Say It Your Way

A Guide to Better Writing for Personal and Employer Branding

Postlight CEO Paul Ford wrote:

Consider Medium.com and Genius.com. One is for writing new things and one is for annotating things. But both are web platforms that have users, logins, long-form text, annotations, and rich media. You could, with some stretching, build Medium on top of Genius, or Genius on top of Medium. They’re different under the hood, but it’s not like one is Photoshop and the other is TurboTax. They kind of do the same thing.

Referencing Ford, I said in my conversation with Tom Osman that Discord and Slack were essentially the same product as well. But the brands couldn’t be more different. Slack has described itself as “Where work happens,” whereas Discord is “Your place to talk.” But beyond the words, the communities are also completely different. Slack is for corporations and workers, Discord is for gamers. (Their words: “Ain’t Nothin’ but a LAN PAAAARTY!”)

The same idea applies for all sorts of products — WorldStarHipHop and YouTube, ConvertKit and Substack, etc. I also recently noticed that this applies — perhaps doubly — to books as well. I’ll suggest this for two books: Tom DeMarco’s Slack, and Richard P. Swenson’s Margin. Both of these books have the same big idea. People are overloaded, which causes them stress…