Who Is This For?
There’s one question I ask before publishing anything. Not “is this good?” Not “will people share this?” Those questions are vague enough to be useless — the brain will always find a way to answer yes.
The question is: who, exactly, is this for?
Not your audience. Not your readers in the aggregate. A person. Specific situation, specific problem, specific thing they’re doing right now that makes this relevant. Someone whose name you could, in theory, write at the top.
Why the abstract version fails
Most content is written for a vague imagined crowd. “Founders.” “Designers.” “People interested in growth.” That’s not an audience — it’s a category. Categories don’t read things; people do.
When you write for a category, you end up hedging. You cover all the cases. You add caveats for the person who might object. You make it universal, and in doing so, you make it useful to no one specifically and kind of useful to everyone in a way they immediately forget.
When you write for a person — someone you’ve talked to, someone whose DM is still in your inbox, someone whose question you keep getting asked — something different happens. You stop hedging. The piece has a shape because you’re solving a specific problem, not a general one.
What “specific” actually means
It doesn’t mean you write something only that one person will ever read. The insight that helped one person usually helps dozens of people with the same problem. Specificity is what makes it feel personal — like you actually understand the situation, not just the category.
This is why the best posts often start as replies. A DM, a comment thread, a question at the end of a call. Someone needed something exact, you gave it to them exactly, and that precision is what makes the thing worth reading more than once.
The move: write for the person who asked. Publish for everyone with the same problem.
The filter this creates
When I can’t answer “who is this for?”, I don’t publish it.
That sounds extreme, but it’s not. It’s just a way to stop producing content that’s technically published but functionally orphaned — posts that exist without a reader in mind, searching for an audience after the fact.
If you can’t name the person, or at least describe them precisely enough that you’d recognize them in a room, the piece isn’t ready. Not because it’s bad writing. Because it doesn’t know what it’s for yet.
Publishing something that doesn’t know who it’s for is noise management. You’re adding to the pile without being sure what the pile is supposed to do.
Who is this for? Answer that first. Everything else is formatting.