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.

@Balastrong Yep, passion is table stakes.