Different visitors provide different value. Not a breakthrough thought, but one that’s important to realize.

A great discussion started, and continues, between myself and Kevin Kent Newsome following my post on a peculiar observation in my RSS vs traffic stats. Kevin Kent continues the conversation today with a long post that has a gem of a paragraph tucked in the middle:

“Some of your readers will become your friends… We trade ideas, comment on each other’s post and generally carry on a conversation. That’s a wonderful thing and it’s one of the main reasons I keep doing this. But the other 98% of your readers don’t know you from Adam’s housecat. To them you are just a name in an RSS reader with a post or two to be scanned.”

In the short history of this blog, I’ve met some great people. I mean, I’m shocked that I’ve come across such great people because of this blog in such a short amount of time. I like that. They’ve pushed my thinking, challenged me, pointed out flaws in my thinking, made me laugh, elevated my thoughts. On and on. I love that. These would be the 2% that Kevin Kent describes. These people have kept my thinking at my margins and are helping me accomplish the number one reason I started this journey - I wanted “a place to … develop [my] thoughts and ideas”. Thank you Kevin Kent, David, Eric, Fred, Chad, Daniel, Eric, Philipp and the others who have helped push my thinking beyond where it would be without you.

You are the reason I get a thrill writing this stuff - I’m eager to hear how you’ll respond; how you’ll fill in the gaps in my thinking; how you’ll call bull when needed; and, most importantly, how you’ll advance my thinking.

What about the other 98%? (They probably scanned the first 2 lines and moved on (hee hee) - so I could say screw you, but I won’t). They add value beyond simply providing nice traffic stats to study. I am going to continue to monitor traffic for a single reason - to make sure that I’m still adding valuable content. It was a goal of mine after all. This group is valuable as a proxy to help keep me on track and honest about my signal/noise ratio.

A new goal with this blog is the result of these thoughts: increase the 2%.

Not in absolute terms, but in percentage terms. I don’t care what happens to traffic so long as the number of people who fit the mold Kevin Kent describes is always increasing.

I will continue to focus on start-up strategy: innovation, commercialization, and venture capital but I’m still going to post about things I love (music, books, …), thoughts that won’t leave my mind, and many other unfocused things I figure the people in the 2% will enjoy getting a better understanding of who I am. It may force traffic to drop, but that’s okay so long as the 2% figure is always growing. That’s the real value.

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