Eleven Years of Proposals That Became Reality
"Let's open a creator economy room on an audio-based SNS." "Let's do a StoryPoll." "Let's do racing charts as video." These proposals all became real.
I've put three proposals on the table.
"On the audio-based SNS, let's open a room on creator economy and connect with readers."
"Let's try a StoryPoll — integrated survey and content delivery. Looking at the data, there seems to be an appetite for it."
"Let's do a brief history through reactive racing chart videos."
All three happened.
Accepted proposals are rarer than you might think.
During the same period, a lot didn't happen. The bespoke 3040 economics media proposal. The Know/edge personalized service that would fight algorithmic filter bubbles. The "Presidential Election User's Manual" I pitched directly to the early Publy team. All left as documents. Rejection became familiar, but each time something came back rejected, I went back with something else.
FactPL happened. I raised the idea of "a vertical newsletter on IT and startups" with the editor — that was how it started. 2020, when almost nobody understood what a newsletter was. I was a founding member from the design stage: format, homepage, content structure. It reached 20,000 subscribers and a 40% open rate. The biggest outcome from the proposals that went through.
Completion wasn't the end.
Making something always generated another proposal. Running FactPL, I kept feeling frustrated that readers only received. I wanted to know what they were curious about, where they were connecting. Integrating survey and content seemed like it would work. Looking at the data, there was a reaction point. That was the StoryPoll proposal. It went through, ran, readers participated.
When Clubhouse was blowing up in early 2021, I set up a creator economy room. Everyone was trying to figure out how to use the platform. It was the first time I understood what meeting readers through voice rather than text felt like.
The racing chart video was the same logic. IT company growth histories as competing videos — they spread much better than static graphs.
Honestly, I don't know what the difference is between what worked and what didn't.
Sometimes it was timing. Sometimes it was whether there was someone to work with. Sometimes just luck. Writing the bespoke proposal gave me a deeper understanding of what vertical media was, and that probably influenced the FactPL proposal later. Things that didn't work also accumulated somewhere.
What made it possible to keep making proposals was probably that rejection wasn't that frightening. A journalist calls someone they've never met every day to ask questions. Rejection was just part of the routine.