52 weeks, (almost) no misses

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

If you want to chat about your own growth strategy, book a free call with me here.

Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.

It's Sunday night. I'm staring at a half-finished draft, the cursor blinking at me like it's personally offended. The newsletter goes out tomorrow morning. I have maybe four hours.

This happened to me more than once this year.

Fifty-two weeks. Fifty-two issues. No misses. But absolutely a bunch of very close calls! (You may or may not have noticed that last week the newsletter was sent later than usual…)

That streak is the thing I'm most proud of from year one. Not the subscriber count (though 120k is crazy 🤯) and not any particular article. The streak. Because keeping it forced me to actually put into practice what I’ve preached to clients for years.

But before I get into that, let me take you back…

Two years ago this month, I hit what I called a hard reset on my life.

The day after leaving my job, my partner and I moved in together for the first time. When she left for work on Monday morning, I sat on our couch. Unemployed. Surrounded by cardboard moving boxes. Thinking equal parts "what do I do now?" and "WTF have I done?"

What followed was a year of many coffee meetings, false starts, a trip to South America (where I had a clichéd-but-accurate realisation about giving myself permission) and eventually a proper pivot back into focusing on my unique expertise. Leaning into my background in both B2B SaaS and media businesses was the decision that changed everything. I got five new clients in four weeks, and had the first sense that this was actually a business.

A few months later, Pistachio became real. No longer just freelance projects strung together, but an actual agency with a clear offer: helping B2B brands build content engines. Today we’ve worked with brands from bootstrapped startups like Atono to hypergrowth success stories like Clay.

This newsletter, Brand Chemistry, launched about six months after that. Exactly one year ago this week!

The honest answer has two parts, and I haven't said both in the same breath before.

The creative part is I'd been posting on LinkedIn for a while and kept running into the same wall. There were ideas I wanted to explore properly. Brand strategies that deserved more than a carousel, trends I was tracking that needed room to breathe. But a few lines in a social post wasn’t enough. Brand Chemistry was somewhere to actually articulate my thoughts fully onto a page.

The business part is more pragmatic. I run an agency that helps brands grow through content, and I wasn't doing it myself beyond Linkedin. That's a strange position to be in. A newsletter was a way to fix that. A live proof-of-concept. If I could build an audience through consistent, useful content, it would demonstrate exactly what we help clients do at Pistachio.

The newsletter and the agency are connected. I've kept that vague until now, but there's no good reason to. That transparency is part of what makes the whole thing coherent. If you’re interested in case studies and concepts about brands connecting with their audiences, then Pistachio is probably going to be a good partner for you and your business.

Initially I naively assumed writing would be the easy part.

I'd spent years building content operations in new-age media brands — editing other people's work, developing briefs and frameworks, running the growth function. Surely 1200 words a week would be manageable?

It was not.

The first issue went out to 41 people. Because the audience was small, I wrote something personal and a little raw. A piece I wouldn't have published to a bigger list. Then the list grew, and somewhere along the way I got cautious. Pulled back into safer territory. More case studies, more structured analysis, less personal than that first piece was.

Every time I published, the low-grade panic about what came next kicked in immediately. Fifty-two weeks sounds manageable at a high level, but week by week it starts to feel like a treadmill you can't get off.

The ChatGPT vs Claude piece was a turning point.

Most of what I'd written up to that point was solidly case study territory. Here's what a brand did, and here's why it worked. Useful, hopefully, but fairly safe.

That piece was different. I had an actual opinion. A strong one. Instead of reporting what happened, I argued a position. Claude's campaign was objectively better, not just creatively but strategically and from a basic branding perspective. Then I explained exactly why.

The response surprised me.

What struck me wasn't just that people liked it. They actually engaged with the argument. Pushed back, or agreed strongly, or said it shifted how they were thinking about their own brand work.

The insight was obvious in hindsight. As readers of Brand Chemistry, you don't just want information (there's literally infinite content available 24/7), you want a point of view you can borrow, argue with, or build on.

When I started, I pictured something fairly structured. A clean rotation of brand case studies, delivered consistently, with clear frameworks readers could apply.

That's still part of it. But the newsletter has become more personal than I planned, and your responses keep suggesting that's the right direction.

The issues that resonated most weren't always the most researched. Often they were the ones where I had something specific to say about a trend I'd been watching, or where I connected a brand observation to something I'd seen working (or not working) with actual clients. That lived experience layer is what makes the analysis useful rather than just interesting. Next month I’m even headed to a conference to do a keynote based on my Missing Middle article, and I did my first ever piece-to-camera video (scary 🫣) based on the Brand Personality article.

Something else the streak taught me was the advantage of compounding systems. Every issue made the next one slightly easier. Not because writing got less hard, but because the habit of looking for ideas became automatic. I started seeing brand moves, positioning decisions, and market shifts differently. Everything became potential material.

The value comes from what accumulates over time rather than any individual piece of content.

Publishing every week also meant I got good at finishing things. No option to sit with a draft indefinitely, to keep polishing until it felt ready. Sometimes it went out and I knew it wasn't my best work... (hopefully you didn’t notice 😬) but you stop being precious eventually.

Two years ago I was sitting on that couch wondering what came next. A year and a half ago Pistachio became real. A year ago the first Brand Chemistry article went out to 41 people.

Now, 52 articles later, I can see the thread connecting all of it is the same bet: that consistent, opinionated content compounds into something worth having.

Year two is about doubling down on that. More perspective, more experience. Less "here's what Brand X did" and more "here's why I think this matters." The case studies aren't going anywhere, but they'll have a sharper point of view.

There’s also the hands-on work I and the Pistachio team do with real businesses just like yours, so I’ll be sharing more insights and learnings from that experience to hopefully give you more tangible and actionable perspectives.

I'm more excited about what this newsletter is becoming than I was about what I thought it would be when I started.

Given where I was sitting two years ago, that feels like a great place to be.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: brandchemistry.co/p/52-weeks