three different tools I use at the moment. A Chrome Extension by Mailbrew to save articles to my "Read Later" pile, a Chrome Extension called Save To Notion for longer-term archival of interesting tools and links that goes directly into "BrainPint OS". I also have this cool Bookmarklet thing that saves links directly to sheets. For anyone who hasn't seen my weekly curation workflow and is curious: https://janelloi.com/how-i-curat...

@simran_handa So hard to distill it into a single piece of advice! I'm going to cheat and give a few bullet points, from the lens of someone creating information products. 1. Build credibility - You don't have to be an expert but you need to be credible. People need to trust that they're going to learn something from you. How do you build credibility? By being an active member in the communities you're in, by writing stuff about the niche you're in, by generously sharing knowledge with others. 2. Don't be afraid to raise your prices - If you launch at a low price, that's ok. Don't be afraid that people are going to stop buying stuff from you if you raise your prices. Price can be a good signal for quality. I needed to remind myself about this a lot. 3. Landing pages make and break your product - Nail your copy. Get social proof on board. If you need a primer to landing pages, check out OnePageLove.com or @robhope's Landing Page Hot Tips

@janelsgm This is great! Thank you :)

thanks for sharing them!

@simran_handa Glad it helped!

@cravenjade Thank you for all your support! - Did you do any research into other products hosted on Notion? Not a whole lot! At that moment, there weren't a lot of info products like Newsletter OS that were hosted on Notion but there were a ton of creators creating interesting templates for other functions (databases, checklists, fancy formulas) that I referenced. - Were there any resources that helped you when creating the product (again, relating to Notion.) Looking at the success of other creators, studying and emulating successful launch strategies, with my own twist was what I did. If you want to learn more about Notion, @mariepoulin has amazing resources available! - Have you changed how you have organized the information since launching the product? Nope! I was very thoughtful about how I structured the product. It sucks to have to rework an entire Notion template, especially if you've already input information in it (which many of my customers have done!) so I made sure my base structure was solid before I released it. Now, updates include drag and drop sections, items and/or bookmarks that are easily imported into the base architecture.

@crypto_fini Rabbit holes are awesome! Strangely, not yet. Please tell me if you do. It's a space that's heating up!

@claire_jack Thanks Claire, that's super kind of you!

@techvoke Great question! Answered it above!

@pck_nautical Thank you