Medium is completely and utterly predictable.

That’s basically the best sound bite that I gave when Sinem Günel interviewed me about how writers can succeed here on the platform. She runs a fantastic coaching group for Medium writers and I’m a big fan.

Here’s a longer version of my quote:

There’s this completely bogus media narrative that Medium pivots. And I feel like I’m the only person on the planet that thinks that Medium is completely and utterly predictable.

They made one pivot, three years ago, towards a subscription business. Literally everything they’ve done since then has been predictable.

Now that they have a subscription business, and they believe in a subscription business, they have to figure out how to make that subscription work.

Since I run three publications here that get paid by Medium, I’m constantly asking myself: how do these publications help Medium’s subscription business? Asking this is a basic business principle. If my partnership is a win for Medium then it will continue and if it is a loss then it will go away. And yet…

There’s a lesson here that goes way beyond Medium, which is that when you are in a business partnership you should be thinking through both sides of the partnership. You want the partnership to be good for you. That’s obvious. But you also want it to be good for your partner otherwise it’s destined to fail eventually.

If you are a customer, it’s still a partnership of sorts. Same if you are an employee.