Experiment - writing with outlines not prose

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!