Building a Newsletter in public: Here’s What We’ve Learned
We’ve been building Idea TBD in public - a weekly drop where we share raw product ideas, highlight early-stage tools, and experiment with building a community around curiosity and creativity.
It’s scrappy. It’s messy. It’s ours.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far 👇
🚧 Substack ≠ Traction
We started on Substack, but it never quite clicked. Felt like shouting into the void.
We deleted our account and focused on what was working:
Product Hunt → Real reach, real feedback
X → Still small, but steady growth and genuine interactions
📬 The Best Feedback is Real-Time
This isn’t just a newsletter - it’s a loop.
Creators share → readers test → we relay insights → everyone wins.
Seems to be working.
💸 Money Spent So Far
$11 on a domain
$7 on X Premium
$10 on a failed post promotion 😅
Early marketing lessons? Priceless.
📈 What’s Working
Product Hunt is by far our best organic channel.
X is slow—but we doubled followers (7 → 12, huge vibes only)
Writing > shouting. Real talk > polished pitch.
🧠 Strategy Going Forward
Keep sharing useful ideas and underrated tools
Keep experimenting with how feedback loops can help builders
Grow our base through trust, not gimmicks
Maybe some guerrilla marketing (QR shirts?? cryptic billboards??)
TL;DR
It’s early. It’s fun. It’s a long game.
If you’re building a newsletter, we’d love to hear what’s worked for you, and what hasn’t. Drop links, lessons, or roast our $10 ad campaign 😂
And if you’re curious what we’re up to, you can check it out at Idea TBD
Replies
Hey Furquaan, honestly, I am very curious about this topic, so I will have more questions:
What is the goal of the newsletter?
What is the desired monetisation model?
Why did you choose Beehiiv over Substack? (What benefits does it have?)
What kind of readers do you want to attract?
How many subscribers do you have in total and what amount brought particular social media/platforms?
P.S.: I think that $10 will not bring many results. In some businesses, we used €1,000 only for testing creatives.
@busmark_w_nika Thanks for taking an interest, Nika :’)
The goal is to build a community and have a place to put the 1,000 ideas we come up with every day.
We’re not thinking about monetization right now or anytime in the near future, the hope is that by building a community of builders and enthusiasts, we’ll eventually have an audience to test our own experiments on.
We picked Beehiiv because it was free to start, offered a customizable landing page, and has an easy-to-use analytics dashboard. Substack is great and has community momentum, but felt more saturated. Also, the Beehiiv founder is a friend of a friend :)
We’re aiming to attract startup/product folks, thinkers, and anyone who enjoys riffing on ideas or collaborating on projects.
Right now we’re small, about 120 subscribers. We haven’t spent anything on paid campaigns except a $10 experiment just to test the waters, lol.
Appreciate your callout - we were definitely a bit impulsive with the test. We’re not focused on short-term results through that channel but are open to exploring it more seriously later on. For now, it’s mostly about learning how to grow without relying on spend.
@chaosandcoffee Thank you so much. Extensive answer! :)
10 dollars might be too small to carry out valid test, but yeah, most of those paid adds are not efficient enough for the newsletters. its more for products with high margin i think =)
@nikita_polovinkin Absolutely, good callout, I think we just got curious and wanted to see what $10 would get us 😅
Definitely not planning to run paid ads again anytime soon, when we do, we’ll have a real strategy in place.
Cool learnings, lessons like these are definitely valuable ;)
I'm curious though, what's the long-term objective?
@david_conelly Thanks David :)
The plan is to build a cool community of builders and help people along the way.
From a financial perspective, we don’t plan on monetizing anytime soon but hopefully, when we’re ready to launch our own products, we’ll already have a space to do it publicly, get good feedback, find collaborators, and maybe even some initial users.
Thanks for sharing your journey, Furqaan! Also, thank you for featuring Lifetoon in one of your editions!
I'm curious why you leaned towards X as a social channel? I'm also slowly growing my own newsletter, and I've been testing with Threads, but that's because I'm pairing it with Instagram. What other channels were you considering before picking X, and what are the actions you're focusing on X?
Keep up the awesome work!
@ruxandra_mazilu Instagram totally makes sense but we feel like it’s a platform that really needs a strategy and consistent posting, which feels like a lot to take on right now. Definitely a channel we want to tap into later though!
We’re leaning into X because it lets us be honest and organic.
We can repurpose our newsletter into bite-sized tweets (which doesn’t really work anywhere else), share real convos from our calls, and engage with the community more naturally.
Loved the transparency in this post.
The shift from Substack to Product Hunt makes a lot of sense, and the focus on real-time feedback loops is spot on.
Appreciate the honest take on what’s working and what’s not. One question: how are you deciding which product ideas or tools to feature each week? Is it based on community feedback, your own research, or something else?
Wishing you continued growth with Idea TBD, excited to see where it goes next!
@zarrak_khan2 Thank you so much for the kind words, Zarrak!
Right now, we’ve added a “Feature Your Product” button in the newsletter and anyone who submits through that is getting featured since we don’t have a ton of submissions yet.
Down the line, we’d love to be a bit more selective, but for now the goal is just to spotlight as many cool ideas as we can and help people get seen.
Appreciate the subscribe :’)
Lancepilot
Substack ghost town? Been there. That $10 ad? Paid the same tuition.
Loving the “writing > shouting” vibe, it’s what actually builds trust. QR shirts? Weirdly into it.
@priyankamandalGlad we're relatable - I feel like everyone doing it right has to go through this at some point. Total rite of passage :)
congrats this is great! what's keeping you from spending $100 testing a few ad copies and adding some growth that way?
it's probably a net positive ROI when you consider the short amount of time in which you'll get feedback/users
@emikes919 Thank you for taking an interest :')
We’re trying to learn how to build a community from zero and hoping those skills transfer long-term.
Though we’re currently looking at Beehiiv Boost, it gives you subs at a fixed cost, so that’s one option on our radar.
Curious what channels you’d recommend testing?
@chaosandcoffee meta ads. I've subscribed to tons of newsletters through there. You can probably start acquiring subscribers for $10-$30 / day and scale from there once you've tested and found working ads.
keep it simple with text-based or simple meme ads. test different offers, like offering the newsletter outright, and offering a separate lead magnet that people need to submit their email to get
honestly a no brainer imo. cheap and will give you hard data quickly