Stop Blogging, Resume Coding!

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 05:30:29 -0500
development

Too much of anything is injurious to health and this is so true of startups too.

As a startup founder/developer, you are asked to have a blog to let users know what you’re up to, to let other developers get to know you, to enable a marketing campaign that works wonders… the list is endless. Blogging, networking, “github”ing (one of the words that’ll be in vogue by the end of this year): these are productive work, mind you. And as developers, our focus is on “creating” and these productive works involve a lot of creation. This creates an impression – a false one – that we’re actually productive.

I read a post on the state of several projects that never really made it to the finish line. This reminded me of several developers who blog about their upcoming new project and after a few months, there’s no project at all. Did this ever happen to you? Like you started off on a high note – blogged about it a lot in the initial period – and then somehow, the whole thing waned away, ending kind of prematurely with an unfinished project?

Oh and it’s not just blogging that can do this to your project. There are other monsters too – monsters who are basically good but who can eventually turn into productivity-suckers.

Networking: Social networking is an amazing thing that can help your app/project like no one else can (okay, PG, Andreessen and, say, TechCrunch excluded). It can help you build amazing relationships with people who can spread the word about your work, or help you hack some stuff out of Backbone.js so your app kicks ass. But social networking can also drain away your most important asset: time.

A popular hangout for developers is HN. Or even Google+ for that matter. And then there’s Quora these days. These are places where meaningful, insightful, informational and “whatever” conversations take place. These are places I love, too and you get tons of info that is hardly found anywhere else. But developers can – and do – get carried away a lot.

GitHub is funny in a way. You start forking one interesting and relevant open-source project and then one thing leads to another and by the end of the day (or night, if you’re burning the midnight oil to code your project), you’ve seen a ton of interesting code on GitHub but none of this is actually, really going to finish your app.

Startups need to have blogs whether you are just starting out or mid-way into your project. But you should be very strict and disciplined about this aspect of entrepreneurship and marketing. The same goes with your time spent on networking and code-discovery.

A lot has been written about why blogging, networking etc. are mandatory for developers. Let’s just not over-step the line and end up spending time that should have been used to finish that module.

Image by David Precious