There’s a tactic that the best content creators all use:
They spend way more time thinking about, revising, and re-writing their stuff than you’d imagine.
In-depth conversations are the key to producing great content, and, if you don’t mind, we’ll use this newsletter as an example.
Consider this:
Our newsletter hits your inbox five days per week. But we spend wayyy more than five hours creating one issue alone.
Here are a few real-world examples of what goes on behind the scenes:
#1 – Choosing the news
We sometimes spend an hour or two in Slack debating whether a piece of news should get a full writeup or just one sentence.
On any given day, there are many pieces of news that could make the top spots—and sometimes it takes serious thought to determine which ones do.
#2 – Making big decisions
We may scrap a piece of news at the last second in favor of something else.
No matter how close the newsletter is to being finished, there’s always the chance that we completely rewrite a piece of the newsletter… Even if the newsletter is done with edits.
#3 – Creating new systems
We spend weeks working on new guidelines for content.
Right now, we’ve got a running Google Doc (and Basecamp thread) with ongoing discussions about how we choose to feature content. This process helps us boil down major conversations into a few simple rules.
Why are we telling you this?
If there’s a lesson in all this madness, it’s that the madness itself is the key. It’s hard to create a great product without spending time refining things.
In the end, we believe it’s completely worth it.
