Yesterday, I posted this at LinkedIn:
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.