How about less blogging and more work on your company?

Good writeup and valid points. I only take issue with one statement:

    "Hey hotshot.  How about less blogging and more work on your darn company?"
    Oh, trolls.
    They used to really get to me.

Seems to me that if you take the time to write an extensive defense of blogging (and don't get me wrong - it is well written, and chock-full of valid points), that perhaps yon troll did really get to you after all...

I'm a huge opponent of this form of advertising being pushed down our throats. Here's some reasons why blogging for HN like this is bad:

- Your brand and your blog are not representing your company, the traffic literally doesn't know or care what you do they're just there for the HN porn.

- If you do a venn diagram of HN users and people who need pretty much anything there is going to be a tiny, tiny overlap that shouldn't be confused for your market unless you've failed at all other lead generation and customer acquisition channels.

- HN is for discussing interesting things, there's nothing interesting about being the victim of yours and others on-going attempts to capture a market in the least efficient way you can imagine.

For disclosure - Jason and I were in the same YC batch and I've gone to him for advice a couple of times. The one thing I'll say about blogging this way, that perhaps a lot of folks don't appreciate, (particularly the incredibly candid way that Jason does it), is that it is really hard to be that honest. It's hard to be that honest with yourself (most people simply aren't, and I know personally that I spent a long time not being so, and in some cases I'm that way today) and its several orders of magnitude harder to be that honest with strangers, in a forum as public as this one.

Insofar as the HN community remains interested in discussing startup related topics, this personal candor/honesty about when things aren't going well is completely under-discussed; it happens all the time that things aren't going well (actually it's what mostly happens) but usually the only times you learn about it are in a post-mortem or a takedown piece. A founder whose currently building his company and willing to discuss these things is extremely rare and valuable to other founders and would-be founders (I on occasion give talks at my alma-mater and I try very hard to portray the unglamorous side of things. The audience always appreciates it).

Actually, I'd be pretty interested in reading about commercial real estate. I have been at startups looking for offices before. I've also met startups in the area, like ones that implement your future building in a game world and let you walk around inside with a real estate agent. If getting someone to buy into investing in a new hotel property is worth a lot of money, then even a small increase in the number of investors is worth quite a lot, so seems like a good point of pain to get money to attack.

I don't publish anything so i'm conscious of how far off the mark i could be.

I think i would choose not to read any replies, responses or discussions on something i'd published. I promise the irony of me writing this comment is not lost on me :-)

Any positive comments are likely too positive and just people wanting you to feel good - which is very nice of them but ultimately could work against you.

Similarly negative comments are likely too negative to be realistically worthwhile.

I dare say there's some signal in all the noise but i bet there's more signal in just surrounding yourself with high quality people day to day.

Ergo, read comments on other peoples submissions and participate in those discussions instead.

Well done. It always drives traffic.

I'm realizing I need to do more blogging.