Would you be our consultnt for the next 5 min?

I used to publish a street magazine and our mailing list was one of our primary tools to interact with our subscribers and fans. Hence, I have (sort of) had the problems you are trying to solve.

I know you're looking for out of the box thinking, but too many marketers obsess over thinking outside of the box and they forget the basics. In this case, you need to pay way more attention to the 'simple' things.

Idea 1 - > FYW (Fix your website). On mobile, your website is a mash of horrible alignment and weird word wrapping. I use Safari on a fully updated iPhone 5c - if I'm having problems, so are others. Based on your website, you couldn't pay me enough to become your customer - I can't trust your ability to format my message if you can't even format your own website. Online marketing is really at least half QA.

Idea 2 - Within a second of loading your page, I got overwhelmed by how quickly {Name I have never heard of} will Email you Five tips about {something I can't see because it changes too quickly. Fix that.

Idea 3 - Work on your copy. Between your Ask HN text and your website I have no idea what your service really does or how it will help me. And, unfortunately, the quality of the writing on the first page keeps me from subscribing to any newsletters. If you're going to highlight content, it needs to be good. I don't need more poorly written articles on growth hacking and I will never engage with that type of content.

Idea 4 - Are you really solving a problem? If so, whose problem are you solving? Go talk to those people. Personally, from what I have gathered from your site, I think this was a problem that I had eight years ago.

Thanks a lot for the reply and feedback. There is a lot of work on the product, totally agree. It's a side project and we try to invest as much time as we can... I would like to talk about idea 4. I think the more time goes by the more relevant the problem is. check out this awesome article http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/24/search-discover...

If you actually think that you solve a problem, talking about #4 is getting way ahead of yourself. I've spent way more time trying to figure out your product than any user ever would and, if you asked me to explain it, the best I could come up with is, "someone you have never heard of will send you emails about something."

I understand that there is too much material for me to read and I know that discovery is a problem, but if you're concerned about customer acquisition, you need to prove to me that your solution is better than my solution. Therein lies my point about paying attention to fundamentals.

Sorry to pick on one writer, but one of your mailing lists is advertised as, "a collection of new tech ventures that are worthwhile watching." Another is described as "News from accelerator world." Not only do those contain pretty severe grammatical errors, but they don't exactly make for a compelling call to action. Why would I subscribe to lists curated by people who can't even craft compelling intros? I know that writing intros is hard, but poor intros don't exactly fill me with trust about the quality of the links I will receive!

If this project does what I think it does, you're going to run head on into a chicken or egg problem. Nobody will subscribe unless you have amazing content to send out. But nobody smart enough to consistently send out amazing content will spend time crafting amazing content unless there are users there.

Once again, focus on the absolute basics before you start thinking too far outside of the box. In this case, you need some extremely compelling content on your first page and that content needs to be so good that I can't imagine leaving without signing up.

hluska thanks for checking out the website, I would like to refer to a couple of your points: 1. You chose two newsletters as examples: A. Accelerator news: the guy that publish this is the managing director of TechStars London, I can promise you that there are not a lot of people who know about accelerators as he does. That's the all point, he gets access to content that someone who is not from the accelerator world wouldn't find. B. Collection of startups: the curator here is one of the most active and smart angel investors in Israel, this guy has a chance to see so many startups years before others learn about them (invest really early). So you see, the intro doesn't really matter here, what maters is the access to the info and both the examples you chose completely proves the value of the service. 2. As for the chicken and egg problem, this is a challenge, but maybe I'll share some numbers with you. We have around 500 curators and 7500 subscriptions to the different newsletters. Here are additional numbers from the past 6 months that gives us good indication that people discover content they wouldn't have found easily otherwise: https://medium.com/@RefreshBoxx/500-curators-5-000-links-6-m... 3. I approached to get feedback here because I'm still in the basics, getting new users is hard, but the main challenge is make the curators to be as active as possible. From discussions with them, we know they want more engagement and that was my question, how can we make subscribers to engage more with the curators. Appreciate your feedback and happy to get more!

Idea #1: Go talk to your newsletter subscribers, or whoever you think will be your subscribers.

Idea #2: Go talk to your curators, or whoever you think will be your curators.

Your questions above point to the fact you are trying to solve your problem (how to get customers), rather than your customers problems.

Thanks for the reply! I have talked to my curators and some of them told me that they want more engagement with their subscribers. That's my main question, how can I encourage more engagement....

Focus on behaviors rather than what they say.

What does "more engagement" look like? What behaviors denote "more engagement"?

Once you talk to 10-20 curators you should have a solid understanding of what "more engagement" means to them.

From there brainstorm possible solutions that will effect that.

Rank your solutions on a graph with Bold - Not Bold on one axis, and Likely to Solve - Unlikely to Solve on the other.

Create experiments starting with the most bold and most likely to solve idea.

The boldest, most likely to solve idea that subscribers and curators are willing use will probably be innovative and better define your UVP.

Thanks, I will do that!

Tell a subscriber that the curators want to interact with her or him better, and listen to that subscriber. Repeat this maybe a dozen times.

Ask your curators if they had any specific ideas for engagement and see what the subscribers think about that.

You've got to be your product's non-technical founder, and coordinate with your users and customers to build what they want.

Thanks! Do you mean that as the subscriber what would make him/her interact with the curator?

How about an "ask a question" feature.... presumably newsletters will be sent on a topic which the sender is interested in / an expert in and at least partially with the aim of drumming up business.... so e.g. if I send a link about what to do or not do when applying for a job (subtle link - previously posted, I admit - : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shoe-in-booted-out-3-tips-you...) then the customer could link straight to a question slot like: "Hey Jer, I'm applying for a job and your article was really interesting, what about XYZ?" - direct user engagement and possible client!

That's a good idea, I like it. It works good in all the AMA...Yes, most of the newsletters are very niched...Thanks for that (:

Sure- good luck with it! If it helps a lot, feel free to thank me with equity hahaha

haa...let's see what the users think about it (: