poach.vc (Europe) | PoachVC | Substack Find undiscovered pre-seed / seed founders in Europe. Click to read poach.vc (Europe), by PoachVC, a Substack publication. Launched 13 days ago.

Just launched europe.poach.vc today! Excited to provide founder leads in Europe!

I'm switching poach.vc from MWF sending to Tues/Thurs. Instead of 2 paid days and 1 free day, each email will be 1/3 free and 2/3 paid.

This:
- gives free subs a reason to open every email
- less manual work (there's no substack api)
- should help newsletter conversion rates

Combination of growing the existing newsletter, SaaS improvements, expanding to multiple regions, and tracking different types of data. Non-trivial but all areas that have real value.

💰

Just broke $20k ARR. My current goal is to 5x by the end of the year, and I can finally see a real path to self-sufficiency!

If the playbook works, Germany/France/Israel/Canada/Netherlands/Sweden/Singapore/Australia/Switzerland/Brazil/Mexico will soon follow.

I'm going to start testing @PoachVC expansion in the UK (~680 firms, ~1.8k VCs, and ~2.2k angels).

I was thinking Europe (or Western EU), but focusing on full coverage of individual countries should be higher value to VCs + be easier to market.

So it looks like Beehiiv boosts will be absolutely amazing or a total money pit.

A week after starting, I have 10 partnered publications, and almost 100 pending subscribers from boosts.

If 1-2 of these convert, it will already be worth it.

Trying to grow a fresh newsletter with Beehiiv boost. I've matched with 7 highly relevant publications in 24h, let's see how long it takes to get some subscribers!

data.poach.vc is starting to get some interest!

As part of Poach, I've had to build a method of finding a LinkedIn profile for a Twitter profile.

I'm considering packaging it like tweetscraper.io: select a set of Twitter profiles and get a list of LinkedIns to download for $0.07/profile.

Anyone doing LinkedIn outreach want to try this out soon?

Rough start with Mechanical Turk. 80% of responses were complete garbage.

This might be preventable with additional form validations + upping requirements on worker rejection rates, but at the end of they day it doesn't seem like a great fit for Poach compared to LLMs + data providers.

shelved.domains didn't get featured on ProductHunt, but due to Reddit and posting around, it got 300 visitors, a few people submitted domains to list, and one listed domain (not one of mine) sold.

shelved.domains - Buy/sell cheap unused domain names from/to indie makers | Product Hunt Indie makers and founders register so many domain names that are perfect for other projects. Why not put them in a marketplace vetted for quality, where other makers can find cheap options to start th...

www.producthunt.com/posts/shelve...

ProductHunt launch is live! Please check it out!

(and hopefully they decide to feature it...)

www.shelved.domains/domain/pytho...
www.shelved.domains/domain/pytho...

Here you go! Please ping me if they sell, haven't set up automated checking for namecheap yet!

Sure, happy to list them!

They just need to be listed on Afternic, SEDO, Porkbun, etc. Any established domain seller that has a buy it now option and handles the escrow process. Are they already listed somewhere?

There's more info and a submission form here too: www.shelved.domains/sell

It's kind of crazy that shelved.domains has made $500 with only 50 visitors so far!

Looking forward to the Product Hunt launch tomorrow: www.producthunt.com/products/she...

Just put up a landing page for data.poach.vc

With the newsletter going fairly well, I figured it'd be useful to expand to providing larger amounts of data directly to VCs.

Just fill out the form on www.shelved.domains/sell if you have any to list!

Just launched www.shelved.domains

My idea is that it'd be good if there was a directory where founders/makers can list their cheap but high quality domains and find interesting domains from other founders.

Let me know if you want to list (for free)

I don't have enough followers for the TikTok account to have a link in bio, so any purchases would look like they came from Google searches.

I made a tool to generate favicons from any React Icon: favicon.to

AI generated shorts didn't work well. One video got ~50 views, and the rest under 5 views, so it ends up costing more than advertising without the ability to attribute sales.

Substack has a great component for building composite filters, so I made my own version for keywordgems.com

Here's an initial version of an AI title generator for keywordgems.com that rates the titles on various criteria and shows both SERPs and generated titles!

How to Grow a Newsletter

New blog post:

www.jrhizor.dev/posts/how-to...

I'm trying out AI generated short form content for mealbymeal.com on TikTok. I'll run 5 shorts per day and report back in a week with how many total views they get, and whether it impacted signups on the site.

Jared Rhizor I'm Jared Rhizor, a maker, founder, and software dev.

New personal site up: www.jrhizor.dev

Time to write some blog posts!

Looking at a site through a revenue per pageview lens is interesting.

For example, if I increased Otamatunes traffic 3-4x, I'd be able to make the same amount of money from ads that I do from sales.

Maybe I could drive that much more traffic if all of the music on the site was free?

For several previous projects, I didn't have these signs, but I didn't feel the absence as the major wake up call it should have been.