SaaS business and side project ideas community

Exactly one year ago I created a Telegram channel for the purpose of sharing ideas for side projects and SaaS business. I wanted to see how many people will be interested in this, can I build a community that gives feedback on the ideas, discuss them and so on.

Growing
When the channel was created, I made posts on Reddit to related communities where I described some ideas and told people that I manage a channel where I post the ideas.

It brings me initial traction of 20 people on the first day after a week approximately there were ~50-100 people that allows me to add the channel to Telegram catalogs (where people add their groups and channels). As I say, the catalogs bring over 50% of the traffic. Thus I had a steady stream of subscribers each day.

Occasionally, I made posts on Reddit where I duplicated the ideas from the channel and told people to subscribe if they are interested. As well I was answering related questions on Quora. Approximately, Reddit and Quora give ~2-5% of the audience.

Around 8%-15% of the people come from Telegram search (e.g. “business ideas”, “startup ideas”, etc.).

As I figured out recently with the Telegram updates, I can see detailed statistics for the channel (extra stats that other services don’t provide). It showed me that people search for specific topics so I could post not only ideas(hard to find) but texts too, therefore increasing an audience that comes from the search.

Some stats:

  • The current amount of subscribers is 5620.
  • 237 posts were made.
  • Audience by gender: 85.6% men and 14.4% women.
  • I make 3-7 posts per week.
  • Engagement Rate by Reach: ~70%
  • Reach for one post is ~3.8K on average
  • Daily reach is ~4K on average
  • 70.2% of subscribers were online recently, ~29% were online 2+ days ago.
  • 59.35% of subscribers enabled the channel notifications on (when a new post is created, they get a notification).
  • On average, the channel gets ~14 new subscribers per day (given ~5600 members per year; current stats is about ~40 new subscribers per day for the last month).
  • 43% of subscribers are Asian, 16% from Africa, 16% from Europe, 4% from the USA, 21% from other places.