You may have noticed that we’ve started posting to the blog. A lot. We used to post, oh, a few times a year. We pretty much only posted about new features and how to use Workflowy. But now, we’re posting a few times a week, and often the posts aren’t about the product at all, but about topics that are adjacent to the product. Topical, but not about Workflowy.
This may annoy you. If it does, I’m sorry. I want to explain what we’re doing and why.
We are trying to do marketing
Workflowy has never marketed itself. We’ve reached a whole lot of people only through word of mouth. This is amazing. But also, I want to do more, to try to reach more people. I want to build something that touches lots of lives, and furthermore, I want the resources to build the product I envision. So, we need to try a little harder to reach people and get them interested in what we’re doing.
Blogging is one well established way of reaching more people. However, the audience for these particular posts is not necessarily our current customers, but potential future customers. There are a few common approaches to reaching new people through blogging, here’s the approach we’re following:
- Figure out what people are Googling that relates to your product
- Write articles about that
- Google starts to notice your articles, and starts sending people your way
- You have a new stream of people to expose your product to
So that’s what we’re doing, and we understand why this might feel a bit different. It’s one of many things we’ll try. Will it work? I hope so.
Is this good for Workflowy?
The Workflowy brand is about minimalism and quality. We have been very quiet for a very long time, and still done well. It’s possible that we will alienate some of you by writing about stuff other than ourselves. I hope this doesn’t happen, and I hope the articles we write are actually interesting. But we’ve already gotten enough feedback to tell that people are confused about what’s going on with the blog, and I hope explaining it will help.
What if you only want to engage on product stuff?
In addition to doing better on marketing, I intend to be much more public about what we’re working on related to the product. In fact, for people who want to be deeply involved in product, I’m planning to create a newsletter where we expose early ideas for feedback, ask people to submit their own ideas, have folks vote on stuff, and generally try to engage the community as we work.
Let us know what you think
Do you hate us now? Do you, in fact, like the new posts? Do you begrudgingly accept the situation? I want to know. I need to know.