packagemain.tech - Progress, Stats, and Future Plans

📅 Fri, Oct 4, 2024 ⏱️ 3-minute read

On May 30th, 2024, me and my friend/colleague Julien posted our first article on packagemain.tech which is a Substack newsletter where we want to share real world experiences and knowledge about Backend Development, Go, DevOps, Cloud, Kubernetes, Databases and more. We’ve been writing articles almost every week since then and we are very happy with the progress we have made so far.

Some stats first

  1. 20 articles published.
  2. 5k+ subscribers.
  3. Earned ~€400 (few paid subscribers and one sponsor).

stats

Our principles

Over this time we have learned a lot about the format we want to use for this newsletter and we have defined some principles that we want to follow:

  • Keep it free for everyone. We believe that this type of content should be accessible to everyone, therefore we removed the Paid premium articles and keep only the donation option if people want to support us.
  • Hands-on content. We want to share real world experiences and knowledge, not just theoretical stuff.
  • No AI/LLMs. Even though English is not our first language, we don’t want to use any LLMs or AI to write our articles. For example all the thumbnails and diagrams are hand drawn by us in Figma or Miro.
  • Be original. No copy-pasting from other sources. No guest authors.

How did we get here?

I learned that many newsletters with good content well don’t reach these numbers, so let me just share what we did to get here:

  • Consistency. We published an article every week, sometimes even two.
  • Branding. Custom domain, logo, etc. I wish it could be even better but we’re not designers.
  • Sharing. The main platforms for cross-posting our articles are: Medium, Twitter, Reddit. And recently I started writing on freeCodeCamp which has a hude audience.
  • Substack Recommendations. This is a killer feauture honestly! Almost half of our subscribers came from Substack recommendations. And currently there are ~50 publications recommending us.

Substack

Few comments on Substack. It was a random decision to start writing on Substack, but I’m mostly happy with it. There is a lot of great functionality like recommendations which I mentioned above, post scheduling, analytics, payments etc. But few things could be improved:

  • Code Highlighting. It’s a pain to write code in Substack. We’re using a workaround with images, or just pasting the code as is in the greay box.
  • Editor. I wish it could support Markdown.
  • Substack App and Notes. In the beginning I tried to engage in different conversations in Substack Notes, but realized that it’s not worth it. The audience is too small and everyone is an author there.

Future plans

We’re still motivated to continue writing good articles, so nothing changes here. Send us your feedback or topic suggestions (X or email) if you have any.

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