Story of The Startup Bug, a popular weekly newsletter for the indian startup ecosystem

I am a huge fan of Product Hunt and Ryan (the guy behind it).

Recently I observed, email first products on the site increased, there was at least one being hunted each day. I stumbled upon one such product, a job newsletter which sends you jobs daily or weekly depending on your skills.

That led me to think, “Hmm..this is a new approach to the recruitment thing” and slowly one thought led to other and that to another, after a few minutes I came up with The Startup Bug.

Our ecosystem, if you haven’t noticed it, is booooooming! Seriously think about the funding news, startup stories you heard 1-2 years back and look at the scenario now. I decided to build something for our ecosystem.

There are many blogs and communities for us but there is was no dedicated newsletter that could send me a digest of the most important stories of the week and a new take on it.

So, I created a list on Mailchimp (it’s free :p), built a form, designed a simple site, hosted it on Blogger, wrote a small description and sent out a few emails to all the entrepreneurs and techies in my address book.

The network got to its work and here is how the numbers increased,

After a week of sending the emails,

NOTE: The 100% open rate you see if of the test email I sent to myself, the first newsletter is yet to be sent out.

What can you expect from The Startup Bug?

Here are somethings which will make their way into your inbox every week:

1. Filtered News. There is a lot of buzz going around and in all this noise the important news, the one which matters, slips out. so the first thing you can expect is a weekyl digest of the most important stuff that took place in the particular week.
   

1. New Products. As ProductHunt is a reddit like platform for early adopters to geek out about new stuff, The Startup Bug also aims to be something similar, it’s just that we plan to keep it email first. Also, this gives our friends who have just launched something new to reach a niche audience for getting valuable early feedback they could iterate on and that is completely FREE!
   

1. Surveys. Things happen, but do you know what others think about a particular incident? We plan to solve it, occasionally we plan to create polls and surveys we will get anonymous views on topics that matter and help shape the opinion of our ecosystem.

These are the three highlights of this newsletter. Now some of you might be wondering if it will be full of ads of is it another way to make some bucks. NO it is not. You will not be seeing any ads in the newsletter in the near future.

So here is what you have to do next.

1. Visit The Startup Bug (www.thestartupbug.com)
   

1. Enter your email
   

1. Click on SUBSCRIBE

This one if for the round pegs in the square holes 🙂 CHEERS!

For any kind of talks, Tweet your queries to @nshntarora