Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
The pinned comment is the only part of a published video you can still edit. That is what it is for: the things that change, and the thing you got wrong.
A blog post and a newsletter issue are the same words in a different container. The reader is what changed, and the reader is in an inbox with a thumb.
Somebody taps a bio link seconds after watching one specific thing, looking for that thing. Almost every link page is ordered by what its owner values instead.
A series prefix is a fixed cost paid on every episode forever, chosen when episode one is the only thing that exists and the prefix still looks tidy.
Everything after the fold is read by people who already decided to read. The first line is the only part that talks to everyone else, and it is usually the part written last.
A crutch phrase is invisible inside one post by definition. You cannot find it by re-reading more carefully - you find it by putting thirty posts next to each other.
Jargon is not bad writing, it is expensive writing. It buys precision from people who share the vocabulary and charges everyone else the cost of looking something up.
A prompter app wraps text on width, which means a line can end on "the". Where the breaks go is the whole format, and it is the one thing the app cannot decide for you.
Every opening line belongs to one of about six shapes, and each shape obliges the rest of the video differently. Pick the shape first; the wording is the easy half.
The first line, before anything else. Every other placement is a judgement call, and two of them have been ruled against — the hashtag block and anything below the fold.
Instagram line breaks collapse because the composer strips trailing whitespace. Put a printable-but-blank character on each empty line and the paragraphs survive.
Numbering tells a reader how much is left, which keeps them reading. It also costs characters on every post, and the style with the total in it cannot be written until you have finished.