Platforms are powerful

Ev Williams has a blog, which he updates from time to time. I follow it, and it’s great.

He also has a project… a company called Medium. You may have heard of it. Ev can only write so many posts on his blog, but with Medium, he has inspired and enabled thousands of people to post high-quality, content-focused articles on topics they care about. He built a platform, and by so doing he added a multiplier onto his contribution.

Chris Coyier’s blog “CSS Tricks” is a highly respected and valuable reference for front-end developers, but his other project, Code Pen, is a platform. With CSS tricks, Chris has to coordinate each article that’s posted in order to continue inspiring his audience. With Codepen, he sets up the infrastructure, and his community takes care of the rest.

Dribbble, iVillage, Tumblr, Vine, DeviantArt, Github, Vimeo, and more. Platforms are a powerful, and if you can satisfy a real need with one, you’ll impact a lot of people.

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