Independent Media
Independent Project
Organic growth, audience experiments and content strategy across TikTok, Instagram and my newsletter, Marginalia.
File 01
Algorithmic experiment
Testing what sticks.
I tried different kinds of short-form video: history, time travel, travel, lifestyle and culture, with different hooks and formats. I watched how people responded and made more of what they engaged with.
61M+
64K+
Each post became feedback: what made people stop, stay and share?
File 02
Can I make a niche interesting?
Fountain pens, made with real enthusiasm.
Good stories, careful presentation and hooks that invited people in, without pretending the subject wasn’t niche.
980K
5,000+
in about three months
A niche subject can still travel when the person making it genuinely cares.
File 03
Can I build a Substack?
Could I build an audience around the things I genuinely care about?
Most of my content work had been video, campaigns and platform behaviour. Marginalia gave me somewhere to write about the things I actually care about.
It’s my biweekly newsletter, and it’s deliberately broad: travel, fountain pens, watches, objects, material culture, and whatever else holds my attention. Its newest series, I Love Things, pays closer attention to ordinary objects: their design, material and history, and why they’re worth caring about.
I didn’t start by publishing long essays into an empty room. I began with Notes, sharing smaller ideas, finding readers and finding my voice. The longer newsletter followed, with people already there to read it.
0 → 1,000
in five months, some of them paid
I wrote about what I cared about, and found the people who cared about it too.
M.01
What Uzbekistan Taught Me About Colour
I’m sick of beige.
M.02
get one damn good notebook and write shit down.
confessions of a pen dealer part 2