The Polymerist

It's been about 4 months since I hit 800 emails and I guess I've added people at a rate of about 50/month, but this is the goal I had hoped to reach at 1 year of writing this newsletter and instead its been almost two years.

One thing I'm consistently surprised about is that the quality of people signing up to read what I write is impressive. There are professional investors both private and public as well as professional chemists, engineers, and marketers that constantly remind me that there are not many writers like me out there.

I've also started to bring some more consistency to the monthly revenue of the newsletter and I'm typically hovering somewhere between $80-500/month for the last few months. Having a slew of products on stripe has been fantastic.

Knowing that people will pay me just a bit of money to read this stuff is really motivating and it gives me hope that when I start to put some things behind a paywall then people might actually sign-up.

See a customer base starting to form on Stripe is great data to have and I just need to put some more thought into how I go paid full time.

Consistency and writing unique takes or deep dives into a really specific topic are really useful drivers of views, shares, and new people. Being broad, but not deep doesn't necessarily do much to make people want to read what you write.

If someone comes away from your newsletter having gained new knowledge that they can share with their friends or coworkers and kind of go deep then that's big I think.

Essentially I want to be trying to write things that could go viral at any moment.

Raised prices to $400 per 8 posts of the newsletter and I currently have confirmation out through the end of March on sponsorship.

I need to figure out if I want to raise prices sometime in April or keep the current $400/month strategy.

I figure if Big Technology can sell at $5000/month for a podcast/newsletter 4 times a month each at 10k subscribers I can sell at $500/month once I hit 1000.

Currently I have 778 free email signups. Next email milestone is 800 signups.

Just sold advertising for the next nine issues of The Polymerist for $300 ($291 after stripe). This was from a reader of the newsletter looking to grow his recruiting business. My total email signups right now on Substack are 650 and I was able to make the case that my pricing was worth it and it was worth supporting me.

I'm intending to turn on paid subscriptions once I hit 1000 free email sign-ups.

I took a call from a recruiter looking to poach me to a competitor, which I wasn't interested in and spent some time on understanding her pain points in filling the position. I then offered her ad space in my newsletter which has an audience around the people she is trying to recruit.

I sold $100 of sponsorship for the week.

I had noticed Zymergen's stock price had plummeted in early August so I spent some time doing some research around the company and read their SEC Filings. I then did a sort of commentary on their SEC filing and gave my opinion as to what I saw as issues.

https://polymerist.substack.com/p/zymergens-implosion/comments

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

Getting people to consistently share the newsletter and writing content that appeals to a broader audience has helped. I've been able to double the subscriber count in about 2 months which is about 2x faster than before. I've also started to try and be more engaging on Twitter. My audience is primarily professionals who are either in chemistry, a related field, finance, or they are students looking to break into the chemical industry.

I posted to LinkedIn, twitter, and facebook while also telling my friends and just writing consistently every week. The structure of the newsletter started to become more apparent. I got a retweet from a prominent chemistry Twitter personality and I broke 100 subcribers

The Polymerist is focused on the chemical industry and I write about different companies on a daily basis, primarily based on press releases, but also on main stream media stories. I recently pivoted my Friday news roundups to have a theme or a focus.

I've wanted to start building out a network of engaged readers in the chemical industry and also make it so that it could also be a means of communicating advances in specific verticals such as plastics, agriculture chemistry, coatings, or personal care chemicals.

Today I got an email from a reader, do not think they are a subscriber that wants to set-up a meeting to talk about their new product. Score.

There is potential here for monetization in the future, but for now I will probably take the approach of just trying to do an interview via Zoom and publishing our written conversation. This would be a good time to do a podcast, but it feels like too much too soon. I'm still trying to work out product/market fit.

I'm also starting to get more readers asking me to cover different topics and they are typically in high school. The kids in high school now are going to be amazing if they are reading and understanding my newsletter now.