Thread by @SamDeBrule

1/ We grew the @usejournal blog from 0 pageviews per month in 2017 to 4,100,000 per month in 2020.

Here's what we've learned along the way 👇

2/ Embrace limitations.

we have a small team

we spend our time writing code and talking to users

a contributor-driven strategy was the only way for us to reach a huge audience quickly

now 99% of articles on our blog are written by people with no affiliation to Journal

3/ Understand what writers want.

our biggest challenge was convincing people to submit posts to our Medium publication

most writers have valuable perspectives to share, but no audience to share with

we offer them distribution for their posts

4/ Establish credibility.

but why trust a stranger?

on Oct 4, 2017 we wrote an article and 45k people read it

thousands followed our medium publication

now when we reach out to writers, we look legit.

here's the article: blog.usejournal.com/almost-every-p…

5/ Be fast to increase luck.

then @hnshah changed everything for us.

he probably doesn't even know it

we asked him to submit a post of his minutes after it went live

100k people read it.

submissions poured in from writers who knew his name.

blog.usejournal.com/why-trello-fai…

6/ Know what to look for.

we decide whether to request a post based on a few signals:

tags, # of claps and the size of a writer's twitter following.

as soon as I saw Hiten's post pop up, I knew we had to have it.

thank you again, Hiten, for sharing it with us.

7/ Re-post content in relevant communities.

we share articles all over to give them a boost:

relevant newsletters

Hacker News

@SachaGreif's sidebar

@lobsters

and more

8/ It can feel like an impossible mountain to climb when you're starting out

but it's possible to to build a blog from 0 to thousands of readers.

if you're getting started, I'd love to meet you.

i'll be live on Twitter Spaces for the next 30 minutes answering questions.