2022: From a Blog Perspective
Dear Reader,
The past year has been one of tremendous growth and excitement here at my blog, and I want to thank each and every person who took the time in 2022 to read, respond, and interact with it.
I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the blog’s year, the things I learned, and take a peek at what you can expect in 2023.
I re-christened the blog Lessons From A Startup Life in late 2022, after an exhaustive search for a title that better reflected the goals of the site. (Thanks again Habib.)
While I was comfortable with the original name, DougL’s Ruminations, I came to believe it increasingly failed to reflect the content within. (The original title stemmed from the fact that most of the blog posts were ruminations arising from a sort of early morning spontaneous combustion of thoughts and ideas). Importantly, the new name was invented by a avid reader.
Writing this blog taught me a lot about startups. The discipline of publishing weekly – Tuesdays at 6:00 a.m. Eastern – provides a kind of clarity to the thinking behind the writing. In addition, there are few other places in any kind of media dealing with things like: VC underperformance, how to value a startup without cash flow, HR recruiting practices in tight markets and downturns, mental health issues for startup exec’s and employees, managing optics, competition, and the right holiday gifts for people in your startup ecosystem.
I learned a lot about communication and the use of social media and blogs. My blog posts generate a lot of digital marketing data that I analyze extensively. This includes email, SubStack, LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, and Facebook reader data. From this, I discovered much about creating headlines and sub-heads, word count, embedded links, open rates, timing, effectiveness of social media, and other factors impacting the interest in the blog.
For example, my Top 10 blog posts in 2022 were:
New Practices for Technology Companies Hiring in Today's Super-Tight Market
Company 'Mental Health' Days Should Be an Organized, Standard Benefit in Startups
“The Coming Washout” was the high point of the year, attracting over 4,000 readers.
SubStack Readers commented most on “A Founder's and CEO's Guide to the 2022 Holidays,” via direct emails and on social media. It was also the most fun to write.
The 5 least popular blogs were:
Most of these blogs were early experiments with SubStack. They were not marketed properly because I assumed SubStack generates more eyeballs than they do. Another thing about blog posts is to be patient when analyzing them. It takes five to seven days before you can properly measure a post’s reach. Readers often take their time getting to the posts, which can languish on email servers or apps for up days at a time.
One potential development for 2023 is a foray into podcasts. I’m currently investigating jumping into this exciting medium in the coming year, so stay tuned!
In 2023, I will continue to write about popular topics – e.g., startup life, competition, VC and finance, executive leadership, hiring practices, etc. – but I also plan to resist writing blog posts solely for their popularity. I’m going to leverage what I hear from startup leaders, overhear at cocktail parties, gather from consultants and board members in Silicon Valley, Boston, and NYC, or talk about with friends and colleagues. In sum, I will keep it fresh.