Writing Like Product

When you're writing blog posts or courses, think of yourself as a startup founder building a product.

Understand your target audience. Learn to see the world from the perspective of your readers, understand their problems and desires.

Write your posts to solve a specific problem for your target audience. Clearly identify a problem your readers have, in the title and introduction promise your readers to solve that problem, use the rest of the post to solve it. Take them from A to B, from where they are to where they want to be.

Create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the most basic solution to your audience's problem, and then launch early - as soon as your post coherently conveys what you want it to convey, you can show it to people and get some feedback. Then iterate based on that feedback to improve your product.

Do things that don't scale - talk to your users (readers), respond to their comments, listen to what they have to say, ask them what they would like to read next.

You can think of your whole blog as a product (not just individual posts). Quickly create short posts on various topics, share them, gauge people's reaction, and double down on what works best.

One level of abstraction higher, you can also think of your writing system as a product. Analyze your writing, develop a repeatable process that enables you to be prolific and create successful posts. Tweak this process and make gradual improvements. Think about becoming a better writer as optimizing your writing system, improving your process.

Competently market your writing, actively promote what you wrote. In startups, marketing is just as important as building a good product. Learn to find people interested in your product, create titles and thumbnails that make people want to read what you wrote. Develop an article launching/marketing plan, a post promotion system you can gradually tweak and improve, and then proactively follow these steps (as opposed to haphazardly sharing your stuff on social media).

Care about the design. The design of your posts is important, make it beautiful, attractive, readable. Do everything in your power to avoid wasting your readers' time (that would be equivalent to building a good UX for your product).

References

Very helpful thread by Dickie Bush

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