Audience Building - the McClusky Curve [Sonal Chokshi]

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Related essay: Particle/Wave Duality Theory of Knowledge

Transcript

I think what's happening is this other phenomenon, which is not only about content, but it's about code building, which is a lot of people on Twitter and social and their own like, one person media brands essentially creating cults. And I think a lot of those are not just subscribers and listeners and audience, but their followers. And a lot of the people I see who are doing that right now are focused on viral hits or like, trying to just get popular. They're not actually thinking about a body of work, like a portfolio of work. And I think a lot of companies and start ups and individuals and even one person media brands should be thinking more strategically about a portfolio and body of work. Well, that's so interesting because there's this sort of polarity between OK, like, viral hits that are sort of trending and that are riding a wave. And these things are pretty good because they can spread far and wide and capture a lot of people who ordinarily would have been exposed to your ideas.

Then there is this alternative, sort of like evergreen backlog of content you can produce that people will go back and read for years to come. Like, First Round Capital is really good at this. They put together, like, several websites where I can go and search for great startup advice from years ago. This is evergreen. And that's also, like a valid way, I think, to reach people. If you go through the right channels, for example, search engines and optimization being found on Google is huge. There's perhaps almost no bigger way to reach people than that.

And so when you are putting together something like future, as an outsider looking in, my knee jerk reaction is like, these are viral hits. These are things that will cause an uproar when they're written and they're very timely. But like two years from now, they might not be as relevant or there might be something that people reference, but that people aren't sharing to such a large degree. And the downside to that is, like, how do you build over time? How do you grow an audience over time? Will people get basically bored if it's the same thing? Or will people keep coming back if you don't continue producing new viral hits? Yeah. Well, this is an essential question of any media operation. And I don't know how you do your editorial calendar Courtland, but I think about everything in terms of stock and flow. I think was it Robin Sloan or someone coined this? It's an economic term, but he coined it in the context of content.

But I think of stock and flow. So, like, the flow is the stuff that you run for volume and cadence and to kind of build an audience. To be clear, you should not be running a bunch of junk. So people ask me, like, number one advice by editorial strategy. And my advice is sometimes it's more about what you don't run and what you kill than what you do run. I think about it in terms of stock and flow, and then the stock is sort of the big ideas that you might put out there. So they're not just things that are timely.

And when you're talking about stuff that might get outdated, some of our best content is very windy, like it keeps coming up over and over and over again. It's evergreen, and that is really critical for creating immediately. You have to have both. I'm reading a quote from Robin Sloane when he says Flow is the feed, it's the posts and the tweets. It's a stream of daily and sub daily updates that remind people that you exist. And stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months or two years as it is today.

It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely building fans over time. And so there are these pieces that have come out of a 16 and other media properties that are like, definitely stuck. Like Marc Andreessen writing It's Time to Build or his idea of sort of product market fit that he wrote about over a decade ago, or writing about Software eats the world. These are things people talk about forever. Legion writing about the passion economy and the greater economy, the idea of 100 true fans. There are these ideas that just last forever that are certainly stuck.

Yes, except I will say it's interesting because in the examples you cited, two of them Marc's post on its time to build and Lee's post on the passion economy, which also grew from the conversations with the consumer team here. Both of those are also very much in the zeitgeist and about the timing that they ran in. And so Lending posts like Evergreen post will do really well regardless of the time they're in the product market. Fit post is a great example of that because that is an evergreen essential idea that keeps coming back over and over and over again. Ben's example on this front is his famous like, good product manager, bad product manager post, whereas it's time to build. As viral as that essay was and oh my God, it was really viral. It also is of the time.

And in that zeitgeist of the pandemic and his frustration, which he writes about in that piece that are you kidding me? We don't have enough surgical masks, eye Shields, and medical gowns. As I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns rain ponchos in 2020 in America. Those are all his exclamation points. But that was very much a call to arms. And in that zeitgeist, it was very motivated by the time of the pandemic. The other variable in what you just discussed is it's not just the evergreenness or not, and the stock versus flowness of it or not, it's also the timing and the zeitgeist. And timing plays a really critical role in content and viral hits as well.

So what are your thoughts on contributing to both of these categories? Because I think there's probably different strategies for producing a viral sort of flow hit, let's call it, versus an evergreen stock hit. And like, no one's good enough to reliably sit down and just say, I want a viral hit today. Just get it whatever they want to. But at the end of the day, if you're trying to produce a publication that is going to be successful in these two areas, you probably have some principles, some thoughts about what will make something viral and what will make something stuck. And also, since you're working with outside writers and contributors, so it's like you don't even have full control over this. I know this is what makes it so hard and also fun. Yeah.

And I actually have to say it's going to sound so braggy, but I don't mean it to sound braggy. One of the things I pride myself on as an editor, from both my work at park to Wired to here is sort of like a track record of viral hits, and there are certain variables that go into all of them, and timing is a big part of that. But it actually goes back to where we started this conversation, which is differentiation. One of the things that I'll tell people is because a lot of times I think people play this content game that they're trying to compete for who has the first take. And this is the exact problem that a lot of media outlets have when they were covering news. It became extremely commoditized very fast. And so the real strategy here is to figure out what your unique mode is.

When I first started at a16z, one of the partners came to me and was like, oh, my God. So and so wrote that post. I wanted to write phone all. We should have gotten it out last week. And I'm like, Dude, if someone else wrote the post, you could write, you're writing the wrong thing. And so you shouldn't be writing that post. You have to write something that only you ...