Paraphrasing Reid Hoffman famous saying: “You may have heard me say: If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”, I’m confident to say:
If you’re not ashamed of your blog post, you published it too late
Same as software products, you shouldn’t consider a blog post to be a finished product but an artefact that evolves based on the feedback you get from your readers and your own evolution (as a writer, as an expert on the topic,…). As any MVP it does need to provide enough content to be useful to your readers. But don’t wait for it to be perfect. Just create the Minimum Viable Post, hit on publish and iterate later on listening to the improvements people want to see.
Blog posts are a place for experimentation and idea sharing (something which it’s getting more and more difficult in other research venues (where even “real workshops” are becoming scarce). Do not miss the chance. And, of course, don’t be afraid to expose yourself. Not to get your ideas “stolen” (it won’t happen and if does, well you should be flattered 🙂 )
NOTE: I had a Trello card with this idea sleeping for months. So applying the idea to the post itself I just wrote it down. Yes, it’s a short post (for SEO purposes), with no images, too few links,… so Google won’t like it, but at least it’s out there instead of being just a forgotten internal note. It will be much easier for me to elaborate it on the future now that it started than waiting to find the time to write a proper, full version of the same idea.
