How Highlights on Medium Changed Publishing Forever: Startup Priorities and Lessons Learned

How Highlights on Medium Changed Publishing Forever: Startup Priorities and Lessons Learned

In the fast-paced world of startups, founders face the daunting task of deciding where to focus their limited resources. Choosing the right priorities can be the difference between success and failure. Two seemingly unrelated articles shed light on this challenge and offer valuable lessons for startup founders.

The first article, titled "How Highlights on Medium Changed Publishing Forever," explores how a seemingly small feature turned Medium into one of the leading online publishing platforms. The feature, called Highlights, allows readers to engage with content by highlighting passages, sharing them, and leaving feedback. This feature not only made sharing writing on Medium easier but also transformed the platform into a community where people interact and become smarter based on those interactions.

The success of Highlights can be attributed to Medium's deep understanding of their users' needs. The product team spent time analyzing how people used their platform and how they could enhance the user experience. They discovered that readers enjoyed highlighting quotes, resonating with insights, capturing ideas for later, and even disagreeing with statements and leaving comments. By incorporating these features into Highlights, Medium gave their users a more social and engaging reading experience.

For writers, feedback is currency. Highlights provided Medium authors with direct feedback from their audience, allowing them to pinpoint the most engaging parts of their posts. This engagement attracted the best writers to Medium, creating a cycle of high readership and financial rewards for quality posts.

The second article, titled "Startup Priorities," addresses the challenge of prioritizing tasks in a startup. The author emphasizes the importance of choosing a key metric to track and focusing exclusively on making that metric grow. This metric should be something you know how to increase and that truly matters in measuring your company's success.

The author suggests using a formula (b * d) / c to prioritize features. "b" represents the number of users impacted by a new feature, "d" describes the importance of the feature to the average user, and "c" indicates the difficulty of building the feature. By focusing on features that have a high impact on a large number of users and can be built quickly and cheaply, startups can prioritize effectively.

Both articles highlight the importance of understanding user needs and focusing on metrics that truly measure the value users derive from a product. Vanity metrics, such as views or clicks, may not accurately reflect engagement and depth of interaction. Instead, startups should identify one metric that truly measures the value their product provides and prioritize features based on their impact on that metric.

Based on these articles, here are three actionable pieces of advice for startup founders:

1. Identify the one metric that truly measures the value users derive from your product. Don't get distracted by vanity metrics. Prioritize features that have a significant impact on this metric.

2. Understand how users engage with your product and incorporate features that enhance their experience. Look for unique ways to make your product more social and engaging, just like Medium did with Highlights.

3. Prioritize features that have a high impact on a large number of users and can be built quickly and cheaply. This approach allows you to iterate and gather data from your users before focusing on scaling.

In conclusion, the success of Highlights on Medium and the lessons from prioritizing startup tasks provide valuable insights for founders. By understanding user needs, focusing on meaningful metrics, and prioritizing effectively, startups can increase engagement, retention, and sustainable growth.