Writing For Startups
Available for download, because articles can’t be that long.
A quick observation for the young, entrepreneurial writer out there: When a Medium article goes above a 5-minute read, your “read” statistics will get cut roughly in half. 10 minutes, they’ll get halved again. Only the true masochists among us ever hit 20 minutes or more (looking at you, Younès Rharbaoui 😘).
Well, I wrote something that clocks in around 45 minutes. But I am
- not a masochist, and
- convinced that reading it is a good, efficient way to get the right mentality on how to create great content for your startup.
What’s in it? The route toward developing a mentality and voice that add value to your startup, saving you from the very real frustrations that are so commonly felt by entrepreneurs and startup employees struggling to produce content. That includes, but is not limited to,
- Why we need to get away from the tech messiah complex;
- The ROI that you can reasonably expect from startup content (hint: Look within, young grasshopper);
- Some inspiration and even a bit of actual writing advice, although not too much — both inspiration and writing are personal 😉;
- Why it’s important to battle through the writing process as an entrepreneur before handing it off to someone else.
Sound like something you could use? Again, it’s free to download right here.
By the way, a quick note on what’s going on with those “read” statistics I cited up top.
I’ve always been a big reader. When I was a kid, I’d read three or four books at a time, in the middle of all of them, going back and forth over the course of the day. People thought I was nuts — they’d ask my mom, “How does he keep track of what’s going on?” She’d just shrug and smile, and keep her keys nearby for our next trip to the library.
Yet even I have problems reading longer pieces now, and part of that is because the internet just isn’t a very habitable place for them. Sure, long-reads are some of the best content out there, and I’m sure you remember one that you absolutely loved (here are a few of mine favorites so you can open them, read a few paragraphs, and then get hit with a tinge of guilt when you close the tab next week: The Siege of Miami, by Elizabeth Kolbert; How the Sandwich Consumed Britain, by Sam Knight; anything by the inimitable Tim Urban’s Wait But Why).
But in general, our internet attention is constantly being pulled elsewhere.
Tabbed internet browsing takes things to a whole new level. It’s super easy to open twenty tabs. It’s super hard to actually read them all, no matter how good the content is. Throw in infinite scrolls on your favorite social media sites, and distraction is everywhere.
That’s why I went for the pdf, which can exist in a different way — on a Kindle, on your computer in Acrobat, heck, print it out if you want.
I really do hope it helps. Lots of the frustration around content creation in startups can be avoided by having the right mindset. And if you want to talk more about the specifics of your startup, your process, and how to produce better content, I’m happy to talk — you can find me at Twitter or email, kyle@thefamily.co.
