If you know any founders in these cities, then we would love to meet them while we're in town. Feel free to tag them in the comments below, and we'll reach out to connect.

— Milwaukee (July 14th).— Chicago (July 15th).— Toledo (July 17th).— Cleveland (July 17th) .— Pittsburgh (July 18th).— Philadelphia (July 19th).— New York (July 20th).— Washington, DC (July 21st).

Join millions who have switched to Grok.

We plan to meet hundreds of founders throughout the country, and spread the good word about community rounds. Our full itinerary is as follows: . — San Francisco (July 4th).— Portland (July 7th) .— Glacier (July 9th).— Grand Forks (July 12th).— Minneapolis (July 13th).

Starting on July 4th, our entire @Wefunder team is riding @Amtrak across America. 77% of VC dollars go to three states today (California, New York and Massachusetts). But we believe that the democratization of angel investing can fix that.

RT @JonnyCPrice: “Work trips” to Puglia are the best “work trips”!

"We saw so much success with having Billy Joe [lead singer of Green Day] go to @Wefunder and wire $100k. It's so easy.". — Founder on a call just now. How amazing is this?.

By the way, Founder Secrets is over for now. But I’ve passed the torch to @denk_tweets . So if you want to learn how he is growing beehiiv to a billion-dollar company, you can subscribe to BDE:

9) Write amazing content. None of the above would have worked without insanely good content. Nothing compensates for bad content. So make sure that your content is A+.

- Welcome email: When someone subscribes and engages with your emails right away, that’s a good signal for Google. - Re-engagement automation: an automated sequence for everyone who hasn’t opened your emails for X weeks. If they still don’t engage, auto-unsubscribe them.

8) Maintaining a 50% + open rate. Growth is critical. But high engagement is even more important. What’s the point of having 100k subscribers if you have a 10% open rate?. A few things to make sure your open rate stays above 50%.

7) More ads . When we started monetizing, LTV increased so we could afford a higher CAC. Started acquiring US subscribers for around $1.50-$2.

When we featured Jolie, we discussed their NYC truck campaign. I reached out to Crosswalk Media (which managed the campaign) to sponsor. Readers tend to skip the “sponsor” in newsletters. In this case, content was about the campaign. This means better recall and brand building.

6) Monetized. Accepted sponsors at $400/episode. The higher rate was due to the quality of the content and audience and to the fact that sponsors were contextual to the episode.

5) Paid ads. After making our first $1000, I launched some ads. Acquired subscribers in Europe for $0.50. For every $1 spent in ads, was getting $1 back (with boosts) and re-investing into ads. That was a cool growth loop.

4) Activating @beehiiv boost. Before launching on Product Hunt, I activated some boosts. Any time someone subscribed to the newsletter, they’d get asked to join other newsletters as well. Was making $2 per referred subscriber. beehiiv makes it easy to set this up in minutes.

3) Product hunt launch. We launched on @ProductHunt and asked all our connections to support us. Got 1500 subscribers and generated ~$1000.

2) Gated content + guests reposts. At the early stage, every article was gated. Every time I was inviting someone on the show, I’d candidly ask them to repost the newsletter episode. For example, the episode with @agazdecki drove ~80 subscribers in a day. The one with Tyler ~100.

1) LinkedIn Automation. I set up an automated campaign to inform everyone of the launch. I also did the same on @JonnyCPrice's LinkedIn account!. New subscribers: about 20/day (CAC: $0). Tools: can do that with @expandi_io, @Salesflowx, or @lemlist.

Last month, the Founder Secrets newsletter was acquired by @denk_tweets . Here are the growth hacks I used to grow it to ~10k readers on a $0 budget:.

Made an X account just to announce that @denk_tweets 🐝 acquired Founder Secrets 🎉. Here is the full story 👇🧵.