The Write Stuff 7 // Anne-Laure Le Cunff

And I think this is the biggest barrier right now for lots of makers not writing more, is because there's still this image people have that, you know, either you're good or bad at writing. And the reality is just that either you've practiced for long enough or you haven't. And I think that anyone who takes the time to write regularly will become really good at writing.

Hey everybody, it's Corey. I'm the creator of Blurt, and today I'm here with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Thanks for joining us, Anne. Anne-Laure, sorry.

You say my name all right. Thanks for that.

Great. Yeah, so a little bit like your background. I know you've been an entrepreneur for a while now. You've been doing some making a lot over the last few years. I remember you created Instalist. That was, that was how I kind of discovered you, the Instalist app. Um, which I thought was pretty cool. It was like a way to discover Instagrammable places. Um, and you also, I know you were in the 24-Hour Startup, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I basically, I used to, I've been in tech for basically, um, for as long as I've been working basically. So I used to work at Google and I left a couple of years ago. And since then, uh, I've been kind of doing my own stuff. First more of a traditional startup and now making stuff more the indie way. So I started with Instalist, which you discovered, and then I joined the 24-Hour Startup. When was that? That was in November, I think, where I built my very first Chrome extension. I say I built, but I think everyone built it because I don't think I would have managed to do it on my own. Awesome. So, I, with a bunch of people, built that thing, which was great. And then, other stuff I've been working on, I've always loved writing, so I've done an ebook recently, and currently my biggest project and my main focus is working on Maker Mag, which is a magazine for indie makers.

Awesome. Yeah, and so that's exactly it. I know that you, And, and too, what I— I mean, you've been writing like on Medium for a while too, just kind of like sharing your thoughts, um, of what you've been working on. Uh, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how you got into MakerMag because it's pretty cool. It's like a, uh, it's essentially an online journal for all topics related to like independent software development, specifically the whole maker movement that was really big this last year.

Yeah, definitely. Um, so as I mentioned, uh, I used to work at Google and I used to read TechCrunch and Wired and all of these tech publications that we have for— well, basically they're all about founded startups that you won't really find indie makers in there. So all of the, like, lots of the announcements are about this startup that raised a million or $2 million, or when we talk about WeWork, billions, for example. And yeah, no, it's, it's insane. And when, when I joined the indie maker movement, I was looking for such a publication to kind of follow what was happening. And there were lots of Lots of makers are maintaining their own individual blog, either on Medium or self-hosted, but I couldn't find any central place where, a centralized place where I could read about makers, not only news about what they were launching because Product Hunt is doing a great job at that, but also their thoughts and their culture and their goals and all of these kind of things. So that's how the idea for MakerMag came about. And when I thought about it, I spend a lot of time, maybe too much time on Twitter, but I tweeted the idea and it kind of went viral, like got hundreds of likes, lots of people retweeted it. I got lots of DMs from people who were like, I would love to join and write for this. And people who actually didn't have a medium or a blog and didn't think that they would write enough to do this, but I wanted to participate in a bigger project. So this is how it started.

Awesome. Very cool. And how— so Twitter obviously has been a central place to like reach out. How are you getting people to contribute to MakerMag? What's the—

how do you—

how are people generating content for MakerMag?

So what's really nice is that— so they were the first week after I kind of tweeted about it, we got about 40 people who joined. So we have this Telegram group where we collaborate together and share ideas and brainstorm. And, you know, every week we have at least a couple of people who bring another couple of people on board. So they read their articles or they share, they share it with their friends. And so it's currently, it's growing organically. I think we have 55 people right now.

Awesome.

And I think the reason why they contribute is because they have this platform where, I mean, we put a lot of work in the design and making sure that it was very easy to read. We actually took a lot of inspiration from Medium in terms of how we wanted it to look. And we're very open in terms of topics. So it's not only about building products. We have topics about wellness, mental health, traveling and lots of different things that makers love to talk and read about. And that you would, you will not necessarily find about on other publications like Hacker Noon or other, which are great but are very focused on the tech side of things.

Yeah, that's great. That's super cool. So I know your background is, like you did content marketing, I think I remember reading or you mentioning to me at Google. How is it you yourself kind of got into the writing space anyways?

That happened very, very early. I was writing novels when I was younger. That was my hobby. I really liked doing that. I love reading and writing. When I was still living in France, I was one of the admins for the biggest forums for young writers there. That was when I was 16 or 17. So that was a long time ago. And I've always loved writing. When I was a kid, I thought I would become a novelist. Turns out I think I'm good at writing, but not good enough to maybe write a proper novel that would get published by an editor. The good thing though is that nowadays, and this is what I did with the ebook, and I think it's awesome, there used to be a lot of gatekeeping in terms of publishing a book because you needed to send, and I did that when I was a teenager, print all of your novel or whatever you want to publish. Yeah, go to the post office and send it to, you know, 10, 20 editors and publishers and hoping that one of them would come back back to you. Most of the time they would not even come back to you. Nowadays there's lots of tools to self-publish, and, and I think it's super empowering because now you can build your audience. And if you find enough people who are interested in what you have to say, you don't need to go through a middleman anymore to share your thoughts and have your own audience. And, and you don't need to have an audience of 100,000 people anymore to, to be able to publish content. Even if there are a few people who want to read your stuff, it's It's good enough to motivate you to write.

Yeah, no, and I think that's true. Like, we're seeing that— it's kind of weird, I've been noticing how products and writing are kind of the same thing. So it kind of makes sense how Maker Mag is even like, you know, as you being involved, it's all kind of related. It's all kind of like, uh, that independent nature. Um, and that's, that's what makers are all about, you know, you know, being smaller and being able to build something very specific for a small group of people. So with related to, so I was actually, that's where I was kind of headed. Cause the other thing that I know you did last year was Make and Shine, which you, which yeah, it was kind of related. Like I think it was a 30-day competition. You were deciding about this. Okay.

We had a, it's when you think about it, like there were a lot of, competitions and sort of like hackathons for makers at the end of last year. I don't think I would do them all again because it's quite tiring to have to sustain that workload. But it was great to get me to be— I was very productive for during those past few months because of these competitions. This one in particular was organized by Women Make and Ben Tussell from NewCo. It was a 30-day challenge where you had to create and launch something. It could be anything, could be a product, could be— some people decided to launch an e-shop, whatever. And in my case, I wanted to participate, but I was going to travel to Algeria, where my family is from, for 2 weeks. And the internet is kind of non-existent there. So I thought writing would be a good thing to do because I can do it even if I'm offline. And when I wrote the ebook, I was just writing down what I would I would have to look up later, but I could still work on it if I had no internet. So that's why I picked that. And also based on lots of conversations I was starting to have with makers about marketing their products and putting themselves out there and how uncomfortable some of them thought this was. So I kind of had a topic and I had a good reason to work on more of an offline product I could work on from Algiers. So that's how the idea came about.

Awesome.

Yeah.

And what was your experience like writing a book? I mean, obviously you did it as you did it when you were younger for fun, and this was like more of a challenge, so I guess that probably helped you get it done. But yeah, how'd that process go for you?

It was both easier and harder. I guess it was easier because I had a very good idea of what the content was going to be, just because it was not something I was making. Like, I was writing novels when I was a kid, so I was literally making it up or trying plan, but it keeps on changing. And, and I have so many novels I never finished because I couldn't find the right ending for it. So in that, in that sense, writing a book about marketing for makers was much easier because I wrote down the outline and I changed a few things, but basically all of the content was already in my head somewhere and easy to access. So that was the easy bit. The hard bit though is that it was for the same reason. It was my first time writing a non-fiction book, so it was hard for me to figure out how to keep it interesting because I didn't want it to feel like a school book that, you know, that I wouldn't enjoy reading. So I had to— I took with me in Algeria a few business books with me that I remembered enjoying when I was reading them, just to kind of like sift through them and seeing what it was that I really enjoyed when reading them, and I tried to bring some of that back into Make and Shine. So, yeah, a lot of inspiration from other business books that I read. So, that was the harder part. First time writing a nonfiction book, and obviously the constraint of having to write it in 30 days was also— yeah.

It probably didn't feel good, but it probably helped you get it done, I guess, at the same time.

Yes, I could have probably kept on working on it for a few more months if I didn't have that deadline. So I'm actually happy that I had it.

That's interesting. Yeah. So, and then what about publishing? So that, like, I really like the point you were making earlier how you don't necessarily have to be held back by the big publishing places out there today. So did you like evaluate other— I don't, I don't— how did, like, how did you decide to go the way that you did?

Yeah, so again, the challenge helped a lot in the sense that the challenge was to create and launch something in 30 days. So I had to launch whatever I was creating at the end of October. So that already made completely impossible to even consider working with traditional publishers because the timelines are months, or if not years, to work with them. So, and in any case, to submit something to a traditional publisher, I would have probably needed to make it longer and to like, you know, so that helps. And then in terms of indie publishing, there were lots of options. And actually it's funny how I probably wouldn't do it the same way if I were to do it again today. But at the time, the two publishers that I was considering were Gumroad and Amazon. Gumroad, because I've read so many good things about it and they're like really interesting founders that are big proponents of the indie maker movement, such as Nathan Barry, who's the CEO of ConvertKit, who always publish on Gumroad and are very happy with it. So Gumroad was very high on my list, but then I don't know, it's just probably because lots of people were telling me, "What, you're not going to publish on Amazon? But everyone is reading their ebooks on Kindle." And so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to do that." Publishing on Gumroad took me probably 5 minutes. Publishing on Amazon took me a whole day because their interface is so bad. And yeah, it's just, it's just really hard to use. And I'm quite tech savvy, but I was actually struggling to understand exactly what the format was supposed to look like and all of these kinds of things. And because they're such a big company, Gumroad, you can just like, you can even tweet at them and they'll come back to you and be like, we'll help you. Amazon is Too bad, your book got rejected. You need to try again. And they're very vague as to what was wrong. But I still did it because everyone was telling me you need to do it. So I did that. And it turns out, I looked at my numbers a week ago and I sold about, I think, 85% of my books on Gumroad. So I don't know if I would publish again on Amazon in the future.

Yeah. And it's also saturated, you know, because it's bigger, so it's probably harder to stand out. I, I think that that's what's kind of interesting too, because I was thinking about how you were saying— because Make and Shine is about how to kind of like be willing to stand out a little bit with your own personal brand. Um, so it's kind of a cool message even too, like how you're saying like that's the beauty of writing. Do you think, do you think people should be writing more? That people that aren't writing— is it something that you are like big on personally for people?

Oh, definitely. I mean, that's a— I mean, I have a chapter about that in the book, and it starts with, I know it's meta because it is kind of meta to tell people to write ebooks and write for their blogs, etc., when inside of my own ebook. But yes, I'm really big on it. It's one of the most accessible things for people to do. You don't need a crazy computer, you don't need a camera, you don't need anything expensive. Expensive. You can do it from literally anywhere. Even if your computer is dead, you can take a piece of paper and do it anytime you have downtime. I think it's also very powerful because it's very easy to distribute. You can use it in different formats. You can, again, you can print it, ebooks, use it on your blog. You can take some snippets and then use them on social media to share with people so they can reshare them. Also, you know, lots of the people I know who are getting speaking gigs at conferences and these kind of things, for example, most of the time it's based on something they wrote before. So they published a book or they have a popular blog, etc. So yes, I'm very big on writing and I'm very much convinced that anyone can do it. And I think this is the biggest barrier right now for lots of makers not writing more is because there's still this image people have that you know, either you're good or bad at writing. And the reality is just that either you've practiced for long enough or you haven't. And I think that anyone who takes the time to write regularly will become really good at writing.

Yeah, that's awesome advice. Yeah. And if you never put anything out, how are people ever going to know that you're there?

Exactly.

Yeah. So what advice do you have for people to get started? Or maybe even better yet, is there a way Or is it even necessary to stand out in some way? Like, is there advice to— like, what is your advice for people to get going if they want to start, like, building a brand for themselves?

Yeah, I think it really depends where— what's their personal barrier for it. If lots of people say, I don't have ideas, and this is why I think it's interesting what you ask about, do you need to stand out? And the thing is that It's very hard to come up with new ideas. It just, you know, almost everything has been written about already. So I don't think it should be something blocking people. And instead, actually, like reading other people's blogs and, you know, just thinking about it and thinking, oh, do I agree with this person? Oh, maybe I have another take on this. I could write something that could be a response to this, or that could be, you know, a little slightly different twist on it. So lots of people don't write because they're trying to find this super original idea that no one has been talking about. And if no one's talking about it, it's probably because no one's interested in it either. So I would, yeah, so I would pick something that people are talking about that you're interested in and just write about it. And it doesn't need to be this groundbreaking, you know, thing and super original that's going to get you a Nobel Prize in literature. That's not the goal. So Start small, and after a while you will see that the more you start writing, the more you start finding your own angle. And this is where I think you can start becoming original and really start having a style of writing and ideas and things you're a big proponent of that will make people recognize your writing even if they don't know that it's you. But it takes time, and I don't think people should aim at starting there. They should start small.

Awesome. Yeah, no, that's awesome advice. Well, Anne-Laure, we are running out of time. It goes by so quick. If people are interested in checking out MakerMag, I definitely like— if you're in the makerspace and you haven't heard about MakerMag, which I'd be surprised that you haven't, definitely check out MakerMag. That's at maker.com, MakerMag. And then Anne-Laure's on Twitter, you can find her there. And she has her own website of all the other stuff she's constantly working on. And that's at anne-laure.net. Anne-Laure, thank you again for chatting with us and excited to share all this knowledge. Very cool. We'll be talking again soon.

Thanks. All right. Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.