
Show HN: Village – Everything to know about Toronto, in your inbox - steve-benjamins
https://www.itsonvillage.com/
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steve-benjamins
Hi HN, I'm posting this specifically for feedback.

You can see a sample of the newsletters here:
[https://mailchi.mp/224bac98aac1/saturday-edition-
june-15-260...](https://mailchi.mp/224bac98aac1/saturday-edition-
june-15-2604689)

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.

