{"id":9030,"date":"2013-01-29T14:29:43","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T13:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=9030"},"modified":"2019-05-02T18:53:32","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T16:53:32","slug":"the-importance-of-blogging-for-entrepreneurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2013\/01\/the-importance-of-blogging-for-entrepreneurs\/","title":{"rendered":"Rude VC: The importance of blogging for entrepreneurs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog_limitless\"The entrepreneurs with whom I work closely are familiar with my repeated encouragement that they blog on a regular basis. Perhaps encouragement, as my portfolio companies might suggest, is too soft a word; unrelenting nagging is more like it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve often felt like a lone voice in the wilderness on this topic, at least in France. Indeed, maybe the blogging habit comes more naturally in cultures that don\u2019t frown upon self-promotion. However, I submit that regular blogging is about far more than shameless self-promotion; it\u2019s about communication of thoughts, transparency in opinions, and beta-testing ideas with the sounding-board of your readers.<\/p>\n

Despite my conviction, I\u2019ve never been particularly effective in convincing my portfolio company CEO\u2019s to adopt a blogging routine. Accordingly, it was with great enthusiasm and even a sense of vindication that I discovered this blog post called Why Every Entrepreneur Needs To Blog<\/a> by former entrepreneur-turned-VC Charlie O\u2019Donnell. Here\u2019s my recap of the key benefits of blogging for entrepreneurs, largely inspired by Charlie\u2019s post.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Being able to innovate requires both intuition and creativity. Regular blogging hones both skills, by training the mind to be more perceptive to patterns and recognize trends.<\/li>\n
  2. Writing things down forces you to sort your ideas with clarity, helping you to separate the signals from the noise in your mind before articulating them openly.<\/li>\n
  3. Blogging can establish you as a thought leader in your domain. It allows you to champion your startup\u2019s space and the trends behind it. It\u2019s a way to seed ideas with journalists, over time encouraging the press to seek your expertise on the dynamics of a market in flux.<\/li>\n
  4. It\u2019s also a long-term recruiting tool. Blogging about your vision creates a continuous, long-term narrative that over time can represent your most persuasive tool to convince talented people to join you in your high-risk, low-pay adventure.<\/li>\n
  5. This narrative you repeat via blogging also of course builds your company\u2019s brand, generates inbound interest, and creates sustainable competitive advantage.<\/li>\n
  6. Every startup in which I\u2019ve ever invested was led by an entrepreneur that successfully formed a long-term relationship with me (and reciprocally, thanks to this relationship accepted me as a VC partner). Blogging is one of the best ways to craft such a relationship.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But my summary doesn\u2019t do justice to the way Charlie has articulated the importance of blogging for entrepreneurs, so I encourage to you to read his post and reference it on your permanent bookmark list of internet wisdom.<\/p>\n

    Finally, for similar reasons, I submit that the importance of blogging extends to VCs too. Far from comparable to my blogging VC peers, I still try to practice what I preach by striving toward a weekly cadence of writing (most of which I archive here<\/a>). I recall incredulously asking a very smart classmate in my electrical engineering undergraduate program why he switched into the English department to become a writing major. His response: \u201cCollege is meant to be a time of self-discovery, and I learn more about myself every time I write.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The entrepreneurs with whom I work closely are familiar with my repeated encouragement that they blog on a regular basis. Perhaps encouragement, as my portfolio companies might suggest, is too soft a word; unrelenting nagging is more like it. I\u2019ve often felt like a lone voice in the wilderness on this topic, at least in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":64800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-finance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}