Unbundling Reddit (For Digital Writers) With Greg Isenberg

Dickie Bush (0:00)

Writers used to retreat into the woods for 18 months and write their masterpieces, right? And now there's just no excuse to put something out there that the market isn't begging for, in a sense. Welcome to The Digital Writing Podcast, where we talk about using writing to capture, keep and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot.

If you're here, I think you know who Greg is, you know about his background. I don't want to waste time going through the whole story. If you want that, you can dig in to all the other places he's described, what he's done in the past. Today, we want to dive into a couple of things, and we're going to start with how writers can better leverage Reddit.

I think it's a extremely underutilized platform for ID generation, market research, posting content, all this stuff. Greg's going to walk us through a little bit of how he thinks about unbundling Reddit. Opportunities are there, and I'm sure that's going to lead to a bunch of cool kind of discussions. So, that sounds like a plan. Let's get to it. Greg, why don't you give a quick kind of rundown of the way you see Reddit as both an opportunity source for products, writers, and we'll start there.

Greg Isenberg (1:19)

A bit of background just in the state of social. Social media, if we think about it, is awesome because we gave billions of people microphones, but you get billions of people microphones and it gets pretty noisy. And that's kind of the state that we're in, and that's why over the last few years, these communities have become the most comfortable way to converse. So basically, people have found refuge in places like Reddit, which we're going to talk about, in places like Discord, in places like Slack, in places like WhatsApp group.

And that's why these are some of the most interesting platforms, both from a idea generation perspective. So like, how do you get ideas in terms of like how to write? From a people perspective, i.e. you're going to meet some really interesting people in here and you can connect with them. And number three, which to me is the most important in the line of work that I do, which is how do you come up with startup ideas that are going to work and that mitigates risk? So we're going to, I'm going to take you through how I think about Reddit.

But before I begin, I think that there's four main problems with the community platforms today. And I'm only telling you this because I think that'll help you when you're creating relationships or coming up with ideas on Reddit. The first is many people feel alone online and that's why they're going to these platforms. The second is a lot of these platforms, the power is in the hands of the platform, not the community. Reddit's a bit different, actually the hands and the power of the community, but in some other platforms, they're not. The other thing is there's more dead communities than alive communities. Not many people talk about this, but how many Slack or Discord groups have you been in or WhatsApp groups that are just completely dead?

And then most of these platforms are everything to everyone. So these are some of the big four problems, and that's why I think unbundling, which basically means that you're taking, you know, the age-old example is Craigslist. Andrew Parker came up with this blog post in 2010, where he basically was like, Craigslist is everything to everyone, and what's going to happen is it's going to be unbundled. So you can take, like, you know, the apartment section and unbundle it from Craigslist and create an amazing purpose-built experience called Airbnb with amazing photos, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of massive businesses were created on top of unbundling. What I see that's happening is unbundling of Reddit right now, unbundling of Discord. So you take a bigger platform. You can see on the right-hand side, these are a bunch of different public Discord servers.

And you can basically create spaces for those people. And those people are going to give you your goal. Those people are going to give you your writing ideas. They're going to give you your startup ideas. So without further ado, let me give you a framework for how to think about how to unbundle a Reddit community. And this applies actually to Discord in a lot of ways, too.

So six steps.

First is find a subreddit. You got to start with a subreddit to actually mine it.