Shadow Boxing

Or how I tricked myself into writing

The best problems one can solve are personal in nature. It’s because it’s much much easier to build something for oneself as the first user rather than off second hand inspiration. The Daily flow is a product of creative frustrations entertwined with burning capitalist inklings, triggered into existence by THC mixed with ethanol in the midst of an inabilty to sleep.

I’d been meaning to write for a long time, and wanted to kickoff the work on an internet media outlet of my choice. Medium was too cliched, Instagram had broken my heart earlier and other blog-forums (at least the ones I knew of) looked dated. Substack was fancy. As it often happens in pursuits of chasing inspiration at 4 AM in the morning, today I ended up convincing myself that none of these outlets solve the distribution problem effectively, which would inevitably lead to constraints in monetization of my work. It’s kind of true also. There are very few people in today’s age who still read seriously, unless they are looking for information from an expert. Information and ideas are consumed on a much larger scale in video/ audio format through YouTube, social media feed etc. But that’s another algorithm driven crowded market. The closest thing to a cool, respectable distribution channel of information which is farthest from being monopolised seems to be a Podcast. Also, because I have written more dialogue, scripts and speaking notes than love letters and essays, there is a natural bent towards writing for speech.

So I kept on stalling myself for another couple of hours.

5 AM.

It wasn’t a bad idea really. When was the last time you finished a book? How regularly ( and not frequently) do you read blogposts/ newsletters/ opinions/ anything legit on the internet? There is passive information consumption that happens through social media infographics and captions. Specialised information consumption happens through google searches ( and YouTube searches ), where reader lifecyle is limited to the primary life objective being fulfilled after referencing internet’s information repository. We are moving closer to a world where the loyalty towards the library is far more stronger than the loyalty towards a writer/ publisher.

How does a broke writer then make a quick buck without a carefully nurtured readership?

So in order to delay writing as much as possible, I tried sleeping. It didn’t work. In order to delay it further, I started thinking about the business problem to be solved. My natural infatuation with podcasts continues to overpower an effort at first-principles approach. I thought it is better to start a podcast than a newsletter, but that pinched the writer in me a little. Plus I don’t have any gear, so now I have an embarassing stalemate against myself. So as it usually happens at 5 AM, a “revelation” struck me that could be the next “billion dollar company” and at the same time; strike out another excuse to not write.

What if one could type a longform post, and it converts into a audio file with the writer’s voice? Writing distributed as podcasts. Where the absence of gear, unfamiliarity with stuff like Anchor/ Soundtrap or even the lack of practice in speaking and recording does not constraint the access to the podcast market. Then I wondered if the world needs another transcribing tool. What does the world need though? Maybe not a new way of podcasting, but a new way of writing. Something like voice letters, instead of news letters. The writing part works as usual, the publishing is like a narration and the distribution is like a podcast. Yes, there are overlaps wih hundreds of similiar offerings, but none of them has taken over the world yet. So worth a shot.

Now it would have been stupid to let the inspiration run away, and I was anyways exploring Substack for similiar features. So I thought that I should MVP the product in the form of a newsletter. The name ‘Flow’ is connected to another related project that I had discussed with a close friend, Deepak; (more on that later). Hence, today 7 July, 2021, 7:57 AM (IST) marks the birth of The Daily Flow.

Lets see how this one goes.