4 ms·

The three I's of startup blogging

13 points by sgrove 18y ago

rokhayakebe 18y ago
Ok, sometimes I feel authors think of a title first, then write a story around it. That being said, I don't have anything against the article.
- sgrove 18y ago
  Sorry if it felt a bit vapid. I actually thought of writing it when I heard the interview on political diaries, and felt it matched very well with what I found was interesting for startup and business blogs as well. I had been procrastinating writing about our "launch experience" on hn from Sunday because of coding to account for all the feedback we received. I tend to write in a very sanitary, evasive, and long-winded manner. The interview just jumped out at me with the "four i's". Out of those, I thought three were really relevant to startups/business blogs. Thanks for your feedback.
scorxn 18y ago
I believe you mean indiscreet, not indiscrete.
- sgrove 18y ago
  Fixed. Thanks.
swombat 18y ago
I was struck by the relevancy to writing startup and business blogs. Immediacy is everything - a hindsight view offers a lot of well-selected, edited, abstracted lessons, but it's boring. Geez, really? I better stop writing blog posts then. I suffer from always trying to appear rational in my actions, so I spend too much time trying to analyze the underlying motivations about why I did something when I should simply write about what I did and the short, simple thoughts that brought me there. Good point. Why analyze where we went right or wrong? What's the point of that? It's not like other people, or even ourselves, can learn from our mistakes. ... Amazon is amazing about this ... Amazon's blog is a start-up blog? Ok, then obviously we have a different definition of what a "start-up blog" is. I thought it was a blog about start-ups, written by an entrepreneur. Apparently tech blogs written by industry behemoths count as start-up blogs, according to this article. I'm not quite sure what this article was talking about. Perhaps the author should have defined what he meant by "start-up blogs" before writing the article. Not at all sure where the "Indecipherable" part came from either.. who reads indecipherable blogs?? Does anyone intentionally write indecipherable blogs?
- sgrove 18y ago
  Hey swombat, I definitely respect your opinion, so let me see if I can explain myself a bit more - and hopefully improve myself in the process. By hindsight view, I meant retroactively analyzing everything after the adrenalin of the moment has worn off. It's pretty much what we always read. It's a bit cooler, more sterile, and methodical. And you're right, writing that down, careful and well-thought analysis is crucial. But for interesting writing (perhaps entertaining is a better word), immediacy offers a lot of emotional nuances that are lost with time. And I simply chose Amazon because the way they openly run their AWS is a great example for startups. I was comparing their style to an article I read from box.net (an actual startup), and the difference was striking. Finally, the indecipherable bit was simply from the original podcast on how to write a successful political diary. I don't think it's useful or really relevant for startups, and that's why I crossed it out. Perhaps I should have simply omitted it. I'll make notes of all of this for the next time I write. Thanks!
  - swombat 18y ago
    I see what you mean. However, there's more than one purpose for a blog, and more than one approach to getting visitors - even from a start-up perspective. To give you a very immediate example, my latest article on danieltenner.com is exactly as you describe - hindsight, cool, methodical (I like to think it's not overly sterile, but that's just me). Yet it gathered about 45k visitors so far (with more to come, no doubt.. even today it still got about 2000 visitors) and sent about 700 click-throughs to woobius.com through the front page on the day of publication. I'd call it a very successful blog post in terms of promoting my business, even though it was not about my business and it was not even on my business blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles http://www.woobius.com/scribbles). Other articles on Scribbles itself got thousands of visits and also sent hundreds of hits to Woobius. Moreover, because those posts provide lasting value (precisely because they are not immediate), they tend to get linked by others, gain pagerank, and appear in google searches (an article I wrote about document control is getting a handful of hits from people looking for document control tools every day). So, while I don't disagree that the "immediate" style can work very well, because it can be quite entertaining to many people and so they'll follow it. However, I don't think it's right to discard the "slow hindsight" style, because it can also work extremely well. I think that would be my main disagreement with your article. Btw, I agree that you should have left out the bit about political diaries.. it was more a distraction than anything else. Keep it up, though, looking forward to more articles :-)

13 points by sgrove 18y ago

Ok, sometimes I feel authors think of a title first, then write a story around it. That being said, I don't have anything against the article.

sgrove 18y ago
Sorry if it felt a bit vapid. I actually thought of writing it when I heard the interview on political diaries, and felt it matched very well with what I found was interesting for startup and business blogs as well. I had been procrastinating writing about our "launch experience" on hn from Sunday because of coding to account for all the feedback we received. I tend to write in a very sanitary, evasive, and long-winded manner. The interview just jumped out at me with the "four i's". Out of those, I thought three were really relevant to startups/business blogs. Thanks for your feedback.

scorxn 18y ago

I believe you mean indiscreet, not indiscrete.

sgrove 18y ago
Fixed. Thanks.

swombat 18y ago

I was struck by the relevancy to writing startup and business blogs. Immediacy is everything - a hindsight view offers a lot of well-selected, edited, abstracted lessons, but it's boring. Geez, really? I better stop writing blog posts then. I suffer from always trying to appear rational in my actions, so I spend too much time trying to analyze the underlying motivations about why I did something when I should simply write about what I did and the short, simple thoughts that brought me there. Good point. Why analyze where we went right or wrong? What's the point of that? It's not like other people, or even ourselves, can learn from our mistakes. ... Amazon is amazing about this ... Amazon's blog is a start-up blog? Ok, then obviously we have a different definition of what a "start-up blog" is. I thought it was a blog about start-ups, written by an entrepreneur. Apparently tech blogs written by industry behemoths count as start-up blogs, according to this article. I'm not quite sure what this article was talking about. Perhaps the author should have defined what he meant by "start-up blogs" before writing the article. Not at all sure where the "Indecipherable" part came from either.. who reads indecipherable blogs?? Does anyone intentionally write indecipherable blogs?

sgrove 18y ago
Hey swombat, I definitely respect your opinion, so let me see if I can explain myself a bit more - and hopefully improve myself in the process. By hindsight view, I meant retroactively analyzing everything after the adrenalin of the moment has worn off. It's pretty much what we always read. It's a bit cooler, more sterile, and methodical. And you're right, writing that down, careful and well-thought analysis is crucial. But for interesting writing (perhaps entertaining is a better word), immediacy offers a lot of emotional nuances that are lost with time. And I simply chose Amazon because the way they openly run their AWS is a great example for startups. I was comparing their style to an article I read from box.net (an actual startup), and the difference was striking. Finally, the indecipherable bit was simply from the original podcast on how to write a successful political diary. I don't think it's useful or really relevant for startups, and that's why I crossed it out. Perhaps I should have simply omitted it. I'll make notes of all of this for the next time I write. Thanks!
- swombat 18y ago
  I see what you mean. However, there's more than one purpose for a blog, and more than one approach to getting visitors - even from a start-up perspective. To give you a very immediate example, my latest article on danieltenner.com is exactly as you describe - hindsight, cool, methodical (I like to think it's not overly sterile, but that's just me). Yet it gathered about 45k visitors so far (with more to come, no doubt.. even today it still got about 2000 visitors) and sent about 700 click-throughs to woobius.com through the front page on the day of publication. I'd call it a very successful blog post in terms of promoting my business, even though it was not about my business and it was not even on my business blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles http://www.woobius.com/scribbles). Other articles on Scribbles itself got thousands of visits and also sent hundreds of hits to Woobius. Moreover, because those posts provide lasting value (precisely because they are not immediate), they tend to get linked by others, gain pagerank, and appear in google searches (an article I wrote about document control is getting a handful of hits from people looking for document control tools every day). So, while I don't disagree that the "immediate" style can work very well, because it can be quite entertaining to many people and so they'll follow it. However, I don't think it's right to discard the "slow hindsight" style, because it can also work extremely well. I think that would be my main disagreement with your article. Btw, I agree that you should have left out the bit about political diaries.. it was more a distraction than anything else. Keep it up, though, looking forward to more articles :-)