Audience Development

Scary Great Ideas

A few months ago, Paul Graham, founder of the startup incubator YCombinator, wrote that most really big ideas are frightening. He believes that you can tell if you are on the scent of something really ground-breaking by how much anxiety it produces personally and institutionally. This phenomenon is one of the most important things you […]

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How Products (And Ideas) Find Users

Every campaign is unique, from a new product launch to a membership drive — but wouldn’t it be great if there were some general principles that govern success or failure? Maybe there are. They come from a fifty-year-old textbook called “The Diffusion of Innovations,” by Everett M. Rogers. Rogers studied how Iowa farmers adopted new

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How to Write for Gawker

Stumbled across an old but interesting memo from Gawker Media writer Paul Boutin to managing editor Noah Robischon (which was immediately leaked to New York Magazine’s Vulture site). Valleywag (a Gawker sister site) then reported on the leak, linking to NYMag and running the piece themselves. Here are the bullets:   How About Headlines? James

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