The guys talk about creating content for Honeybadger and the difficulties switching back and forth from writing prose to writing code. Starr channels his inner Anna Wintour and describes his latest initiative recruiting developers to write guest posts on the blog. Josh talks about his process for writing evergreen content for the newsletter.
Links:
Leveling Up
The Devil Wears Prada
Seth Godin
Indie Hackers
Mastering Ruby Exceptions eBook
Full Transcript:
Announcer: Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole a nerdier. You're tuned in to FounderQuest.
Starr: I'm blaming a lot on the internet these days, Josh. So one more thing, we'll just throw it on that pile and we'll get a volume discount on that.
Josh: I love it. Yeah.
Starr: Take that to town.
Josh: Internet's pretty much responsible for all the ills in the world. I think.
Starr: Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a few goods. A few goods. It allows me to ride out the ills in relative comfort, but ...
Josh: Right. You never have to leave your house.
Starr: No, I never have to leave my house. Yeah. So I guess we should explain. So if the astute listeners haven't noticed, Ben is not with us today. And the reason for this is very convoluted. We had originally planned to record this episode on a Friday and we had been ... We had Josh and everybody ready to go and then this truck pulls up outside my house and starts sawing down this gigantic tree, chipping it. And there was just no way that was going to happen. So we canceled. But then Ben has all sorts of travel plans because he's an international Ben of mystery. And so yeah, so it's me and Josh this week.
Starr: So we're going to be talking about something that Ben usually doesn't get involved too much in, which is content creation, like blog posts and email newsletters and all that stuff and ...
Josh: Something that you happen to be actually working on lately.
Starr: I am working on it. Yeah. Right now. I don't know if our readers remember or listeners remember, but a couple of weeks ago I put out a call for writers for people to contribute to our blog. And we actually had a lot of people respond to that. It was very successful. The only issue is now I have to go through all of them and kind of manage that process and chat with them about what they want to write.
Starr: And I think it's all going to turn out really well. But this whole having coordinating things with 15 different people over email and having all of them at a different stage in the process, that's the type of thing that is designed to make my brain just fall apart. It's just something I'm apparently not good at.
Josh: It sounds like you're a kind of like a magazine producer or something now or editor.
Starr: It is, yeah. I'm kind of like an editor in chief. It's pretty cool.
Josh: We could give you a title of editor if you want, business cards or something. Or desk, one of those little desk nameplates.
Starr: That would be nice. I'll take it. I'll take whatever form of recognition I can get.
Starr: So Evie and I watched The Devil Wears Prada a couple of days ago. So I'm all ready, I'm ready for my role as a big time magazine editor. If you haven't seen that ... Have you seen it, Josh?
Josh: I have. Yeah. It's been awhile, but I think, yeah, I saw it a while back.
Starr: Yeah, so it was all about, what is it? A thinly disguise fixing fictionalization of like Anna Wintour's Vogue or something. Anyway, this lady who ran Vogue and was very mean to her subordinates or something and imperious. That's what I'm working towards.
Josh: And then in the end though, doesn't she have a change of heart in the end or something? I don't want to .... Spoiler alert.
Starr: No, there's no change. It was very confusing.
Josh: Oh, okay. I thought there was. That's too bad.
Starr: Yeah. So at the end, it's like the movie simultaneously celebrated this woman, this young woman who sort of rejected it all and went off to do her own thing, while at the same time sort of glorifying the sort of people who stayed in the magazine and devoted their lives to it even though their lives were falling apart.
Starr: It's like, I have no idea what the moral of this is. Pick one.
Josh: I have faith in you in as the editor of the Honeybadger blog that you will see the light in the end.
Starr: I'm not sure how many divorces I'm willing to have to make the Honeybadger blog a success though.
Josh: Right.
Starr: So, yeah, I was honestly super pleased with the quality of people who applied. Just like some really good writing going on out there. I consider myself a pretty good writer. I'm like, "Oh man, these people might be better than me so I've got to get them on my team."
Josh: Yeah, they must be pretty good. That's cool. I can't wait to read what they come up with. Are you kind of directing the topics or what's your process for kind of figuring out what each person is going to work on?
Starr: Well, like most things I do in life, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. Basically my plan was to sort of see what people wanted to write about and see if I could make that sort of fit with the theme of our blog. And at least the initial contracts you do with people are probably just going to be stuff that they want to write about, which I think is great because they probably already know about it and are excited. As time goes on, maybe I will jump in there and suggest things. I'm really, really hoping to have a sort of collaborative relationship with these folks. Not just assign them something and then they produce a deliverable and then I sign off on it and then they get a check at the end. I'm kind of hoping it'll be this personal little, I just get to be the den mother of the writer's room and just make everybody cookies and just as long as they keep producing that content.
Josh: We talked about I think doing a series of posts kind of around a central theme or central top...