Big milestone! We just hit 10.000 subscribers on the Structural Basics newsletter
Big Thank you!
Hello friends,
Today, I am extremely happy to share that we hit a big milestone for the Structural Basics newsletter and our community: We just hit 10.000 subscribers to the newsletter.
To me, this is still mind-blowing that there are 10.000 nerds out there reading my engineering stuff.
Thanks to everyone who has joined me on this journey. Without you, I would have quit by now.
I am proud of what we have achieved together and more motivated than ever to grow Structural Basics further, create more and new content, try out new formats and ultimately make Structural Basics better than it is today.
This isn’t our usual Wednesday episode. So, I want to keep this short. I know you are all busy.
But I do quickly want to recap what we have built over the last 3 years.
02.01.2022
I published the first article on structuralbasics.com about different roof structures (check it out here). I was so nervous putting myself out there on the internet for getting bad feedback on my writing, visuals or whatever. In the first couple of months, I was even scared of getting sued because I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to put URL links from other homepages into my content.
Why did I create a homepage for structural engineering content in the first place?
A friend from uni who was into architecture asked me how she can quickly design and verify timber beams of a flat roof. Everyone who has studied structural engineering knows that there is no “quickly” in structural engineering. Quickly is dangerous and beginners are very likely to do mistakes.
My idea was to find an in-depth tutorial on the internet that I can send to her with a couple of comments where she might find the missing information. I started searching on Google and couldn’t find anything. I googled more for other structural engineering topics and was shocked how little information there was. If I found an article, the quality was terrible. At that moment, I knew that I need to change that.
From October 2021 until December 2021, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on how to create a blog, brainstormed names for the blog and wrote the first blog post. I think it took me 30–40 hours to write the first one. If I am looking at this blog post now, I am laughing because it’s one of the most unsuccessful and shortest ones that I have ever written. But I had to start somewhere.
July 2022
I published one blog post every week since the 2nd of January. At the time I was still in uni, having 5 hours of Danish class a week, working 15 hours in my student job and I had a girlfriend who wanted to see me. Some weeks I struggled a lot to find the time to write. To publish on time on Monday, I often got up at 5 am on the weekends, cause otherwise I wouldn’t have made it.
The first 3-4 months only 30-40 people visited the homepage per month (besides me and my ex-girlfriend). But then in the end of July things started to change.
June 2022 was the first month with 1000 visitors.
December 2022
We continued to publish one blogpost a week and by the end of the year we had 8000+ visitors per month. Things started to grow.
February & March 2023
I finished my master’s at DTU (Technical University of Denmark) and took 1.5 months off to travel to Thailand and Cambodia with my brother before I started my full-time job as a structural engineer. Before the trip, I wrote 10 blog posts within 2 weeks, because I wanted to be completely off (also from Structural Basics) for at least a month on my travels. But I didn’t want to break my streak of publishing a blog post every week.
The trip was amazing, but I am never completely “off”. I always think about what I want to work on next and how I can make things better. On the trip (probably while I was laying at the beach) I came up with the idea of starting a weekly newsletter and (because a newsletter alone wouldn’t be enough haha) a YouTube channel.
My brother left 10 days before me, and in those 10 days I set up the newsletter on Substack and the YouTube channel. At the time, I was in Chiang Mai and Pai in Northern Thailand. And I am always with my laptop.
April 2023
I published the first newsletter and the first YouTube video.
At the time we already had, 17000+ visitors/month to the homepage and I thought that many of the people visiting the homepage would sign up for the newsletter.
November 2023
The growth of the newsletter was very underwhelming in the beginning.
There were maybe 50-70 new sign-ups a month, and I was publishing one newsletter every week.
December 2023
In December 2023 I introduced the Structural Design Cheatsheet and that’s when things started to change for the newsletter. The sign-up rate 10x because of this lead magnet.
In the end of December there were 838 newsletter subscribers and 27.400 website visitors (during Christmas the website numbers always drop).
I also managed to publish 8 YouTube videos in 2023 which resulted in 923 subs there.
July 2024
We kept publishing 1 newsletter a week and the newsletter kept growing by around 600-700 new Structural Basics members per month. By that time, my focus had already shifted from articles on structuralbasics.com to the newsletter. I put in much more time and effort into the newsletter because that is the place where I get to talk to you guys and where I also get feedback.
In April 2024, we were also hit by a Google Algorithm update which made our website visits drop by 30%-50%.
August 2024
In August, we experienced a spike in new subscribers to the newsletter. Some dudes with quite some following on LinkedIn posted my Structural Design Cheatsheet. In the beginning, they didn’t give credit to me or Structural Basics. One of them even put his name onto it. Thanks to our amazing community, some of you saw that and reached out to me. I texted them and asked them to add credit to Structural Basics and the download link, so everyone interested could get the original version.
That’s the reason why we gained 2000 subscribers in less than a week in August.
Btw., you can always use my content like images, cheatsheets, emails, etc. in your presentations, reports or whatever. Just please add a reference to Structural Basics if you post something online.
Also, just think about your credibility if you don’t add a reference and somebody finds out that the images/content isn’t from you, you are less trustworthy. Or, in my opinion, not trustworthy at all and a cheater.
Now, I am quite confident that my content on structuralbasics.com is of high quality. So, every time there’s a Google Algorithm update and my monthly homepage visits drop, I am not too worried because quality wins over the long time.
And after every drop, we have come back stronger with even higher homepage visits. In August, Google made a tweak to their algorithm again and had even more visits after that.
In August, we also published our first YouTube video after a break of 10 months.
05.12.2024
10.000+ subscribers to the weekly Structural Basics newsletter.
We’ve come a long way. Thanks to everyone for your feedback, spending your valuable time reading my newsletters and just being part of Structural Basics.
It is a pleasure and joy building Structural Basics. I learned so much and I enjoy every second of it.
Structuralbasics.com has almost had its first 50.000 visitors per month, and you might have noticed that I have been more active on YouTube recently. I introduced a monthly series where I talk about personal and professional stuff, and I published a couple of engineering tutorials.
We have a bit more than 2300 subs there, and I have plans to grow YouTube more in the future.
Final Words
Thank you again for being here. I appreciate every one of you. ❤️
Big things are coming. But I will be talking about my plans for next year in a video on the 2nd of January, which is Structural Basics’ 3rd birthday.
I hope you get value. I hope you return.
Talk to you next Wednesday.
Laurin.