She grew her audience from just 50 subscribers to 21,500 under 18 months
Noor Gupta is the Founder and CEO of Touristy, a Business Media Publication that gives you insider access to the latest stories shaping Consumer Culture. She founded Touristy after interning in Marketing at Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine and graduating from both NYU and Cass Business School in London, UK.
Combining her communications chops with her business savvy, she has grown her weekly newsletter from 50 readers in mid 2020 to north of 21,000 today.
What strategies have you used to grow your subscriber list?
Basically doing all things that don’t scale. I’ve conversed with over a 1000 people, literally one by one - from my NYU alumni to strangers over the internet! I've been loving the building process too! I've met such cool people- albeit virtually!
You’d be surprised at how much you can do from behind a screen. This enormous effort has compounded into bringing Touristy distribution on LinkedIn and Twitter.
How do you build trust with your audience?
Well, trust is always a function of being consistent and predictable over a long period of time. So far, I’ve sent out 95 newsletters over 95 weeks. Hence, regardless of where I am and what I’m doing, on Tuesday’s at around 8 AM EST, my newsletter has to go out to my audience.
In fact, I recently got engaged and my newsletter still went out that day because I just can’t let my audience down- no matter how small it is!
I started with a list of 50 friends, and over almost 100 weeks, today, that list has grown to over 20,000 subscribers with over 40% actively engaging with us every week.
a bootcamp series by Newsletter Crew | Kickoff: Wednesday 27th October
Grow Your Audience Wed Oct 27th - Fri Oct 29th
Grow Your Audience is where you'll learn from leaders at Ghost, Smooth Ops, and Morning Brew, how to use tools and best practices to build your online brand and nail self promotion.
Schedule
Wednesday 27th October
12pm Eastern
How to get your first 1000 subscribers
Join this workshop for a practical and proven guide to attracting, converting, and retaining your 'true fans.' Learn about creating your content pillars, SEO, building lead magnets, and running effective promotion experiments. There will also be an AMA session via Discord after the workshop.
Thursday 28th October
12pm Eastern
Is audio a content pivot or a growth hack?
In this panel with Smooth Ops leaders (who are also both ex-Morning Brew) we are unpacking the big-picture and tactical questions on every newsletter writer's mind.
Will audio kill the newsletter star? Can I create both types of content? What kinds of operations will it take? How far can podcasting grow my newsletter?
Friday 29th October
12pm Eastern
The operations and creative of a fast-growing newsletter
A fireside chat with the man who has over a decade at the helm of Morning Brew seeing it grow from 200k to 3 million subscribers. We'll talk about understanding a changing readership, crafting voice, building successful writing teams, growing pains, distribution channels, and much more.
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