I used to write for everyone. README files that tried to impress senior developers.
Blog posts written like documentation.
LinkedIn updates that sounded like release notes.
Clean. Correct. Completely unreadable to actual humans.
Nobody shared them. Nobody commented. I told myself the content was good and the algorithm was broken. It wasn’t the algorithm.
The idea that broke everything open
Seth Godin talks about the smallest viable audience.
Not the biggest. Not the broadest. The smallest. The idea is simple: instead of writing for everyone who might care, write for one specific person with one specific problem.
Make something so right for them that they feel like you wrote it just for them. I read that and immediately thought it was a marketing concept.
Something for product people and startup founders. Then I looked at my own writing.
Every post I wrote tried to be useful to beginners and experienced developers. To people using WordPress and people using React. To freelancers and agency owners. I was writing for a crowd that didn’t exist.
What happens when you write for one person
I tried an experiment. I wrote a post for one specific developer. Someone exactly like me three years ago.
Someone who has built good things, knows their craft reasonably well, but cannot figure out why nobody notices.
Not for developers in general. For that one person. The post got more traction in two days than anything I had written in six months.
Not because it was better written. Because it was written for someone real.
When you write for everyone, you make safe choices.
You smooth out the edges. You remove the specific details that might confuse some readers.
But those specific details are exactly what makes writing recognisable. They are what makes a reader think: this person has been where I am.
Why developers struggle with this
We are trained to write documentation.
Documentation has to work for every possible user. It cannot assume context. It cannot have a point of view. It has to be neutral, comprehensive, correct. That training bleeds into everything else we write.
Blog posts that read like API references.
LinkedIn posts that feel like changelogs.
READMEs that nobody finishes reading.
Technical writing teaches you to remove yourself from the writing.
Personal writing requires you to put yourself back in. That is the switch most developers never make.
The smallest viable audience is not a small audience
Here is the part people misunderstand. Writing for one specific person does not mean only one person reads it.
It means one person reads it and thinks: finally, someone who gets it. Then they share it. And the next person feels the same thing. And so on. Specificity travels. Generality stays put.
The most shared pieces of content I have seen are not broad and universal.
They are specific and personal. They resonate widely precisely because they were not written for a wide audience.
What I changed
I stopped asking “who might find this useful?” before I wrote. I started asking “who is the one person who needs this most right now?”
Sometimes it is a developer who just shipped their first open source plugin and has no idea how to tell anyone about it.
Sometimes it is someone who has been freelancing for years and still feels like an imposter quoting their own rates.
I write for that person. I use the details that only they would recognise.
I skip the context that everyone already knows. The writing becomes faster. More honest. Less polished in the corporate sense, but more true.
The takeaway for developers
You do not need a bigger audience.
You need a more specific one. Pick one person.
The version of you from two years ago works perfectly. Write something that would have genuinely helped them.
Do not explain everything.
Do not hedge every statement.
Do not write for the person who might disagree in the comments.
Write for the person who needs it.
Everything else follows from that.
This is part of my #marketing4devs series. If this landed for you, it was written for you.
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