250→22k Subscribers in One Year: How I Started & Grew "The Caring Techie"

+ Happy re-launch anniversary "The Caring Techie Newsletter" 🥳

Today “The Caring Techie Newsletter” turns 1! Well, kind of.

The actual birthday of TCT is in April 2021, when, as a burned-out tech lead on a sabbatical, I decided to launch a newsletter. I wanted to write about burnout and share my lessons with the world so that people avoid making the same mistakes. Exactly one year ago I relaunched TCT, and this is what we’re celebrating today! 🥳

Starting a newsletter isn’t easy, but it’s one of the best things I ever did. The growth this past year was WILD: from ~250 subscribers in March 2023 to 22k today, March 1st, 2024.

Figuring out how to make writing a habit and continue growing my newsletter were my biggest challenges. So today I wanted to share my story, lessons, and takeaways from this experience. We’re going to cover:

1. A short history of “The Caring Techie”

2. How to start a newsletter

3. How to get better at writing

4. 🔒How to keep going despite challenges

5. 🔒How to grow your newsletter

6. 🔒All the tools I use

7. 🔒What I’m not doing (for now)

8. 🔒Plans for the future

Let’s dive in!

A short history of “The Caring Techie”

One cold winter Saturday in February 2021, I decided to sit down and write about my burnout experience. 6 hours and 30 pages later I had my very cathartic shitty first draft. It felt amazing and tears were shed. I shared this draft with a few friends and they unanimously thought it had potential. The feedback mentioned my essay was insightful and interesting, but kind of depressing. They were not wrong.

That gave me enough courage to take this first draft and split it into 3 parts and continue working on it. To make it less depressing, I added a 4th part talking about strategies to avoid burnout.

The Caring Techie was officially born on April 26th, 2021 with this introductory post.

Burnout sucked, and I wanted to understand its causes and figure out how to not repeat the experience. I achieved this through writing. What they say about “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it” is absolutely true.

Due to how comprehensive the burnout series was, it took me a solid 3 months to progressively write all 4 articles. The original draft tripled in size.

After the burnout series was done, in August 2021 I wrote a coaching-related article and that was it. I stopped writing 😢.

In the back of my head, however, I kept having the same thought: “When are you going back to writing?”.

Fast forward to 2023, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to relaunch my newsletter. I spent the first couple of months planning and preparing for it, so on March 1st, 2023, I wrote my “I’m back & life updates” post and the rest is history.

Welcome to those of you new to “The Caring Techie”. You are reading an article that is part free / part exclusive for the paid subscribers.

The free part has plenty of juicy useful information! If you'd like access to the entire article, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!

How to start a newsletter

If you’re also thinking of starting a newsletter or you’re curious how I started mine, keep reading.

Step 0: Prepare to launch

Before you launch a newsletter, there are a few things you need to figure out. For starters, you’ll need:

• a platform to host your newsletter

• a name

I remember thinking: Should I host my newsletter on Medium, Ghost, or Beehiv? If it’s on Medium, what about the paywall? I don’t want a paywall. Also, what should I name my newsletter? And how do I start, do I just publish the first part of the burnout series? Will it be weird? What if nobody reads it?

I procrastinated on picking a platform for almost two months because I was in analysis paralysis until my good friend Charlyn told me about Substack. It seemed simple and flexible enough, so I just went with it.

Picking the name was the easiest for me. That’s mainly because I had taken a personal branding course many years prior and I knew how to think about it.

The origin story of the name starts with a piece of feedback I got a long time ago that said “I should care less about some things”. Explicitly mentioning “caring” in the title was a form of me saying “You know what? It’s not me caring too much, it’s you care too little”. I also wanted to reclaim the word “techie” and decouple it from the bad rep it has. “Caring” + “techie” seemed an interesting juxtaposition.

By the way, I teach personal branding as part of my Maven course on influence. Check it out here.

Now that the platform and title had been chosen, I had to decide on the rest:

• my target audience

• my content pillars aka what do I want this newsletter to be about

• my tone and voice

I struggled a bit with choosing the target audience. Should it be software engineers? Or engineering leaders? Or both? Or maybe I should focus on tech leads? What about product managers? I decided to keep it broad with a focus on engineers and engineering leaders since that’s what I’m most familiar with. My audience covers pretty much all possible roles in the Tech space and I’m very happy about that!

My content pillars evolved over time but stayed in the large sphere of leadership, career growth, and personal development.

Lastly, the tone was easy to pick. It’s how I normally speak: direct, friendly, knowledgeable, empathetic.

Step 1: Write an intro post

Pretty self-explanatory. Tell the world who you are and what your newsletter is about. Hit send.

Step 2: Start writing your real articles

And you’re done! You have a newsletter, congratulations! Now the real work begins. One intro article down, infinite to go.

How to get better at writing

At first, sitting down to write in front of a white empty screen was daunting. From picking the title to writing the introduction and figuring out the main thesis, everything seemed overwhelming.

I was committed to learning how to write better and was determined to not let English being my second language get in the way.

I would not have been able to make the Burnout series turn out as good as it did without the help of my very talented friends. They gave me a lot of feedback and helped me edit. I’ll be forever grateful for them because otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the confidence necessary to continue writing. All the feedback that I received in those early days made a lasting difference in how I write today.

Some of the books that were a game changer for me are:

• On Writing Well - William Zinsser

• The Art and Business of Online Writing - Nicolas Cole

Over time, I was able to come up with my own process of building my articles, and the overwhelm went away. For every new article, I now follow my 7-question checklist. William Zinsser said that “clear writing is clear thinking”, so these questions help me start with clear thinking. It might seem silly, but writing seems smooth sailing once I clarify the answer to “What am I trying to say?”.

Other things I’ve learned include:

• Titles are the first part of the hook, they need to be interesting but also enticing

• The title seen as an email needs to be compelling enough to make people open the email, you can change it later

• The hooks are the most difficult to write —at least for me— so I’ve learned that it’s best to write them at the end together with the conclusion

• Clunky sentences are my nemesis, I’ll always wish I had more time to edit

• Good enough is better than perfect, sticking to a cadence is more important than producing a piece of literal art

• It’s okay to ask friends and family to help you edit until you’re okay on your own

In terms of style, the most important thing is to sound like yourself. For that, my strategy is to read my text out loud when editing. If it doesn’t sound good, that is a sure indicator it needs editing.

Lastly, the best way to get better at writing is to actually write and put your work out there.

🔒How to keep going despite challenges