I'm of the opinion that you should focus on building an audience but it depends on the type of audience.
Whenever I'm working on a new brand I think about the problem that the audience has and that's what I want to create an audience around.
When you create an audience around a problem then when you have the solution (your business) the audience fuels it.
However, too many people take the advice of building an audience before a business to mean that they need to build an audience around their personal brand/persona and that's why you end up with the things in the author's post.
While building a personal brand can be very helpful for clout and opportunities, it's never a surefire way to generate success for a business because who is your audience at that point?
> More than once I had been confusingly introduced as a founder or CEO of the company. That, in part, was how I ultimately was able to sneak into the Andreessen Horowitz corporate apartments and stayed there rent-free for sixteen months. I currently have twelve monogrammed a16z robes in my collection, and possibly was involved in mistakenly giving the greenlight to a Zenefits employee who came by asking if they could get an additional key to the stairwell for a… meeting.
I think he could've done a little bit better job of tying the Parcells story with his actual point unless I was reading it wrong. For a while I really thought he meant people don't care when things go wrong and I kept saying "the hell they don't, that's when they care the most!"
But then it turns and he's saying nobody cares about the story of why things are going wrong. That makes more sense.
Yeah, exactly. It's like what Steve Jobs used to tell newly minted VPs: once you reach a certain rank in the company, reasons don't matter anymore, and only results do.
What also matters are expectations. If you have mediocre results, but everybody expected much worse, then you still are a hero (example: Paralympics). This is relevant when dealing with clients. Keep expectations down and then over-deliver. Much better than promise a dream and then (only) deliver something great.
Sometimes expectations are everything that matters. For example, elections. Turns out, you can get a Nobel Peace Prize, before you really do anything as president.
I live in Playa del Rey now and absolutely detest thinking about taking a cab home. I almost have to ensure I mention a nice tip so the cabbie doesn't roll his eyes.
Usually I just say that I'll give turn by turn directions instead of just saying where I'm going.
I agree with the other replies in that I don't think the quality of Reddit has necessarily gone down, you just have to look in the right places. You probably can't get the deep discussions that you initially could, but on the other side of the coin you also can't get the vast amount of new content that you might've never come across.
You certainly do need to hide away from the top level stuff and find the sub-reddits which you can tolerate. For example, the sports reddits are awesome forums for me to visit, but the design and web design ones rarely grab my attention.
With a community of any size that can grow infinitely it is going to be tough to maintain quality. With that being said I created a site that tries something a bit different where you can only follow 150 people and the content you see are the links and posts those 150 people comment on.
This doesn't limit the amount of content you can see because the 150 people in your network will be following their own set of people and so forth so the good content should spread naturally throughout the site. In essence I guess you could think of it as a mix between HN and Twitter where you get to curate the content based on who you follow.
It's called Dunbargo if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://dunbargo.com
There are two restrictions that might not sit well with the HN crowd, but things I put in place to manage quality:
1. You have to connect to LinkedIn just so the site can get your real name.
2. The people you invite you are stuck with forever. This means you can't just toss around your invites without any thought, but instead have to consider if the person you are going to invite will actively do a good job contributing to your stream.
These guidelines make it so the site isn't for everybody, but then again I'm not trying to create a place for everybody.
While I can see why Meerkat providing the option not to save as a feature it is also its greatest frustration. My success rate of actually viewing a Meerkat stream before it gets taken offline is maybe 20%.
As I saw on Twitter the other day, Meerkat is great at letting you know you are too late to view a Meerkat stream.
I was wondering why there was even a loading image in the first place. Not like this is a web app. It's a simple content site so I just expect the next page to load.
If anything the spinner makes it seem like the page loads even slower.
Looking at the source the site uses WordPress. Couldn't you just slap in a plugin like WP Super Cache and have everything cached up and loaded up instantly?
While I can't speak on how the designer of this particular piece created the shapes you see, in Sketch I would create a shape (the flower petal) and then do "rotate copies". Do that a couple of times with the different size shapes and give each layer a different opacity (ability to see through the shape). Making it a black background with high opacity and layering them on top of each other provides for the cool effects.
Then place a rectangle background with a gradient on it that transitions from purple to green like in the graphic.
I'm curious about autoresponders. The landing page says that you can setup an initial autoresponder which is great, but to get the most out of email marketing you need to setup a series of autoresponders to guide customers through things.
So am I able to do that?
Also, can I have multiple lists or do I need a separate account for each list?
Whenever I'm working on a new brand I think about the problem that the audience has and that's what I want to create an audience around.
When you create an audience around a problem then when you have the solution (your business) the audience fuels it.
However, too many people take the advice of building an audience before a business to mean that they need to build an audience around their personal brand/persona and that's why you end up with the things in the author's post.
While building a personal brand can be very helpful for clout and opportunities, it's never a surefire way to generate success for a business because who is your audience at that point?