This post goes out to the entrepreneurs, marketers and writers who are playing the long game in their businesses, but are impatient when it comes to shipping content.
I’m right there with you.
Sometimes growth happens fast, and sometimes growth happens slowly.
A good majority of the growth that happens in our businesses is out of control. You can’t directly manipulate things like market conditions, economic factors, or inbound demand.
But there are certain factors you can control where it’s healthy to be impatient.
I’m talking about shipping content.
Most of us have felt the pain of the following process:
- You finish creating an asset (blog, podcast, website design, email series) for a client who already paid you.
- The client loves your work and tell you it’s going into production.
- Two months goes by and the project’s stuck in approvals.
- The client forgets about it for “competing priorities”.
- The client makes the excuse that they’re too busy right now.
- Despite your follow ups and votes of confidence, the client never launches what would have been a big revenue for them.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s wasteful.
And it’s unacceptable because hoarding ready-to-go assets intentionally neglects all the work you just put in (or paid someone else to put in).
I couldn’t push people harder on this point:
Failing to ship fast means failing to generate revenue in the Attention Economy.
The longer you wait, the easier it gets to extract zero value out of all the work you put in.
I’ve written website copy that took 4 months to launch.
I’ve also written copy that never launched because they changed their company strategy & messaging right after — without even putting it to the market test.
And I get it. Pivots happen, startups change on a dime.
But the benefits of not delaying launches outweigh the costs of launching in the midst of a pivot. The market insights alone are worth putting it out there anyway.
The main reason this happens so broadly is good ol’ fear (of looking dumb or getting ignored).
Launching new marketing is scary because you’re opening yourself up to both criticism & failure.
Launching daily means you’re opening yourself up to criticism and failure every single day.
Again, the benefits outweigh the cons of a nuclear-level scale.
The only way to build a well-oiled content machine on the internet in the 2020s and beyond is to get really comfortable with the uncomfortability the market potentially ignoring you and telling you how they feel.
Because how will you ever know if you never even try? Get rid of the psychological safety, let go of being arbitrarily perfect, and treat your organic content like an ongoing science experiment driven by curiosity.
The shorter your queue, the more room you have to be creative.
I usually prefer non-actionable content, but if I had an action item for any entrepreneur, marketer or writer it would be to find a social channel you like (preferably a writing one) and post 2-3 times per day every single day for 6 months.
Then come back after and tell me you didn’t see massive gains in terms of skill-building, visibility, credibility, revenue, clarity of thought (just to name a few).
As Justin Welsh says in his newsletter, creators should act like a “streaming service for your niche”.
This couldn’t be more on point.
We live in the golden age of niche internet content. Establish yourself as a rich, trusted source of information inside a profitable niche and it’ll be really hard not to sell well.