My Blogging Strategy Was Supposedly All Wrong

In the spring of 2005, I started blogging.

During those days, blogs were not as commonplace as they are today. Om Malik, at the time a close friend, and a pioneer in the tech blogging scene, introduced me to the concept. “You are so opinionated, you must blog!” Om declared. Then, he went on to have his own web guy set up my blog.

I started writing.

I wasn’t a journalist, so my writings were largely opinion and analysis pieces. People seemed to like to read them, so I found it encouraging, and started taking it seriously.

About 18 months into this process, I decided I wanted to use my network and invite experienced entrepreneurs to come and share their lessons from the trenches. Thus, the now well-known Entrepreneur Journeys interview series was born.

My stories were long. Very long. The whole industry was obsessed with news, hot stories, and short snippets of posts that were consumable easily, quickly, without much intellectual energy. I was interested in how entrepreneurs were building successful companies, the details, the nuances, and sharing that knowledge broadly, around the world. Blogging seemed like a perfect way to do so.

But friends who were considered experts in the blogging universe considered my style of “journalism” totally wrong. “It’s boring,” they told me.

Well, I am a stubborn person, so I stuck to my “boring” style of journalism.

Fast forward to 2015.

Over the last 10 years of my blog, we have had the founders of more than 350 highly valued companies share their entrepreneurial journeys with us. These entrepreneurs have been generous in sharing their lessons from the trenches, helping us further our understanding of the strategies and tactics of building robust businesses.

Over 40 of these have emerged as Unicorns with billion-dollar-plus valuations.

Another 300 or more have built smaller, mostly profitable companies, often bootstrapped.

Overall, we have touched 5000+ companies through our media platform and the 1M/1M accelerator.

The Entrepreneur Journeys series has produced 12 books. The latest of these is Billion Dollar Unicorns.

My widely syndicated columns including on Forbes, Seeking Alpha, Wired, HBR, Xconomy, Huffington Post, and a whole host of other media outlets draw from this ongoing research and coverage.

And, in 2010, this body of work led to the founding of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) global virtual accelerator with the mission of helping a million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond.

The 1M/1M curriculum is entirely developed on top of these interview-based case studies, synthesizing nuggets from the experiences and advice shared by a remarkably large number of entrepreneurs.

Perhaps it was, indeed, a mistake to pursue my unorthodox blogging strategy. After all, in these days of instant gratification and attention deficit disorder, who wants to take the time to read lengthy stories?

It turns out, people do. People are extremely curious about how others are figuring out ways to be successful, and here, on the 1M/1M blog, we have created a fantastic repository of systematically captured tribal knowledge. The experience is akin to sitting down with a successful entrepreneur and having a cup of coffee.

In normal life, such a large number of people do not have the privilege to have a cup of coffee with such a large number of entrepreneurs.

My mistake, I am happy to report, has blossomed into a meaningful body of work that hundreds and thousands of entrepreneurs over the years have found useful to learn from, to be inspired by.

My mistake, I am ever so grateful for having committed, it turns out, was worth making!