The Importance of Innovating on Content (Part II)

Last week, I told you about James Gordon Bennett Sr, founder of The New York Herald, which became both the biggest and most profitable New York paper during his lifetime.

He invented a lot of new content formats, and got me thinking about the importance of innovating and how that plays out these days.

So today, I want to look at three people I think do a good job of this, and talk about what we can learn from them.

I.

Sahil Bloom was the first person I ever noticed purposefully testing new content formats. Maybe you’ve seen it too – he tries different things, some catch on, then he repeats those (often with further small tweaks).

Eventually, the world catches on, and people start copying.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with recycling formats that seem to be working for other people. I’ve done it myself. BUT it’s important to realize the limitations.

I’ve never seen anyone get as big or bigger than Sahil by repurposing his hooks, and that suggests something interesting – that content formats are subject to the same “law of shitty clickthroughs” as ads.

If you don’t know the law of shitty clickthroughs, it basically says that people respond to novelty until the novelty wears off. A new ad format grabs attention, driving all sorts of traffic and clicks and buzz. Competitors copy it. And over time, people get used to it, and learn to tune it out.

It’s one reason growth teams are constantly experimenting with new ideas.

One issue with copying what’s working for other people is that by default, you’re joining further along the curve and get less time before the idea stops working.

But much more importantly, if you only copy others, you don’t form opinions about why something is working and what else might work. You’re reliant on others to keep your growth engine going.

It’s also hard to build a position as a leader if your audience notices that you’re always following someone else.

So the first rule I can see of content innovation is that you generally want to be at the front of the curve, trying new things. That will help you wring the most out of formats that hit, but it will also help you develop an opinion of your own around what to try, and that’s the most valuable part.

II.

Okay, so we agree that we should be “innovating” but what the hell does that actually mean?

Well, I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean you need to be completely unique, with never-before-seen ideas, and it doesn’t mean you need to be a million times better than everyone else. Trying for either of those is more likely to stall you rather than help you.

Instead, the winning formula seems to be “a little better, and a little different.”

This is where Mr Beast comes in. In his interview with Joe Rogan he talks about the exponential rewards that can come from small improvements in content:

It can be hard to look at the small tweaks someone like Sahil makes – moving a semicolon here, changing a thumbnail, trying a different video title – and feel like that’s a valuable use of time.

That is, until you truly internalize the idea that small improvements can unleash enormous gains. A bit more engagement sends a signal to the algorithm that more people should see your stuff, and that snowballs.

But it’s not just about the algorithm. (Blegh, I hate the way we talk about that)

When you’re a little bit different, you’re no longer competing with everyone else. This again is why it’s better to be at the front of the innovation curve rather than further along it.

And when your stuff is a little better than what came before – a little more detailed, perhaps, or a little easier to read, a little more fun, etc. – you give the audience something to get excited about. And word of mouth will always be the most powerful algorithm out there.

III.

I swear this isn’t going to become the Sahil-Bloom-fanclub newsletter. But there’s one other important lesson I take from his recent work that I think is worth sharing.

These days, the main place I see him testing stuff is on Youtube.

He’s relatively new to the platform. At the time of this writing, his oldest video was posted just ~2 months ago.

I want you to pay attention to these view counts.

When he joined Youtube, he had over a million Twitter followers. An average tweet from him gets hundreds of thousands of views – often millions – and his newsletter list is 700k+ strong.

But on Youtube, he’s the new kid on the block.

Imagine that for a second.

Think about how hard it’d be to go thousands of likes and shares every day, to a few hundred views total. That ability – to ignore your ego while moving into new arenas – seems important to what we’re talking about here.

My prediction is that within a year, Youtube will be his biggest audience. But you can’t get that kind of growth unless you’re willing to repeatedly go back to basics.

In their book, Dual Transformation, the authors use the metaphor of a mountain range.

When you dominate a space, you stand atop a hill, and from up there, every other path looks like it heads down.

But there are bigger mountains than the one you’re standing on – emerging trends and competitors that will one day surpass you. If you’re not willing to at least put one foot on another hill, you’ll eventually become obsolete.

You have to be willing to go downhill in order to get higher.

Naval Ravikant put it similarly once. “When you look at the greatest artists and creators,” he said, “they have this ability to start over that nobody else does.”

IV.

I want to close this out by looking at Tim Ferriss for a second. I think he’s a fascinating person to learn from for two reasons:

1. He’s stayed relevant for almost 20 years now, and…

2. He tests a lot

If you know of Tim, you probably think of him as either a podcast host or author of The 4-Hour Workweek. But I’ve been following him since 2008, and he’s tried so many things in that time. To name just a few:

• Ran one of the world’s top 100 blogs

• Filmed 3 different TV series

• Trialed a membership format

• Trialed a monthly box-club

• Runs a newsletter with 2m+ subscribers

• TED and SXSW speaker

• Wrote 5 books - including an NFT project called Cockpunch 😂

• Launched a fiction podcast series for Cockpunch

• Built apps for 4-Hour Body and Slow Carb Diet

• Co-founded largest psychedelic research center in the world

• The Tim Ferriss Book Club produces audio versions of famous books from other authors

Even within each of those things, he tests a lot of different formats, like his recent walk & talk interview with Greg McKeown (which I think podcasters will adopt en-masse as soon as someone figures out the tech to make it easy).

But most know him for just one or two things.

The lesson here is that over the course of your career, you’ll try a lot. Some of it will fail, a decent amount will be successful, and then a few things will be so overwhelmingly successful that they eclipse all your other work in people’s minds.

We don’t control what we’re remembered for. All we can control is what we put out into the world, and the effort that goes into making it better and different than what came before.

A Few Great Links

• Scaling Community Impact to $35m: If you’re following along on the local newsletter trend, you’ll like this interview with John Garrett, whose building hyper-local (literally down to the neighborhood).

• A Guide to Freelance Pricing: If you freelance in any way, you need to be reading Eryn Peters’ newsletter. She’s directly impacted 3m+ freelancers around the world, and knows a ton about the business side of freelancing.

• A Great Explainer of DMARC: You’ve probably heard people talking about DMARC, SPF, DKIM, and wondered WTF?! This is a great article breaking down what it is and why it’s important for your newsletter.

• How The Hustle Thinks About Voice: Brad Wolverton, my editor at The Hustle and Trends, started a newsletter all about how to make great content. In this first issue, he goes over voice. Must-read.

• Freedom in Obscurity: I really enjoyed this piece from Zac Solomon talking about the upshot of being unknown. If you find yourself stuck, and you’re not publishing because you worry all eyes will be on you, read this.