Thoughts About Our Quora Page

The Tom on Entrepreneurship page on Quora crosses 125,000 followers without much fanfare not that long ago. We’re now at over 130,000 and we pay less attention to the growth numbers these days and just focus on our mission. We’re picking up anywhere from 45 to over 4,000 followers a day sometimes and we never know if it will speed up, slow down, or stop for some reason. We all just keep writing.

We’re deeply humbled by the rate of growth and it was unexpected from the start. The page has only been up since Christmas Eve 2019! The original goal was to make our page as meaningful as possible and so we often discuss the honor that comes from capturing and sustaining so many followers. It’s a big deal to us and we try and bring some of that content we write to this blog.

We spend hours searching content and writing answers to questions, all with the intent of providing substantive answers that can make a difference to someone building or managing a company. It’s a labor of love. Yet, as much as we try to figure it out, we don’t know where it’s going and we don’t have all the answers all the time. We are experts at what we do, and a large following is one of the few data points that provides some indirect evidence of our expertise.

When I write, I’m aware of the reader’s time constraints, yet I avoid overly simplistic answers to sometimes complicated situations that led to the question in the first place. When I read the question, I imagine the motivation behind the thought and do what I can to connect with that author’s point of view and their concern. It’s why we opened up our group Zoom call so that these same people could interact with us directly and dive a little deeper into practical solutions. I worry about boring readers so the goal is to keep it meaningful.

As I look at our page, and the thousands of business related questions on Quora, I was thinking about how to remain above the noise of it all and get to real solutions and in parallel better show off our expertise. It would be easy to get distracted or off message and someone is always trying to submit content that’s really a sales pitch disguised as an answer to a question they originated. We never allow those unless the answer is meaningful beyond the pitch, and we get a lot of them. A large number of participants on Quora seem to be working an angle and our goal is to stay on substance.

While we also want to build our business, we much prefer providing great value along the way to our clients. There is something very rewarding about just helping others on their entrepreneurial journey. It’s what we do best as a special projects company and we love to share the depth of our knowledge.

The advice someone gave me about Quora, and writing in general is, to just keep writing, even when you’re reaching a low point. It has become a mantra to us, so we just keep answering questions and we keep our blog current. I often don’t know what to write, especially when there are so many topics to cover! Lately, I’ve had to slow down because I have a book in the works and I’m also working on business development for Middlerock.

I’ve had to think over and over again about the “why?” in all this, far beyond the love of writing and solving problems for our clients and readers. As we were driving around Washington State a few weeks ago, I kept thinking about where this will all lead. I want to keep improving so that’s certainly a piece of the “why.” There is something meaningful in improvement, and that’s a foundational component. Yet, helping someone solve that next problem creates a deep sense of accomplishment, and that’s the “why” in Middlerock.

Here is another way I think about this. 108 billion people have lived and died on this earth in the last 50,000 years. Think about that massive number! We’ll never know that 99.999% of those people ever existed. If 50 million people make the history books worldwide beyond 100 years, that’s only 0.000463% of the people who ever lived. Imagine that! Think of the contributions lost, or those who never had much of an opportunity to contribute to anything.

Yet, those unknowns after tends of thousands of years got us here so that the remaining 7 billion alive today can exist. That’s as much as we know. I’d be deeply disappointed if I never contributed to anything meaningful in this world. That would bother me a lot. That’s why I write and pass along what I learned. It’s a core value of Middlerock. We want to be meaningful contributors no matter what.