It's A Marathon Not A Sprint
Hey newsletter crew. I think the last time I wrote here I had passed 400 email signups on my newsletter The Polymerist via substack back in April. I was planning on writing again when I hit 800, but it's been a grind in the last few months. I recently passed 500 email signups and felt that it was a significant milestone worth sharing.
I've been writing for the most part twice a week, sometimes 3 times a week, since October 2020. New England has been opening up due to high vaccination rates and life is returning to something that seems somewhat normal. I'm writing this from a coffee shop without a mask while I'm on vacation!
I've got a guest post coming out via the American Chemical Society, the professional society for chemists in the United States and also a significant organization globally for chemists. I'm hoping that should drive some traffic. The thing is I could spend 10x more time on driving traffic to my newsletter, but its not very sustainable with respect to my finite amount of time with a full time life.
The greatest amount of traffic to the newsletter comes from direct links or shares of people to people and I think this is the best way to try and garner people actually interested in what I am writing about. Should I spend more time posting to Reddit, Hacker News, and similar sites? Sure. Do I have time to do this routinely? Not really.
I'm running a marathon here with no end in sight and I'm even writing this on my vacation. I remember when I thought 100 email signups was a big deal at the begginning of the year and now I'm at 5x and I feel less excited than that first 100. I'm more concerned now about figuring out how to monetize my work on a sustainable basis. I'm hoping by the end of the year I could hit 1000 email signups.
My big idea right now is a quarterly report looking at the performance of all the biggest chemical companies in the world such as the top 50 to paying subscribers only. Ideally, this would occur sometime near the end of this year but perhaps it could occur earlier. I'm also hoping to monetize some of my historic content and by the time my newsletter turns 1 year old I'll have at least 50+ articles that will be relevant for years.
Anyways, its a grind for the newsletter writer. Being able to write with sustainability is super important because if you burn out as a solo newsletter writer then you have dropped out of the marathon. Don't be afriad to take breaks or vacations.
Keep writing.
I’m sure you already know, but many paid newsletters do 1 free email a week and 2-3 more paid ones a week. I think I’m going to likely move towards this model on mine.