Steph Smith: How to become successful as a content creator

Transcript of episode 28

Matthias:
Hello, dear listeners, this is another episode of the audience explorer. Matthias Bohlen on the microphone. I’m happy to have Steve Smith here today. Nice to meet you. Hello Steph.

Steph:
Hey, nice to meet you and thanks for having me.

Matthias:
Thanks that you’re here. I’m so excited to hear more about what you do. I read on your website that you do so many things at the same time. So, our listeners will be curious to hear what it is that you are currently doing.

Steph:
Yeah, to your point, I often whether it’s on a podcast or when I meet people, I’m asked what I do. And I guess my full-time job was at a company called The Hustle, which was one of the biggest newsletters in the world, that was acquired by HubSpot. So, now I work at HubSpot. And I was working on a product called “Trends”; it was a paid newsletter. So, that was my full time job for a while, for the last two years or so.

But in addition to that, I wrote a book last year. I taught myself to code a couple of years ago. So, I’ve built little projects online.

Matthias:
Oh.

People have multiple identities

Steph:
This past year in 2021, launched my own podcast as well. It’s called “The Shit You Don’t Learn in School”. And I guess, yeah, I’m just always trying new things out online.

And one of the things that, if people are interested, that has really like guided my view on that is Paul Graham’s essay, “Keep Your Identity Small”. It’s a great essay. It’s actually structured around something slightly different, but it’s this idea that like I think a lot of people do gear themselves around being like, “I am an artist” or “I am a marketer” or “I am a developer”, and you don’t only need to be that one thing that your identity is curated around. So, that’s kind of why I’m very happy to kind of bounce around, even though it may sound stressful to some other people.

Matthias:
Interesting, especially about identity. I feel very much that one person can have several identities.

Steph:
Yeah.

Matthias:
I inside my myself am several persons at the same time. Is that right?

Steph:
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s quite strange, actually, to consider that your identity as a human, that’s like very dynamic thing, to be one thing, right?

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
No single person in the world has a single interest. In fact, most people have many, many strong interests that they want to pursue, but then they end up just, in the way that I guess they’ve been taught to do, to only pursue that one path.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
But instead, there’s actually no reason why you can’t pursue multiple paths. And a lot of the unlocks, like remote work in the last couple of years, actually allow you to do that more easily.

Before you had almost a time constraint, in terms of having to go to one office for eight hours, commute there, and then basically most of your day is done. But today, you have this kind of flexible day that you can allocate, let’s say 30 percent to one thing, another 50 percent to another, another 5 percent to something else. And that is actually something that was a big unlock for me when I started to pursue all these things, because prior to that, I was a little limited in just like the share of my time that I could allocate to any given thing.

Remote work has enabled us to do different things

Matthias:
Yeah, remote work has really enabled us. It’s a pity that that Covid had to come around to force everyone into remote work. But I think there were many people who did that before Covid times, right?

Steph:
Yeah, I’ve been working remotely for around five, maybe even six years now; it’s hard to tell with the years because Covid just feels like a blink of an eye. But yes, lots of people did it before. And to your point, it’s unfortunate that a pandemic had to force so many other people into it.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
But I think it was this wonderful test. It was an experiment for much of the world, and much of that experiment prior to the experiment thought this could never work. And I think what it showed is, yeah, maybe it works better for some industries, or some people prefer it more than others. But generally, I think many people were probably surprised that it at least can work, and it seems to be working to some degree.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And one thing to keep in mind is as someone who worked remotely prior to the pandemic, pandemic remote work kind of sucks for everyone.

As in, you just don’t have the same outlets and the same, I don’t know, life that you had before the pandemic. So, as someone who loved remote work before the pandemic, and still really likes it, it’s been a lot harder. And so naturally, I can imagine people jumping right into it or like, “Oh, I don’t know if I like this”, but I can guarantee once the world kind of gets back to normal, I think a lot of people are going to be like, “Wow, this is actually really amazing! I have the flexibility and my social life and X, Y or Z that I have been missing over the last couple of years.”

Everyone had to adjust

Matthias:
Yeah, my wife and I, we love going to restaurants and dining out. And in the pandemic, it hasn’t been possible anymore because the law restricts it because of those infections. It’s such a pity that we are not able to anymore. But working remotely is a great thing.

In the beginning of 2021, I was really upgrading my studio here with camera, with lighting, with microphone and whatever. So, I was almost forced to do it, but it’s a lot of fun, actually!

You write a lot about remote work in your blog. Is that correct?

Remote work is a driver of innovation

Steph:
Yeah. Yeah, I haven’t written for a while, but I write about it, I tweet about it, in my podcast, we talk about it. It’s, especially in the last year, one of my favorite topics to talk about because I talked about it a lot before the pandemic because I was like, “This is something that I just wanted more people to experience and to not pass off as something that works for one person but can’t work for another.”

And the reason I have had almost like a renewed interest over the last six months is, as I just spoke about, I think there’s a lot of pushback, especially right now, of either people who have tried it and are like, not quite sold on it, which I understand; not everyone needs to love it. But I also see this pushback of like companies, for example, saying, “We need to have our people back in the office”, and I just think it’s a very backward stance.

I think of remote work as an innovation, and I truly think it is the same way that the iPhone completely changed the world, the airplane completely changed the world. Remote work, I think, fundamentally changes the world and in really macro way; this is not a small change.

An example of something I found the other day was that the number of commute hours in the U.S. alone in 2020 saved, was in the billions. I think it was around 16 billion hours of commute hours saved. And you can just imagine like that is of a macro shift in our society.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And that’s just the United States alone. And there are many other kinds of second third order effects from remote work. But that’s why I love talking about it, because I truly see it as like almost like one of the few age defining things that will happen in our lifetime.

Innovation causes pushback

Steph:
And I find it interesting because with any innovation or any, especially technology innovation, there’s always a lot of pushback. If anyone’s curious, you can just Google like pushback or fear with the airplane, with the iPhone, with the railroads, Wi-Fi, even teddy bears. Any innovation, if you’re going to call a teddy bear an innovation, had a ton of pushback.

In fact, one concrete example is there were people who literally thought it would take 10 million years for humans to fly; 10 million years. So, anyway, that’s my rant about how I think every technology is feared, every innovation is feared, and I think remote work is actually going through that phase right now. And that’s one of the reasons why, again, I’ve kind of had a renewed interest in talking about it.

Matthias:
Yeah, yeah. That’s absolutely true with innovation. I remember the books I read about the early trains, when they started to become faster than 30 miles an hour and people said, “Above 30 miles, humans will die.”

Steph:
Exactly. They thought they would melt or evaporate or something crazy.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And really, there’s a there’s actually a great site called Pessimist Archive. If people want to just see the depth and the breadth; the breadth is more important here. Every innovation was doubted. And not just doubted, but like the railroads, really feared in many ways.

Matthias:
Feared, yeah.

Steph:
And the other important part of this is it’s not just, you could say, uneducated people. Some of the smartest people in the world got this wrong at many junctures. So, it’s important for people, I think, to look at something like the Pessimist Archive to see, “Wow, like it’s very easy to mispredict the future or to fear the future.”

Matthias:
Yeah, absolutely.

Steph:
You can use the past to almost remind ourselves that we’re probably doing that in some dimension currently.

Matthias:
Yeah, I’m only waiting for time travel to happen, right? This would be really an innovation that I would like.

Steph:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

How Steph wrote “Doing content right”

Matthias:
Yeah. I also learned in the last few weeks that – No, not in the last few weeks; it’s even longer because I bought your book already some time ago. It was “Doing Content Right”, and I’m very big fan of that book.

Steph:
Thank you.

Matthias:
I’m exercising SEO and everything for my blog. And I understood that you wrote a book in parallel to everything else that we’re doing. How did you get this book written? How did the process work?

Steph:
Yeah. So, it did get written in a short period of time. But I always tell people that even though I wrote this in a short period of time while I was working full time, it really was the combination of many, many years of just doing those things. As in, the book is about creating content. And I probably spent the three to five years before that doing that and learning about it and being paid to do it and leading teams to do it.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And so, by the time I actually sat down to write it, it was much less work and much quicker than a normal person who had never gone through those things. So, that’s really how I did it, as I was doing many other things.

And then another simple hack is, of course, Parkinson’s law. I just set a very, very arbitrary, but tight deadline to just like “get it out there”. I don’t know if other people feel the same way. But at least with my own productivity, in order to work on many things in tandem, they’re not actually all in tandem because if I’m working on eight things at once, none of those will get finished.

And so, what I try to do is really, really constrain what I’m working on. And so, for that book, it was written, and I think around seven weeks, and I just like –

Matthias:
Oh, that’s a short time.

Steph:
I just like really compressed it, because if I’d left it to seven months, I think I’d actually never would have published it.

Matthias:
Yeah, it’s a kind of force field that that pushes you into the result; into achieving something.

Steph:
Exactly.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
Yeah.

How Steph tweeted an outline and got the first readers

Matthias:
Amazing. Amazing.

And about this book, how did you get the first readers for it? How did they get that first people interested at all in this in the subject?

Steph:
Yeah. So, this actually starts with choosing the book itself. As in, when I started creating it, it actually wasn’t even supposed to be a book. I mean, it only became a book due to the length, which was just due to how much I had to say about the topic. But initially it was just going to be a blog post.

When I started my blog, my personal blog in 2019, it took off in the first six months or so. And as that was happening, I basically wrote an outline for this blog post about creating content online successfully. And that outline itself was several thousand words, and I actually got so overwhelmed by it that I kind of put it aside because I was like, “Oh my gosh, the outline is this long.” And later on, I revisited it.

But when I revisited it, I learned a lot about validation in the market and especially with indie hacking. And I decided, “Let me just tweet about this.” I had also grown my Twitter audience by that point. And I just said, “Look, if I actually write this” and again, I don’t even know if I framed it as a book or just a blog post or what, but I said, “If I create this, will people pay ten bucks for it?” And a lot of people said, “Yes”, some people even said they’d pay more for it.

And then that was enough validation. I threw up a presale page. People paid for it. I think in the first day, I think several thousand dollars came in from that presale. And so, that was enough validation for me to say, “Okay, it’s going to go.”

Matthias:
Yeah, absolutely.

Steph:
Now, I’ve built this. And then from there, of course, I’ve done other things to generate more sales. But that was the initial kind of cohort of people.

And it’s pretty cool because actually before that, I had never sold anything, in terms of my own projects. And so that was kind of fun to be like, “Wow, like, this is my first paid product.

Matthias:
That’s totally amazing! Even with a blog, the usual effect is you write something and nobody is reading it.

Steph:
Yes.

Matthias:
Then Google comes around with the first three or five hits and goes away again. How did you get more readers onto your blog into in the first place?

Steph:
Yeah, so I cover a lot of this in “Doing Content Right”. But yes, to your point, most people, when they are creators, they focus so much on the creation and then they create wonderful stuff, but no one sees it.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Writing/distribution should be 50/50, not 90/10

Steph:
And so, they focus probably, if I were to say the average in terms of talking to many creators, like 90 plus percent on creating and less than 10 percent on distributing. And from my experience, it’s got to be around 50/50.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
So, for every blog post I published in that 2019 period, which was not that many, I think it was probably somewhere between a dozen to 20. So, maybe 16 or so in that first year. So, around once a month, not even a crazy volume of blog post. But it was because for every single post that I published, I created a distribution plan which meant posting it in different communities, relevant communities, not just spamming it across the web. It included posting it on my Twitter. It included optimizing it for SEO.

I got pretty lucky in a sense because, well, of course, it relates to hopefully good content, but of those 16, four of them ended up trending on Hacker News, which obviously gives you a massive bump.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
I also had been building up my Twitter audience by then. And of course, again, I shared like more tactical stuff in the book. But the really key, as simple as it sounds, is that most people from my experience spend just a fraction, or even a fraction of a fraction, of time in actually getting their work out there.

But it’s kind of silly when you think about it, because most of the people or even the companies that you love the most have put a lot of money and time into marketing themselves, not just creating what they create. But for some reason many especially new creators are like, “If I create it, they’ll come.” Like that’s kind of like a common misunderstanding.

Matthias:
Yeah, the “Field of Dreams” thing. Yeah.

Steph:
Exactly. And it’s not true, right?

And then the other thing that I cover a lot in the book as well is just if you are going to write online, it needs to be a long term endeavor. Now, I think I got a little lucky in terms of it kind of growing so quickly, but incorporating that SEO element, those 16 articles still bring me thousands of page views a month now because I optimize certain ones for SEO, and they continue to bring traffic. And that’s really the only way that you’re going to grow sustainably. Because even though I got those Hacker News hits early – they’re hits, and then they disappear.

Matthias:
Yeah, and kind of spike, right?

Steph:
Exactly. It’s a flash in the pan! And so, you do need to gear your distribution around the long term efficacy or the long term traction of what you’re also building.

Matthias:
And what kind of people are you serving? What do you think? Do they have a name for themselves? Do they say, “We are so and so”?

Step about getting really specific about your audience

Steph:
You know, that’s a great question, because it’s so funny because a lot of people, when they create content, they think of it very differently to a startup or a company. But it’s got a lot of the same structure; a lot of the same frameworks that must be applied.

And one of those really simple frameworks that you would always think about if you’re building a startup is, “Who is this for?” Right?

Matthias:
Yeah, absolutely.

Steph:
But people, when they’re writing content, they’re like, “I’m writing a tech newsletter stuff” and I’m like, “Great.” And they’re like, “Do you know if it’s going to be successful?” And I’m like, “Well, tech is pretty broad” and also like, “How are you tailoring this to people within tech?”

And it’s just they structure it in a way where again they think just, “If I create something good, whatever good is to them, people will come.” But no, the first question is, “Who am I writing this for? What are the types of differentiators they’re looking for?”

And so, for me, at the time, I will say that when I was creating my blog originally, I wasn’t thinking about it with these mechanics because they kind of came together afterwards. But in some way, I guess I was accidentally doing that in the sense that who I was targeting early on so that my early blog posts were a couple of things.

One of them was, as we talked about, remote work. One of the categories was also about learning to code. And so, I would say it was curated for a lot of nomads, but you could also kind of extrapolate that to be intellectually curious people. But even that sounds broad. What I would say even more specifically, is people who experiment with their lives. And so those people were the people that I was targeting again, kind of unintentionally, but based on the topics that I was going for.

And then the differentiator for me, in terms of how I was actually different in approaching those people, is that all of my articles were, you could say, extremely transparent. So, they were more honest than most articles. So, one of my early articles was “The Guide to Remote Work That’s Not Trying to Sell You Anything”, because all the stuff I saw out there was like some company that was trying to sell something or some person who was trying to sell some e-book on remote work. And so, that’s an example of something that was really transparent. Any time I like learned to code write, I would write an article about exactly like the resources I used or exactly, the tracking I used to track it every single day.

But the point is that’s who I was targeting; people who was–even though it sounds really niche – people who’re experimenting with their lives. And I was just much more transparent or honest with my articles, which is important because some people will get to the audience stage, but then they won’t get to the differentiator stage. And ultimately you need both.

The audience definition stage of any product

Matthias:
That’s an interesting point. How do you call that; the audience stage and the differentiator stage? Could you elaborate a bit on these two?

Steph:
Yeah. So, like I said, some people don’t get to either of those stages, and they’re just like, “I’m going to start a newsletter or a blog or a podcast.”

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And this is not just true for individuals, it’s true for companies. I see this all the time. They’re like, “Well, it seems like it’s time to launch a blog” and then that’s it. And then they just hire some writers, and they start writing, and they don’t ever think about the audience or the differentiator, which are both essential.

Now, quite a few people will get to the audience stage, and as simple as this is, it’s literally thinking about exactly who this is for it the same way that you do with a startup. So, an example, as I mentioned, is like people would be like, “I’m writing a tech newsletter” and I’m like, “Okay. Again, it’s pretty broad. It’s like, are you writing tech news? Are you writing for C(XT)Os who are looking to hire people in a specific industry?

Or you’re writing about cyber-security? If you’re writing about cyber-security, are you writing for the individual to stay safe or are you writing for the CTO to learn how to implement a company?” They just broadly will say, I’m writing about X.

And so, part of getting down to specifically what you’re talking about is so that you can identify exactly who you’re trying to reach.

And when you go through that exercise, I didn’t really go through it when I was explaining it myself. But you want to think through like, “Okay, who are these people from like job titles to their age?” If they have a specific skew towards gender, where are they spending their time? What websites are they going to? How much money do they make? You want to get to that level the same way that you get to that level with a startup.

The differentiator stage must follow

And then the part that I see the least people get to, which I would say is actually the most important, is the differentiator. And all that means is how are you doing this differently? And again, this is very obvious in startup land where you’re going to say, “Oh, my startup is cheaper than the existing alternatives.” “My startup gets to the solution faster. It’s X Y or Z better than what exists.” But for some reason, a lot of people don’t focus on that with content, even though it’s the most important thing.

And just to illustrate its importance: When you go and tell someone about your favorite newsletter or about your favorite podcast, you are never saying, “Hey John, I love this podcast because it talks about technology.” No, like, when have you ever heard of that?

Matthias:
No.

Steph:
Because so many podcasts talk about technology, right?

Matthias:
Absolutely.

Steph:
Or even if you’re going to get even more specific, even if you’ve gotten really nitty and gritty about that audience, and you say, “Hey, John, I love this podcast about cybersecurity for executives.” No, they still don’t say that because ultimately, even if there are 50 podcasts about cyber-security for executives, a couple of them will do that better. They will have a better differentiator, meaning they’ll be way, way, way more academic or contrarian or novel, or the equivalent of being cheap or fast in a startup, but for content.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Stand out with your content, have a differentiator!

Steph:
So, why would someone read your stuff versus someone else?

And it’s really simple when you think about it because there’s so much content out there, because it became democratized, that you need to stand out in the sea. And so again, as simple as that sounds, I see so many people who just use the tech newsletter example again will come to me, and they’ll say, “Hey, Steph, I’m starting a tech newsletter. Do you think it’ll be successful?” And I’m like, “Based on that description, I have zero idea. It could be the most successful newsletter in the world or it could be a newsletter that literally zero people read. So, you need to find that differentiator of how you’re actually doing the thing differently and attracting the right people.”

Matthias:
Now I see. I found this a good example that you said when you talk about your favorite podcast, you don’t say, “I’m so fond of this podcast because it’s a tech podcast.” For example, when I heard the first interview ever from Steve Portigal, he’s in the UX field – in the UX research field – and he really does interviews in on a very, very deep level. He gets people into talking deeply about what their experience of the product is and what emotions are going on. And he has an amazing way to ask people and leave the silence so that they can really answer. It’s all those things that he’s differentiating himself.

Parse your differentiator into a single adjective

Steph:
Exactly. And there are so many other podcasts probably about UX or product. And ultimately, one of the exercises that I tell people to go through is if you think you have a differentiator, try to take that and parse it into a single adjective. So, for the example you gave. Maybe it’s more inquisitive than other podcasts out there, right?

And other examples like you gave, maybe is more deeply researched than something else.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
Maybe the hustle is more funny or more friendly, right? So, there’s all types of adjectives. And typically, if it’s clear enough, you can parse it into an adjective.

People share when there is more clarity, less friction

Steph:
And that’s important because the way things are shared depend on the friction to share them. And if something is so clearly one thing; so clearly hilarious, so clearly fun, so clearly academic, whatever. So, clearly high quality; whatever you want to call it, it’s much easier for me to then go to my friend and tell them.

But if it’s a little muddy, and it’s kind of like a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and I go to my friend, and I’m like, “I really like this podcast because…” and I struggle, I’m much less likely to go and tell them about that particular thing. It’s reducing the kind of sharing velocity of your particular content property.

And so, if you do want your stuff shared, which ultimately will determine its success, then you have to be very clear about what your differentiator is. And trust me, if you can’t determine what that is, then how is anyone else going to tell their friends about it or even convince themselves to continue engaging with it?

Matthias:
Wow, that’s a that’s a big point, I think! It’s an entire exercise in itself to become conscious about “what am I good at? What is my point? What is my differentiator versus all the other podcasts that I can find on Apple?” What is it? It’s an exercise in itself, right? It can be scary, I think, to think, “Oh, I have to be different.”

Isn’t that stressful for a podcaster or for a content creator in general?

Steph:
Yeah, of course. And I think it’s probably the same stress that someone who’s raised a bunch of money, and they’re six months into their startup, and they have another six to 12 months of runway, and they realize, “Wait a minute, what are we doing that’s different from what else exists out there?”

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And yes, it’s it can potentially be scary, especially if you’re far enough along, and you realize that you never addressed this in the beginning. But the best time to address it is now. The best time to realize, “Oh, actually, do I not have a differentiator” is today instead of continuing to ignore that.

Matthias:
Oh yes. And producing and producing, without any special point. Yeah.

Be honest: If you’re slogging along, 12 months in, should you continue?

Steph:
Exactly. And that’s ultimately, just a quick note on that, is often when I see people like slogging along, and they’re like, “Steph, I’m 12 months in. How do I know if I should keep going?” Well, most of the time the answer is you probably shouldn’t.

But one of the key things to address there is that differentiator, and most often it’s not like you chose the wrong topic. It’s that you didn’t differentiate within that topic, right? It’s never that. There’s always room for another tech newsletter or another travel blog, another business podcast. There’s always room within even the most competitive spaces, but you have to differentiate.

And that’s often when people are in that slog and they, like, wake up and they’re like, “But I’ve been writing consistently for 12 months” and I’m like, “Well, would you read your own stuff?” That’s also a nice proxy for determining if you have a differentiator. And yeah, that’s like the key question if you’re at that juncture, but it should also be addressed if you’re just starting from new. That’s like the best point to ask yourself that question.

Matthias:
Hmm. Amazing. Yeah, that resonates with me when, for example, when I read my old blog posts, sometimes I’m surprised and I think, “Oh, that’s a good piece. I didn’t know that I knew that. I have forgotten, in the meantime, for example. Thank God I wrote it down.”

But with other blog posts, I think, “Okay, that’s a, yeah, okay, pretty good piece, but nothing exciting.” So, yeah, it can help to read old things. Yeah, absolutely.

Steph:
Yeah. And be honest with yourself, because I feel the same way where I look at, even to use those 16 blog posts as an example. I look back at one or two, and I’m like, “I wrote that?” And I’m similar to you; I’m a little impressed with myself.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
But there are some, where I look back, and I debate taking them down, and I don’t. But there are definitely blog posts or podcasts or other forms of content that I’ve created where I look back, and I was like, “People liked this?” You should actually be the most critical of your own work, right?

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
And I asked this question, even on a lot of people try to grow Twitter audiences, and I ask, “Would you follow yourself? Like, really be honest; if the same content was coming from a no name person on Twitter, would you follow them?”

Matthias:
Would you follow yourself? Yeah.

Steph:
I think most people – I think I ran a poll in around 50 percent said, “No”, but I honestly think it would be higher. If people were really, truly honest with themselves, I think probably 80 percent plus of people would realistically say, “No, like this is not great content.”

Nomads: a part of Steph’s audience

Matthias:
Okay, so there’s room for exercise.

When we go back to your audience for a moment. You said they were maybe nomads, maybe people who will try to experiment with their own lives to get into a new quality of life. Did you ever meet with those? Did you get to know some of them?

Steph:
Yeah, yeah. And I think a key was that I was one. And I was living that life and I was around nomads. And so, yes, when I started to write in 2019, I was living a nomadic life. I think I originally started my blog in South Africa, but then for a lot of that time, I was in Bali with other nomads.

Matthias:
Wow, okay.

Steph:
And so, I knew what their pain points were. I saw all these designers or product managers saying, “Oh man, I really should learn to code.” I saw my friends who weren’t nomads, messaging me and saying, “Hey, what’s this remote work thing? I really want to do it. I see all your stories.”

And so, that’s another key part, which is obvious to most people. But still, some people don’t follow this where they try to predict what other people will care about, which can work. But the easiest way to make sure that you’re creating good content is that you are the expert in that thing.

And expert does not mean academic expert. It means that you know what people are looking for within that topic because you’ve lived it, or you’ve studied it.

Matthias:
Yeah, you’ve been there, simply. Yeah.

Steph:
Yeah, you’ve experimented with it. And so yes, I was around other nomads. Now, I wasn’t like doing user interviews or anything like that, but I could just observe what was happening around me because I was living it.

Matthias:
Can you walk us through an example of where you met other nomads and what happened?

Steph:
Yeah. So, I mean, I was nomadic for, you know, it’s hard to remember now, but probably four, maybe even five years. And yeah, at that time in 2019, I was on a Wi-Fi Tribe trip, which was one of the only ones I did, but it was like an organised trip that they actually just booked things for you. And it was in South Africa.

And I remember writing “The Guide to Remote Work That Doesn’t Sell You Anything”, partially because I remember on that trip there was people like me who were just like full-time nomadic who had kind of accepted that reality permanently. And then there were people who had booked that trip as like a one-month get away from their job or as a test to see if they could be nomadic.

Matthias:
Ah, okay. Yeah.

Steph:
And that was partially inspired. That article was partially inspired by that experience, by seeing these people who didn’t realize like, how easy it is to just like flip that switch and just decide, “I’m a nomad now.”

You know, one of the funny things about all these e-books that talk about being nomadic, I don’t know if they exist now, but at least prior to the pandemic, they did. They used to sell this life, and they used to sell this e-book about like how to become a nomad. And some of us nomads used to joke, “Well, the easiest way to become a nomad is just buying a plane ticket.” You just buy a plane ticket nomad and you’re a nomad. You decided, “I’m going and moving somewhere. I’m traveling, and that’s it.”

And so, I wrote that article because I could see people who were kind of on that edge. And I wanted to write an article about all the things that were maybe hidden in these e-books or construed by these blog articles that were just like, “This is the accuracy. This is the truth about becoming a no matter or starting to work remotely. This is what you need to know. This way you don’t need to know. And these are the kind of traps you should be aware of.”

And so, yeah, that was an example of like directly from my experience in living that and seeing the like hesitation that some people had, I was able to create that article and that article wasn’t one of the ones that trended on Hacker News, but it was shared around really widely because I think it spoke to people and they were like, “Oh, this is actually the information I’ve been looking for.”

The Wi-Fi Tribe

Matthias:
Hmm. And when you went on this Wi-Fi Trip, did you say the Wi-Fi Trip? Why is it called a Wi-Fi Trip?

Steph:
It goes called Wi-Fi Tribe. That was, you know, there’s several different companies that still exist. Wi-Fi Tribes still exist, Remote Years still exists. There was several others that I think shut down, and now there’s been new ones. But the idea is when you’re a nomad, one of the biggest downsides to being a nomad, similar to the downside of working remotely, being social interaction, as a nomad, you don’t have a consistent set of friends.

Now, that’s not always true, especially people who end up kind of nomading – We call it slowmading and kind of mostly staying in a couple of places. But these trips help facilitate some of that social connection by bringing people together for a month in one place and planning everything or remote year originally and still runs trips like these or like 12-month trips where you actually spend 12 months going from one place to another with the same group of people.

Matthias:
And maybe they call themselves Wi-Fi Tribe because they need Wi-Fi to be on the road, right?

Steph:
Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of like a silly but fun name for the company.

Matthias:
Yeah, I understand.

Steph:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And when you met those, what were they like? What were their questions, their challenges, the things they were working on? What makes a nomad?

Steph:
Well, like I said, what makes a nomad is very simple. It just means that you live nomadic, which all it takes is booking a trip and leaving your lease behind.

Matthias:
Yeah, but apart from that, what was special about them that you met?

Steph:
Well, so I think what was special about that particular group is that most of the time when I was nomading around, I was around full-time nomads at that point, right? So, if I’m in Bali, and I’m in a co-working space. All those people in Bali have already taken the leap to go completely nomadic.

Matthias:
Okay.

Steph:
But what inspired that article while I was on that trip was again seeing some of those people who were “on the edge”.

So, I could almost see what gaps there were in in them wanting to become nomadic, but kind of still teetering. And that was what inspired just that particular article to say, you know, what are all the things that you if you aren’t fully nomadic, or you haven’t kind of jumped, headfirst, into remote work, these are the things that you should know. And even if you don’t want to do that, these are again, the title of the article was something like “The Guide to Remote Work That’s Not Trying to Sell You Anything”. So, it’s like, here’s everything you should know about remote work if you’re debating it.

Because again, not only was I seeing the teetering within Wi-Fi Tribe at that time, it’s kind of silly now because now everyone is, or not everyone, but many digital workers are remote.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
But before that, it’s important to remember, like very few people were. And so, I had so many friends DMing me on LinkedIn or on Instagram or on Twitter being like, “Hey, how do you do this?” And so, it was also kind of a function of that too.

If you want to write, look at what people have questions about

Matthias:
So, some of them you met in person and many of them you met them on social media asking you questions.

Steph:
Yeah. The most easy way to determine what you should write about is just to see what people ask you about, because that is as simple as it sounds, a filtering mechanism to see, one, what do you know a lot about? Because if you don’t know a lot about something, someone’s not going to ask you about it.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Steph:
But also, what does the world need, right? So, you can know a lot about something, but if the world doesn’t need it, unfortunately, it’s not really going to be something that is going to thrive.

And so, that is such a simple question to ask yourself. And often people will come to me, and they’ll say, “Hey, Steph, I’m thinking of creating my next product or writing a newsletter. What should I do it on?” And that’s the easiest question; what do people ask you about or what do people ask you for help on it?

If you ask yourself that question, you may realize, “Oh, actually, a lot of people come to me for negotiation. I’m really good at negotiation. And again, it checks the box; people think of me as an expert in this space. And there’s demand for it because people are asking for it. They’re actually asking for it without me even talking about it.” So, there’s a pull there instead of a push, sometimes with certain topics.

Matthias:
That is a very good indicator.

Steph:
Yeah.

Matthias:
That’s a good indicator that there’s demand, right?

What did you do with the questions? Did you write them down so that you could use them for your article or what was the way to process the input that you got?

Steph:
You know, that’s a great question. For that particular article, I wrote it pretty quickly, but with other things like the book, yes, for a while. Remember, I said that I created that outline. For a long time after that, I would kind of jot down all the questions that people were asking me about content.

Also, things that I was seeing in specific communities. For example, I was in this newsletter Telegram group. And I would just kind of jot down the specific questions that people were looking to get answered. And sometimes they would get them answered in the chat, but sometimes I would also be like, “Huh, I think I can actually answer this even better than what I’m seeing here.”

And so, I would over the year or so, from that outline to actually going and writing it, I would jot down through my own one-on-one encounters or in communities, things that I was seeing that I thought could add to the book. And that actually relates to one of my articles, “Writing is Thinking”, and I walk through my writing process.

If you write, let it ruminate and marinate before you type

One really important part of it is a lot of people write in one session or two sessions because that’s what we’re taught in school. But I find it really, really helpful to lower the activation energy, but also to produce a better product by getting an idea for something and then letting it ruminate, letting it marinate, letting you pick up on different things that are important.

Which is leading to one of the first questions you asked me here, “How did you write this book at the time of working?” Well, it was actually really–Well, I shouldn’t say really easy–it was a lot easier because I had been picking up little tidbits from around the web while I was leading up to that book.

Matthias:
Amazing.

To summarize all this a bit, what do you think? Are there any recommendations that you have; like five most important points or three most important points. When you say if someone wants to be a content creator, what would you recommend? Things that they absolutely need to do.

Summary: Differentiator and distribution or two important checkboxes!

Steph:
Yeah. So, let’s summarize a couple of things we talked about. So, the first thing is that you should never just create a blog or a podcast or newsletter just because everyone else is doing it, or because it’s time to do so. You do it because you have something to say. And that’s something to say can be a derivative of you being an expert somewhere, or it can just be something that you just truly want to say. That was an example of my early remote work articles. I had something to say. I saw this gap in the industry, and I wanted to say something.

So, the first thing is don’t just start something because everyone else is doing it. But if you do have something to say, then clearly outline your audience and treat your content properly like a startup. Say exactly you’re targeting how you’re different from what else exists out there.

You can also do the exercise that we talked about with the adjectives. Make sure that you have a differentiator, and you can parse it into an adjective.

One easy way, because I find that sometimes people struggle to do this exercise at first, is to go through your own inbox or your own podcast feed. So, what you already listen to or read and do the same exercise or say, “I like this podcast because…” – write it in a sentence and then take that sentence and turn it into an adjective. Again, punchy, novel, contrarian, visual, concise.

Do the same exercise with things that you like, because that might actually make it easier for you to pick up on what you can differentiate with.

So, if you’re creating content, make sure you have a differentiator. If you take anything away, it’s that one thing.

The second thing that people should take away is this idea that if you create it, they will not come. You must invest in distribution. You must invest a significant amount in distribution. And if you’re in the content game, it should be for the long term. And if that’s true, I would really encourage people to focus on bedrock channels; the biggest and most significant of which is SEO.

So, even though SEO seems like maybe two gamified for some people, or maybe they just want to write, they say, “I’m an artist.” Trust me, if you want to create something substantial, focus at least part of your time on SEO because that builds the bedrock for you.

I’m trying to think of some of the other things that we discussed, but those are two keys that if you don’t have a differentiator and you’re not investing in distribution, you’re going to end up as that archetype that I mentioned earlier of someone who’s like, “I’ve been writing consistently for 12 months and nothing’s happening”, and I look, and often it’s either they never had a differentiator or they didn’t spend any time on distribution or not significant time on it or a combination of the two. So, if you’re going to take away kind of like two check boxes, make sure that those two are checked.

Matthias:
Thank you so much, Steph. I think that was a real good summary of what we talked about and this will enable our listeners to produce content for their audience much easier.

Steph:
Awesome.

Matthias:
Thank you so much for being here today.

Steph:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

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Outro

Thanks for listening to The Audience Explorer podcast, today.

You can find me on Twitter at @GetTheAudience and you can check out the blog at gettheaudience.com

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