Creator Spotlight: Nick Trimmer

What is Creator Spotlight?

Each week we'll feature a newsletter on beehiiv that's experiencing tremendous success with their content and growth. It's a two part initiative packed into a single day:

1. an email showcasing their content, tips, and goals (this email here)

2. and a live Twitter Spaces today where you can join the conversation and ask questions directly

Tell me about Trinita Wine

The purpose of the Trinita newsletter is to help drag the wine industry, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Trinita is about the business of wine and the people who shape it. Wine is such an interesting topic because it has such deeply-rooted cultural importance as both a social symbol and an art form. It plays a central role in everything that humanity holds sacred: primarily food, religion, and culture. To me, wine is culture.

The business side of it is equally interesting, yet also somehow more intractable. Alcohol is the second most regulated industry in America and yet most of these businesses still run on dollies and pen-and-paper purchase orders. My goal with the newsletter has been to share the most important industry developments with the accompanying analysis that I could never find myself. I wanted to write something that was informative to those who work in the industry and entertaining to those who don’t.

Why do you think the wine industry has a dearth of business analysis?

The signal-to-noise ratio for industry news is atrocious. The largest publications in the space occasionally report on business, trade, and regulation. There are analysts out there doing great work collecting data, monitoring trends, and sharing their insights. Probably a handful of these organizations are writing 80-page reports that are released once a year. To give some context, one of the biggest alcoholic beverage industry newsletters in the country literally copy-pastes articles into a daily email thread that would take the average person about 30 minutes to read.

Wine is such an interesting topic and there is important information out there. I romanticize wine a lot because of the way it touches economics, law, culture, and environment. It ties in all those things. It’s also a highly regulated industry. After prohibition was repealed, a series of laws were put into place to make alcohol more expensive and more difficult to obtain, with the goal of lessening the amount of alcohol abuse. This is why we have a three-tier system- the laws dictate that when alcohol is sold, it must go through several middle men. A producer sells to a wholesaler who then sells to a distributor, who turns around and sells to restaurants, bars, and stores. So we see multiple markups in the process of getting wine to consumers. On top of that, each state has different laws so you’ll see things like wholesalers creating shell companies to be able to distribute in different states. It’s a monstrosity.

Where do you see the newsletter going?

I haven’t monetized it yet. I transitioned to beehiiv because I saw the way they were building an engine for monetization. I still feel very new in the writing spaces, in the newsletter space. Trinita is only five months old. I plan on monetizing later on. I am excited about the referral program and paid tier system that I can use to offer more detailed industry deep dives for paid tiers.

There are so many opportunities to combat the information asymmetry that's so ubiquitous in this industry. From more accessible industry reports, to job boards, to harvest internships, there are so many amazing opportunities to improve the wine industry.

After building an audience of passionate winemakers and professionals, having a community resource like this will help modernize the industry and make it more accessible.

Advice for other writers

When you first start out, don’t worry too much about building a brand or curating an audience. Write for yourself, find your voice, and you’ll attract people just like you.

Want more?

Join the conversation with Nick Trimmer on Twitter Spaces. We'll discuss how Nick plans to grow to 2,000 subscribers in 2022.

For those new to Twitter Spaces—you can join the conversation and ask Nick (and others) whatever you want!

When: Today at 2pm ET Where: Twitter Spaces (link below)

In the meantime be sure to follow Nick on Twitter and subscribe to his newsletter to view more of his work! We'll see you all tomorrow at 3pm ET