Bundle Magic

Usually in business things go worse than expected. But every once in a while, if you’re lucky, an experiment goes 800% better than you hoped. And when it does, you’d better understand it.

Sooooo... this week I’m writing about bundle economics 🙃

...

Four months ago my friend Dan and I decided to start paid newsletters together. They’re independent businesses, but we operate like a team. We edit each other’s pieces, share all our data, and brainstorm growth ideas together.

One idea we came up with recently was to offer a bundled version of our newsletters. The theory was based on an idea called “bundle economics” that I thought might apply in our case. So, this past Monday, we launched the bundle.

The night before launch we talked on the phone to guess how many subscribers this bundle experiment might bring in. To put it in context: in the past, we might get 5-10 new subscribers on a good day, and 15-20 new subscribers on a great day. On the night before we launched the bundle, we had 648 total subscribers between the two of us. 

Dan and I were both really excited about it, and thought it might be one of our best days, so we predicted we’d get 20 new subscribers from the bundle. In retrospect, it’s kind of embarrassing how wrong we were 😆

In the three days since we launched the bundle, we added 180 new subscribers, bringing our collective total to 828. That’s exactly 800% better than the 20 we had hoped for. Overall, we had 28% subscriber growth in just a few days!