The Slow (Feed)Burn and How Patience Wins on the Web

Quick growth is often seen as an indicator of success on the web. But in my experience, hardly anything that grows fast does so without strain and stretch marks. The quick growth often forces your hand to implement before you can strategize. Then you waste time trying to fix mistakes brought on by speed, hopefully before the hoopla surrounding your launch dies down and everyone leaves for greener pixels. I wonder why slow growth isn’t popular on the web? Too boring for us? Not immediately measurable?

Here’s my subscriber stats from when I started using Feedburner in November ’07—current:

No huge swells of change, no massive influxes of traffic. Not very exciting, is it? Just a slow, (surprisingly) steady uphill climb which enables me to (hopefully) build long-term relationships with fine people like you. Nothing flashy. Nothing newsworthy. Not even a lot of traffic* in the grand scheme of things. Then again, sustainable relationships take time, effort and hard work, and those things aren’t nearly as sexy as big stats.

But they’re way more valuable.

*It would have been easy to prove the point without the actual stats numbers, but why bother trying to be something I’m not? Transparency is valuable, too.