The Distance: A new online magazine about long-lasting businesses | Hacker News Reader

The Distance: A new online magazine about long-lasting businesses

thedistance.com

29 pointsryanSrich12 comments

Even tho this may be a content-marketing play, these guys seem a bit all over the place. They just "dropped" everything else to focus full-time on Basecamp and here we go with another new side business.

"However, because we've released so many products over the years, we've become a bit scattered, a bit diluted. Nobody does their best work when they're spread too thin. We certainly don't. We do our best work when we're all focused on one thing." "Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp."

+1 this was also my first reaction.

One story a month though is not so bad - that's my second reaction.

I much prefer the idea of the Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud series, which seems to be on indefinite hiatus. That being said, it should be interesting.

Id say this is more in line with a signalvnoise than a highrise. Not quite a side business.

Maybe, it still is quite a bit of work.

"One story each month" doesn't sound like that much work. But I guess it depends on how much research they need to do for each.

It definitely depends. If we're talking about standardized interviews, in Q&A format, it's not too much work. If we're talking 10,000+-word, deep, New Yorker- or Atlantic-length articles, it's a lot of work. One of those every month is an aggressive cadence for anyone not doing this full time. Writing in-depth stories like those is very research-intensive, travel-dependent, and analytically taxing.

I would guess (?) that they're aiming for a medium in between those two extremes. But even still, bandwidth can be an issue. If you're doing primary discovery, primary research, and primary analysis, you're going to have to commit significant effort to produce something really good every month.

In general, we as readers tend to underestimate (and undervalue) the effort involved in primary research and investigation. Some of what we read in feature-length magazine articles involved hundreds of hours of primary research or experience.

This is actually a very good content marketing strategy. I'd enjoy being the canonical publisher of these pieces of unique long-form content about an industry that just gets bigger and bigger every year (and interest in it at 3x).

It will make an even bigger name from them outside of the "core" startup community... can piggyback off any big brands, directly from their own, as all they need to do is call someone and say "hey, we're from Basecamp" since so many people love them.

When you frame as a 'new online magazine' it looks to me like a lot of work, but we'll see.

(Not complaining here BTW, I'm pretty sure these will be awesome and inspiring stories I'll benefit from. It's just weird.)

I hope this is a Cake reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Distance_(song)

More likely a Rocky reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_distance_(boxing)

;-)

Love this idea. Staying in business isn't easy.

The company writing this blog seems to do well though :-)

(In case anyobe wonder: basecamp, formerly known as 37 signals, most known for basecamp project management and ROR framework. )

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