I am 6 months into my newsletter about polymer chemistry. This newsletter is primarily an experiment I am running on Substack. My hypothesis is that chemistry news is essentially broken and that the chemical industry has ruined their own reputation. The subject is not accessible to a broad audience and those that work in the industry do not have many options that are low cost. The biggest publication in the industry is probably Chemical and Engineering News, which is published by The American Chemical Society and costs about ~$100/year to get. This magazine appeals to the broad chemistry community, but primarily focuses on academia from what I can tell. I used to only read about 20% of the magazine when I got it.
My product (the newsletter) is aimed at people in the chemical industry, but is focused on those working in polymers, materials, and industrial chemicals (i.e. people like me). I publish two newsletters a week that are either deep dives into a specific topic or an overview of a specific theme in chemicals. On Sunday I do a review newsletter and curate some other stories on the internet that I found interesting. I cover 4 major themes in chemistry and my content is aimed at having "long tail effects." The goal is to write 100% of something that I personally have wanted to read for a long time. I am attempting to solve my own problem in content creation in my industry.
I try and only celebrate a 2x growth here on Indie Hackers via newsletter crew. This last week I've been on the "Featured" page for Substack's discover function and I went from 233 to 404 subscribers in a week. I also wrote a story that really resonated with my core audience and got a significant amount of retweets and Twitter followers, which I think also drove a lot of subscribers/readers. You can see the post here:
https://polymerist.substack.com/p/externalizing-the-costs-of-our-modern
The growth from inception was slow and was primarily driven through me posting on LinkedIn to my ~800 connections. To try and expand that funnel I developed a LinkedIn page (394 followers) and sent out a lot of connections to people (currently at 1300) in my perspective audience. The first big inflection point occurred in January when I started a Twitter account for my newsletter and I got retweeted by a prominent person in my target audience.
Notice the change in slope of subscriber growth. From November to January I was adding about 12 subscribers a month. With the addition of Twitter I was adding about 50-60 subscribers/month from January to March and I hit 200 subscribers at the end of February. My open rates were about 35-45% and my audience were all involved in chemistry or chemicals either being professionals in the industry, professors, journalists, consultants, investors, etc.
I've tried a lot of the growth strategies posted here, but my target audience is really fragmented and there are not a lot of them (maybe ~1-2 million globally). I've really only been able to get growth through three channels: Direct, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Twitter and LinkedIn have worked for me because I have the credentials and experience required to show that I have "domain expertise." I think direct (people forwarding emails) has primarily been a result of writing ability and topic selection.
While I am happy with the recent explosion in subscribers the majority of them are not I believe my original intended core audience. My latest issue of the newsletter only got about a 26% open rate, which is significantly lower than my previous 35-45%. I'll keep a closer eye on open rates with the larger subscriber count, but I may have to make my writing significantly more accessible to get it back up.
I think the challenge I need to solve for in the next few weeks is being able to keep my professionals entertained/informed with my current writing style while also having appeal to a broader audience. What is ironic to me is I wrote a post here recently that said effectively, "I'm going to stop obsessing about growth and checking my stats all the time." I then get more growth in a week than I have in six months (lol) and I check things obsessively.
I guess the next time I'll post here is at 800 subscribers or if I get really frustraed, which might be in a month or in 8 months? My content strategy will really be the main driver and I'll have to add another few audience profiles to my list of readers. I'm aiming for attempting to monetize at 1000 free subscribers both through funneling readers to a website I'm building and potentially sponsorship level access at $1000/year.
Best of luck everyone in your newsletter endeavors!
congrats Tony! Thanks for sharing your experience, it was so helpful to learn about how The Polymerist grow as I am trying to figure out mine. Really resonate with a lot of your struggles and I am super happy for your success!
Thank you for the kind words Hua. I look forward to getting your emails every week. I really enjoy learning about the different fonts out there.
Nice job! Any recommendations to get on the Discover page on Substack? Do you know what drives that? Is it views or likes/comments on the article. Been curious to know what it takes to get an article on their Discover page.
I have no idea how I got on the Featured Page under the discover tab. It's not actually an article, but your whole newsletter, which is cool.
My guess is that it is random since there were a few other newsletters out there that had only 1-2 issues published. It may also be curated to represent a few different tags? Not sure, but happy for the exposure. Doing cross promos has been difficult for me too. I almost feel like I am too threatening sometimes either in quality of my writing, the volume of my writing, perhaps the combination of the two or my writing style just doesn't click with who I am trying to cross promote with.