Over The Last Year, I Focused On My Newsletter And Grew It To 10k+ Subscribers

Donovan Hutchinson

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Published: March 5th, 2023

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Donovan Hutchinson

Founder, CSS Animation

$500

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

CSS Animation

cssanimation.rocks

from Dublin, Ireland

started January 2016

$500

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Donovan recommends to grow your business!

social media

Twitter

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Dropbox

Trello

payments

Stripe

analytics

Google Analytics

education

Udemy

Discover what books Donovan recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on CSS Animation? Check out these stories:

1. I Make $6K Creating Website Animation Tutorials [Side Project] (2022) ➜

This is a follow up story for CSS Animation. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I love creating and teaching people how to create for the web. About 6 years ago I launched a website, CSSAnimation.rocks, to share tutorials and inspiration around the topic of bringing websites to life with animation.

The website was closely followed by a newsletter, 2 courses, and a book. I go into depth on this in my original Starter Story.

Over the last year, we’ve focused on building and growing our community to 10,000+ users.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

In the past year, I’ve concentrated on growing my newsletter and looking for ways to connect with my readership through it. I’ve grown the CSS Animation Weekly newsletter to almost 10k subscribers and kept up with weekly posts.

A big factor in growing the newsletter has been creating and sharing free content. On my blog at CSSAnimation.rocks, I create tutorials and then promote the content by sharing it with other newsletters, as well as through social media. People respond well to high-quality free content and my biggest growth has been from ensuring the content is useful enough that other email newsletters want to mention it. This is a great way to gain subscribers without spending money on advertising.

In over 6 1/2 years, I’ve not missed a week. It’s great seeing people respond to the inspiring, fun, educational content I share through the newsletter every week.

I’ve also continued running and selling me Level Up Your CSS Animation Skills video course. The content is at an intermediate level and thankfully has remained current. It has now reached over 25,000 students, across 156 countries. I’m proud of having made such an impact.

While I’m not in a position to look for sponsorship currently, I do retain a certain amount of passive income from keeping the newsletter going. I enjoy building the community and it’s exciting to see the possibility for future promotion growing with it. I see my email list as both a community and a long-term investment - more valuable than social media followers.

I’ve also had some success with a free ebook, CSS Animation 101. I published it via Github, with downloadable ePub and PDF versions, and it’s been added to the Github Arctic Vault archive, buried deep under the snow for future generations to discover.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

One of the biggest challenges has been dealing with the changes in social media in the last year. I’ve learned the importance of maintaining my email list. With the recent events at Twitter and Revue closing down, I’ve had to migrate between platforms and experienced some of the challenges that come with letting private companies control the connection between me and my audience.

I’ve been moving away from using social media generally and relying on direct channels where possible, and I find it’s working well for my needs currently.

I’ve also been balancing this, which is a side project, with full-time employment and family life. With the last few years being a little more stressful than usual, it’s been tricky finding time to devote to side projects. However, having a weekly newsletter has helped keep me connected to the work and the amazing people involved in my industry. I’m glad I have it.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

A lesson I learned is to take time regularly to make small updates and improvements to my work, and in my case, my main website CSSAnimation.rocks. Over time it becomes more difficult to make changes to old tech, and while the website was cutting edge when I built it, it’s a little creaky now.

If I could go again, I’d invest more time in finding and fixing tech debt, to help make it easier to create new content and focus on growing my audience.

Conversely, I’ve also learned that it’s ok to put things on the back burner sometimes. With a pandemic going on, and a family to stay connected to, I did put the writing on hold for some time. Since it’s not my main job I’m lucky to be able to do so but at the same time, I was worried it would cause me to miss opportunities. In retrospect I shouldn’t have worried, life is more important.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

This year I hope to ease back into the website creative work and combine this with a doubling-down on the newsletter. I am excited to be trying a new newsletter platform and putting time into making my website better too.

I love making use of new tech, and growing a business at the same time is a great motivator to get stuck in and build something cool.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

I’m a huge fan of the websites CSS Tricks and Codrops to check for inspiration and ideas. There’s a lot of great inspiration I latch on to across Youtube, through following blogs RSS feeds, and following hashtags on Mastodon. Too many to mention, but creativity on the web is just as active as ever.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

I think it’s important to try to add a pinch of salt to anyone who claims to have some super-secret success-guarantee advice. More often than not, they had a running start or advantage they may not even realize, and attribute the fact that they get up early or take cold showers to somehow contributing to their success.

I would say stop any social media scrolling. Use it only as a broadcast channel, and instead foster and grow genuine connections with your peers, customers, and friends.

Keep following your passion and keep it real.

Generally, though, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, honestly, so I don’t think I can advise anyone!

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!