Most of the 69 people who paid in the first week were already on her free weekly newsletter about blogging for developers.

“Most new members were already subscribed to my free weekly newsletter about blogging for developers, which is about 4,000 subscribers strong.”

A third party submitted Monica's launch recap article to Hacker News; the resulting traffic became the main driver that pushed the community past 100 paid members within its first month.

“I accidentally launched on Hacker News because someone else submitted my launch recap article. Skeptics aside, the community ended up reaching 100+ paid members in the first month thanks to Hacker News.”

She crowdsourced and ranked lists of the best developer blogs to attract backlinks and search traffic back to Blogging for Devs, then pushed the site to Hacker News twice.

“made it to position #2. Two days later, it has 300 points and 48 comments. It drove about 9,000 unique visitors to the site.”

Traffic did not translate into newsletter signups. She undersold the email opt-in and her Twitter profile link on the Trends site, so the flood of Hacker News visitors converted at a rate she called terrible.

“my opt-in rate from HN was something like 0.12%. Terrible.”

Random mentions, backlinks, and shares kept the newsletter growing steadily without any deliberate content marketing on her part.

“Right now, word of mouth is what grows the newsletter.”

She judged organic word of mouth alone as too slow to get the business to sustainability in a reasonable timeframe, which is what motivated the Trends generated-content project.

“Today, word of mouth isn't sufficient to grow the newsletter quickly enough to reach sustainability in the near term.”