🔗 Give People a Reason to Stick Around

Matt Birchler:

If I had one recommendation to people launching new web projects, it would be that you need to present value right up front. Often I see new projects launch with a message of “subscribe and find out what I’m going to be doing”, which may work for some people who are hugely popular already, but I don’t think works for 99.9% of people.

For example, if you launch a YouTube channel, you really should have a video up by the time you announce it that either acts as a trailer for what’s to come, or that is an example of the content you are going to be creating. It’s hard enough to get people to subscribe from inside a well-produced video, so telling folks to go to an empty channel page and hit the subscribe button isn’t a very strong sell. That can extrapolate out to newsletters, blogs, and any other creative work online.