I love reading other people blogs. Of technical blogs, techcrunch and webware were two of my favorite. That was back then. Now I don’t read them as often. And the reason is not because I don’t like how Michael and Rafe write. It is because most of the writing is now done by other people.
Personally provided service is not scalable. You start being a service provider. Be it a freelance software developer (me) or a blog writer (Michael Arrington). If you are good, people want your service, they order you software projects or read your blogs. You finish projects, they give you more projects. You upper your per hour rate, they pay. You write more, they read. You organize conferences, they attend. And all of a sudden you can’t grow your business without hiring other people.
This is a turning point. You hire other people and they are not as good as you or not as experienced as you or not as connected as you. Because if they were, they would open their own service or blog. So you have to delegate part of your work to people who will not do it as good as you could. Granted, you invest your time in the people you hired, you help them grow and with time they’ll make you proud. May be. And they will possibly leave and open a competing service. And even if they stick with you, it is all still very painful and slow process.
You may decide you don’t want to delute the quality of your service. That is why I like TWiT podcast so much. Leo was good back in the day, and he is every inch as good now. He still does all of his stuff himself. But then your service will coverage will reach plateau. Some people are ok with that. Either way, a human service is not scalable.
So that is a decision I has made early. I will provide software development services to finance product development. Software products are infinitely scalable. You can make million copies as easily as one.
