Breakfast Blocks - Blockchain email news product
Breakfast Blocks is a blockchain-focused morning newsletter that hits your inbox every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Myself and two friends worked on this product for approximately 6 months in our free time purely because of our fascination for the industry. After 55 successful issues, we are taking a step back to assess feedback, understand where we succeeded / fell short, and roadmap our future... Check out our work here!
What did we do?
Idea conceived in December 2017
Spent 2 months developing aggregation algorithm and product design
Performed beta testing in February 2018; 1 month feedback / tweaks
v1 launch in March 2018 (MVP), Agile approach to v2 launch in April 2018
Grew subscriber list 50% month over month to reach 300+ subscribers
Co-authored 55 editions of newsletter, hitting inboxes more than 12,500 times
Average open rate of 23.1% over 4 month period
Consistently beat average Business / Finance Industry newsletter open rates (13.1%)
What did we learn?
Organic growth is extremely difficult, especially in a crypto bear market
Paid acquisition works, and CAC in the Bitcoin / blockchain world isn't cheap
Low click rates aren't a bad thing - it keeps people inside your email
Writing 3x per week drastically improves ones writing ability - no matter the topic
2-step sign up (web sign up + email confirmation) reduces capture rate... Small lists should not implement this, large ones should; it keeps your demographics honest