A startup starts up a publication on Medium and writes about it on Medium

The basics of setting up a publication are easily searchable, so this story explains how newbie bloggers are organizing a publication for multiple contributors across different topics.

We started the idea as an area to share our tech learnings like the amazing Netflix Technology Blog. As we started talking about it more inside the company, different departments like Design and Product wanted a platform to share ideas as well.

So we decided to call it “Inside League” instead of “League Tech” or something similar. The hope is that we can create cool enough content to help a bunch of different audiences.

Like any product driven companies, there are some requirements. I’m not going to write these as actual Agile stories. That would be too geeky.

1. Easy to create and maintain content
2. Multiple contributors
3. Ability to draft and review stories
4. Can organize stories by topic e.g. tech, design.
5. A good platform to get readers, comments, and insights.

Easy to create and maintain content

This help document shows how to create a publication. One thing I found is creating avatar needs to be circular. So you may need some cropping creativity to make it work.

You probably don’t want this:

You probably want this:

You can only pick 5 tags which make sense. I hope the ones I picked also make sense.

Multiple contributors

Writing stories takes a long time, so people need some credit! Also, it’s nice to see some different personalities. So we invite people’s personal accounts in there. I don’t see a need to create specific work accounts.

We’re not big enough to justify writers versus editors. Maybe in a future world.

Ability to draft and review stories

From a writer’s or editor’s personal account, you can submit stories into a publication:

Then in the publication, it shows up under “stories” → Drafts and submissions

Editors can review the story, and click the “…” at the bottom of the story to manage it. I think I found a bug because when you click the “…”, it disappears.

Then, you can accept, reject, or banish poor writers.

Can organize stories by topic e.g. tech, design

In the story, the magic “…” allows you to “change tags”. It also shows how many stories are tagged to the story. I guess the way you look at it, putting the story in a bigger or smaller bucket can both be advantageous.

The best tags I found for this particular publication.

1. Startup (333K)
2. Startup Lessons (1 something) ← Cropping the actual number
3. Tech (142K)
4. Technology (168K) ← They should merge with “Tech” for even more power
5. Product Management (26K)
6. Design (187K)
7. Design Thinking (2 something)
8. Architecture (21K)
9. Engineering (12.9K)
10. Software Development (50 something)

I’m presuming the homepage can be organized by tag. That will be left up to a future post. Someone with design sense like Andréa Crofts.

A good platform to get readers, comments, and insights

Medium has great readership. To be honest, not sure yet how to get traffic to this publication yet. I guess that will be part of the journey.