A month after I first started at Figma, I traveled from NYC to SF for its annual conference named Config. It was the first in-person one after the pandemic. My co-worker Jenny and I wrote a liveblog for it, and I also got to see a copy of Creative Doing on the bookshelf at Figma HQ.
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).