Words can plant ideas in your mind forever. You read them, they click, they stick. Often, we attribute such insights to books — Growth Hacking, Inbound Marketing, The Lean Startup.
Books certainly spread breakthrough ideas, but it’s rarely where they’re born. Each of the examples I just mentioned started from somewhere else: blockbuster blogs.
The Road to Breakthrough
Let’s start close to home. You probably know Jimmy Daly, now the CEO and founder of Superpath, formerly VP of Growth here at Animalz. But it’s even more likely you’re familiar with an article he wrote on this blog in 2018: “Your Blog Is Not a Publication.”
When Jimmy hosts Content, Briefly, Superpath’s podcast, guests often mention how this post has influenced their careers. Many other content marketers tell us the same on sales and customer calls.
I’m pretty happy if people still talk about one of my articles a few weeks after I hit publish. So how did Jimmy achieve such an enduring blockbuster?
Hard work. He wrote 31 Animalz posts before “Your Blog Is Not a Publication” and was in content for many years before joining our agency.
Feedback and iteration. He talked to dozens if not hundreds of prospects and customers during that period, which helped him refine the concept based on their feedback.
A ready audience. The Animalz content channels already had thousands of readers back then, so Jimmy had an audience that could embrace and spread his idea.
“Steve [Jobs] didn’t just read a script for the [Apple product] presentation[s]. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months [… ] to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.”
— Tony Fadell in Build
Perhaps most importantly, if you asked Jimmy (which we did), he wouldn’t have predicted that particular post would become such a breakthrough, which is why these three factors are so important:
- Without doing the work, you’ll not create enough ideas to hit on one that takes off.
- Without feedback, you’ll not figure out what really resonates.
- Without an audience, you’ll reduce the chance your idea spreads.
We see this pattern of hard work, refinement, and a ready audience with many other blockbuster blogs:
- Growth Hacking started as a single post on Sean Ellis’ already popular blog based on his work advising startups on their marketing.
- “The days are long but the years are short” has become a famous parenting mantra. Author Gretchen Rubin mentioned this idea many times on her blog, two years before it ended up in her 2009 book (The Happiness Project) and went mainstream.
- Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator (YC), came up with “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“ (one of his many influential posts), after working with hundreds of startups and writing 111 (!) essays.
Origins of Blockbusters
Great ideas rarely materialize out of thin air — or books for that matter. They emerge from experience, perception, and pragmatism.
“A book should be an article before it’s a book, and a dinner conversation before it’s an article.”
— Ryan Holiday in Perennial Seller
Direct Experience
Graham articulated the disruptive impact of meetings on a maker’s day. He wasn’t just capturing a problem many founders he worked with experienced. Being an engineer himself, he knew the problem first-hand.
Jimmy also got his blockbuster insight through his many customer interactions at Animalz. Ellis landed on growth hacking from advising lots of startups.
You’ll find this pattern again and again. Direct experience is a prerequisite for breakthrough ideas — with one exception: direct observation.
Kevin Kelly, the legendary founder and editor of WIRED, realized the internet allowed creators* to establish direct relationships with their fans, instead of through intermediaries like publishers and record labels.
This change enabled people to earn a living from creative work by having “1,000 True Fans” who buy everything the creator releases.
Kelly didn’t need to earn a living from 1,000 fans himself. But as the cofounder of the world’s most influential technology magazine, he was well-positioned to observe a new business model for creators.
🔎 What to look for? Emerging trends, ideas, or pain points in your field that nobody has clearly articulated or named yet.
* “Creator” is itself a breakthrough idea that didn’t yet exist when Kelly came up with 1,000 True Fans. The term most likely also came from a blog post or online publication.
Pattern Recognition
Chris Anderson, a media entrepreneur now mostly known as the leader and curator of TED, observed a peculiar pattern in digital businesses in the early 2000s. In contrast to traditional brick-and-mortar stores, online retailers could “stock” and sell a large number of niche products since their inventory space was essentially limitless.
He called this “The Long Tail” in a 2004 WIRED article, which was later turned into a book (you notice the pattern here? 😉).
Another famous example is “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Marc Andreessen, tech entrepreneur turned investor, recognized a pattern of software disruption across industries and predicted technology companies would digitize large parts of the economy.
Andreessen published his idea in a 2011 essay, which became the inspiration for the tagline of their VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz: “Software is eating the world.”
🔎 What to look for? You can find patterns in data analysis (as Anderson did), but also through customer interactions like survey responses or questions people ask you repeatedly.
Framework Creation
Two weeks before they publicly launched Slack in 2013, founder Steward Butterfield wrote a blog post memo titled “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here,” a framework for thinking about product positioning.
Butterfield argued that instead of focusing on selling saddles (the product), it’s more effective and lucrative to be in the business of horse riding (the broader experience or category). Butterfield used this analogy to emphasize that Slack wasn’t just selling a messaging tool but organizational transformation, a much more expansive vision.
This idea has become popular among startups and other businesses, and it’s so enduring at Slack that people still share the memo almost weekly in internal channels according to Sara Yin, Senior Editor at Slack. “People don’t even need to summarize the post. I think there might even be a saddle emoji.”
Butterfield’s entire framework can be expressed with a simple emoji and endures more than a decade after writing his post — that’s the power of a blockbuster blog.
Other famous examples of framework creation:
- The Lean Startup: Eric Ries, entrepreneur turned author, developed this framework by applying lean manufacturing principles to his own startup development — and writing about it on his blog.
- The Skyscraper Technique: Brian Dean analyzed what made content rank well in Google. He found three critical factors and named it “The Skyscraper Technique,” an actionable framework that quickly spread among SEOs.
🔎 What to look for? Repeatable processes or mental models you’ve developed to solve problems. The best frameworks come from approaches you’ve refined through experience that help others solve similar challenges.
Repurposing and Amplification
You don’t always need to invent a new concept to create a breakthrough idea.
To this day, “BLUF: The Military Standard That Can Make Your Writing More Powerful” pulls in the most organic traffic for our blog. Jan-Erik Asplund, formerly at Animalz and now at Sacra, took the BLUF concept (which stands for “Bottom Line Up Front”) from the military and repurposed it for business communication.
Another example is Ryan Law’s information gain, now a widely popular term in content marketing since first appearing here on the blog.
Ryan didn’t invent the idea — he found it in a Google patent, and it’s a long-established term in information theory. His brilliance was to apply the concept to content marketing and amplify it through our audience.
⚠️ There’s a thin line between repurposing and plagiarism: Repurposing uses an idea while acknowledging its original source; plagiarism does not.
🔎 What to look for? Don’t just read the Animalz blog. 😉 Look for ideas outside of your normal domain and expertise. Other industries, sports, science, biology, music — inspiration can come from anywhere.
Traits of a Blockbuster Blog
Predicting a breakthrough in advance is practically impossible. But many of the ideas we remember share characteristics we can apply to our own work — and increase its chances of breaking through.
Coins the Concept
In an episode of The Lex Fridman Podcast, Anthropic’s founder and CEO Dario Amodei says: “Sometimes there are these one sentences, these Zen koans, that you hear them and you’re like, ‘Ah, that explains everything. That explains a thousand things that I’ve seen.'”
This is exactly what the name of your idea must do: capture the concept’s essence and trigger the reader’s imagination so it’s instantly memorable.
“The easiest, fastest, and most predictable way to lodge your content in the reader’s brain is to wrap it up in a coined concept—a short, easily remembered catchphrase.”
— Ryan Law in “How to Get Competitors Speaking Your Language“
These keywords came to mind when I started making a shortlist of blockbuster blogs for this piece:
- Your blog is not a publication
- Copycat content
- Information gain
- 1,000 fans
Except for the first one, these are not even the full article titles. It’s been years since I read most of these posts, but the core ideas are still top of mind, anchored to just a few words.
Without a coined concept, your idea can’t spread. You have to come up with a name or very short sentence that captures the essence of your idea in a memorable way.
⚠️ Beware of forced coining. We all know it when we read it: someone trying really hard to coin a corny concept. No matter how good the name, an idea without substance will not stick.
Simplifies Complexity
A breakthrough idea helps us understand a complex problem in a simpler way or with a new perspective.
The Long Tail explains the effects and possibilities of digital economics. “Why Software Is Eating the World” gives us a framework to understand complex technological transformation. “Your Blog Is Not a Publication” provides a new lens on content strategy.
Most breakthrough ideas also offer a solution for how to solve a widespread pain:
- “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” captures a problem about meetings many knowledge workers encounter daily but lack the framework to describe and solve.
- Internally at Slack, a simple saddle emoji can now convey an entire mental model about issues with positioning and sales strategy.
- At Animalz, we regularly tell each other to “BLUF it,” and we’ll know exactly what’s wrong and what to do about it.
Challenges Conventional Wisdom
Breakthrough ideas challenge the status quo — and for good reason: if something is already mainstream, it can’t break through anymore.*
“All new ideas start as heresies.”
— Marc Andreessen (source)
In fact, conventional wisdom is a breakthrough idea’s final destination. What’s a breakthrough idea today is tomorrow’s conventional wisdom, ready to be disrupted by a new breakthrough idea.
We already see this happening to some of the concepts we’ve discussed:
- “Your Blog Is Not a Publication (But It’s Not Just a Library Either)“: Jimmy Daly and the Animalz team question and update the original premise.
- “1,000 True Fans + 1 Elephant in the Room“: Jessica Abel, author and Creative Business Strategist, highlights that creators need to continually find new fans for the model to work.
- “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?“: Anita Elberse’s research using Rhapsody music and DVD rental data suggests that blockbuster movies were gaining, not losing, market share to niche products.
- “Maker’s Schedule 2021“: David Tran, cofounder and CTO of Flow.club, proposes an update to Graham’s theory.
- “Challenges With The Lean Startup Methodology“: Reforge gives an overview of issues with The Lean Startup.
* The exception is when you’re repurposing a concept from another field: BLUF was conventional wisdom in the military but not in business.
Arrives at the Right Moment
Besides a poor or missing name, the other way to ruin a good idea is bad timing.
There’s no ironclad rule for how to get this right. The best analogy is probably a surfer catching a wave: a great surfer sees the wave coming, catches it at exactly the right moment, and rides it out in harmony with the water.
Those who launch breakthrough ideas do something similar:
- They see a cultural or technological shift coming — or have a direct role in shaping it.
- They articulate an effect, opportunity, or problem this change will bring about well before anyone else does.
- They ride their coined idea to breakthrough success on the wave of this shift.
Most of the examples we’ve discussed share this characteristic. They took off in harmony with a larger shift going on in an industry or society.
Is Breaking Through Worth It?
Creating a blockbuster blog is close to magic. You need to combine deep experience with seeing things others miss, and capture complexity in a simple but memorable way.
There’s also the work: developing your perspective, writing consistently, gathering feedback, refining your ideas — and doing it all over and over again, until you get the timing and message exactly right.
It might all seem like a bit much, but life after a breakthrough is sweet.
Your idea changes how people think.
Your perspective moves your industry forward.
Your framework helps others solve problems they couldn’t previously articulate.
(Oh, and also: you get to finally publish that book, receive more speaking gigs than you know what to do with, and have LinkedIn posts so popular you don’t even bother checking who liked them.)
So yes, a blockbuster blog is a goal worth writing for — and might just arrive with your next post.