Art West of NoCodeDevs: Making the Most of a Niche Newsletter

If you’re a creator who dreams of building a business with a niche newsletter, you won’t want to miss this Creator Spotlight!

The NoCodeDevs Newsletter has grown to 8,000 readers in a tight niche, which is no easy feat. It's also successfully monetizing that audience with steady advertising without doing a lot of sales outreach work, which is a dream for many newsletters.

How are they making that growth and revenue happen? We sat down with Art West, who leads the project. He shared insights on his process to help other creators looking to develop powerful content and monetization strategies.

A Curated Guide

NoCodeDevs is an online directory of no-code tools that also offers educational workshops, events, and tutorials. The company’s mission is to help creators, business owners, and employees who don't have a technical background learn about the no-code resources that are available to help them grow, scale, and automate their businesses.

According to West, the newsletter lets the NoCodeDevs team keep their audience up to date on the industry. "With so much going on, it's hard to keep tabs on what's happening in the space. All these platforms are constantly updating and shipping new features. So we use the newsletter to keep our audience up to date with everything that's happening, not only with our partners but also the general no-code SaaS community at large."

For a niche audience, their coverage manages to span a variety of topics. "We cover platform-specific updates for the most popular tools that are most interesting to our users. So, for instance, if Notion adds an AI feature that's wildly popular, we'll cover that. But more generally, we cover industry updates, trends, and new tools that are emerging into the space."

8,000 Subscribers and Growing

The NoCodeDevs Newsletter team has produced about 300 issues and has just under 8,000 subscribers. "It's been growing really well," says West. "Especially recently. Ever since we came to beehiiv, it's been growing really, really great."

Like many newsletters, the primary driver of growth for NoCodeDevs has been social media. "Generally, we source most of our subscribers from Twitter and a little bit from other social platforms — namely YouTube. We're very active on Twitter, so we're able to capture a lot of [subscribers] from plugging the newsletter on some of our bigger content pieces on Twitter."

A Content Strategy for Growth & Engagement

Like many newsletters, NoCodeDevs started using its newsletter to mirror its social media content. But over time, the content strategy has evolved into something more comprehensive and engaging.

"When we first started, [the content] was a lot of tutorials we were making and updates to features within our own community. So, for instance, if we added a forum or a new webinar, that was essentially the content in our newsletter. So what [our audience] was seeing on our Twitter was exactly the same as what they were seeing on our YouTube and then our newsletter. And I think that stalled our growth a bit."

Shifting gears made a huge difference.

"What really made the shift towards growth and accumulating subscribers was going beyond our own updates and sourcing content from the greater community at large. We curate news from hundreds of sources and then choose the most interesting content to feature in our newsletter. We do the curation so [our readers] don't have to sift through thousands of articles to find the most interesting pieces of content."

The content shift has not only helped build readership but also increased engagement and community. "We intentionally leave knowledge gaps in the newsletter, which creates some curiosity and a reason to engage. People often reply directly to the newsletter because they have a question or they're curious about something, and then we can engage with them in that way."

"We do a wide range of different polls through the newsletter, which is really a helpful engagement tool to not only survey our audience but to get them engaged in interacting with the content to see what they find interesting. And then we can repurpose that knowledge to…