Hey friends,
I’ve had a busier than normal last two weeks finishing up my time in Seoul, spending time with a good friend in Bangkok, and getting settled in my new home for the next 6 months, Chiang Mai.
Now that I’m done with traveling for the year, I’m more than ready for a highly productive period where I can push this newsletter to the next level.
So how are things looking at the moment for SaaS Decoded?
At the time of writing, SaaS Decoded has 28 published posts, 141 email subscribers and 206 Substack followers.
You can see that the follower count has risen quite sharply over the last 2 weeks, mainly thanks to Substack pushing the newsletter within their network.
The newsletter did also recently receive a recommendation by MRR Unlocked, Alexander Estner’s GTM-focused Substack.
New subscribers of MRR Unlocked are now being recommended SaaS Decoded which has helped get the newsletter some new subscribers.
Make sure to check out Alexander’s substack if you’re looking for help with your GTM strategy and implementation.
All-in-all I’m happy the newsletter is reaching more people very month and I’m excited to see how things look in a year from now.
It’s time to monetize
I’ve decided now is the time to start monetizing SaaS Decoded.
Up until now all the content I’ve published on the newsletter has been free, but moving forward I’ll be publishing a mix of free and paid posts.
To read the paid posts, you’ll need to become a paid subscriber of the newsletter.
Currently there are three plans, a monthly plan for $14, a yearly plan for $99, and an insider plan for $299 a year.
I’m offering a one-time discount to you, my early readers, of 25% off the annual subscription. This means that for $74.25 a year, you’ll have access to the entire SaaS Decoded library, including all paid posts I publish.
To take advantage of this discount, visit https://www.saasdecoded.com/cfc93481, enter your email and you’ll then see the subscription options.
This discount is valid until the end of the month and then will be gone forever.
I’d like to give a shout out to Luke and Chris, the first two paid subscribers of SaaS Decoded. They both subscribed to support the newsletter early on, even though I hadn’t yet published any paid posts.
So why now?
Back in January of this year I published a post on my other Substack, Coffee + Revelations, covering my desire to make a complete pivot away from consulting to content.
Now that I’m 8 months into this transition I’ve learnt many key lessons.
The main lesson I’ve learnt is that building a newsletter takes an incredible amount of work, patience and grit.
It’s a game of gaining awareness and trust in a world of unmeasurable distractions and noise.
I’ve had to completely switch my mindset from thinking, “why is the newsletter growing so slowly”, to instead celebrating every new subscriber and follower.
I’ve also developed the habit of reminding myself that those that win this game are the ones who simply didn’t quit and push through the “valley of despair”.
In the content game, the real gains come years after starting.
I decided a few months ago that 200 followers was enough proof that SaaS Decoded was serving a need in the market, and that I could start monetizing through subscriptions.
The fact that the newsletter has a >40% open rate and is growing month over month, with few unsubscribes, tells me there is product-market fit.
Now that I’ve passed the 200 follower milestone, it’s time to make this change.
One argument against monetizing is that it will hurt growth, but based on my research, this belief doesn’t seem to hold any water. If anything, publishing paid posts sends a positive signal to the market that could help increase traffic and word of mouth.
I’ve also read time and time again from very successful substack writers that they wished they’d monetized sooner.
This change will also force me to raise my standards and make sure my content is so good that people will literally pay to read it. That’s a bar I want to set and thankfully Substack gives me the tools to enforce it.
The last main reason to start monetizing is because there’s really no reason to hold myself back from making some money as the newsletter grows. Money is a strong motivator and seeing my monthly recurring revenue grow over time is not only incredibly motivating, but ties directly to my main business goal; getting to $20k MRR.
I want to get to the point where SaaS Decoded is paying me enough from subscriptions and affiliate sales that if all my other businesses went to zero, it would still cover my living expenses.
The Vault is growing
A quick reminder that all of you can take advantage of the many perks in The Vault, my benefits program for SaaS Decoded email subscribers.
The number of perks has grown to 11 and my goal is to hit 25 before the end of the year.
The latest addition to The Vault is Sequenzy, an amazing email platform for SaaS, built by a very talented indie developer, Nic Polotnianko.
I still need to add the subscriber-specific perk to The Vault so if you decide to sign up to Sequenzy via the link above, just send me a short email and I’ll make sure you get the perk once it’s available.
I plan to publish more content about Sequenzy since I’m now using it for my own SaaS, and it really serves a big need in the market.
What else has been happening?
Here’s a quick list of some things I’ve been thinking about, playing with, and investigating.
I spent about 8 hours this weekend setting up my AI workforce using Grok Bot. It’s amazing and you should definitely give it a try, especially if you’re already paying Cursor.
Project Echo is a bit stuck. Traffic is low and visitors aren’t signing up. It’s a source of frustration but I’m still in the fight and will share more in a future post on what I’m doing about it. Check out the most recent product updates here - https://feedback.projectecho.io/changelog/linear-integration-votes-tab-deep-linking
If you’re curious how I’ve seen the 1st half of 2026 across all my businesses, check out the post below.
That’s it for this week friends, thanks for reading.
Justin