Building something you believe in that’s never existed before and getting people to follow you, and even getting some to buy what you are building is not an easy chore.
Doing so without typical marketing and sales doesn’t make it easier, or maybe it does when the founder is out engaging people on the web and openly sharing with the world what they’re building week to week and the good things their team is doing to change the world.
As we build the LexBlog Library, an extension of our democratizing legal publishing, I recalled introducing digital publishing to lawyers twenty-three years ago. When I discovered a blog and the ability to share one’s insight and commentary with your audience, I was hell-bent on introducing the concept to lawyers and to empower them with a “turnkey” legal blog solution. I was to going to help lawyers and the people they served.
I grew legal blogging and LexBlog by being open and frank about what I was working on, sharing observations as I went. People commented about my posts on my blog site, cited me on their blogs and the trade and mainstream media shared what I was saying. No doubt this all helped us build a name.
We don’t have comments on blogs like we used to. But the channels are still there. My blog. Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn too. LinkedIn, though popular in the legal community, feels different. More news and social promotion. It builds relationships, but it feels a world apart from the open engagement and publishing of a blog.
The clearest amd best example of how this down-to-earth candor and engagement works to build technology and a cause is WordPress. Matt Mullenweg co-founded WordPress in 2003 while at the University of Houston and led the cause. Ironically, that was the same year I started LexBlog.
I stayed away from WordPress at that time. If I recall right I did so because I thought it would have taken me a few lines of code, something that would have been like climbing a mountain for me. Small, open-source, not a company a la Six Apart with its Movable Type blogging solution. A “typical company” felt right for LexBlog customers.
But look at WordPress today: 42% of every website in the world runs on WordPress. Around 60% of every site with a content management system.
The vast majority of digital legal publishing runs on WordPress. Yet most legal professionals have probably never heard of WordPress, unless they used WordPress in high school or college.
How did WordPress grow like this?
Matt. Here are some of the things he did.
- A founder blog (Unlucky in Cards at ma.tt) with a real voice and frequent posts. He shared what he was building, what was breaking and what he was reading.
- A stated why that he repeated. “Democratize publishing.” “Code is poetry.”
- Showing and sharing the work in public. Roadmaps, decisions, debates and tradeoffs.
- An annual State of the Word. Once a year, he told the WordPress community where things are and where they’re going. He still does.
- Credits WordPress community members by name. WordCamps in cities around the world. Soliciting ideas and engagement.
- Regularly uses Twitter (once it was founded) to share, complement and engage.
I apologized, saying that they just weren’t a company à la Six Apart. I was pretty naive. It took us a year and a half to migrate our blogs from Movable Type to WordPress, which our tech team and I now swear by.
This type of frankness and immediate engagement builds a following and the growth of a cause.
That model used by Matt at WordPress in a way far better than I at LexBlog works. I need to get with it to build the Library and its following.