Build in Public

A little self-criticism goes a long way

"Moveable Type" by Dave DeSandro is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

As part of my job as a financial news reporter, I get to interview the founders and CEOs of startups on a regular basis. One lesson that has come across loud and clear across hundreds of these interviews since 2005 is the power of a freemium model. This slightly ugly word is a portmanteau of “free” and “premium.” It refers to a strategy where startups try and build a massive audience by giving away a free version of their product or service.

Founders who commit to a freemium strategy then try and monetize the business by offering a premium version, with added features. Only a small number of users ever convert, so it only works when the basic version is so appealing that very large numbers of people sign up for it.

Last year, when I finished the beta version of my free book on critical-thinking skills, Sharpen Your Axe, I studied the best way of getting it into people’s hands. Approaching the issue with a bias towards freemium models, I was shocked by how old-fashioned the publishing industry is. The core of publishing involves putting a paywall around interesting information. This works well for established authors or for people who have a large following outside publishing, which is why we see so many ghost-written books by celebrities.

However, the odds are stacked against new authors. There are so many people who write books in their free time that people in the publishing industry don’t even feel the need to answer their emails. Personal introductions can make a difference, but this stacks the odds in the favour of people who happen to have random connections to people in publishing. It also makes the industry much less meritocratic.

In any case, I wanted to make the information in the book as widely available as possible. There are far too many conspiracy theorists and dogmatists out there. Fighting to develop a connection with someone in publishing on the off-chance that they might put useful information behind a paywall didn’t make any sense at all. Why not just give it away instead?

I realized that there might or might not be a chance to monetize the project later, but that this would be much less important than spreading the word about skepticism and a probabilistic approach based on carefully choosing between different models.

As I started to have these dangerous thoughts, I stumbled upon Substack. It had been founded in 2017, but by late 2020 scores of journalists, reporters and essayists were flocking to the platform, which is based on a freemium model. Why not build an audience on Substack? I could give chapters of my book away for free and summarize the key points in a weekly column, while promoting it on Twitter and other social media sites.

Although getting people to give me their email addresses has been slower than I hoped and only one post has blown up in an impressive way, I have still managed to get reasonably respectable numbers. I have no regrets at all about going down this route.

In fact, if I were starting again, I would take open community-building even further. I began the project in 2016 when I noticed a number of friends going down strange internet rabbit holes and realized that arguing with them on social media triggered cognitive dissonance all around. Spending five years with my head down working on the book in private in my free time was a mistake, in retrospect.

What I should have done is to build it in public, in the words of another phrase popular with startup founders since maybe 2017. I should have started to build a community as soon as I committed to the idea, maybe with a blog or mailing list. I could have summarized my reading on conspiracy theories and research methodology, while showing people how my thinking was evolving.

Doing something open-ended like this is actually scarier than sitting in front of your computer writing a book in secret. If you fail to complete the project, you will do so in public. All authors have unfinished manuscripts under the bed and I am no exception. You have to be confident that you will finish it; or humble enough to live with yourself after failing to do so in public.

If I had shown my working in public, I could also have made the actual book much punchier. I think I ended up packing so much information into the book that it made it hard for casual readers. A couple of people told me that a recent post that mentioned the bond market was too difficult for them. I think simplifying complex ideas would be a good description of this project. I think I have had some success in this area, but I need to work harder on it in future blog posts; as well as improving the way I describe my posts on social media.

Hopefully, some of you will be surprised by the tone of this week’s column. Being critical of others is all well and good, but the magic happens when we can be critical of ourselves and admit our mistakes in a spirit of honesty and humility. This might not be easy for those of us with big egos, but it can help us grow and improve. See you next week!

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.