Me and my cofounder (Piyush) started working on Curated Connections in 2023 with Piyush working full-time and me doing part-time. We shipped our MVP and got our first few paying customers that year.

2024 was the year when I joined him full-time. In that one year, we went from 1 tool to 4 tools + 1 in Alpha, 8x'ed our revenue and collected a bunch of nice testimonials from strangers using our product. But we haven't hit ramen profitability yet.

So, as we get into 2025 I wanted to count our wins and measure our losses before setting a direction for the year.

Wins

Here are some of our small and big wins in a roughly chronogical order:

1. We got a ton of inbound leads this year. In fact, 90% of our leads are inbound - divided roughly equally between people discovering us on Google and people discovering us through word of mouth.

2. Conversations with Nate Ritter were amazing. I found my first startup mentor and each call felt like I unlocked new key strategy to boost the business. From rebranding Beginner Maps to an email course to simple things like adding a "Book a demo" button on the website header - Nate gave me some really effective advice. Thanks Nate!

3. Talking of Beginner Maps (the marketing arm of our business), we extracted lessons from our podcast, turned it into an email course and rebuilt the website to talk about those lessons instead of the podcast.

Best insight ever! People loved it, sent thank you messages for the lessons and we collected many more emails with this.

Most importantly - I'm now confident that we created something people love. ✅

4. We quietly released an annual plan and got four subscriptions for it!

5. Multiple people told us that they were frustrated with our competitors - primarily Intros and Orbit - and that Curated Connections was not just a less expensive product but also a more robust product.

6. We created alternative comparison pages for our VC-funded B2B competitors and those have became a major discovery point of our product. At this point, it has become normal but April 2024 was the first month we saw a complete stranger go through the flow of discovering us through Google → free trial → hitting paywall → become a customer.

7. A Youtuber created a freaking video walkthrough of our product! Complete stranger who posted a video on her channel to tell her audience of community builders about us. Thank you Carmen!

8. We onboarded Health Tech Nerds as a customer - which was a massive win. This is the biggest community that we have, serving more than 5000 members. It is safe to say that at this point, Abbey, the COO, knows more about the ins and outs of CC than we do simply because she has stress tested every nook and cranny of our product.

Curated Connections | How this 5000+ member community makes meaningful

Case study: How Health Tech Nerds newsletter + community uses Curated Connections to make their membership more sticky

Curated Connections

9. We got accepted into the Slack app directory. So Curated Connections is an official Slack app.

10. Rails Foundation used us for their annual Rails World conference, second year in a row. This is special for us because Curated Connections is built using Rails.

11. We built Thread Archive v1 in 4 weeks. And before we even had a paywall for it, someone reached out on email asking how to pay for it. She was using it for free and she could have kept using it for free unlimited. But she wanted to pay for it, unprompted! 🥹

12. Someone from NASA started using Curated Connections for Women in Aerospace Network. She said that she LOVES our platform.

13. And finally, we built an entire wall of testimonials from people saying nice things about our the first SaaS product we ever built. It's surreal because I didn't know any of these people before we started working on Curated Connections in 2023.

Misses: How I half-assed my content efforts in 2024

Okay now it's time for painful vulnerability.

You ever heard the advice of "double down on your wins"? It simply means that when you see something working, keep doing it.

Turns out, I have a hard time doing this. 2024 was filled with instances where I didn't do it.

1. We published 25 new episodes with some of the top community creators on the Beginner Maps podcast. The plan was to create minimum one lesson per creator to the email course I mentioned above. I wrote 5 lessons, launched the email course and crushed our success metric.

And yet, I didn't create a proper, repeatable process to keep writing those lessons. We ended 2024, with ~250 new signups to the course and only 10 lessons published.

2. I wanted to explore partnerships with other creators to boost email signups. The first one I explored was with a much bigger SaaS company called Bonjoro. And somehow, the founder agreed to a trade of getting us in front of an email list of 100k+ in exchange for an email list of barely 200 signups - just because he was impressed with our content.

This should have empowered me to reach out to more such creators. But I didn't.

3. At this point, you know that people really loved Beginner Maps website and email course. And yet, I kept using bad tools - Super and Mailerlite. Bad in the sense that they were cheap and made me procrastinate about updating the website. At one point, I had released 4 new episodes, published them on socials but not updated the website itself.

The straw that broke the camel's back? Realising that most of my articles on the website weren't even being indexed on Google.

I have just changed the infrastructure now. But in hindsight, I should have done this sooner.

4. I created 2 standalone programs to showcase the power of our product - Indie Cofounder Dating and Masterminds for community creators. Both exceeded expectations in terms of the number of people who signed up for them.

The plan was to keep launching such programs as stand-alone products and create value for our target customers while fostering meaningful connections.

How many did we launch in 2024? 2 🤦🏻‍♂️

5. Thread Archive - We created a new product, told 1 person about it, got 2 paying customers before we had set up payments. And yet.. I've done 0 marketing for it. In fact, I haven't even told my existing customers about it.

6. As I mentioned at the beginning, one of the main ways people discover our product is by seeing us in other communities. We've received a lot of business this way.

So the logical thing to experiment is to just gift 25 of my favourite communities with free access to the tool and see what happens. But we haven't done that yet.

7. Most people posting on social media struggle with not having stuff to post about. I've got tonnes of stuff to cool post about - new product updates, testimonials, podcasts, articles and testimonials. I could be posting 3 times a week just by talking about the cool shit we have done that week. But I most of those posts never get written. Big miss.

8. Same thing with the Circle community. That is an active community which had vocally appreciated it when I shared one of our essays from Beginner Maps there. I should be sharing all new content there regularly.

9. Talking of social media, our LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube cover images are so dumb. We need to fix them.

10. Thoughtful cold reachouts - I sent 2 cold DMs to creators I admire and both responded positively to my messages. But even then, I never cold DM'ed anyone else.

To be fair, I got discouraged when both of them declined to use the product or even get on a call to understand how it worked. But statistically, a 100% positive reply rate means that I should keep digging.

11. Finally, we have onboarded so many creators to the product - both free and paid - and yet I haven't set up an automated email sequence to properly onboard them to the product. That is so stupid.

I can be telling them about how to use the product (note: we need better customer support docs in 2025 too) and be more successful with the product. I can be asking them for feedback, for referrals. Probably our biggest low hanging fruit.

As I'm writing this, I realize there might be a problem with me where as soon as I get a little win somewhere, instead of doubling down on it, I'm stupid enough to ignore it and move on to a different thing. Even though that win is really small and definitely inconsequential at the point where I leave it. I need to fix that in 2025.

If we can just double down on these wins that I already know works, while improving the product, there should be no stopping us in 2025.

We 8x'ed the business in 2024. There's no reason why we can't accelerate that growth even further in 2025.

ChatGPT is all the rage on the Internet these days. Finally, we have an AI Assistant that is actually intelligent. People are astounded by it’s capabilities of comprehension and writing.

So, I decided to see how it performed when I gave it the same prompt as my last article’s title:

“Unintuitive things I’ve learnt about building an online community”

I used Notion’s AI Assist as my interface (which is based on the same GPT-3 API like ChatGPT - meaning that Notion AI and ChatGPT have the same brain). Here’s the short article that it produced:

Building an online community can be a tricky proposition. Even after years of experience, there are still lessons to be learned. Here are some of the unintuitive things I've learnt about building an online community.

1. It’s more important to focus on the people who are already part of the community than it is to focus on attracting new members.
2. The most successful communities are those where members feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves.
3. While it can be tempting to focus on the “big numbers” of how many people are in the community, it’s more important to focus on quality over quantity.
4. The key to keeping people engaged in a community is to create a sense of belonging.
5. It’s important to be flexible and willing to adapt to meet the needs of the community.
6. It’s important to make sure that everyone feels included, regardless of their background or interests.
7. To keep the community vibrant and active, it’s important to create opportunities for members to interact with each other.
8. It’s important to foster an environment of mutual respect, where everyone is respected and differences are celebrated.
9. It’s important to create a safe and welcoming space where people can be open and honest.
10. Finally, it’s important to remember that building an online community is a long-term commitment, not a short-term project.

I observe 3 things of note here:

• It’s not wrong
• It’s not novel
• It has no limits

It’s not wrong

One of the most common criticisms against GPT-3 is how it can be confidently wrong. But I didn’t find it to be true in my use case.

Not only did it write meaningful sentences without any grammatical errors, it’s also not wrong about anything it says about community building. Atleast not objectively.

Sure, you could argue against the point about making sure that “everyone feels included, regardless of their background or interests” but that would be up for debate. I can understand how it may be wrong when you ask it technical questions like debugging a piece of code or a trivia question but it is remarkably correct for non-technical topics.

It’s not novel

Even though it’s not wrong, nothing it says about community building is particularly novel. It feels like something an “SEO expert” would write to cover target keywords without having any real insights into the subject.

That’s not surprising to me because novelty comes from experience.

Great writing includes anecdotes and stories. It gives you contradictions and transformation. It is created by people who do things, solve challenges and in the process, discover something interesting to say.

Just like a bad SEO content strategist, the AI obviously cannot have any insights into the subject at hand. It has read a bunch of content on the Internet and can only regurgitate it in different forms.

It has no limits

This is the part that scares me but also holds the most promise.

This AI can generate correct, non-novel content infinite number of times. The excerpt above took me less than 3 seconds to generate. But that’s not it. With another 2 seconds, I was able to get it to expand upon the first line.

Prompt: “Why is it important to focus on the existing community members?”

GPT-3: “It is important to focus on the existing community members because they are the foundation of any successful online community. They are the ones who are already familiar with the platform, the content, and the people. They are the ones who have already built relationships and trust with other members. Focusing on the existing community members is also essential for expanding the reach of the community. They are the ones who will help bring in new members, as well as promote the community to their friends, family, and colleagues. It is also important to focus on existing community members because they can provide valuable feedback and insights into how the community can be improved. By engaging with existing community members, it is possible to gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t work for the community.”

Remarkably correct.

And the limiting factor here was actually my own ability to think and write the prompt.

That’s what scares me. If you’ve hated the "SEO-fication" of search engine results till now, expect a tsunami of such surface-level content in the future. Especially around non-technical disciplines like community building, sales, marketing or philosophy.

But on the flip side, I can also sense an unprecedented opportunity here. The ability to generate intelligible content, at will, in an instant, feels like a superpower. Like something out of a science fiction movie.

Combine with this the fact that this is only version 3 of the GPT model. We’ll soon have GPT-4, GPT-5 and so on. One can’t even imagine how those would be even better.

Prompt: “What would Steve Jobs say about building an engaged community?”

GPT-3:

"If Steve Jobs were alive today, he might have some interesting thoughts on building an engaged community. After all, he was a master at gathering people around a shared vision and inspiring them to take action. He was known for his ability to bring people together and make them believe in a cause. Jobs believed that having a passionate, engaged community was essential for success and he often spoke about the importance of creating a sense of belonging. He might have said something like this:

"Building an engaged community requires creating an environment where people feel included and valued. It's about creating an environment where people can come together and share ideas, collaborate, and create something bigger than themselves. When you build an engaged community, you create a powerful force that can help you achieve your goals."”

3 years ago, I wrote an article that had 10,000+ views in the first 2 days. A true overnight success.

Knowing that another 1000s of visitors will be visiting the page in the next few weeks, my entrepreneurial mind decided to capitalise on this success by starting a new Slack community. My brilliant idea was to include a link to join the Slack at the bottom of the article.

And it worked! I got 100+ people to join my Slack community over the next few weeks. I was so proud of myself. All of these people had a place to meet likeminded peers, talk to each other and all I had to do was sit back and reap the benefits.

That community is long dead now.

Simply bringing like-minded people under the same roof does not create a community - that was my first lesson in community building. I needed a strategy to nurture them from strangers to an active community members.

The problem is that building communities is very counterintuitive. If you relied on the traditional startup wisdom, you are very likely to fail.

Since then, I have helped 5 different startups avoid making the same mistake as their first community consultant. Inevitably, I stumbled upon many more mistakes.

If you're a first time community builder, here is an exhaustive list of counterintuitive things about communities that I have discovered, so you can avoid making the same mistakes I did.

When setting up a community for the first time:

1. Don't sell a "free" community

“Free” is your enemy.

The Freemium model has a great success rate for SaaS products but not with communities. That's because this one word:

1. attract the wrong type of people
2. who dilute the quality of your community
3. and leave you struggling with an everlasting engagement problem

"Free" attracts people who are coming in to sample a free product. You don't need them in your community. So avoid using it on your community website or when talking up your community.

You need people who need your community just as much if not more. You need people who are interested enough to join without the lure of a "free" product. Because those are the people who will add energy to your community!

But what if you don't want/aren't ready to charge for your community?

That's okay. In that case, make it exclusive. Say that people need to "apply to join" and vet those applications. Or personally invite only a specific set of people.

You'll have a smaller community, sure. But remember:

SMALL + BUZZING community >> LARGE + DULL community

2. Know that nobody actually asks for more channels

A good community design can be the difference between members feeling comfortable in posting versus members feeling too overwhelmed to post.

Here are 3 principles to keep in mind when you're designing your community spaces –

• Less is more. Having a few active channels makes the community feel alive. So, start with spaces with broad scopes that cover a lot of things. It’s also easier to grasp as a new user.
• Non-overlapping but complete scopes - the only way users can make sense of the different spaces is if each of them covers an area that does not intersect with another's area but together, all of them cover everything your community wants to talk about.
  
  Remember this when creating new spaces. For example, if you have a "pets" space and you observe that half the posts are only about dogs, don't simply spin up a new "dogs" space. It'll confuse someone who wants to share their pet dog's picture. Be sure to rename "pets" to "other-pets" or don't start a new "dogs" space at all.
• Every new space you create is a responsibility to keep a new community engaged. If you aren’t ready to take it on, don’t create the channel. If you see that a channel is not engaged enough, close it up - tell people that they can post in another bigger channel.

3. Meet members where they are

If your members are trying to remove Facebook from their lives, don't host your community on Facebook. But if you have to, then make it clear on the sales page that members will need a Facebook account to participate in the community. This is the mistake the Trends community did.

If your members use Slack to communicate in their work life, consider using Slack as your community platform instead of Discord.

If you see your new members missing out on the important conversations because they haven't developed the habit of visiting your community yet, help them by meeting them in their inbox by sending a weekly recap email. It will improve your engagement numbers too.

When growing engagement as a first time community builder:

4. Know that everyone wants to help strangers

If you're struggling with increasing user engagement in your community, you don't need fancy strategies or elaborate programs. The easiest way to spark engagement is to just ask your members.

I tried it recently when I launched a community of international university students for a client. People were joining the community, some of them were saying Hi but none of them were talking to other users. Classic community engagement problem.

So, I DM'ed people who had recently introduced themselves to join me in my mission to improve engagement in this community by joining a Superuser Program where they would help in welcoming new users to the community and share links to the resources they read online every week. Result?

• I invited 13 people
• 8/13 responded
• 4/8 accepted the invitation

This is the counterintuitive thing I've learnt from building communities - everyone wants to help strangers.

They just need the request to be authentic, feel personal and have a clear ask that they can fulfil immediately.

Authentic - Everyone wants to do good in the world. So, if you can connect how their actions can help the community, there's a high chance that your request is answered. Plus, they'll be happy that you thought of them to fulfill this request.

Personal - People are hesitant in responding to a request that feels like an automation sent to hundreds of others. I introduced a personal touch to my request by giving them a 'why'. Something like, "I'm asking you because I saw that you recently introduced yourself."

Clear - Even the most helpful people don't want to waste their time. That's why it wouldn't work if you just asked something vague like, "Can you help me increase engagement in the community?". Rule of thumb - always end the request with 1-3 things that the person can do within the next 1 day in 1 hour max to help.

5. Superuser Program > Community Manager

The best investment you can make in your community in the early days isn’t hiring a community manager - it is investing in your superusers.

Your superusers are people who are already invested in the well-being of your community. They visit your community regularly, react to posts and jump on opportunities to engage other users. These are your model community members.

Creating programs that allow them to take their participation to a new level is a great way to promote the right behaviour. Investing money into these programs is like getting them on steroids.

Here are some ideas of some programs you can invest in to activate your superusers:

• Running a competition with a grand prize - nothing works better than a good old competition to create excitement in the community and align members to a common cause.
• Swag for superusers - surprising your best members with some exclusive swag makes them feel seen and acts as a gentle way to incentivize their actions.
• Conducting amazing workshops with great speakers - who’s the thought leader that your community follows? Inviting them to conduct a private workshop for the community not only creates value for the member but can also be a great way to add “celebrities” to your community.
• Compensating members for creating in-depth content in the community - create an exclusive writer’s club where you work with the top members to create articles and compensate them fairly for each published piece.
• Compensating moderators - finally, there’s the time-tested moderation program where you incentivize members to do housekeeping activities like welcoming new members, reporting spammers, and helping people by answering questions as well as creating activities in the community.

6. Understand the "Jeff Bezos opportunity"

Jeff Bezos famously got the inspiration to quit his job at DE Shaw and start Amazon when he saw that Internet adoption was growing at 2300% per year. He saw an incredible trend and capitalised on it. He create the store with infinite shelf space.

I believe that COVID-19 pandemic has created similar trend in online community building. The cost of conducting "in-person" events has reduced >100x in the last 2 years.

Yes, that's because of the absolute adoption of video conferencing solutions.

• Almost overnight, everyone learnt how to use Zoom/Google Meet
• It became socially acceptable to host serious virtual conferences/meetups/gatherings online
• People have opened up to the idea of paying money for virtual attendance

You no longer need to spend money renting a physical space or commute. Add to it the time and money you save for each attendee.

So, now you have the opportunity to create a community that helps members form real connections with no barriers of location and with marginal cost of enabling each connection being ~0.

Most people haven't realised this Jeff Bezos opportunity in enabling in-person connections yet.

7. Don't be a creator - be a matchmaker

• Writing engaging posts
• Hosting events
• Community platform
• Automations
• Analytics

None of it matters if your members aren't meeting each other. They can help you build community but they aren’t community themselves.

Because community exists in the relationships between people.

So, at its essence, the community builder's job is that of a matchmaker. Instead of thinking about brilliant new content ideas, think about how you can help your members feel comfortable in sharing their ideas.

Instead of thinking about how you can increase the number of attendees to your events, think about how you can increase the participation of the people who attend the event.

Instead of thinking about how you can grow your community, think about how you can grow the collisions between members.

8. Best personal development investment you can make as a community builder

As a community builder, the best thing you can do to improve your community-building skills is to join an engaged community and become active there.

Sometimes they cost money but I promise you - if it is an active community, it will be the best professional development investment you can make.

Why? Because it gives you a gym for developing your community-building muscle.

• It is an opportunity to observe. You can see what other members respond to and what they don’t. As a member, you can take notes on what part of the community experience worked for you and what didn’t.
• Being active improves your ability to empathize. You start to understand the motivations of an active member. Being in their shoes will give you ideas on how you can incentivize more members to become activated.
• Become a superuser. Don’t just stop at being an active member but help members of the community help each other. This skill will directly transfer when you’re building your own community.

When measuring returns of your efforts as a first time community builder :

9. Don't measure community like you measure an audience

One key difference between an audience and a community is that a community is organic, living whereas an audience is inert. And organic and living things, love randomness.

By not treating all your audience members as equal numbers on a dashboard, you expose yourself to the possibility that someone might bring a disproportionate value to the community. Randomness.

So why measure your community efforts like you measure your audience building efforts?

Ditch the engagement numbers.

The real value of community is counted in stories of asymmetric wins from your community. Random high-impact incidents like a founder making a critical hire or a member leading a new club or forming a deep connection that changes their lives for the better. This is value that only community can bring.

10. Don't expect users to give more than they take

This is the most common community guideline.

I hate it.

It is trying to be smart by programming a rule that ensures an abundance of value in the community. But it's not sensible because it looks at the value of the community in a finite, zero-sum way that makes no sense.

A community does not have a fixed pool of value that can be depleted by the people who only keeping asking for help without helping others in return. If anything, by asking for help in a thoughtful way, they are helping you engage your community. Because the generous community members wouldn't be so if they didn't have a place to show their generosity.

And yet, so many communities share this as a general guideline with every new member. I would argue that this actually harm them by making good members feel like moochers when they ask for help.

Instead, you should bring the right members into the community and encourage them to take as much value as they can. Basic human instincts of reciprocation will ensure that they will give back to the community some day in the future in whatever way suits them best.

11. Count the creators

The unique value that community brings to your business is that it creates creators.

You take in a passive audience, give them a voice and empower them to use it.

Consumer -> Creator

So, the ultimate measure of success for a community should be the number of people it persuades to share something. Question, comment, thought, resource, win, article - anything!

So, it's not the views that you get on your posts. But the comments that you get on your posts. Or the number of posts that members create.

I will keep this post updated as I make more mistakes in my community building career.

Until then, you can keep up with my work on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you need help building your own community, check out My First Community Manager or drop me an email on nityesh@hey.com.

For the past ~3 years, I have been making a living as a community professional. I help startups turn their faceless audiences into online communities where they can show their personalities and create value for each other. I love it!

But in my earlier life, before I was into communities, I was trying to build a career as a programmer. I wasn't half bad at it either. In fact, I enjoyed it. I even wrote articles to teach people what I learnt - articles that have been read by >500,000 people!

But I failed to build anything real with my programming skills. So, I quit.

My failure to build something real by programming

I have a bachelor's degree in programming but I never cared for it. I only got into programming because of my fascination with Paul Graham's essays. I read them in my 2nd year of college.

Paul Graham told me that building a startup is how nerds can take over the world and being a great hacker is the best way to start. So, I got inspired to teach myself how to code using the Internet and building pet projects.

• I tried learning the C programming language by building the game of Tetris but soon realised that C was sorely outdated. Nobody codes in C to build real applications anymore. I had to learn Python or Javascript.

• I tried learning Javascript/HTML by building a Chrome browser extension but then realised that it was ugly AF and I would have to spend months learning frontend technologies to make it beautiful. I saw this monstrous frontend roadmap and decided not to pursue web development.

• Then, I got into Machine Learning and Data Science using Python. These were the next frontier of technology in 2018. But after spending months pouring through countless courses, analysing toy datasets and building prediction models for them, I realised they weren't enough to build a product. If I want to create something that I can put in the hands of people, I had to learn to develop web or mobile apps.

Long story short, I had spent 3 years jumping from one technology to another, just trying to collect skills that would one day enable me to solve real problems and become a founder someday. Bad strategy, I realise now.

Without a sense of direction, I got overwhelmed - there was just too much to learn in programming! So, slowly transitioned myself out of programming.

How to be a great programmer?

"Start programming at the age of 12"

My 3 years in programming told me that before I'm capable of creating any real impact using my coding skills, I would have to learn it for another - God know how many - years!

Anyone who has "done it" has either been coding since the age of 12 or working crazy hours or both. Probably both.

Then in 2020, I stumbled upon DHH. He:

• is the co-founder/CTO of 37Signals, a bootstrapped company whose product Basecamp has millions of customers and has made hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue
• is the creator of Ruby on Rails, an open-source framework which powers top companies like Shopify, Github etc.
• recently launched Hey, an ambitious Gmail competitor that was a success right from the launch day

More importantly, this is a guy who breaks the mould of a "technical cofounder" in every way possible:

• grew up, lives in Denmark (not Silicon Valley or even USA)
• got into programming only at the age of 20 - with no programming/maths degrees or programmer parents
• built and released the first version of Basecamp in 2004, his 3rd year into programming

You're probably thinking he must have incredible grit and must have hustled during those 3 years, working like 100-hour weeks. But you could not be more wrong.

He is arguably the loudest advocate for having a work-life balance:

• By his own admission, he built the first version of Basecamp while working only 10 hrs/week.
• He still works a maximum of 40 hours/week and often spends 100% of his day coding. Remember, he is the CTO of a company doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue with 2 major products.
• He is also a New York Times best-selling author, Le Mans class winning racing driver and a family man who enjoys playing video games with his kids.

A self-taught programmer who only got into coding in his 20s and was able to build a product that does 100s of millions of dollars in revenue without hustling himself out of a personal life.

This should be impossible!

But here he was alive and real, speaking to me on Jason Calcanis' podcast.
DHH's story told me that there exists a path that I can follow to learn programming and build useful things. A path that wouldn't require me to pour years learning the craft.

I had seen the Black Swan and it had hijacked my brain.

The promise of Ruby on Rails

If you have dabbled in the world of web development, you may think that DHH's story is possible only because web development in early 2000s wasn't nearly as complex as it is today. And DHH would probably agree with you.

"There's so much to learn these days, if you want to be an expert in all the latest tools and techniques. The conventional path, as paved by solutions extracted from giant tech companies, is a journey akin to The Oregon Trail. You might well die of dysentery before you ever get to your destination!"

- DHH

Luckily, DHH is fighting this complexity with his open-source framework Ruby on Rails. His vision is to create the One Person Framework:

"A toolkit so powerful that it allows a single individual to create modern applications upon which they might build a competitive business. The way it used to be."

And that's the promise that Ruby of Rails boldly states on its homepage:

It is this ambitious promise backed by a man whose achievements feels incredible yet reachable that makes me want to get back to programming. This time with Ruby on Rails.

Not just a toy

As an aspiring founder, I find it comforting to know that despite being beginner-friendly Rails is not just a toy. Which means that if I create something using it, I don't need to worry about replacing it with serious tools as I get bigger.

Rails is the real deal. DHH created it by open-sourcing the backbone code that Basecamp and now, Hey runs on.

That's not it - countless recognizable companies have used Rails to create products that have reached millions of users and billions in market valuations, including Shopify, Github and Airbnb.

Ruby on Rails framework has been around for two decades now. That's ages in the web development world where new frameworks are released every month.

So, if you go by the Lindy Effect, you can count on Rails being around for atleast two more decades. That's a long lifespan for a web framework!

Rails doctrine for the aspiring founder in me

One of the reasons behind success of Rails is the controversial doctrine at its core that drives its development. This doctrine, written by DHH, comprises of a "wide set of heretical thoughts about the nature of programming and programmers".

Here are 9 excerpts from the Rails doctrine that are especially attractive to the aspiring founder in me:

1. Optimise for programmer happiness - "I created Rails for me. To make me smile, first and foremost. Its utility was to many degrees subservient to its ability to make me enjoy my life more."
2. Convention over Configuration - "beyond the productivity gains for experts, conventions also lower the barriers of entry for beginners. There are so many conventions in Rails that a beginner doesn’t even need to know about, but can just benefit from in ignorance. It’s possible to create great applications without knowing why everything is the way it is."
3. The menu is omakase - "with Rails we decided to diminish one good, a programmer’s individual privilege to choose each tool in their box, for a greater one: A better tool box for all."
4. No one paradigm - "The way to alleviate some of that learning burden is to simply just make it easy to get started, make something of real value, before you understand every single aspect of the framework. We have a rush to Hello World for this reason. Your table already prepared and an appetizer served. The thinking is that by giving something of real value early, we’ll encourage the practitioners of Rails to level-up quickly. Accept their journey of learning as a joy, not an obstacle."
5. Exalt beautiful code - "Part of the beauty comes from these calls honoring the previous principles, like Convention over Configuration. This leaves the programmer with very little code to write. This is very different from a programmer making all this happen and stitching the workflow together from libraries they call themselves."
6. Provide sharp knives - "Ruby on Rails is an environment for chefs and those who wish to become chefs. You might start out doing the dishes, but you can work your way up to running the kitchen. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be trusted with the best tool in the trade as part of that journey."
7. Value integrated systems - "Rails specifically seeks to equip generalist individuals to make these full systems. Its purpose is not to segregate specialists into small niches and then require whole teams of such in order to build anything of enduring value."
8. Progress over stability - "...it’s why it’s so important for us to continue to welcome and encourage new members of the community. We need fresh blood and fresh ideas to make better progress."
9. Push up a big tent - "It requires work to be welcoming. Especially if your goal isn’t just to attract more people who are just like the ones who are already part of the community. Lowering the barriers to entry is work we should always take seriously."

Rails for non-technical founders

It is becoming more and more difficult for non-technical founders to create an MVP:

• Hiring developers is becoming increasingly more expensive.
• Tools for modern web development, built by the Googles and Facebooks of the world, are becoming increasingly more complex.
• Even with the "no-code" tools, it often impossible to bring your sketch to life without reshaping its scope to fit the tool's capabilities.

In this environment, Ruby on Rails feels like the perfect solution for all the reasons I have stated above.

Therefore, my goal is to learn enough Ruby on Rails so that I can confidently build the epicenter of whatever new product idea I have. It is too early to tell how long this journey will take or if I'll succeed at all in reaching the goal. But I'm sure whatever the outcome, it will be a remarkable journey.

If you're a founder or an aspiring founder looking to build useful web applications, you can follow my journey in the Rails for Founders newsletter where I'll write about my hard-earned lessons!

No real bonds, camaraderie or learning by osmosis can happen on Zoom - they say.

Just like no online database will replace your daily newspaper.

Just like no CD-ROM can replace your competent teacher.

Just like no one will buy things without human contact and salespeople.

Or, just like no clunky computer can replace the friendly pages of a book.

Online publishing, ecommerce and online education were all dismissed as just a passing fad by the smartest people 25 yrs ago. And yet today, no one reads a newspaper, Amazon is the king and Internet is the best teacher.

So, why do smart people underestimate the power of the Internet?

Answer – The Innovation Adoption Lifecycle

Early adopters make for only a minority in the early days of any new innovation. A vast majority of the people lack the imagination on how this new tool would be used, because it is still being explored.

This was the case in 1995 when we didn't have Amazon, Google, or the millions of other websites we take for granted today.

Newsweek published this critique of the Internet back then.

Now, it is just laughable.

Same is happening with the Remote Work innovation today.

The democratising power of Remote Work

It is easy to dismiss it for all the obvious challenges that come from missing human contact. But the smartest people of tomorrow will be the early adopters today who focus on power of the innovation.

No matter how skilled you are, your earning potential was mostly limited by the opportunities around you.

That changes with remote work.

Until now, Internet had democratized access to information. With remote work, it can democratise the access to opportunities.

In fact, I believe remote work is an amazing and necessary complement to the equalizing force that is the Internet! That's a superpower for people coming from underprivillaged backgrounds.

Take me for example, I come from India.

~3 years ago, in late 2019, I found my first full-time job, before I had graduated, at a startup based in San Francisco. Since then, I have had the privilege of working with 3 other startups based in some US city, received many more offers - sitting in an apartment outside the city of Kolkata, India.

For the most part, I've read the same things and learned from the same people as a 23-year old in San Francisco might. With the adoption of remote work, I'm able to use that knowledge to access the same opportunities too. I mean it is only fair!

The un-ignorable challenges of remote work

What about networking and making friends?

Yes, it's a challenge.

But we are still in the innovators stage. Challenges are to be expected.

I try to solve it by proactively inviting strangers to "virtual coffee" chats, attending online events like Community Hacked and investing time and money to engage in small, curated online communities. The key, for me, is to lean deeper into the "remote" part of my life.

Is that enough to replace the lost "human touch"? Ofcourse not! I'm also actively trying to meet friends and make new ones in my city.

Even that doesn't feel enough. I often get envious when someone tells me about their friends from office or an office party they attended. But during these times, I tell myself that new problems require new solutions.

In the long term, I believe niche online communities will become more fulfilling, individuals will learn to build their personal brands on the Internet and there will be better solutions for strangers to make friends IRL.

The smartest people will be the early adopters of this new way to work. Employers will focus on the benefits of having a global talent pool. Employees will focus on the benefits of divorcing your income from the place you choose to live.

Over the past year, On Deck has done something insanely hard: scaled an education company, online, profitably, while growing revenue 10x! They even raised a $20 million Series A to build the "Stanford of the Internet".

Unlike other online education startups that we are familiar with - like Udemy or Coursera - On Deck is heavily relying on a future where education is community-led. Instead of selling text or video-based courses that students consume passively, their key value proposition is the community-based fellowships led by an expert Program Director.

They now offer 14 such fellowships:

I wanted to get a first-hand experience of how On Deck is doing it. So, I was excited when they announced their new Community Builders fellowship and joined the first cohort.

"We're taking everything we learned building the On Deck community to help you supercharge your own."

- On Deck Community Builders fellowship page

It was an 8-week program attended by ~100 other community builders who wanted to learn from the On Deck community playbook.

While they didn't share a literal playbook - alas! - I was able to identify 3 key pillars of their metaphorical playbook:

1. Allow members to create value for each other
2. Be the matchmaker to engage your community members
3. Put barriers to make it difficult to enter your community

Best part?

These pillars are not unique to On Deck - any community builder can steal them to improve their own communities!

So, below, I'm going to discuss each of these pillars and describe how On Deck created a high-value experience around them, so that you may use it for your own community.

Pillar #1: Allow members to create value for each other

My biggest takeaway is how they enable their fellows to create value for each other, and thus, for On Deck itself!

Community Builders, take note:

Our job is to allow members of our community members to create value for each other.

How On Deck allows it's members to create value for each other:

On Deck Community Builders (ODCB) fellows created value for each other all the time:

1. They hosted Serendipity Dinners

Once a week, On Deck banded participants in small groups of 10-15 people for a 1 hr "dinner chat".

These chats were 100% hosted by a fellow.

2. They asked questions during Fireside chats with experts

On Deck organised 45-minute Zoom calls with 2-3 experts every week, for ODCB fellows.

Our Program Director, Lais, interviewed them for the first 20 mins.

But it's the fellows who asked the most interesting questions in the remaining 25 minutes.

3. They made the Icebreaker and Social sessions awesome!

What were these sessions?

They were hour-long sessions, hosted on the awesome Gatheround app, where you connect with 7 randomly chosen fellows on a 7-minute 1-on-1 call. Think speed dating but better because everyone went home with amazing connections.

I remember having such an adrenaline rush after participating in my first Icebreaker session.

Oh, the serendipity and excitement of connecting with a stranger around the world who understands your work!

4. But that's not all...

We were invited to an ODCB Community Calendar to keep a track of the events that were 100% organised by the fellows.

These were events based on specific, shared interests (like edtech, venture, gen-z etc).

Did you notice how it's the paying customers who were creating value for each other, but under the ODCB brand?

So, On Deck is not creating a valuable product for their customers. It's creating it with them.

And that's the key pillar of the On Deck playbook that allows them to run 14 fellowships, each of which cost 2000-5000 USD to enter.

Pillar #2: Be the matchmaker to engage your community members

A simple way to engage members in your community - be the Matchmaker.

As a Community Builder, you have special matchmaking powers that others in your community don't. And we all know - with great power comes great...

How Be On Deck plays the role of matchmaker in their fellowships:

1. Interest-based socials and Slack spaces

At the start of the fellowship, every new fellow filled out a detailed form listing their interests and expectations from the fellowship.

Then, they used this info to bring together people interested in specific topics, both on video socials (that I mentioned earlier) and private Slack channels.

2. Masterminds

Based on time zones and years of experience, they put every member in a Masterminds group of 6 people.

These groups meet every other week on a 90-minute video call to allow members to discuss their communities and seek feedback from their peers.

3. They encouraged fellows to organise events, dinner chats and klatches

These were events hosted by fellows to talk about a particular community building issue or share their expertise on something.

This way the fellows created value for each other.

Your special matchmaking powers

What are those special powers you have as a community builder?

1. You have the "Ice-breaking Hammer"

People are naturally scared of reaching out to strangers and putting themselves out there.

But you are different - you are no stranger! Everyone knows who you are. Plus, you have credibility as their community person.

So, you can help them by becoming everyone's wingperson.

2. You have the best knowledge of who can help whom

You know who's there. You know their stories - what's their background and where they want to go.

Atleast you know it better than anyone else in the community.

The community is the village you set up.

Pillar #3: Put barriers to make it difficult to enter your community

This is the most non-obvious, even controversial, pillar I discovered:

Community-as-a-product creators can create a lot of value for their customers simply by creating a high barrier of entry to their premium communities.

I call it the "Self-fulfilling Prophecy Effect of Premium Communities".

How it works

1. The high barrier of entry attracts serious participants
2. who create lots of value for each other
3. thus justifying the high barrier of entry to the premium community

Unlike other traditional products, it works because a lot of the community's value is created by its members (the customers). So, as a creator, you can increase your product's value by increasing your members' output.

There are 2 ways in which high barrier of entry helps in increasing your members' output:

1. Accelerates trust b/w community members.

Members can be sure that everyone around them is serious about the purpose of the community.

This makes it easy for them to let their guards down and participate in your community.

2. Makes members more enthusiastic about participating

By spending effort to get in, members become invested. They want to get their effort's worth.

To do that, they need to participate - because with a community, you get what you put in.

Take On Deck for example

One of the reasons On Deck communities work is simply because there's a high cost of admission ($2000-$5000). Everyone knows that everyone else around them is seriously invested.

On top of this, fellows go through an interview where they need to convince the program director that they can be positive contributors in the On Deck community. This gets them invested.

Invested enough that they participate in the fellowship despite having a full-time job. They take out >5 hours out of their time every week to

• interact with other fellows
• participate in sessions
• build group projects

Non-monetary barriers of entry

But the barrier doesn't have to be monetary though.

In fact, YCombinator pays you money to be a part of their cohorts. But they put the barrier at the application process and take only those candidates who can show that they are highly motivated and relentless.

You can have similar non-monetary, proof-of-work type barriers to make your community exclusive yet, accessible.

Before participating in this fellowship, I used to doubt the scalability of high-value communities like On Deck.

I used to think that the only reason they can provide such an awesome community experience is because the high ticket price must allow them to hire a tonne of community professionals who can devote time to meaningfully engage with everyone.

But after joining, I was surprised to see that there were only 2 full-time people who were devoted to this fellowship - one Program Director assisted by an Operator. That's it!

I, now, understand how good communities created using these 3 pillars can be highly scalable.

David is the founder of CMX - a community of community professionals - and has helped in building hundreds of communities at companies like Udemy and Google using his frameworks.

In his book Business of Belonging, he discusses how a business can create a customer community and use it as an extension of their teams to achieve measurable results in all areas of the business like Product, Marketing, Content and Support.

"What community does is it extends the capacity and impact of each of those teams by organizing community members to contribute to the same kinds of projects and goals."

Takeaway #1: Use Community as an extension of your other teams

David understands this space very deeply because he has built and advised a lot of business communities.

As I was reading this book, I felt like David knew about all my struggles and desires as a Community Manager. He has written one of those rare actionable books that I have put to work right away. My work email is filled with Kindle notes and highlights I sent from this book to myself.

It is extremely practical and has no fluff.

It is no overstatement to say that this book has changed the tragectory of my career as a community professional.

Restarting my career in community building

Like a lot of other community professionals, I got into the community industry accidently. I was hired as a Community Manager for my company before I even graduated due to a cold email I sent to the CEO.

I couldn't have asked for a better first job. But 6 months in and I was already thinking about transitioning to become a marketer or product manager.

That's because I wanted to build my career in a team that leads the business - Marketing does it by selling the product and Product does it by creating it. Compared to them, customer community felt more of a liability than an asset to the business. I thought creating a sense of belonging is good but it can't earn money.

David's book has caused a shift in my perspective.

Well, actually it was the first chapter of his book - where he discusses how community can be the competitive advantage for a business. It is the one thing that competitors cannot copy.

"One reason that community is becoming more important is that it's becoming much easier to build products, but it's always going to be very difficult to copy a community."

Takeaway #2: Communities are built on relationships. This makes them difficult to copy.

He also argues that community can improve retention for the business by adding an emotional layer to switching costs.

"To leave your product would mean leaving their people, their relationships, and sacrificing the social capital they've earned within your community. There's a social cost to leaving your product.

Takeaway #3: Community improves customer retention by adding an emotional layer to switching costs.

After reading the first chapter, it felt like I've been let in on a secret to building a better business. I remember feeling so pumped up after reading it that I finished the rest of the book by the next week.

Creating the Community Strategy

In the second chapter, he dives deep into how to create a community strategy that can create a measurable impact on the business.

One of the big themes of his book is that building an engaged community and achieving business goals should be 2 sides of the same coin.

"The key is to communicate how community engagement is also achieving business goals that impact revenue and growth. They both matter. Business goals without a focus on building an authentic, healthy community will result in low engagement and trust. Community engagement goals without a focus on achieving business goals will result in an underfunded, undersupported community team."

Takeaway #4: Focus on initiatives that improve community health by improving business health.

Prioritising stuff with the 3 Levels of Community Strategy

David and his team has developed a simple strategy for structuring and measuring a community strategy called the 3 levels of Community Strategy:

Whenever I create a strategy for my own community, I refer back to this framework.

This 3-level strategy framework forces me to think about the business needs before I start brainstorming new community initiatives. That's important because it's easy to get lost into thinking about community improvement ideas without tying them back to the company's goals.

Using the 3-level framework makes me confident about the direction I set for our community. Since reading this book, I've had multiple conversations with the CEO and directors at our company where I confidently present ambitious strategies involving the community.

Deprioritising stuff with the SPACES model

Everyone I talk to at the company has been part of some online community. So they all have ideas on improving our community. "Introduce a voting system", "incentivise people with badges", "create interest-based groups", "something with social media", "let's crowdsource content" and tonnes of other such interesting suggestions.

These seem like obviously good ideas. So, I thought that it was my responsibility to experiment with as many of them as I could to make the community really shine.

But David's SPACES model serves as a helpful reminder to not stretch myself too thin.

His team has identified 6 measurable business outcomes that the community can drive:

• Support - customer service and support
• Product - innovation, feedback and R&D
• Acquisition - growth, marketing and sales
• Contribution - collaboration and crowdsourcing
• Engagement - customer experience, retention and loyalty
• Success - customer success and advancement

David warns that community builders in small teams should focus on just one or two of these outcomes unless they want to set themselves up for failure.

Choosing my focus area makes it easier to explain why I'm deprioritising someone's suggestion.

Takeaway #5: Narrow your focus if you have a small community team

Strategic to Tactical

David's book's structure beautifully mirrors his 3 Level of Community Strategy - he discusses high-level strategic stuff in the first few chapters and then smoothly moves into discussing the practical nitty-gritties. Every chapter just flows into the next one.

In the 3rd chapter, David writes how community builders are essentially reinforcing a social identity of their members.

What stood out for me was this simple formula he presented for coming up with new community ideas:

There's a good chance that everyone has some part of their identity where they feel lonely. There's always an opportunity for community. You just need to find the isolated identity.

Takeaway #6: To find new community ideas, look for parts of people's identity where they feel lonely.

In the 4th one, he discusses community participation.

It is in this chapter that he presents the answer to every community builder's problem - how to increase engagement in the community.

His answer? Love your lurkers but prioritise your creators:

Generally, you want to focus your engagement strategy on the inner circles. The Pareto principle applies here, which predicts that roughly 80 percent of the content in your community will be created by 20 percent of your members... You'll grow your community a lot faster by working to get that 20 percent to double their commitment than by trying to get the other 80 percent of your community to increase their commitment by fivefold.

Takeaway #7: To increase community engagement, focus on the top 20% of your members.

5th chapter is all about incentives.

People often suggest votes, points and other "gamification" tactics like they are the Holy Grail to building a better community. After all, these are what they have seen working in large online communities like - Reddit (upvote/downvote), Hacker News (upvotes) and even Facebook (likes).

I have always felt icky about using such incentives. But I had trouble putting my ickiness into words.

Thankfully David did it for me by:

1. Differentiating between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators:

Motivation comes in two forms: intrinsic and extrinsic.

2. Talking about the superiority of intrinsic motivation:

Of course, communities work best when members are primarily intrinsically motivated. It's a requirement for true, deep communities. You need members who are there not to receive external rewards, but because they genuinely care about the community and the other members.

3. Yet, not dismissing the power of extrinsic rewards:

Reinforce the intrinsic motivations with praise, social validation, and other extrinsic rewards.

Takeaway #8: Focus on improving intrinsic motivation of your members by giving them autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Takeaway #9: Reinforce the intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards like increase in status, networking opportunities, special access and perks.

In 6th chapter, David discusses how to design community spaces and experiences.

This is where things get really practical. If you thought the rest of the book had practical advice, you are in for a treat in this one.

There's too much of meat in this chapter for me to summarise in this article. But here are the pieces that I've already put to practice:

• Importance of both asynchronous and synchronous experiences

Asynchronous experiences provide breadth. Synchronous experiences provide depth.

I realised that my community only ever interacted asynchronously. So, I've started bringing small groups of people together for video chats. It's so exciting to meet the people behind those avatars!

Takeaway #10: Create opportunities for your community to interact both synchronously and asynchronously.

• "The key is repetition and consistency"

David says that the key to building a habit of coming back amongst your members is to have recurring experiences daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.

Here, I realised that I didn't have enough monthly, quarterly or annually experiences. So, now, I'm brainstorming some.

Takeaway #11: Design daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually repeating events to build habit amongst your community members.

• 7 Ps of Community Experience Design

David suggests that before creating any shared experience, figure out the 7 Ps of that experience - People, Purpose, Place, Participation, Policy, Promotion and Performance.

I recently put together a Community Council comprising of the top participants. Sketching out the 7Ps before starting it - forced me to think about the tactical stuff. Now, I feel much better than I did before doing the exercise.

Takeaway #12: Decide on the core fundamentals of your community by figuring the 7 Ps - People, Purpose, Place, Participation, Policy, Promotion and Performance

• The fundamental question - what platform should you use to host your online community?

Online, a forum with 10 people in it will feel empty, and a chat group with 1,000 in it will feel extremely overwhelming.

My community of thousands lives on a Discourse forum. But I created a Discord chat room to bring the 10 people of the Community Council together. And I'm going to do the same for every new subgroup that I create.

Takeaway #13: Use online forums for large communities, chat based platforms for small communities.

• Tell your members how to participate

Putting people in a room together is not enough for creating a community. You have to tell them how to successfully interact with each other.

So, these days I'm creating guides and playbooks to help my community members understand how to participate.

Takeaway #14: Tell your members how to participate.

And the final chapter, has tips and tricks for the community builder.

Here David shares advice to help the community builder manage their emotions and be successful in their role.

My favourite is the one where he explains the power of personal invitations:

You can use personal invitations to facilitate engagement as well. In the online communities I run, we always have a rule that every question must get at least three quality answers in 24 hours. If it's not happening organically, we make it happen.  I'll start messaging other members privately and ask them to jump in and answer the question...

To the person who asked the question, it still looks like organic growth. They just see that a few people answered their question. To the person I ask to help, they feel good because I let them know that I consider them an expert and that they're helping the community in a meaningful way.

What a great little hack to create a win-win situation for everyone in the community!

Takeaway #15: Be the matchmaker in your community

In today's world, information is abundant but belonging is scarce. There's an opportunity for building community all around us.

I, now, aspire to create and lead the community team that creates a competitive moat around the business.

With David's lessons, I feel confident that I'll get to do it soon. And when I do get to do so, I'll be sure to give a copy of this book to every new community person that I hire!

I'm gonna post all my brain dumps about community building on Twitter and LinkedIn. Follow me there if you'd like to follow along my journey as a young community builder. :)

I started writing because the generous community of programmers had helped me by sharing their knowledge freely over the internet. I wanted to contribute to this incredible trend so I could be a part of something bigger than myself.

Little did I know that it would be me who benefitted the most by pursuing this noble cause.

Three years of writing on the internet has done more for my career than what four years of college education did.

I published 14 articles in the past three years while I was teaching myself programming, data science, and machine learning. These have allowed me to reach hundreds of thousands of readers around the world, make valuable connections, get a unique job opportunity, work with people from multiple countries, and make more money than I hoped.

I now work as the Community Manager for a remote startup that teaches data skills online. I could not have asked for a better first job as a 20-year old!

In this article, I’ll tell you why being a good writer can take your career to the next level and how you can start your writing journey.

The Writing Revolution

We are living through a Writing Revolution where good writing skills can have an immense impact on the life of every ambitious knowledge worker.

That's because in the past 30 years, our world has changed in a fundamental way — the Internet has demolished the cost of distributing information.

“It turns days into minutes,” Andrew Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel, commented on the arrival of email. “A lot more people know what’s going on than did before, and they know it a lot faster than they used to.”

Today we have email, Slack, Notion, Github, Twitter, Facebook, and a plethora of internet apps focused on written communication.

For 200,000 years of human history, speaking and listening were the primary modes of communication. But in the past 30 years, reading and writing have overtaken them as the primary mode of communication.

You are now living in the early years of a Writing Revolution that has changed the way humans communicate with each other.

It doesn't matter whether you write code, design stuff, create things, build communities, market products or lead people who do these things. Writing is your primary mean of communication. So, being a better writer can help you.

However, traditional education has failed to recognise this human-scale revolution — good writing tuitions are still reserved for students of the liberal arts.

You cannot wait for traditional education to catch up when being a good writer can benefit your career now.

Especially with the remote-working revolution underway.

The Remote-Working Revolution

During the pandemic, some of the biggest companies of our generation, like Facebook, Twitter, and Shopify, announced a permanent transition to remote working. Inevitably, they have paved the path for entire industries to follow.

Therefore, it’s highly likely that your next company will be working remotely.

In remote settings, with little face-to-face interaction, good written communication becomes the key.

It’s your competitive advantage in a tough job market.

Work-from-home means that the competitors for your next job are not just from your city — they’re from your entire country and potentially the whole world. Add economic depression and rock bottom unemployment rates to the mix, and you have a saturated job market.

You need to find a way to stand out.

Being a good writer will help you.

When deciding between a few candidates to fill a position, companies like Basecamp hire the better writer. People of Basecamp have been working remotely for more than 20 years and great writing is a prerequisite for every single position they have.

Being a Good Writer Boosts the Arc of Your Entire Career

Being a good writer helps you get a new job. A better job.

But more importantly, it helps you do your everyday work better, and therefore, changes the arc of your entire career!

Here are three ways it boosts your career:

1. Grabbing the valuable attention of people around you

• You need your coworkers to understand the reports and strategies you create.
• You need your peers to read that awesome idea you propose.
• You need your subordinates to pay attention to you.
• You need hiring managers to read your next job application.
• You need interesting people that you admire to read and answer your cold emails.
• You need your connections on LinkedIn or Twitter to pay attention to your posts — we all know better connections mean better opportunities.

Yet, you can’t rely on the awesomeness of your ideas to grab their attention. Everyone has loads of them.

What differentiates successful people is their ability to convey their ideas in ways that make people want to pay attention.

“Being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit.”

— David Heinemeier Hanson and Jason Fried, founders of Basecamp

2. Finding new career opportunities

Writing on the internet can advance your career. A well-written article, published on the internet, works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to find new opportunities for you!

Therefore, your blog is like a resume, only better.

Writing a useful article is the quickest way to establish yourself as an expert in that field. No degrees required.

Two years ago, I wrote an article to help people get started with reading Deep Learning research papers. It still fetches me LinkedIn connections from PhDs in universities around the world. The funny thing is that I have read only one research paper in my life — when I wrote the article!

“By making it easy for people to find you online, you’ll create a vehicle for serendipity.”

— David Perell, creator of the popular course Write of Passage

A good online presence allows you to connect with like-minded people around the world who you would never be able to meet in real life. And meaningful social connections are often the source of surreal career opportunities.

3. Improving your thinking

“You don’t just write to share what you think. You write to discover what you think in the first place.”

— Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company behind Wordpress

Compressing your thoughts into the written word removes noise from your thoughts. Clear writing induces clear thinking.

This is why Jeff Bezos made his executives prepare six-page narratives instead of 20-slide PowerPoints before any meeting. Bezos believes that PowerPoint presentations conceal lazy thinking. Instead, he wants his employees to think deeply and take the time to express their thoughts cogently.

I’m often amazed to see how writing an idea leaves me with a better version of the idea itself. It makes me realise how sloppy my thinking usually is.

Writing clearly can have the same effect on your thinking too.

So, how do you start?

Step 1: Unlearn What You Learnt at School

You’ve probably taken writing lessons in school.

And yet, so much of what school teaches you is worse than useless. It hurts you in real life. You need to unlearn so much if you want to write meaningful things in real life.

Here are some of the things that school made you do in order to get respectable grades:

• You followed minimum word limits. Whereas the real world has maximum word limits - the key is to convey your message in as few words as possible.
• You followed rigid formats for “creative” writing. There was a format for essays, formal letters, and even informal letters! Well, guess what? Nobody likes it when you are formulaic and everyone loves being surprised.
• You wrote an introductory paragraph before you made your point. Whereas, in the real world, your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Nobody has the time to read an introduction to your main content.
• You wrote what was prescribed instead of what you wanted. You never realized that you write your best when you write about something that you are excited about.

What Else?

There are writing courses all over the internet that promise to turn you into a successful author or a professional blogger or a successful newsletter writer.

Oh, that dream of writing like a pro and monetising your words!

But wait, most of us don’t aspire to be a professional writer.

You probably want to be a pragmatic programmer, a resourceful builder, a great manager, or maybe a successful entrepreneur. Don’t you?

By connecting an incredibly useful skill with a dreamy aspiration, those guides miss the point of writing well.

Learning to write well is about learning to convey your thoughts to others.

I have found that there are no good courses to help professionals get started with writing on the Internet.

Therefore, I created one — Clear Writing, Clear Thinking. It's a short email course where I've distilled everything I've learnt from writing articles that have been viewed by 500k+ peole.

Thanks for reading.

You can follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn to see my latest "brain dumps" about writing on the Internet, community building and self-learning.