

How about less blogging and more work on your company? - jaf12duke
http://blog.42floors.com/less-blogging-more-work/#.Ul1iD2RKnCY

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GrinningFool
Good writeup and valid points. I only take issue with one statement:

    
    
        "Hey hotshot.  How about less blogging and more work on your darn company?"
        Oh, trolls.
        They used to really get to me.
    

Seems to me that if you take the time to write an extensive defense of
blogging (and don't get me wrong - it is well written, and chock-full of valid
points), that perhaps yon troll did really get to you after all...

~~~
jaf12duke
They used to really to get to me. Now, they only kind of get to me. More like
a mosquito bite than a bee sting in that it's annoying but not painful.

However, once I looked past the snarkyness of his delivery, I had to admit his
question was valid. And I've now had the conversation with other entrepreneurs
who wonder if they should do more blogging on their startup blog or stick to
product updates. This post is my answer.

~~~
GrinningFool
Fair point. The difference between having been successfully trolled and having
been successfully motivated.

------
benologist
I'm a huge opponent of this form of advertising being pushed down our throats.
Here's some reasons why blogging for HN like this is bad:

\- Your brand and your blog are not representing your company, the traffic
literally doesn't know or care what you do they're just there for the HN porn.

\- If you do a venn diagram of HN users and people who need pretty much
anything there is going to be a tiny, tiny overlap that shouldn't be confused
for your market unless you've failed at all other lead generation and customer
acquisition channels.

\- HN is for discussing interesting things, there's nothing interesting about
being the victim of yours and others on-going attempts to capture a market in
the least efficient way you can imagine.

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kunle
For disclosure - Jason and I were in the same YC batch and I've gone to him
for advice a couple of times. The one thing I'll say about blogging this way,
that perhaps a lot of folks don't appreciate, (particularly the incredibly
candid way that Jason does it), is that it is really hard to be that honest.
It's hard to be that honest with yourself (most people simply aren't, and I
know personally that I spent a long time not being so, and in some cases I'm
that way today) and its several orders of magnitude harder to be that honest
with strangers, in a forum as public as this one.

Insofar as the HN community remains interested in discussing startup related
topics, this personal candor/honesty about when things aren't going well is
completely under-discussed; it happens all the time that things aren't going
well (actually it's what mostly happens) but usually the only times you learn
about it are in a post-mortem or a takedown piece. A founder whose currently
building his company and willing to discuss these things is extremely rare and
valuable to other founders and would-be founders (I on occasion give talks at
my alma-mater and I try very hard to portray the unglamorous side of things.
The audience always appreciates it).

------
lnanek2
Actually, I'd be pretty interested in reading about commercial real estate. I
have been at startups looking for offices before. I've also met startups in
the area, like ones that implement your future building in a game world and
let you walk around inside with a real estate agent. If getting someone to buy
into investing in a new hotel property is worth a lot of money, then even a
small increase in the number of investors is worth quite a lot, so seems like
a good point of pain to get money to attack.

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CraigJPerry
I don't publish anything so i'm conscious of how far off the mark i could be.

I think i would choose not to read any replies, responses or discussions on
something i'd published. I promise the irony of me writing this comment is not
lost on me :-)

Any positive comments are likely too positive and just people wanting you to
feel good - which is very nice of them but ultimately could work against you.

Similarly negative comments are likely too negative to be realistically
worthwhile.

I dare say there's some signal in all the noise but i bet there's more signal
in just surrounding yourself with high quality people day to day.

Ergo, read comments on other peoples submissions and participate in those
discussions instead.

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kumarski
Well done. It always drives traffic.

------
beat
I'm realizing I need to do _more_ blogging.

