

Sometimes people do. - mdenny
http://blog.wells.ee/sometimes-people-do

======
sudonim
I can attest to the "Nobody wants email" myth being a myth. We started with a
"Sign up to find out when we launch" form on our startup page and never
planned to email until we launched. (Big mistake)

About 3 months in, with the encouragement of an email marketing guru, I
started emailing people every week. People didn't unsubscribe. In fact they
wrote me to tell me how valuable my little newsletter was to them. People all
over the world told me it was the only newsletter from a company they read
because they learned something new every week. They even forwarded it to other
people in their company.

In the end, we launched, and I spun out the newsletter into it's own thing.
There are over 1000 people who want me to write them an email every week. If
you asked most people in tech, they would say "That's not gonna work".

It remains to be seen how well that translates into more subscriptions, but I
figure if I can share what I've learned to give value to others, it probably
comes back to us somehow.

~~~
bigiain
Any chance of a link to your archives? I'd love to see the sort of content you
wrote which got that sort of reaction.

(My email is in my profile, if you don't want to share it quite as broadly as
posting it here.)

~~~
lostsock
I'd also be interested if you have the archives available. My email is also in
my profile.

~~~
sudonim
Hey, your email isn't in your profile. Feel free to shoot me one - colin at
customer dot io

------
petercooper
When I decided to try creating a Ruby e-mail newsletter two years ago, I had
people saying e-mail was old technology, they wanted RSS, it wouldn't work,
etc. And I've heard that many times over the years. Now at 74k subscribers
(across four newsletters) and it has become my main business by accident. My
takeaway is that it's better to pay attention to what people _do_ , rather
than what they say.

~~~
tomjen3
Paying attention to what people do is often a good thing, but how many
subscribers would you have if you had gone with blog+rss?

~~~
petercooper
I can actually attempt an answer at that as I launched the e-mail newsletter
off the back of the most popular Ruby blog which I also run.

I grew the blog to 25,000 RSS subscribers (as measured by FeedBurner) between
2006 and 2010 _but_ the engagement and what those readers actually _do_ pales
in comparison to my 15,000 e-mail subscribers who click more and open more in
vastly greater levels. I now believe, like many, that the numbers FeedBurner
give out are mostly BS and don't give any hint of engagement at all.

Separate to this I've built a 30k strong JavaScript e-mail newsletter
_without_ any blog. This is a larger regular subscription base than most other
JavaScript related sites I know of.. with the exception of Ajaxian which is
now half dead.

So I can't say for _sure_ because maybe I could make a blog work better, but
in terms of engagement, how much money I can earn, etc, e-mail has been a huge
win over blogging.

------
fmela
Apologies for the completely OT post, but what blog engine is this?

~~~
wells-riley
It's called Svbtle. (<http://svbtle.com>)

------
tomjen3
Link 404 for me.

~~~
stan_rogers
The domain seems to be gone altogether now -- there's just a generic search
results page based on the domain name (wells, water, get well soon cards, that
sort of thing) at the main domain and at www, and the blog subdomain is all
404.

------
FredBrach
This article has a very important point. Thanks so much for having wrote it.

