I know how hard this can be. I've been doing startup stuff for 7 years. And it's still awfully painful. I'd encourage teaching to find an audience.
I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish.
The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds up. It eventually opens up new doors.
It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.
What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source? Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?
I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.
Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and better at. Forever.
Seven years is a long time. I am pretty on the same timeframe as well. I took a chance to redo everything over and this time with 5 months I have already launched my new product. My HN launch is kinda depressing as it just gave me 6 visits LOL. That traffic graph is my new motivation factor. I love to improve my writing to write blog like you but for now I am sticking to similar goal and that is to release an upgrade to my product every week.
I have to wonder if releasing an upgrade is better than other things. Also you should leave your contact in your profile! My first reaction was to email you, but I have no way to reach you.
I think releasing frequently give me an opportunity to keep user interested. So far it pressured me to keep on adding values. Either way I think it does have possible effect until I burned out :). BTW, I updated my profile so feel free to contact me.
Do you think it's better to blog on your own personal blog, or to blog on the product's blog page?
I figured you'd want SEO on the product's blog page, but on the other hand, if it tanks, or you end up doing something else, you'd want the SEO on your own blog, right?
I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish.
The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply sticking to a schedule of writing once per week. It all eventually adds up. It eventually opens up new doors.
It doesn't happen over night either. But the audience that finds you tends to stick with you. And tends to help market all the new projects.
What about creating BromBone.com was hard that you figured out? Any hosting problems that you solved? Any bugs in PhantomJS? Anything you can open source? Did you learn anything about what kind of mailing list post gets more traffic than others? Learn anything about making collecting signups easier?
I continue to collect tons and tons of ideas as I go through life that I feel were hard and I figured out or were interesting. A bunch of people just pass on when I write about them. Meh. But then every now and then, something spreads like crazy. An open source project here. A motivating post here. And years later you find, a lot of awesome stuff has built up. People following you. People wanting to see your next project and spread it.
Doing what we're doing is a career. It isn't a lottery. It isn't going to happen in one launch. It's something that we should expect to get better and better at. Forever.
> If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times. - Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/312438036929576962