The venture slowdown could save blogging

Relearning how to have fun online

The other day I wrote a little note about startups, venture valuations, and the 2023 climate for software sales, a dry little collection of nested topics. In the past while writing about the intersection of technology and money — my professional niche — I worked to include small bites of levity: little word jokes, cheeky alliteration, the bending of words to be just so. Yes, my editors occasionally despaired when I got too far out of pocket, but it was a formula that provided enough creative sustenance for both myself and, I have long hoped, readers to get through words and themes and conclusions that otherwise might be somewhat spare.

My little blog from the other day was a failure by this standard. It wasn’t funny; it was flat. It may have said something interesting, but it’s not a piece of writing that I want to read again. It’s not a piece of writing that I want to write again.

That post is not the only thing that I have written in the last few quarters that has been devoid of humor and generally dull. In fact I think that nearly everything I wrote in 2022 was vanilla at best, and often worse.

What ailes me is a combination of taking myself too seriously and, at the same time, writing for too narrow an audience. There are only so many people who want to masticate on SaaS multiples three times weekly until we die; if I want more fine folks to give even half a flat fuck I am going to have to get looser.

I need to relearn how to blog.

When I was still at university I wrote for The Next Web in afternoons and evenings, in a rush, but with vigor and what I think could be construed as joy. Did I know a lot? No. Was I an excellent writer? No. Was I the next name journalist? Please. But I did have something to bring to the table that no one else did — myself — and I was more than willing to lean into that single advantage without apology.

Somewhere along the next decade that confidence or sheer willingness to fail loudly was slowly leeched from my bones and my prose. Now that I have been on leave for a few days, and have had a chance to breathe, I can more clearly diagnose what has immiserated my output: I stopped blogging, and so I stopped having fun.

The good news is that blogging is somewhat back these days, meaning that if I intend to cure myself I will be able to do so with a new fleet of tools at my fingertips and compatriots at my wings. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Verge is currently penning essays about the importance of blogging; after all, both The Verge and TechCrunch have had periods of being more bloggish and less so, with our friends over in gadget-land recently rebuilding their site to support the sentiment that, in their own words, “well shit, we just need to blog more.”

Agreed.

A few things are propelling the return of blogging. A key piece of which is notably the platform that I am writing on for you today. Substack is a blogging platform that snuck into the zeitgeist on the coattails of the Internet’s true cockroach — email. But you don’t have to email out all your posts on Substack, and I often don’t. I just want to blog, and not every blog needs to be in your inbox demanding your attention. I want to blog for myself, a sort of blogito ergo sum that I think will at once make me more fun to read, and likely more useful to boot.

Substack is not alone in its rise, of course. Ghost is taking a more indie approach to Substack’s venture-powered rise. Beehiiv, a related platform that I need to learn more about, has raised venture money as well. Each provides a set of tooling that is, frankly, whip-ass and either free or inexpensive. Thanks in part to venture dollars, and part to the fact that subscription software à la Ghost is a viable way to build an independent company, you and I and our friends now have, within reach of whatever keyboard we sit in front of, all the resources we could possibly need to blog frequently, and with a reasonable shot at readership.

Venture capital was kind enough to pour eight figures into Substack, and seven figures into Beehiiv. Thank you. And more importantly, venture capital has seemingly fucked off. The booming 2020/2021 era of media investments — perhaps driven more by pique at a16z than any real investment thesis — and creator economy dollars may not yield many venture-scale outcomes, but for your humble scribbler it’s proved a bonanza.

There are other encouraging winds for a return to blogging. The last few months have reminded us to distrust singular power sources, be they social media companies or feudal owners thereof; a blog, however is effectively yours.

Don’t Substack et al present the same sort of risk? Aren’t they effectively platforms that we, the writing world, don’t control and therefore are at as much risk from as we stand to derive benefit? Nope. They might have been if the venture dollars kept flowing; if Substack was still raising successive rounds of external capital it would, in turn, have to grow faster. That would have led to compromising choices, I think.

Without rising venture demands, Substack likely has more room to maneuver and experiment and not fuck over the folks writing with its tooling. And there’s ample competition amongst the neo-blogging platforms for our time and words, meaning we have a lovely situation in which the average blogger gets to pick amongst competing, and quality providers that want to help get their words into the world. Excellent.

So here’s to blogging, here’s to being loose, here’s to thinking out loud, and here’s to fun. I won’t be back at work until late February but I am going to keep blogging in the meantime. Onward.

The featured image on this post is an excerpt from a piece of Steve Johnson’s work, whom I wish to thank.