A lot of other stuff went on though, and here’s one of the stories (I recently shared at LinkedIn as well):

Three years ago at Config 2023, Figma had just hit the front page of Hacker News with 500+ upvotes. My boss’s boss found me and asked, ‘How did we do it?’ I blurted out,

“I don’t know!” The blog post my coworker wrote was great, and my mind went to how much care our team put into it, so I added, “The content was really good!”

Everyone cheered. I felt strange about it, accepting credit when I felt I had little influence on the impact. Then again, this wasn’t the first time it happened.

A month before Config, I submitted one of Figma’s earlier blog posts to Reddit. Someone cross-posted it to Hacker News, and those few clicks turned into tens of thousands of pageviews, ending up the 4th most popular Figma post of 2023. That success led us to try hitting the front page with Config’s Dev Mode launch.

Over the next year at Figma, I paid close attention to better understand how these lucky outcomes happened. I worked with our team to hit the front page of Hacker News 7 more times. More recently for my client, Greptile, I’ve ghostwritten 3 blog posts that have also hit the front page.

One way to think about luck: It’s what we call positive outcomes when we don’t understand the causes.

If someone were to ask me again, I know now the honest answer is we wrote a clear, useful, blog post and shared it with people who needed it. The distribution side is its own craft as well, which I’ll write about more in the future.

Organic growth feels like luck because there’s less you directly control. What you can do is influence the conditions. The biggest constraint on that influence is the quality of the writing itself.

You can execute on content distribution (e.g., submit something to HN, post it to r/programming, or email it to readers) and none of that matters if the writing isn’t at least useful to the people reading it.

I now work with content and growth managers at AI dev tool companies on exactly this problem: writing executive content, ebooks, reports, product announcements, blog posts, and helping the work find the audience that it deserves.

That’s what led me to set up this distribution workstream. There’s a lot more to write about, including how I think about distribution these days (including finding spaces to discuss ideas, and selling 5,000+ copies of Creative Doing).

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TL;DR: When you start a new blog or publication, your metrics will disappoint you. That disappointment leads to doubt, and often kills a content practice before it has a proper chance to make an impact. A more useful signal in the first few months is author satisfaction, and it’s something you can actually pay attention to.

I write about content strategy, and I’ve helped companies like Figma, Shopify, and QuickBooks build it. This piece is about an early part that usually gets overlooked:

In my first few weeks of high school, my gym teacher took our class outside. Amidst a backdrop of changing fall colors, he paired us off to practice throwing and catching footballs. 

My partner threw a football that didn’t make it to me. I ran to catch it. It bounced up off the ground at an awkward angle, in the strange way that footballs do, and the sharp end hit me right between the legs. I’d been punched in the stomach before and had the wind knocked out of me, I’d also been hit in the forehead with a volleyball pole, but this felt way worse. I got up and pretended I was fine, to avoid drawing attention, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if I’d need to go to the hospital. (No, it wore off, and I was fine.)

Early into kicking off a content practice, clicking into your metrics feels exactly like that. You publish twelve blog posts in a couple of months, and you click into Google Analytics, and the low numbers make you feel shook. You put on a brave face, but you wonder, is this project actually going to work? Is it worth my time to continue prioritizing this?

Pageviews are a common dimension of success. It’s a signal that people are actually reading the content. (I say “reading,” but you can substitute “viewing” for videos or “listening” for podcasts.) It’s easy to understand and measure. More pageviews are generally better. Going viral is “good.” 

But early on, even a leading indicator like pageviews, or a lagging direct measure like sign ups, aren’t signaling the underlying progress you’re making. 

There are many reasons people in companies decide to establish themselves as leading thinkers. For starters, it’s good for business. When you have a reputation, prospects trust you and you can close deals faster. You stay top of mind with them, so your business is on their consideration list when they’re in the market. The list goes on… (Easier to recruit people, creates a halo effect for your future products, a more reliable marketing channel for you, not so reliant on paid ads or platforms, getting publicity is easier, etc.)

David Heinemeier Hanson is a leading thinker. Known more widely as DHH, he’s the CTO of Basecamp and co-author of several books. A few years ago, he started a new blog. After writing a few essays, he started checking his metrics, and realized almost nobody was reading. He decided to stop. He says, “In the beginning, it’s always disappointing.” This period of disappointment is more often the case than not, even with prominent leading thinkers like DHH. He says:

“The only way to get through that is this authentic yearning to just talk about what you’re doing. That’s the other thing that I found makes it so much easier, is if you stop setting the goalpost of, “I’m doing this because I’ve got to promote the business [or] because I’ve got to grow it. I’m just going to talk about what interests me. I’m going to write to me… as though I was a reader, and if I was watching someone else, this is what I would want to know. Then it’s a lot easier. It’s like a journal. You stop caring so much about those specific outcomes, and suddenly it starts feeling like there’s a human on the other side and that is probably the only way you’re going to connect to anyone these days if you’re not shoving it down their throat with ads.”

As a result of this shift, DHH shifted his focus away from metrics and towards the writing process. He wrote hundreds of posts in the years since, and finally reached a number of people he feels good about. 

DHH uses the words, “authentic yearning,” to describe what I would call author satisfaction. Tyler Cowen, who writes every day at the most popular economics blog in the world, describes it in a different way, “If I keep on doing it, I figure I’ll get somewhere with my writing and most other people don’t find it that fun. So, it’s a competitive advantage just to be choosing things you’re intrinsically interested in.”

This experience of satisfaction feels different to DHH and Tyler, and it’ll probably feel different to you as well. It isn’t as clear, tangible, or easy to measure as quantitative metrics like pageviews or sign ups. But I think it’s much more useful as a gauge of early success, as well as a signpost for whether you’re heading in the right direction or not. 

With practice, you feel a clearer sense of what satisfaction means to you. I recently interviewed a co-founder of a company with seed funding for a blog post. In our first meeting together after I sent him the draft, he said, “Wow, Herbert, you made me sound so smart!” That, to me, can also be how satisfaction sounds like. He even volunteered to cross-post the article to LinkedIn.

Satisfaction is tricky to measure; it’s more useful to evaluate it. Measurement is about getting specific dimensions, like pageviews and sign ups. Evaluation is about finding the value of something; appraising it. While metrics may provide you with dimensions to inform your judgment, they don’t replace it. Startup advisor Shreyas Doshi describes it like this, using the analogy of parenting: you don’t have metrics to tell whether you’re becoming a parent, but you can tell you are by evaluating it.

Similarly, if you’re a growth manager working with your team members on content, you need to evaluate how the authors feel after they publish their work. Here are some aspects to consider:

• Process: Do they enjoy writing it themselves, or do they prefer working with a ghostwriter? 
• Expression: Did they say what they wanted to say? Do they feel like they represented themselves and the team well?
• Further actions: Are they volunteering to share the post link to their network? Do they show interest in publishing again? Are they sending you more ideas and drafts?

And of course, you can ask yourself these questions as well as you write your own material.

Success in content strategy rarely shows up in the form of clearly defined metrics. It’s more useful, and reliable, to start with keeping author satisfaction in mind. 

In the previous edition, I suggested that content strategy success is the sum total of teaching someone how you think. When I think of my favorite teachers, they didn’t just try to go through the motions; they aimed to transform their students, which evoked a sense of satisfaction in themselves. They related to students using their own lives, or selected reading material they felt enthusiastic about. That’s the type of satisfaction you can measure success with.

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This isn’t a useful frame for actually making something you want to make, which is what being a creative person actually means.

Instead, shift your focus to the process. Measure your creative work by your contribution. What can you give? Who can you help? Where can you offer support?

In The Courage to Be Disliked, a fictional philosopher character explains, “It is through labor that one makes contributions to others and commits to one’s community, and that one truly feels ‘I am of use to someone’ and even comes to accept one’s existential worth.” 

Creative contribution is the guiding star. The rest of the metrics are just noise, useful for marketing, but not very useful for actually making stuff. 

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The immediate thought that came to me was, “I would be confusing readers if I did both.” 

Eventually, I chose to announce the Consistency Journal first, figuring that I’d need many more people to know about it in order to get enough customers, whereas I only needed a handful of clients in order to sustain my practice. You can read that intro post at LinkedIn, which I also republished at this blog. 

It was an acceptable solution to my writing block, but I knew I was missing out on building awareness for my business writing services.

Two things happened recently: 

I was invited to join Guild95, where I met Mo Akif who made time to chat with me and start a content strategy.

I also got to consult with an experienced strategist, who conducted a tutoring session with me about integrative thinking. They recommended that I read two articles to prepare, Strategy & Integrative Thinking as well as Your Personal Playing to Win Strategy, as well as to write down three drastically different winning aspirations. As we refined these, I also learned that it was possible—and actually necessary—for me to test multiple strategies to figure out what would work. This session took around two hours, and wow, it made a huge impact in terms of how clear my path forward looked.

Both of these events created the conditions for me to finally decide to sit down and make it work somehow. That’s what Creative Doing is all about; working through a block with the understanding that you only know how to get through it after the process, not before.

The post is here, and here’s some detail on the writing process I wanted to add. I had pulled a couple of references, neither that totally represented me but had elements that I liked. I’d written up a fragment, which documented the moment a friend asked me if I was available for business writing and editing work, which I didn’t feel great about. I dropped this context into Claude, then asked it to prompt me with some developmental editor questions. 

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In Canada, where I live, there are just over 40 million people. 10 million of them are between 20 to 40 (let’s assume 0 to 19 years of age won’t qualify for the Top 40 Under 40). 

100,000 are in the top 1%. That’s enough people to fill up a stadium. A lot of exceptional people didn’t make it into the Top 40 under 40.

When you zoom out to the world, there are 4.9 billion people in this world under 40, which makes 1% 49 million people. Again, whatever dimension you want to use to filter for the top 1%, that is a lot of exceptional people who haven’t been honored yet.

When the team at Basecamp chooses to skip the Fortune 500, and broaden their focus to serve the Fortune 5,000,000, they’re tapping into a similar dynamic.

When you’re doing anything counter to the prevailing convention—in my case, reading and writing books—it helps to just zoom out for a sec, from the top 0.001% that are honored in public, and remember the top 1% that haven’t been yet. 

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A few months ago, I showed a friend an early sample of The Consistency Journal. As we caught up, he mentioned he’d been having trouble with a blog post at work. The technical writer they’d been working with couldn’t take the draft where it needed to be. “I don’t even know if you have bandwidth for this,” he said. “But if you do, would you be able to have a look?”

I’d edited dozens of articles as a content strategist at Figma, as well as my book Creative Doing, so I was delighted to. While the draft had real technical depth, it read like a personal investigation. The topic was already interesting to someone outside the work, but the draft didn’t reflect that yet. I made the draft more compelling by tightening the structure, making the author’s reasoning clear, and tying it back to why it mattered to his team. He and his CTO signed off. They published it, submitted it to Hacker News, and it hit the front page.

A few months later, we expanded our work together to cover product launch posts, opinion pieces, and articles that people search for.

One of my favorite marketing mottos, which I learned from Kathy Sierra: “When you can’t out-spend, you’ve got to out-teach.” If you’re not in a position to outspend your competitors, you get ahead by teaching your customers what you know. The problem is, you’ve usually got more worth teaching than you realize. You assume your own expertise is obvious, or you’re too busy running the business to prioritize sitting down and writing it out. That gap is usually where I can help most. I work best when I’m embedded enough to see the whole picture: what’s already working, what’s missing, and what content opportunities are worth building from zero to one.

If you’re leading growth or marketing at an AI company with seed or series A funding, and you have a launch coming up and not much content infrastructure yet, that moment is also the first real opportunity to build trust with people who haven’t heard from you yet. That’s exactly the kind of problem I’m well suited to solve. 

It took me a couple of hours to write this post, which took place the day before I posted it. The first hour was coming up with the concept and tying in a specific moment to what I actually do. The second hour was spent editing it, and maybe even a bit of a third hour editing an accompanying video that I didn’t end up using. 

I posted the draft to the group at Guild95 and got some really great feedback to use a photo of the Hacker News post. However, I’d tried that before and knew people didn’t seem to like looking at screenshots of Hacker News.

The day I posted it, I worked at the Toronto Reference Library and happened to have both my laptop and The Consistency Journal. So in a moment of creative doing, my mind saw an opportunity to take a photo of both my laptop displaying Hacker News and the Consistency Journal. The library made for a great backdrop, and I felt very satisfied with the post.

Last year, I wrote about the increasing need to promote my work. I’d hoped to start when I had 10 posts queued up, but alas, what usually happened was my posts got more and more ambitious. So, I just started even though I occasionally fall behind writing every day here.

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As far as I know, you can only call them by phone. They charge a consistent, flat rate and only accept cash when you get to the airport. They give you a precise estimate of time, and show up 10 minutes early. (In other words, they’re reliable. No surge pricing, no cancellations, no delays.)

My family found out about them through friends. They’ve been in business since before mobile carshare services like Uber and Lyft, and will probably be around after. It’s similar to GoGoGrandparent, a business that helps seniors use rideshare services.

There’s good business advice to focus on a very small group of people, and making the best service for them. Whenever I hear that, my mind goes to this car service business. It’s too small a market for the carshare services to tackle, and big enough for at least a handful of local businesses to serve. 

To their customers, this business is the best in the world.

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A few moments, or perhaps days, later, I realize that I’m not going to have the time and energy to write it at this moment; maybe I never will. My hands are full, and life is too short. That fever turns into grief.

This process takes place in a similar spirit to how Visakan Veerasamy describes his unfinished drafts as having “grandiose shapes.” He explains, “They’re conceptualized from the beginning in ways that require a lot of time and energy to finish, and would also require quite a lot from my readers.”

Several years ago, I realized that focusing on agility as a writer can be useful. A couple of years after that, I started writing every day at this blog. 

This practice is training my brain to take big ideas and, instead of putting them into a grandiose shape that I don’t have bandwidth to work on, find a more modest one for them that I’m actually capable of. It’s much scruffier. It’s imperfect because it meets the real world. The game doesn’t end when an idea is in the form of a book; the whole point of the game is to keep writing.

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By 1998, Steve Jobs and the company’s other new leaders decided to try to save it. Steve identified two things that were working for Apple: its neglected brand, and its operating system. They cancelled a lot of product development. That year, the company released only five new products. 

There’s a fine line between being prolific and being distracted. That line is being choiceful: making thoughtful, intentional, and deliberate decisions. 

Steve’s successor Tim Cook said it well when he took up the reins at Apple: 

“We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.”

It reminds me of something a former leader at Apple, Jony Ive, said: 

“What focus is, saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea. And you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it. Because you are focusing on something else.”

Apple spent billions of dollars on developing a car. A couple of years ago, Apple shut it down to focus on AI and continue to improve its current product portfolio.

It feels painful to practice choicefulness. The trade comes in the form of the energy you free up by choosing to focus, and a much better chance at succeeding.

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His first home was in a room on the fourth floor of a brownstone in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just a block west of Central Park. In the evenings, he often worked at a diner nearby, sipping on coffee while completing his harmony exercises as well as composing his own music in his notebooks.

One night, Philip noticed an older man in his 60s doing the same thing—composing music. He writes in his memoir, Words Without Music, “It was a piano quintet (piano plus string quartet) and, from my few quick glances, it looked very well thought out and ‘professional.’” 

If you were in Philip’s position, you might think that this older man hadn’t seemed to gain much success with his music. You might even worry that would be your fate; after decades of dedication, there you were, still toiling away in obscurity in a diner with someone decades your junior. 

That thought didn’t cross Philip’s mind. Instead, he writes:

Now, here is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story, and something I didn’t understand until many years later: I wasn’t at all upset by this nonencounter. It never occurred to me that, perhaps, it was a harbinger of my own future. No, I didn’t think that way at all. My thought was that his presence confirmed that what I was doing was correct. Here was an example of an obviously mature composer pursuing his career in these unexpected surroundings. I never knew who he was. Perhaps he was there, escaping from some noisy domestic scene—wife, kids running around, too many guests at home. Or, like me, perhaps he was simply living alone in a single room. The main thing was that I didn’t find it worrisome. If anything I admired his resolve, his composure. It was inspiring.

Creative commitment expresses itself in all different types of ways. Success can be one signal of it, but it’s no more than that. And there are plenty of serious people who don’t need to broadcast success to be a sign of their commitment, just as there are plenty of spouses who don’t need a big diamond ring to let the world know that they are happily married. (Many artists, including Philip, worked day jobs before they could focus on their art full-time. If you’re participating in this tradition, you’ve joined a long lineage.)

As long as you keep practicing and working on the craft, you’re taking it seriously.

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