Not since the Great Recession has there been such a disruptive reconfiguration of how media, "content," and comms work on the internet. I've been tossing around a few predictions and observations with friends, and I wanted to collect them all in one place here.

I do so partly to go on the record. Partly for people to argue with me and push these to be better. But mostly to help anyone reading this perhaps see something coming around the bend.

It's a bit stream-of-consciousness, but I'm separating these into "inputs" (things that are happening) and "outputs" (the downstream effects of those changes).

Input

Platform decay. 

Much like stable national business and predictable tax policy attract investment, stable internet platforms attract makers and creators. I'm more willing to build my audience on your service if I can expect a reasonable amount of stability and predictability. For more than a decade, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn had stable rules and incentives.

However, thanks to a mix of AI and changing market conditions, each of these platforms is now antagonistic to linking to outside sources. Their reliance on humans to create chum for the algorithm may be temporary as AI and machine-generated content are now easier to create.

X once again adds headlines to article links — but with tiny text

The change makes it easier to know what you’re clicking on.

The Verge

As a creator, journalist, or brand, you can no longer reliably pour money or labor into a platform and have it reliably return an audience that you can turn into customers. As a result, audience growth has slowed across the board. 

AI and Google

Many media brands and publications in the previous decade existed for the sole purpose of being one of the ten blue links Google serves up on a search result page (or a "SERP" for you nerds). When you Googled "how to paint a wall" you had to resort to a basket of tricks to be in that list of 10 thus getting the clicks and attention you needed to run your business and sell some paint (a practice known as "search engine optimization").

But those links were always just grist for the Google answer machine. Now with advanced AI models, Google can write the answer on the fly, skipping the middle man.

This not only turns off a major source of traffic and audience, Google's attention to AI has allowed the quality of its core search product to atrophy. While updates stem the tide, all search engines are losing the cat-and-mouse battle against affiliate marketing and SEO practices. Additionally, after a wave of layoffs there is anecdotal evidence that ambitious technologists are seeking to work elsewhere as Google attempts to find its footing again.

Google executive turnover and role changes come as the company searches for new identity

A string of executive changes over the last few months come as the company faces more pressure than ever — and executives want to try something new.

CNBCJennifer Elias

One day, there may not even be a text interface, just a voice prompt that answers any question you have based on what the AI can produce. There's no way for a publisher to cut into the middle of that transaction. I've seen businesses that depend on 80% of their traffic from Google. What happens when that goes away?

Parity 

The existing platforms to drive audience are decaying and no new ones are taking their place (yet). This creates shrinking acquisition channels with more brands than ever before seeking to capture new audience members. In the content marketing world, everyone is running the same category creation playbook. The audience has seen this all before, and the lack of new platform innovations makes it difficult to stand out on distribution. 

Higher interest rates

Yeah yeah, everyone blames this for recent changes. Here's my version: The cheap money of the past decade made it easy to borrow and start a new, extremely ambitious business. New high-growth companies with a long runway of cheap cash and ambitions to win a winner-take-all market are the perfect candidates for building media brands on the back of their companies. These media brands take a large amount of patience and capital to get right (just ask the billionaire owner of the LA Times, who reports losing $40 million last year alone). But when those runways shorten, and the paths to acquire audience dry up, so do the jobs.

Influencers have made it in B2B

There have always been influencers in B2B markets. (You know, the industry insiders and smarty pants with a newsletter among other things.) The economics for brands to hire and administrate a content team made sense when scale was easier to achieve.

Now that audience growth is more difficult, B2B brands are diverting money from full-time staff and buying existing audiences from influencers. Additionally, B2B buyers are wise to most content marketing tactics and few see them as authentic. Even if an influencer is running a pay-to-play operation (and many are), audiences trust a single human more than a brand.

Brian Morrissey calls this the "twilight of the brands."

Outputs/Predictions

Those are the inputs. So what happens next as a result?

If you're an individual, you should go solo...

The economics of a publication do work. They just work in teams of less than five. During the Great Recession, there was a great deal of handwringing about whether readers would "pay for content". 

Thankfully, for many niches in 2024, readers do pay for content. A capable solo operator in the right niche can exceed the average salary of a journalist or marketer. If a technologically capable writer who is well-sourced on a topic, you shouldn't join a publication or a brand. You should go solo.  

Additionally, SaaS tools and AI assistants can speed up workflows to a degree that wasn't possible as recently as three years ago. An example from my own work: analyzing the results of Crossbeam's yearly survey of revenue professionals used to take 7-10 days of VLOOKUPs. This year, I ran everything through an AI tool and asked it questions (for the record, I manually reviewed all outputs). This allowed us to ship our Future of Revenue survey a month faster.

...and you should publish new ideas.

The AI tools help you write, edit, animate, illustrate, and create. The path from idea to publication has never been shorter. That's good for the creator (or journalist or artist). That's bad for the support structure that brought these ideas to life.

If you're an editor, designer, animator or any of the other behind-the-scenes jobs that help turn an idea into "content" — much of your work will be replaced by AI tools. It's better to be the originator of a concept or idea or belief and lean on AI tools to bring your work to market.

If you're a B2B brand, you should go down funnel

If the path from idea to "content" has been shortened and solo operators can own niches, it doesn't make sense for large brands to staff editorial teams (or "go direct"). The resources of a brand used to be an asset, but now they can be a bureaucratic drag.

If you helm the marketing arm of a brand, you will not be able to build an audience as quickly or effectively as a solo operator. You will be outmaneuvered. Previously an organization's size often translated to PageRank or social media following that would crush you. But when those platforms matter less, it evens the playing field.

In a world where institutions are distrusted and B2B buyers are savvy enough to see a "go direct" playbook being run from a mile away, it will be harder than ever to win the trust of an audience. Instead, we will see that trust is rented in the form of sponsorships or M&A activity. We will see a redirection of resources to tapping into existing communities and audiences rather than having brands build their own — and in extreme cases, buying them.

Marketers will then direct their in-house resources to things that are closer to the product they are selling (aka down funnel). More product education, more howtos, more resources for the people who have already been made aware of the company.

Collectives will rise

If being a free agent is the dominant way of doing creative work online, what happens when a project demands multiple skill sets? The video editor will be in a loose collective with the copywriter who knows the animator and they will all team up when they need to and all work on their fiefdoms when they don't.

Creative agencies, if they survive, will be made of overlapping networks of free agents. This is already happening in the comms space.

Video will be (even more) the dominant medium

There is an asymmetry in the AI tools for text and video. With text-based AI tools, I can output an endless amount of text and it's increasingly difficult to parse whether it was written by a human. While AI video tools are impressive, none have reliably and cheaply replaced popping open your webcam and ring light and recording a video. Audiences will trust video more and those that can compellingly communicate ideas via video will continue to thrive. 

Federated systems will have their day

With platform decay, we all now have to build an audience on yet another platform. (Can you hear my long sigh after staring at Threads after 15 years of Twitter?). There will be a degree of consumers and creators who have platform fatigue and don't want to go through the hard work of building another audience somewhere else.

We'll see a rise in "federated systems". Whether that's protocols like ActivityPub and RSS or standards like email. These allow publishers and creators to port their audience wherever they'd like. And, perhaps, they allow new startups to quickly create new ways of leveraging the protocols (like Superhuman did with email or Mastadon did with ActivityPub).

Discovery is back

Gather ‘round children, and let me tell you about StumbleUpon. And blog rings. And the curator's code. It used to be a skill to "surf the web" and pluck out fun links for your audience. Entire link blogs were built on this. So was del.icio.us. As the platforms decay, it will become harder to find cool stuff. The curator and the aggregator will return.

_

I would love to hear your take on the above. Find me at sb@seanblanda.com or on Threads.

The first phase of a startup’s journey often gets most of the attention. After all, it’s the one phase of building a company that everyone has to go through. Peter Thiel popularized this moment as the “Zero to One” phase.

Crossbeam, where I’ve served as the head of content since September 2019, is decidedly out of its first fragile moment and into the next. More than 12,000 companies now use the platform.

Various metrics that took us weeks to accomplish now take days.

That first phase of the company firmly ended in August 2021 when we raised $76 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. And on the content side, so far, so good. Some highlights:

• In 2019 we had 22,000 people on our mailing list. Now it’s 50,000.
• Content is #2 source of new product signups (#1 is the product itself. PLG baby!)
• We hosted our first IRL conference (more on that later), and our first virtual event
• We’ve built out our YouTube channel, with 100K+ total views
• We’ve expanded to serve multiple personas (hello, sales professionals!)
• We’ve added additional talented team members, and now the content team is a mighty group of six people: Olivia Ramirez, Zoe Kelly, Kyle Ussery, Nick Beaulieu, Kate Young, and Jess Rowe

And most importantly, the audience we are serving continues to respond positively.

Suddenly, we are no longer wondering “will this thing be a business?” But “how successful of a business can this possibly be?” Will we end up as one of those cute, over-capitalized zombie startups? Or will we be able to continue to scale and serve even more markets and customers? And how can content help or, ugh, hurt that journey?

Operating as a “content leader” at this moment has been challenging for me. I’ve messed up a bunch of times and have had to change my approach.

After writing a post about starting your content career, and then starting a content department (see chart above for context), this is the next installment: The 6 things I had to shift my thinking on while navigating the transition from scrappy startup to grownup(ish) company.

I hope they help you on your own journey.

Mindset Shift #1: Scale on Your Own Terms

Coined by friend Christopher Wink, “Journalism Thinking” is the strategy of using journalism skills, workflows, and approaches to places you may not expect. It’s the way we run our content operation at Crossbeam.

Crossbeam content starts with speaking to a practitioner (not researching keyword) or some proprietary data/research . This effort is largely led by senior staff writer Olivia Ramirez and staff writer Zoe Kelly. They spend each day reaching out to and interviewing those that work in the partner ecosystem world and then distilling those insights into blog posts.

Some examples (all from Olivia and Zoe):

• Embedding with a sales professional to track partner-sourced vs cold lead workflows and success
• Taking a super obscure (but important!) part of the partnership workflow and doing several rounds of interviews with an expert to produce the only guide available
• Conducting ~10 interviews to assemble the ideal five co-selling “plays”
• Getting six actual org charts from real companies to help guide readers as they build out their own partnerships department

Those blog posts contain the raw material that shape everything else we do. It’s how we unearth possible conference speakers. It’s how we sniff out new trends, like “ecosystem-led growth”, quickly. Everything starts with assuming our audience knows more than we do, and speaking to them about it. They are labor intensive, and we publish once a week and rarely more.

In the early days, we did things this way because, candidly, we didn’t know a lot about the community we were covering + it’s my personal skillset. It's also a great way to build an audience, when you interview someone for a post, you are guaranteed at least one reader.

But I was convinced that when we grew I’d eventually have to dial this back and “make content” the way other companies do: optimizing for traffic, conversions, and other marketing-y metrics.

Then something funny happened: We gained new competitors. And most were running a "traditional" content playbook.

I had to shift my mindset and counterintuitively, more stubbornly insist on the “Journalism Thinking” approach. As you grow your content team, think about what you and your team are uniquely able to do. What is your “secret weapon” - the thing that endeared you to your readers in the first place?

Maybe you make videos your audience loves. Maybe it’s staying on the pulse of your business by publishing eight posts a day.

Whatever it is, triple down on it and codify it so you don’t lose it as you scale. If our team started to do things the way they are “supposed to” be done, we would be indistinguishable from any competitors.

As we scale, we continue to base each article on a conversation with the people with first-hand learnings. Sometimes these people do not want to talk to us. Sometimes they are purposefully below the radar. But that’s where the true insights are.

It’s hard work, and it’s our not-so-secret sauce.

Mindset Shift #2: Content Marketing is an Execution Game

At other companies, leaders would occasionally forward me some marketing post from some influencer about how they grew X by Y with this one weird trick. The email would sometimes have some message like “why aren’t we doing this?!?!”
As we scaled Crossbeam, I found myself looking for “easy” wins like this. I thought that if I just used a certain tool, or ran a specific campaign it would unlock all of this crazy growth. I was wrong.

Content marketing is a mature discipline and its tactics have been the same for nearly a decade. The platforms to drive audience have barely changed.
Chances are, you will not discover some hidden tactic or tool that will totally unlock the impact of your work beyond some small margin. No, my friend — at a certain point, you’ve written the blog posts, you’ve hosted the events, you’ve made the videos, you’ve recorded the podcasts and they just get thrown into the world wide web with everything else.

The difference maker and the only true “alpha” remaining in content marketing is creating things that people want. Write things people want to read. Host events people want to attend. It’s not by tricking some algorithm. It’s not piggybacking on some current event. The only thing you should care about is what your target audience thinks.

That’s it.

There is no shortcut. It’s just boring ol’ execution. There’s no marketing growth hack that will lead to sudden and long-lasting results here. After you make it out of survival mode you have to work on building franchises that are set up to be increasingly successful as time goes on.

Mindset Shift #3: Create Franchises, Not Campaigns

I used to think that we needed successful one-off campaigns. But as you scale, making new things from scratch every quarter can be a drag on growth.

The backbone of a growing content team is repeatable, anticipated marketing events. I’ll call these “franchises” — recurring moments that your audience looks forward to and derive a large amount of value from.

They also allow your team to get several chances to make better. This also allows new team members to team up with existing members to quickly get up to speed (important for scaling!).

At Crossbeam, the most successful content “franchise” we’ve managed to create in 2022 is our yearly in-person event, Supernode. We hosted the first Supernode in May 2022. When creating a new institution, it is important to be ambitious but not foolish. Unique but not confusing.

Every niche already has its long list of conferences it could attend, so we knew if we were going to enter the arena, we’d have to lock in on what made us different.

When we looked around the B2B partnerships space we saw lots of stilted events in large convention centers with panel after panel of sponsored speakers. Sure, the value of most conferences is in the hallways, but those building partner ecosystems, cannot do their job without a counterpart. That connection is more than just "nice for career development", it’s essential.

As a result, the first Supernode was less about the “content” and more about facilitating unique experiences that gave attendees a chance to meet one another. Some things we tried:

• Holding the event in an art museum/school rather than a conference center
• We randomly assigned attendees a spot at one of the tables at 15 restaurants picked by our Philly staff
• With one exception, had a single track of content so attendees had a shared experience
• We started late (10 a.m.) and allowed for 50-60 minute breaks between session to allow for maximum networking time
• We did not distribute the attendee list to any attendee or sponsor, there was no "official" way to set up meetings before you arrived, you had to be present and “find your people” at the event

Some of these worked better than others — for example, the single track resulted in some speakers being too junior or too advanced for attendees. However, we were proud of the result and are hosting our next Supernode in June 2023 in San Diego.

Mindset Shift #4: Your Job is to Safeguard Quality

When you’re in scrappy startup mode, your currency is market feedback. You need to release as much stuff as you can, see what the world thinks about it, and adjust quickly. From the previous post in this series:

You need to write stuff that appeals to the right person in the right way so they explore your product. You will get this wrong over and over again. Your only hope is to quickly adjust as you talk to your audience and publish new content.

But when you are trying to scale, you have a better idea of what works. You start repeating those “franchises” I mentioned above. People begin to have expectations for you and the brand that you help shepherd.

You can’t release poorly considered work into the market. You now have something to lose, something you can damage. And as the leader of your content team, any damage to the brand will make the entire company’s work more difficult.

You need to balance delegating the creation of publicly available materials like blog posts, social media, events, and branding to your very capable teams. But you also need to be there when it’s first conceived and again when it’s about to ship to safeguard the brand reputation you have worked for. Sometimes you have to kill stuff after people have worked very hard on it. Sometimes you have politely but meticulously explain why a certain request or idea would cause harm to your brand.

This means, when you get to a certain level, you need taste. Luckily this is not the Louvre, it’s B2B SaaS. Sometimes, the person with the best taste in the room is simply the person who is advocating for the customer/audience.

Everything you can think of being “ruined” by marketing and marketers is because that company stopped thinking of the people at the other end of the computer screen. You don’t produce content to track the pageviews or leads or insert-your-metric-here. You do it because actual human beings find a tiny bit of delight when they come across something your team does.

The members of a content team, and most marketing teams, are creatives at heart. They enjoy writing, designing, and producing things for people. As a leader it's your job to humanize your work, your team, and your audience.

You can never ever ever ever lose that. You can never ever ever get so “busy” or so jaded that you don’t have time to protect that. The moment your team feels like they are just shoveling content into yet another algorithm, they will disengage and everything becomes less fun.

The value of protecting the humanity of your work goes beyond your team, it affects the entire company. There’s a reason content leaders become brand leaders, the good ones spend time thinking equally about both.

As you scale, this is your primary role.

Mindset Shift #5: No Lone Wolves, Please

In late 2022, I asked our very talented People team to conduct a 360º review. They asked my managers, colleagues, and team members where I needed to improve. It was a necessary and humbling experience, and the feedback was loud and clear: I needed to communicate and delegate more.

As the proverb goes, if you want to go fast go by yourself. If you want to go far, go with others.

In a small startup, the more independent you are, the better. No one has time to formally train you, the best way to help the company and yourself is to move quickly and find product/market fit before the money runs out.

On a content team, this usually means being a “team” of one. You think of the campaigns, you execute them, and you measure them.

As Crossbeam passed the 100-employee mark, we now have departments with more than one layer of management. There are people in our Slack that I no longer have a personal relationship with. This is normal and healthy for a growing company, but it changed the way I had to operate.

Now, we should plan months in advance. We should communicate to the entire company often what we are publishing and why. We should stay attuned to the product roadmap and do our best to align content with any themes. And as a leader, I should have tight feedback loops with my managerial counterparts to quickly disseminate learnings. This has been difficult for me, as I’d rather write stuff than host a Zoom call.

At a remote-first company like Crossbeam, it's possible that entire teams are working on things that you are not aware of. This means if you don’t work in public, you run the risk of doing something that undermines or counteracts another effort in the company.

If you ship the wrong thing quickly, you’re causing damage. As you scale, you need to balance speed with synchronization.

Mindset Shift #6: Work With People That Care

I used to think I only wanted to work with people who are good at their jobs. I wanted to kick ass and then go home. I still want that, but I find myself thinking of another layer as we grow: I want to work with people that fixate on the details and make sure the things we release into the world are thoughtful. Not necessarily “successful” or “impressive” (though that helps) — but thoughtful.

I am not an engineer. So who knows how many startups I’ll be able to watch grow from 14 to 100+ employees? From Series A to C (and perhaps beyond)? There are fewer positions in an early-stage company for liberal arts majors like me.
There’s a good chance I look back on today as one of the most fun and impactful stints in my career. And I want to make sure everyone I work with and everyone on my team feels the same way.

This is yet another area where I am in debt to the content team: Olivia Ramirez, Zoe Kelly, Kyle Ussery, Nick Beaulieu, Kate Young, and Jess Rowe. They’re all thoughtful, obsessed about the right things, and make Crossbeam a fun, creative place to be.

Yes, we all have to be good at our jobs. But it’s more important that we care and that we’re proud of our work. Once I made that mindset shift, I became more patient and a bit more focused on the long-term health of the company.

The thing I now spend the most time “creating” is an atmosphere for those around me to care and do good work.

What’s Next:

As I write this, markets are in disarray, venture capital funding has dried up, and tech layoffs are increasingly commonplace. At Crossbeam, we’re still full speed ahead. Some challenges and opportunities that the content team is focused on for 2023:

• Hosting a Supernode conference that is 3x bigger than the previous one, how can we increase the scope of Supernode without losing the communal feel?
• Our best customers use Crossbeam and “ecosystem-led growth” as a centerpiece of their GTM strategy. How can we “spread the gospel” to make it easier for others?
• What “franchises” should we stop doing? Which ones should we grow?
• And, most importantly, how can we do better work and still keep it fun?

2023 will look nothing like 2022 and will bring an entirely new set of challenges. Off we go.

(And if this is the kind of thing you love talking about or have questions about, please drop me a line at scblanda@gmail.com.)

There is a road in Philadelphia.

Like many American roads in many American places, this arterial is in dire need of repair — has been for more than a decade. This particular road is the dividing line between South Philadelphia and Center City.

It’s one of the primary ways to get between the city’s two rivers and, thus, major highways. It's one of the widest, mostly due to its historical purpose of moving industrial loads over its now-paved railroad tracks. I live two blocks from this road and cross it twice a day, often with my one-year-old daughter in tow.

After decades of neglect, the city of Philadelphia decided it was time to finally, mercifully repair and reimagine Washington Avenue. But what happened instead is a textbook case of living in urban America in the 21st century.

It’s a story of one man cynically stopping the hard work and the frustrating-but-fair compromise thoughtfully navigated by a community of city workers, parents, students, volunteers, and activists. But mostly, it’s yet another example of how American cities are seemingly no longer capable of accomplishing even the simplest of things. Things like repaving a two-mile stretch of road.

This is what happened to Washington Ave.

The State of The Avenue

To understand the urgency of changing Washington Ave, it helps to understand the utter state of disrepair and general anarchy that marks a trip down Washington Avenue today.

Washington Avenue was last repaved in 2003. The status quo and (as of this writing) the current state of Washington Ave is a road that holds five lanes of traffic, two lanes on each side with a center turning lane. To its north and south are mostly one-way streets in walkable, dense neighborhoods with (mostly) street parking.

While there are technically five lanes, cars are often double-parked to access the businesses that dot the avenue. Likewise, the potholes are at times so deep and so large that they effectively block an entire lane.

While there is technically a bike lane, it is not shielded from the traffic and most of the markers depicting the bike lane have faded with time. The few bikers that do venture biking the avenue are exposed to passing cars and vulnerable to a doubled parked car suddenly opening their door or blocking your path. It is sparingly used.

And while there is technically a sidewalk, pedestrians often choose a surrounding street instead as Washington Ave is routinely blocked by cars parking on the sidewalk blocking access. Or by dumpsters and mounds of trash that businesses discard. Or by the total lack of tree cover that makes the avenue a miserable walk in the summer heat.

It is part of the city's "High Injury Network" — the 12% of roads that are responsible for 50% of the city's total fatal and serious road injuries. Washington Avenue is not a fun trip whether you’re walking, biking, or driving. If there’s one thing residents can agree on, it's that the road needs some attention.

Time for a change

The city agreed, and in 2013 began conducting outreach and research.
The Philadelphia Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, & Sustainability (OTIS) got to work. In 2013, it began the process of collecting feedback. From the city’s materials:

At the tail end of this process of study after study and numerous public input meetings, COVID struck. But the city admirably pressed on to gather additional feedback from residents. The question posed was simple: Which of these three options would you most prefer for Washington Avenue?:

• Option #1: A (mostly) 4-lane option
• Option #2: A “mixed” lane layout where sections ranged in width
• Option #3: A (mostly) 3-lane option

(Note the lack of a 5-lane option. The city wasn’t even considering keeping the status quo.)

The city's outreach to learn the preference of the residents included…

• 37 meetings with 26 registered community organizations and civic associations.
• 5,458 survey responses across four languages.
• 5,400 postcards mailed to homes surrounding the avenue.
• 80% of the 187 businesses judged to be impacted by parking and loading changes.

The results? Residents overwhelmingly preferred the 3-lane options (the city says this number was “74%-67%” of residents). Furthermore, the second-to-lowest ranked goal of any repaving from nearby residents was “quick drive times”.

The consensus was clear: those who lived around the avenue wanted fewer lanes for cars and more room for bikes and people. At this moment, the city was proud of this outreach. OTIS itself called its outreach “extensive” and here is Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney boasting how many people participated in a range of formats and channels:

“Equity”

That’s seven years (!) of study and outreach and an undeniable majority opinion. Case closed, right? No.

As COVID stretched on, the repaving was delayed. In 2021, OTIS shared that they were reopening the analysis and feedback process. (The same one they had begun in 2013 and bragged about being so thorough.)

In a July 18, 2021 Philadelphia Inquirer article, OTIS first blamed the pandemic. From the piece:

The project delay is due to the need for “review, coordination and contracting” of a number of construction and repair projects underway at the same time amid a backlog of work from last year’s COVID-19 shutdown, Mike Carroll, the city’s deputy managing director for transportation, said in a statement.

But something else was going on. Someone, somewhere had insisted the process reopen in the name of “equity”. Eventually, it became public: the city was hoping to ease the perception that they had only reached out to new or wealthier residents. Which, given the history of urban planning in America, is understandable. From a Feb 2022 WHYY article:

“People who are Black and brown, people who are in lower-income situations — there’s a pattern in transportation — only get asked or spoken to after decisions are made,” Carroll said in an interview after the decision was announced. “Anyone who knows anything about the history of urban transportation cannot argue with that fact. And so in a profound way, this was replicating that process.”

Washington Avenue cuts across several neighborhoods, some historically Italian, some historically Black, some historically Asian, and all feeling various pressures and tensions of changing demographics from an influx of new residents.

OTIS’ statement from a later release:

In 2021, the City responded to requests from community and Council for more engagement particularly in the Point Breeze and Grays Ferry neighborhoods, where low-income and residents of color have been historically underrepresented in city planning decisions.

There are a few issues with this framing:

Problem #1 - At no point were the identities, organizations, or even the quantity of these “requests” demanding an updated process ever shared. (Right to Know requests have been heavily redacted).

Problem #2 - The outreach was not solely digital, which may favor wealthier households. There were phone calls and postcards sent to all homes within a two-block radius of the avenue. Local businesses were physically visited. OTIS visited 26 community groups. To say nothing of the meetings stretching back to 2013.

Problem #3 - Point Breeze and Grays Ferry (the neighborhoods mentioned explicitly in the justification for reopening the process) are largely covered by 19145 and 19146. Residents in those zip codes still preferred the 3-lane options.

Problem #4 - The very gentrification that this hopes to prevent… has been occurring anyway in the previous decade! By leaving the avenue the same and protecting the status quo, it ensures that the same set of circumstances that lead to the massive increase in local property values stays the same while the road remains unsafe.

Problem #5 - This framing assumes that no longtime residents or non-white residents prefer safer biking, walking, and driving on Washington Ave. It supposes that only newer residents somehow benefit from any changes to the road.

As a supporter of the 3-lane option (and Point Breeze resident), I was furious and began to ask around. What was once an open, public, and transparent process was now moving underground.

OTIS began "quietly meeting with local Registered Community Organizations (RCOs), residents, businesses, and advocacy groups." These were closed-door, invite-only meetings to gather additional feedback — likely an understandable attempt to soothe concerns with their plan.

These meetings were publicized via backchannel to existing interest groups, which meant you had to already be somewhat politically connected to be aware of them and to attend them. There was no way to find out where these meetings were unless you knew someone who knew someone. The guest list was never shared publicly. And those who had weighed in during the previous outreach and had no means of finding them out.

This meant, of course, that those happiest with the status quo would be the most likely to be aware and attend. It also meant the new meetings would likely not address any concerns of reaching residents left out of the previous process.

I found the location of a meeting and attended it on November 9, 2021. When I entered, I was signed in by staff that immediately handed me a flyer for a protest against the 3-lane plan. There were 20 or so residents in chairs who were never asked to identify themselves, though I recognized several from community meetings in the past — again, these were people who had some (however minor) existing affiliation and local influence and power.

Representatives from OTIS said they were there to listen, and before they could finish addressing the room, two or three outspoken residents shouted over them demanding the road be kept the same. One of those residents owned a car body shop that routinely parks cars on the sidewalk and claimed to be speaking for businesses on the avenue.

A generous reading of the room would have had opinions split. After some order was restored, attendees were asked to mark up maps of Washington Avenue with their thoughts.

But OTIS also shared another note: they were collecting paper surveys to help reach residents who may not have been notified by any online outreach. Again, the fact that there was no offline outreach is not true according to OTIS’ own analysis.

The closed-door working group created a paper survey. Though the survey was never publicly shared and its source remained opaque to most who took it, pro-3-lane activists took the new rules at face value and began circulating those paper surveys in neighborhoods to help make the case that most residents, no matter their race or economic status were in favor of 3-lanes. I was one of those people who went door-to-door in my neighborhood in 19146 and camped out at local bars collecting surveys.

On November 30th, at the next meeting, we delivered 750 surveys all in favor of the 3-lane plan. The effort was the hard work of dozens of volunteers who set up drop boxes, went door to door, and attended events. 790 surveys were received in total. If all of the 40 remaining were against the 3-lane option, that meant 95% were supportive of the new plan.

If you’re keeping track at home, the 3-lane option remains undefeated after engagement in every conceivable forum and format.

Again, by the city’s own admission: “The survey showed most respondents were still in support of the City’s proposed changes [to three lanes].” (source)

Additionally, two new dueling online petitions surfaced.

• 2,677 signatures including representatives from schools around the avenue supported the 3-lane option. These signatures were meticulously checked for duplicates and signatories that were outside of the affected zip codes.
• 1,868 signatures opposed the changes. Even if we assume all signatures were people that lives in affected zip codes, yet again, the 3-lane option proved the most popular.

Having the 3-lane option win every medium, every forum, and every survey — The city closed its second round of process and said it would announce a new plan. Any residents who had issues with the plan had a chance to make their voice heard.

If one takes the allegation that a process was not inclusive at face value, a series of in-person meetings with hand-picked participants, combined with extensive paper surveys hand delivered door-to-door should have found some sort of hidden majority of residents overlooked by previous outreach efforts.

The "Mixed" Option and Moving the Goal Posts

On February 5th, 2022, OTIS announced that the 3-lane option was dead. As was any hope of a reverse course to the 5-lane option (hold this thought). They would be choosing between the 4-lane and the “mixed” option, backtracking from its own recommendation and "equitable" outreach process. The most popular option was off the board, and there was no evidence that this was the preferred outcome of any group, by any segmentation.

The city then announced on March 1st that it would be going with the “Mixed” option, which varied the widths along the avenue. It also hosted a contentious open house where OTIS staff members presented their plan to shouts, boos, and protests from all sides of the issue.

3-lane advocates felt duped. And 5-lane advocates felt that the city ignored them.

But at least, after a decade of outreach, there was a resolution and a bit of a compromise. At the end of the meeting, the next step was clear:  All that was left to do is to have City Council members approve the changes in parking and loading zones, and then the city could repave using the new mixed lane format. OTIS was adamant that the repaving was happening in 2022, regardless of whether a specific plan was approved.

You can probably guess what happened next.

The Pocket Veto

Washington Avenue runs through the districts of Councilmember Mark Squilla (the purple line) and Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson (the orange line). Both would need to submit the changes to parking and loading zones via legislation. As of March, this seemed likely. After the compromise plan was announced Councilmember Johnson said in a city statement (emphasis mine):

“I want to thank OTIS for taking the additional time to hear from all voices in the community concerning Washington Avenue. I always wanted to make sure that the public comment process on Washington Avenue was diverse and inclusive and reflected the views of all residents, including the business owners and long-term residents...”

With the City Council’s summer recess approaching in June 2022, and a repaving happening sometime this year, there was a tight window to submit the legislation. Councilmember Squilla submitted for his side. And Councilmember Johnson then… did nothing. He did not submit the required legislation.

There was no statement or reasoning given until approached by the media. But the implicit soon became explicit: Councilmember Johnson seemed to have no intention of ever hearing the concerns of his own constituents. In an interview with KYW, our local news radio station:

“Where I’m at right now is supporting the five-lane plan with traffic calming measures,” Johnson said in an interview this week.

The 5-lane plan. The one that was off the board for months, that no majority in any forum had expressed support for.

Johnson didn’t suggest an alternative greater than some speed bumps and traffic light timings.

He insisted on a more inclusive process, got it, and then did what he wanted anyway by hand choosing an option that was dismissed a year earlier. If equity concerns were the reason for the delay, then surely the new compromise plan after private meetings with long-time residents would address his concerns. The city (again, understandably) attempted to address all perceptions of inequity, adjusted the final outcome, and still couldn't get the councilmember to play ball.

But not only was Johnson refusing to submit the legislation, but he was also choosing an approach that wasn’t even in consideration by the city: maintaining Washington Avenue as 5 lanes.

So let’s recap:

• Residents in every available forum across nearly a decade voiced a desire to reduce the width of Washington Avenue.
• The city itself came to the same conclusion.
• Concerns about an equitable process were raised.
• The city then asked for more feedback in formats that included long-time residents.
• The city added another lane and adopted a “mixed plan” instead of the 3 lane options as a compromise.
• Rather than submit the legislation for the compromise “mixed plan” Councilmember Johnson chose to do nothing.

The ten years of engagement were a waste. Thousands of hours of city workers' time at the taxpayer’s expense were wasted. And, what is most frustrating to this resident, hundreds of hours of well-meaning, civically minded residents on all sides of this issue were rendered moot because of the choice of a single elected official — and we’re not getting a true explanation as to why.

If you made it this far, you may be thinking, “I mean, this is just a single road, dude. Chill out.” But that's the point. Repaving roads should be the easy stuff. Philadelphia has bigger issues than a single road:

• Weeks before this writing, Philadelphia made international news for a mass shooting on one of its most popular streets. There were 557 fatal shootings in 2021, the highest ever recorded.
• Philadelphia has an illegal dumping issue that it is partly tackling by... conducting a study:

“I understand the public’s frustration, and we are looking at many options criminally, many options civilly, to bring people to accountability,” said Lewis, who chairs the city’s interdepartmental committee on illegal dumping.

“There are a group of 20 professionals sitting around trying to figure this out, in addition to everyone we work with. We’ve all been working on this problem for a number of years.”

• Many Philadelphia schools contain asbestos and lack air conditioning, leaving many schools to shutter or require costly upgrades and repairs.
• Local pools and libraries remain understaffed and in poor condition, leaving children few options for summer recreation.

True "equity" would be acting boldly to address all of our issues, from a single road to the issues above. Something as simple as a road being repaved should not require a full decade of analysis. And if it does require all those resources, let’s make sure they actually impact the final decision!

Examples of ineffective and wasteful urban governments like this play out all around the country. Three recent examples:

• In 1900 to 1904 New York City opened 28 subway stations. It took 17 years to open the three Second Avenue Subway stations. (source)
• Upgrading a single bus lane and the underground utilities cost San Fransisco $349 million. (source)
• A backup in the Port of Long Beach was only mitigated when a single entrepreneur took matters into his own hands to conduct a review that the government should have tackled. (source)

It’s the same reason most Americans can agree to basic gun reforms, or healthcare policy, or any of the hundreds of other vexing issues and be ignored at every turn by elected officials.

Why would any of the thousands of citizens, community groups, or activists that participated in the process ever engage with the city ever again if they know that this is the likely outcome? For my fellow Philadelphians reading this, we don’t have to be yet another American city stymied by small imaginations.

It starts with paying attention locally. In Philadelphia windows, Ukrainian flags outnumber signs about local issues. 23% of residents voted in the 2019 primaries, the last time city council members were up for election.

Elections matter (and little else). Know that any “engagement” or process or study done on behalf of the city is pure theater. The city is running the same playbook for the Ben Franklin Parkway. Why would anyone participate in the ultimate decision will often come down to the influence of an unelected few have on a single elected official? In Philadelphia, change happens by replacing, not engaging with, ineffective leaders.

Ending councilmanic prerogative. Above I stated that the two councilmembers would have to introduce legislation to move this forward. That’s not entirely true, it’s just a Philadelphia tradition of “councilmanic prerogative” the idea that councilmembers defer to one another in matters concerning their district — giving each member absolute power over developments in their district.

Councilmember Johnson is awaiting (re)trial by the FBI for accepting money in exchange for approving a proposed development in his district. Another councilmember had to step down in January after being convicted of similar bribery charges.

This is not a law, the mayor or any of the other 16 members could end this — but they don’t. It's a gentleman's agreement in order to maintain a series of ineffective fiefdoms where one representative can overrule the preferences of entire swaths of the city.

—

This is not democracy, it is not American ingenuity. It is corruption and cynicism — often wrapped in a cloak of social justice or grievance politics. It's a series of officials who skim their share of power and money and don't care about the impact on residents. And it's the desires of a handful of outspoken and well-connected residents overruling the needs of the many after an exhaustive 10-year process.

The only way to overcome this national malaise is to replace the officials who rest comfortably because of apathy, and it starts locally, wherever you are reading this.

I’ve been working as a head of “content” in one capacity or another since 2014 and I’ve never seen a hotter job market for my field. Tech companies are tripping over themselves to “go direct” and build the audiences they want to reach, skipping most traditional media channels.

After writing about how to grow one’s career in content, this is the sister post: This is how companies and leaders should think about audience building. I’m sharing because building an audience is much much harder than it looks (just ask the 50 million Americans out here trying to be influencers) and also to share many of the unseen factors that go into building an audience for a startup.

There are thousands of posts about one-off content/editorial tactics. But not so much about launching and scaling a content operation at a B2B SaaS company from a standing start to building a reliable machine that delivers top of the funnel traffic and marketing qualified leads.

I’ve been the Director of Content at Crossbeam, a B2B SaaS company based here in Philadelphia since September 2019. I’ve had the privilege of building this thing alongside the content team of Jasmine Jenkins, Olivia Ramirez, and Nick Beaulieu and under the guidance of Jess Waldeck and Bob Moore. Since founding the content and community department at Crossbeam:

• We’ve built an email list of 22,000+ averaging a 38% open rate.
• We’ve averaged a 14% month of month traffic increase

• We’ve established many industry-defining terms (more on that in a bit)
• Most importantly, our readers constantly give us positive feedback.

This post is about what worked, what didn’t, and how we think about building an audience.

Lesson #1: Know Your Audience

When you are building an audience for a company, you are often providing the “top of the funnel” for marketing and sales. You are gathering a bunch of prospective buyers, asking them to hang out for a bit, and if they are interested in what you have to sell, they’ll strongly consider buying.

Before you write any blog posts, record any podcasts, or sit down in front of that webcam, you need to know who you are talking to.

In our early days at Crossbeam, we called ourselves a “collaborative data platform” — we help companies find overlaps in their CRM data. So who would want to buy Crossbeam and thus, what audience should we try to build?

We codified this early. We knew that the people who felt the pain were “partner professionals” at SaaS companies. An excerpt from an early strategy document:

Primary Audience: Anyone who owns partner-influenced revenue at a B2B (though B2C should be kept in mind for the future) SaaS company. Exact job title TBD, likely “partnership managers.”

Secondary Audience: Director/VP of partnerships, head of sales, chief revenue officer, head of business development

Some people overthink these as “personas” and invent entire characters. If you’re in B2B, don’t waste your time.

It is your job to make your reader a superhero within their organization. Throughout my career, I’ve written for marketers, designers, sales, and now those working on partnerships. Each one is overlooked in some way by their peers and colleagues. What can you give them to accelerate their career growth? In B2B, every publication is ultimately a career advice publication. Get your readers a raise or a promotion and they’ll trust you (and you’ll feel great!).

Pick a job title or job responsibilities and get moving. Talk to as many people that fit that profile as possible, the content ideas will come quickly.

Note: The hard part about startups is that it may not be immediately obvious who your primary buyer is. This is where content needs to enter a symbiotic relationship with sales. Check in with any customer-facing team member and take note of any content that comes up during sales conversations — that’s the work that is likely targeting the right audience.

Lesson #2: Skip SEO — at first

You have the “who” now it’s time for the “how”. This is where most content marketers get a little too ambitious. Everything you read about content marketing will tell you how to do keyword research and bang out dozens of SEO-ready posts per month. This is most often an awful idea.

Chances are, you are a one-person operation. In the early days, you will not win on quantity. Incumbents with tons of inbound links and a fleet of paid writers will smash you the moment they notice you.

One of your primary jobs as an early B2B SaaS content leader is communicating why the “normal” SEO approach won’t work for this market — in fact, it might be your most important task in the early days. Don’t play a game you can’t win. Instead, use your “weakness” of a small team as a strength (more on that in Lesson #7).

In B2B SaaS, ignore SEO and instead focus on getting actual humans who could actually become buyers to read and respond to your content. It’s better to have 10 readers who respond than 10,000 who do a drive-by via Google and exit in less than a minute.

Another “weakness” of B2B SaaS is that many companies rely on a handful of enterprise deals for revenue versus the 10,000 $10 subscriptions one needs for a B2C startup. That weakness is an asset. If you can bring in a small handful of ultra-qualified leads, you’re doing your job. So put out content that is mostly likely to get a handful of potential buyers to sit up and take notice. Some advice for accomplishing this:

• When you’re doing your audience research and interviewing people who are potential buyers, ask, “Where do you keep up with this industry?” The answer is where you should consider guest posting or sponsoring.
• Include the voice, and the actual words, of your readers in your blog posts. When you interview someone and distill down their insights into a blog post, that’s at least one reader! Now try roundups, or mentioning 10+ companies/people in a single post.
  

Additionally, SEO takes months to gain traction and show results. You need to be certain you have that audience/publication/business fit before investing in a long-term strategy like that. Get a repeatable cycle of publishing stuff that gets buyers excited. Then, and only then, should you worry about SEO. This way, you’ll have somewhat of a traffic and inbound link foundation on which to build upon.

Otherwise, it’s like obsessing over the tires before you even build the car.

Lesson #3: Collect Email Addresses and Don’t Care About Anything Else

In the early days of B2B, your business doesn't need traffic, it needs leads. Your funnels likely don’t work and you likely don’t have any nurture campaigns. You don’t have a reliable way of turning a visitor into a customer.

In the early days of Crossbeam, we tried to immediately get any visitor or email subscriber to sign up for our service, and it didn’t go so well. People needed more hand-holding before signing up for something like our service. There was no way they were going to go from “Hey what is this thing?” to “Sure, here’s my credit card and I’ve connected my company’s services to this!” We needed a soft place to land in the middle.

An email subscriber is a “holding pen” for your readers until they are ready to buy (or, more importantly, you know how to sell to them). As early as possible, use what you’ve learned in your audience research to produce at least one gated piece of content. For us, it was our State of the Partner Ecosystem report.

We surveyed our audience, collected the results, and produced a report that offered a snapshot of an industry that few were writing about. As a result, for the first time in their careers our readers received information on KPI benchmarks, common challenges, and salary data.

This kickstarted our email list. You can see below each time we released a new piece of gated content.

Lesson #4: Optimize for flexibility

Like a startup finding product/market fit, you are seeking publication/audience/company fit. You need to write stuff that appeals to the right person in the right way so they explore your product. You will get this wrong over and over again. Your only hope is to quickly adjust as you talk to your audience and publish new content.

Flexibility depends on strong feedback loops - As often as possible, you need to hear directly from your reader what they think of your content. Sometimes that can be via surveys or interviews. Other times, it requires being brutally honest about your metrics.

In the early days of running content, you’re a scientist. Pick a hypothesis, test it, and move on when you’re wrong. One example: our first version of a weekly newsletter had a “what we’re reading” section. Our logic was that this audience would want tech news curated specifically for their role.

Turns out, they didn’t. Our numbers showed that nobody clicked the links.

The next issue, I removed the links and nobody noticed, the surest sign nobody cared. A few weeks after we removed them the open rates jumped and hovered in the 40% range and the click rate jumped and hovered around 2.5%.

Another example of a strong feedback loop: when we interviewed partnership professionals we heard the same phrase verbatim: “I wish I had a playbook for partnerships.”

When many of your readers use the same exact phrasing, steal it. We released our Partner Playbook in early 2020 and it’s our most popular asset and has driven thousands of leads.

Lesson #5: Have an Opinion

This is common wisdom, so I won’t belabor the point. However, there is a reason this advice is so common: Your job description says you are making “content”, but you are really building a brand. And brands have opinions. Most startups make software and software can be pretty boring. But the reason the software is being created? Now that's interesting.

Work to have a debatable view on how your company hopes the world will change. Ours is “Ecosystem is Everything.” Crossbeam believes that a company’s partner ecosystem and a willingness to connect with other businesses and services will be the prime lever for growth and a key indicator for success.

This is debatable, and some people reading our opinion may roll their eyes. Good. That’s the point. Everything we produce is a chapter in a never-ending book proving that "Ecosystem is Everything.

Once you carve out your company’s opinion, you’ll begin to play the long game. The longer software exists, the more likely it will be copied and commoditized. The separators will be brand and community. Make it clear what you stand for (brand) and it will attract like-minded people (community).

Lesson #6: Define the space

Crossbeam is a new kind of software. There is no “category” we fit snuggly into, and for many months we had no direct competitors. We’ve spent months convincing various publications and analysts that we are creating something brand new. And, like, I know, everyone says that, man. But we really are.

To help establish this new space, we introduced some new terminology to the marketplace:

• Crossbeam was a “Partner Ecosystem Platform” or PEP.
• Our service helped our customers drive Ecosystem Qualified Leads (EQLs).
• The tools and processes for running a partnerships org was Ecosystem Ops.
• A company with a vast partner network was a Supernode.

And so on…

At times, the concept of introducing yet another acronym or buzzword can become fraught. But when done correctly, you are naming something in need of identifying.

We soon saw competitors use these phrases, and readers began using them in emails to our team.

When defining the space, you set the rules of engagement. It’s like getting the high ground, not a guarantee your brand will win out, but it certainly helps.

If you’re in an already crowded space, think critically about what new positioning and functionality you are offering. Whatever sliver of an advantage your company is establishing over competitors should be named.

Some example business concepts that were totally made up by marketers include  Customer Success, DevOps, and Growth Hacking.

Once you define these terms the content and community building options are endless. You can offer conferences, courses, certifications, article series, podcasts, books, and more.

Lesson #7: Use your size to your advantage

If you’re a small team (or just a single person) in charge of content you aren’t small, you are agile. One of the bigger mistakes I made in the early days was trying to go toe to toe with companies much much larger than us.

Example: I thought that if we could “map” different partner ecosystems and layer on analysis it would be like a honey pot to everyone in that space. Voila, our Ecosystem Guide was born. After a modestly successful blog test with e-commerce companies, our first PDF edition was Email Service Providers.

My team and I interviewed nearly 20 companies to learn what they were looking for in a partner. We layered on some data we collected and released it. We painstakingly “mapped” them according to partnerships, classified them into several categories, and offered an analysis of each one. It was a truly beautiful document thanks to Nick Beaulieu.

Unfortunately, it flopped.

Turns out if people really want to explore a vertical they will go to G2, or Capterra, or Forrester, or Tegus, or any one of the places where industry analysis is all they do. Crossbeam doing it on the side was never going to stack up, and the campaign was a big waste of resources. We may return to this series, and if we do, we’ll do something more cohesive and competitive than a one-off.

Instead, we focused efforts on the places we could provide unique value. For us, that was providing the fuel for partnership professionals to grow their career as individuals — not necessarily how they can grow their company’s partner ecosystem.

A nuanced, but important, distinction.

The result was the Partner Playbook and The State of the Partner Ecosystem, campaigns that have been much more successful than our poor Guidebook.

—

Other tips for the early days

• Focus is the most important thing. People smarter than you have tried this and failed because they tried doing too much at once. Pick one thing at a time. This is much easier said than done.
• A good early sign you’re onto something: Your sales team walks into meetings and people mention that they’ve heard of your tiny startup because of the content.
• Internal credibility is extremely important. Take goals and OKRs seriously, especially if you’re a team of one. If you want to continue to receive executive buy-in: be super clear about what you’re going to do, do it, and measure it.
• Ugly is ok. You’ll be compelled to “do it right the first time” and painstakingly design everything. Don’t. You have no idea what will work and what won’t. Get feedback before committing extra resources to branding.

_

Building a content and editorial team takes an appreciation of the long game — the willingness to get the “simple” things right and to revel in the process as much as the results. If this sounds like the kind of team you want to work with, drop me a line.

It's an exciting time to make things on the internet.

Writers, long subject to the whims of social media algorithms and shriveling media companies, have never had more opportunities to be fairly compensated for their work. And maybe, just maybe, there is yet another opportunity on the horizon: NFTs.

NFTs, or "Non Fungible Tokens" allow digital items to be “owned” and tracked via blockchain. People are mostly using this to make, buy, and trade digital artwork. See this “painting” for auction, as an example. The New York Times recently covered a more notable NFT purchase here. For the first time, we can prove who owns something digitally, and transfer that ownership in a traceable way.

As exciting as NFT art is to artists, a similar opportunity may await writers, editors, and publishers. But, the infrastructure and tools are not quite there.

This is a post that is really a wishlist of sorts. These are the kinds of things that would need to happen before NFTs can gain a foothold with writers, editors, and media companies.

Note: I'm new to this whole NFT thing. Please let me know if there are any errors in this post!

A better way to collaborate with other writers, on any marketplace

As I write this, there is no way of collaborating on an NFT and ensuring that royalties are split in perpetuity. Cargo offers split royalties, but only if the NFT is sold on its marketplace. Part of the promise of NFTs is it can untether the dependence creators have on platforms and marketplaces. I’ve seen some evidence on Github that this is on the mind of others, though there is no way of splitting royalties on any marketplace, present or future.

This mechanism won’t only allow for multiple authors, it will allow for publications. As my buddy Tom Critchlow wrote in Tokenized Essays, there is an entirely new opportunity for bundling.

Ten writers could release regular “issues” for a price, and as people collect those issues the writers would continue to receive a small piece of every purchase and repurchase. The shared interest of the writers would enable some fascinating marketing strategies where what benefits the individual benefits the whole publication and vice versa. Writers would continue to “own” their work long after publication — something only afforded to the highest profile writers in the current media environment.

Much like there are loose confederations of people in “creator” houses, the NFT publication could be a short-term collaboration or the start of a lasting brand — like Every.

Your wallet needs to be your “bookshelf”

There is a public and private aspect to collecting NFTs. Let’s start with the public. Much like there are nascent efforts for collectors to showcase their NFT art via 3d "galleries," we need similar efforts for the written word.

A cool part about crypto wallets is you can look up anything about any wallet via a service like Etherscan. Look, this one has more than $1,000,000 USD In Ether!

I should be able to query any wallet and also see some sort of representation of all of the books, magazines, essays, and blog posts that they own — either as an author or as a collector.  

Part of the fun of owning a home is finally getting space to curate your personal library. Browsing someone’s bookshelf is a window into their character. There hasn’t been an online equivalent since the days of del.icio.us. Imagine a “blogroll” for 2021 where you can peep what your favorite people are collecting and reading. Curating your media diet can become a status symbol of sorts.

Your wallet needs to also be your “reader”

A difference between art and the written word: the written word is meant to be consumed. It’s no good “owning” five blog posts from some of your favorite writers if you have to port them to some other service to read them.

Imagine your wallet as a “headless” reader and various wallet UIs will offer different approaches at interfaces. It’s the RSS reader reborn, but with revenue going to the writers you love.

A way to "gate" premium content

I graduated from college with a journalism degree in 2008. And since then there has been an elusive dream of "micropayments" helping fund journalism. The idea was that you'd kick a dollar or two to every article you read and everyone would be happy.

History didn't work out that way, but with crypto wallets, frictionless paywalls and micropayments become more possible than ever before. There needs to be a way to create an NFT where a reader can pay a small amount to access, thus "owning" a copy of the content.

This doesn't have to just be small, ahem, token amounts for news articles. Writers could also work for much more premium NFT essays, novels, comic books, and collector's editions with limited edition runs. A writer could even team up with an artist and offer limited edition covers — but then again, there's that collaboration problem again.

John Palmer did a version of this using the Mirror platform as crowdfunding play. However, access remained open to all readers.

A way to post anonymously

Part of the fun of crypto is the removal of real-world identity from your wallet ID. NFT could enable whistleblowers, journalists, dissidents, and others to receive compensation for their work and be totally outside the reach of any nationstate or corporation. It would be like Wikileaks but with a direct financial incentive.

Lower "gas" prices

Every transition on the Ethereum blockchain costs "gas." At the time of this writing, gas prices are $400 for a single transition.

That's untenable for a solo writer to pay every time they publish. However, if gas prices remain high, publications could cover this fee for writers as an "advance." But given that spinning up a WordPress site is free, that seems unlikely.

—

I write this not only as a wishlist but, hopefully, as a flag in the ground. If you are thinking about these concepts (or maybe have solved them already) please let me know.

The economics of the web only change once a decade or so, and with any luck, this next version of the internet will finally, mercifully, empower the individual writers.

When you read old speeches of American presidents, you’ll sometimes notice it was commonplace to refer to our country as “these” United States. From Lincoln (“And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States”) to Roosevelt (“I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making”).

These United States. Plural. A loosely affiliated group. In the years since, we became singular. We are an “us”. And the United States a “The”.

But in 2021, America is becoming a “these” again. Our singular nation with shared values is reverting to the loose collection of groups fueled by changes in technology, culture, and (if we’re honest) grievance politics.

Consider:

• 60% of Americans believe America will be less important in the world
• 73% believe that the gap between rich and poor will grow
• 65% believe the country will be more divided
• 52% of Americans 30-49 believe they will see no social security benefits
• 69% are “very” or “fairly” worried about climate change
• 11% of Americans have “seriously” considered suicide since COVID. That number climbs to 25% in 18-24-year-olds
• Support for the police is at record lows
• Only 20% of Americans “trust the federal government to do what is right”

It’s clear: something is wrong.

This essay is an attempt to offer my solution. The way out of this splintering is, paradoxically, to embrace it. We must recommit to our communities and our countrymen based on proximity, not ideology and not technology. We need localism.

To understand why I believe this, I'd like to diagnose two of the (many) causes of this unraveling: a lack of a shared "now" and a lack of a shared "here".

Cause #1: The lack of shared "now"

If you go to any protest, you’ll see the bizarre sight of everyone holding up their cell phone camera. At times, protest is theater for the fragmented now, each clip repackaged to be delivered to an awaiting audience. There was no truer example of this than when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people. It was abundantly clear that they didn’t have much of a plan beyond sharing it on social media.

Within minutes of any current event, there are instantly calcified narratives as to who was to blame, what was responsible, and what, in fact, happened. We don’t have one “now”, we have as many “nows” as there are eyeballs and cell phones.

How can we agree on anything if we can’t even agree on what just happened? How can we trust anything we see when it has been stripped from its surrounding context?  

Geography is a natural dampener for this effect. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan once wrote:

“In the past, news that reached me from afar was old news. Now, with instantaneous transmission, all news is contemporary. I live in the present, surrounded by present time, whereas not so long ago, the present where I am was an island surrounded by the pasts that deepened with distance.”

h/t to Doug Stewart aka zamoose, who found this in The Convivial Society

With the dampener of location quickly removed, we are increasingly aware of the objectionable behavior of others, and we are increasingly powerless to do anything to stop it. We are also constantly confronted with news telling us that everything is not okay, even if our day-to-day lives are unaffected.

It’s making us naturally distrust others. At any moment, you can pull up dozens of videos of injustices around the world, views you find abhorrent, or people acting in ways you find objectionable. And short of some catharsis online, we are powerless to take any immediate action.

The way back to a shared now is to shrink your zone of attention. To reintroduce that dampener. The only “now” is the one you can literally reach at this moment. The closer something is to your physical location, the more it affects you and you can affect it. It allows you to regain some control and influence.  

Americans don’t trust what they see on their screens. But they will trust those in their communities and those they know personally. Americans trust local news over national and believe news from friends is more considerate of multiple “sides” than news from news media. We need to rebuild and reinvest in these relationships if we are to get our feet under ourselves again — and that means focusing where we have agency.

Cause #2: A lack of a shared "here”

There are many that hope to use the very tools causing our lack of a shared “now” to solve our issues. Don’t repair the institution, the thinking goes, make it irrelevant.

Fix the banks with the blockchain. Fix our education system with asynchronous learning. Fix income inequality with remote work.

These “techno-futurists” hold the belief that technology will liberate the individual from most power structures, giving them the ultimate flexibility. You can work wherever, go wherever, and get whatever in a frictionless, borderless society. Everything should be as cheap and as convenient as possible.  The common thread in these “solutions” is the removal of geography and location as a constraint.

This sounds appealing! But the question they never answer is: what happens next?

If I wave that magic wand and everyone holds Bitcoin, goes to school via Zoom and Youtube, and can work anywhere with a wifi connection — what do we, as a nation, build? The very things we want flexibility to enjoy are only possible because someone made a commitment to a community and a place.

The reason, say, Tokyo is so interesting to Americans like me is because it’s a completely different place with different values. Generations have labored and tinkered to create a place with a memory and a culture. And from those generations sprung the institutions that make Tokyo what it is — and those are the outputs that you as the visitor get to enjoy.

The techno-futurists want it both ways: access to culture and community any time they want, without putting in the work to preserve and create culture and community. They are working to create a world where there is some sort of mass, collective consciousness where frictionlessness and is the primary value. In her powerful essay in Tablet, Alana Newhouse derided this as “Flatness.”

Frictionlessness is sometimes good. But strip malls are frictionless. Fast food is frictionless. Facebook feeds are frictionless. Tinder is frictionless. Getting videos of terrible human behavior beamed directly to your phone is frictionless.

The techno-optimists have one thing correct: there is no putting the cat back in the bag. Our technology will continue to change our lives and there is no use in pretending otherwise.

But to the localist, the tools of the techno-optimists are best used to find the right local community, not to supplant it entirely. The internet is not the end. It is the means. Learning via YouTube supplements the classroom. Remote work enables labor more flexibility to care for one's family and community.

Nearly a year into this pandemic are you happier because you have to rely almost entirely on the internet and social media to communicate with your friends and family? The techno-optimist future looks more like forever COVID isolation than some sort of Star Trek utopia.

Why localism is the way: trust

America is not a collection of individuals. It’s also not a monolithic “nation”.  The atomic unit of American society is the community. The community is the middle ground of friction and ease, of trust and anonymity.

“We draw our strength from not only being ‘one nation’ politically,” writes Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak in The New Localism, “but also from having multiple nodes of energy, innovation, and experimentation.”

Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this as the “township” it is “the grouping so close to a man’s nature that wherever men gather township automatically comes into being” and that “the strength of a free nation resides in the township.”  To him, it was one of many characteristics that made America, well… America.

Those of us born in the age of the internet and globalization have abandoned our roles as caretakers of our townships. We express loyalty to politicians who will never set foot in our town. We work for massive corporate entities who spend their profits and spoils elsewhere. We allow our minds and our bank accounts to be extracted by people who have no plans on positively changing our day-to-day lives.

Location is the great equalizer. It’s harder for me to lie to you in person. It’s harder for you to hate me if you see me every day. It’s easier to feel progress and faith in our institutions when we can see it not just on our screens but on our block. Our dollars should, as much as possible, help our neighbors.

How to live like a localist

Localism is not charity. It doesn’t require you to dedicate your life to building a non-profit with your family name on the door (though by all means, go for it). It’s also not a demand that one never travel or spend money outside of their community.

Instead, it’s a filter for knowing how to make choices and direct your resources of time, attention, and money. It’s a prioritization. It’s a system of beliefs and not an end.  

Some suggestions for living your life as a localist:

• Commit. You must pick a community based on geography on a long time horizon. Think in decades, not years. You must put some skin in the game via home ownership, starting a business, or other means that somehow intertwine your future with the future of those around you. This may not be the best way to maximize your economic returns. But persona economic benefit is not (entirely) the point.
  
  This doesn’t mean you can’t (or won’t) move someday. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel (quite the contrary!) But it means you plan on being a participant and not an observer of wherever you are right now — and that’s easier when you know you’ll be around to see the results of your actions.
• Work locally. When possible, contribute your labor to a business that is located in or around your community. Good is working remotely and spending the money locally. Better is working alongside your neighbors and contributing to your local economy via your commute, lunch breaks, after-work activities, and business spending. Too much in our world makes it easy for our time, labor, money, or attention to be sapped away by those we will never meet in person. This decouples actions and consequences in a way that can be destructive to our shared sense of trust.
• Disassociate from the hive mind. Dramatically increase the threshold that “non-local” news has to meet in order to command your attention. Know that some annoying viral video taking place several states away should have no impact on your day-to-day thinking — nor can you do anything about it. Know that acting online has a fraction of the impact as acting in person.
• Live and let live. The inverse of the rule above. If you don’t like the idea of someone not from your community telling you how it should work, give others the same courtesy. It’s not your job to tell people what’s best for them. If Miami wants to go crazy to attract startups, god bless.  If a bunch of people in Oklahoma want to rename their high schools, best of luck.
• Be exceedingly generous to those in your community. Should you be able to, be liberal giving away your time, effort, and (when appropriate) money to benefit your neighborhood. Say hello, solve tiny problems, respect the history and those that predate you. Welcome newcomers. When in doubt, err on the side of being almost annoyingly friendly. These are the small efforts that, over time, make a neighborhood special and introduce you to your neighbors.
• Build something that will outlast you. View it as your life's work to permanently improve something in your community.  It can be something simple like funding a bench in your local park. Or something like creating a community group, a building, or a scholarship. Maybe it's starting the first local soccer team or throwing an annual event. Be patient. This isn’t like your work life where you can grind out a project and declare victory.

I'm not pretending localism is a cure-all. But before telling anyone else what America should be or look like, we need to get our own houses in order — and that starts locally.

Author, podcaster, and entrepreneur Paul Jarvis spent years building his email newsletter, writing books, and making courses. His career was the dream end state for many of those in the "creative economy." There was "passive income," a published book, and a portfolio of diverse revenue streams.

But earlier this year, he did something drastic. He threw it all away. His newsletter that he sent each and every Sunday? Gone. His decade of articles on his blog? Poof. SEO suicide.

His homepage now reads "I used to have a personal brand, and now I don't."

Baller.

-

For previous generations, making a living through an audience (i.e. "fame") was a rarity. You needed something compelling to share and you needed to get the approval of gatekeeper before even playing the game. 15 years after Web 2.0, however, and the tools for audience building have been fully democratized and socialized. Building an audience is now the default state of operating online. Just ask any tween, they all want to become internet celebrities.

In 2019, Ypulse asked different generations to name their favorite famous person. The results:

The youngest Gen Z consumers were most likely to name an online celebrity as their favorite famous person, while older Millennials were most likely to name a Hollywood celebrity.

But there is a price to pay for these tiny empires. One needs to amass an audience for them to work. That audience must be served. That audience must be responded to and considered. And that audience doesn't always pay. In fact, they usually don't.

Fame, followers, and attention are means to an end, and too often they are treated as the end. In the United States of America, the real means to freedom (for better or worse) is money and power. And fame /= money and power. This is why the internet famous still wait tables.

An entire American generation is about to spend their teens and early 20s trying to build an audience only to discover it's near-impossible to turn that into something financially meaningful. Li Jen writes about this lack of a "middle class" in this kind of creative economy:

On Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage of $1,160 per month in 2017. On Spotify, artists need 3.5 million streams per year to achieve the annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker of $15,080, a fact that drives most musicians to supplement their earnings with touring and merchandise. In contrast, in America in 2016, 52% of adults lived in middle income households, with incomes ranging from $48,500 to $145,500.

While it's fun to read and think about all of the new platforms and voices in the world, the smart ones are avoiding that game all together.

I posit that there is a deceptively large (and growing) quiet class of king maker. This group prizes anonymity and moving under the radar as they accumulate money and power. They are like dark matter, a powerful force in our universe and culture that we have trouble seeing, especially if we don't know where to look.

In our COVID "K-shaped" recovery they are on the top side of the "K." They are accumulating wealth and status and power and staying away from social media or building audiences. They are the producers. They are the editors. They are the funders. They are the silent partners. They are the ones taking advantage (fair or unfair) of some edge they've observed in the market and shutting up about it.

To the Dark Matter Influencer, attention is a liability. Attention gets you called out or cancelled. Attention subjects your flaws and faults to a mob without context.

But much like their namesake, Dark Matter Influencers warp their surroundings. Operate long enough in a market and you'll inevitably stumble into one. In lieu of 100,000 Instagram followers, the DMI prefers to keep a tight circle of intellectual and entrepreneurial partners. There is no pleasure in impressing strangers.

If I'm right, you'll see the following play out over the next few years:

• The rich won't necessarily be the famous. The famous will be "like the rest of us" and not particularly wealthy.
• Our "celebrities" will be increasingly niche as more participants in the traditional influencer economy enter the fray.
• You'll start to wonder how things are portrayed as getting "worse" by traditional influencers with large audiences while nothing actually changes.
• You will see a growing disconnect between what we are told accumulates wealth and power versus what actually does.
• You'll see an attention economy become (even more) hyper fractured.

It's because those that actually can affect change are running up the score quietly. While everyone else is trying to win the game, they are playing for the championship.

Or, to paraphrase author Nassim Taleb, everyone else is trying to win the argument. They are just trying to win.

As COVID-19 continues to alter the way we live, there is a scramble to predict what our “new normal” will look like. After the virus fades away or, God help us, becomes a constant in our day-to-day life for years to come, which change brought on by the pandemic will stick?

There is one consensus prediction that is emerging, especially among knowledge workers and those in tech: The distributed workforce is here to stay. And, furthermore, this change is a good thing for workers and welcomed by all.

To which I say: Um, have you ever worked remotely?

I have understood and enjoyed the perks of working remotely before. From 2009 to 2016 I wrote about entrepreneurs and creatives, many of whom were early proponents of remote work. And from 2017 to 2019, I worked remotely for a small, privately-owned e-learning company and then a 1000-employee SaaS company.

While the upsides to remote work are true, for many people remote work is a poison pill — one where you are given “control” in the name of productivity in exchange for some pretty nasty long-term effects.

In reality, remote work makes you vulnerable to outsourcing, reduces your job to a metric, creates frustrating change-averse bureaucracies, and stifles your career growth. The lack of scrutiny our remote future faces is going to result in frustrated workers and ineffective companies.

Let’s tackle these issues one at a time.

Remote work “democratizes talent” for everyone. Even you.

In May 2020, a Gartner blog post summarized a common argument in favor of remote work: “Democratizing access to resources lowers the barriers to innovation and enables everybody to partake in the ensuing prosperity.” Not everyone can (or wants to) live in an urban commercial hub. Remote work, the thinking goes, allows people to live in whatever environment they’d like — depending on their own circumstances.

These remote technology jobs don’t just go to a version of you living on a cute farm in the Hudson Valley. Those jobs go to anyone, anywhere.

This is good for global prosperity and perhaps arguably inevitable. However, if you’re working in technology today as an American, you have tremendous earning potential. This earning potential may not be possible forever. It’s baffling to me that American workers would cheer an acceleration of this trend that would place downward pressure on their wages.

When you, the American worker, share this belief you are being blinded by an erroneous belief in American exceptionalism. When your company goes all-remote, it is starting a clock that ends in you eventually competing with the global talent market — especially if travel and visas continue to be restricted by the federal government.

A tech optimist will likely (and correctly) point out that more innovation and new technologies will replace any outsourced jobs. While my academic brain wants that to be true, I can’t help but see the devastating effects globalization had to our manufacturing workers and communities — many of which have never recovered or benefited from new innovations.

Innovation in the American economy didn’t get transferred one-to-one. Every manufacturing worker did not suddenly receive a tech job. Every technology worker outsourced will not receive the benefit of the next wave of innovation directly.

Remote enables you to be forgotten

Remote work advocates often praise the focus that remote work enables. No longer will you be judged by the time you spend at the office, they say, you’ll instead be judged and rewarded on whether you “get things done.”

These “benefits” are always used to sell remote work to an imagined audience of Dilbert-like cubicle dwellers who are imprisoned and subjected by annoying coworkers and an oppressive boss. The key to freedom, they say, is to work remotely. Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried writes in Remote:

What you're left with is "what did this person actually do today?" Not "when did they get in?" or "how late did they stay?" Instead it's all about the work produced. So instead of asking a remote worker "what did you do today?" you can now just say, "Show me what you did today." As a manager, you can directly evaluate the work--the thing you're paying this person for--and ignore all the stuff that doesn't actually matter.

First, being more productive isn’t the only goal of working, but let’s put that to the side. Second, Fried is right, you do gain a bit of freedom from your boss (which doubles as a loss of a mentor, but we’ll get to that). You also gain “freedom” from your colleagues and collaborators. Which means you’re effectively on your own.

This is empowering to some, but the isolation can mean your contributions are easily overlooked or misunderstood. As a result, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend at (especially larger) remote companies: Some managers often have no clue what their direct reports are doing and how they are doing it.

Performance reviews are difficult enough under normal circumstances. But how do you judge someone when you can only see their output and never their process? Marketers, project managers, product managers, growth marketers, and others spend their days supporting or maintaining existing things.  

This a difficult problem that predates any shift to remote work. But when applied to remote work, a manager loses several of the inputs needed to judge a direct report’s output — including, yes, who is physically (and mentally) present when actual work is being done. But also: Do the other team members appear to enjoy working with this person? And, if they are struggling, is it due to a lack of effort/focus or something outside of their control?

Employees who “do the right thing” spending extra time and energy supporting their teammates receive absolutely no recognition for doing the little things needed for a smooth-running, collaborative organization. It’s usually a quantifiable fact whether a sales departments reaches their goals. It’s not as clear that the social media manager had a good quarter.

With the removed context of a real-life office, your team’s output is difficult to individualize for your manager — especially if work is done in private DMs or one-on-one Zoom calls. The manager sees the end product with no visibility as to who did what, who pulled their weight, who made tough choices, and who made things more difficult. This has a nasty side effect of the leader viewing you less as a person who they have to empathize with and understand — and more as a talking head on a Zoom call or Slack who does things for them.

This will cause your work to “flatten.” Whatever soft skills you bring to the table will be minimized when working remotely. This will lead to companies and processes relying less on things like creativity and collaboration and more on simple inputs and outputs. Which, again, makes your work easier to outsource.

We bemoan the loss of empathy and context created by solely getting our news and interacting via social media … and we then turn around and set up our working lives in their image.

This has a pronounced effect in large organizations.

Remote work breaks large companies

Remote work supporters often return to the “interruption culture” at an IRL office as an argument for distributed work. First, clearly people that believe remote work creates an interruption-free zone have never used Slack or email. Second, those interruptions often exist for a reason: They often communicate information that ensures everyone is working on the right thing.

For companies that have strong product/market fit, have reached scale, and have a clear product roadmap, remote works swimmingly. A distraction-free environment means everyone can focus on “what matters” because “what matters” has been clear and consistent.  

But what happens when “what matters” changes?

Because it will. Eventually, the market shifts. There’s a competitor or a Black Swan-style event in the industry (like, say, a global pandemic). Suddenly the well-oiled machine needs to adapt and change course. For companies larger than 100 people, this is tremendously difficult in an in-person environment. Working remote, it’s damn near impossible. Twice-a-year in-person meetups are not enough to disseminate brand new strategies.

And I'd bet that as formerly IRL companies go remote, it will have a negative effect on their ability to iterate and adjust to market conditions making them vulnerable for a smaller, co-located upstart.

Remote work can stifle your career growth

Think back to your first job in your current field. I’d bet there is a person or group of people who were tremendously important in shaping your career. They gave you candid advice and were able to passively observe and critique your behavior.

When you work remotely, mentorship is stifled because there is no learning via osmosis. You can’t model your behavior on your successful teammates because you only see them on Zoom and in Slack. Whatever process they are using to achieve their results is opaque to you.

Much of the language used around remote work (and remote events) assumes that one is in the mid-to-late stages of their career. When you’re young, you don’t need “focus” or to “get things done.” You need exposure to new ideas and people. You need the serendipitous fortune of sitting in on the right meeting, attending the right happy hour, or earning the respect of the right observer.

All of the above is more difficult in a remote environment. As a result, we are in danger of having a generation of new knowledge workers who are never properly onboarded and hastily told to work remotely with nothing but an OKR to chase. They have no context for how to do all of the messy office-ready skills like building consensus, having productive disagreements, and advocating for their ideas.

Additionally, the professional bonds created in the early parts of your career end up becoming a large fraction of your total professional network. That’s the group of people who will stay in touch with you as you develop and those are the people most likely to share new opportunities with you.

Most people praising remote work tend to focus on the “convenience” for this reason. They talk about no commutes and spending more time with their families. These are worthy lifestyle benefits! But you rarely hear a remote work proponent share how they’ve maximized earnings, career growth, and influence because of remote work. Sometimes, people want to “go for it”. And most executives at these remote companies often made their money and network working in-person at a prestigious technology or financial company.

This, again, allows the work of an individual contributor (i.e. disproportionately people new to the industry) of a technology company to be minimized, un-mentored, and oftentimes forgotten. It’s the Mechanical Turk-ziation of white-collar work.

The blind spots of remote work advocates

Those boosting remote work are often not entirely straightforward about their intentions — to themselves or their audiences. I’m not referring to meaningful deception, but instead a convenient alignment of incentives and some blind spots oftentimes fueled by class and circumstance.

The next time you see someone advocating for remote work, ask yourself: How do they pay their bills?

Chances are they work at, fund, or own a technology company that would benefit tremendously from asynchronous work or a future where humans are geographically dispersed. Think of your collaboration tools, e-commerce companies, and your communication tools.

These companies are doing exactly what I would do as a content marketer: supporting every customer persona that uses their products, and that includes remote workers. However, the marketing from these companies is often citied by news outlets without much skepticism or pushback — creating a cycle where remote work seems to be an inevitable outcome that every single worker would benefit from. It isn't, and they don't.

Digital transformation is a wonderful, net-positive trend but it has the side effect of shifting dollars spent elsewhere to a handful of tech companies. In person, you and I can have a conversation in the hallway. In our remote work future we have to pay Slack for that. Instead of dining at local downtown eateries, we are cooking our own lunch or using a delivery app. Instead of giving the team update at a conference table, we pay Zoom.

This is not to say whether that’s “good” or “bad” but that thousands of technology companies view remote work as a way of encouraging you to pay them money for things you previously paid other industries and companies. This is normal business behavior, which is good for the people that profit from the growth of those companies! But it’s a bit like McDonalds telling us we should take more lunch breaks: We’re not getting a full view.

Secondly, those advocating for a remote future tend to erroneously assume several things are true for most workers:

1 - They assume that remote workers prefer to tightly wrap their identity in their work. When your office is in your house, your personal life, family life, and working life all are compressed into a single space and each of those worlds can intersect at inconvenient and undesirable times. It can range from the trivial (a child “interrupts” a Zoom call) to the destructive (no division between work-induced stress and home-induced stress). These lead to burnout, an inability to turn off, and a feeling of being “trapped.”

2 - They assume that everyone has a dedicated working space. Many individuals have set up their home lives to be augmented by the services provided by working in a “second space” — mainly a separation from the rest of their lives. Ask any large family or person with four roommates, working uninterrupted at home can be impossible. Congrats, you’ve replaced getting interrupted by your boss to being interrupted by your roommates upset you didn’t take out the trash.

3 - They assume that parents have reliable child care outside of the home.  Working at home is one thing, working at home with a child who is not of school age is another. When one parent is required to work from home, they require the other parent to shoulder the child care duty full time despite being in a spare bedroom or basement office. The cognitive dissonance can be exhausting for the parents, to say nothing of explaining to your crying three-year-old that Mom is here but she can’t see you right now for hours on end.

If your answer to any of the above is “find a coworking space” — wonderful. Now I’ve swapped my in-person collection of coworkers who live in my city and are all working to the same goal with a loose collection of strangers who have no incentive in being my friend or helping me succeed. And I might even have to pay out of my own pocket for the privilege.

What instead?

To insist upon remote-only working is to think of your job as if you were a computer. Input in, output out. But, something I’m proud to share with you for the very first time: you are a human being.

You are the science AND arts department. You are the theory of relativity AND the Sistine Chapel. This is not to say that every single worker out there should believe they are saving the world one spreadsheet at a time. But work is not strictly transactional. It’s the way we spend half of our waking lives.

We derive more from our careers than simply a paycheck. We find meaning, community, and connection to others. We gain a needed context for seeing the world. We cannot completely decouple the working experience from being in the physical presence of others without causing a slow-simmering existential crisis in its participants.

The future doesn’t need to look this way. I’d prefer a future-of-work conversation that focuses less on remote work and more on:

1. Localism

There’s an aversion to thinking of our technology companies as local businesses. But they are. Local economies and amenities usually depend on dense collections of workers. That bar you like and your favorite restaurant are likely possible because they are located adjacent to a commercial corridor where people work IRL.

Let’s instead encourage companies to invest in the cities in which they are based. That means paying taxes, investing in local education, and generating wealth that can be used by workers to create more companies or fund more amenities where they live.

2. Flexible work > remote work

If remote work depresses the wages of white collar workers, the opposite extreme also has its consequences: requiring everyone to be in the office every day at the same time can suppress the wages of new parents, especially new mothers. I wish those in the technology sector would put more pressure on governments to fund subsidized child care options to enable working parents to not have to pick between shelling out 50% of their salary for child care and becoming a stay-at-home parent.

Additionally, on-campus day cares, pumping rooms, and other services for new parents should be a legal requirement for companies of a certain size. Governments and the private sector should be supporting the working parents who want to continue to grow their career by providing services to facilitate in-office work — not eliminating the office entirely. And managers should trust employees to manage their own schedule: show up when you’re required, leave if you need to attend to personal matters.

3. For companies that choose it, remote work should be opt-in, not required.

Even considering all of the above there are workers that will choose to work remote. They accept the negatives because the positives are worth it to them, or they have a personal circumstance which makes remote work more appealing. This is the kind of personal choice that every worker should be afforded.

Remote friendly offers each worker the choice that works best for them. Remote required (especially after being IRL) forces everyone to adopt working styles that may be damaging to their personal lives and/or productivity.

—

I don’t want to live in a future of “cloud kitchens”, Zoom happy hours, remote jobs, and distributed colleges. At its best, technology augments — but does not replace — what happens IRL.

And if we’ve learned anything from the great pandemic of 2020 it’s that being in the same room as people is pretty great.

Thank you to Andrew Thompson, Christopher Wink, Tom Critchlow, and Jovian Gautama for reviewing this draft.

I was catching up with a friend recently when I asked how work was going.  He was making good money, he said. And had enough seniority to have a high amount of autonomy. For the first time, he felt in control of his career trajectory.

“But I dunno man," he continued. "I’m just not as into it any more. Like, it’s fine. But it’s just such a small part of the things I care about.” He paused for a moment. “It’s enough.”

It’s enough.

I’ve had some version of that conversation dozens of times in the past few years. It usually comes up whenever we get to speaking honestly about someone's long-term career plans, and I suspect it has something to do with my age. As of this writing I am 33. Most people I know are +/- two years of me.

In these conversations, we usually end up dancing around a set of related questions: When it comes to my career, what is "enough"? Should I get off the career train and focus elsewhere? Is my lack of interest my boss’s fault? Is caring less about my work like giving up on life? How could I do anything but give this my 101% effort after I've worked so hard?

I posit that every modern, young-ish white collar professional hits some version of this inflection point. It’s a point where you have of your “basics” covered. You’ve reached the top of some hill you were mentally climbing only to see a much bigger, more difficult hill. It is at this moment you have to answer a life and career-defining question:

Do I need more? Do I go for it?

The 20s→30s inflection point

If you were an ambitious college grad in the previous decade or so, your life likely followed a few common beats:

1. You moved to where you had the most economic opportunity (not necessarily where you had existing friends/family aka The Big Sort).
2. You tried to match your natural proclivities in (like math or writing) with some growth industry empowered by digital transformation (like software, finance, or medicine/pharma).
3. You worked like hell making industry contacts, learning how to do your job, and absorbing all of the career advice you could.

You got good at what you do and were rewarded for it. You were paid more. You received fancier titles. You got greater control over your finances.

But eventually, the wins stopped coming as quickly. It started to feel like you're walking in molasses. Maybe you switched jobs a few times and didn’t see a significant gain in money, status, or autonomy. Or maybe you arrived at a level in the org chart where you were the youngest and were expected to "wait your turn". Or maybe you saw the life of those one level “higher” than you in the org chart and how much they had to work. Or maybe you wanted to start a family in that major metro and realize how much you and your spouse have to make.

It’s at this inflection point where many people ignore this stuck feeling, press on, and start to feel burnout. As Anne Helen Peterson in (her wildly heralded piece in) BuzzFeed wrote:

Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.

I’m positing that many hit this barrier somewhere close to 30. The rewards have slowed down and it’s taking its toll. Yet we are wired to value ourselves in terms of work. It feels like a grind. It’s at this point you wonder: Do I go for it?

Do I continue to orient my choices around the goal of accumulating the most amount of money, power, and prestige in my field?

Why does it get hard?

There are many reasons why the wins do not come as quickly. Let’s touch on the main ones:

• Simple numbers. Climbing the corporate ladder is like a game of musical chairs where the longer the game goes on, more chairs are removed each time. And there are no rules. And your competitors can bring brass knuckles. With every step higher in the org chart you will be battling more people for less positions and higher stakes. In some companies, this log jam is such a problem that they just keep adding VPs. Ever notice how Goldman Sachs has 10,000 VPs? It’s their way of keeping top talent.
• You must manage people now. In most (though not all) companies, there is a limit to how much you can make as an individual contributor. As a result, you must not only be good at your job, you must be good at helping other people be good at their job. It's a skill that surely no one ever trained you on yet is paramount to your future success. The reason we have 10,000 management books is because it’s the currency of modern career advancement in knowledge work — and few have ever received formal education about it. This is likely harder to master than whatever talent got you to your current station. It’s like starting college all over again just when you think you’ve graduated, and some people don’t have that in them.
• There are many more variables as you advance. Getting closer to the C-suite is like wading in a river and getting closer to a waterfall: going your own way requires more resistance and work, and if you do nothing, the waterfall will consume you. Consider that Harvard Business Review estimates that with every new executive position, enough additional work is created to employ 3.2 other people.
  

You are less in control of your time as you advance up the corporate ladder because some very powerful people can always swoop in and command your resources. And, because the stakes are so high and so many people are willing to slide into your role, you often have to listen to them. You paradoxically have more authority but less power. You can easily spend 50 hours a week just responding to priorities of senior executives before you ever lend a thought to your own objectives and career growth. This is how people wake up after 25 years of ladder climbing and have the haunting realization that they didn’t accomplish anything they sought to do.

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To overcome all of the above it will take a more focused and singular approach. You will likely need to orient your life around your performance at your job. And most everything not related to your career will have to be in service of keeping you energized for work. If you pull it off the rewards are massive and the security may span from your generation to your children’s. Is it worth it?

The right choice

I want to be clear: there is no “ideal” choice here. The beauty of life is that you get to choose your own adventure.

You can choose to focus on your career. At that level, candidly, it will require support from your significant other, understanding from your family, and may affect your health.  You may also need to make so much money that you can afford to support aspects of your domestic life via child care, personal trainers, elderly care, and other support. Do this on purpose, because you are in a zero-sum competition with people who are willfully sacrificing and find great joy in having a singular focus.

You can choose to focus on something else. Your source of novelty and fulfillment will come from friends, family, and other pursuits (David Brooks calls this The Second Mountain). Depending on your industry, you could be doing (close to) the same job functions for a decade or more. A pursuit of rewards needs to be replaced with the patience of craftsmanship. You will watch some peers “pass” you when it comes to money, power, and status — especially on social media.

There is no ideal choice but there is a “wrong” choice: Not choosing at all. The destructive thing to do is to limp along, zombie-like, banging your head against an invisible career ceiling, never fully committing. You will find yourself judging your self-worth by your career accomplishments but not actively exploring the changing dynamics of your career as you advance. You will spin in circles and be not be adapt at servicing your career or friends or family or health.

The only mistake is trying to have all of your burners turned on, but only at half power while your mental image of yourself is one of a high achiever, yet you know in your soul you’re not making progress. This is to bear the downsides of both options with none of the upsides.

This phase of your life requires making a decision, accepting the sacrifices of that decision, and enjoying the pursuit of whatever you decide. Because you chose it. Because you couldn’t ever imagine choosing anything else.

And that needs to be enough.

In honor of Bandcamp waiving their feeds for indie artists and motivated by my friend Tom Critchlow, I’d like to recommend two artists that stopped me in my tracks the moment I heard them: Sierra Ferrell and Casper Allen.

I have a few hobbies that exist in what I’ll call the “epistemological sweet spot”: I know enough to identify what I enjoy, but not so much that I’m no longer pleasantly surprised. For example, I know I like red wine from South America, but I have no grasp of the best years, brands, and vineyards. I just know whenever I pick up a few bottles at the liquor store I will be pleasantly surprised—and that’s enough for me. It’s one of those private joys I’m sure we all have.

Musically, “epistemological sweet spot” is blues and folk music. I have a stack of vinyl records I add to as I discover new classic and modern artists. But it’s a joy that’s purely personal, I have no desire to be an expert or to discuss it anywhere other than in my living room nodding along to some Son House.

I attended the Americana Festival in Nashville this year and as my friend and Matt and I bounced from venue to venue, there were two artists that I continue to think about. The kind of musical performances that make your heart ache because you realize there is so much god damn talent out in the world that you will never get to see no matter how much you search.

Sierra Ferrell

I was at a Nashville City Winery when I heard Sierra Ferrell. She was an opening act for another artist. Normally you’d have a crowd of people half-listening while the audience grabs a beer and prepares for the main act. Thirty seconds into Sierra Ferrell nobody was moving or speaking, all eyes were on stage. The tension built with each song until the finale in which the now-packed venue erupted into applause. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Casper Allen

Casper Allen is the reincarnation of the aforementioned Son House. A gravelly, grief-stricken voice that belongs in a prison chain gain. I saw Casper in an attic with 15 other people where he ended the show with “Grinnin’ in your face.” One of my life’s wishes is that he releases a full-length LP. For now, enjoy his Bandcamp and this performance on GemsOnVHS:

I hope you enjoy these two as much as I do!

Pilcrow House is an event series that aims to foster candid conversation over some delicious food.

At least, that’s what it is today. A year in, Allison and I are still figuring it out.

Since the first Pilcrow House event with Adobe executive and author Scott Belsky in November 2018, Pilcrow House events have existed with different positioning, event types, and pricing on a quest to build a new Philadelphia institution. One that attracts the ambitious and the curious — while making some of the top authors and intellectuals more accessible to Philadelphia.

Pilcrow is a side project, one we want to build slowly and thoughtfully. As a result, we’ve tried some things and have learned some lessons. I presented these lessons to Klein Camp here in Philadelphia on November 16th, 2019. What follows is a mix of what I presented, and some bonus extra lessons (And be sure to subscribe to the Pilcrow House newsletter for event updates!):

It’s about the people, stupid

One day, we hope that Pilcrow House has a physical location where attendees and community members can gather for intellectually stimulating events and conversation. The ambitious and aggressive thing to do would be to immediately acquire a space, begin programming events and workshops, and then hope the people come.

Failing fast works if your goal is to quickly find the idea that scales the fastest. But that’s not what Pilcrow House is or ever will be. Before all, Pilcrow House needs to be a gathering place. And that doesn’t happen overnight.

Here, I’m thankful for the lessons shared by Indy Hall, Blue Stoop, and others in this city. Both are thriving communities, and both started by getting the community and content right before ever thinking of renting a space. They started by thinking of the people.

Pilcrow House has welcomed CEOs and interns. People from Center City and from two states away. College students and retirees. This season we sold our first “season tickets.” Creating something that lasts isn’t about programming, content, physical space, or even food. It’s about the people.

Events are about expectations

Even the simplest event has a high number of variables. One of the many career lessons I learned from Jocelyn Glei was the importance of setting expectations. Your goal when planning an event is to remove as much uncertainty as possible for all parties. This applies to everyone: the speakers, the guests, the sponsors, and the venue.

Some simple examples:

• Speakers – As a speaker at other events, it can be daunting to have to share ideas with an audience you don’t know, in a space you are not familiar with. As an event host, it is our job to remove any barrier to the speaker feeling at ease. That includes: What the space will look and feel like, what they should wear, exactly when they should show up, what kind of person is expected to attend, will it be recorded?, where will promo appear?, should they come with a full or empty stomach?, what kinds of questions will be asked from guests and hosts?, and much much more.
• Attendees – Will there be food served? What kind? What are your allergies? When is the exact time they will be expected to arrive? When can they leave? What context or info should they read about the speaker to get the most out of the event? Will you be allowed to tweet? Take photos? How will the event feel? What should you expect to get out of the dinner?
• Venue – How many people will be there? What is the seating arrangement? How should the host greet our attendees? Where will they send them? Do they accompany guests to the table? Should they hand them a drink right away? What music are we playing? Is the lighting bright or dim?
• Sponsors – We haven’t had these yet. But if you’re interested, email me!

In each case we try to communicate the expectations in a single email on a new thread, giving each party a single reference (and for venues, a single source of truth for us to reference if something is not quite right when we arrive).

Get the mission and messaging right

I’ve had coffee or drinks with many Pilcrow attendees and eventually, the question is asked, “So, what’s the plan for this thing?” If I’m being honest, we don’t have the best answer. Not yet. But we’re getting there.

We know we want to have a dedicated space. We want to foster candid conversation. We know we want Pilcrow to be of Philadelphia. We know we want to connect our attendees. We want this to feel fun and not contrived. There’s room to improve for us on all of these, for sure, I’ve changed our tagline at least four times.

Pilcrow House speaker #1 Scott Belsky likes to say one should be, “mission-center and medium agnostic.” We’re still exploring the right way to communicate and listen for the right mission and values. That’s part of the fun, but it’s something we need to get right before growing into a space.

Use your assets

When Pilcrow House began we hosted “on-stage” interviews with notable thinkers. While we will return to this structure soon, something about that felt off as the foundational event. It felt expected. As curious people that live in a major city, Pilcrow House attendees could attend an event every night if they wanted. That means we can’t just be the same, but better. We need to be different and better. So we took stock of our assets:

• Location: Philadelphia is smack in the middle of the Northeast corridor, which means anyone on any sort of promotion tour in the eastern timezone will likely pass through (or over) Philadelphia. Advantage: We can piggyback on existing travel to lure top-shelf speakers here for a lower cost.
• Speakers are tired of the same event structure: Many authors and intellectuals are on a “circuit” of lectures, or conference talks to cavernous hotel ballrooms to uncertain audiences of larger brands. They can all blend together and it can feel as if the speaker is performing rather than connecting. I knew from my time organizing other conferences that the speaker dinners were often the speaker’s favorite part. Advantage: Only do the fun part. We’ve been able to attract great speakers by offering something intimate.
• Philadelphia’s restaurant scene. We’re a top five American food city with more restaurants per capita than every other city save Boston. The city is also home to a number of very successful but accessible restaurant groups. Advantage: we’ve begun to develop relationships with local groups to utilize their best private tables and host a truly unique event.
• Scaling: Many events are an extension of another brand and are created for business reasons, rather than community or creative reasons. This is okay and often needed. But sometimes, the event is an extension of a brand rather than being the reason the brand exists. Advantage: Pilcrow, for now, is a labor of love. We can play the long game and explore and be a bit more high-touch.

What’s next?

Our final Pilcrow House dinner of Season Two is Wednesday, December 11th (learn more and snag a reservation here).

After that, Allison and I will begin work on Season Three, which will feature new (and possibly experimental) event types. If you’re interested in attending, learning more, or have feedback/advice, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line or subscribe to Pilcrow’s email list to get a heads up when new events are announced.

As of this writing, there are more than 1,000 content marketing positions on AngelList.

It’s not only startups. A recent Axios story highlights how Netflix, Airbnb, Blackrock, Robinhood, Stripe and other large orgs are launching new content ventures. In 2019, it’s more realistic than ever to start and grow one’s career entirely in the content marketing space.

The path to making six figures in sales, design, or product roles is well worn. But content marketing is entering its awkward adolescence. Advice for mid-career content practitioners here is hard to come by. As a result, I’ve noticed a growing class of people who are hitting a career ceiling.

As I enter year 10 in this space, I’ve had several “a-ha!” moments that I’ve witnessed in my career and in the careers of others. What follows is some big-picture learnings that I’ve seen “unlock” another level of a content marketer’s career.

Don’t get sucked into a “content writer” downward slope

From venture capitalist Om Malik:

You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.

When you think of yourself as someone who “writes content” you are allowing the very people who want to put downward pressure on your wages commoditize what you do. This isn’t only bad for you, it’s bad for them (they just don’t know it).

You can call yourself a “Content Marketer” or have that phrase in your job title. But in your mind, you must know the difference. You write articles, curate emails, and record podcasts that serve a community. You don’t “make content.”

You need to be playing on a higher plane. And that starts with understanding the business you’re in. You’re not just filling empty boxes with content. You’re contributing to the business. Many mid-career folks have told me that when they were able to prove their direct impact on the business, they were able to ask for more resources. And that includes salary.

To truly increase your value, you need to understand what drives the company’s long-term growth and focus maniacally on that. This means elevating your mental frameworks from tactics (i.e. “I must publish three articles a week”) to strategy (i.e. “I must find a way to help our events team sell more tickets”). And it means structuring the content operation to lead to outcomes (i.e. “webinar signups”) and not outputs (i.e. “publishing 10 tweets a day”).

All content jobs are not created equal, get specific

All of the apps and websites you enjoy follow similar structures at various parts of their growth and people build very successful careers by being awesome helping with a very particular part of this journey. The organic traffic expert for startup marketing teams is a thing. So is the marketer that understands email funnels for large B2B Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.

To the inexperienced eye, all of these content jobs appear to be the same role requiring the same skillset. They aren’t. And they don’t. Each company is different, each readership has its own quirks, and the ideal conversion changes with each job.

Whatever company you are applying to, you need to understand where they are in the startup journey. You need to understand the game they are playing so you can help them win. And then you need to know how your strengths fit in. Some questions to answer:

• Audience: Are they B2B (targeted) or B2C (broad)? What are the job titles of their ideal customer? What are the hot button issues within the community of customers?
• Maturity: Do they have product/market fit? Or are they still experimenting?
• Business model: Are they “self serve” or do sales require more hand-holding? Do they know their main “levers”? (i.e. Does more traffic equal more signups?)
• Marketing funnel mechanics: Do they need content for their existing customers? Or just for potential customers? Or both?
• Distribution: What channels align with the business and audience? Social? Events? Audio? Video? Organic? Guest posts? Email? Private Slack groups?

A massive company will require just as much consensus building as actual creative production. A startup with product market fit likely only cares about a handful of specific metics. Know what the needs of the business are before you ever walk in the room for an interview.

If your leadership team is trying to sell more into existing organizations, that’s a different content strategy than, say, a brand new consumer SaaS company that is still feeling out its product features and messaging. The better you can align with the needs of the business, the more you resources you can command.

Respect the moat

Most digital product companies (i.e. companies that make things that cost money on the internet) are within one or two standard deviations of one another. For digital products, any breakthrough feature becomes commoditized quickly.

Oftentimes what appears to be a brand-new feature is actually a user interface change or simple back-end functionality. That’s why you can take a tutorial and make a new Twitter in a matter of hours. Or how Snapchat can pioneer the “story” and then immediately lose their advantage after it was stolen by Facebook.

(Yes, this is always true in any business, but the digital world makes this cycle much faster and frantic.)

I can copy your software “features” in a few days. In a hyper-competitive business where the gravity pulls the products down to commoditization, the only advantages in this marketplace (the “moats”) are audience, community, and brand.

Getting content right matters more than ever. Editorial is the life blood of this new way of operating. It provides the backbone of what every non-commodity brand is based on. It gives the advantage of a network effect to businesses that would not otherwise have it. If you prove you are building this moat (one way you know: your sales team closes deals because of great events/blog posts, etc.) you can advocate for more.

Define your category

If you are a “knowledge worker”, stop and think about the tools you use every day. If you’re a designer, you use Adobe, InVision, and Figma products. This is the design “category.” If you’re an email marketer, maybe you use MailChimp or Hubspot. This is the email marketing “category.”

Every job title has a standard bundle of products that its workers use, subscribe to, and pay for. Once an industry standard is agreed upon and solidified, it takes a few years to change the landscape.

As a result, when there is a new industry or job title, there’s a mad dash to create software for that industry and create a new “category” of tools and techniques. This leads to maps like this:

Those companies need to continually remind you of of their value. Otherwise, you’ll go through the pain of changing your workflow, unsubscribing, and joining the competition. They also need to entrench themselves into large companies where the monthly revenue is high and the risk of churn is low. But when most digital products are rapidly copying each other the mental hurdle of learning a new tool gets easier to bear.

If you can convince, say, Walmart to use your SaaS product that can mean seven figures for one sale. But that also means that one person at Walmart can decide your tool is obsolete and demand everyone switch.

With so much at stake, the marketing has to change. Customers paying a monthly fee for a service all have similar needs. They face similar problems and could probably benefit from meeting and interacting with one another. Sound familiar? Customers of subscription products are communities.

This community would exist without your brand (key observation!) but they are brought together in a more streamlined way because your brand exists. Editorial is the fuel which keeps that community engaged.

This is why Salesforce has Dreamforce. And there are conferences, guides, and products built around something like YouTube. These are community brought together by a product and kept there with editorial. I am less likely to cancel your product if I use it as a conduit to meet other people in my professional community.

Content is the long-term play that helps savvy companies capture these winner-take-all categories. In many cases, editorial work can insulate the product team from the fluctuations in the market. When you prove your work advances this strategy, you can command more resources.

Have a point of view

In April 2019, Mark Zuckerberg stood up at F8, the Facebook developer’s conference and declared that “the future is private.” Let’s put aside the idea that the wolf will guard the hen house, Mark was on to something. Users are increasingly leaving the free-flowing open information market and turning to private groups, sub-communities, and curated spaces.

The social media web of 2010-2015ish was more of a Pangea, but we’re increasingly becoming an archipelago. It’s the reason conspiracy theories can fester unchecked. It’s also the reason it’s extremely difficult to market digital products to a broad audience.

To an old-school marketer, this is a frustrating development, one that renders many of the previous tactics ineffective. To a new generation though, it’s enabling the convergence of advocacy and commerce. Companies with a point of view do it because it enables them to target and own a very specific island in the archipelago.

It’s better to make a small group obsessed with your work than a large group passively engaged. Just ask newspapers and network television. This is doubly true in the B2B world where 1,000 customers are enough to build a healthy business.

Again, this trend favors editorial work. Most online customers get their information because a member of a community they belong to shares it. Those members need something to share. There needs to be an artifact which carries a company’s point of view alongside with it.

First Round Capital’s point of view is that founding and growing a startup is hard and sometimes lonely. And their community and experience makes them a better investor for early stage startups than most others. So they target and serve that community with First Round Review. Zapier thinks the web should be open and customizable. So they target that community with useful tutorials one connecting apps and services. Notion believes non-developers should own their own tools. So they educate the world on computer science pioneers and concepts with their video series Tools and Craft.

Editorial exists as videos, podcasts, or articles and it has a passport to every island in the archipelago that wants it. A link is universal. It can be emailed, Slack’d, chatted, or texted. It can be pasted in a forum and included seamlessly into the means in which people interact online in 2019. Those links need to say something. They need to put forward a belief. They need to be editorial.

Your role might be helping your company find its point of view. That’s okay. But be sure to let everyone know internally the value of doing so. And when you hit on the right messaging, you can make the case for more.

Internalize any winner-take-all stakes

When it comes to online products, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are happy to take 1% of any given market. They keep things lean, and they probably go to Chiang Mai once a year or something.

These people are fun to follow on Instagram, but are never hiring you. A lifestyle business only supports the owner’s lifestyle. For the rest of us, it’s a hard ceiling on growth.

For the companies gunning for number one, it’s a bloodbath. Venture capital money flows freely so companies can operate at great loses in order to starve competition. Competitors (and new communities) are purchased to shore up the flanks. The war for top-level talent is ruthless with six-figure signing bonuses happening at the absolute highest levels. There’s an entire class of non-founders with highly specialized skills that float from start-up to start-up, taking lots of money (and occasionally, stock options!) off the table. Most of them live in Brooklyn and NoMa. This is hard for founders, but good for you.

The winner-take-all mindset of top companies means there are an ever-increasing number of “ins” for a potential customer/community member. A company like video hosting platform Wistia needs to be in every Google search, every media hit, every tiny podcast, every community event, every YouTube channel, ever influencer account as much as possible to demonstrate the good they do for their current and future customers.

The metabolism of this kind of marketing is extremely quick and resembles that of an old-school newsroom or a creative agency. No matter the target market, companies that are gunning for the fat part of the long tail need to win the content wars in a blowout to succeed. And to do that, they need experienced producers, editors, and writers.

That’s you.

How to find your next gig

Today’s business climate is demanding:

• Products that serve communities
• Products that have a point of view
• Highly specialized workers for each phase of a business’ growth

With this environment, the demand for workers that can win the content war in their industry has skyrocketed. But the supply of qualified workers has not. I know because I spend many of my working hours looking for people with the right mix of writing chops and market savvy. And that’s why I’m writing this essay.

The modern “content” person needs a collection of skills that, historically, aren’t in the same industry. You need to be able to write and edit. You need to be able to work the internal politics it requires to throw your body in front of underwhelming creative work. You need to know what the customers of the business are thinking before they do. You need to know how acquisition channels work. You need to know how marketing funnels work. You need to build something for the long term while registering enough wins in the short term. You need to pivot tactics as a startup grows into a regular ol’ business. You need to be able to find and cultivate creative talent. And you need to do it all in a way that isn’t tremendously…scientific.

(And if this sounds like you, I hope you reach out to me and say hello!)

If you ignore the complex nature of this job and just put your head down and “churn out some content” you’re doing yourself and your career a disservice. You’re in a unique field in which the demand for experienced and strategic thinkers is outpacing the supply.

Don’t waste this opportunity.

This won’t be like every other blog post about travel.

Your narrator won’t be casually doing something awesome when suddenly there is a life-changing revelation. That’s not how life actually works.

This, instead, is an essay about something harder than sitting on a beach and Instagramming about it. This is about blowing your life up, analyzing each piece, and then putting it back together again.

It’s about leaving your life behind, yes, but intending to come back to it after some time away. This is a post about sabbaticals and how they are becoming a linchpin of the wandering career path for those privileged enough to be able to take them.

The sabbatical, typically the realm of academics and over-worked executives, is becoming mainstream. Or it least, it’s becoming easier and a more realistic possibility.

Episodic careers, nomad-friendly jobs, an increasingly accessible travel infrastructure, and the lack of loyalty incentives for knowledge workers has made the long-term career break increasingly common. Companies like Automattic, Adobe, and McDonalds even offer a month-long sabbatical to longtime employees. So if you’re daydreaming about packing your bags and heading anywhere to reflect and recharge:

You’re not alone. And you’re not crazy. And it is possible. But it’s hard.

The sabbatical differs from a “vacation” or “time off.” It has a goal. One who takes a sabbatical is doing to so work on … something. Sometimes it’s a company or a book. But in most cases, the sabbatical is taken to work on the very person taking the sabbatical. It’s a turn inward and a chance to do some mental accounting.

Kill me.

Despite sabbaticals becoming more common (and needed) those that embark upon them typically have to figure out how to best use their time on their own. Or worse, wade into the scammy content cesspool that is the travel blogosphere / travel vlogger community.

The best serious sabbatical takers have is to pack a copy of Vagabonding, or a stack of business books, and to hope the free time jiggles loose some hidden insight.

We can do better. And this is my attempt to help.

For this blog post, I spoke to a handful of people who embarked on their own sabbatical with one question in mind: How can we make the most of this career break? How can we come back to “normal” life recalibrated and renewed? What would you tell someone doing this for the first time?

Consider this a cheat sheet. And the start of a conversation. (If you’d like to stay updated as I continue to explore this topic, sign up for my newsletter.)

I write this not to tell you about where to go or what to do. But how to think about your own version with some guidelines. A sabbatical is a personal journey, and is fraught with all of the unique attributes of your own life and ambition. There is no recipe. But there may be a framework. And this is the list I wish I had for my own version of this.

Insight #1: You are creating a new map.

When it comes to the reflection required for a successful sabbatical, many people I spoke with used the metaphor of adding nodes to their network or ingredients to their kitchen. Here let’s try it: Think of the elements in your life like a Chipotle menu. The beans are your job. The tortilla is your house. The rice is your hobby. The emoji person is you.

Right now, maybe your life is like a nice burrito. Your job and house and friends all fit together just so. And it’s pretty great. But eventually you realize a burrito is maybe not the best way to arrange your tortilla, cheese, beans, rice. So you combine it into other things. Hey, remove the rice (your hobby) and you have a taco (and a new weekly schedule)!

Melt the cheese on the tortilla and you have a quesadilla!

But alas you realize, your life is only the same set of ingredients. There’s a whole wide world out there and you’re ready for something a new (especially after seeing some friends try some new dishes). You need to change the elements that make up your life. So you walk out of the Chipotle.

Whoa, there’s an entire strip mall of options! You can get pizza. Or Chinese. Why didn’t anyone tell me I could make things with pepperoni? Or hey, you can even combine items from a grocery store with the Chipotle and, oh man, you created an entirely new dish you (or your parents, or your coworkers) never would have dreamed of.

A sabbatical is the act of finding more ingredients for your life. Of stepping outside your own mental Chipotle confines and seeing what else you could be eating for lunch. Of hoping to find your own personal Doritos Locos Taco. Sometimes that’s additive (“What happens if I were to start working out more?”). Sometimes it’s subtractive (“You know what, I actually don’t even like the industry I’m in!”).

On your sabbatical, you aren’t quite sure what’s out there or what you could even make. But you know that new ingredients and new restaurants enable to you maybe create some different dishes. That means trying some new dishes — which means doing things you wouldn’t normally, going places you’d never go, and talking to people you wouldn’t normally talk to.

This is why there can be no linear “path” or “progress” in the way we normally think of things (you hear that, you Type-A’s out there?). There is no direction. There is only discovery. Especially at first.

“It was the psychological equivalent of shock and awe. It took a couple months for me to feel like I had enough mental space to ask myself questions like, ‘Is this the career I want? Is my life heading in a direction that makes sense? How many of my goals are actually intrinsic and how many of them are the result of external social norms?’ It’s hard to evaluate your own life on first principles if you’re always caught up in the day-to-day.” — Eliot Peper

Insight #2: Be ready for “the thrash”

To go on a sabbatical is to peel away layers of your identity. Think of things you spent most of your waking hours on…

These are your routines, your work, many of your friends, your local city — they will all be gone.

And when you do that, all you are left with is… you.

You’ll realize how much of your self confidence came from work or the gym. You’ll see how much the way you view your self comes from the fact that you’re a “designer” or a “churchgoer” or a “weekly Sunday brunch host.”

The fact that you are able to take a sabbatical means you have enough money and are good enough at something to give you a bit of an ego. But for this trip, that person who is “good at something” is no longer you. It’s just part of you. And you’ll have to let that part go (for now). And it will feel like starting from scratch. And it will feel like you’re giving up all the “progress” you’ve made.

You’ll see how much of your identity wasn’t really you but your friends or your political leanings. It may scare you. You’ll be forced to stare into your own internal abyss. The good news? That’s the point. By searching deeply, you’ll see some hidden motivations and desires. And that’s how you can begin to chart a new path, true to your internal self. That’s how you get more ingredients for your recipe. But it requires turning over some rocks and being okay with the absence of identity. It’s like being stuck in a waiting room with no magazine and no cell phone. It’s just you in there.

Nearly everyone I spoke to had some version of this hit them after the thrill of novelty wore off. Unfortunately, going through “the thrash” can take some time:

“By month three. I thought, ‘Okay, this is empty, I need to be productive in some way. And then I was talking to a friend of mine … and she says, ‘oh no, no, four months is when you just start to awake. You’re just starting to get rid of all of the bullshit and the anxiety that’s residual from the previous thing you were doing. You’re just starting to wrap your head around your new state placing the new dots. We’re going let them connect later on.’ And to me, that’s what growth feels like.” — Elena Manho

Insight #3: Release your “curiosity constipation”

Pre-sabbatical, you probably had a constellation of half-interests, possible business ideas, and curiosities. Tina Roth Eisenberg, founder of Tattly and Creative Mornings, once said “I have a rule: If I keep complaining about something, I either do something about it or let it go.”

The sabbatical is the time to do something about all of the loose ideas you have in your head. What is typically seen as burnout or aimlessness is often just the back up of possibility in your own mind. So tackle your ideas head on, dance with them, and be prepared to quickly dismiss them.

Doing so creates room for new ideas and removes previous hangups. My personal example: I had long been obsessed with automation as a threat to “modern” careers. I toyed with starting a website preparing people who were also obsessed with this. A sort of “career bomb shelter” where people would learn to survive the coming cataclysm together.

During my break, I read several books about the pending robot revolution as well as analyzing the predictions of past generations. I spoke with people who agreed and disagreed with me via Skype. This process forced me to confront if I was really interested in such a thing, and if I was willing to dedicate a large portion of my professional life to this idea. I ultimately decided “no” (being the career equivalent of a Doomsday Prepper didn’t sound fun).

But it wasn’t a loss. I tried not to feel “stalled.” (Remember, this process is not linear. It is an exploration). The freedom from removing the idea from my daydreams was incredibly liberating and allowed me to tackle other items. And the people I met while exploring that idea became my friends and future collaborators.

“I worked on my first novel during the trip, but it was a passion project, not a source of income.” — Eliot Peper, who now is on book six and was just featured in the New York Times.

Insight #4: You may have the instinct to plan this like a vacation. Don’t do that.

Chances are, when you’ve traveled in the past it was for a vacation: a finite period time designed to maximize your exposure to a certain place. And in that framework, the idea of returning home without experiencing X or Y would be devastating. The concept of traveling somewhere just to sit around (and doing something you could be doing at home) may give you shudders, sure. But a sabbatical can’t just be a longer vacation.

Your brain needs empty thoughts and moments to connect the dots and work out the new information you are introducing it to. Your mental cupboard needs to clear space on the shelves for more life ingredients. Imagine your brain as a shelf. And it’s pretty full. This was fun for a while, but you’re feeling cluttered, frazzled, and you get the sinking feeling you don’t need all of this stuff.

Instead, consider that you are just living your life, but over there. You need to take some things off the shelf and test putting new things in there. And If you spent every waking moment at home visiting museums, eating out, and taking tours people would think you were insane and you would be too exhausted to do anything else.

Every place you visit will give you a different energy. It will help you see your shelf in different ways. And if you don’t sit and internalize that, you might as well be on your couch.

“Your brain is working without you necessarily realizing it. You need the rest and you need the leisure and you need to give yourself the chance to feel lazy. I needed to know that, as a justification that the path I was trying out of just letting things be was worthwhile.” — Elena Mahno

Insight #5: You won’t do this alone. Much of your progress will come through people.

I used to have a strong belief that if I just sat in a cabin in the woods for a few weeks I’d make great progress on whatever project was on my mind. That all of this distraction was holding me up. And if I just had some peace and quiet and get my best work done. That was a lie I was telling myself.

Most of the people I spoke with talked about reaching out to friends and friends of friends with what they were thinking about and interested in. They then set up coffee meetings, Skype calls, and email threads with those people. And those people open up pathways to things you won’t consider on your own.

For example, you musing about a future career in real estate can lead directly to you talking to veterans of the industry (who are happier than you’d think to answer all the questions you have). Or if you’re thinking of finally shooting that short film, you can use the time to get connected to people who’ve seen 100 of them. Or who are in the middle of making them. Or can highlight the industry standard reading list for you to a develop common language to discuss your ideas. Remember: The goal is to get more ingredients for your recipe. And to do that you have to listen to what other people are also seeing.

“And it always starts with reading, reading, reading, reading. Then it’s let’s look up this and this and this and this. … Then I am literally Googling things. And then I’m reaching out to people asking, ‘Hey, do you know anybody who does this? Can I talk to them?’ Now have more information than just my own perception.” — Elena Mahno

Insight #6: The distance from your “normal life” will make you realize what you miss and what you don’t.

In the best seller The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up author Marie Kondo has an unorthodox approach to cleansing your home of clutter: Go room by room and remove everything. Take every piece of clothing out of the closet. Dump out every drawer. And assess it one at a time. So let’s try that.

Pretend all the important elements in your life are “items” in a pile. If you’re a crazy person like me you may take to writing them down.

Oh wow. I have so many things in my life to sort through. This will be tough.

Place all items on the metaphorical floor. Then go item by item, hold it in your mind’s eye, and decide if the item still “sparks joy.” If yes, keep. If no, “Thank it for its service” and discard. A silly but powerful premise.

By removing all your items from their context and viewing them critically, even for just a moment, you are forced to decide their value to you.

Do I really need to own a home to feel like I’m at my best? Does it spark joy?

And ultimately, you’ll be surprised at the items you haven’t seen in years that you totally forgot. Or the items you realize you use only because they are visible to you on a daily basis. And at the end of the process, you are left with only what you need and what makes you happy.

The same phenomenon will happen during your sabbatical. After stepping away, you’ll realize you do, in fact, need to see your grandparents every so often to feel happy. Yes, you actually do miss the TV shows you watch every day back home. Though, now that you think about it, your identity as someone who loves ice cream wasn’t because you actually enjoyed it. But because it was a habit.

This is uncomfortable and will force you to discard parts of your life that were previously “just part of who you were.” Let these things go and see how it feels. You can always pick them back up again.

“Last night, I wrote at least 25 different tag lines for my Linkedin and couldn’t decide on one. So I just decided, I’m just going to change it every two weeks. People will come across my profile and sometimes they’ll say, ‘oh yeah, this makes sense!’ While others, ‘I have no fucking idea what she does. It does not make any sense.’ That’s part of the reflection.” — Elena Manho

“You need to go back to being a student of life and ask ‘What do you want?’ I actually had to focus back on me, and stop following other people’s expectations. I think, for a while there, I lost the originality of what I was doing. I clearly didn’t feel like it was me anymore and I was a bit tired.” — Natalie Sisson

Insight #7: When you come back, you’ll need a narrative.

Like a good book, what you learned during the sabbatical will continue to reveal itself for years. The learning from that just doesn’t stop the moment you get back. But you’ll need to determine some milestones that occurred.

People will ask you “how was it?” And while some people returning from a trip may find that annoying, it’s really a chance to hone the story of your time away (and show them your Instagram). It also constantly forces you to reexamine what you learned or how it changed you. It is only in this moment that your sabbatical will feel like a process with start and an end. Lean into this and play around with how different takeaways sound.

The act of explaining what you did over and over again will force you to reckon with all of the things you learned and observed and how they fit into your (new) day-to-day life.

“I eventually wound up describing it as a ‘room to maneuver.’ As in, ‘I’m just taking some time getting some room to maneuver and figure out what’s going to come next’ … basically I just tried a bunch of things on for size” — Hugh Redford

Insight #8: Lastly, every single person I spoke to would do it again:

The sabbatical isn’t a cure-all. You’re still you, just over there and then back. But it does force you to prioritize and focus. And that clarity can be messy in the short term, but it leads to some long term gains. And everyone I spoke to agreed it was the best move they could have made.

“At first, we were terrified that taking a sabbatical would be career suicide. But within two weeks of getting back, I had two job offers and a publishing deal for my novel. Within six weeks, my wife had an offer from a company she was really excited about. We were like, ‘Oh my god, this is the best thing we’ve ever done for our careers.’”— Eliot Peper

For some reason, when my brother told me our dad was dead, I immediately went and listened to my voicemails. He left me silly voicemails often and I wanted to hear his voice.

I came across the last voicemail he ever left me, a month before. This one wasn’t silly. It was the one he left me when he confessed he doesn’t want to see me ever again. I can’t bring myself to listen to it again. But if I scroll back far enough I have the message he left me after I got engaged. He was positively giddy and I smile just thinking about it.

A lot happened in between those two voicemails.

My dad was a wonderful father. He also suffered from the disease of addiction. I wasn’t aware of this for most of my youth and if I’m being honest, I’ll never quite square these two versions of him. It’s like he had an alter ego that his old friends knew well but I only saw the aftereffects of: A divorce or a bankruptcy or a job that didn’t work out. But later in his life, I became more familiar with that alterego.

So when my phone rang last August at 4 a.m., I knew what it was about. My dad was dead at the age of 54.

***

Up until that moment, whenever I’d see friends suffer the loss of a family member, some pre-planned mechanism would spin into place. The last wishes of the deceased were obvious. They had set aside money. Or at least mentioned what they wanted to have happen next. Those friends were then free to grieve a terrible loss.

My dad had no living will. No life insurance. He wasn’t married. He owed more money than he had to his name. We eventually learned his house was in the foreclosure process (shoutout to the lawyers that continue to try and bully my brothers and I into paying). There was no “estate.” I wasn’t even thinking of asking him about his plans for such a thing. I was hoping he still had decades left.

And in those hours after someone dies unexpectedly, you stop thinking rationally. You just hone in on one tiny detail like you’re on a high ledge and you can’t look down. I became desperate to find some note, or message. Something that told me what he was up to for his last few months when we weren’t speaking. Something that explained his internal tug of war, these two sides.

I knew I had to start coming to grips with the fact I might never know more about him (and his wishes) then I did at his passing. There were two versions of him, and I only really knew one of them. I knew the one that would make sure I took my school work seriously. The one that taught me how to stand up for myself physically and intellectually. The one that never missed a soccer game. It was the version I didn’t know until very late in my life, his alter ego, that killed him.

The day after he died, my two brothers and I went from room to room opening drawers and turning over furniture. Maybe there was something on his computer? His phone?

That’s when, rummaging through boxes in the basement, we found his journal. I opened it and cried. He wrote on the inside cover “Upon my death this book is property of [my sons], I ask you all to read this and protect it and keep it with the family treasures.” It was a discovery that, if I saw it in a movie, I’d roll my eyes and change the channel. But 48 hours after he died, he threw us a life raft.

The journal is a window to my dad’s inner workings. He kept that journal for four years writing on and off in both times of darkness and moments of clarity. The handwriting goes from illegible scribbles and back again often.

It was a window into the mind of a loving father. It was a look into the fraught thought process of a deeply analytical man. A religious man who knew he was sinning. An addict who was self-aware, and still couldn’t pull himself out from the abyss. It was Jekyll talking to Hyde. Bruce Banner talking to the Hulk. And, in honor of my dad I feel I must also include: It’s Data talking to Lore.

Flipping through the journal I arrived on one page where he wrote a note to my wife after meeting her for the first time when we were dating.

“Tonight, I had one of the most wonderful days of my life,” he wrote. “I met Sean’s #1 love.” He then asked her to take care of me. “I can’t be there anymore, but you can.” And he even drew a picture of all of us as a new, bigger family. It’s one of a few times in the journal it became heartbreakingly clear: He knew he was going to die soon—something he never touched on when I spoke to him.

The journal, like the man, is complicated.

The night after my father died, my brother would eventually read it cover to cover in a night. That’s when he found the passage. The one where he said what he wanted us to do if he were to die. And it involved a family tradition we had: going camping in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a remote area in South Jersey best known as being on the way to the Jersey Shore and a place where mobsters supposedly hid their bodies.

His request was for us to revisit our favorite campsite:

“I feel like I may not be around forever so please…go to Hawkins Bridge campsite, spend time together and create a new traditional for each of you and your children. You are each the crown of my life and what God has given me…Your children are nothing more than the memories they spend with you. Please learn from this.”

For the first time since his death I felt some degree of relief. We didn’t have a will. But we had a journal. And we could make sure that our dad would always be with us whenever we followed his instructions.

***

After his funeral, my brothers and arrived at the campsite, still wearing our suits with a box containing my dad’s ashes in the back seat. It was the campsite we had spent so many weekends with our dad. We have boxes of pictures of us all together there. It’s where he taught us how to drive, throw a football, and crack a joke. And now, this time, we came to bury him.

My brothers and I split up, gathered firewood, cleared the fire pit, and then arranged the kindling. And then we sat around the fire and enjoyed each other’s company, just like he taught us.

The weather was beautiful, filling the air with light, warm air. The normally oppressive August sun was filtered by the pines, so soft rays of light dotted the woods. If God asked me to lock Earth’s weather to one day, I’d choose August 30th, 2017. In the previous two years my brothers and I lost our uncle, our grandmother, and our dad. It seemed that after the losing most of our family tree in a three-year span, the Blandas got a tiny break.

My brothers and I didn’t talk much. It was the last bit of closure and it was important we did it correctly.

We walked down the trail to Hawkins Bridge and ambled down to the shore line. We were three grown men in tailored suits, our most expensive shoes, and a box of our old man’s ashes.

Some campers clad in camo gear nearby watched us pass by. We made eye contact but didn’t exchange words.

I took my brother’s pocket knife and opened the box. I tip-toed down to the river bank and slashed the plastic bag containing his white ashes and let them spill into the Batsto River. They took on the consistency of smoke that danced in the cedar river, sprinting under the bridge, and into a ray of sunshine. I like to think it was the peaceful resting place he deserved.

My brother and I then stood on the bridge. We separated. One of us smoked a cigarette. We took our last moments alone with our dad.

My brother pulled out the journal and read a passage from his journal. It was the second part of his request of us. It was the closing paragraphs of what he wanted to happen after his death.

“Teach your children who I may never meet with the Lord inside you. God must be inside you for how could you have lived the life you lived?…God bless you and thank you for making me a better person and a child of God.”

We shared a hug. My younger brother etched my father’s name into the side of the bridge. He lived here now.

Our task was done and we could start to grieve now. And after keeping it together for most of the week I hugged my brother, I suddenly found myself unable to stand and sobbed as he held me up.

***

My dad didn’t have a tidy ending. I won’t. And neither will you. Our lives will not be a slow positive upward slope before we die in our sleep surrounded by our loved ones.

My dad loved us unconditionally. He kept his darker side a secret from us for years. I’m mad at him for that. But I’m glad he did. I saw him the way an oldest son should look up to his father.

I like to think that was my dad’s goal. To show us the full picture he couldn’t when he was alive. To make sure he wouldn’t become some caricature to my brothers and his future grandchildren. It’s through the journal that I realized the internal struggle he was going through. And that sometimes the worst part of ourselves will win. And I’m not sure I could have handled knowing the full extent of that when he was alive.

My brothers and I will hold onto that journal for the rest of our lives. When my future children are old enough, I’ll encourage them to read it cover to cover — they’ll need to meet their grandfather and know where he lives now.

Dad, it’s only after all this that feel like I know who you were. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I miss you and I’ll see you in the Pine Barrens soon.

A year ago I flew to Austin, Texas and started my tenure as the Editor in Chief of the personal finance website I Will Teach You To Be Rich and the entrepreneur community GrowthLab. It’s a fully remote company, one of the properties sounds like a scam, and most of the content is signed by the company’s founder Ramit Sethi.

It’s pretty much the opposite of most media jobs where you write articles in a loft office somewhere trying to drive as much traffic as possible while secretly hoping that your byline makes you internet famous. As someone who checked Twitter three times while writing this, I say that with love.

On the surface, IWT (as we affectionally call the company) is weird. But look under the hood, and I believe we’re laying the ground work for the future of digital publishing. And it’s the reason I joined the team, and it’s something I don’t talk about enough.

1. Direct reader payments. While some publications are just now beginning to try and distance themselves from advertising, our business has always been built on the back of online courses, books, and online information products. So when we help our readers, we stay in business. When we don’t, we suffer.
2. We own our platform. We rely on a combination of our WordPress sites and email newsletters for traffic and sales. Yes we share stuff on social media, but Twitter and Facebook could disappear tomorrow and we wouldn’t notice. Instead, we mostly use social media as a place for our various sub communities to gather (like students of Zero to Launch our course on starting a business).
3. We measurably improve the lives of our readers. Rafat Ali challenges writers and editors to ask themselves: if your publication disappeared would your readers care? I measure my work this way. I’ve spoken to dozens of readers who have had our content and courses dramatically alter their livelihoods. I spoke with one entrepreneur whose business allowed her to quit a toxic workplace. Another whose side project blossomed so she could move out of a poor neighborhood in Eastern Europe. The testimonials we collect are truly magical:

Here’s a snapshot of how my salary has grown over the past 5 years – 2013: $28k, 2014-2015: $42k, 2016: $50k, 2017: $75k, 2018: $102k.

Just signed a $100k Part Time job (30hrs per week, with 4 weeks vacation) with an employer who supports me growing my agency and writing my book!!!

This foundation is the reason I chose to work at IWT, but I realize I haven’t written about what I’m actually working on professionally. So I’d like to offer this as a year in review:

The big picture

We write the best damn free content we possibly can, continue to deliver that value creatively via email, and then open up our courses every few months. There’s no ads, and the size of our audience isn’t as important as the right audience. We’re doing our best to build out our Universe by choosing niches that directly correlate to problems our readers face and I’ve spent most of my time making this process smoother while upping the quality of our content across our two brands:

Internally we refer to our strategy as the “ascension model.” We hope you find us via search, social, or referral and are so in love with what you read you sign up to hear more. We then offer you our course suite throughout the year, starting with our “flagship” course. There are then a collection of smaller, more specific courses.

For example “Zero to Launch” teaches students how to go from no idea to growing online business. Those graduates can then sign up for “Call to Action” which teaches students how to be top-rate copywriters.

Now we’re asking ourselves: how can we add more elements to this that provide value to our readers? And are there other subjects we can tackle in a few years?

1 – Scaling our editorial operation

What started as Ramit Sethi blogging about personal finance in a dorm room has blossomed into a full-fledged business with more than a dozen courses, complex SEO strategies, a handful of writers, and two publications. All of this happened organically and according to the needs of the business.

As with any business in its adolescence, it’s acquired a bit of operational debt of all kinds: editorial, brand, tech. So the entire IWT team is “cleaning up” to set a stable foundation for future aggressiveness.

That includes fixing a tech backend that was built piecemeal and removing vestiges of old content efforts. Editorially, it means putting in the building blocks that every publication needs: A guiding mission, cohesive branding, a regular content schedule, content pillars, and reliable workflows to ensure the things we publish are consistent and of high quality. Some wins here:

• Growing the team. We’ve hired two new writers to bring our editorial department up to six people. Shout out to Copy editor Nasrin Chiappetta, Director of Editorial Ryan Johnson, and staff writers Tony Ho Tran, Katie Parrott, and Stephanie Lee.
• Less sales, more fun, and more fun sales. We’ve dialed back the number of weeks we launch courses to our email list to instead email blog posts and fun one-off emails from each brand. And when we do send marketing emails, they are written hand-in-hand with our “regular” writers. Our readers often like our sales funnels more than some of our “regular” blog posts.

A steady stream of expert contributors. On GrowthLab we ask our students and community to share their insights. The result has been some great writing from those in the trenches. Like this post about being realistic when starting a business. Or this one about how hard it is to change your identity as an entrepreneur. Or more tactical stuff like how to hire an expert copywriter or how to find your business idea on Reddit.

• “Leading with creative.” In the past, much of the blog content existed to support the current sales cycle. Now, each blog is to help us serve readers and advance new ideas in each niche. Changing the “why” behind content has lots of secondary and tertiary effects on its quality.

2 – Laying the ground work to serve more communities

Our mission is to “build no-BS personal development brands that deliver real results.” And personal development can take forms beyond just personal finance and starting a business. But first, we need to build the internal muscles and processes that are required to run a successful publication at scale. So I’m working on things like…

• Attracting a reliable stable of guest contributors to make our brands the home for the best insights in their niche
• Making the reader experience seamless from blog to email to course
• Surfacing reader feedback to other parts of the team so we can build better products, host better events, and more. Speaking of…

3 – Events

My last responsibility is building out GrowthLab’s events arm. More to announce soon, but the events are the most recent step in treating each of our brands like communities and audiences. And every community needs a reunion.

***

If what I wrote above sounds appealing, GrowthLab is currently looking for freelance contributors. Read our contributors guide, and drop me a line!