One reason I’ve been all over the map (physically and mentally) lately is because I’m in the middle of starting up a new company.
I’ve been thinking I could write about it, but I’m not sure if the world needs another founder/CTO doing self-indulgent blog-posts about what it’s like to have a miniature tornado of your own construction attached to your leg. It’s sort of like being the Sorceror’s Apprentice, except you didn’t just trash the sorceror’s lab, you cajoled millions of dollars from the sorceror in order to do it.
Obviously, I think it’s an interesting process and there are interesting stories there, or I wouldn’t be doing it. But I also understand that there’s a great danger of turning solipsistic; that’s also part of the start-up scene: you’ve got to be incredibly focused and disciplined, or you hit the wall so hard you’re a splatmark.
What do you think? Options are:
A) Just stick with the existing mix of stuff
B) Maybe just a bit of start-up stuff but don’t get carried away
C) An “inside the whirlwind” narrative interests me
D) I don’t read anything you write anyway, so I don’t care
B
Keep doing what you’ve been doing.
Put a content warning on the business stuff.
B. Blogs about things heavily on your mind can be useful. Discovering one’s “stopping point” tends to happen through experience.
Would have said B, but now I’ll go with option chigau instead.
I would vote C, having done the startup thing myself last year it would be good to hear another take on the tornado.
B.
B please!
I could see myself being interested in your narrative, but I think it heavily depends on whether you find interesting things to write about it. I don’t know if you’ll end up writing an incredibly useful guide for running a startup, or whether you’ll have some entertaining stories to relate. Or maybe you’ll just have the sort of dry commentary I can find on my friend’s Facebook wall. Can I abstain my vote until after the first post?
Worst comes to worse people just opt out of certain content. Most of my readers opt out of one series or another I run on mine.
Business is pretty interesting. You write about many other things and make them very interesting, I think you’ll have interesting things to say about your business too. On the other hand I would not want to miss out on the other things you write about, and would not want the blog to be just about your new business, not that it’s up to me of course.
I’ll go with B.
Thanks, all!!
I’ll go with B/chigau, then, adopting the idea that I’ll only go into a topic if I find it interesting in a meta-sense; no “look! these boardrooms are NICE!” or any of that kind of thing. There are a lot of elements of the whole process that are interesting but I definitely want to steer clear of the dirty laundry. I’ll come up with a series title and mark everything with it, though I’ll try to keep things interesting where I can.
C. Definitely C! Do it habitually so that it draws you away from the work and then carefully document the splat mark you make when you hit the wall!
Maybe with some charts and graphs?
C.
C, particularly if it’s security-related.
Thank you all. So I’m going to take that as “occasionally but keep it interesting and not a total blow-by-blow, and don’t let it dominate your content.”
…. Which is good. It’s dominating my life, right now, but at least not my content.
Advice from a failed startup: The only thing more expensive than a really good sales force is a really bad sales force.
mikekaye@#17:
The only thing more expensive than a really good sales force is a really bad sales force.
Oh, yes.
When I formulated that lesson, I phrased it as: “A good salesperson can sell anything, a bad one can only sell their resume.”
I always hired sales on a quota and gave no leeway to anyone who didn’t hit the number. On the flip side, I never cheesed with the commission: we had one sales guy at NFR who landed a multimillion-dollar sale to a big phone company and I assembled the whole company and we all cheered while I wrote him a check for $400,000.
mikekaye@#17:
There’s another one.
“What if you train your people and they leave? That’s nowhere near as bad as if you don’t train them and they stay.”