Coding Horror: The Unfair Advantage To Get An Audience Of 30 Million – with Jeff Atwood

Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror, Content, Scaling

How does a blogger launch a collection of question and answer sites with over 30 million monthly visitors?

Jeff Atwood is a developer who’s been blogging consistently about his work and ideas on his site, Coding Horror, since 2004.

Four years later, he announced StackOverflow.com, a site where programmers can help each other. That grew into StackExchange, a collection of 87 similar Q&A sites. When I had a question about how to change a template on my web site, I asked it on wordpress.stackexchange.com and got the perfect answer in under 2 hours.

I invited him to tell us how it happened.

Jeff Atwood

Coding Horror

Jeff Atwood is a software developer, podcaster and writer of the popular blog Coding Horror.

 

Andrew: Coming up! Well, actually, here’s what’s not coming up. There’s no video in this interview but, frankly, between you and me, Mixergy was never supposed to be about video. It was supposed to be about ideas, about words. Audio only was the format I imagined. I only added video because it drew in more users to those ideas in the interviews. Well, in this interview, we don’t have any video. What we do have is the story of how two founders discovered an idea that led to a business that helps over 30 million people every month, including me. And how can you find a similar idea? I wanted to know in this interview. The other thing I wanted to know was what about getting users? How do they get the unfair advantage, as some people consider it, that helped them grow their audience in the beginning? And finally, where do you get your ideas for improving a business? All that and so much more, coming up.

Before we get started, I wanted to congratulate...

Continue reading the transcript...