Why we pivoted from “365 Words or Less” to “Under Pi Minutes”
If you are a recent follower, you probably wouldn’t know that we originally named ourselves as “365 words or less”. For those of you wondering why 365 words specifically, read our introductory blog first:
But about a month back we decided to pivot our strategy for a few reasons. In this blog, I’d like to walk you through how we ended up here.
Step 1: Why pivot?
Over the last 6 months, our group tripled in size and we published around 25 blogs — 25 diverse, interesting blogs. We loved what we were writing, but we were bleeding on three major fronts. Let me capture them real quick:
- Blog quality: Keeping things short helped us get started easily, but the 365 words constraint crippled us on a few occasions. Some great ideas had to be let go, authors complained that it restricted their creativity and blogs would sometimes lose their true essence.
- Medium engagement: Your followers, your tags, and publications are popular ways to get more eyes on your content. Medium distribution is the less known channel where your piece gets picked by Medium staff for enhanced reach. While there are no set parameters, we have observed that they prefer larger articles that have around 750 words.
- SEO impact: Search engine optimization is what allows an article to pop up at the top of a google search. Google looks for various elements such as relevancy, backlinks, quality, length of the article, etc. A quick google search will tell you that they also prefer larger articles 500–1000 words.
Since the word-limit was hurting on both content creation and promotion side, we decided to tweak our strategy a little while staying true to our mission.
Step 2: Keep the mission intact
As we set out to revise our strategy, we all agreed that we won’t let the true essence of our blog go. We still want to present unique, intriguing stories in quick reads. So, our original description remains relevant — all of it except the 365 words part.
Our novels have become thinner, our sports have become quicker, our songs have become shorter, our views have gone twitter (a.k.a 280 characters or less) and basically, our attention has become slimmer and slimmer. We are a group of passionate writers/readers who believe that opinions need to be shorter as well. So, we are kicking off this unique blogging voyage where we will limit ourselves to <̶ ̶3̶6̶5̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶b̶l̶o̶g̶ ̶-̶ ̶e̶r̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶b̶r̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ ̶u̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶8̶2̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶ ̶8̶6̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶d̶s̶!̶
Step 3: New Name — Think on the edge of the box
I say edge because we had to come up with an innovative blog name with a few known constraints/facts:
- Google word constraint (500–1000 words)
- Medium word constraint (Around 750 words)
- The average reader reads 200–300 words per minute. This translates to 3–5 minute reads.
- The title should communicate brevity
- The title should be memorable
We started with the list below
Decision Time
We chose the process of elimination to trim down the list. Here are the highlights of our discussion:
- We did not want to commit to a strict word limit after our first experience
- The words “or less” is not necessarily adding too much value
- “Under 3 minutes” and “under 5 minutes” weren’t unique
- So we were left with just two options: “Under Pi Minutes” and “Under 365 seconds”
- While Under 365 seconds was closer to our original title, people don’t usually think in terms of seconds. So, we wanted to avoid that friction.
We agreed that Under pi minutes is sophisticated, easy to say, memorable (pi is unique + rhymes with five), and gives us the flexibility to be elaborate if needed.
What do you guys think about our new name? Did you have any other favorites from the list? Comment away!
