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 🚀
OctoArt website analytics
And besides that, it is really cool to see people sharing their pictures. This is my favorite one:
Taco Party in GitHub style
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:
The first CTA
And the second one is in the footer:
CTA 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 🤗
