How Miguel Correia grew an automated investing newsletter to 3000+ subscribers

Hello! Who are you and what newsletter did you start?

Hi! I’m Miguel and I started the IPO Brief - a weekly digest with information about the companies going public every week.

How did you launch it and what did you do to get the first 100 subscribers?

After I published my first issue (about 2 years ago), I started by posting on many platforms such as Product Hunt and Indie Hackers, plus sent it around my friends and family and quickly got to around 100 subscribers in the first few days.

What does your process for creating the content look like?

Initially I compiled all the information myself while I was still understanding what was relevant or not to include, but as soon as the second or third issue I started building some custom scripts to fetch and compile all the information. Nowadays it takes me about 10 minutes every Monday and little to no intervention to create an issue and publish it.

What tools are you using to create, send, and grow the newsletter?

A lot of custom scripts to scrape the information required from multiple sources. The scripts feed all data into an Airtable. A final script fetches everything from Airtable, generates an html template, and schedules the email to be sent.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain subscribers?

There were 3 big identifiable spikes in subscribers and both came from side products that linked back to the newsletter. I’m a big believer in this technique to boost eyeballs back to your product.

The first one was when I introduced an alert system so you could be notified as soon as a company goes public, and this also improved engagement across the list but also brought people in that wanted to get a reminder and then they stayed for the newsletter.

The second and biggest spike was when I launched the onethousand.in tool that you could check how much it would be worth today if you had invested $1000 at a specific stock. This product went a bit viral, people in multiple forums took it as a game as well to find out what was the best and worse and brought a lot of subscribers in. 

The latest product was Hot Picks of the Week which automatically shows the 5 most requested stocks from my subscribers from the current week and it shows a bit of how people are interested in different stocks.

How are you doing today and what are your plans for the future?

As now, the stock market is not in the best shape and so the IPO market also is quite cooled off so I have been focusing my time on Sponsy that started directly from my experience with the newsletter and managing multiple sponsors, but that’s a topic for another day.

Since the newsletter is very low effort and it keeps growing just with word of mouth, I’ll keep doing it every week. I have some more ideas for the future but they are still parked. For the time being I’ll do some cross promotions and small stuff like that, but won’t spend too much time on it.

What’s one piece of advice you’d like to share with someone who wants to get started or is just starting out?

As a developer it might be easier to say because we can automate most of the stuff, but the best piece of advice to any newsletter creator is to be consistent. It takes time and it requires time. You have to be persistent and keep doing it and results will come.

Also important to say to do it about a subject you love and you have interest in. I’ve built the IPO Brief mainly for myself: I’m my first customer and I still find the insights I share every week quite valuable.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you are into the stock market subscribe to the IPO Brief and get insights every week, although the market is quite cooled off at the moment. You can play around with onethousand.in and see how your FOMO is.

And if you ever grow your list and start making money with sponsorships and need help managing all those slots and customers and assets, give us a ping in Sponsy we love to help you out.

Last but not least, you can always follow me on Twitter @sircon, I don’t post much (yet) but I’m planning to be more active there one day soon and share more about my projects’ journey.