Capture The Flag
I was thinking recently about quantity versus quality, and also, on a separate note, the Niche Site Challenge that I ran a few years back as a project for this site. I got to thinking about why that challenge succeeded in the context of why I’m struggling to get similar projects off the ground now.
Of course, it’s 2024 and niche websites still exist – and maybe there’s something to experiment with at some point – but ultimately, you can’t simply write a bunch of articles on a blog, make money from affiliate marketing and/or Google ads and hope that your living is paid for.
Instead, there are a series of different platforms that, on the one hand, aren’t quite so straightforward as ranking SEO content was back in the day, and on the other, provide huge opportunities of their own. For instance, one of my friends has a huge Substack and makes a living writing solely on that platform. Another friend makes money every month just by posting meme content on Twitter. Yet another has a YouTube channel and does very little outside of that.
So, if one were to do a Niche Site Challenge inspired challenge, it’d probably be akin to a “Capture The Flag”-style challenge where you attempt to conquer either a single platform – or, if you’re up for a bigger challenge – try and capture each successive platform in turn.
Of course, there’s a lot of potential project creep, which is why I came up with the following game:
50 Pieces of “Content”
Creating a lot of content can be endless – and a project is never necessarily complete. This ultimately makes endless content creation a hamster wheel.
Understanding that sometimes, limitations help, I said to myself, “how would you design a social platform hacking system that wasn’t an endless game of endless content creation?”
And the answer for me, (and entailing all my systems thinking biases,) was that you could pose the following question:
“How could I take over a platform with just 50 pieces of “content” or less?
(Side note; the endless quote-marks are because I don’t really like the concept of content. But it’s an aside for another day.)
The goal of the game is to limit yourself to fifty pieces of content – and instead of endlessly creating new content, you instead think at the planning stage; how do I create fifty things that’ll get attention, keep attention and direct the energy of the audience?
This limits the amount of time and energy you spend, and ensures you concentrate only on creating needle-moving work that grants you more energy in response than you use in creating it.
But what do you create?
Solving Problems
The phrase, “providing value” is overused and quite weak when compared with the better version, “solving problems.”
Can you provide value? Sure, but it’s a nebulous and unending task. You can always “provide more value” but it’s ill-defined, and leads to huge project creep and then, as a result, the loss of focus and worse outcomes over time.
Compare this to an approach that focuses on solving problems. You have a clear objective, you have a set of problems that need solving which you can solve independently, and over time, the project will only evolve in so much as solving more problems in a modular fashion.