18 Comments

thanks for your insights, Reid 🙏🏼

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May 12, 2023Liked by Reid DeRamus

This is so interesting. Until now I was very survey shy as I felt that they can often not really make a difference, your Substack has started a rethink, thank you

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This is great Reid. Thanks. Does Substack have some 'boiler plate' suggestions for survey questions and formats we could simply pick up and use? A bit like the pre-cooked invite emails for Chat and Notes. Also, does Substack do cancel surveys? Is it planning to give us the option? With a pre-cooked suggestion? Cheers. Bernard

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May 14, 2023·edited May 14, 2023Liked by Reid DeRamus

Thank you Reid for this great article! I have a quick question if you don't mind:

I have recently co-founded a new startup and have been sending out a 1-2 minute anonymous survey to a waitlist. As we are not actively promoting the tool yet, the majority of those who have been signing up for the waitlist come from organic traffic to our landing page – around 75% through google search. I think the survey is good (I have lots of research experience) as well as the emails that get send with it (I send follow up emails as reminders). I think they follow the advice in this blog post quite well. The survey also offers the possibility to win a $100 Amazon voucher for those who fill it out.

However, only around 5% have been filling it out. My interpretation of this outcome is that it reflects the quality of the people signing up to the waitlist more than anything – meaning the majority of these leads are weak and possibly not our target users (considering the organic nature of most), or fake email addresses.

Question: Do you think my interpretation is correct or could there be another likely explanation/assumption I could investigate? And is there anything more do you think I could try to increase the percentage of people filling out the survey?

Thanks again!

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May 13, 2023·edited May 13, 2023Liked by Reid DeRamus

I'm curious at how we can turn our audience into a more hungry audience. If a cancel reason says the main reason for leaving is time, how would you approach a solution to that churn problem? I noticed Azeem is doing videos. But for me, as a reader scanning articles, especially bullet point lists is much more time efficient than listening to a podcast necessarily.

But I just don't know, it would be useful to have standardized bassline of typical survey questions per category that were aggregated anonymously within the substack network. As a writer, this would provide me with a lot of insight. As a new newsletter, I'm not sure I would trust the sample size of my audience to conduct a survey quite yet.

As a high frequency publication, I'm expecting to have issues with open rates and churn, and I consider this strategy as an outlier that's possibly killing my conversion rate to the point of potential failure. However, on the upside, if my growth of free readers continues to accelerate, I'm creating more opportunities for conversion overall and literally narrowing down my paid audience.

I'm not sure I'm clearly understanding the pros and cons of my approach that boils down to intrinsic obsession with my topic and a category that's relatively curation friendly. As my competitors multiply in the AI space on substack I'm very curious to see where I end up.

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Another great one; I feel far less timid about this tactic now. Thank you!

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