Level Up: Bulletin No. 1

Hello, readers!

Welcome to the first bulletin of Level Up Newsletter! 👏

If you get this in your inbox, please consider this as my token of gratitude. You are one of the first 30 people who subscribed to this newsletter.

Yes, we are 30-strong now. Wohoo! 🙌 I promise, we will all look back in this bulletin and look in awe of what our newsletter has become. 🤞

So, let me introduce myself:

My name is Raymel,

I am dev for 6 years, specialized on Web and Mobile apps
I am coding since my teenage years, where I started with Windows apps (.NET, C#)
I failed at 2 startup attempts, for 2 consecutive years (one in transport sector, another in ecom / agriculture)
I had little success on two more endeavors for the succeeding 3 years (YouTube and Crypto)
I quit my 9-5 last year to be a full time entrepreneur
I started building my social media audience back in September 2023
I started #buildinpublic in January 2024 to ship my first product, recaps.fyi
This March, I am launching Level Up Newsletter alongside Level Up, Founders! blog as a journal, a launchpad of my future projects, and a place to feature projects from the community

More on https://twitter.com/pseudokid/status/1741989325963952628

Okay, let’s begin. As promised, our bulletins will contain:

Monthly learnings of my entrepreneurial journey as a dev turned entrepreneur
Weekly curated tech news. We will focus mostly on AI, for now.
Featured products. More into this as we release more bulletins.

All good? Let’s go!

Learnings on building in public this early March:

So I just finished a good February,

See https://twitter.com/pseudokid/status/1763104898940567914

March went by too fast. At this point, I already revealed and promoted my two projects: recaps.fyi and Level Up Newsletter, and got +111 followers.

See https://twitter.com/pseudokid/status/1765903212299919513

NOTE: We will backtrack on Jan-Feb in the future newsletter bulletins.

On recaps.fyi

While good numbers across various facets are great, it does not tell the whole story.

recaps.fyi is still finding its way on the market.

The biggest lesson to learn here is that, while spamming “recaps.fyi” on each of my post is effective on getting traffic, I wonder if there is a better way to do it.

More leverage, less work. That’s the goal.

Plus, we have to talk about conversions. Conversions? Truth is, not good. Less than 1% conversion rate, around half are unverified emails, so it’s even lower.

We still have work to do, and that is to reach out to social media managers, and craft a good value prop for them. I am going to start finding them on LinkedIn and will share the results.

Meanwhile, we will continue on shipping the self-service Twitter recap generator. There is demand from our friends with Twitter accounts, so it’s a good sign.

Soon:

recaps.fyi self-service Twitter recap is on its way

See https://twitter.com/pseudokid/status/1763341164051399105

On the other hand,

On the other hand, we have other stuff brewing, like this newsletter. My grand plan for this newsletter is to use it as funnel for all of my future products and activities.

One of these activities is resource curation, which is one of my means of giving back to the community. More details on this soon.

We also have a few of small and quick products lined up, which has a strong painkiller effect vs recaps.fyi, which is more of a vitamin.

So stay tuned!

Okay, let’s proceed on the curated news: