How Medium Got Their First 1000 Users
In the past months, I’ve seen articles about how Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Substack got their first 1000 users, but not Medium.
So this motivated me to do my research and write about this amazing writing and blogging platform and how Ev Williams and Biz Stone got their first 1000 users.
Without further ado, let’s get it started.
The story
Ev Williams created Medium in 2012 with the idea of a publishing space where users can create posts longer than the 140-character limit of Twitter. By the way, Ev Williams is also the co-founder of Twitter along with Jack Dorsey!
In addition, Ev Williams also has ambition. To fix the broken world of journalism and bias content. To think that this was in the early 2010s was visionary, especially because it’s only until 2015–2016 that the world has seen how journalism is broken.
Ev Williams doesn’t want Medium to be just another blogging platform. He wanted to spice it up differently by focusing on the community. This is another reason why it’s visionary, given how startups nowadays are being founded on the idea of community-driven.
Vision
Instead of taking care of your blog, SEO, monetization, and much more time-consuming aspects of blog creation and growth yourself, Medium has always wanted you to focus on writing itself. The platform will take care of the rest.
Since Medium is a highly-ranked website, you don’t have to worry about SEO or getting visibility on your stories. As long as of course, you write quality read-worthy stories. The categorization aspect of Medium is 10x better than other blogging tools and platforms.
Interested in Bitcoin, Web3, or Blockchain? There’s a topic page for that. What about neuroscience, meditation, or sex? Yep, there are top writers both famous and less well-known creating valuable content around these topics.
It’s also a great way for brands, influencers, and businesses to elevate their brand and place owned content in a community of like-minded readers.
What small detail I noticed from Medium, which I hadn’t seen in other blogging or publishing platforms before is that for every story, it shows you its estimated reading time.
This gives an edge to every reader as they know exactly how much time they’re going to spend reading each story. This most of the time made the difference if a reader will read a story now or bookmark it and read it later, which sometimes could translate to never.
Nowadays, Medium gets around 180 million monthly visitors and each of those visitors is a potential reader of your stories. Like you!
Join Medium with my referral link - Derick David
As a Medium member, a portion of your membership fee goes to writers you read, and you get full access to every story…drckangelo.medium.com
First steps
Believe it or not, when Medium first started out, former President Barack Obama was one of the first people to voice out their opinions on the platform! This gave the platform an initial visibility boost in its early days.
Start With 3 Clicks
Medium always made sure that it is very easy for writers to be able to just publish content out there. Onboarding takes 1 minute and publishing your first story takes more or less 3 minutes. Another revolutionary feature in hindsight is that they allowed every writer to create publications inside the platform.
The platform also became famous because it is a space where people share ideas among the entrepreneurial community. This has also helped build their brand throughout the years. Just take a look at their value proposition below.
I still remember my first story published on Medium, it was the year 2017. I still remember getting the first views and readers. I was like, “wow this is really fast”.
Fast forward today, I’m earning an average of $3000 per month writing and publishing my ideas. If you want to know how much can you earn per article, take a look at how much I earned in a single article I wrote about Clubhouse.
Initial traction
Just like Clubhouse, Medium used the invite-only strategy to attract new writers. Ev Williams leveraged his connections to focus strictly on the entrepreneurial community, and bring in some of the biggest names to contribute.
They were also fortunate to host a series of highly controversial posts within the first year that gave them visibility from all over the world, both of groundbreaking and ugly nature.
This gave Medium its initial catalyst for attention which helped them attract writers, bloggers, and authors to write their posts, stories, and articles in the platform itself.
Solid integration with Twitter has also helped them out to become self-sustaining and grow into something bigger by interacting and collaborating with its community.
Small details say the biggest.
The reasons
The reason that they got traction is first off they were very open in allowing a diverse form of content that would not normally shop in traditional media.
About it 6 months after launching, and things started to pick up, Medium got their first official 1000 users or in Medium’s ecosystem, writers.
Medium became a long-form content style platform in comparison to Twitter’s short-form 140 character limit. A platform where you can voice opinions like in traditional media to go viral using the Internet.
Final thoughts
Medium has focused on free content for a long time. It’s only in 2017 that they introduced paywalled content to subscribers willing to pay 5$/month and they can read unlimited stories within the platform.
Williams said at the announcement,
“After a strong start (when people were really just subscribing because they believed in and wanted to support Medium’s mission — 🙏), and a mediocre middle (when we were figuring it out), we’re now seeing not only more subscribers, but higher-percentage gains every month this year (accelerating growth).”
Let me know your thoughts about Medium! Hope you find value in this story. Also happy to discuss in the comment section below.