Member-only story
How Medium Got Their First 1000 Users
Fact: Barack Obama was one of the early supporters!
In the past months, I’ve seen articles about how Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Substack got their first 1000 users, but not Medium.
So this motivated me to do my research and write about this amazing writing and blogging platform and how Ev Williams and Biz Stone got their first 1000 users.
Without further ado, let’s get it started.
The story
Ev Williams created Medium in 2012 with the idea of a publishing space where users can create posts longer than the 140-character limit of Twitter. By the way, Ev Williams is also the co-founder of Twitter along with Jack Dorsey!
In addition, Ev Williams also has ambition. To fix the broken world of journalism and bias content. To think that this was in the early 2010s was visionary, especially because it’s only until 2015–2016 that the world has seen how journalism is broken.
Ev Williams doesn’t want Medium to be just another blogging platform. He wanted to spice it up differently by focusing on the community. This is another reason why it’s visionary, given how startups nowadays are being founded on the idea of community-driven.
A little know fact: Ev Williams has almost two decades of background on writing and journalism. As a matter of fact, one of his first jobs out of college was for the technology publishing company, O’Reilly Media.
Vision
Instead of taking care of your blog, SEO, monetization, and much more time-consuming aspects of blog creation and growth yourself, Medium has always wanted you to focus on writing itself. The platform will take care of the rest.
Since Medium is a highly-ranked website, you don’t have to worry about SEO or getting visibility on your stories. As long as of course, you write quality read-worthy stories. The categorization aspect of Medium is 10x better than other blogging tools and platforms.
Interested in Bitcoin, Web3, or Blockchain? There’s a topic page for that. What about neuroscience, meditation, or sex? Yep, there are top writers both famous and less well-known creating valuable content around these…
