The story of Hooked

Three years ago, I was living in a small surf town in Costa Rica and writing my first novel, when I had a panic attack.

The novel was a sci-fi fantasy trilogy for young adults, set in Silicon Valley a hundred years in the future. I’m a tech entrepreneur, so it’s not surprising I chose this theme.

But there was something unusual about this sci-fi story — my protagonist was a dark-skinned Indian girl, like me. And that was what caused me to panic.

Would anyone read a sci-fi story with a dark-skinned, female protagonist? How was I going to convince an agent to take a book like this seriously? Would a publisher be able to find an audience for my strange story? And, do teenagers even read?

My husband and I were working on this book together, and, as we were writing, these questions kept coming up.

The thing is, we’re not writers by training. We’re app developers. In the early days of the iPhone, we built music apps, like AutoRap, which have helped hundreds of millions of people around the world make music on their phones.

But in the fall of 2013, after several years of building musics apps, we were ready for our next adventure…

The Story Begins

So we decided to get rid of our possessions and travel the world, and pursue our dream of writing a sci-fi fantasy trilogy.

We bought a one-way ticket to Costa Rica, started learning how to surf, and began writing our novel.

But after six months in Costa Rica, I felt stuck. I was terrible at surfing, and I wasn’t making progress on my book.

Something felt wrong about how we were approaching the book. As app developers accustomed to a Lean Startup mindset, it felt strange to spend so long behind closed doors creating this huge project, without having any sense of whether it would resonate.

And this question about my unusual protagonist kept nagging at me. Was the world ready for a protagonist like me?

Once an app developer, always an app developer…

We decided to a/b test it.

A Crazy Idea

It was the desire to a/b test our book that first sparked the idea for what would eventually become Hooked.

We also started to see a massive opportunity in the business of storytelling.

The more we thought about how the existing players in the storytelling industry —primarily book publishers and Hollywood studios — identify a good story, and how they approach distribution and monetization, the more we felt there was immense scope for innovation.

The way we consume content is changing dramatically, especially in younger generations. For example, a majority of young adult novels are being read digitally now in the U.S., and that’s increasingly happening on mobile. But the way that books are created hasn’t changed in centuries.

People say that reading is dying.

But we refused to believe this. Storytelling is fundamental to humans; some believe it is the essence of humanity. The demand for great stories is ever present.

Fiction must evolve with the times.

We believed there was a billion-dollar opportunity in doing so, and that a mobile-first company that could figure out how to apply Lean Startup principles to story development might just be the next big thing — the next Netflix, the next Disney.

And so it was, a year after we left on our nomad adventure, that my husband and I returned to Silicon Valley and founded a new company, with the goal of redefining fiction for the Snapchat generation.

We managed to convince a few of our previous investors to take a chance on our crazy idea, and we got to work.

Early Evidence

When we started, we had no idea what form the product itself would take. We just wanted to prove that it was possible to a/b test a story.

We started by building a testing system for stories.

We took excerpts from fifty best-selling novels in the young adult space. We took the first 1,000 words of each of these novels, or about a five-minute read, and put them up on a basic mobile-optimized web reader we had built for testing. And we developed custom analytics to measure reader behavior.

The metric we were most interested in was completion rate. We wanted to see — are completion rates different among these different best-sellers, or, given that they’re best-sellers, are they approximately the same?

We focused on mobile reading only, and we limited our test to the first five minutes of each book, to align with typical mobile session lengths.

We sent 15,000 readers to our test, using Facebook ads, and we looked at the results.

What we saw amazed us: there were huge differences in completion rates, even among best sellers.

This was encouraging. Imagine if the authors, editors and publishers had access to this data before they published these books. They could have used it to make the books more engaging.

This was the first evidence we had that data-driven story development could work.

Gut Reaction

Now that we had some benchmarks, we were ready to play :)

We ran all sorts of a/b tests, and learned many interesting things about teen reading preferences.

For example, the recent YA trend of writing in the first-person present tense is irrelevant. Teen readers are just as likely to read the story in the third-person past.

And, we learned that readers are more engaged with a story if they understand the context. Starting in medias res, without setting any context, makes hooking the reader more challenging.

Of course, we also tested my big question: do teen readers prefer a white male protagonist over an Indian female one?

Any guesses?

The answer is no.

According to our tests, teen readers are equally interested in reading a story when it has a white protagonist as when it has a brown one. Moreover, teenage boys are equally interested in stories with female protagonists as with male protagonists. But, perhaps most interesting of all, teen girls prefer stories with female protagonists.

The Challenge

Eventually, an interesting pattern emerged from our tests.

The completion rates on a 5-minute read varied, depending on the story we were testing. In some cases, only 5% of people would read to the end of a 5-minute excerpt. In other case, 10% or 15% of people did.

But there seemed to be a ceiling in the completion rate. Of all the stories we tested, in the very best cases only about a third of readers would make it all the way to the end. That’s on a five-minute read.

In other words, the majority of teen readers were not even completing the first five minutes of best-selling YA novels (when reading them on a phone).

This was depressing. Maybe reading really was dying.

But we took it as a challenge. We asked ourselves: can we come up with a format innovation that makes reading fiction more engaging for teenagers?

How can we get a majority of teens to give us their undivided attention…for five minutes…on their phones…to read…fiction?

That’s when we had our epiphany.

The Aha Moment

We started initially by testing comic-book inspired ideas. We thought that if we told more of the story through images, teens might find reading more engaging.

We tested many iterations, but nothing moved the needle. No matter what we tried, reader engagement was still abysmal.

Then we had an off-the-wall idea to test a story written as a text message conversation between the characters. It was 1,000 words, or a five-minute read, the same length as everything else we had tested thus far.

The first chat story we tested had staggering results. Almost every teenager who started reading our chat story finished it in one session.

We thought it was an error. We had never run an a/b test before with this magnitude of a change. So we tested it again. And we got the same results.

That was the light bulb moment.

We launched Hooked four months later.

Getting To Traction

We launched an MVP (minimum viable product) of Hooked in late September, 2015.

We spent the next year iterating, talking to our early readers, building product, working with undiscovered authors, and developing our catalog of chat stories.

Over time, we added social features, including the ability for users to write their own stories.

We started to get some press coverage, in BusinessInsider, TechCrunch, Wired, and LATimes.

And slowly, slowly, things started to click.

In September, 2016, Hooked began rising up the charts.

On December 1, 2016, Hooked hit the #1 spot in the App Store.

Since then, Hooked has consistently been a Top 100 app in the U.S. App Store, and it’s hit the #1 spot again twice, including this past weekend. We’ve also hit the #1 spot in several other countries, including France, Canada, U.K., and Mexico.

Ten million young readers have installed Hooked in the past six months, collectively reading over 10 billion fictional text messages in the app during that time. Hooked users have also written over a million chat stories of their own, directly from their phones.

Our stories still have remarkably high completion rates, and our most popular ones, like The Watcher — a YA thriller told as a dark, modern day fairytale — have amassed avid fanbases.

Just A Dumb Fad?

Understandably, we have encountered a high degree of skepticism about what we’re doing.

Although we have been fortunate enough to attract some of the best investors in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, there are still many people who think chat fiction is silly. Others fear that we are destroying reading.

But to ask “is chat fiction a fad?” is to look at things too narrowly.

Art evolves with technology.

Think about movies, for example. The first movies ever made were essentially just theatre, captured on film. But as directors, writers, actors and cameramen became more adept with recording technology, the way in which we tell stories fundamentally changed. Technology made us more effective at storytelling.

The same will happen with mobile phones. As we spend more and more time consuming media on phones, the way in which we tell stories will change, to reflect our evolving behavior. To reflect our evolving lives.

Chat fiction is one step in that progression.

As the category has grown, several copycats of Hooked have emerged. Although these initial products are simply clones of Hooked, they are making one thing clear: chat fiction has come of age.

Hooked will not be the only one telling stories in this format, and that’s a good thing.

It means we are succeeding in our mission: getting teenagers to read more fiction.

Rather than destroy reading, Hooked makes reading engaging for a broad audience. We’ve heard from many teens who say they hate reading books, but they love reading in Hooked. It’s a gateway drug.

And we’re just getting started. What you see in Hooked today is but a glimpse of the future of storytelling.

The greatest stories ever told started with a 1,000 words. Ours is just beginning.

Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free, and to develop a more rigorous and efficient peer review system. Free access to academic research makes the world a more equitable place, and rigorous and efficient peer review accelerates the pace of scientific and scholarly research.

Academia launched in 2008, and now around 35 million people use the site a month. Around 19 million papers have been uploaded, and are freely available on the platform. Forty percent of Academia’s users are from developing countries and would otherwise have limited access to academic research.

In order to achieve Academia’s goals, Academia is working to become a sustainable operation. As part of that operation, we have introduced Academia Premium, which includes extra features such as Readers, Mentions, Expanded Analytics and Advanced Search.

• Readers tells you who is reading your papers
• Mentions alerts you when papers are uploaded mentioning your name
• Expanded Analytics provides a more detailed look at what kinds of people visit your profile and how people find your papers
• Advanced Search allows you to find exact keyword matches in the full text of every paper on Academia

Academia’s Premium features are designed for people who want to stay on top of how their work is being found, read, and cited by the other academics on Academia and in the wider academic community, and to understand the impact it is having. Upgrading to an Academia Premium account helps keep the site’s free features available for others around the world, while also helping you make the most of your work.

In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free. This means that features related to open access (free access to uploading and downloading papers), and features related to peer review (sessions, recommendations) are free. As we add new features to Premium, we will continue to ensure that features related to the mission (open access, sessions, recommendations) are free.

Many of our Premium users upgraded to support the mission of the company. We are grateful they consider ours a cause worth supporting. We will continue to serve all academics around world, freely distributing the research they need to find cures for diseases, combat political corruption, promote public health, and enrich their knowledge of history, philosophy, anthropology and 2 million other topics that are available on Academia. We are grateful to all the academics who have contributed to Academia and to making the world a more equitable place.

Academia Introduces a Premium Account was originally published in Academia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week I talked about how you can land a 6-figure job in tech with no connections by generating referrals from people inside those companies.

The article found its way in front of a lot of people, and they had a lot of questions. The most common questions focused on one thing: experience.

Many people find that their current career isn’t living up to their expectations. They want to change paths, but they don’t have any experience in another field, and no idea where to start.

In this post I’ll show you how to quickly gain experience in any field, as well as how you can leverage that new experience to land job offers in that field.

I personally used this strategy to transition from the medical field — where I was working in hospital operating rooms — to the tech industry, where I received offers from Google and other tech companies (along with a 200% raise).

Myths about things you DON’T need when switching fields

Before we dive in, I think it’s important to address a few “myths” about changing industries:

• You don’t need an extensive network of contacts. In fact, you don’t need any contacts at all — you can make them all on your own.
• You don’t need a degree in the field you want to switch to. Perception is reality, and results speak volumes when it comes to perception. They are worth more than any degree or previous job title. More on that later.
• You don’t need money. Everything you need to know can be learned for free. In fact, I’m going to show you how this process can actually help you generate a second stream of income.

Next, I’m going to outline the exact steps I used to land a job in a totally different industry so you can make it happen for yourself.

Part 1: Painting a picture of the perfect candidate

The good news about entering a completely different field is that you are a blank canvas. You can choose your skills and mold yourself into the perfect candidate.

What does perfection look like?

In order to become the ideal candidate, we must first understand what “ideal” looks like in the eyes of the people who will be hiring you. There are two ways to accomplish this:

Job descriptions

Job descriptions are essentially resumes in reverse. They spell out the exact skills you need in order to be successful in that particular role. That sounds obvious, but we are going to be looking at this from an atypical lens.

Let’s take a look at this Growth Marketing Analyst role that I grabbed from Facebook’s site:

Responsibilities

- Leverage data to understand our products in depth, identify areas of opportunity, and execute projects to drive growth and engagement of Facebook users.

- Drive projects focusing on new user growth, mobile usage, and revenue — working closely with design, product, engineering, and data teams.

- Work both on core Facebook products like news feed, notifications, and mobile, and offsite marketing channels like SEO, SEM, and email.

- Use tools like Hadoop/Hive, Oracle, ETL, R, PHP, Python, Excel, MicroStrategy, and many other internal tools to work efficiently at scale.

Minimum Qualifications

- BS or MS in Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Physics, Statistics.

- 1+ years experience with SQL.

- 2+ years of quantitative or statistical analysis experience.

- 1+ years of experience managing a project.

- 1+ years of experience in marketing, advertising or growth.

- Ability to process and analyze data sets, and interpret them to make business decisions.

- Communication skills and ability to manage a project or product.

Preferred Qualifications

- Software development experience.

- Internet Marketing experience.

What do you see here? What does the ideal candidate look like? What do they need to get hired?

My guess is that you’re thinking, “Ok, they need a degree in computers or math. Then they need at least two years of experience coding and managing projects at a company.”

Well, here’s what I see:

Facebook is looking for someone who understands how to identify trends/patterns within big data that will have a direct impact on revenue. That person also has enough knowledge of programming to efficiently make those discoveries and present them in a simple, concise fashion.

The main issue a lot of people have is that they think the only way to get “experience” is to work at company or have fancy degrees. This is one of the biggest myths when it comes to job searching.

In order to understand it, let’s take a step back and think about why companies hire.

They want someone who will come in and have a large, positive impact on their bottom line.

Someone could have a PhD in Computer Science and be fluent in all of the programming languages mentioned above, but if they lack the ability to clearly convey results, the company isn’t going to benefit.

On the other hand, someone who may not have a degree or total fluency but understands how to find impactful insights and presents them in a concise, actionable manner is extremely valuable.

Your goal is to become that second person.

Informational interviews

In addition to combing through job descriptions, it’s equally important to get in touch with people who work in the industry.

They will be able to help you prioritize the skills you found in those job applications, as well as give you some inside info on the intangibles (nuances of the hiring process, putting you in touch with their contacts, etc.).

I’ve found that the best way to make this happen is by leveraging LinkedIn’s advanced search filters.

You can search for people at specific companies, with specific titles. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can even search for people who used to work in your industry and now work in your target industry — or even at your target company.

Then you can use this email script to reach out:

Subject: Quick Question

Hi [Name],

My name is Austin and I currently work at Cultivated Culture. I was browsing through LinkedIn and came across your information — I hope you don’t mind me reaching out of the blue here.

I saw that you have extensive experience in Facebook’s Growth Analytics vertical and I’m very interested in learning more about that space. I would love to have the opportunity to run some questions by you, as well as tap into any advice you may have given your knowledge of the industry.

I know that your time is extremely valuable so please don’t feel to need to respond in depth. If you do have 5 minutes to chat, I would really appreciate it.

Best,

Austin

When they agree to a meeting, you’ll want to prepare some questions. They should focus on:

• Identifying which skills are the most crucial for performing daily activities (this will allow you to prioritize)
• Providing some background on how that person got to where they are (you’d be surprised at how many people came from other industries)
• What they would do if they were in your shoes — trying to get this job with little to no experience in the field

Here are those bullets in question form to help get you started:

1. I’ve been doing some research and it seems like [Skill 1] — [Skill 3] are common in the space. Which of these do you think is the most crucial to success?
2. I was looking through your LinkedIn and saw that you came from [Previous Role/Company]. How did you initially get involved in this industry and how did you end up at [Current Role]?
3. Let’s say you were in my shoes — you’re new to the industry and don’t have too much experience. How would you go about getting your current job? What specific steps would you take?

Bringing It All Together

Now you have an understanding of the skills that you need, where they stand in terms of priority, and a roadmap from someone who has/had the role you want.

Next, you need to build a foundation with those skills and use them to generate results that directly align with the company’s goals for that role.

Part 2: Nailing The Basics (On The Cheap)

Over the next month or two we’re going to focus on building a rock solid understanding of the basics needed for the skills you identified above.

For now, the best ways to do this are by reading books, taking courses, and creating a sandbox you can use to test your knew knowledge.

Reading Up (For Free)

Books are a fantastic way to understand the basic concepts of a specific subject. They also happen to be very easy to get for free.

Remember that public library your parents wanted you to check out when you were a kid? It’s actually still there! Amazing, right?

The good news for you is that even public libraries have caught up with the times and now carry ebooks. You can borrow them for free like any other book, but they will be sent directly to your phone so you can read them anywhere, anytime. All you need to do is install the Kindle app (which you can get for free for iOS and Android).

In order figure out which books to read, I would Google “best books on [subject]” or go ask some folks on Quora.

Taking Courses (For Free-ish)

While books are giving you the 30,000 foot view of your topics, courses will help you figure out the nitty gritty. They are a better way to learn the actual skills because they tend to be interactive and are updated regularly.

One of the best resources for our purposes is Coursera. Coursera aggregates courses from the best professors at the best schools in the country (I’m talking Princeton, Stanford, Harvard — they don’t mess around).

These courses are fantastic because they are structured like an actual course you would take in college. They have videos, but they also have tests, projects, and forums where students can collaborate. This is key because it helps make the course “sticky” due to the fact that you are committing to all the above rather than just watching a few videos.

Best of all, at the end of the course, you can receive a certificate stating that you passed the course. It will even have the seal from that university on it! It does cost ~$49 but it’s well worth it because you can put that right on your resume:

Subscribing To Industry Blogs & Newsletters

Next, you’re going to want to sign up for some newsletters.

Blogs stay in business by having the highest quality, most up-to-date information and getting it out there as quickly as possible. This is the easiest way for you to stay on top of current events in the industry while picking up tons of knowledge along the way.

You can find them using the same method you used to find the books — Googling and hitting up Quora.

Additionally, try to find a niche blog as they tend to have highly detailed information on your topic. Here are some examples:

SEO: The 10 Chapter Beginner’s Guide To SEO

Content Marketing: The Advanced Guide To Content Marketing

Facebook Ads: The Ultimate Guide To Making Money With Facebook Ads

Free Resources (Where Applicable)

Many industries and fields have a ton of free resources out there to help your learn. For example, if you’re an analytics person — Google Analytics is completely free to set up. Additionally, Google offers an entire course on the platform for free.

If your plan is to break into the development field, you’re already in the right place. Free Code Camp is one of many great resources that will help you learn the basics of programming for free.

Be sure to do a thorough search on your industry. Chances are good that free training resources exist.

Bonus Pro Tip: Google Alerts

Google Alerts are an awesome way to save yourself hours that you would have spent searching for articles on specific topics or companies.

You can set them up for anything that you could feasibly search for in Google, but probably want to stick with the salient points like a specific industry, certain skills, the company you want to work for and Beyonce.

Then, every day, Google will crawl the web and find the most relevant (and worthy) articles on your specific subjects and deliver them straight to your inbox.

You can sign up for Google alerts here.

Part 3: Getting Paid To Hone Your Skills

Yup, you read that right. We’re going learn how to have someone pay you to learn the skills you need to change industries.

Building Credibility & Real-World Results

Now that you understand the basics of these skills, it’s time to really develop them.

I’ve found that the best way to truly learn something is by doing it. I can’t think of a better way of “doing” than selling your skills for some cold hard cash.

Rapidly Develop Your Skills By Freelancing

While it may seem like a daunting task, it’s fairly easy to get started in the freelance world even if you have no prior “experience.”

As Tim Ferriss says, the definition of an expert is someone who knows more than the person they are dealing with.

There are two ways of going about finding clients when you’re starting out — freelance aggregator sites and traditional cold outreach:

Upwork (A Freelance Aggregator)

Upwork is a community where business owners come to find freelancers for everything under the sun.

The beauty of Upwork is that it removes the need for you to invest a lot of time in marketing yourself. It is an inbound site meaning your services will show up to people who are already looking for that particular service, making them more likely to hire. That may also be attractive to someone who is uncomfortable with a traditional sales process.

The trade off is that, while you save time, Upwork charges a hefty fee for saving you that time. For our purposes, that’s not too terrible because you’re mostly in it for the learning while the money is icing on the cake.

I recommend using Upwork if you’re having trouble managing the sales process on your own, or if you’re just starting out and need to build up a few success stories.

If you really want to expand your initial reach, check out Hubstaff’s comprehensive rundown of Upwork alternatives and get yourself on multiple platforms.

Cold Outreach

The second option, and the path that I recommend, is handling the sales process on your own. That way you get to keep 100% of the revenue and remove the middle man.

This can be a bit tougher initially because those businesses may not be actively looking for your services and if you don’t have much sales experience, the learning curve can be steep.

In this section we’ll through the steps that I used to land my initial clients, build success stories and then use those results to expand my portfolio (and increase my revenue).

Define Your Niche

Our first step on our freelancing journey is defining our target prospect. Most articles out there tell you that when you start a business your niche should be laser-focused, like Male Golfers, Ages 47–54 who suffer from back pain.

While I agree that it should be targeted, it’s not reasonable to expect that you’re going to know your target audience in that level of detail before you’ve even worked with a single client.

You’ll begin to hone in on your ideal niche as you go, but for now we’re going to use the following process to determine our target audience (actually, we’re going to choose 3).

Defining Your Initial Target Prospect

Start by making a list of 50 people that you know. It can include everyone from your best friend’s parents to a connection on LinkedIn you met at a conference last year. The only criteria they need to meet is that you must feel comfortable reaching out to that person.

Add these people into this spreadsheet I created for you along with their company type and industry (ignore the email column for now, we’ll get to that later):

Now that we have our people, let’s take a look at their company type and industry. Which industries and company types match up best with your knowledge and skill set?

If we take my list, I know that my marketing skills could benefit a tech company, but they could also benefit a health & wellness startup looking to build an audience. Additionally, know that it’s much easier to sell into startups than corporations when you’re first starting out. With that in mind, my ideal mix is:

Company Type: Startup

Industry: Advertising, Tech, Web Development & Health/Wellness

Now we have one “niche,” but my list here is only 10 people. I want you to try and find 3 different niches where one or more of your skills apply. Then I want you to assign each niche a number and label your spreadsheet (you can also highlight too if that helps):

Awesome! You just defined 3 areas that you can sell into and you have your first set of prospects.

Key Takeaway: Don’t get caught up in finding a super-specific niche before you’ve ever booked a client. Keep things broad, take on a few initial clients and your niche will narrow over time.

Create Time & Be Consistent

I have spent a lot of time reading about success. I’ve also spent a lot of time building businesses in hopes of chasing it. After sifting through the thousands of pages and lessons, I found that one thing had the greatest influence on whether I was successful or not:

Consistency

The ability to work on something every single day — regardless of how you feel, how crazy your job is or how many friends tell you to go to happy hour — is the difference between succeeding and failing when you start a business.

In order to be consistent, you have to create time. Time that you know is not going to be interrupted. For me, that means waking up at 5:30am. For you, early may work, or maybe late at night is your thing. Whatever you do, make sure that it’s a natural fit for you. You don’t want to feel like you have to drag yourself to do this, otherwise it will never work.

Put It In Your Calendar

Start by opening up your Google calendar and finding a 1.5 hour block of time that works for you at least 5 days every week (yes, that includes weekends).

Create an event and set reminders for 1 hour before and 15 minutes before. Mark that time as “busy” on your calendar:

Hold Yourself Accountable

Now it’s real — ink on paper. However, your calendar invite isn’t going to get you out of bed the day after you went out a little too hard or help you say no to those free concert tickets to see Kanye. If we truly want to stick with this, we’re going to need a little outside help.

I personally recommend StickK because I’m a competitive person who doesn’t like losing. StickK basically lets you bet yourself that you will start your business.

You put down a dollar amount (I recommend $100) and you set a goal. Then you’ll be assigned a “referee” who will hold you accountable. If you complete your goal, you get your $100 back. If you don’t, that money is donated to the charity of your choice.

I can personally tell you that the thought of $100 being yanked out of my wallet has helped me push through many hangovers.

Getting Your First Client

Now that we’ve got our service and our niches nailed down, it’s time to get some paying customers.

Since we don’t have much in the way of a portfolio, we’re going to want to start by aiming for a prospect where we have a personal connection. Then we’re going to leverage the current experience that you have to land the deal.

Let’s head back to our spreadsheet and look through the list of names that we highlighted in each niche. I want you to go ahead and rank each of these people in the order of how likely they are to help you. Then we’re going to reach out to each from top to bottom.

Finding Emails

If you don’t already have their email, you can easily find it by using VoilaNorbert or FindAnyEmail.net. Once you have it, go ahead and plug it into your spreadsheet for future reference.

Reaching Out

Now we’re going to reach out to our contact and ask them if they can help us set up a meeting. Here is the exact email template you can use for that:

Subject: Quick Question

Hi [Name],

Hope you’re doing well! I wanted to let you know about a business I’m starting up called [Company Name]. It’s aimed at helping companies [Insert Value Prop].

Most recently we were able to [Insert Success Story]. I did a quick audit of [Prospect’s Company] and I have some ideas that I’d love to share with you. Could you help me get in touch with the correct person? Either way, would love to catch up soon!

Best,

[Your Name]

All you need to do is fill in their name, your skills and press send.

I would also highly recommend getting an email tracker such as Hubspot (free) or Yesware (better, but costs $). These will allow you to see if your prospect read your message and help you determine whether or not to follow up.

If they open your email once, that trail is dead. However, if they open it multiple times across multiple days, feel free to follow up with them after 4–5 business days. I have personally followed up with people 8–10 times before eventually getting a response that led to a deal.

Preparing For The Meeting

Once the meeting is set, we want to make a compelling case for why this company needs your services. The best way to do that is using what I like to call The Audit Technique.

It’s extremely simple and effective:

• Carefully review our prospect’s current set up (website, social media, content, copy, health — whatever fits your service)
• Identify as many issues/improvements as we possibly can
• Determine the measurable impact of fixing these issues
• Share specific strategies for solving 2–3 of the issues and then showcase the potential result of fixing all of them
• Tell them that, regardless of whether or not they hire you, they can keep the audit report

Boom! Easy.

Closing The Deal

In the beginning, most of your prospects aren’t going to be seeking you out. That means that you have to convince them that your services will be worth their time and money. The best way to do that is via the following framework:

1. Address

We’re going to start off the meeting by addressing the issues that you found with their site. Don’t be too critical. The goal here is to make them feel good about their business while also letting them know that there is a lot of untapped potential out there.

Hand them your Audit Report and walk them through each of the issues. Explain what is happening, why it’s hurting their business, and what the solution is.

2. Illustrate Potential

Once you’ve explained the issues, you want to clarify what the prospect is missing out on. The more quantifiable this is, the better. For example:

• Your call to action on the site isn’t strong enough. Your conversion rate is probably 5% lower than where it should be. If your site gets 30,000 visitors a month, that’s 1,500 people we’re not capturing!
• Instagram accounts like yours typically see 100–300 followers every day, but you are only netting 20–30. If you implement the strategy I laid out here you should see an immediate boost within a few days. That could mean an additional 2,400 followers each month!

Show them how this is impacting their bottom line. Walk them through the math:

You: What is your typical sales conversion rate from your email list?

Prospect: Hmmm, it’s around 3%

You: Wow, that’s pretty good! And how much profit do you make from each sale?

Prospect: Typically we net around $150 per sale.

You: Awesome. Based on my audit, I’m seeing that we’re missing out capturing an additional 3–5% of your site’s traffic due to poor copy and CTA placement. I poked around and saw that your site gets ~30,000 visitors per month which means that we could be capturing an additional 1,500 people every month. Based on the numbers you just gave me, that’s $6,750 per month!

If you charge $2,000 per month, that’s a no brainer for your prospect. Any business owner would pay $2,000 if they knew it would result in an incremental profit of $4,750 — and you just made $24k this year!

Ask Them For The Sale

Now that you’ve proven out the value — ask them for the sale:

• Tell them that the Audit Report is theirs to keep regardless
• Reiterate the potential opportunity they have to gain
• Outline what next steps look like for hiring you
• Ask them if they want to move forward

Chances are good that they’ll want some time to think about it. No worries at all — drop note on your calendar to follow up with them 72 hours later.

You just booked your first client!

Now I want you to rinse and repeat this process for everyone on your spreadsheet. If you can get your foot in the door, you can expect about a 5%-10% close rate.

Consolation: Offering Your Services For Free

Since we’re mostly in this for the learning, this is great option to consider if the above process isn’t initially working out.

I found that it was much easier to land clients when I had success stories I could speak to. It’s important to figure out a way to get some results before you go all-in on pitching for money.

You can reach out to businesses, same as above, and offer your services for free. This takes away all of the risk for the company, making them much more likely to agree, while allowing you to get right to the learning and create real-world results.

Remember, we’re in this to try and find a job we love that pays us what we deserve. That is worth a LOT more than a few paid freelance contracts. If the freelancing turns into a source of revenue, that is icing on the cake.

Leveraging Your Results To Land Your New Job

There you have it — a step-by-step plan to build the experience you need to land a join a different industry. Now it’s time to get out there and get your foot in there door.

First up, edit the resume.

Add Your Experience To Your Resume

As soon as you have some concrete results under your belt, you’re going to want to add them straight at the top of your resume.

This will be the first thing that your potential employer will see and it helps remove any doubt about your qualifications.

Way back up at the top of the article we took a look at why companies hire. The qualifications of X years is just an arbitrary number set by the company to make them feel like they are hiring someone who can do the job.

Adding in your freelance experience not only shows that you can do the job, but also that you have an understanding of how to run a business. This knowledge is extremely valuable to an employer, especially for a technical hire because technical folks typically get tunnel vision and have trouble seeing how their work relates to the larger picture — making money.

Here is a screenshot of my consulting experience on my resume:

Identify Influencers At Your Target Company

Now that you have the relevant experience, you’re going to want to start connecting with influencers who can help refer you into your dream job.

I outline that exact process in my article How To Land A 6-Figure Job In Tech With No Connections so be sure to check that out when you’re ready.

Want More Advice About Landing Your Dream Job?

Click here to sign up for my free newsletter and start taking your career from 0–100 real quick.

How you can start a career in a different field without “experience” — tips that got me job offers… was originally published in freeCodeCamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up — one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication. Blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Google+ news-streams and communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.

But in addition, STEM scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars all have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world. At the moment that’s often being done

• in ramshackle and impoverished ways
• in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums
• in difficult language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia. Some of this is necessary for condensed specialist communication. But much of it is just unneeded jargon and poor writing dressed up as necessary vocabulary
• with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data (that will never be used by anyone else in the world), often presented in unreadable tables
• and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. From submission to publication in some top economics journals now takes 3.5 years. At the end of such a process any published paper is no more than a tombstone marking where happening debate and knowledge used to be, four or five years earlier.

So the public pay for all or much of our research (especially in Europe and Australasia). And then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date, arcanely phrased academic junk.

Types of blogs

A lot of people think that all blogs are solo blogs, but this is a completely out of date view. A ‘blog’ is defined by Wikipedia as:

‘a truncation of the expression web log… [It] is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject. More recently “multi-author blogs” (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other “microblogging” systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams’. [Accessed 29 August 2014]. (Let me pause here to reassure some academic readers who may be bristling at being asked to read Wikipedia text – I know this passage is sound since I co-wrote much of it). 

Actually the evolution of academic blogs specifically has now progressed even further, so that we can distinguish group or collaborative blogs as an important intermediate type between solo blogs and multi-author blogs. The two tables below summarize how these three types of blogs now work, drawing attention to their very different advantages and disadvantages.

Why blogging works in academia

Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break free from all the legacy practices I covered at the beginning of this post, although to differing extents, because:

• It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based yet timely ways. Esoteric knowledge and accumulated wisdom that might previously have been shared with four or five people over lunch in the Senior Common Room, or the PhD hangout, now gets out into the public domain, and can be read, tracked, emulated or contested.
• It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. Twitter is a huge supplementary help, in forcing academics to communicate key messages in 140 characters!
• Multi-author blogs especially help create multi-disciplinary understanding and the joining-up of previously siloed knowledge. They hugely reduce the barriers involved in keeping abreast of a wide range of knowledge, or in finding out for the first time about a subject or debate or field of work that is new to you. All the LSE family of blogs, for instance, cover 40+ different social sciences (and some related) areas like architecture, city planning and technology. Our EUROPP blog pools within this large discipline group for 50 countries in Europe, and our USAPP blog has the same focus for the United States, Canada and Mexico. The LSE Review of Books and the LSE Impacts blog both range even more widely, incorporating history, philosophy, media and cultural analyses that span across the social sciences and the humanities, and some fringe aspects of the huge STEM disciplines group. An enlarged disciplinary range that was once just the province of a few exceptional publications and magazines (like Scientific American or the Economist) becomes a lot more accessible to a much wider audience. Group blogs have lesser cross-disciplinary effects, because they are rarely widely visible — usually only insiders find them. But they contribute greatly to better communication within disciplines, and so they can help reduce barriers to learning by being passed on to well-informed or persistent outsiders to the discipline.
• Blogging thus creates a vastly enlarged foundation for the development of ‘bridging’ academics, with real inter-disciplinary competences, honed by lots of interactions with people in other academic silos. By the 1980s the siloing of science and scholarship in reductionist mode meant that there was a sharply diminished potential for inter-disciplinary understanding. At that low point the bridging role was exploited only by a few ‘public intellectuals’ (on whom excessive attention is still focused). But now this key ‘bridging’ role is once again beginning to become a far wider-scale competency.
• Blogging can also support in a novel and stimulating way the traditional role of a university as an agent of ‘local integration’ across multiple disciplines. This capability is especially important now at the many interfaces between the social sciences and the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, where co-operation across silos and growing genuinely trans-disciplinary research are increasingly salient for societal progress.

Academic blogging gets your work and research out to a potentially massive audience at very, very low cost and relative amount of effort. With platforms like WordPress, you can set up a very simple solo blog and have your first article online in no more than 30 minutes. With Medium (which of course I’m using here) the threshold is even lower , maybe 10 minutes. As soon as you register in Medium you get a blank screen bearing the heartening message ‘Bang out some text!’ That’s what I did in January this year, and since then many tens of thousand people have downloaded these posts (e.g over 21,000 in just the last month). The key difference between the two is that Medium is just for communicating text — it has a very simplified editing function, and you can’t easily control how your texts are listed. It’s best for people who either have no Web competencies or don’t want to devote any time to refining the ‘look and feel’ of their work online (I plead ‘guilty’ on both counts). If that’s not you, then a WordPress solo blog is surely the route for you to follow.

Recent research from the World Bank has shown that blogging about an academic article can lead to hundreds of new readers when before there were only a handful. Blogging in and tweeting from multi-author blogs especially is a great way to build knowledge of your work, to grow readership of useful articles and research reports, to build up citations, and to foster debate across academia, government, civil society and the public in general.

Six tips for academic blog editors

I’m not an expert here, although I have helped design the format of LSE’s top blogs, along with a great team of folk — whose wisdom and expertise I’ve tried to briefly summarize here:

• Make sure your titles tell a story, and that the findings of each post are communicated early on. Academics normally like to build up their arguments slowly, and then only tell you their findings with a final flourish at the end. And they often show great dedication in choosing obscure titles for their work. Don’t do this ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in which layers of irrelevance are progressively stripped aside for the final kernel of value-added knowledge to be revealed. Instead, make sure that all the information readers need to understand what you’re saying is up front — you’ll make a much stronger impression that way. In a group or multi-author blog content will often be eclectic and needs to be signposted to readers in really effective ways. So here the editors should always write the titles for posts (clearing them with the authors if you must). In all the big LSE blogs the editors also write an initial summary paragraph for readers, which is not cleared with authors because it is our understanding of what their key messages or findings are, and is clearly signposted as such. In a solo blog you are your own editor, always a problem. My advice would be to ask your partner or a friend for advice on the titles of important posts. Also see how people retweet you — their re-phrasings and summaries can often show you a better way of capturing what your post says.
• Readers should never be in any doubt about who has written a blog. In multi-author blogs and group blogs, always give a decent short Bio of the authors, ideally including a photograph. It is important to tell readers clearly who the author(s) are, where they come from, how to contact them and to give URL links to their other recent books or work. In solo blogs make sure that you provide a clear explanation of who you are (again including a photograph), what the blog aims to do and how to contact you via email and social media. This may seem obvious stuff but in fact it is not. Often in group blogs it is very hard indeed to work out who has actually written the text, and the author name is buried away in an obscure corner. And very, very often in solo blogs, readers who arrive at a particular post from Google or social media then have to launch off on a prolonged search of obscure corners of the blog just to find out who the author is.
• Because blog contents should be timely, make sure that the date for content displays prominently at the start of content. Don’t just put a date in an obscure way at the bottom of the post, or even in some separate listing of posts (as I’ve seen on some WordPress solo blogs). Clearly dating posts is especially important if the blog is dealing with fast-moving social developments, or an ever-changing research frontier in academia, where earlier content may be less valuable than the more recent material. And however fancy your blog design gets (e.g. with picture-based titles and rotating slides) make sure that when people reach it they can easily view it in a date-order format that will load quickly on a smart-phone or tablet. (This is a lesson we lost sight of in a recent LSE blog re-design, and we are now locked in to a elaborate format design that does not do this and will take us some time to rectify).
• Remember the Web is a network, not a single-track railway line — and not everyone uses the web in the same way. So once you have a blog post, do everything you can to get the key content out to diverse readerships who want to see it. Post your links to Twitter (several times, at different times of the day) and Facebook, whose timestream format is excellent for blogposts. Let people subscribe by RSS or email.
• Wherever possible deposit all blog content of lasting academic value in a university e-depository, so that it can be picked up and listed by Google Scholar. Any good multi-author blog run by academics or universities should already have a fully consistent stream of content, and so should already be depositing all blogposts. If you run a MAB and are not yet doing this, you’re missing a trick, so talk to your library about changing that. If you run a group or solo academic blog this may be more tricky because posts are often not that consistent in terms of length or the lasting academic value of the content, and your local e-depository may be correspondingly sniffier about hosting any materials. You need to find a way to select the best materials you have generated and talk to your library or e-depository about getting them permanently archived.
• Talk to your readers. Encourage people to comment (but only post their comments after moderation) and respond to comments and to Tweets. Talk to people on Twitter and Facebook when they discuss your work. And be reciprocal, open-minded and fair in sharing your content with others and linking to their work — improving the public understanding of university research is a huge collective good for academics across all disciplines. We can all flourish together in the new paradigm for academic work.

I sincerely thank Chris Gilson, with whom I co-wrote an earlier version of many of the ideas in this post.

To follow up relevant new materials see my stream on Twitter @Write4Research and the LSE’s Impact blog

Some related writing ideas are covered in more detail in my book: Patrick Dunleavy, ‘Authoring a PhD’ (Palgrave, 2003) or the Kindle edition .

Shorter, better, faster, free was originally published in Advice for authoring a PhD or academic book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Apparently then a lot of folk suffer from some serious misconceptions about what writing a post entails:

• They think it takes days, weeks, or even months to produce that difficult bit of text — it doesn’t, it takes two or three hours at most.
• They believe that time devoted to a blogpost is time away from your main research — it’s not. Your post is done after you’ve finished and published your journal article — it is just a more readable and hopefully more popular version of that article, with key messages summarized in about 1,000 words.
• Perhaps they also think that publishing a blogpost takes the time and hassle involved in submitting to journals, trekking through box after box of obscure electronic publishing bureaucracy, and then waiting weeks or months before seeing a proof, and months more for publication. But publishing a post is not like that at all. You get your 1,000 words finished in Word or equivalent. Include a table or a chart or two, being scrupulous to present them well. Then send it to a multi-author blog (MAB) with a big readership in your field already assembled for you — like LSE’s Europp.eu or other LSE top blogs, or the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, or the Scientific American blog, or a group blog in your disciplinary area. You get an email by return saying ‘Great let’s do it’, and a couple of days later your text is online at the blog. And if a bit further on you spot any mistakes, just resend the texts with corrections marked on and it’s good as new, either immediately or within a day.
• If you thought all blogs are solo blogs, you could find the previous paragraph puzzling. Y ou might well think: ‘Don’t I have to set up my own blog and then learn Wordpress to get blogging? And unless I can assemble an audience all on my own, won’t my solo blog languish unread with the tens of thousands of others online?’ Of course, you can do a solo blog (or publish stuff on your individual website, an even less fruitful use of your time). But with modern blogging packages like Medium.com (where this is published) you need to learn nothing at all before starting. Their ‘how to use’ instructions are just: ‘Bang out some text!’ But increasingly, blogging is a collective form of short-form digital publishing. In the multi-author LSE blogs or other outlets mentioned above, it is rather like writing for any short-form magazine. (Indeed, we may soon leave the ‘blogging’ description behind for something that better captures modern realities — perhaps ‘short-form digital publishing’).
• Finally, of course a blogpost may well not be cited itself (although now reputable multi-author blogs increasingly are) — but if not, this is because it’s job is different. Academically a blogpost boosts citations for the core article itself. It advertises your journal article in ways that can get it far more widely read than just pushing the article out into the ether to sink or swim on its own. A post reaches other researchers in your discipline (those who are not digital hermits). And because it’s accessibly written, it travels well, goes overseas, gets re-tweeted and re-liked. It takes the ‘memes’ key to your research into a limited viral spread. It also gets read by academics outside your immediate sub-field and discipline, potentially pulling new audiences to your work.
• A post on the right kind of blog, one with a big ready-made audience, also often communicates your key messages to a far wider groups beyond academia itself. Thus it helps to create external impact for your work amongst practitioners in government or business or the professions as well. An LSE colleague’s article in an academic journal has been read and downloaded less than 100 times. But his post about it came out on the LSE Impact blog (and got re-published on LSE’s British politics blog), and was retweeted multiple times. In six months the post was read 42,000 times — quite a difference, even if this is an outlier case.

In the digital world, academic authors now get multiple chances to create their own accessible messages. Without having to accommodate to the limited expertise or limiting agendas of journalists and broadcasters, researchers can explain directly and clearly. The logic here goes like this. First get the eyeballs on your text (i.e don’t [just] solo blog). Then make your case as briefly, clearly and accessibly as you can. If the work is good, it could be retweeted, read and favourited by the right people in your research community. And from that cites will flow. If you can really do communication in an accessible way, your writing may also circulate widely in other disciplines and in the external world outside universities, enhancing your reputation there.

So having explained all this to blogging sceptics, the question I ask is — ‘You’ve put eighteen months or two years of your life into doing the research in your article. You’ve devoted months more to writing the paper and sending it to journals, dealing with comments, doing rewrites and hacking through the publishing process. Why would you not spend the extra couple of hours needed now to pull out from your journal article the key bits needed for a good blogpost?’

And yet we know a huge fraction of research is still being churned out only in obscure outlets read by very few people. It’s made available only as hard-boiled, jargon-prone and inaccessible text. It’s illustrated with mounds of ‘dead on arrival’ data that no one will ever look at again. In this guise alone it must stand or fall. Little wonder that (inaccurate) folklore has it that 90% of journal articles go uncited, even by the original author. Clearly thousands of intelligent academics and researchers are still not taking the extra few hours needed to do a blog version of their work, or tweet its publication to their networks and contacts.

Getting to a blogpost — it’s easy if you try

So I hope it will help to offer a brief guide here on generating a short-form digital version of your research article.

1. Let’s assume your journal article is 8,000 words long. Your task is to get a decent version of it in 1,000 words (or somewhat less), as quickly and painlessly as possible.

2. Begin by cutting out the whole of the methodology section — it matters a lot to you, but most readers won’t care. If your methods are innovative, people will probably need to read the the original article to make detailed sense of them. So briefly sum up your methods innovation in intuitive terms within the post (and even then more towards the end)— and then link to the article, using an open access version whenever you can. On the other hand, if your methods are bog-standard, any expert reader will know them already, and any lay readers will be happy to accept the standard approach.

3. Next get rid of the long literature review at the beginning — in the blog context, no one cares about academic credentializing or point-scoring. Also cut out most of any closing discussion of how your results agree with or diverge from other people’s work. A line or two somewhere near the start, and then 2 lines of closing thoughts or pointers at the end of the post, normally suffices.

4. Next, write a narrative heading that gives your essential message substantively. Try to tell readers very clearly and simply what you found out. You need something meaningful, but in less than 140 characters — that way the blog title can also be the tweet. Don’t try just one heading — experiment with six to 10 different variants to find one that really works. If your academic diffidence, or the complexity of the content, stops you achieving a full narrative heading, at the least make sure that there are clear narrative cues in the blog title.

6. Also, try to always include in your blog post a ‘trailer’ paragraph that spells out in no more than 3 or 4 lines, why the post is interesting and gives another take on what the key message is (without repeating the title wording). Your task here is to evoke interest, and give readers a good narrative steer that attracts them into the post, and assures them that they will understand it. The format is well developed in the major LSE blogs, in the Conversation and it’s used in a very brief way at the top of Economist articles. (Not all multi-author blogs are yet geared up for this approach though, especially in America where there is a long tradition of lengthy, journalistic articles [often over 4,000 words], presented in great wodges of unheadlined text, organized only by paragraphing).

7. Now comes the part where you take the key findings and arguments out of your journal article so as to form the main (or body) text of the blog post. At root, what did your research efforts discover or conclude? What do you make of your key findings or conclusions? If you are instead making an argument, integrating ideas, or developing a theme, you still need to have a crystal clear and substantive summation of the central message. Most academic writing actually shies away from these questions, taking refuge instead in formal wording, vacuous discussions, ‘heuristic insights’, banal statements, or multiple hedged qualifications. Make your blogpost very different.

It is vital here to front-load the material, putting it into a quite different sequence from the conventional article (which is end-loaded):

• Start off in a high impact way, ideally trying to begin with something motivating for readers — either a startling fact, a paradox resolved, a key summary statistic, or a great quote. For blog readers something topical linking to a recent development is often a good start. Alternatively promising readers a change in our knowledge, or other new things, is a great motivator. Once readers are hooked in, it’s OK to have a small amount of context here (3–4 lines) that draws out the salience of the issue. It is worth writing your high impact start carefully and trying to keep it punchy.
• Next explain early on in your body text the core of your finding or argument from the journal version. Try to rigorously avoid the normal academic tendency to do a ‘dance of the seven veils’ in which layers of low-relevance or low-interest material are progressively peeled aside to reveal a tiny kernel of new findings at the end of a long screed of text. Instead, move straight to what worked in your research or experiment or archive search, etc. and tell readers clearly what you found or concluded. In a blogpost the best bits arrive early on, not just at the end. Cut out any text from your article covering intermediate stages, or earlier models, or avenues taken that did not lead to results.
• Once that’s done, you can unpack the message a little — perhaps highlighting no more than three specific aspects — ideally the aspects with the widest interest or appeal to readers, or the greatest claim to advance our knowledge.

8. Exhibits. Wherever possible include at least one table or chart, maybe two or three — but try to avoid ever having more than four exhibits.

• Explain tables or charts properly, label them very clearly, and simplify them if they are too complex. Include a short explanatory note under each chart or table that explains what is being shown and helps readers to understand it. Make sure column or row headings in tables, and both the axis labels in charts, are crystal clear.
• Look carefully at any chart or table that you’ll include, and ask yourself if all its components are really needed — e.g. do you need all the columns of the table, or could you cut out some intermediate ones and just show the final results column(s)? Similarly try to have simple charts, where every bar or line shown is needed because it actively helps build readers’ understanding — otherwise it gets cut out.
• The acid test for any exhibit is: What do readers really need to know?
• Any modern blog comes in full color — so always colorize your dull black and white journal artwork. You also deliver the final charts or artwork to the blog yourself, in a straightforward picture format (that is, saved as . png or .jpeg files). So what you send is what you’ll get. No difficult negotiations will be needed with outsourced journal designers in low-cost, faraway places, who don’t understand your text.

9. Level, style and tone. Don’t assume that readers know what you mean without explanation.

• If you must use specialist vocabulary (‘jargon’) — and in academic work, sometimes you must — keep it to a minimum, and explain all terms likely to be unfamiliar when you first use them.
• Be especially careful with acronyms and initials and formulae. Don’t explain once, use 20 or 50 times. Explain once, then use the full label (or refresh the explanation) every 5 or 6 times the acronym or formula is subsequently deployed. Always re-label or re-explain if you stop using an acronym or formula for 200 words or a page, but now are going to restart.
• Write shorter paragraphs than in a journal — say 150 words. But don’t write bitty text where every sentence is its own paragraph — that style may work for press releases, but ordinary readers will quickly find it disorganizing. Proper paragraphs are units of thought — they give your text a subtle sub-structure that makes it far more understandable, when done well.
• For the same reasons, a 1,000 word post needs only a very few internal sub-headings — maybe one to three. If you have five or more sub-heads get rid of some. Each sub-head must group a set of paragraphs. A heading for a single paragraph has no point. Sub-heads should be short and informative, and give clear narrative cues to the argument you are making. Never have two headings without intervening text between them.
• Write shorter sentences with real subjects and active verbs wherever possible. And follow good style precepts generally.
• In blogposts all references are unobtrusive hyperlinks — the URL sits behind a relevant highlighted term or short phrase. Of course, digital links go just to the top of the source cited. So if you need readers to find a particular section within it, weave into your own text a quote of five or six words from the source that are distinctive to the passage involved. That way readers can go to the source and use Control+F to find the relevant passage exactly. Never add another list of references at the end of a blogpost — it ruins the look and feel of the piece, puts off non-academic readers, and good blog editors will just cut it out.

10. Try to end the blogpost in a decisive and interesting fashion, one that sums up and encapsulates your argument in a new and neat way, perhaps opening out to next steps or future developments. Again try for a very well-written finish, that leaves a good lasting impression with readers.

11. Below the post, give the title of your long article and a clear link to it, ideally a hyperlink to an open access, full text version.

11. Lastly, include a few (4–5) lines of ‘bio’ about yourself. Ideally this should give your organizational position, link to your Twitter, Facebook or email accounts, and perhaps briefly mention recent books (hyperlink the titles) or other key works. For the LSE blogs and many good quality outlets, we also need a small photo of every author. Writing a blogpost is a great digital networking opportunity, and these elements all help maximize readers’ ability to find out more about you and your work. They are also greatly appreciated by readers. Unfortunately some other multi-author or group blogs will still drastically prune or omit these elements, but at least you’ll have tried. (Watch out too for some poorly-edited academic group blogs and even some magazines or newspaper pieces where your authorial identity can get sublimated or masked, or your full journal article is referred to only obscurely or in abbreviated title form. It must always be clear that you have authored the post, and how to digitally reach the full text of your article).

I thank Chris Gilson and Stuart Brown of LSE for helpful ideas incorporated here. To follow up these ideas in more detail see my book: Patrick Dunleavy, ‘Authoring a PhD’ (Palgrave, 2003) or the Kindle edition, where Chapter 5 covers ‘Writing clearly’ and Chapter 6 ‘Developing as a Writer’.

There is also very useful advice on Rachael Cayley’s blog Explorations of Style.

And for new update materials see the LSE’s Impact blog and on Twitter@Write4Research

How to write a blogpost from your journal article was originally published in Advice for authoring a PhD or academic book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Of all the research activities I’ve done, the most challenging and time-consuming was always recruitment. When figuring out a timeline with product and engineering, my recruitment time was always variable. Now, I’m able to recruit people easily at a moment’s notice within 24 hours. I’d love to share what has worked through my trial and error.

I used to be a copywriter and product marketer before I moved on to do UX Research. However, I’ve found that writing to optimize for conversions and writing to optimize for someone’s time is a bit different. After all, asking for 15-30 minutes from a busy person can be difficult.

Improving the experience of asking a person for their time and feedback can also influence the likeliness they actually respond to you and help you. You, too, can beat the average email campaign benchmark of 20% opens and 2-4% clicks.

On Writing Emails

In the beginning, I tried to be direct and bold. My subjects read like:

• We Need You: Influence Our Next Big Thing
• Psst…Help Us With Our Next Big Feature
• We Want Your Opinion — Help Us Help You

And that didn’t work out well. It actually sucked. My stats looked like this:

Here’s what I did next to change that.

Changing the conversation from “help me” to “could this help you?”

I shifted my strategy after the first few emails I sent were unsuccessful. I started thinking about what I was really asking for — people’s time. And I realized that was a big ask for someone that was busy with back to back meetings or someone who only checks emails twice a day. So I decided to shift my focus towards how I could help them.

Now, I don’t do anything gimmicky or click-bait in my email subject line. I write as if I was asking a coworker or friend if they could do something for me. I think this is a simple and effective way of communicating because it doesn’t come off as bluntly,

Hey take this survey!

or incentivized,

If you take this survey, you can be entered in a chance to win an iPad!

As someone who is working for pretty lean company, I usually have a budget of $0 for any sort of incentive for research. But that’s why us researchers can get creative with our recruitment.

Below are 3 emails that I’ve used with success (over 20 confirmed meetings within 24 hours consistently, over 50 after 48 hours) that you can use for recruiting people for you own studies. I’ve listed the context and strategies regarding how I approach them as well. You really only need at least 5 to get going, anyway.

Each email assumes that you’ve already identified the goal of your user study and the have identified people to reach out to. See my post here on how to gather a list of people reliably and fast.

Just replace whatever is in brackets [ ] to your own situation.

Template 1 — Recruit people after using analytics to verify their level of engagement

Doing quantitative sourcing for your users gives you a lot of information to go off on how often someone does something or the opposite — the lack of an activity. By using analytics to inform decisions, you’ll be able to target people for your interviews better, and the emails you send will contextually be appropriate because a person would remember just doing whatever you are asking about recently.

Subject: Could this new [FEATURE] help you?

Hi there,

We’re developing [IDEA] in [PRODUCT], and I’ve seen that you’ve used our current [FEATURE] extensively. I’d love let you see some early concepts of what we’re working on to get your feedback and to also let you influence our design. Basically, we want to see if what we have would actually help you do your job better.

If you’re interested and have 10-15 minutes to chat (I promise to keep the time!), reply back to this email with your choice of the times below that work for you. I’ll follow up with you to figure out what method is the best way for us to connect.

[TIMESLOTS]

[EXAMPLE] Thursday, March 27th at 9AM PST

[EXAMPLE] Thursday, March 27th at 9:30AM PST

[TIMESLOTS CONT’D]

Thanks for reading this and helping us make things that help you get stuff done.

[YOUR NAME]

[YOUR POSITION]

[YOUR COMPANY]

P.S. If none of these times work for you and you want to participate, just reply with whatever time works for you better =).

Template 2 — Recruit people after screening people out with a survey

I usually have a screener to generate research leads for myself so that I’m emailing people who I think are qualified or relevant to talk to. This helps me spend my time efficiently by talking to targeted people that are in the space and environment that I am trying to research. Also, the email someone receives also is a bit more expected. They know they answered a screener already so this email doesn’t seem out of the blue.

Subject: Want to see the new [FEATURE] wireframes?

Hi there,

I’m contacting you because you’ve recently completely a questionnaire regarding a new [FEATURE] in [PRODUCT[. Thank you for your help! We’re now ready to show you some wireframes and screenshot concepts of what we’ve built for [FEATURE]. You’d be one of the first people to see the concepts and eventually have access to your own [FEATURE].

If you’re interested in looking at these wireframes and providing feedback, please fill out the following form so that I can schedule a time to speak with you:

[LINK TO GOOGLE FORM WITH TIME SLOTS]

Thanks for your continued help. We’re excited to share with you what we have coming and hope to make it even better with your feedback.

Best,
[YOUR NAME]
[YOUR POSITION]
[YOUR COMPANY]

Here’s an example of one of my own screeners that you can use to build your own screener in Google Forms.

Template 3 — Recruit people for general feedback/survey

Sometimes, the simplest emails get the best response. It makes you look human rather than some survey machine robot. Here I’m asking for general feedback through a survey that asks things like a NPS Survey which is usually asked like this:

“From 0-10, how likely would you recommend [PRODUCT] to a friend?”

Apple actually does this with their web support, in-person Genius Bar, and retail experience. After having interacting with an Apple employee for support or purchase, Apple will send you an email 7 days later to ask you to take a survey to rate your experience and also to fill out an NPS Survey.

Subject: I need your help for only 1 minute

Hi,

I saw that you were using [PRODUCT] recently and wanted to hear what you think about it.

Could I get 1 minute of your time? It would mean a lot to me if you could just fill out this really short survey so we can know what you think of [PRODUCT].

[LINK — Go to the super short survey here.]

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
[YOUR NAME]
[YOUR POSITION]
[YOUR COMPANY]

P.S. Feel free to email me back if you have specific feedback, too!

Hope these email templates help you get started with having a conversation with your users. I personally only do remote research currently, but these can also be used to recruit people for in-person usability tests. I’m always tweaking my own copy to get better responses, but these seem to work pretty well so far. When you talk to your users, you’ll want to look out to see if the users fit all the design stories or jobs to be done you’re looking for. One risk of getting of so many so fast is that you may not end up with all the scenarios you’re looking to validate.

Let me know if you know of any other effective emails that you’ve sent. I’d love to try them out.

Check out more things I’ve learned on my blog.

3 Email Templates for Recruiting All The Users You Need in 24 Hours was originally published in User Research on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Richard reached out to my cofounder and I after reading about Plasmyd on TechCrunch. During our call, he invited us to the Open Science Summit, a conference at the Computer Science Museum the following weekend. Invited by the CEO of a major player in the open access movement? Of course we had to attend.

The morning of the conference, I accidentally left my phone on silent. No alarms rang and any phone calls were left unheard. Compounded with car problems, we missed Richard’s talk. Dejected, we drove back down to Irvine thinking we had missed our opportunity.

Fortunately, a few days later, Richard reached out again to chat about potential ways we could work together. “How many million users?” I said incredulously, unaware of the scale they were engineering at. These talks evolved into a potential acquisition. We drove up again the following week to meet the team.

We were buzzed into an unassuming looking building wedged between a jewelry store and a store that apparently sold food in boxes. Richard, the CEO, and Ben, the CTO, greet us at the door. Is this what a startup office looks like? We get pulled into different rooms as I get grilled with some technical questions. They ask me how I would scale a news feed system to millions of users. I attempt to strategize while reminiscing how I got to this moment. Until recently, my career goal had been training to be an academic bioinformatician, recently studying shotgun proteomics quantification algorithms.

We spent a few days seeing if there was synergy and then negotiated terms. Eventually we settled on a mutually agreeable deal. We dropped everything and moved up to San Francisco in a few weeks. We joined and the acquisition was announced on a few tech news outlets. During my first few days, I fixed a minor bug in analytics on the site and I wondered if my 15 minutes of fame had passed.

Nearly three years have since passed, and it’s time for me to move on.

In the time I’ve spent at Academia.edu, I’ve had the opportunity to work on and learn innumerable things. I’ve prototyped and built out completely new features on the site such as Sessions, Recommendations, Advanced Search, and have rewritten the Profile and Newsfeed pages. I’ve worked on internal tooling for our dashboard systems, design systems for our redesigns, rewrote our chat bot, and been on call for any infrastructure issues. I learned about user interviewing, product development, design, process, fund raising, and even office management. I helped grow the team from 4 engineers to a peak of 16 engineers. Most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to work with an amazing group of people and make some really great friends.

I’ve always aspired to climb the steepest learning curve. Over the last three years I’ve learned so much about full stack engineering and want to continue learning and applying this to the same reason why I founded Plasmyd and joined Academia.edu: making great tools for scientists. I’ll be joining 10x Genomics and will continue building products and improving experiences for people that will change our lives.

In roughly chronological order, I’d really love to thank the Academia.edu crew: Richard, Ben, David, Nate, Mandy, Adnan, George, Josh, Yuri, Mike, Paul, Conway, Kate, Colin, Patrick, Sambridi, Carla, Edd, Dave, Stuart, Max, Alexey, Jon, Tiffany, Andy, Vijay, Sapan, Brynn, Alvin, Hannah, Michael, Zach, Blaine, and everyone else I had the pleasure of working with. Thank you for all the experiences and great times that you’ve given me.

This story was crafted by Job Portraits and commissioned by the San Francisco-based company Academia.edu. The interviews below were conducted at the Academia.edu office, starting with a chat over breakfast with Richard Price (Academia.edu’s CEO) and Nate Sullivan (a software engineer).

What does Academia.edu do?

Nate: Academia.edu is a network where academics can share their research papers. Most people sign up because it’s an alternative to having a homepage on a department website, and Academia.edu looks nicer and has built-in analytics so researchers can assess their impact.

How are you disrupting academic publishing?

Richard: The current process is, you do some experiments, you write a paper and you submit it to a journal. Then the journal sends it to a couple of people who peer-review it, which means they write a page of comments about the paper. That takes 12 months. Then the paper ends up behind the paywall, and you have to pay $35 to read it.

Our vision of the future is that, having finished writing your paper, you post it to the internet immediately and it’s accessible for free straight away. The peer review happens post-publication, not pre-publication, and it happens with a large community of academics, not just two or three. After review, the paper is completely free and accessible along with all the data within it.

How are you making the world a better place?

Nate: I think freedom of information is a powerful equalizing force in the world. If people in the first world, who have the privilege of being at wealthy institutions, are the only ones able to access research, that’s inegalitarian.

And yet, the way we encourage people to make their papers open-access is not by making emotional or ethical appeals, it’s by creating compelling products. That’s why we think a lot about how to align individual incentives with stuff that’s good for the research community as a whole. We like that academics join Academia.edu for career reasons, and then as a positive side effect they end up making their papers freely available to everybody.

Richard: It’s very difficult to get a job in science and research these days. If we can make that easier, that’s also a great thing. Users frequently report sharing their papers’ analytics with their tenure committees to make their case more compelling.

How do you learn about the needs of academics on the site?

Nate: We usually do user interviews, especially when we are developing a specific product. For example, I was recently working on the discussions product, so we wanted to get background on the ways discussion currently happens — whether that’s chatting in a hallway, going to a conference, or grabbing beers. To understand all of that, we did a bunch of users interviews at Berkeley and Stanford.

What are the stats you provide to users on the site?

Richard: One of the most popular is a view of traffic broken down by country and city. You can also see what search words people are using to find your paper. We recently released something called “percentiles” where we notify you if you are in the top 5% of the site by page views for the last month. We see people tweeting those very often. Then there are other metrics tied to the site’s mechanics, such as follower counts and having your paper bookmarked, which is kind of like re-tweeting.

Still today, you mostly put your work out there and don’t know if anyone’s read it. If you meet someone at a conference and they say they’ve read it, it’s very exciting, because there’s no feedback loop whatsoever. It’s appealing to have your paper on the site and see people reading it and following you and marking your paper. You can see they are interacting with your precious, precious work! It is good from a career aspect, but it’s also satisfying on a personal level.

How did Academia.edu come about? What was the spark that lead to it?

Richard: I was at Oxford doing a PhD in philosophy at the time. I had done a few papers and when I finished, I was looking to publish them online. It was immensely difficult. If you wanted to create a personal homepage, you’d have to learn some HTML and know about user experience design. Then you’d put your paper up there and no one would visit. So I went and raised $600,000 from venture capital firms in London, moved straight out to San Francisco, and we launched the company a year later, in September 2008.

At that time no one really talked about open access. There wasn’t a name for it. It wasn’t a movement yet. Now we’re part of this even more ambitious movement called “open science.” Open access takes down the paywalls. Open science is rethinking scientific examination from the very first step and basically getting rid of the journals. That movement is really taking off and we’ve helped drive it.

What else has changed since the company started?

Richard: When you’re just starting a company, you’re glad when you have 50 sign ups in a day, right? Now we have 70,000 people joining each day and 25 million unique visitors a month. We’re the biggest research sharing platform in the world by traffic by a long way. The next biggest has 16 million a month. And yet we’ve stayed quite small as a team, with 16 or 17 people.

“I think any startup should be inspired by Gandhi’s quote ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’” — Richard

After lunch we spoke with a few Academia.edu team members about their experience at the company, starting with Software Engineer David Judd.

Why did you decide to work at Academia.edu?

David: When I moved back to the Bay Area from New York, one of the things I was looking for was a place where I could feel like what I did at work mattered to somebody beyond my co-workers. The company I’d been working for in New York was an advertising company, which was a good place to work, but at the end of the day, if I’d built a feature very well it meant that one dentist would get a customer that would otherwise have gone to another dentist. With Academia.edu, I was attracted to the mission of trying to change the academic publishing industry.

So what’s different about working here compared to bigger companies?

David: I have to work more on everything. If the site is having problems, there’s probably no one who knows more about it than I do. I don’t specialize, which is good in forcing me out of my comfort zone and forcing me to learn new things. And there’s just something about spending a lot of time with a small number of people — you get to know them very well.

Next up: Kate Miltenberger, head of user operations and formerly the company’s office manager, until Carla Butigan took over the role.

Why did you decide to work at Academia.edu?

Kate: The thing that really drew me is this mentality of, if you have an idea of something you think will help the company, just run it by some people, figure out how to do it, design an experiment, and test your hypothesis. Like with this meetup we’re preparing for today. George [Bashi, a software engineer] was like, “I think this will help us with recruiting.” So he put down all his thoughts, organized everything, and we’re going to see what happens.

Do you think there’s a kind of person who wouldn’t do well here?

Kate: You do really well if you can handle uncertainty. You don’t necessarily have to love it but you have to handle it. If you see a huge challenge, instead of being, like, “Run!” you need to be able to think about it and come up with a solution and then just do it. I didn’t necessarily know that was in my personality until I started here.

I really hit the ground running. The day I started we had our 10 million user landmark, and Richard was like, “You have some event planning experience, can you plan a party in two weeks?”

Were there things that surprised you about working here?

My entire life, I’ve always enjoyed playing hooky. But I never get that here. Even when I do get the impulse to not go to work, I’m like, I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing with this day. A lot of that is because of the people. All of my best friends in San Francisco work here, and only one of those people was my friend before I started.

Next we sat down with CTO Ben Lund and VP of Product Conway Anderson to discuss what they’re looking for in new team members and how they organize and prioritize work. You can peruse Academia.edu’s open positions here.

How do you decide to hire someone?

Ben: We have always looked for people we can trust to make good decisions about what to work on and those who can tackle anything that might plausibly come up. We’re small, so one day you’re building a dashboard and the day after that you’re building a deployment tool. If we had people who just specialized in the front end, and our next highest priority was the back end, that would really slow us down. We have about ten engineers but we’re just starting to look for people who have a ton of experience with one specific type of problem.

“Academia.edu is still frictionless in terms of getting things done, and that is a hundred times more frictionless than any other place I’ve worked.” — Ben

How do you judge if someone is going to be able to tackle a lot of different problems and move between them well?

Ben: When you ask someone to describe a project that they’ve built, you want it to be like they’re describing a painting they’re looking at. They can see it very clearly. We’re also looking for people who can sort of flip their mind between the code, the process, the architecture, and the product — up and down these layers — at will.

One of the problems we give people we interview is to design our new peer review system. Then we see what they start talking about. Do they start with the concepts of users and papers and connections and events and following, or do they talk about data structures? Can they flip between those layers? I’ve found that people who can identify the right level of abstraction, those are the people who can solve any problem.

How do you think about prioritization here?

Ben: It’s very simple. Lots of ideas get generated and then two axes are drawn: impact and ease. How hard is this to do, and how much impact will it have on the mission of the company? Once you break it down into those two things, it’s obvious what you should be working on.

Conway: We generate so many ideas at this company, it’s crazy. Now we use Trello to record them but we used to have sticky notes on the wall. The problem is, whatever tool we use, we generate too many ideas for it to handle. The UI just breaks. Because the whole team is basically made up of product people.

Conway, you joined the team as VP of Product recently. What drew you in?

Conway: I had been consulting for early-stage companies, but I hadn’t come across anything that was super compelling. I started working here in a contract capacity and then just slowly got more and more interested. It’s amazing the amount of people we’re affecting and how small the team is. We have more than 13 million users with 70,000 sign-ups a day — that level of impact is pretty rare.

What are your biggest goals in design?

Conway: We’re still trying to figure out what the design culture at Academia.edu looks like. But a big benefit of that is that most of the engineering team has adopted a design philosophy. They’re thinking about the end experience, like, is the load time fast? Is the front end built properly? All of those things relate to design.

Thankfully, we’re optimized for this with a multidisciplinary team, where everyone’s a little bit technical, everyone’s a little bit of a designer. Everyone here is working at a founder’s pace. Everyone thinks, “This new thing needs to happen, therefore I’m going to go do this and then I’ll just ask someone for feedback briefly before we ship it.” That’s very different from, “Let’s brainstorm for two weeks and set a deadline and it will get produced two months from now.”

What kind of people are you looking for in design?

Conway: Right now my strategy has been to bring people in to do small projects and get a feel for working together. In the industry at large, design is just now getting its seat at the table. So the skill sets and personalities of people we are thinking about working with are completely different from when I started just a few years ago.

I think what we’re looking for is two types of designers: architects and explorers. They’re very different, but they would both fit in really well here. The architect is going to rely on a ton of experience, a ton of process and planning. They’re thinking about engineering problems, design problems, business problems; that’s kind of the quintessential product designer. With explorers, they’re just going to dive in and rely on some level of intuition and rapidly ask questions and find answers.

Which are you?

Conway: I’m probably closer to the architecture side, but in a startup, you have to be at least one part explorer.

Interested in joining the Academia.edu team? Visit their fancy hiring page. Or contact the team at hiring@academia.edu.

Academia.edu is reimagining research was originally published in Job Portraits on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.