Sometimes growth comes from luck.

A few years back, before most of what we do now, we built a small newsletter for crypto users called Outposts. Small as in 750 people. The kind of list where you half recognise the names.

We were proud of it, but then it stalled because our usual way of growing it, posting and hoping, and then posting again, had stopped working.

Then we tried something new and in just over a week it went wild, all the way to 21,000+. I remember one specific push took us from 750 to around 2,000 in a single day.

When you're used to adding readers a handful at a time, that's a strange thing to sit through. You keep refreshing the dashboard, half-expecting it's a bug.

Truth is we didn't get better at marketing.

Our newsletter got placed inside a discovery feed that lived in a wallet a lot of our target readers already had open. Instead of us trying to drag people over, we turned up in a spot they were already at, recommended, in context, and right when they were poking around for something new to try.

We also had a referral push running alongside it, so I won't pretend the placement did all the work. But it's what turned a slow grind into something that felt like flipping a growth switch.

And to top it off, we hadn't paid for any of it.

We just got lucky, and the whole time I kept thinking about the alternative, the months of content and outreach and patience it would have taken to add that many real users.

We'd skipped all of it by being in the right place at the right time. It felt a little like getting away with something.

That's the thing most of crypto growth completely misses.

The users worth having mostly aren't clicking your ads or reading your threads. They're heads-down in the apps they already trust.

Get in front of them there, as a recommendation rather than an interruption, and you've sidestepped the attention war.

That lucky placement wasn't something we could request or pay for, and we had no clean way to measure it. When we wanted more of it, there was nowhere to go. So we were sitting on the best growth hack we'd ever seen, with no way to make it happen again.

It's a little embarrassing, but it took us way too long to connect the dots.

The thing that grew us fastest wasn't something we could go out and buy, but it was something we could replicate. When that finally sank in, it stung a bit, because we'd had our best case study (ourselves) sitting in front of us for over a year and written it off as a fluke.

Behind it all is one simple thing we learned. Get in front of the right people where they already are, and growth doesn't have to feel like a grind or a fight you're losing.

Everything we've built since has been about making that luck something you don't have to wait for. It's what we later built Specify on.

Which brings me to the other reason why I'm sending this now.

We've just made Outposts V3 live. Before, the web version used to be a static mirror of the email. Now it's live with a lot more news in there too, and some AI analysis on top, which all updates in real time.

You can now also choose between getting the email on Tuesdays and Fridays, or just Fridays.

It's a solid foundation we've spent a good few weeks building, and we've got big plans for it.

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