DaedTech

Stories about Software

Jul
23

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The Flat Squirrel Barrier to Content at Scale

Category: Tech Content Marketing, You Asked For It |

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post over on the Hit Subscribe blog.

Be decisive.  The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision.

I don’t know who originally said this, so I can’t properly attribute it.  I guess that makes it some kind of piece of folk wisdom, now best suited for cheugy merchandise.

But whoever dreamed it up has a gift for impactful figurative language.  I’m sure you can picture the situation — your car barreling down on some hapless squirrel who starts left, then right, then backward, then splat.  Had the squirrel run in any direction, it would have met a better fate than it did by fretting to literal death about the decision while doing nothing.

I’m setting the stage with this gruesome metaphor to make my point here memorable.  And my point here is that collective flat squirrel syndrome is going to be your organization’s single biggest barrier to content and funnel metrics at scale.  (And I should note this only applies to customer acquisition strategies that require and substantially economize on scale: SEO, communities, parasocial followings, podcasts, etc.)

Here are some things you might think would be the problem but aren’t:

  • It’s so hard to find good writers.
  • The keywords in our space are super competitive.
  • {Insert our audience here} is such a picky audience.
  • There just aren’t any public distribution channels where our audience hangs out.
  • So few people know how to talk shop to our audience.

Nope, nope, nope, nope, and…drumroll, please…nope.

Those problems are all actually relatively easy to solve compared to flat squirrel syndrome.  The reason for that gets a bit into org theory but suffice it to say that this problem is intractable because it’s human nature and because the solution has to come from within, unlike all of the logistical issues above that can be solved with staffing and experimentation.

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May
14

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Generative AI And Main Character Syndrome Fatigue

Category: You Asked For It |

(Editorial note: I originally wrote this on the Hit Subscribe blog.)

Yesterday I was wasting a little time on LinkedIn between calls.  I ran across this post by April Dunford which resonated heavily with me and introduced me to a term I’d not previously heard: main character energy (or syndrome, I guess).

I rolled up my sleeves and waded into the comments as a thought-follower, offering a threat to steal the term (with attribution).

 

And today, I find myself making good on that threat sooner than anticipated.  While jogging this morning, I was listening to a podcast about how agencies can help their clients prove the ROI of using generative AI.  Begging the pardon of host and guest, I promptly spaced out and started to think instead about the last eighteen months of generative AI mania and just how much main character energy the entire zeitgeist has inflicted upon the world of commerce.

And today I’d like to riff on that a little and use it as food for thought for carving out a differentiated approach to marketing strategy.

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Mar
5

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How We MVP Organic Traffic as a Lead Gen Channel

Category: You Asked For It |

Minimum viable product (MVP), as defined by Eric Ries in the Lean Startup, is a fascinating term.  It has a specific meaning in the context that he defined it, but it also has a highly-inferable, slightly-wrong meaning if you simply happen to know what each of those three words mean.  I imagine a whole lot of people have inferred the definition without reading the book:

A minimum viable product is the earliest, feature-poorest version of your product that can survive in the market, right?  Right!?

Turns out, not exactly.  According to the source:

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

I’ve always thought of the Lean Startup as a book about applying the scientific method to business. And so I’ve thought of an MVP as an experiment rather than a product, myself.  How can you form and then verify or disprove a hypothesis as quickly and cost-effectively as possible?  This is the core question of the MVP.

(As an aside, if legibility and lifecycle of buzzwords is a topic that interests you, I once spent a whole blog post musing about this.)

Against this backdrop, I’d like to formalize an offering we’ve been doing more frequently of late: our organic traffic MVP.

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Dec
11

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Coders in the Hands of a Missing God: How Newly Minted Freelancers Badly Miss the Point

Category: You Asked For It | 6 Comments

As any follower of this blog knows, I regularly answer reader questions, both with blog posts and videos.  Usually, these are fairly specific to an individual situation.

But sometimes, I get many variants of the same core question, such as “help, my boss sucks.”  When that happens, I answer a composite question.  And that’s kind of what I’m going to do today.

I say kind of because we’ve got two mitigating factors here:

  1. The questions actually differ considerably, but all miss the point in a common way.
  2. I won’t answer the question directly, but will instead try to get people asking these questions to think differently.  (I want to include this caveat because this is the equivalent of you asking, “how do I do X in Java” and me saying, “don’t use Java,” which is not the same thing as answering the question.)

How Can I Optimize ____ to Bring in Business

So with that aside, let’s look at what people ask me.  And bear in mind that the people asking this are either newly minted freelancers or freelancer-curious, considering going off on their own.

These people ask me questions like:

  • Which Stack Overflow tags should I answer to bring in lots of business?
  • How can I optimize my Upwork profile to get the most business?  (My five second answer here, if you’re interested.)
  • What’s the best title to give myself on LinkedIn to attract interest?
  • Does my current website copy sound polished and will it appeal to potential clients?

These are at best tactically different questions.  I’d actually call them nominally different, myself.  Underlying them is a common pattern.

All of them put the spotlight on you, personally, and not your prospective clients.

In other words, all of them assume that if you dial up the right and optimal magic sequence of words, points, layout, and presentation, you will earn business.  Notice that the client here doesn’t matter or have any agency; clients are almost like NPCs that simply have to hire you because the game dictates as much when you activate the magic stones in the right sequence.

My answer to any and all of these reader questions is both simple and bleak.

What you’re asking about doesn’t matter. And as long as you continue to think that it does, you’re going to have a painful journey likely to end in failure and an eventual return to salaried employment.

The good news is that you can easily avoid this fate and flourish.  You just need to grok and adopt a rather fundamental mindset shift.  Today I want to try to explain that shift with a bit of humor and metaphor.

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Nov
13

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Reader Question Round-Up: Freelance Taxes, Billing International Clients, and More

Category: You Asked For It |

It has now officially been over a month since I posted anything related to the software industry.  Well, that ends today.

As I said in the video below, I’ll offer an explanation, but not an apology.  I was on a vacation.  After 2 and a half years of not ever taking a true vacation, we finally helped ourselves to one.  And we made it count by taking something like 19 days.

But now I’m back and ready to resume normal content operations.

Today I’ve got a reader-question round-up video and digest.  And this video even has some vacation B-roll in it, as I continue my slow trek away from complete video amateur status.

As a reminder, if you’d like to ask a reader question for me to answer in a video (or on the blog), you can ask here.

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