How the Wonder Tools newsletter grew to 39,000 subscribers

There’s this saying that “those who can’t do, teach,” but Jeremy Caplan actually practices what he preaches. By day, he instructs on entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and on his nights and weekends he writes Wonder Tools, a newsletter about the internet’s most useful websites and apps.

Jeremy launched Wonder Tools in 2020 and has since grown it to 39,000 subscribers, which is pretty remarkable considering he’s still running it as just a side hustle.

In a recent interview, he walked through all the strategies he uses to grow his audience, including how he partnered with Poynter to grow his initial subscriber base, how he collaborates and swaps recommendations with other newsletter writers, how he buys ads on other newsletters, and how speaking gigs at online and in-person events drive signups:

I will share to LinkedIn some of the posts where I feel like there's a group of people on there who might benefit or might be interested. And I will basically just describe one of the key points from the piece: What am I writing about? Why is it useful? Why should people care? It’ll be really brief, followed by a link to the post

And I will post to Substack Notes because within Substack, there's a community of people who are reading each other. And for them, it's a natural place to be exposed to new posts and things they may not have known were being written about.

And beyond that, I will still post to Twitter a little bit. I don't find that particularly useful at this point. I think Twitter has devolved to the point where it's not a primary source of traffic for a lot of newsletters or podcasts in my sphere at least. And so I find that to be less useful and less relevant at this point. I've experimented a little bit with Threads and I may do a little bit more with that because I think that's a growing community and could be interesting going forward. But in general, social media is not a primary driver for me, I would say.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below: