Community Finder is (knock on wood) profitable now, with monthly $300/MRR. I got here in 8 months and here's how I did it and what challenges I faced. A thread

I'm making money from sponsorships of my newsletter Community Weekly ( https://communityweekly.co ). Some stats for the start:
- I sent 63 emails to companies
- 4 sales of monthly sponsorship package
- 1 sale of one-time sponsorship

The question I get most often is how I set the pricing? I'm now charging $104 for 1 issue and $374 for a month. Which is quite high for the newsletter of my size (300+ subs). The engagement rate of the newsletter is really high:
- 20-25% click rate
- 50% and more open rate.

I sold my first monthly package for $176, with 210 subs, and the same stats. After the first sale I got feedback that I should up my rates. As @petecodes says in his newsletter monetization course, you need to ask uncomfortable number to have a place for negotiations.

After the increase my new pricing was $222 (yup funny number I know) for one month and the same $67 for 1 issue. And I sold one more package with this pricing. So I decided to up my rates one more time to the current $374/month.

The current profitability stats are:
- 1 monthly package - $176
- 1 monthly package - $222
- 2 monthly package - $374
- 1 one-time package - $67

~1213$ starting from October.

The next question is: where I found companies to contact?
- producthunt
- betalist
- I bought subscription of Sponsorgap ( http://sponsorgap.com/ )

Although sponsorgap is helpful in finding leads. I had only 1 sale from them. The others were from producthunt.

How I organized the sales process. Well, I'm Airtable fan. I do every automation there. So I created a base on Airtable where I had emails and names and where I found the company, and with help of Airtable automations I autogenerated an email and sent it to the prospects.

Where I was wrong?
- I thought ad-based sponsorships are not worth the work
- I thought ad-based sponsorships will increase the unsubscribe rate
- I thought that I'll be a sell-out

What I found:
- people don't care that much about ads in Community Weekly newsletter,
- it's actually a good way to start making money and it can be reliable source of income. However it's a lot of work.

Fuck up's that I had (aka why I started to autogenerate the emails):
- sent an email with wrong name in it,
- sent an email saying that I use their product when I don't
- sent an email mentioning that I found them on producthunt when they never launched there.

What are the plans:
- I don't plan to send continue monetization process just now, as I'm booked till March.
- Work on other revenue sources like consulting and online course.
- Establish good relationships with the already featured sponsors.

Hope this was helpful to you by any means. If you still have questions don't shy away and ask them out. I feel like it's important to ask questions and I'll try to answer them without any fluff.

Thanks for the enormous online motivation @petecodes @yarobagriy @DenseDiscovery