15 years of Birchtree

Today marks birchtree's 15th anniversary! While I don't have the complete archive going that far back, I have been writing under the Birchtree title since October 17, 2010. For some context, the iPhone 4 was still brand new at the time, and was not even available on Verizon yet in the US. We were even in the middle of the now-legendary macOS Snow Leopard reign, and the iPad was only a few months old.

I'm actually not 100% sure what I was publishing to all the way back then, but I got the birchtree.me URL back in 2012.

The earliest post I have on the current site is Finish the Job (Because Nobody Cares What You're "Going to Do"), which was my first post to go any sort of viral.

The trick is getting yourself to finish that last 10%. That’s where the magic happens; the part where you finish those little details that separate good work from great work. I have no tricks for how to get there; how you do that is completely up to you. Finishing is the difference between talking about what you want to do (which is interesting only to you) and showing off what you have done.

It's not a bad post, although it's not really how I'd write this today. There was a different energy in 2010 and as someone trying to get attention, I probably was a little more curt than I'd be today in making a point. I wrote this as I was getting my website, AltStock, off the ground, which was a site dedicated to suggesting alternates to the stock apps on the iPhone. Terrible name aside, I thought it was a cool idea. I don't know if Shawn Blanc was inspired by it or not, but just months afterwards, The Sweet Setup launched and did everything I was doing, but better. incidentally, I went on to be a regular contributor to The Sweet Setup from 2019-2024.

Lessons

I have to be honest and say I don't have that many lessons to impart based on my 15 years. The main thing that I would say has allowed me to keep doing this for so long is that I've kept it relatively loose in terms of structure and topics. There were certainly eras of the blog where I focused pretty heavily on the Apple Watch or the iPad or "the iPhone guy who uses Android", but I've always felt I've enjoyed it the most when I didn't have any strict rules around what I could or couldn't write about. I've always felt my most fulfilled doing this when I just wrote about what I was interested in rather than adhering to a specific brand image I was trying to formulate.

Another thing that's helped me personally keep this up is that I've never had this blog be a meaningful portion of my personal income. Yes, I've run ads, and at the site's and web advertising's peak, I was making a few hundred dollars per month on it, it was always a value that could disappear at the drop of a hat and I'd be okay. This meant that I wrote for the fun of it, not for the money. This is something that's helped quite a bit over the last 5 years as blog readership has generally fallen across the web and the advertising market has dried up. If you're not huge, the advertising numbers are rough right now, to the point I just removed the ad from the blog and rely 100% on More Birchtree subscribers.

The last lesson I've learned is something that's relevant across all entertainment mediums, and that's having a general idea of what you want your reader/viewer/whatever to get out of what you're creating. Will they be entertained? Will they learn something? Will they laugh? Will they change their mind on something? What do you want them to feel when they close the tab? When you do it long enough, it becomes a subconscious thing that just happens naturally, but consider this when trying to get people's attention. You can write for yourself if you want, that's totally fine, but if you're trying to grow an audience, consider what they're getting out of what you're creating.

Here's to many more years

Someday I'll stop writing this blog. Someday I'll stop paying for the domain and the hosting and it will all go away, relegated to The Internet Archive. That said, I do consider this in a way to be "my life's work" and is a document of how I was feeling and what I was thinking about through my 20s, my 30s, and just a month from now, my 40s. You haven't seen the last of ol' Birchtree. 😁