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Experiment - writing with outlines not prose
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Experiment - writing with outlines not prose

Mar 21, 2021
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OK this is a bit of a weird content experiment. Please bear with me

  • I’ve been wanting to figure out how to write more, in general

  • You might know that writing one of these essays, when I do it for real, is like several hours of work

  • Thus, playing around with the idea that constraints are helpful for writing shorter, but more often

  • tweets are are the most obvious example with short characters

  • many other different types of constraints might work too

  • couple ideas

    • Slides. Make every essay a slide deck. You make a visual slide and then underneath it, put a bunch of bullets. This might work particularly well since it’s sort of become the most popular thing in business to communicate via deck. here’s kind of an example

    • Bullets. Like what you’re reading now. I’ve also done an experiment here where I typed out a “roadmap” for my blogging in the next year. And then started to implement it (which was hard). But the actual outline itself was interesting content

    • Word length is also interesting. Like trying to keep everything I post under 1000 words

    • Audio is the other one. Just recording content, maybe having it auto-transcripted, and just seeing where that goes

    • I also like the concept of AMAs as a way to generate content. For example I answered a question about Facebook’s DAU/MAU on Quora and then just cross-posted on my blog, which was pretty cool

  • the downside of this is that it’s a little weird to read

  • the upside argument is that there’s been a lot of social media type innovations that have just come from making content creation much easier even if theoretically as a viewer you’d prefer something different. Ephemeral content — like Snapchat and Stories — is the obvious example

  • Tbh this is my first time writing like this. Not sure it actually is making me write faster. But it’s a little weird and interesting. It definitely saves me from wasting time on transitions between topics

  • Other idea I’ve been thinking about is to take a couple big umbrella topics and then writing very long megaoutlines underneath them, and blogging away. Especially with stories and so on

  • Example: Viral growth

    • What is viral growth - buzz and word of mouth, versus viral loops

    • Building Viral loops

    • Piggybacking on an existing platform

    • Viral factor

    • Optimizing loops

      • A/B testing

      • Landing pages

      • Optimizing each step

      • Invites

      • Increasing # of recipients — all at once, versus over time

  • Anyway, you get the picture. Each one of these sections could be its own blog post, and then I could link to stuff. Could be fun

  • OK - more to come.

Thanks for humoring me on this weird new format!

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