Steph Smith
Podcast host at a16z and author of Doing Content Right
Where to hear and read about Steph Smith1 episode or test
Steph Smith hosts the a16z podcast, was on the early team at The Hustle, and wrote Doing Content Right, a guide to being a full-stack creator. The thing most worth learning from her is to stand out through how you write and what fascinates you, then spend nearly as much time distributing and researching a piece as writing it.
you should be investing equal time, I'd say 50/50 time, in distributing your content as writing it.
How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably | Steph Smith | How I Write Podcast
Steph Smith: the story and the lessons
1Steph Smith's path from remote work writer to podcast host
Smith started writing because she had something to say about remote work. She did not start to go viral or hit subscriber targets. She now runs the a16z podcast, was on the early team at The Hustle, and wrote Doing Content Right.
She says starting from "let me be a writer" wipes out your own excitement, and the true self goes with it.
Smith took a full-time job so her side projects don't have to pay. The job means her projects are things she has to make, not things that earn. She says successful creators she admires were often fine with having no money for a while.
She says the time needed is sometimes "many, many, many, many years". Money did arrive for those creators, but it was not crucial to their choices along the way.
Smith codes her projects so they come out exactly as she wants. Her blog runs on a Ghost template she customized, and she chose how it is delivered. She did not plan to become a full-time developer.
Handing projects to contractors or employees is hard because they feel like an appendage that must reflect her voice and brain. She is still weighing it.
2How Steph Smith stands out: how you write, not what
Smith says differentiation comes from how you write, not your topic. Nobody recommends a newsletter because it covers business, since there are plenty. They recommend it because it is hilarious, elegant or deep. With 8 billion people, saying the same things in the same ways cannot set you apart.
Her test: "How do I show up differently in how I'm writing, not just what I'm writing about?"
Smith asks what most people in her field are unwilling to do. Barstool talked about sports like friends on a Saturday. Fans wrote 10,000 word deep dives on Taylor Swift's hidden references. Distinct work lives in that gap, and just showing up daily is not the answer.
She says advice like "pick your wedge" or "just be consistent" ignores that everyone else is publishing too.
Smith found her defining trait, approachable, only because others told her. She asks writers for the one adjective people would use about their work. Hers is approachable. Her coding projects made readers think they could learn to code too.
Once you know the word, she says to lean into it deliberately. It takes years of feedback to see.
Smith found readers respond most to her struggles and stupid mistakes. She spent early years trying to seem knowledgeable. Readers resonated with her struggles instead. Early pieces often work because the writer assumes nobody is reading.
The advice she and Perell discuss, from Kevin Kelly, is to tell your story with uncommon honesty. Perell challenged her to write her next piece as a private email to him and decide later whether to publish.
3Where Steph Smith's ideas come from and how she drafts
Smith's best angles sit in what fascinates her, and a friend names them. Your best ideas are so close you cannot see them, like a finger touching your forehead. Her love of spreadsheets became her love letter to Excel, one of her top articles.
Passing reactions like "You do what?" are seeds worth noticing. Good friends push you toward the strange things instead of what you think success requires.
Smith writes from long-held fascinations because it is easier than school-style writing. School has you learn a topic all semester and then write about it. Writing on interests you already know lets ideas pour out and the nuance show.
She says excitement makes a piece better, not just faster.
Smith captures an idea at once and feeds one document for weeks. Exciting ideas fade within hours, so she writes them down immediately. She tosses related notes into a Google Doc over weeks, months or years, then refines when she has enough energy.
Her How to Be Great article took weeks or maybe months this way. Most of her pieces start with no title.
Smith replays her Google Doc history to study how she works. She used Draftback, a Chrome plugin that plays back a document's version history. She saw that many articles began as ideas on paper with no title.
It shows how you actually work, not how you remember working.
Smith would teach writers to spot what is interesting before teaching sentences. At New Trends she asked new analysts to send three things they found interesting, with no article or infographic. The differences in the answers were easy to see.
A good answer did not guarantee success, but it showed real thought about what is worth sending to thousands of paying readers.
4How Steph Smith distributes and researches her work
Smith spends about as much time distributing a piece as writing it. Every strong article got a plan: Hacker News, Lobsters, communities, Twitter, cross-posts to Medium and Dev.to, and a link at the end of other articles. On a 10 hour article she says three or four hours of outreach is possible.
In groups like Women Make and the Work in Progress Telegram group she shared her journey, not a pitch. She says a tweet at the end of the day is not distribution.
Smith emailed authors with a new angle on their books and got 100% replies. She applied ideas from Adam Grant's Give and Take and Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies to remote work. She wrote the article first, then told the authors she loved the book and asked if they had considered her angle.
She did not ask for a share, and Rubin retweeted anyway. She says she did not do it a ton.
Smith checks keyword research mid-draft to learn what people actually ask. Her How to Be Great draft was about 80% done but had no hook. Keyword research showed many people typing how to be great into Google, which gave her the title.
She calls search one of the biggest free data sets on what people think, and says SEO is hugely underrated. She skips it for passion pieces nobody is searching for.
Smith says great work still needs marketing craft. She points to the Cultural Tutor, who found culture writing dry, studied copywriters and applied their hooks to 13th century Italy. He reached 100,000 Twitter followers while working at McDonald's and living with his parents.
She sees low-hanging fruit in studying good Twitter threads, especially the first tweet.
5Steph Smith's craft: visuals, hooks and rhythm
Smith favors opening a tweet with the striking statistic or chart. Derek Thompson promoted a loneliness essay with a statistic and a screenshot from the piece, and the link below. The reader learns something before clicking.
She adds that a data point or infographic can compress a multi-decade story, and tools like Flourish make moving infographics in minutes from a data set.
Smith recommends one fixed visual style so work is recognizable at a glance. Quoting Tim Ferriss, make one decision that saves a thousand later: a line style, one hex code plus one other color, and black or white.
Jack Butcher is polished and Tim Urban is goofy, and each is instantly recognizable. Urban wrote about 300 posts on an earlier blog before his first stick figure around post 250.
Smith studies technique for podcasting but protects her own voice in writing. For podcasting she studies intro music, how questions are asked, pauses and editing. In writing she wants the voice to stay hers, and accepts that her husband calls her wordy.
Her career playbook came from long Media REDEF pieces by Tal Shahar and Matthew Ball, which she reread for ten years.
Smith wants taglines and ideas that stick for years. She and Perell discuss how songs, poems and speeches are remembered for style more than substance. Perell suggests memorizing them to absorb rhythm.
Examples they cite include Lose Yourself, Kennedy's inaugural line and Hamlet's soliloquy.
6Steph Smith on pace, deadlines and escaping a past hit
Smith lets each piece take its own time. Her pieces take weeks to years, from 400 words to 4,000, and she drops the ones that never get there. She compares it to the Duomo door in Florence, which took 40 years.
A fixed weekly publishing day does not work for her.
Smith uses deadlines rarely, only on projects that would otherwise never ship. Her 70,000 word book and her 50-plus video course were each finished in about two months because she knows she would not finish them without a deadline.
Perell warns that constant deadlines lead to burnout: "a deadline only has integrity if it's something that's rare".
Smith has not blogged for years, bound by the style of her early hits. Her early posts did well, with 3,000 words and many quotes, and she feels she must repeat that. She now wants to write 400 words in a new way.
She points to Porter Robinson's Nurture, which she likes less than Worlds but respects more because he changed. She now sees her own expectation as "mostly self-imposed".
How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably | Steph Smith | How I Write Podcast
Steph Smith argues that writers stand out through how they write and what fascinates them, then get read by treating distribution and audience research as real work. The habit worth hearing is spending nearly as much time seeding each piece and checking what people actually search for as writing it.
Smith started writing because she had something to say about remote work. She did not start to go viral or hit subscriber targets. She now runs the a16z podcast, was on the early team at The Hustle, and wrote Doing Content Right.
She says starting from "let me be a writer" wipes out your own excitement, and the true self goes with it.
Smith took a full-time job so her side projects don't have to pay. The job means her projects are things she has to make, not things that earn. She says successful creators she admires were often fine with having no money for a while.
She says the time needed is sometimes "many, many, many, many years". Money did arrive for those creators, but it was not crucial to their choices along the way.
Smith codes her projects so they come out exactly as she wants. Her blog runs on a Ghost template she customized, and she chose how it is delivered. She did not plan to become a full-time developer.
Handing projects to contractors or employees is hard because they feel like an appendage that must reflect her voice and brain. She is still weighing it.
Smith says differentiation comes from how you write, not your topic. Nobody recommends a newsletter because it covers business, since there are plenty. They recommend it because it is hilarious, elegant or deep. With 8 billion people, saying the same things in the same ways cannot set you apart.
Her test: "How do I show up differently in how I'm writing, not just what I'm writing about?"
Smith asks what most people in her field are unwilling to do. Barstool talked about sports like friends on a Saturday. Fans wrote 10,000 word deep dives on Taylor Swift's hidden references. Distinct work lives in that gap, and just showing up daily is not the answer.
She says advice like "pick your wedge" or "just be consistent" ignores that everyone else is publishing too.
Smith found her defining trait, approachable, only because others told her. She asks writers for the one adjective people would use about their work. Hers is approachable. Her coding projects made readers think they could learn to code too.
Once you know the word, she says to lean into it deliberately. It takes years of feedback to see.
Smith found readers respond most to her struggles and stupid mistakes. She spent early years trying to seem knowledgeable. Readers resonated with her struggles instead. Early pieces often work because the writer assumes nobody is reading.
The advice she and Perell discuss, from Kevin Kelly, is to tell your story with uncommon honesty. Perell challenged her to write her next piece as a private email to him and decide later whether to publish.
Smith's best angles sit in what fascinates her, and a friend names them. Your best ideas are so close you cannot see them, like a finger touching your forehead. Her love of spreadsheets became her love letter to Excel, one of her top articles.
Passing reactions like "You do what?" are seeds worth noticing. Good friends push you toward the strange things instead of what you think success requires.
Smith writes from long-held fascinations because it is easier than school-style writing. School has you learn a topic all semester and then write about it. Writing on interests you already know lets ideas pour out and the nuance show.
She says excitement makes a piece better, not just faster.
Smith captures an idea at once and feeds one document for weeks. Exciting ideas fade within hours, so she writes them down immediately. She tosses related notes into a Google Doc over weeks, months or years, then refines when she has enough energy.
Her How to Be Great article took weeks or maybe months this way. Most of her pieces start with no title.
Smith replays her Google Doc history to study how she works. She used Draftback, a Chrome plugin that plays back a document's version history. She saw that many articles began as ideas on paper with no title.
It shows how you actually work, not how you remember working.
Smith would teach writers to spot what is interesting before teaching sentences. At New Trends she asked new analysts to send three things they found interesting, with no article or infographic. The differences in the answers were easy to see.
A good answer did not guarantee success, but it showed real thought about what is worth sending to thousands of paying readers.
Smith spends about as much time distributing a piece as writing it. Every strong article got a plan: Hacker News, Lobsters, communities, Twitter, cross-posts to Medium and Dev.to, and a link at the end of other articles. On a 10 hour article she says three or four hours of outreach is possible.
In groups like Women Make and the Work in Progress Telegram group she shared her journey, not a pitch. She says a tweet at the end of the day is not distribution.
Smith emailed authors with a new angle on their books and got 100% replies. She applied ideas from Adam Grant's Give and Take and Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies to remote work. She wrote the article first, then told the authors she loved the book and asked if they had considered her angle.
She did not ask for a share, and Rubin retweeted anyway. She says she did not do it a ton.
Smith checks keyword research mid-draft to learn what people actually ask. Her How to Be Great draft was about 80% done but had no hook. Keyword research showed many people typing how to be great into Google, which gave her the title.
She calls search one of the biggest free data sets on what people think, and says SEO is hugely underrated. She skips it for passion pieces nobody is searching for.
Smith says great work still needs marketing craft. She points to the Cultural Tutor, who found culture writing dry, studied copywriters and applied their hooks to 13th century Italy. He reached 100,000 Twitter followers while working at McDonald's and living with his parents.
She sees low-hanging fruit in studying good Twitter threads, especially the first tweet.
Smith favors opening a tweet with the striking statistic or chart. Derek Thompson promoted a loneliness essay with a statistic and a screenshot from the piece, and the link below. The reader learns something before clicking.
She adds that a data point or infographic can compress a multi-decade story, and tools like Flourish make moving infographics in minutes from a data set.
Smith recommends one fixed visual style so work is recognizable at a glance. Quoting Tim Ferriss, make one decision that saves a thousand later: a line style, one hex code plus one other color, and black or white.
Jack Butcher is polished and Tim Urban is goofy, and each is instantly recognizable. Urban wrote about 300 posts on an earlier blog before his first stick figure around post 250.
Smith studies technique for podcasting but protects her own voice in writing. For podcasting she studies intro music, how questions are asked, pauses and editing. In writing she wants the voice to stay hers, and accepts that her husband calls her wordy.
Her career playbook came from long Media REDEF pieces by Tal Shahar and Matthew Ball, which she reread for ten years.
Smith wants taglines and ideas that stick for years. She and Perell discuss how songs, poems and speeches are remembered for style more than substance. Perell suggests memorizing them to absorb rhythm.
Examples they cite include Lose Yourself, Kennedy's inaugural line and Hamlet's soliloquy.
Smith lets each piece take its own time. Her pieces take weeks to years, from 400 words to 4,000, and she drops the ones that never get there. She compares it to the Duomo door in Florence, which took 40 years.
A fixed weekly publishing day does not work for her.
Smith uses deadlines rarely, only on projects that would otherwise never ship. Her 70,000 word book and her 50-plus video course were each finished in about two months because she knows she would not finish them without a deadline.
Perell warns that constant deadlines lead to burnout: "a deadline only has integrity if it's something that's rare".
Smith has not blogged for years, bound by the style of her early hits. Her early posts did well, with 3,000 words and many quotes, and she feels she must repeat that. She now wants to write 400 words in a new way.
She points to Porter Robinson's Nurture, which she likes less than Worlds but respects more because he changed. She now sees her own expectation as "mostly self-imposed".