That's a lot of advice!

There are shortages of many things when you are running a startup. Cash, time and talent are all limited resources that must be carefully managed. One thing that their is no shortage of is advice on how to run things. Whether it’s Six Simple Rules of Logo Design, or Ten Ways to Manage Engineers Better, or yet another article on what “Minimum Viable Product” actually means, the internet is awash in blog posts on best practices for startups. Filtering through all this can be a bit overwhelming. The amount of opinion presented as fact is staggering and a lot of it, not necessarily good, is repeated ad infinitum on blog after blog after blog.

This is where things get potentially hazardous. As has been famously noted, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. As a corollary to that, nobody knows if you have any idea what you are talking about either.

My background is graphic design. I’ve worked on major brand campaigns, I’ve designed hundreds of logos and I’ve worked to coordinate the look and feel of companies across multiple media platforms. Until I quit it all to found Graphient, I charged a lot of money for these services. I can safely say that I am an expert graphic designer. I routinely encounter blog posts on graphic design that present superficial understanding of the topic as expert advice. This of course calls into question all the “expert” advice I’ve read on other startup or product development related issues.

So what? The internet is sort of known for a bad signal to noise ratio, right? Yeah, I guess. That doesn’t really justify the sheer volume of posts. I was mulling this over after work the other day with my esteemed colleague, Mark Trumpbour. We decided that like so much in the world the fault lay with Search Engine Optimization and a lack of critical thinking about received wisdom.

One of the first pieces of advice you get when you launch a startup is to have a blog. It is suggested that you use this new platform to project your opinions on things related to your domain in order to increase both your mindshare and your google ranking on searches related to what your company does. This dovetails nicely with the advice that an entrepreneur should seek to become a thought leader within the business community. So, there’s your means and motivation for publishing. Now, what are you going to publish? How about some advice for other entrepreneurs? Maybe you could tell them about the importance of having a blog?

Two final statements before I go back to the salt mines:

1. There is in fact some very worthy advice out there.
2. The irony of the fact that this opinion is being published on the blog we set up when we founded the company does not escape me. We were following some advice we read on the internet.