2 months ago when I first read about Meta launching a new microblogging platform, I knew this was a golden opportunity in so many ways. I believe it was due, and I’ll tell you why in a few points. This is quite *the* story, so grab a cup of coffee ––
2 things I believe in more than anything: Tech + Writing
Sharing clear, sharp, & concise ideas has always been my aspiration & my utmost goal.
Why? The internet is forever – So soon enough I learnt that if all what’s left of me was those ideas I share online, then that could be enough of a legacy, in so many ways.
So examples like seth.blog and sive.rs were like top-of-food-chain to me. These people have been publishing short ideas online everyday for YEARS – Think of someone posting religiously everyday since 2008. I was thinking: If I could just do that, then when I eventually maintain, anything else I want out of life could be handled. That’s the main challenge.
In order to drive impact through sharing ideas online, you need 3 things:
- STRUCTURE
- AUDIENCE
- DISTRIBUTION
Now by the end of my story, you’d know why this is the first place to provide all three.
Straight out of college, I was thinking of starting on Medium because it was hot back then. Then it slowly faded and fell victim to clickbaits and people optimizing for the algorithm.
Here’s the thing: You can either *intentionally* make art or make money. You can’t focus on both. I wasn’t ever fascinated by people who write to make some extra dollars out of it.
But I was always fascinated by people who write clearly. Clear writing produces potent & powerful ideas that make you think “I could’ve written that”.
So I came across a golden article by a writer named Nat Eliason. It was called “How to start a blog that changes your life”: https://www.nateliason.com/blog/start-a-blog
During covid, I kept searching for what I want to do with my life moving forward, and what to optimize for. Then by the end of 2020, it occurred to me that whatever I want to get done, “blogging” is always going to be at the center of it. This above article put that thought into context for me. It was time to start a blog.
After some research I used a tool called Substack, and I designed a webpage to redirect readers to my blogs on Substack – I gave it the slogan:
“Notes on lifelong pursuit of wisdom & freedom”,
for I always believe these are the only 2 things worth “doing” for.
Some iterations from 2021:
Around that time I had some structure about what & how I can share my notes online, but I had zero audience, so I thought of Twitter as a logical step to start growing an email list. However, growth was very slow, and repurposing content between several platforms wasn’t quite as easy.
But, by sheer luck, on March 10th 2021, something fun happened.
Around that time Clubhouse was picking up, so I was hanging out at a room hosted by Naval Ravikant, and then I started taking some notes of what he was saying.
Shortly after, I wrote a thread on Twitter about what was said in the session, word-for-word.
The thread did exceptionally well:
All of a sudden I learned 2 important lessons:
- Smaller chunks of info were easier to consume & interact with → Some tweets of the thread did better than the others, but overall, people were treating them as if they are *separate* pieces of info
- Twitter IS THE THING → Many online communities are advocating for building in public, which means laying out your story to your audience AS you build your product/service/software/whatever, to build rapport and gain trust. And there was just no better place for this type of raw conversations than Twitter
And even more, Twitter allowed for addressing & connecting ideas from whatever place and whatever time. Because of the complexity of our thought process, it is quite common to talk about something that’s connected to something you wrote about in the past. Quote tweets + Replies allowed for that → A cool way to retain context. The most influential people on the platform were taking advantage of it, and this alone made building an audience so rewarding! You can talk about anything, share ideas, and grow in your niche.
And so I decided I’d continue blogging and maybe use Twitter on the side, and try build a following on it. Although I didn’t prioritize it, I always knew Twitter was the answer to the DISTRIBUTION part. Great! 2 pieces of the puzzle are *almost* there.
I think 2021 was the year threads started picking up on Twitter.
But sadly, one year later, I found that many people started resorting to ONLY cramming as much trash info as they can into a thread because it was working. Twitter feed turned from a feed of valuable insights to a feed of people trying to hook your attention with the most catchy headlines to view/save/interact with their threads.
So I gradually stopped using it again, and resorted back to just sharing what I think is valuable on my blog on Substack, even with little audience and -almost- no distribution.
Substack provided for structure, but the distribution was hell, and audience -as always- fell down to your efforts, so it was also not good.
After 2 years of blogging on Substack (https://blog.zeyads.com/), I found that I want to switch. Mainly because the friction is so high, for the little value I gain out of it.
My publishing process was:
- Write ideas in Notion
- Choose a cover photo for the blogpost
- Copy-paste to Substack –and deal with their shitty text formatter
- Put a link to the Substack blog on my website (I always wanted to make my website the forefront of my blog, not Substack)
So I kept thinking of something frictionless, and through which I can also talk to the audience already available to me (Instagram & LinkedIn).
In March 2023, I stopped using Substack and deactivated my website, I resorted to a much simpler setup; I found a tool called super.so that enables you to create webpages out of your Notion pages. So that the process becomes:
- Write ideas in Notion
That’s it. It handles auto-publish.
And the setup is quite simple.
So I solved friction, and I solved STRUCTURE.
But DISTRIBUTION & AUDIENCE problems remained ~
Because I never really had any audience outside of Instagram & LinkedIn, I thought I might share links from my microblog – Although, this defies why I’m using Instagram. Instagram was never a distribution platform for text, BUT it had everyone.
So it was tricky, but the only viable option was try to integrate the microblog on my Instagram as much as possible, and may be build from there.
Then in April I read the news about an instagram for text.
So in summary, we now have:
- Our audience carried over
- A place for raw conversations
- Zero limits for distribution
At a time when Twitter is falling & large AI models are ready to analyze terabytes of text, it only made sense; the timing is perfect!
That said I think I’ll hang out here for a while.
I also think, building has never been easier, with the new tools we have, it’s an age of blessings.
That I believe in.