Newsletter
Overview
Build infrastructure for automated content curation and generation, deployable across multiple niches. The system is the product — individual newsletters are instances.
Potential Niches
- Oral surgery / dental advancements: brother-in-law (oral surgery resident) expressed interest in following discipline advancements
- AI / Data Engineering: closer to home, founder previously ran “Sanity Check” (more thought leadership than curation)
Monetization
Sponsorships
Key Insight
Build the curation pipeline once, deploy across niches. Each newsletter is a low-marginal-cost instance of the same infrastructure.
Prior Work
- Sanity Check newsletter (paused) — thought leadership format
What’s Needed
- Content sourcing and curation pipeline
- Publishing infrastructure (Substack, Beehiiv, or similar)
- Audience growth playbook
- Sponsorship acquisition process
- Research: what does the oral surgery resident actually want to know?
Sanity Check Archive (21 articles)
The founder’s original newsletter — a mix of thought leadership, analytics commentary, and data engineering perspective. Published on sc.raydata.co.
Early Issues (E01–E09)
Written 2021, more exploratory and essay-driven. Establishing the voice.
| Issue | Title | Date | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| E01 | There Is Always a Silly Simple Question | 2021-03-04 | Teaching over solving, patience as a professional skill |
| E02 | Mysterious to Miraculous: The 3Ms of Comprehension | 2021-03-10 | Framework for understanding data maturity |
| E03 | Analytics: The Mixed Bag | 2021-04-03 | The state of the analytics profession |
| E04 | Git Environmentalism: Protect Our Branches | 2021-04-11 | Version control as data engineering discipline |
| E05 | Analytics Crafting a Way Forward | 2021-09-25 | Analytics as irreducible craft, professionalization |
| E06 | Open Book Analytics | 2021-10-12 | Bottom-up community building in analytics |
| E07 | Data’s Secret Sauce | 2021-10-20 | What makes data teams effective |
| E08 | DPIM Framework | 2021-11-08 | Bundling better infra, people, models, and data |
| E09 | One-Way or Two-Way Doors | 2021-11-08 | Decision frameworks applied to data |
Main Run (000–021)
Written 2021–2023, more structured format with recurring sections. Stronger voice.
| Issue | Title | Date | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000 | Writing DAG | 2021-12-04 | Writing as a directed acyclic graph |
| 011 | Hi Again, Forgiving Failure, & Loops in DAGs | 2023-07-27 | Return from hiatus, loops in workflows |
| 012 | ”We’re So Back” — The Analytics Engineering Angle | 2023-08-03 | Analytics engineering momentum |
| 013 | Analyzing in Public | 2023-08-10 | Open analysis as profession-builder |
| 014 | The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: dbt Updates | 2023-08-17 | dbt ecosystem commentary |
| 015 | In the Lab: dbt State Management & Writing Online | 2023-08-24 | Experimenting with dbt and publishing |
| 016 | Data Repair Work | 2023-08-31 | Eight failure modes in data projects |
| 017 | Analytics Arcade: Great Game of Business | 2023-09-07 | Net New MRR as unifying metric — unicorn exit story |
| 018 | Getting Weird with Squarely | 2023-09-14 | Cross-pollination: puzzles meet data |
| 019 | Squarely’s Squares: Gathering Puzzle Pieces for Growth | 2023-09-21 | Growth loop mechanics for Squarely |
| 020 | Analytics Antenna & Good Guy Amazon? | 2023-10-01 | Industry sensing and commentary |
| 021 | The Advantages of Going Deep on Architecture | 2023-10-22 | Deep architecture knowledge as career multiplier |