Making peace with Allison

Since that post, I have decided two things. One, that I blog only for myself: if I want to post pictures of naked cheerleaders, go on about the philosophy of language, or list my new recipe for carrot cake, I'll do it and the audience be damned. Love having you guys, and I sincerely hope you get some value from the blog, but that's not why I do it. I blog to organize my thoughts.

The second decision I made was to try to find something to write about that was structured. Pick some random topic and make something useful out of it.

This, you may notice, is a variation on the famous "make something that people want" definition of startups.

At first I hated the idea about writing for a random topic. How boring is that! But, as it happens, I love writing. I used to write for newspapers and magazines, and trust me, a lot of published material consists of an editor saying "Hey, go write something about X" when X doesn't seem very interesting at all.

In fact, that's probably the difference between a good writer and a poor one: a good writer makes anything fun while a poor one can't even make something exciting interesting (please no comments from the peanut gallery)

So I started using tools that let me find what people were looking for and what kinds of content was already on the web. What a great system of information we have now! It used to be some editor would say something like "Markham, give me 500 words on the Fall Festival. Folks love that stuff." and then nobody would read it. Nowadays, you can tell before you write the article that yes, folks really want to know how to counterfeit money using their laserprinters at home. So you know there's an audience. What you write may suck, sure, and nobody still may read it, but at least you know people are interested before you start. It's an improvement.

And there is a critical decision point you make when you start writing for somebody else: you don't get to pick the topics or format any more. After all, you're trying to please other people, not please yourself. This changes the entire game.

What I found was that sometimes I would write things I hated. People would like it. Other times I wrote things I loved. People hated it. Sometimes I wrote (what I thought to be) eloquently. People were ambivalent. Sometimes I just threw crap out there. They liked it.

It was like I was internalizing a lot of things that didn't seem to match up to the data.

And that brought me full-circle back to Allison: for some reason, folks like reading that particular article I wrote. I don't know why, I may never know why, I don't care why, and I may never care why. Hell, I even resent the fact that they waste my time so much. But none of that changes the fact that I have made something that people want. The value of the site to the reader has no relationship at all to the value of the site to the author, the motivations of the author, or the opinions of the author.

You can even show your material to some friends, or some fellow hackers, and they can tell you how bad it is and how much it sucks. Doesn't matter. External judgments of what something or another might be good or might be valuable and the actual value experienced by the consumer are different. not just slightly different, they are two entirely separate things.

It was like a light slowly went off in my head.

Sure, I thought of my blog as being about technology and management, and in that context the piece stuck out like a sore thumb. But my model of what I think things are and other people's experiences are miles apart. When you go about making something that people want, what you think or feel (or what your friends, family, or partners think or feel) is the first casualty of contact with reality.

So I've left the Allison piece alone, at least for now. Every few months or so I still bring it up in the editor and try to monetize it -- lately I've put an Amazon affiliate link to related Allison material on the pictures and at the bottom (all clearly noted, of course). But nothing seems to work so far. Nothing may ever work. I may struggle with trying to recapture that ten bucks a month for the next decade or longer. But that's an even more important lesson: making something that people want and making a living are closely related, but still very far apart.

I think I was confusing a lot of different concepts. When I started writing I thought that by pleasing my readers -- my friends, family, and visitors -- that somehow that was an indication that I would please people in general. That I was doing something worthwhile. So if I had a startup idea, I would pitch it at friends and see what they thought. A good response? Maybe worth pursuing. A bad one? Maybe I should change it. What I was performing here, without realizing it, was a very bad case of selection bias. This type of logical error sucks so bad because it's the hidden assumptions that burn you, the ones you never see.

Allison has done me a great service. She taught me that my perceptions and reality are different, and that making something people want and actually making money from doing that are different things. I wonder what else she has in store?

Like a squirrel worrying at a nut, I keep coming back to the puzzle trying to find the hidden value deep inside it. And, against all odds, it's slowly providing a bit of nourishment.

Perhaps I can live with Allison a little while longer.