I recently had a great chat with Hiten Shah on my podcast, Product People.

At one point, Hiten brought up an idea I’ve been hearing a lot lately:

One of the key things we’re learning is that you need to build an audience before you build your product. Build your audience not for marketing, but for learning.

Too many of us are building products that don’t have a market. The idea here is that instead of starting with a product, we start with people.

As an example: you’re an Android app developer so you start building an audience of Android app developers. As you get to know these people, you can learn about their pain. It’s these pain points that become the seeds for new products.

I think Hiten is on to something here.

And yet, for anyone who’s never built an audience, this idea is hard to grasp. For one, many of us don’t know where to start:

How do I get started if I can’t even identify the niches that I belong to?

There are practical questions, as well:

How do I get people to follow me on Twitter, my blog, etc…?
How do I know if my niche will be profitable?

There’s also this nagging personal question I’ve had:

Isn’t it self-serving to build an audience, only so you can sell something to them?

Your mindset affects everything

Your mindset is a powerful thing: it has a strong influence over the outcomes you’ll achieve.

If you try to build an audience while you’re focused on yourself you’re going to get bad results. No one’s going to follow someone who’s self-absorbed and desperate.

Don’t build an audience; just help people

Derek Sivers makes a great point in Start Now: No Funding Needed:

Start by teaching someone something this week.

I love this. Instead of trying to build a big audience, or worrying about which niche will be the most profitable, just get started by looking for someone you can help.

This mindset is helping me move from being self-focused to other-focused.

When you focus on the needs of others, “finding your niche” actually takes care of itself.

Derek Sivers was a musician who had more programming knowledge than most musicians. When he started helping artists add a shopping cart to their websites, he “fell into” his niche. He was just trying to help people out, and it turned into a business.

The secret to a big audience

Hiten Shah has a big audience, but that didn’t happen overnight. He’s been focused on helping marketers since 2002. That’s his secret: he started small, 11 years ago. Look at his Twitter stream, look at his blog (where he freely reveals his real Gmail address): this guy is always looking for opportunities to help people.

After 4 years of helping marketers, Hiten and his co-founder Neil Patel saw the need for heatmaps, so they built CrazyEgg. Two years after that, marketers were asking for help managing funnels, so they builtKissmetrics.

We see the big Twitter follower-count, but we don’t see what’s behind that: looking for ways to help people every day.

Start small

Let’s return to our friend Derek Sivers:

Starting small puts 100% of your energy on solving real problems for real people.

Quit thinking about yourself. Seriously: stop focusing on your insecurities, your lack of experience, and your non-existant social network. It’s OK.

Just look for opportunities to help people. When the person in the cubicle next to you is cursing at their computer that’s an opportunity. When you notice a question in a forum with no answers that’s an opportunity. When someone approaches you for advice that’s an opportunity.

Eventually, you’ll stumble on a trend: you’ll notice that a common group of people have a common problem.

Suddenly, you’ll have an audience.

And suddenly, you’ll have an opportunity to help those people with a product.

If you liked this, you can follow me on Twitter, or join my mailing list.

After suffering with my low-cost web host for years, I decided to switch. I was fed up with poor up-time, slow load times, and bad customer support. The price was cheap ($5/month), but I needed something better. So I started evaluating other providers. Anyone who’s tried to compare managed hosting providers knows what a pain it is: spammy review sites, 100 item feature lists, and cheap looking marketing pages.

Finally I found a provider that stood out from the crowd: they had a beautifully designed website and promised speed, reliability and support.

Did I mention they were pretty?

There was a time when most web apps looked bad. They were cluttered, noisy, littered with icons, and had little in terms of cohesive design (here’s a good example).

But then companies like 37signals came on the scene. Their products were beautifully designed; they believed that software should look good. Soon new SaaS apps emerged with a similar design aesthetic.

For those of us buying this software, an unspoken rule emerged: software with a nice design = better software.

And for a long time, the rule held true. Software that looked good often was better than it’s uglier counterparts.

Back to my story

I chose the web host that had the prettiest design. They were 4x the cost of my low-cost provider, but I was confident that any company that cared about design also cared about building a great product.

I was wrong.

As I started to use their service, the pretty veneer faded away and revealed an ugly truth: they weren’t reliable. This meant frequent downtime, slow customer support, and an interface that “looked nice” but was cumbersome to use.

After a few years of using this new provider, I finally bit the bullet and switched again. This time, I chose a web host recommended by a friend. They were a bit more expensive ($9 more per month) but they delivered on the things that really mattered:

• they were blazing fast
• they had almost perfect uptime
• they could handle a lot of traffic
• they had great customer support

Notice that “beautiful design” isn’t on that list. The design of their website and their back-end is basic, utilitarian, and (dare I say it) a little ugly.

We’re in the post-pretty era

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m not saying that the principles of design don’t matter. They do, especially when applied to structure, flow, readability and navigation. Good interface design helps users get things done, and creates great experiences.

What I’m focusing on is the “look”. It’s the philosophy that we need to create gorgeous looking screens. It’s the desire to emulate the pretty designs we see on Path, Mailbox, and Pinterest. It’s wanting to have an app that is the most “stylish”, “sexy” and conforms to current design trends.

The era of stylish design being a competitive advantage, or a marketable feature, is over.

Pretty doesn’t sell (anymore)

Like I mentioned, there was a time where I’d pay for a new app just because it looked great. Not anymore. Here’s why:

1. It’s easier to fake a nice veneer - using frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap, and other UI libraries, it’s easier and easier to make an app “look nice”. For marketing pages, there are dozens of cheap templates available that look good. 
2. I care more about outcomes - I’m use software to achieve tasks. What’s the use of a pretty design if it doesn’t help me get my work done? Apps should focus less on making it ”look good”, and more on making it “work good”. Help the user get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible.
3. What’s under the hood matters - speed and reliability matter. I want the software I use to be fast, whether it’s on the web, on my phone, or on my desktop. I also want uptime: anytime an app crashes, is down, or unavailable it’s a disruption to my day.

Essentially, a good looking app is no longer a good measure of quality. These days, most apps look pretty good. Customers aren’t as easily wowed by a stylish design.

What impresses B2B buyers now? Apps that solve a pain, are efficient and reliable, and have support when you need it. Focus on those things first; don’t worry about flair.

Want to hear more?

Thank you for reading this post! If you’d like to hear more of my musings on products, business and marketing you can:

• Follow me on Twitter
• Subscribe to my newsletter
• Listen to my podcast

People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services.
- Jason Fried, 37signals

Kyle and I recently interviewed Jason Fried, of 37signals, for our podcast Product People. He had a great story about how he built his first product (when he was around 13!). Here’s the transcript:

Justin Jackson: Have you always been making products? Is this something you have been doing, you know, since you started 37signals or was there stuff you built and sold before that?

Jason Fried: When I first got started in computers I was in junior high school, I’m 38 now, so I guess that was, I don’t know, 25 years ago or something that I got a computer. I started messing around with it and one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to keep track of all the different tapes and CDs that I had.

So I eventually got on AOL, before the formal Internet was around, went to the file section, searched in the Mac section for like music organizing tools and I found some stuff and downloaded those things. They were mostly based in FileMaker Pro, which is a data base. I had FileMaker Pro so I could run them and I just didn’t like them. I don’t know what it was, they weren’t attractive, they weren’t easy to use, they were complicated, they were doing far more things than I needed.

I just needed this really simple thing. I wanted to look good, and be fast. I ended up just figuring that I could figure out how to make this sort of thing myself. I had File Maker, I started screwing around, started learning how to do it, and I eventually made a product called Audio File, which I started using to catalog my music collection.

I basically wrote a little text file, a read me file basically, and in there I said, “Hey, if you like this it’s $20.00. Send me a check, or send me $20.00? and I put my address down. Then I uploaded it to AOL, and see what would happen. I had no idea.

Then one day I got a check in the mail, well I got an envelope in the mail from a guy in Germany, and I didn’t know anybody in Germany. I hadn’t heard of anyone from Germany, I had never been there. And so my parents gave me this envelope, this air mail envelope, and I open it, and there was a print out of that read me file and $20.00.

That was the start for me of selling software. After that I started taking off, and it didn’t put me through college or anything, but I had a nice amount of spending money, extra spending money in college just from this $20.00 shareware tool that I made. I probably made 10s of thousands of dollars or more selling it over the next few years.

Justin: You’re kidding me, actually 10s of thousands of dollars selling this little shareware app?

Jason: Yes, 10s of thousands of dollars, $20.00 a pop.

Justin: Did that seem significant to you? I would love to make $10,000.00 now! 

Jason: Oh yeah. I’ve always had jobs too, so I’ve been working since I was 13 at grocery stores and shoe stores and gas stations and all this stuff. I had part time jobs anyway. I would have had spending money, but it was great to have extra money coming in, to have a significant amount, and for it to be sort of this passive money in that I didn’t feel like I was working for it. I had already done the work, making software.

The money just kept coming in, unlike my part time jobs where I had to go after school and work for four hours or something every day. That was a real nice thing. It was great. It was killer. I bought a bunch of stuff I wanted like a stereo or whatever, just a bunch of garbage probably.

[laughter]

The thing I realized early on is people are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services. Don’t be afraid to charge for what you produce. If those people who don’t want to pay for it want to complain about it, that’s fine. They don’t have to buy it.

There are plenty of people out there who appreciate something good and are happy to cough up some cash for it, because they think it’s worth their time and it makes their life better.

Want to hear more?

You can listen to the full interview with Jason Fried here. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes. Follow @productpeopletv on Twitter.

Jason blogs at Signal vs Noise, and co-authored a book on business with DHH. They’re writing their 2nd book now.

1. Hire the best people
2. Empower them to do their best work
3. Give them a vision for helping the customer

Simple right? When you look through the lens of “how can we build great stuff?” as opposed to “which work environment is best?” everything becomes clear.

This debate is about management

What people are missing in the “Yahoo work from home ban” is that this is a management issue. It’s not about “remote vs non-remote”; it’s about having the flexibility to create great work. The HR manager at Yahoo thinks the solution is black-and-white:

Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
- Jackie Reses, Head of HR, Yahoo

Do you hear what she’s saying? It’s the old management diatribe: “I don’t trust you, and I know the best way to make you work.” But awesome, creative people, who take responsibility for their work, don’t build great things in an environment like that. If this is Yahoo’s cure for innovation, I think they’re doomed.

This debate has exposed something significant about managers: many of them are insecure! They’re scared about losing (a perceived sense) of control. They want to stick with what’s comfortable and safe. They would rather “do it their way” than think outside the box and empower their team.

What good managers do

I’m a remote manager of a team of ten. We ship a lot of mission critical stuff.
- Laura Thomson, Engineering Manager at Mozilla

Good managers hire great people, and empower them to do great work. This means hiring people so good that you could leave for a 2 month holiday and not worry about the office. Managers should be talking to their team, and asking them: “How can I help you make your job better?” If the answer to that question is: “We need a better office” than do everything you can to make a kick-ass office. But if the answer to that question is: “I’d like to work from home on Thursdays” than make it happen! Yes, every job, product, and company will have certain constraints. The point is to create as much job flexibility as you can so your people can succeed.

The only time a manager should fear a flexible workplace is if they’ve hired the wrong people. If you’ve broken Rule #1, all bets are off. It doesn’t matter what kind of office you have; mediocre people create mediocre results. Unfortunately, great people with mediocre management also create mediocre results.

It’s all about management: hire the best, equip them to do the best work possible, and give them a vision for where you’re going.

So companies don’t have to get caught in a tug-of-war between letting their employees work remotely or forcing them to come to work and collaborate. Collaboration can happen even among in-house employees and teleworkers. It simply takes a different managerial skill set.
- E. Glenn Dutcher, New Research: What Yahoo Should Know About Good Managers and Remote Workers

There’s a discussion on this post at Hacker News here

How not to validate your idea

Let’s start with what doesn’t work. These are some of the common traps that people building a business fall into:

Media exposure

Just because you’ve been published in Techcrunch, doesn’t mean you have a marketable idea. Early on, a company I founded received a lot of press (primarily newspaper coverage, magazine articles, blog posts). But we couldn’t convert that hype into paying customers. Getting covered in the media won’t turn a bad idea into a good one.

High traffic

Likewise, getting a lot of traffic to your site or landing page doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded either. The problem with traffic is that it’s hard to quantify why people are visiting. Are they just curious? Bored? Our SaaS app’s homepage received a spike in traffic due to a mention in a HN post. But none of that traffic converted because people were just curious; they weren’t in our target market, or looking to buy.

Awards

This is one of the most dangerous forms of flattery. When I owned a retail shop we won “New Business of the Year”. Guess how many customers cared that we’d won that award? Zero. Customers only care about their problems; they don’t care about what accolades you’ve been given.

People that “like your idea”

You can’t validate a business based on people saying they “like” your idea. In fact, I think it’s the kiss of death for startup ideas. When you hear comments like “Oh yeah, that sounds interesting”, “That sounds neat”, or “Cool concept” it’s probably time to kill that idea. Why? You can’t build a business on a mediocre response. What you’re looking for is: “please take my money and let me use this”.

How to (really) validate your idea

If you’re creating a startup, where the end goal is to make money, the only real way to validate your idea is if people are willing to pay you for it.

For his new product, Drip, Rob Walling emailed 17 founders (like Hiten Shah of Kissmetrics). He said very specifically: “I don’t want you to tell me that you think this is an interesting idea; I want to know if you would actually use and pay for it.” Out of the 17 people he asked, he got 11 people that said “yes” (ref: at 7:00 of this podcast).

Jason Cohen, of WP Engine, puts it best: “When ten people say they’ll give you money if you build this thing, that’s the only validation that counts.”

Before and after the Revolution

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were manufactured by contracting individual craftsmen who worked out of their homes. The merchant would drum up sales, and would coordinate the production with at-home sub-contractors.

Even back then, home working was popular because it gave people more freedom:

The domestic system was suited to pre-urban times because workers did not have to travel from home to work which was quite impracticable due to the state of roads and footpaths. Workers had some flexibility to balance farm and household chores with [this other] work.

- Wikipedia, Putting-out system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

This all changed with the Industrial Revolution: production was centralized in factories and cities.  For merchant capitalists, this made sense: it was cheaper and more efficient to produce goods in one place, with machinery.

The Information Age came, but work didn’t change

We’ve been in the Information Age for at least 25 years. We’ve made huge leaps in technology. Many of us would describe ourselves as Knowledge Workers: we don’t work in factories, we work at desks in front of glowing screens. We don’t make goods with physical materials, but rather things made out of bits. The great thing about bits + the internet is that the materials and means needed for production aren’t dependent on location.

But here’s the funny thing: the way work is organized hasn’t changed. Despite all these advances, most of us still work in central offices. Employees leave their computer-equipped homes, and drive long distrances to work at computer-equipped offices.

It’s management that’s broken

CEOs, like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Apple’s Steve Jobs, think that a central office fosters more innovation and productivity. I think they’re wrong. We’re still early in the research, but recent studies seem to dispute their claim.

Studies and data aside, we know, at least anecdotally, that distributed teams can create tremendous innovation. Automattic  created the world’s most popular publishing platform. 37signals helped create a programming framework that powers “tens of thousands of  applications”. At both companies, the majority of their employees work remotely (or have the option to do so).

It’s not remote working that’s broken, it’s management habits that needs to change.

Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
- Jackie Reses, Head of HR, Yahoo

Managers have developed centuries worth of habits based on the central workplace. The hallmarks of office work (meetings, cubicle workstations, colocation) need to be seen for what they are: traditions we’ve kept alive since the Industrial Revolution. We need to question these institutions: are they really more innovative and efficient?

To succeed, we’ll need some practice

To give remote working an honest chance, there needs to be a paradigm shift. Managers need to practice new ways of organizing people, and producing results. Individual employees need a chance to practice self-management, taking initiative, and collaborating online. Developing new habits takes time and commitment.

What does success look like? Taking millions of cars off the road, because people no longer need to commute. Reducing stress and improving the mental health of employees. And ultimately, increasing innovation and producing better products (as shown by platforms like WordPress and Ruby on Rails).

Discuss this post on Hacker News.

More reading

Subscribe to my newsletter: I regularly discuss working better and creating better workplaces.

Telecommuting Creates Happier and More Productive Employees

Why remote workers are more engaged

Inside Automattic

Here are some unique ways to meet new people, get out of your comfort zone, and have great conversations:

1. Buy someone lunch

There was a CEO that I really wanted to meet, but I was never able to connect with him at social events. So I wrote him an email with the subject line: “Can I buy you lunch?” In the email I said: “You’re a business leader that I really respect. I want to get better at x. Can I take you for lunch?” He replied and said: “I’d love to go for lunch, but you don’t have to buy.”

Everyone likes being taken to lunch. Be generous, and you could receive enjoyable company, and great advice, in return.

2. Start a podcast

This one isn’t for everyone, but I’ve been able to have amazing conversations with interesting people through the podcast I run with Kyle Fox: Product People. Podcasts are great, because you can choose a topic that you’re passionate about, and then invite other people (that are passionate about the same thing) to join you as a guest.

You don’t need to be naturally outgoing or extroverted to podcast. Some of the best hosts I know are actually the opposite! Here’s a good resource for getting started.

3. Start your own meetup

Kevin and Jared didn’t like the other networking events in town, so they decided to start their own: Nerds Night Out. Instead of doing the “normal” thing, and have a presenter, they just get together for drinks at a pub. They started small by inviting a few other people in the web development community. They told them they’d do it every month. It gradually grew, and now 10-25 people come each month.

4. Take a class; in a different city

One way to meet a completely new group of people is to take a class in a different city. I took a weekend “learn to code” class in Las Vegas. It was actually easier meeting people as the “out-of-towner” because I was unique (I was the only non-local). I still keep in touch with people from this class.

5. Volunteer at an event

Every event organizer needs help: a photographer, a sound person, a host (to welcome people). When you volunteer, you get to meet the organizing team, and anyone attending the event (plus, you usually get to attend and participate for free).

I built the website for a fundraiser. Peter volunteered to do the video for a workshop I was running. Here’s a tip if you’re a photographer: why not volunteer to take photos of attendees throughout the night? As you take photos, offer to email people their photographs. You’ve made a meaningful connection, and you have a great way to follow-up.

What’s next?

I hope these techniques are helpful! If you’re feeling nervous, this article might help. I regularly send my email list tips like this. Right now I’m preparing a special tips sheet for meeting people and achieving your goals when you attend a conference. You can sign-up for my email list here.

What about you?

What are techniques you’ve used to meet new people? Reply in the comments with  your stories. Have questions? You can ask me on Twitter.

I used to fawn over myself for having started businesses in the past. Everyone thinks starting a business is hard. But the truth is that starting a business is not that hard. Starting a business is easy; starting the right business is hard. You could start most businesses by choosing an idea out of a hat, filling out a bit of paperwork, and sending out a press release (bingo! you’ve started).

The challenge isn’t starting a business; it’s starting a business that will give you something back. It’s running a company that won’t suck the life out of you. It’s building a product or service that people love and pay you money for.

Starting a business is like getting married

Have you ever had a crush on someone? You experience powerful romantic feelings, and day dream about spending your life with that person. Your crush is all you can think about. But if you asked that person to marry you (without getting to know them first) they would think that you were crazy. Why? Because marriage is for life (and your crush doesn’t want to marry a crazy person).

Starting a business is similar to marriage in that you need to:

• choose the right thing (person)
• invest time and resources to make it work
• be committed for life

The difference, is that when you decide to start a business, the business (unlike a person) can’t say “no”. Even worse: while your friends would dissuade you from marrying someone you just met in Vegas, they will do the exact opposite when you’re starting a business. Instead of critically questioning your decision, they’ll encourage you with maxims like: “Yeah, you should follow your dream!”

The wrong business will give you pain every day

The wrong business will suck you dry. I should know: when I started my retail company, I was infatuated with my idea. But running my store was a different experience: I would invest time and resources, but wouldn’t get anything back. Instead of making money, it was losing money. Instead of giving me more freedom, I spent most of my time just trying to keep things afloat. Instead of enjoying my work, going into the shop became a sad grind.

Every time my business treated me badly, I dug in deeper, because I wanted to be a committed entrepreneur. But ultimately I was committed to a business that could never love me back: after 5 years, I pulled the plug (and lost over $80,000 in cash investment).

The Startup Stooge

5by5′s Dan Benjamin talks about “the corporate stooge” on his show Quit: 

You have to work relatively long hours and it’s thankless. And you go back and forth to work every day and it’s the same thing over and over again like Groundhog Day. And you say, “what am I doing? Is this what my life was? Is this what I went to college for? And it’s a soul-sucking job. It’s sad, and there’s no end to it.

Ironically, I’ve seen this same scenario played out with my friends that have started the wrong business. The idea of starting a coffee shop, software product, or service company sounded exciting so they jumped in. But soon they become the Startup Stooge. Every day they face a miserable drudgery: committed to a business they no longer enjoy, and that barely makes a living (or worse yet, continues to drive them into debt).

I’ll take my pain upfront, thank you

The mistake my friends and I made is this: we never paused to think about the huge life commitment we were making. We never asked: Who will my customers be (and do I like these people)? What do they desperately need? And can I market to them, and still make a profit?*

Before you get married, you probably want to take your future spouse on some dates. In the midst of dating, you might find out you’re not compatible; then you break up. Breaking up is painful (and so is letting go of your “brilliant” startup idea), but it’s way less painful than a lifetime in a miserable marriage.

I’m dating the customer, not the idea

Don’t get married to your startup idea. The idea itself is actually not that important. Businesses run on customers + dollars not ideas + excitement. In fact, you might be “dating” a bad idea right now. If so, you should break up.

When I asked Amy Hoy about building a product, she gave me simple advice: “Go spend time in communities that you’re a part of, that you like, and who spend money. Start observing their pain.”

So instead of dating a bunch of ideas, I’m dating different customers. I’m hanging out. Spending time with different communities, and seeing what they need. It’s going to take some time, and it’s going to take some work. But I’d rather do this work up-front, and really discover where I can add value, than have a messy “divorce” later on.

Want more?

You can listen to the audio version of this post here. I have also haven an email newsletter where I write about business, working smart, and marketing; you can subscribe here.

Special thanks to Amy Hoy who shared the marriage metaphor with me, and has been working really hard at helping me understand all of this. 

* These questions are straight from Amy Hoy and Rob Walling.

Go research before you do anything. Research instead of having an idea. Go out and look at different groups of people: see what they’re doing online, what they’re talking about, and what their needs are. Evaluate those audiences, and get an idea based on what those people need (rather than starting with your own idea that’s based on you). Learn what people need: that’s the most important thing when you’re starting out.

I want to keep building businesses that that help people.

Jarrod Drysdale on Thoughtbot with Ben Orenstein

Jarrod wrote an excellent book called Bootstrapping Design

He emphasizes that the above lesson was learned in Amy Hoy‘s 30×500 class.

Attention seeker

My greatest struggle with blogging is fighting the temptation to seek attention. Rather than aiming to help people, I’ve written some posts just to garner views (Retina is not a big deal is a good example). The challenge with this struggle is that it’s hard for me to evaluate my motives before I publish. It’s so easy to write something and rationalize that “this post provides value for the community”. Does anyone else struggle with this?

Addicted to crack

This is going to sound so silly: but getting thousands of page views is like crack to me. The problem really started when I published Things I’ve quit doing at my desk. It was a post I wrote in about 2 hours, on a Sunday morning, originally inspired by a tweet I’d posted months before.

Before taking my kids to the park, I decided to post it to Hacker News on a whim. After we’d been at the park for a couple of hours, I checked Twitter on my phone: “Weird, I just got a ton of retweets on this tweet.” Then I checked my email: “Weird, that’s a lot of notifications for comments on my blog.” I loaded up my WordPress stats on my phone: “Whoa sh*t! Where the hell is all that traffic coming from?”

I realized my post had gone #1 on Hacker News.  It stayed at #1 for about 24 hours, amassing 41,557 in one day, and 16,223 the next. I’d never had anything remotely close to that much traffic before. My previous record was 821 views in one day (when Derek Sivers had tweeted a link to my post).Soon after, Tessa from Lifehacker asked if she could re-publish it there; where it went on to get over 100,000 views.

Here’s the problem: once I tasted the rush of having that many page views, I wanted to experience it again (I know, this sounds ridiculous). I wrote another post trying to “recreate the magic”. It didn’t work.

Writing honestly, being open

Too many times, I’ve written with a “holier-than-thou-art” tone. Too many times, I’ve hidden my true insecurities, to create the illusion that I’ve “got it all together”. Too many times I’ve opted to “sound impressive” instead of being real. I want to change this: Stop Networking at Events and Geek Dad are my first attempts at writing more transparently.

Who am I? Who do I connect with?

I don’t want to write selfishly. And I don’t want to write for page views. I want to write content that matters, for people that care.

To do that I think I’m going to need to answer two questions:

1. Who am I? What am I good at? Where do I truly have expertise (or experience) that I can share?
2. Who do I connect with? Who are the people I can help? What communities am I a part of?

Here’s what I’ve come up with in my self-reflection so far:

• I’m good at connecting with people (online, and offline)
• I love communication and marketing: I like writing email newsletters, recording podcasts, blogging, Tumbling, planning campaigns, creating landing pages, and writing copy.
• I’ve always had a passion for business, and have a revived interest in building products.
• I have years of experience with sales, marketing, leading teams, improving workplaces, career advancement, and shipping projects.

What’s next? Want to help?

First: I’d love to hear from other people about their “blogging demons”. What have you struggled with? You can leave a comment below, or reply on Twitter.

Second: if you’d like to give me feedback on ways you’ve connected with my content, you can fill out my survey, leave a comment below or get me on Twitter. I want to know how I can help you (or how we can help each other). Your feedback will help shape the content I create in the future.

Update

Here’s some feedback I’ve received so far:

 Please write selfishly. I want to know your thoughts/ideas regardless of what a community may think. – Adrian Unger

The answer to “what to blog about” isn’t what you want and what you’re good at, it’s what people need from you. – Amy Hoy