On Saying No
If you try to build an audience on social media, you’ll quickly learn that attention is an incredibly scarce resource. People are busy. They won’t even look your way unless you can offer them…
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Mental Health
Parasocial Relationships: Imaginary Friends of the Social Network Age
There are a lot of one-sided relationships on social media. They have many names: superfans, otakus, and stans. When you intimately know the personality, likes, dislikes, and the entire personal…
Read the essay →You Don’t Need to be an Extrovert to Build in Public — an Introvert’s Perspective
One of the major reasons people don’t start building in public is that they don’t want to stand in the proverbial spotlight. They don’t want to be exposed. Building in public is by definition a…
Read the essay →Seven Kinds of Entrepreneurial Debt
When I need to relax, I paint little miniatures. It’s a hobby I have had since I was a teenager, and once a nerd, always a nerd. But as an adult nerd with disposable income and dedicated “hobby…
Read the essay →What Founders Can Learn from Professional WoW Gamers
If you want to see tenacity at work, watch professional gamers racing to be the first to kill the latest dungeon boss in World of Warcraft. Every time Activision Blizzard releases new dungeon…
Read the essay →Building in Public and Negativity
I was invited to a Twitter space about audience-building this week, and we talked about the not-so-fun side of building in public: dealing with negativity. That’s something a lot of people are scared…
Read the essay →Being Imperfect in Public
When I launched my Twitter course Find your Following earlier this week, I realized that my launch Tweet had a typo less than a minute after posting it. For a supposedly pristine piece of marketing…
Read the essay →The Performative Nature of Building in Public: A View From the Inside
When you build in public, you’re performing. You can call it what you want: sharing your authentic journey, teaching from the driver’s seat — when you type your updates into that Twitter prompt, you…
Read the essay →Fear-Setting
While I was working on answering questions for my upcoming Twitter audience-building course, I ran into this one: “What if it doesn’t work?” While my immediate thoughts went to the random nature of…
Read the essay →Burnout
Every week, I see more people talking about burning out. It seems to be hitting anyone: from seasoned entrepreneurs with glowing track records to people scrapping their side projects because they…
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