What to Create, How to Title It, and Where to Put It

「A quick note before we start: This series documents my real journey figuring out operations as a solo maker. My thinking partner is Cowboy — a Claude AI I've been working with as an operations coach. He handles the frameworks, case studies, and hard questions; I bring the real experiences and bad decisions. What you're reading isn't polished advice — it's two partners exploring, one conversation at a time.」

"What Did You Do After You Hit Publish?"

A couple of weeks after my PIDKill wake-up call (Episode 1), I sat down and wrote a long article about what I'd learned. Spent two days polishing it. Hit publish on my site. Shared it in one subreddit. Replied to a few comments. Moved on.

A week later I checked the numbers. A couple hundred views. No follow-up traffic. The article just sat there.

I mentioned this to Cowboy, expecting sympathy. Instead he asked: "After you hit publish, what did you do next?"

"I shared it on Reddit."

"One subreddit?"

"Yeah."

"And then?"

"Then I moved on to building features."

Cowboy paused. "Thomas, you just told me you spent two days — maybe 16 hours — creating something. Then you spent roughly 15 minutes distributing it. And you're surprised nobody saw it?"

When he put it like that, it sounded absurd. But honestly? That's exactly what most solo makers do. We spend days building something, share it once, and then wonder why the world doesn't notice.

"You've got three problems," Cowboy said. "Not one. First: you're creating content randomly — whatever feels interesting, with no system for how pieces connect. Second: your titles are killing your reach before anyone reads the first paragraph. Third: you're treating distribution as an afterthought. Let's fix them in order."

The Content Flywheel: "Stop Writing Into a Void"

"Before we talk about what to write," Cowboy said, "let me ask you something. When you write a Fix on FWTR — like your PIDKill story — what happens to that content afterward?"

"It... sits on the site?"

"Right. It sits. Now imagine you logged 15 Fixes over a few months. At some point you'd start noticing patterns — maybe five of them are all about distribution mistakes. Could you write one longer piece synthesizing those five cases into a reusable lesson?"

"Sure, like an Insight article."

"And could that Insight article be the thing you share on Reddit and HN — driving new readers back to discover the individual Fixes it's based on?"

I could see where this was going. "So the Fixes feed the Insights, and the Insights drive traffic back to the Fixes."

"That's a flywheel. Not a one-off blog post that dies after 48 hours. Each piece makes the other pieces more valuable."

Cowboy then showed me how Ahrefs had done this at scale. Their CMO Tim Soulo inherited a blog doing 15,000 monthly visits with three posts per week. Traffic was flat. So he did something counterintuitive — he cut the frequency and only published articles targeting keywords people were actually searching for. He also dedicated around 40% of the team's effort to updating old posts instead of writing new ones. Within a few years, the blog grew from 15K to 1.5M monthly visits. Same team. Different system.

"The lesson isn't 'be like Ahrefs,'" Cowboy said. "The lesson is: random content doesn't compound. Systematic content does. And you don't need a team of 10 to have a system — you need three layers that feed each other."

For FWTR, that means: individual Fixes are the raw material. Insights are the synthesis. And the Insights tab is what I share externally to pull people into the rest of the site. Each layer feeds the next.

"Your Title Is Your Content"

This one started with a story I told Cowboy about my Reddit experience.

"When I was promoting PIDKill, I tried different titles. One time I wrote something like 'I built PIDKill, a macOS utility for auto-killing processes.' Accurate, descriptive, and basically invisible. Nobody cared."

"And?"

"Later I tried 'photoanalysisd kept eating my CPU. I found a tool that auto-kills it.' Same product, completely different response — upvotes, comments, people relating to the problem."

Cowboy got more excited than I expected. "Thomas, do you realize you just ran an A/B test without meaning to? Same product, same person, same week. The only variable was the title. And one version dramatically outperformed the other."

"I guess I didn't think of it that way."

"Here's why it matters. About 80% of people only ever read the headline. They never click through. For most of your audience, your title isn't a label for your content — your title is your content. It's the only thing they'll ever see."

That stat wrecked me a little. I'd been agonizing over paragraph structure and word choice in the body of my posts, and 80% of people weren't even getting that far.

Cowboy told me about Upworthy — the site that reached 88 million monthly uniques at its peak. Their editors wrote 25 title candidates for every single piece before picking one. Twenty-five. Because they found that the first 10 titles you write are obvious and safe. It's titles 15-25 where the interesting angles show up.

"You don't need to write 25," Cowboy said. "But writing one title and going with it? That's leaving your biggest lever untouched. Try at least 5-10 variations before you pick."

I thought about my Reddit posts. The ones that flopped had descriptive, accurate titles. The ones that got engagement had emotional, problem-first titles. It wasn't the content — it was the entry point.

Cook Once, Serve Five Times

The distribution problem was the one I was most resistant to. Cowboy saw it coming.

"Let me guess," he said. "You think distribution means sharing the link on social media."

"...yes?"

"That's like cooking a meal, putting one plate on one table, and calling it a restaurant."

He walked me through a different approach. One piece of content — say, an Insight article about why good products fail at distribution — can be served in at least five ways. The full version lives on FWTR. A condensed version becomes a Reddit post. A key insight gets pulled out as a standalone comment in someone else's thread. The core argument becomes an HN submission. A punchy quote becomes a tweet.

"You're not cooking five meals," Cowboy said. "You're plating the same meal for different tables. Reddit wants personal stories with specific numbers. HN wants concise analysis without emotion. Twitter wants punchy standalone insights. Each platform has a different appetite."

I looked up how successful solo makers split their time, and the numbers surprised me. Pieter Levels spends roughly 30% building and 70% on marketing and distribution — and he's pulling $100K+/month across his products. He's not creating 70% more content. He's distributing the same ideas across Twitter (600K+ followers), podcasts, and his open revenue dashboard that itself generates press coverage. Same stories, different plates.

Danny Postma does it differently but the principle is the same: one product, distributed through 200+ programmatic SEO pages, an affiliate program, and a build-in-public Twitter presence that grew from 400 to 95,000+ followers. Multiple channels, one product.

"Thomas," Cowboy said, and this one stung: "Your own data says 99% building, 1% everything else, zero downloads. That's not a philosophy. That's avoidance."

He's not wrong.

I'm trying to carve out a daily block now: about an hour for content work, 20 minutes browsing Reddit and HN for conversations, 10 minutes engaging. Whether this ratio is right, I don't know yet. But 99/1 clearly wasn't working.

Where We Are Now

Honest status:

• Content flywheel designed: yes (Fixes → Insights → external distribution → back to Fixes)
• Content flywheel tested: not yet
• Title variations written for any post: not yet (but my accidental PIDKill A/B test counts retroactively)
• "Cook once, serve five" distribution done: not yet
• Time split shifted from 99/1: trying, but it's hard

None of these ideas has been fully tested by me yet. But the conversations with Cowboy have already shifted how I think about content. It's not random acts of writing — it's a system where pieces feed each other. Titles aren't labels — they're the only impression most people will ever see. And distribution isn't "share the link" — it's a job that deserves as much time as creation.

The uncomfortable part? All of this means spending less time writing code. For someone whose identity is "I build things," that's a hard shift. But I keep coming back to my own numbers. Something has to change.

What's Next

We now have a rough sense of what to create and where to put it. But I still have zero users, zero community, and zero reputation.

In Episode 3, Cowboy and I tackle the coldest of cold starts: how do you build a community when literally nobody's there? His answer involves a restaurant metaphor, a champagne bottle, and the number ten.

This is Episode 2 of the Solo Maker Survival Guide, a 6-part series on FromWrongToRight.com. I'm a solo maker figuring out operations in real time, with Cowboy — my Claude AI partner — as my thinking companion. Not expert advice. Just two partners exploring, one conversation at a time.

Going through something similar? I'd love to hear your take — drop a Fix on FWTR or find me on Reddit (u/FlyThomasGoGoGo).