Hit 10,000 email subscribers and it felt totally different than I expected

I crossed 10,000 subscribers on my newsletter last month and I thought I'd feel like a big deal. Instead I mostly felt panic because my open rate dropped 4% the same week. I started this list back in 2018 with a $7 Mailchimp account and maybe 200 readers. Ten thousand was just a number I saw on other people's dashboards, never mine. But what really hit me was realizing that number means 10,000 real people let me into their inbox every Tuesday. That's heavier than any milestone I've chased before. Has anyone else hit a subscriber goal and felt the opposite of what they expected? How do you keep that pressure from messing with your content?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_luna26d ago

Stop treating 10,000 like it's 10,000 weddings you have to attend. It's just folks who clicked a button once because they liked a post or wanted a free PDF. The open rate drop? That's probably Tuesday fatigue or your subject line sucked that week, not some cosmic sign you're failing. You built this thing slow over years, so why are you acting like one bad number erases all that? If the pressure is eating you, pick a different metric to obsess over, like replies or shares, and ignore the dashboard for a month. You'll live, and so will your list.

the_dylan24d ago

So what happens when you tell people to ignore the dashboard for a month and they do, but then the number drops even further because they stopped checking? That's the part I keep tripping on with this advice. Like, sure, @the_luna, Tuesday fatigue is a thing, but if I ignore the metric I'm scared of, how do I know if it's actually a trend or just my own head? I get that 10,000 is just a list, not a room full of people needing me to perform, but there's a difference between healthy detachment and straight up hiding from the data. Maybe the real question is why do we even build these lists in the first place, because if it's just for the number, then no wonder it hurts when it dips.