I started the day yesterday with 350 followers on Twitter. During the afternoon, after a brainstorming video chat session, Allan and I posted the following tweets:
Allan: Just had an idea orgy with @stevenbristol
Steve: The most giving and considerate partner a guy could ask for: @lessallan
Shortly there after I was joking that I probably lost a few followers, so I checked and I was down to 342 followers, losing eight folks. I don’t check my follower count regularly, but I happened to look that morning because Twitter has been having problems and the count was changing wildly. So maybe the drop was due to Twitter, but I hope not, and here’s why: Because I am not fucking bland. When writing your blog, you should be yourself. That means not going out of your way to not be offensive, and not going out of your way to be offensive. Be who you are. I swear a lot (my mother hates it) so I occasionally tweet swear words. That’s OK with me. Allan and I enjoy junior high school type humor, so we tweet stupid jokes a lot. We try to be honest and genuine.
When you meet us in person, you will know exactly what to expect. Allan and I had a talk a long time ago about softening our personalities for the blog and Twitter and every public facing thing we do. We decided that people will want to work with us and know us because of who we are, not because of who we represent ourselves to be. It turned out to be true.
We’ve found that most people that know us have a definite opinion of us, they either really like us or hate us. Just like most of our users either love or hate our products. This is a good thing. Having passionate users IS the goal. People that love your stuff is the way to grow a business, any business. Having bland and watered-down products is like eating pea soup at every meal of every day for the rest of your life. You can live on it, but nobody wants to. Also, it is my understanding that eating the same thing for every meal will eventually make you sick, just like using bland software.
Be yourself, have the confidence to stand out in a crowd and say what’s on your mind.
And for those of you that are genuinely bland, that’s OK, too. Be yourself. Love yourself. The world will love you too. Just don’t write bland software, no one needs that.
Allan’s two cents, “people love vanilla ice cream, but not many people are passionate about it.”
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