You Need a Domain

Make your own site

You need a domain.

I mean this in both senses of the word:

1. Set up a site at yourname.com that has all your best work
2. Pick a field that you care about.

The first is self-explanatory. Instead of putting all your work on a platform somebody else owns, like Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or another industry blog, have it primarily discoverable on your own site/blog. This builds your site as a destination and lets you fully control your presentation and narrative — even off-site, on Google.

Have a distinctive site design

Having a distinctive site design is yet another point of personal branding that, because you are a dev costs basically nothing. People come to my site, and they remember my scrollbars.

“Just understand that your domain and your website are the centers of your identity, so ideally, you’d have a good domain that will last a literal lifetime.”

- Daniel Miessler

Plant your flag

However, the second meaning deserves more introspection: I am asking you to plant your flag. Put up your personal bat signal.

Be the guy

I used to have a very crude, kinda sexist name for this idea: “Be the Guy.” This is because I noticed how many people were doing this:

• The Points Guy is the Internet’s preeminent authority on travel perks (now a nine-figure business)
• The RideShare Guy blogged about ride sharing for 4 years and became the guy Wall Street called upon when Uber and Lyft IPO’d
• Science communicators have definitely caught on to this. Neil deGrasse Tyson always introduces himself as your personal astrophysicist, but he’s completely owned by Bill Nye, the Science Guy!

Get a guy

If you skim over “the guy” as a gender-neutral shorthand, the actual important thing about having “a guy” is that you look better just by “knowing a guy”. Listen to Barney Stinson brag in “How I Met Your Mother”:

You know how I got a guy for everything?.. My suit guy, my shoe guy, my ticket guy, my club guy, and if I don’t have a guy for something, I have a guy to get me a guy!

This effect is real, and it is extraordinarily powerful.

You can now focus on something else

Just by “having a guy” for something, you suddenly feel no desire to overlap with that person’s domain. You can now focus on something else. To the extent you do this, you are now utterly dependent on “having a guy.” You’re also extremely invested in your “guy” (aka go-to person – the gender is not important) being as successful and prominent as possible so that you look better by association.

This is what I do

It should strike you that being someone’s go-to person is very valuable and also scales pretty much infinitely (You can be as many people’s go-to person as you want, so long as they rarely actually call on you.)

You get there by planting a flag on your domain and saying, “this is what I do” (a framing I stole from an excellent Patrick McKenzie keynote). People want expertise. People want to defer to authority. People don’t actually need help all the time; they just want the option just in case. People love hoarding options. You can satiate that latent insecurity indefinitely. Most people also define “expertise” simply as “someone who has spent more time on a thing than I have” (The bar is depressingly low, to be honest. People should have higher standards, but they don’t. This is a systematic weakness you can – responsibly – exploit.)