Advice for people trying to be helpful on the internet

advice.md

I get asked a lot about how you 'grow an audience', or 'how to make good content for developers'.

Here's what worked for me.

It might not work for you.

Audience Building

• Be helpful so often, and so effectively, that people start asking you questions. X is a great platform for this.
• Provide resources which are high-quality and accurate enough that people share them with their work Slack.
• Serve one community. If you're just starting out, pick a small community - perhaps based around your favourite library. I started on XState (small) and moved to TypeScript (big).
• Don't start by streaming. Streams are for building a community from your an existing audience, not creating a new one.

Content Creation

• Create content with tips that blow people's minds. Or, teach them something new quickly.
• Developers respect their time. Make your videos shorter. Summarize your articles at the top. Add chapters to your YouTube videos. Optimize for people skimming your content.
• Don't bet big on a single piece of content. Ship many small things. Monitor the feedback, and adjust your sails accordingly.
• Build internal processes which make those resources faster to produce without sacrificing quality.
  • Automate as much as possible, including video editing and proofreading with AI. Every second counts.
  • (I now automate all of my video editing via scripts in https://github.com/mattpocock/total-typescript-monorepo)
• Experiment with different types of media, prioritizing those which are good enough and fast to produce.

Video

• First improve your mic, then your camera, then your background.
• Improving your background is an insane time suck. Buy a greenscreen instead.
• If you're screencasting, make your font size so large that it can be read on a mobile phone.

Course Strategy

• When the first person asks you "do you sell a course?", start building a course.

Course Creation

• Make your course as practical as possible. Do just-in-time explanations.
• Videos: under 5 minutes good, under 2:30 better, under 1 minute best. Lots of short videos is best.
• Optimize for people skimming/fast-tracking your course - make exercises extremely atomic.
• No temporal references in video content! No "next exercise, we will..." Makes chopping/changing exercises hard later.
• (Unsure about this, but this is a heuristic I use anyway) Avoid project-based courses. Very hard to update, hard to build.

Great points!
I'd love to get some insight into how you address point 3 yourself

Build internal processes which make those resources faster to produce without sacrificing quality.

+1 to Timmoth. That's a very interesting point. Thanks a lot for sharing all of them.

@Timmoth Added, thanks!

What is working for me so far is being passionate about the topics I talk about.

I think just following trends to get more "numbers" is not sustainable long term.
Besides, putting passion in your content actually makes it more enjoyable for your audience, we're not robots after all

@Balastrong Yep, passion is table stakes.