daily awesome internet finds
I'm Andy Thompson. By day, I'm Creative Director at an awesome company called onebluebrick ™ (proof). By night.... well, same thing, but I also tend to waste my time tweeting absolutely worthless bits of information to a group of random people who for some reason like to hear that kind of thing. I used to be in a band, but now record mostly noise.
Wednesday March 18

Let me take off my blogger skirt and put on my biz-advice pantsuit ...

tedroden:

enjoysthings:

I recently spoke with some VC people who gave me some “advice” which I promptly tossed in the garbage (along with any business cards exchanged). They said that I needed to say ‘we’ so that I could “seem bigger … like a real company.” I don’t get that at all, but I think it comes down to this: Many people confuse looking like a serious company with being a serious business. I’m firmly in the latter, which is exactly where I want to be.

I kinda went off on a rant when responding to a user who wrote asking for some advice on communicating with users. I don’t know what I’m doing either, so I figured I’d post it online. Am I making huge mistakes with handling this stuff? If you’ve got opinions on the matter, let me know.

Not that my opinion matters, but you are in the unique position of having a cool site with a ton of functionality that people love, and the fact that you built it all yourself should be reason to be proud, not a dark secret to be kept from the rest of the world.

I’ve had 5 companies (well, only two have been legal entities, but still), and it took me all this time to realize that being transparent about the fact you are a company of one (or two or three) was something that people respected, not feared. Sure, it may make you feel more comfortable or even prestigious by writing “we” on your about page or in emails, but the reality is that people expect you to function completely differently based on wording.

Instead of being wowed with what you pulled together for them as a single person working their ass off, as a “we”, you instead get judged more critically and held to an entirely different set of rules.  As a “company of one”, not only are you more approachable and accessible, you are also more prone to valuable and creative feedback on what you are doing.

Had Evan Williams not been completely open and honest with the world after everyone left him alone to run Blogger, he most likely would not have been able to turn it around, sell it to Google, and move to his next project (a little thing called Twitter).

Embrace the fact you’ve been able to get your project off the ground on your own, and stay completely accessible so that input from others can help craft it into an even more successful endeavor.