Three Things
After a few years running a site, I got asked the same things over and over. How do you build something that actually works. How do you make money. What’s the secret. The honest answer is there’s no secret—just three things that kept everything alive for me.
First is image. Everyone develops one online, whether they mean to or not. One guy becomes the guy who destroys everything he touches, someone else becomes the omniscient voice, another is the weirdo who can say anything because that’s his territory. Nobody’s actually like that. But if you want to stick in someone’s memory, you have to be consistent. You commit to a version of yourself and then live inside it. It’s partly strategy, partly self-invention, mostly just not faking it every day. Because people smell the performance.
What you genuinely care about forms the skeleton. Where you live, what music hits you, what you read, who you spend time with—all of it bleeds into this internet version of yourself. The trick is making it real enough that you can sustain it without feeling like you’re performing. You magnify pieces of yourself that are actually interesting and fold in some ambition, some aspiration, until it feels true.
A website needs its own distinct image too, though it stays connected to yours. I used to think of it as a positioning triangle—pick three publications or sites you admire, put them at the corners, build something in the middle. A music blog at the top, a design magazine on the left, something journalistic on the right. That becomes your boundaries. Everything you publish fits inside those lines.
Design hits first, and it has to land. It needs to stop someone from scrolling past. Make them come back. And it has to convince brands and agencies that this is worth their money. From the moment the page loads, everything needs to feel intentional. Name matters. Hosting matters. Nothing rented.
The thing that kills most blogs is they can’t sustain it. One post and waiting doesn’t work. You’re publishing multiple times daily without the quality dropping and without losing yourself. You read obsessively in your lane. You curate, vary the formats, stay interesting. You have to love it enough that showing up is just what you do, not what you’re forcing yourself to do anymore.
The blogs that lasted were unmistakable about their obsession. Of course this person publishes six times a day. Of course this is all they care about. The ones that died—you could feel the strain from the beginning. The fatigue or the fakeness. You could sense the person running out of gas.
I don’t know if any of this transfers. Everyone finds their own path. But I saw it happen enough times to trust it: if you’re building something and waiting for it to explode without actually loving the work, without creating something true enough to live in every day, it’s going to fail. I watched it happen repeatedly. That’s not wisdom. That’s just what I observed.