I have always admired good writing. Not only in books, magazine articles and personal blogs, but also mundane emails and business strategy documents.
Good writing, as I realized this year, is a reflection of how clear your thoughts are. And I want to be that person. Clear thinker, clear writer.
So at the beginning of this year, I decided I will write and publish public posts once every two weeks. That was my goal for the year 2020, and as 2020 has shown, goals are not a thing to be chased.
Anyway, in the throes of excitement of new projects, I dug around to see where to write. I finally landed on Substack. Substack was (and is) the quickest way to set up a blog. Sign up with an email, very little setup work, and a simple text editor that makes writing as easy as it gets.
Unlike many others on Substack though, I did not intend to write for an audience. At least not yet. My once-in-two-weeks writing routine was less about building a newsletter audience, and more about building a writing habit. (I have failed spectacularly on that front.)
In that sense, it was an unconventional choice. But I figured that a tool is a tool, and I can use it any which way I like. But over time, I have realized that the newsletter format brought with it one big constraint.
I wanted to write on product marketing, but I also wanted to write about my favorite music, books, and maybe even politics. But Substack had no easy way for me to categorize posts and separate them out for readers.
Beyond the UX, this also became a source of obligation. I started second-guessing if I was writing about stuff subscribers to my newsletter (however few) hadn’t signed up for.
I also suspect that it limited the number of times I would write. Sometimes, I would think of an idea to write, but it would be extremely tangential to what I had professed I would write on the newsletter. I did not want this to be an excuse for the lack of writing.
So last week, I decided to move everything over to my own custom domain.
I hope I can start writing more on this blog, and make up for the year to some extent.
P.S. Using a custom domain gives me a child-like pleasure of owning a small, bu my very own piece of the internet.
Utkarsh's Blog 