Books certainly spread<\/em> breakthrough ideas, but it’s rarely where they’re born. Each of the examples I just mentioned started from somewhere else: blockbuster blogs<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s start close to home. You probably know Jimmy Daly, now the CEO and founder of Superpath, formerly VP of Growth here at Animalz. But it\u2019s even more likely you\u2019re familiar with an article he wrote on this blog in 2018: “Your Blog Is Not a Publication<\/a>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Jimmy hosts Content, Briefly<\/em>, Superpath\u2019s podcast<\/a>, guests often mention how this post has influenced their careers. Many other content marketers tell us the same on sales and customer calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m pretty happy if people still talk about one of my articles a few weeks<\/em> after I hit publish. So how did Jimmy achieve such an enduring blockbuster?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hard work. <\/strong>He wrote 31 Animalz posts before “Your Blog Is Not a Publication” and was in content for many years before joining our agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feedback and iteration.<\/strong> He talked to dozens if not hundreds of prospects and customers during that period, which helped him refine the concept based on their feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A ready audience.<\/strong> The Animalz content channels already had thousands of readers back then, so Jimmy had an audience that could embrace and spread his idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Steve [Jobs] didn\u2019t just read a script for the [Apple product] presentation[s]. He\u2019d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months [\u2026 ] to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he\u2019d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he\u2019d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.”<\/em> <\/p>\u2014 Tony Fadell in Build<\/em><\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Perhaps most importantly, if you asked Jimmy (which we did), he wouldn’t have predicted that particular post would become such a breakthrough, which is why these three factors are so important:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We see this pattern of hard work, refinement, and a ready audience with many other blockbuster blogs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Great ideas rarely materialize out of thin air \u2014 or books for that matter. They emerge from experience, perception, and pragmatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “A book should be an article before it\u2019s a book, and a dinner conversation before it\u2019s an article.” <\/em><\/p>\u2014 Ryan Holiday in <\/em>Perennial Seller<\/em><\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Graham articulated the disruptive impact of meetings on a maker’s day. He wasn’t just capturing a problem many founders he worked with experienced. Being an engineer himself, he knew the problem first-hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jimmy also got his blockbuster insight through his many customer interactions at Animalz. Ellis landed on growth hacking from advising lots of startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll find this pattern again and again. Direct experience is a prerequisite for breakthrough ideas<\/strong> \u2014 with one exception: direct observation<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin Kelly, the legendary founder and editor of WIRED<\/em><\/a>, realized the internet allowed creators* to establish direct relationships with their fans, instead of through intermediaries like publishers and record labels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This change enabled people to earn a living from creative work by having “1,000 True Fans<\/a>” who buy everything the creator releases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kelly didn\u2019t need to earn a living from 1,000 fans himself. But as the cofounder of the world\u2019s most influential technology magazine, he was well-positioned to observe<\/em> a new business model for creators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udd0e What to look for?<\/strong> Emerging trends, ideas, or pain points in your field that nobody has clearly articulated or named yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * “Creator” is itself a breakthrough idea that didn\u2019t yet exist when Kelly came up with 1,000 True Fans. The term <\/sub><\/em>most likely<\/em><\/sub><\/a> also came from a blog post or online publication.<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Anderson, a media entrepreneur now mostly known as the leader and curator of TED, observed a peculiar pattern in digital businesses in the early 2000s. In contrast to traditional brick-and-mortar stores, online retailers could “stock” and sell a large number of niche products since their inventory space was essentially limitless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He called this “The Long Tail” in a 2004 WIRED<\/em> article<\/a>, which was later turned into a book (you notice the pattern here? \ud83d\ude09).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another famous example is “Why Software Is Eating the World<\/a>.” Marc Andreessen, tech entrepreneur turned investor, recognized a pattern of software disruption across industries and predicted technology companies would digitize large parts of the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Andreessen published his idea in a 2011 essay, which became the inspiration for the tagline of their VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz: “Software is eating the world.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udd0e What to look for?<\/strong> You can find patterns in data analysis (as Anderson did), but also through customer interactions like survey responses or questions people ask you repeatedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two weeks before they publicly launched Slack in 2013, founder Steward Butterfield wrote a blog post memo titled “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here,<\/a>” a framework for thinking about product positioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Butterfield argued that instead of focusing on selling saddles (the product), it’s more effective and lucrative to be in the business of horse riding (the broader experience or category). Butterfield used this analogy to emphasize that Slack wasn’t just selling a messaging tool but organizational transformation, a much more expansive vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This idea has become popular among startups and other businesses, and it’s so enduring at Slack that people still share the memo almost weekly in internal channels according to<\/a> Sara Yin, Senior Editor at Slack. “People don’t even need to summarize the post. I think there might even be a saddle emoji.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Butterfield\u2019s entire framework can be expressed with a simple emoji and endures more than a decade after writing his post<\/strong> \u2014 that\u2019s the power of a blockbuster blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other famous examples of framework creation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udd0e What to look for?<\/strong> Repeatable processes or mental models you’ve developed to solve problems. The best frameworks come from approaches you’ve refined through experience that help others solve similar challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don’t always need to invent a new concept to create a breakthrough idea.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To this day, “BLUF: The Military Standard That Can Make Your Writing More Powerful<\/a>” pulls in the most organic traffic<\/a> for our blog. Jan-Erik Asplund, formerly at Animalz and now at Sacra<\/a>, took the BLUF concept (which stands for “Bottom Line Up Front”) from the military and repurposed it for business communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another example is Ryan Law’s information gain<\/a>, now a widely popular term in content marketing since first appearing here on the blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ryan didn’t invent the idea \u2014 he found it in a Google patent, and it’s a long-established term in information theory. His brilliance was to apply the concept to content marketing and amplify it through our audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u26a0\ufe0f There’s a thin line between repurposing and plagiarism: Repurposing uses an idea while acknowledging its original source; plagiarism does not.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udd0e What to look for?<\/strong> Don’t just read the Animalz blog. \ud83d\ude09 Look for ideas outside of your normal domain and expertise. Other industries, sports, science, biology, music \u2014 inspiration can come from anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Predicting a breakthrough in advance is practically impossible. But many of the ideas we remember share characteristics we can apply to our own work \u2014 and increase its chances of breaking through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an episode of The Lex Fridman Podcast<\/em><\/a>, Anthropic’s founder and CEO Dario Amodei says: “Sometimes there are these one sentences, these Zen koans, that you hear them and you’re like, ‘Ah, that explains everything. That explains a thousand things that I’ve seen.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is exactly what the name of your idea must do: capture the concept’s essence and trigger the reader’s imagination so it’s instantly memorable<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The easiest, fastest, and most predictable way to lodge your content in the reader\u2019s brain is to wrap it up in a coined concept\u2014a short, easily remembered catchphrase.”<\/em><\/p>\u2014 Ryan Law in “<\/em>How to Get Competitors Speaking Your Language<\/em><\/a>“<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n These keywords came to mind when I started making a shortlist of blockbuster blogs for this piece:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Except for the first one, these are not even the full article titles. It\u2019s been years since I read most of these posts, but the core ideas are still top of mind, anchored to just a few words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without a <\/strong>coined concept<\/strong><\/a>, your idea can’t spread.<\/strong> You have to come up with a name or very short sentence that captures the essence of your idea in a memorable way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u26a0\ufe0f Beware of forced coining. We all know it when we read it: someone trying really hard to coin a corny concept. No matter how good the name, an idea without substance will not stick.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A breakthrough idea helps us understand a complex problem in a simpler way or with a new perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Long Tail explains the effects and possibilities of digital economics. “Why Software Is Eating the World” gives us a framework to understand complex technological transformation. “Your Blog Is Not a Publication” provides a new lens on content strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most breakthrough ideas also offer a solution for how to solve a widespread pain:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Breakthrough ideas challenge the status quo \u2014 and for good reason: if something is already mainstream, it can’t break through anymore.*<\/p>\n\n\n\n “All new ideas start as heresies.”<\/em><\/p>\u2014 Marc Andreessen (<\/em>source<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n In fact, conventional wisdom is a breakthrough idea’s final destination. What’s a breakthrough idea today is tomorrow’s conventional wisdom, ready to be disrupted by a new breakthrough idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We already see this happening to some of the concepts we’ve discussed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n * The exception is when you’re repurposing a concept from another field: BLUF was conventional wisdom in the military but not in business.<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides a poor or missing name, the other way to ruin a good idea is bad timing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s no ironclad rule for how to get this right. The best analogy is probably a surfer catching a wave: a great surfer sees the wave coming, catches it at exactly the right moment, and rides it out in harmony with the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those who launch breakthrough ideas do something similar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of the examples we\u2019ve discussed share this characteristic. They took off in harmony with a larger shift going on in an industry or society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Creating a blockbuster blog is close to magic. You need to combine deep experience with seeing things others miss, and capture complexity in a simple but memorable way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s also the work: developing your perspective, writing consistently, gathering feedback, refining your ideas \u2014 and doing it all over and over again, until you get the timing and message exactly right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It might all seem like a bit much, but life after a breakthrough is sweet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your idea changes how people think. (Oh, and also: you get to finally publish that book, receive more speaking gigs than you know what to do with, and have LinkedIn posts so popular you don\u2019t even bother checking who liked them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n So yes, a blockbuster blog is a goal worth writing for \u2014 and might just arrive with your next post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n The Road to Breakthrough<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>Origins of Blockbusters<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Direct Experience<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Pattern Recognition<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Framework Creation<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Repurposing and Amplification<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nTraits of a Blockbuster Blog<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Coins the Concept<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Simplifies Complexity<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Challenges Conventional Wisdom<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Arrives at the Right Moment<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Is Breaking Through Worth It?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\t\n\t\tTim Metz\t<\/a><\/h5>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t