Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and Tips To Get Started | Hacker News Reader

Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and Tips To Get Started

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This is all good advice except that (as you can see in these comments) I spell like a retarded gold fish and my ideas aren't really that interesting.

I very much doubt I am alone in this.

First, not every blog post is going to be your greatest piece of work ever.

Second, if you don't have a single interesting idea, why are you starting a business? Hopefully your business or product is an interesting idea. Write about that!

Eh, lacking an interesting idea didn't seem to hurt Zynga. The obvious answer to "why are you starting a business?" would be "money."

> my ideas aren't really that interesting

That's what you think now. Look at how much mileage Gladwell gets out of his core ideas, which wouldn't have a leg to stand on without all that embroidery.

For my product I look for a story to tell in every bug-fix and feature I work on. If nothing else, I want to see if it doesn't add credibility when readers are at least informed how much work goes into a quality product day-to-day.

You could try starting with twitter and working your way up to larger texts over time. Particularly as the 140 chars becomes annoying!

Tweeting to get better at blogging is a backwards way to approach the problem. If you want to blog well, you should blog until you can blog well.

I don't know about that. A big part of what holds me back from blogging (and I suspect others as well) is stage fright about putting my ideas out in public. Tweeting is a low friction way to get over that.

I would also add becoming a more active commenter as another way to get in the habit of writing in public (something I've been working on lately).

I don't believe every entrepreneur should write. Sometimes those of us with the passion & ability tend to take things a little too far... Its almost impossible for me to write something decent that isn't essentially a heated op-ed piece that in turn gets me into trouble in some way. Not every entrepreneur is an even-tempered sensible person driven by logic and rationality. In fact, many are quite the opposite. A blog in these cases would only give them more opportunities to put their foot in their mouth and damage their reputation. In my opinion in some cases its important that some entrepreneurs deliberately stay away from blogging...

Wow, is that all I have to do? And here I thought I should spend most of my time programming...

If you're a founder of a tech company and you spend most of your time programming, you're in for a rude awakening [1].

1. Unless you have one hell of a business cofounder.

And even if you do have one hell of a business co-founder, writing still helps.

I think it's more about writing well, which translates into designing well. My favorite quotation from Strunk & White:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Conciseness is a universal design principle, and writing is one way of practicing it.

Good advice if you can do it. As a not quite starving entrepreneur I hardly have time to keep up with my life than to write a blog. I did take this advice a while back and kept a dedicated WP blog for a couple of months but like any startup it needs continuous care and handling. Then building an audience takes time, you have to comment on other blogs and hope they swing by and be sociable. With hundreds of millions of blogs, Twitter and FB pages out there you start to wonder if anyone at all will come.

FYI, check the links at the end to Spencer fry, marco arment, and Gruber. Insanely useful resources and genuinely good advice.

Good post and good tips. I'm aware of most of them but the reminder is definitely helpful to keep me blogging.

Not to mention possibly the most important benefit of clarifying your own thinking on the subject.

When I started my first company, we almost didn't make payroll one month but I blogged my way out of it.

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." --Oscar Wilde

Great tips!

What if you're not an entrepreneur, but you'd like to be one some day, and you're overwhelmed with the sense that you're more intelligent than the majority of the population? Should you write then?

Absolutely do! There's nothing more refreshing than reading the blog of someone just starting out, like Patrick (patio11) when he started his blog. As much craziness that happened this weekend about him and what he should and shouldn't do, he continues to lay his business life bare and is as candid about triumphs and setbacks and problems as one can be. I'd love to read a book by Patrick when/if he ever cares to, but if he doesn't, his blog suffices greatly!

And, about the other thing: As long as you realize that even though you feel you're "more intelligent than the majority of the population" you, at the same time, realize that there a metric _boatload_ of people who are smarter, more successful, more insightful, and better at expressing themselves than you, you'll do great! Confidence + humility + honesty = a great path to success. There isn't one person that would dispute that.

Suggested post #1: candid thoughts on why I still work for people dumber than me, and my plan for changing this. (It isn't wrong to not have a business, but if you aren't starting today, have a good reason for it. "I like eating" is a good reason. "gtg WoW raid" got radically less persuasive after I thought about it for a while.)

Even if that is so, you're not gonna have all the insights, experience, knowledge, training and divergent thinking openend to you till you have an audience, peer group, whatever, going over your thoughts. Half-jokingly, one other downside to being so intelligent is that you tend to discount all the things that obviously won't work. Some of the 'less intelligent majority' might offer something seemingly obvious but just might work. See the whole crowd outperforming single experts in certain areas research.

http://brandsplusmusic.blogspot.com/2010/04/creativity-and-1...

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