A founder sent a launch email to 78 friends using MailChimp's free tier and set a 40% open rate target. It hit 60%+ opens and grew to 104 subscribers in two weeks with zero promotion, so the team spent the next two quarters refining based on user feedback.
And so you said the first thing you did was you emailed 78 of your friends. Yeah. So we were using MailChimp at the time. I think it's free up to 10,000. I give Drew a lot of credit here. He's a scientist and he's not from like the startup world. And he was like, let's just write it and ship it out tomorrow. And I was like, yes. If you look at the original email, it's probably 85% of the same thing that we have today. So yeah. And then like, we just shipped it out to 78 friends and family, groomsmen, my uncles, like our friends from high school. We said, if we don't have a 40% open rate and a 5% weekly organic growth rate, we shouldn't spend time on this project. I've just got burned on another one. But we had like a 60-something percent open rate, which we still have today. Our 78 the next week had 91 subscribers. So we didn't ask anything, but people were like, check this out. I remember saying that to Drew, like, there's something cool in there. Keep going. And then the next week we had, I think it was 104. We just kept on taking all the feedback and iterating. We spent the first 2 or 3 quarters just doing nothing but that.
