As you know, last week I launched a funny one-off project called OctoArt to get some new newsletter subscribers (you can read a post about it here).

The OctoArt allows to generate beautiful AI images in a GitHub logo style.

Why GitHub logo? Well, this is the single most recognizable symbol of open-source. And besides that, I anticipated it would attract some attention from GitHub and help the project to get trending.

And you know that? IT REALLY HAPPENED 🤯 I reached my goal of getting noticed by GitHub, but I didn't reached other goals of getting new newsletters subscribers.

Let's talk about it step by step.

Reaching the goal

Well, first of all, let me brag a little bit…

OctoArt got mentioned by official GitHub Twitter account 🎉 It was really joyful to see this tweet on a Saturday evening:

As a result of this tweet, OctoArt got around 1k new website visitors, and more than 1.5k images were generated in total 🚀

And besides that, it is really cool to see people sharing their pictures. This is my favorite one:

But despite all these nice things, I got only 4 new Twitter followers and just 2 new newsletter subscribers 🥲

Not reaching other goals

So as I said, I didn't reach my goal of getting a meaningful amount (~100) of new newsletter subscribers from this launch.

I think there are several reasons:

• CTA to subscribe to the newsletter is not strong enough

• Newsletter website is meh and it doesn't look credible

• Audience is not right.

In general, I feel like the CTA is the weakest thing. So I have two CTAs on the website which lead to the newsletter.

The first one is showed after a user generated the first image:

And the second one is in the footer:

Besides that, I feel like the audience (followers of GitHub Twitter account) is not the right one for my newsletter. Though I think it is in general one of the biggest problems of my newsletter, I am not sure who it is intended for 😅

Last but not least is the newsletter website. It is a default website generated by Beehiiv, and it doesn't look really good. I really need to improve it.

Learnings

So despite all the wins, I have a lot of things I should do to improve:

• Focus on one audience and be intentional about it

  • I am not sure about the audience of this newsletter, so I am not sure how to grow it

• Be more aggressive with CTAs

  • CTA was very weak, I should have shown something like a popup and even not allowed users to generate more than 1 image until they check out the newsletter 😀

• Collect more analytics

  • I am not even sure which one of CTAs was clicked more 😅

• Improve the newsletter website

  • It just looks bad 🥲

Anyways, building and launching this project was a lot of fun. I learned a lot, created interesting content from it and shared my learnings with you. I hope you find it useful.

Repo of the week ✨

Tolgee is an open-source web localization platform for translators and developers. It saves a lot on time spent on localization tasks thanks to features like in-context translation, one-click screenshots, machine translation, auto translation and more.

Check out Tolgee and give it a star ⭐

P.S. If you have less than 1,000 stars and want to be featured in the next issue, send me a message on Twitter

See you in the next one 🤗