Massive Science

I co-founded Massive Science at the end of 2016 as a product-driven media company after raising seed funding from Bloomberg Beta and General Electric. Our stated founding mission was to improve understanding between scientists and the public. Our unstated mission was to invent new ways of publishing stories and sharing knowledge online.

A few months after formally starting our company, I led the design and development of our editorial publication. It was also called Massive Science. From the start, we decided to produce a statically-generated website backed by a headless CMS. In 2016, static HTML generation was mostly used for publishing small websites and personal blogs, with all the content authored as static Markdown files and minimal admin interface. Professional content production tools (mainly Wordpress and Drupal) still assumed server-side page rendering coupled to a server-hosted admin interface. We were ahead of the curve in using a cloud-based content editor and rebuilding our static site in response to content changes. But, as a small, scrappy startup, this made sense: it afforded us a very fast, very inexpensive, and very flexible starting point for building web products.

We started spinning up an editorial production process, working with freelance writers, and producing magazine-style stories. We were still finding our voice, our angle, and our approach to publishing science stories. The biggest story at the time was the inauguration of Donald Trump, which had scientists and academics on-edge about the prospects of funding, basic-research, and cultural changes under a Trump Adminstration.

Then on April 22, 2017, we witnesses the first March for Science. Across the world, hundreds of thousands of scientists assembled for a politically-charged event and advocated for the value of their work, the importance of evidence-based policy, and increasing public funding for scientific research. We saw that scientists, especially those early in their careers or still studying, felt compelled to speak up for themselves. We also saw that, following this worldwide event, there were limited pathways for them to continue their speech and advocacy. In response, we quickly stood up a Slack group and a webpage for a contributor network we called the Massive Science Consortium.

Almost immediately, we found we naturally attracted scientists who were eager and interested in writing and publishing online, but didn’t know where to start. We also found that their unsolicited submissions didn’t meet our editorial standards. Understanding this, I proposed that we adopt a training model: we would provide editorial guidance along a structured path for scientists to become better writers. My hypothesis was two-fold: first, that each contributor would require more intense editing after first joining, but require diminishing amounts of editorial effort as they learned and became stronger writers; second, that we’d expend a relatively constant amount of resources on a per-piece basis. Following from that, we developed a program where we wouldn’t pay for a contributor’s first couple of pieces, instead exchanging education for effort, but once they’d worked with us enough, they could earn a commission for each published piece that ramped up the more they published with us. This created an incentive structure for continuing to contribute, while fairly respecting the time and effort of each author.

This hypothesis was very quickly proven true. We built a network of contributors, who grew their own reputation as writers and helped grow Massive’s reputation as a knowledgable and differentiated source for science news and analysis. We had a core group who published dozens of pieces with us, and a much longer tail of contributors who published only a few pieces. Over time, some of our strongest contributors joined our editorial team as editorial assistants, with a few becoming full-fledged editors. Online community became the heart of our business and the soul of our voice.

With this contributor network, we were able to publish timely, topical science stories that many other outlets simply missed. We found a unique, irreverent voice and grew a passionate audience. By early 2021, Massive had over two-hundred thousand unique monthly visitors and an average time-on-page of over three minutes (these are remarkably strong metrics for a publication). Our weekly email newsletter grew to over 20,000 subscribers. We entered editorial parterships to provide an authorititative voice for others: we launched Ginkgo Bioworks’s GROW magazine, the science section of Pioneer Works’s Broadcast magazine, and consulted on a young-adult graphic novel series called The Curie Society.

We also leveraged our content archive and active audience to launch the Women of Science Tarot Deck, a unique product that created a storytelling card game based on the biographies of over 50 women in STEM throughout history. This product was based on a long-running and highly successful editorial series of biographies of underappreciated women in STEM, paired with illustrations by Matteo Farinella. This product repurposed existing editorial content into a new format, supported the creation of additional content to further grow our audience, and attracted earned media to our publication and business.

Launched as a Kickstarter, the Women of Science Tarot Deck eclipsed our initial goal and raised nearly $20,000. I led the design and production of the physical product, working with suppliers to manufacture the game in China, ship it to the states, and fulfill over 500 pre-orders. Following this, we established an e-commerce business to sell remianing units of the deck, along with other science-based products, to our audience. In addition, we worked with the MIT Press and Penguin Random House on a second edition of the card game, supplemented with a 80-page printed guidebook, for nationwide distribution.

While Massive Science was founded and run by whip-smart editorial and product leaders, we lacked the business development and sales expertise to grow our revenue to a sustainable point. After years of effort and a year of working non-stop through the COVID-19 pandemic, we ran out of steam while trying to make the business viable and went into haitus at the end of 2021. But while now defunct, Massive Science continues on: our work is still available online; our tarot decks are still available on bookshelves nationwide; our contributors have gone onto careers communicating science in labs, universities, and government agencies; and, just recently, our editors have launched a new, reader-supported science publication called Sequencer.

I learned so much while building Massive: how to run a business day-to-day, how to hire (and, sadly, fire), and how to build products through rapid iteration and evidence-based decision making. Its lessons continue to inform my work to this day, and I’ll always look on it with fondness.