>I'm curious, what is the motivation for moving into the content business? I'm certainly interested in this project, and will likely buy the book, etc, but I'm also somewhat disappointed to not see you going after something bigger/harder/technical and sharing that journey. I found your previous work very inspiring.
I'm trying to find a business that lets me write about technical things that I find interesting and have it be financially viable and aligned with my readers' interests.
When I was running TinyPilot, I wanted to write about a lot of what I was doing, but the pace of the business was tough, so I had very little time to write. And after the first few months, my writing didn't have a measureable impact on the business anymore. I liked to think that it did, but it was hard to allocate so much of my time to blogging when I could have been working on other parts of the business.
And it makes sense that blogging wouldn't help TinyPilot much. I think there's overlap between people who read my blog and people who are interested in that product, but it's not super aligned. Like the people interested in running an indie business are not necessarily interested in buying a KVM over IP device.
There are a few different models for making money from blogging (ads, affiliate deals, paid membership). The one that appeals to me most is what Julia Evans[0] does, where she blogs about what she's interested in, but she has paid products[1] that allow readers to contribute back financially.
I'd eventually like to get back to a SaaS or some type of software product, but I'd like to see if I can make the book work, as there's a lot I'd like to teach that I don't see elsewhere.
But in general, I think educational products ("info products") have an unfortunate stigma. I've only done one, but I found it to be a great way to learn about indie businesses because it's a microcosm of the whole process of customer discovery, marketing, and sales. But it has the advantage of not being a long-term promise, so if it doesn't work out, you just move on to the next thing rather than tell all of the early customers who bet on you that you're shutting down and killing off their product.
[0] https://jvns.ca
(In principle, you could use "write something that someone else would actually read", but I think this is much harder, because it's much harder to know how other people would react! If you yourself would read it, well, we aren't that unique, lots of other people would read it too.)
Also, props for this stark picture of reality: https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/write-blog-posts-dev...
I hired an illustrator to design a custom cover for me, but the project went off the rails, as the artist was using AI in ways I disliked, so I ended up just doing my own mediocre cover in two hours.[1]
[0] https://unsplash.com/photos/shallow-focus-photo-gray-balance...
[1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2025/01/#my-poor-experienc...
you can have your cake and eat it too: TLDR, create a multi tier system
do a bunch of short form posts and see what gets abnormal traction from others / gets referenced by YOU more
THEN you invest the time to go the extra yard
this way you dont overinvest in what isnt popular and you also get multiple "shots on goal"
I developed a writing format that I call an “iceberg article”:
https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html
… which qualifies as an inverted pyramid but with some additional attributes.
That is, the lines in the heading got progressively shorter, making a visual inverted pyramid, with the most important information first.
Later, the "inverted pyramid" term described the structure of the entire article with the most important parts first, but the metaphor does seem backward.
https://books.google.com/books?id=rNaEw8DwatwC&pg=PA154&dq=%...
In some cases it is possible to combine both, by using the storytelling formula that starts describing the outcome and then traces back to how things ended up that way.
[1]: The lede is in the title, even! https://entropicthoughts.com/code-reviews-do-find-bugs
[2]: This is all meandering discovery. https://entropicthoughts.com/deploying-single-binary-haskell...
The post is aimed at people who want their writing to reach more developers. If they've reached the article based on the title, I assume they already want to reach more readers, so I don't think it's worth explaining at that point.
If I clicked an article called, "How to vertically center a div using CSS" and the article explained why I might want to center a div, I'd find it kind of strange and not what I want to spend my time reading.
>I write a blog that gets read by no one. When I publish a blog post, I don't check how many people read it. The blog has no particular topic, just whatever random thoughts pop into my head. Yes I'd like to improve my writing, so I can formulate my thoughts better. But I'm a little suspicious of anyone who thinks reaching a big audience is so obvious a goal it doesn't even require explaining why.
I think that's fine, and I support you doing that, but it just means that you're not the audience for this particular post.
I've published several other excerpts on the book's website that are about craft rather than strategy for reaching readers, so you might be interested in those.[0]
They should still be teaching it? I don't think much has changed? I went to school a decade ago, and during that time we still wrote essays following these guidelines.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_...
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_proce...
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Also, there are many different forms of writing. People write in forms other than argumentative essays, etc.
I’m all about improving my writing to be useful to others. However, diversifying my content to attract a broader audience usually results in the most vapid, formulaic, clickbaity articles. No matter how many eyeballs they get, I don’t get any pleasure reading or writing them. And writing is how I slow down and shape my thinking. I like doing it for myself, not for the audience. But I deeply appreciate however many readers I get.
Hacker News has a pattern of articles it favors: Zig, Rust, why Go isn’t for the “smart” developers, arcane PL theories, nostalgia about some Lisp variant, why you should blog, small internet, and so on. Ninety percent of the time, they’re forgettable. I usually learn more from the comments than the articles themselves. I also don’t want to write just to capture a certain kind of audience.
I mostly write about things I’m currently working with or interested in. I tend to write something I think past me would find useful—and future me might, too. That’s very different from shaping your writeups for the audience. My stats aren’t impressive as the author, but I do get a few thousand monthly visitors to my blog[1]. I’ve had job offers because a recruiter came across one of my posts somewhere. It’s a different way of thinking about writing, but I’m immensely happy with the result.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/
I read a really interesting book* about the topic a while back where the authors delve into why humour works and how to find a style of humour that works for you. Unfortunately there are places imo where they fall into their own trap of trying too hard, but honestly it serves to prove the point.
* https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Street%20Jok...
Still, for most people who are still finding their style and (for some reason) are optimizing for popularity, this seems like sound advice.