I run a small Product Hunt alternative called Tiny Startups.
I've been running it as a newsletter for a few years and have grown it to around ~20k subscribers but I decided to go ahead with a soft pivot and build it into a "launch platform" in April to try and compete with the big boys like Product Hunt.
I made $4.9k in revenue in April - my first month as a launch platform.
In May revenue jumped from $4.9k to $5.6k -- most of this is from promoted submissions, even though a very high majority of submissions (~98%) are free submissions.
Costs me ~$200/month to run the site + newsletter, the rest is profit.
May saw over 12k unique visitors visit the tinystartups.com website.
I'm mainly just promoting this via my newsletter (~20k subs) and X. Word of mouth does the rest.
Looking to grow this project to a stable ~$10k/month but not sure how it'll get there yet.
I don't know if this is inspirational or helpful for anyone, just thought I'd put it out there and hope for the best.
Alex-Programs3 days ago
Interesting. I'd be interested in testimonials alongside the options for promotion/putting it in the newsletter/etc. E.g. how many people actually read that newsletter?
klakierr3 days ago
How did you start/grow the newsletter?