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Writing more human content with Mat Patterson · The Not-Boring Tech Writer

• Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we hear from other writers to explore writing concepts and strategies, deepen our tech writing skills, get inspired, and connect with our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. If you're passionate about documentation, you belong here, no matter your job title or experience level. Welcome! Kate Mueller: [00:00:28] Hello my lovely not-boring tech writers. Today I have the honor of interviewing one of the content creators in the customer support and customer success spaces whose work I've followed for a long time and who was, for me, the name and the face that I thought of when I thought about the company Help Scout for years and years and years, and he's now gone freelance and is here to talk to us all about that transformation. Not Help Scout, not anything else. And I'm so delighted to welcome to the pod, Mat Patterson. Mat, thank you so much for being here. Mat Patterson: [00:01:04] Well, thank you for having me. That was very nice. Kate Mueller: [00:01:07] And all true, I will say also. And it was funny, I chatted with a few friends before this and I was like, “So I'm interviewing Mat Patterson. Is there anything you want me to ask him?” Every single one of them was like, "Oh, the Help Scout guy." And I was like, "No, no, he's not the Help Scout guy anymore. But what do you want me to talk to him about?" So, I mean, you have a fantastic, huge following, although it does seem like a bunch of folks don't know that you're not officially full time with Help Scout anymore. So for people who do not know you, maybe let's start there. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? You're not officially using a job title of tech writer, but I feel like you fall into the broad spectrum that is the tech writing world. So give me a little bit of a rundown about how you got into the work that you're doing now. Mat Patterson: [00:01:57] Yeah. Well, a pretty classic story, I think. You get a paper cut on a radioactive user manual and that's how you become a tech writer. I think we've all been there. But if you want a more helpful answer than that, even, yes, I would not say I'm a tech writer, but I am probably a writer in tech, which crosses over in various ways. And certainly I have done technical writing in my past. I was thinking about this, I don't know that I ever started thinking about writing. I think I always thought it would be something I did, and I sort of took a long and circuitous route to get here where I am. But maybe that moment, if you were going to put a like a comic book moment of like, this is when it began. Kate Mueller: [00:02:41] Yes, it all dates back to this. Mat Patterson: [00:02:43] Yeah. You would flash back to this moment when I was a web designer in the early 2000s. Yeah. And I was a freelance web designer, I think at the time. So it's not my first freelancing experience, but. Kate Mueller: [00:02:56] Excellent. Mat Patterson: [00:02:57] In those days, I was a web designer and I got a notification. I forget how, but somehow I was notified that someone had ripped off my company website, which is sort of both flattering and also extremely irritating. Kate Mueller: [00:03:11] Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:03:12] So then I went, I'm like, all right, let's go see what this person has done. And it turns out they had not copied my web design. They had only copied the copy. Kate Mueller: [00:03:20] Wow. So they just took the copy and nothing else. Mat Patterson: [00:03:24] They just stole like literally my About page. They just changed the name. And so that was probably a sign like, maybe you should do more of the writing, less of the web design. But it took me. Kate Mueller: [00:03:35] It’s good enough that people are stealing the writing, but. Mat Patterson: [00:03:37] Not that they actually liked. Yeah. Fair. Kate Mueller: [00:03:42] Okay. All right. That's a fantastic nugget, I love that. And how long did you do web design for? Mat Patterson: [00:03:48] So out of university, which was in the last millennium, I did some tech support for a while, like as a first job, and then I went from there because it was 1998 or 99 and no one knew how to do a website, I became a web designer because I'd done one HTML course, and that was enough. Kate Mueller: [00:04:09] It was enough in that time. Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:04:11] Yeah. And so then I did that, I think until I joined Campaign Monitor, which was in 2006. So probably 6 or 7, 8 years, something like that. Kate Mueller: [00:04:19] Okay. And were you doing tech support still at Campaign Monitor or something else? Mat Patterson: [00:04:27] No. So I was a web designer at the zoo in Sydney. That was my last web design gig, Taronga Zoo, which is a great zoo if you're into zoos, it's a good one to visit. It's right on Sydney Harbour. Very nice. I was there and I saw an ad for Campaign Monitor wanting a support person, and I had used Campaign Monitor as a customer of theirs for my clients. And so they were looking for someone with web design skills who could come in and talk to their web design customers as part of the support. And so that's how I got into support. And also they were really close to my house. Kate Mueller: [00:05:05] Very convenient. And also you knew the product. Yes. Actually, my origin story at KnowledgeOwl is similar. I was a customer before I came to work here. So there's something to be said for pulling in some of your experienced users and hiring them and then letting them talk to your customers. Mat Patterson: [00:05:23] Absolutely. And also, if you're going to go to a job where you know the product, you do get a sense of what this company is, how they think about things. It's not always exactly the same on the inside as it looks from the outside, but it does help to have experience with the products that they create. Kate Mueller: [00:05:40] Yeah, you at least get a feel for how they think about the product, how they think about the problems that they're solving. Even if you find out things about the culture that you didn't know were a thing that you couldn't see from the outside, but you at least have that foot in the door in a way that you don't with a company that you've, whose product you've never used. And certainly on the customer support side, you get a feel for how they talk to customers, how they treat customers. And there's a whole lot of culture around that that you can get a very fast feel for if you've been on the receiving end of it. It's a nice pre-interview in a way. Do I like the way you do customer support? If I'm going to come do it for you, I'd like to be sure that I actually like what you do. Mat Patterson: [00:06:23] It's suggestive of the internal culture. Customer support is always a good kind of proxy for how these people treat their own people. Kate Mueller: [00:06:32] A lot of folks who don't treat their own people very well often do not treat their customers particularly well, so. I mean, there are exceptions to folks who will treat their customers well, but won't treat their own people well as well. So it's not a direct 1 to 1, but it's. Mat Patterson: [00:06:47] You know who you are. Kate Mueller: [00:06:49] Yes, exactly. We won't mention names. However, we know you exist. So that was customer support straight up at that point. And so I'm assuming that that's direct conversations with customers. Were you doing chat or email or live calls? What did that look like? Mat Patterson: [00:07:09] Pretty much all email support for most of that time. So I was doing that. We did do a little bit of phone calls, outgoing, like, I'll call you if it's really gone off the rails, but also during that period of time, which is nearly ten years, almost exactly. I did the knowledge base and blog posts. I was writing those things. Basically, I was doing everything because it was a very small company. And then I started doing conference talks as well. And this all sort of led to joining Help Scout, where I made that switch from running in the support team to again, talking to the Help Scout customers who were customer support people. This is pretty much the pattern that I've been following. Kate Mueller: [00:07:52] Hey, it's working for you. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And there is something about once you develop that skill set of being able to write effectively about things, of being able to get up and give talks about it, or to give interviews about it or whatever that might be, that's a skill that transfers really easily to other places. I think I sometimes get asked as a tech writer, people assume I'm very introverted, which is actually true, believe it or not, hosting a podcast, I am somewhat introverted, but people always assume that I'm really uncomfortable getting up in front of a room full of people to talk. And I'm like, well, actually, in my former life, I taught college freshmen English and there is nothing that a group of professional adults could throw at me that would be more uncomfortable than teaching rooms full of college freshmen in a class that they did not want to be in, had zero interest in learning about and only took because they had to, and seeing them 3 or 4 days a week under those circumstances, I'm like, yeah, you want me to get up and give one talk for 40 minutes? I'm here for it. That's not hard. Mat Patterson: [00:09:03] Yes. And if you were to want to start doing talks, the customer support audience that I was talking to, there is no audience on earth that is more prepared to be nice and kind to you than a support conference. Kate Mueller: [00:09:17] Absolutely so gracious. My big experience on the conference side, there has been ElevateCX. And the first time I went, I was like, "Oh my gosh, everyone is so nice. Everybody is so supportive of the speakers. You're not getting massive heckling. Everybody wants you to do well." It's fantastic. Mat Patterson: [00:09:34] Yes, I would say the first talks I did were actually in the web design world when I was at Campaign Monitor. And that audience is different. They especially were not huge fans of HTML email as a concept, which is a tough place to start from when you're representing Campaign Monitor. Kate Mueller: [00:09:50] Yes, yes, you're already starting out with both hands tied behind your back at that point and trying to make it over something that requires balance and finesse, the pit of despair, so to speak. Okay, so if I'm thinking about the writing that you were doing during that time, it's customer support interactions. It's knowledge base articles. I'm assuming there's also some saved replies or canned replies happening somewhere in there. But then you also have this kind of more. Is it considered, are blog posts considered marketing in this context or like a technical content type, not technical in the way that knowledge base stuff is, but you are still trying to speak to an audience who you are assuming is going to be using the product. So you it's not like pure marketing gobbledygook. It is probably technical marketing or something. What do you even call that? Do you call it something, Mat, that is more intelligent than what I'm fumbling through? Mat Patterson: [00:10:47] I would say it was both. There were definitely more marketing posts, but there were also posts which are really solving problems about HTML email. I remember, this is how many times I had to write blog posts. I remember trying to create an email. I'm like, why is this like a weird white line? And it's only happening in Outlook. It's not happening in any other email client. I'm googling around for it, and I found the answer in my own blog post that I had forgotten that I had already solved this problem before. Kate Mueller: [00:11:17] Docs or it didn't happen. But you have to remember, the doc exists. Mat Patterson: [00:11:21] To remember it exists and you have to search for it. Kate Mueller: [00:11:24] Yes, I do have days where I'm very thankful for former me who decided to document that one irritating thing, because I have completely forgotten that I both ran into it before and documented it, and then I just happen to search for it on the off chance, like maybe we have something kind of like this. And then I find that former me did a really great deep dive on that thing five years ago, and it turns out it's still accurate. And wow, isn't that amazing. Mat Patterson: [00:11:51] Documentation is not just for everybody else. It's for yourself. Kate Mueller: [00:11:55] That’s right, you can drink your own champagne too, and often that helps. Okay, so that kind of gets us a little bit into the Help Scout realm. And so when you were brought on at Help Scout, what was your role then? Mat Patterson: [00:12:08] Yes. Excellent question. I don't think anyone really knew for sure. I think it was more of a case of because I reached out to them, because I was like, I'm ready to leave and I would like to do something different. And I just tweeted the CEO, this is what you could do in the early days of software companies before they get too big and then you have to go through 12 interviews. Just saying, like, is there something we could do? And we kind of eventually came up with sort of a customer evangelist type role where it's really just come in and help people do the thing better that they're trying to do. They're paying us to use the software to help them to do it. But we don't have to just talk about the software. We can just talk about what is good customer support and how can we do it better, and how can we structure the teams and all of this sort of stuff around where the software lives. Kate Mueller: [00:12:56] Yeah, in many ways that's about, I mean, the way that I think of that often is that you are trying to support either the philosophy or the culture that drives them using your product. So I'll use KnowledgeOwl as an example, if I can help people create a better culture of knowledge management and knowledge sharing, ultimately they do end up being more successful using the product, but often those conversations have very little to do with the product and a whole lot to do with, like, how does your company work? Where do people keep important information? Who are the gatekeepers of that information? How would they feel about not having to be the gatekeepers or are they really excited about it? And so you get into all of this stuff that has nothing to do with the product, but a great deal to do with why people adopt the product in the first place, the problems they're trying to solve, the pain points that they have, their hopes and dreams for the future and hoping that they can work better. Evangelists. I haven't heard that title in a long time. I feel like it's kind of dropped out of usage in some ways, but I do like it as a title a bit. Mat Patterson: [00:14:06] It comes with some connotations that you might not want. Kate Mueller: [00:14:09] Yes, yes. Very true. There is a period of time where I feel like every software company had an evangelist, and then suddenly they just disappeared or got called something else. Mat Patterson: [00:14:20] Yeah, it's a little squishy as a title. In small software companies, though, almost every job title means something different between two different companies that do even do the same exact thing. They'll have customer success people doing wildly different jobs, for example. Kate Mueller: [00:14:36] Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:14:37] Because just what needs doing in the company at the time. And that's sort of all just gets folded into whoever happens to be there and what their job title is. Kate Mueller: [00:14:45] And what they're good at or willing to try. Maybe not even be good at, but just willing won't say no to or like, okay, I'll give that a shot. I’ve worn 18 hats. Why not add a 19th to this? I could probably learn how to do that thing for a little while. Please don't make me do it forever. Mat Patterson: [00:15:03] Dangerous trap. Kate Mueller: [00:15:04] That kind of leads into the reason I knew that you existed as a human being is that KnowledgeOwl has used Help Scout for a long time, and when I first started here, I got a Help Scout account, and I think that auto enrolled me in like the marketing emails or something. And I used to get an email from you. I want to say once a week in my inbox about some thing. And sometimes it was like a real spot on the nose/this is a thing I'm struggling with. And sometimes it was like, this is not a thing that is at all relevant to my current work. I'm going to skip that. But Mat's a lovely writer, so that part's great. And I have a distinct memory of one of your emails about, I'm totally going to flub this, but I think it was like the first written customer support complaint from some ancient time. And it was one of my favorite quote unquote marketing emails ever because I was like, oh, I'm learning something I didn't know that is adjacent to this space, but I do not feel like I'm having something rammed down my throat. I just feel like somebody told me a cool story over drinks that I now get to go tell somebody else. Mat Patterson: [00:16:16] Yeah, Ea-nāṣir, copper trader, quite well known on the internet generally. Kate Mueller: [00:16:20] There we go. See. Mat Patterson: [00:16:23] You can watch that video too. That's still out there. Maybe we'll put a link in. Kate Mueller: [00:16:27] Oh yes. Send it to me. We'll put it in the show notes. Mat Patterson: [00:16:29] By far the most popular video I've ever made. Kate Mueller: [00:16:34] You've set the bar high for yourself at this point, Mat. I mean. Mat Patterson: [00:16:37] Yeah, I started too hard with that one. But yeah, I mean, the idea for me of the newsletter is always, okay, one, don't be boring, which is a nice fit for this podcast. Kate Mueller: [00:16:48] Yeah. Particularly. Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:16:51] Because so many newsletters, especially marketing newsletters are just like, here's another terrible attempt to sell you a thing. And often the thing I've already bought it. You don't have to keep telling me about how good it is. All right, I get it. So I was trying to transition it from, I think when I started doing that newsletter, it was here is the blog post we wrote this week and that was it. And sometimes. Kate Mueller: [00:17:17] I mean, easy to put together, but not the most riveting from a content perspective. Mat Patterson: [00:17:20] I think it was literally automated at one point. Like it just sent out, here's the new, here's the blog post from the week. And we did do good blog posts to be fair. Help Scout's blog was why I wanted to go to Help Scout in the first place. I was never a customer of Help Scout, but I was a blog reader because the content was always helpful in my previous role, so that was valuable. But if it is really just telling you, go and read the blog, like I already go to the blog anyway, so I don't really need that. It's just an RSS feed that happens to come in an email. Kate Mueller: [00:17:52] Yeah, exactly. Mat Patterson: [00:17:53] Just give me the RSS feed and put the whole thing in the RSS feed. Don't give me the first two paragraphs. Anyway, that's my rant for another time. But if people are going to invite you into their email inbox, which probably has all the million other things that they have to get in their emails, at least be interesting and be useful in some way that's different. Make use of the email inbox. And it does feel different, I think. I did spend ten years in email as well, and I just get that sense of someone's giving you an email address and it's permission to come and talk to me in my house, not like I have to come to your house to read the stuff. And so it should be different. And I think you can be more personal there and you can make it more like, here is a person talking to you as opposed to here's a company blasting stuff. I mean, that's another email marketing term. E-blast. Kate Mueller: [00:18:46] I really like the idea of treating that as that somebody has invited you in and that there's something that that is, I think we so often view emails as a purely transactional thing. And so much of newsletters in particular is about like, well, we just need to stay top of mind. So it doesn't really matter what we send, what matters is that we are consistently sending something. And to me, what you're describing is a completely different approach to that, which is to say, hey, people are busy, they get a ton of email, maybe let's give them something that's actually valuable. So that a) so that they keep receiving the emails, which is ultimately one of the goals here, but b) so that they actually feel that they got something of value from that. Not just this, I can tell that you checked a box and maybe there's like eight reasons why I should do X, which ugh, please, no, give me a story about the world's first written customer service complaint and how that relates to what I'm doing right now, and how some of those problems have just never gone away. They've just changed the shape and the expression, but they're still here, people still get disgruntled, etc. And so then you get to situate yourself within this larger context or this larger community, and it feels more like it's a conversation rather than a transaction, which was what I always loved about getting a lot of your newsletters is that it was like, oh, I heard from Mat this week. So I’ve felt like I've known you for years, even though I have not, in fact, known you for years. Mat Patterson: [00:20:19] No. And I think that's the power of it. You get my face in there, but I get to have a conversation even though it's a bit one-sided. But email is nice in that people can just hit reply when they want to. And sometimes they do and say nice things. Or sometimes they say, “This is dumb and you should not have said that.” And that's fair enough too. But you get that interaction in a way that's hard to get in other forms even. I mean, social media is a very different vibe. A response in social media is performative for other people as well. It's not just that I'm replying to this person who's talking to me. People send me some really nice stuff about that newsletter and about how they find it interesting, even though it's not necessarily applicable to them all the time. And I think that’s the goal really, it’s like it should stand alone. It's not going to make sense, as you say, like not every one is going to be relevant in the moment, but sometimes it's just going to hit you at the right time. It's like, yes, I needed a different way to think about this thing that I do every day and I'm having a bad day. And just a little reframing can be really helpful at the right moment. Kate Mueller: [00:21:22] Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I've learned with this podcast also is that there's some things that I feel like I am, there are themes that I find myself returning to, especially in the solo episodes. And part of my mind is like, “Kate, you don't need to talk about this again. I'm sure everyone is tired to death of hearing you talk, get on this particular soapbox and rant about this particular thing.” But then the episode goes out into the world and I get a comment from someone who says, “This was exactly the thing I needed to hear today, and I'm really glad you shared it.” And we forget sometimes that like, it's okay to say kind of the same thing, but in a different way, because that different way may be the exact way that somebody needs to hear it to really connect with it and feel like, “Hey, I'm not alone in thinking about this,” or “This is exactly, like, I have been banging my head against trying to figure out a way forward, and this suddenly unlocks something for me. And I can get there now.” And it is one of those, to me, amazing things about what I'm going to call technical communication, because I think a lot of this does fall within technical communication, even though a lot of it is on the softer end of that spectrum, but that there is something about the written form and also just like speech in general, that we connect as humans better to those things that we like somebody to be a little bit quirky and a little bit themselves, and not to scrub all of that away and that there's power to that individuality. Mat Patterson: [00:22:53] We have to read so much stuff. It doesn't have to be dry. I think especially technical writing, when you come to a company like, oh, I like this company. I like the way they talk about their products and they're excited, and then you have to read the documentation and suddenly all of that is gone. And now it is just like we made the most desiccated manual you could possibly imagine and sucked all the life out of it. I'm like, well, it doesn't have to. You can still transmit the same information, but retain some sort of personality or anything vaguely interesting because this is a job I have to do is to read this and get information out, make it more pleasant for me. Kate Mueller: [00:23:33] Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can say the exact same technical set of steps in a thousand different ways, but there are a bunch of those that you can still have a really engaging tone. You can pick good examples. You can provide best practice guidance or things that are beyond just those strict steps that do provide a little bit more connection, a little bit more of a philosophy around how to do the thing and people connect with that, or they don't, and they send you stuff about like, “Boy, your owl puns are bad. Why do you keep using them as examples in your documentation?” And I say, “Owl puns are part of our brand.” Mat Patterson: [00:24:14] I mean, that's the danger, right? Anytime you try and have any sort of personality, some people aren't going to like that personality. And that is true. But you cannot cut that out without also losing the connection that you make to all the other people who are like, yeah, this is my scene. I'm enjoying this. Yeah. So I think you're taking a small risk, but yeah. Kate Mueller: [00:24:34] Yeah, yeah, you'll alienate a small number of people, but it might welcome in far more people than you would have welcomed by being bland. Mat Patterson: [00:24:43] All the owls, for example. They love that. Kate Mueller: [00:24:45] That's right, that's right. And they are a very picky crew, I must say. Mat Patterson: [00:24:50] If you were designing a technical documentation for birds, I mean, I guess birds could use keyboards pretty easily actually. Kate Mueller: [00:24:59] Pecking at least they could. Talon-wise probably not. Mat Patterson: [00:25:02] And they've got incredible eyesight, so you could have quite small font to fit a lot on a page. Kate Mueller: [00:25:07] And instead of using a wide variety of emojis, you could probably just use variations on prey that they would want to eat, and you've already got their attention right there. There's good visual interest. And so you were at Help Scout, I feel like ten years also, weren't you? Yeah. Or around about. Mat Patterson: [00:25:25] Yeah. Almost exactly. Again ten years. Kate Mueller: [00:25:27] And so it sounds like when you made the shift from Campaign Monitor to Help Scout, you really knew that you were ready to be doing something different. Was it a similar thing for you kind of leaving Help Scout and going off on your own? Did you know you were ready? Mat Patterson: [00:25:44] Yeah. So it's a combination of things like obviously I'm not doing vastly different work now in this shift, although I am to a degree. It was a combination of things. Part of the reason that I left Campaign Monitor when I did was it got to a size in which the just the types of business structure that have to exist at certain sizes differently fun, let's say, for different types of people. Whereas I tend to enjoy the earlier stages where there is more hat wearing, there is more experimental. We'll just try this and it will take us a day to try it. And it won't take a six month project before we can push out V1 or whatever. All of that sort of stuff that just comes with bigger companies. So I'm always, once we get to that size, like maybe now is a good time to start thinking about what it's like to revert back to a smaller company again. Kate Mueller: [00:26:34] You're like Mary Poppins. You come in, you help them get to a certain place, and then you have to leave to, like, nourish the next one. Mat Patterson: [00:26:45] Another family needs me. Kate Mueller: [00:26:46] You as Mary Poppins is maybe interesting. I want you with the umbrella. That's what I want. But it's an analogy I use for myself often because I, too, like small companies. Mat Patterson: [00:26:56] Yeah, so there's definitely part of that and the kind of larger company stuff. It's not that Help Scout is a large company, but there's big differences between when I joined, it was 30 people and I don't know, it's over 100 something now. Kate Mueller: [00:27:10] Yeah, it's a pretty significant shift. I mean, you end up having to put in structure that didn't exist when you were much smaller because you're coordinating more moving parts and more moving people. And some things change, and often they do change very well for the growth. But if you're somebody who prefers that smaller end, it's going to feel a little weird to you, and you'd prefer to find somewhere that feels more like the earlier stages, yeah. Mat Patterson: [00:27:34] Yeah. And there are people who love that next stage. And there are people who love to go on the growth journey and to bring in all the structure. And I'm sure there are probably people who love when people come in with all their corporate language and apply that, because that's how they like to talk about business. It's not for me, I would say. So there's a bit of that going on. But also, yeah, ten years, I would say I was enjoying the creative parts of the work. And then there's other bits of work that just have to be done that are less interesting to me. If there's a spreadsheet involved, I would like to avoid it. So that's just a general rule that I have in my life. Kate Mueller: [00:28:12] The anti-spreadsheet. Mat Patterson: [00:28:14] Yeah. If there's a graph, there's that aspect of it that has never really worked for me. I know some people love spreadsheets and they get excited about seeing the numbers, but it's just not the way my brain works. And so it was a nice time to think, “Okay, well, how could this be different?” And my boss, who is still, I guess technically my boss because I'm still contracting to Help Scout, this is not the first time she was like, “Are you sure you're enjoying this bit of the job? And maybe what if you just did the content for us?” And so that was sort of offered to me as like, would you be interested in doing that? Because I think they were worried that I was just going to throw a tantrum and leave eventually when I got sick enough of it, and my ability to hide my disdain for certain parts of corporate life was waning. Kate Mueller: [00:29:04] Something I think we can all relate to at some point or another, you just lose the ability to mask that you hate that thing. Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:29:14] Yeah. So that was becoming dangerously obvious, perhaps. So it was like, well, this might be a good time to restructure it and to think: could you keep doing the parts that are obviously the bits that I'm actually best at making the stuff. And what if we just paid you to do that, and then you could go find other people to pay you to do that as well. Kate Mueller: [00:29:33] So she kind of opened the door to the possibility and you're like, “Hey, this actually doesn't sound bad to me. This sounds pretty good.” Mat Patterson: [00:29:40] Yeah. And I think it had been opened before that door had been opened before. And I was like I'm not sure it wasn't the right time. But then America started to collapse in on itself in a terrible death spiral. And it seemed like, well, maybe now is a good time not to be completely shackled to this sinking continent. Kate Mueller: [00:30:01] A thought I have nearly every day, I must tell you. Mat Patterson: [00:30:07] Yeah. Kate Mueller: [00:30:08] Yeah. So it also let you diversify a bit, which in our current reality is incredibly useful. Also, I feel like we should talk about what you're currently doing. I've been like, you're freelancing, blah, blah, blah. So the name of your company, I guess, is More Human Content, right? Mat Patterson: [00:30:27] Yes, mostly because More Human was already taken. And I had to put content on there to be able to get a domain name. But the idea always was it's not about and people sometimes think it's all about AI. Like it's an anti-AI thing, but it's not. I think it's more about if anything, it's anti-large company and not in the sense that they shouldn't exist, but that if you're a small company, you should not act like a large company because you're throwing away so much of the benefit of being small, which is that you can be a person, you can have personality, and you can make choices about who you want to work with in a way that a large company just sort of has to deal with everybody because the market gets so big and you can't focus in on just “I like to work with these types of people” because you just can't, because you have a company that has to have a much larger customer base to survive. And so the idea was, well, I like writing the content–as we were just talking about–that has a bit of personality that is interesting that maybe you do risk turning some people off, but that's okay if you don't need everybody in the world to be buying your product, you're not Google. Mat Patterson: [00:31:32] You just need a much smaller number of people. And if you can talk to them like they're people and make them feel like they know who you are, as well, as a business or as an individual, then so much the better. And you can be more flexible and you can be more interesting and you can use the technology and the AI to amplify the things that make you different than big competitor who offers pretty much the same products. So many of us are in businesses where, yeah, of course, there's six other things that do basically what we do. So why choose us? So the idea was, yeah, I just try to work with people and where I can help them create content that does that, that makes them stand out, makes them interesting to their customers or their prospective customers. Kate Mueller: [00:32:18] Yeah, it's more human in the sense that very often those communications don't feel particularly human at all. Even in the pre-AI era, a lot of them did not feel, you get those weekly marketing newsletters. And I mean, even ten years ago, sometimes it was like, did a person write this? I'm sure a person did or a committee did or somebody had to have. But it doesn't really feel like there's a personality behind the thing. And so yeah, I do really like that distinction of it not being anti-AI so much as pro-human in recognizing, I think this is a thing that sometimes happens in business, that people feel that they need to sterilize to be competitive or to be professional or something, and that it's somehow unprofessional to stand out or to be unique. And companies are just composed of a whole bunch of people. So to me, it feels okay to be like, “Hey, we are human. Here's the human side of us. Here's us sharing some opinions about things. You probably won't like all of them, but some of them are probably you're going to be like, yeah, I relate to that. I have the exact same opinion or a nuance on that.” And there's just, yes, maybe this is also because I live in the US. So right now, I think a lot about the ways that institutions do or don't serve people or don't center humanity at all. We kind of have a choice in how we want to do these communications. And maybe we could choose to be more human and more personable. And boy, wouldn't that be so much more fun for everyone involved. Mat Patterson: [00:33:58] Absolutely. It would be. So the reason for what I try to write about is like, don't rush into something you don't have to do. I think if you are a large company, it sort of is inevitable that you end up just sanding off all of the edges of the corporate tone. And you use the corporate language because you get to a size at which you can't risk offending anybody. You bring in other people who are from other large companies, and they all talk in sort of the same way and use the same corporate language. And it just happens. It’s happened at every company I've ever been at. The more you grow, you just end up sort of–I’m making a hand gesture that will not come across on a podcast. Kate Mueller: [00:34:43] But it's coming together. Yeah. Mat Patterson: [00:34:46] It's a sort of a gravitational pull towards the middle, the middle nothingness of corporate sounding businesses. And a lot of that stuff. You have to have an HR department that does certain things with certain language, right? Because obviously the HR department is very important. I've been in small companies that desperately needed somebody to do some HR things. But the sort of language that comes along with all of these things makes everyone sort of sound the same and sort of sound a bit boring and a bit nothing. And also sometimes just incomprehensible because they don't write like humans anymore. They write like machines somehow. Kate Mueller: [00:35:24] Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:35:25] And all of that’s necessary to a degree. I think you can still fight against it. And I have been doing that to the annoyance of many people for a long time. But if you're small, you don't have to do any of that. And so it would be insane to start speaking like a big business when you don't have to. But I think that a lot of people kind of feel like, well, that's what makes me look professional. That makes me look like I'm a bigger business than I am, and that I'm more important than I am. Whereas, in fact, I think the opposite is true now, and particularly as we get into this age where everyone's talking to machines all the time. A person that sounds like a person or a business that sounds like, hey, we are some people who get you and we kind of get alongside you and help you solve your problems. So valuable. So don't throw it away until you absolutely have to. Kate Mueller: [00:36:08] I think this is a fantastic note for us to take a break on, because I want you all to think about that. So we're going to take a break and we will be right back. Kate Mueller: [00:36:16] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team's next knowledge base solution. You don't have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com. Kate Mueller: [00:36:39] And we are back with more from Mat Patterson. All right, Mat, so here's a question because I feel like a lot of the folks I know are kind of in this place of thinking, maybe I want to start picking up some freelance stuff, or maybe I've been doing it a little bit on the side, but I want to get more serious about it. And I have to start thinking about what am I going to call myself? How am I going to brand myself? What am I going to offer people? And so I think one of my questions for you in this vein is, as you were kind of coming up with More Human Content other than the domain name requirement, how did you make decisions about the kind of work that you wanted to be doing or were going to offer to do? Was it just like, “I've been doing this for long enough, I have a good feel for the kinds of work that I'm good at and I like doing”? Was there anything that you like kept even though you're not super over the moon about it, but it felt like it was a good thing to offer. Walk me through that process a little bit. Mat Patterson: [00:37:42] Yeah, it's a combo as it so often is. I mean, it does help. Ten years, so, and writing a newsletter, probably for a good more than half of that, I would say. And like any writer will tell you, like the more you write, the more you get a sense for like, what is my voice specifically as opposed to everyone else's? And so I have been fortunate in both of my last jobs where I've sort of created the company voice and tone by just being the person who wrote about it most of all. And so they sound more like me rather than a different company, which is good, obviously, but then also somewhat risky when you leave there and you’re like, “Can I write in any kind of different way? Have I accidentally trapped myself in a well of my own content?” So when I was thinking about leaving, which I did technically leave, I guess, and then immediately signed a contract. Kate Mueller: [00:38:45] You left the full-time gig and then signed a contract with them. Mat Patterson: [00:38:49] Yeah, and it's even better than that because being in Australia, I was already technically a contractor. So just a different kind of contractor now, but as I was thinking about that, Help Scout was very keen for me to keep doing the content that I was doing, which is the newsletter and the podcast and the videos and the articles and maybe a conference talk, I don't know, that hasn't happened yet, but that might. And so I knew I had that there, which is a great place to start. And I had to think about, well, what would I do in the other pieces? And so I guess in my mind, I have an idea of like, if the perfect client just popped into my life, it would look like this, which is probably, I'd love to find a startup who's just figuring out they're like, how are we going to talk to our customers and just sort of go through that development process of creating connections with the customers and understanding how they like to be talked to and how can we be interesting to them. But those people don't just magically appear at the moment you sign a contract. And so there's definitely other parts of writing work that just will pay the bills in the meantime that you can maybe introduce a little bit of a more interesting tone and voice into. Mat Patterson: [00:40:13] And so yeah, like there's some more kind of SEO type articles that need to be written. There's opportunities like the one I wrote for KnowledgeOwl, which was just “Write about the topics that we're interested in, but do that in an interesting way, please,” which is a great opportunity. So those kinds of things pop up here and there. And then there's especially a thing that you find, and we've already touched on this a couple of times, that once you sort of are connected into a company, they're like, “Could you also do this other thing? Because we don't have anyone else who can do it. Do you want to have a go at that?” Which is fun. Yeah, quite fun. And a way that you might find something out about your own skills or your own interests that you didn't know about. So sort of just remaining open to doing different kinds of writing and different kinds of content creation. But I have in my mind a pretty good sense of what I would like to do and which ones are maybe just for now while I need them. Kate Mueller: [00:41:09] Is there anything in there in the months you've been doing it that has surprised you? Mat Patterson: [00:41:13] I'm in a position where mostly the people that I'm working with are people who already knew me from that content that I was already creating. So they are mostly coming because that's something they want. So it's not too far off. Nobody's coming in and saying, “Could you do our corporate reports for the financial year, please?” I'm the wrong person for that. And they know that. Kate Mueller: [00:41:38] See earlier comments about spreadsheets. Mat Patterson: [00:41:41] Exactly. So I'm mostly attracting a certain type of client, which is great. Good for me. So that's not that surprising, I suppose. Whereas I suppose the thing that's more surprising is like, suddenly I'm back to running my own business again, which I haven't done for a long time. Mat Patterson: [00:41:59] And I'm like, oh, yeah. Yeah. I have, in a sense, traded some of the more tedious corporate stuff for well, now it's my own tedious corporate stuff, but at least it's mine, and that does feel different. Kate Mueller: [00:42:10] Yes. Although some of it is super tedious as a team of one. Some of the tax and compliance stuff in particular, or. Yeah, not my favorite tasks, but necessary. Mat Patterson: [00:42:24] Yeah. And at least I can just call them what I want to call them and they don't come with weird acronyms that I have to learn. Well, the government does. The government comes with its own acronyms, but that's what an accountant is for, is to explain that to me. Kate Mueller: [00:42:37] In my case, your local small business association gives little webinars that walk you through some of the ins and outs of that. So if you can find a good resource to do it. But there is, I think no matter what you do, there's going to be some tedious work that is not the stuff that you actually love doing. It's just. Is it corporation's tedious work or is it the tedious work you have to do to be an independent contractor in your country, state, whatever? Mat Patterson: [00:43:05] That's right. And there is a difference, I think when it's your own thing and you know what is genuinely required. And that's not always the same. In a larger company sometimes there's a lot of stuff that's going on that if we stop doing that, it would be fine. It's just because someone has decided, this is how this is the process that needs to happen. And in fact, if I didn't do that report every month, that nobody reads, the world would continue to turn in exactly the same way. But we're all going. There's always a little bit of that sort of work that is just performative work done to make someone else happy that nobody actually needed. And you just don't do that in a small business because there is no capacity to do it. You don't have that sort of seven levels of people that are required to somehow someone asking one question once turns into 12 different people doing reports every month that nobody reads. Kate Mueller: [00:43:56] Yeah. There is no space for that kind of busy work because, well, a) as you said, you know what actually needs to be done, what genuinely is a requirement and what isn't. But also you have a very finite number of resources. So you deploy them the best you can to solve the problems you need to solve. Even were you so inclined and what do you do? I will admit I haven't paid attention to this. Do you have a newsletter that is specifically for you at More Human Content? Mat Patterson: [00:44:32] I do. I just sent it out yesterday, in fact. Kate Mueller: [00:44:35] Ooh hoo hoo. Mat Patterson: [00:44:37] It's about fridges, sort of. In classic me style. Kate Mueller: [00:44:42] Probably starts with something about fridges and then becomes about something else and then circles back to the fridges near the end. Mat Patterson: [00:44:48] Don't give away my whole secret. Kate Mueller: [00:44:53] I mean, spoiler: sometimes I do similar things with the solo episodes, so I totally understand. Mat Patterson: [00:45:01] It is a nice pattern to have. I mean, I love an analogy. That's basically the secret to my whole career. Kate Mueller: [00:45:07] As dedicated listeners to this podcast know, it's almost every single solo episode is like, oh, here's a different analogy for talking about what we're doing. I mean, if you're not into it, you're probably not listening to the solo episodes because you must be sick to death of it by now. But if you are an analogy person, that content resonates. I love a good analogy. So maybe this is why I like your content so much, Mat, because we speak the same language. Mat Patterson: [00:45:33] Yeah. Someone wrote a reply to the Help Scout newsletter once that said, “Look, I see what you're doing every week. You've just got some weird thing. And then you make it about customer support.” And then they followed that up with, “But I really like it. I enjoy it every time. And it's always a fun surprise to see how you're going to get there.” Well, that's it. That's the whole thing really. Kate Mueller: [00:45:56] Yeah. I mean, it's. Mat Patterson: [00:45:57] You're not wrong. Kate Mueller: [00:45:57] You need a kind of structure to generate content on that kind of schedule and whatever little scaffold you need to get you there, I think is totally fine. And there will be people for whom it's off putting, but there will be people also who are like, hey, I can see what you're doing, but I dig it like, I'm here for it. Mat Patterson: [00:46:13] Because it's a newsletter. Like you get it once a week and you don't have to read it if you don't want to, and you just pick it up when you do. And it's different. I mean, and I feel bad for airport book authors. There's a certain type of business book where it is basically just that, right? I've got one idea. Let me explain it to you in 50 different ways, but because they put them all in a row in one book, you're like, this is insane. I don't need 100 examples that are teaching me the same thing, but it works in an email newsletter. Kate Mueller: [00:46:40] Two examples would have been sufficient. I mean, that is the airport book, right? Mat Patterson: [00:46:44] I mean, it's often just here's a blog post that got unexpectedly successful that we turned into a book and we really had to pad it out for the last two thirds. But in a newsletter situation, and because it's to an audience of people who are doing that work every day and that people are joining all the time and they're at different points in their career, and that you can repeat the same thing in different ways. And it just has to be like, well, this week, this one really got me like that made me think about it in a different way than it did before. And so you can get away with having that sort of repetitive pattern. It makes it a little bit easier to come up with a way to talk about the same topic over and over again in an interesting way. And it gives me an excuse to just read basically anything and then somehow make a link to the topic at hand, which is, it's a good way to live. Kate Mueller: [00:47:33] Because you have taken this position of kind of embracing your personality and doing a lot of these things, have there been points where that–I mean, that's a very conscious choice, first of all, and there is a certain amount of vulnerability and risk to making that choice. And so I'm curious, especially in the beginning, was that…did you have doubts about making that choice? Did you worry that you'd put it out there and then nobody would be interested in it or like it? Mat Patterson: [00:48:08] Hmmm. Yes. I mean, that's a short answer if you would like more than that though. Yeah. I would say it was a slow burn in that we didn't transition. You could probably go back, I could go back to HubSpot or wherever and find the earliest ones, which were much closer to here as a blog post of the week. Let me just put a paragraph of information with it. And so it's really evolved over quite a long time where I discovered that I could get away with putting some pretty silly jokes in. And making the subject lines and the previews, just little fun bits for me, or references to songs that probably most people have never heard. And so it was an experimental slow roll in that way. And it is, there is a risk in that it's got my face on it and my name and it's the internet. So I do try not to be too personal. I don't put my kids' names in there or anything. Keep a lot of that stuff off the internet as much as possible. But also, I am a white man in tech and so it's reasonably safe for me. I can get away with more things. Hooray for us. So it hasn't been dangerous in that way that I think I have been able to again, because the company's voice and tone was sort of the same as mine to a degree. Mat Patterson: [00:49:46] That gives me a little bit more license to be like, well, if I said it and I sort of am writing the way Help Scout writes, this is what Help Scout would say. But also, having your own personal name and face on the email newsletter means that I can say things that Help Scout would not say, and so we can be a little bit more pointed in a newsletter. Again, a newsletter is different, I think, because you're sending it to people. I can definitely say things in the newsletter that I would not put on the website, because on the website, there's too much chance that people are going to misinterpret it, or deliberately or accidentally misinterpret something or take it to an extreme that was clearly not intended. And then that goes everywhere. It just doesn't happen in the same way with the newsletter, because everyone's having their individual reading experience. They're not like corporately reading it and discussing it and social sharing it together and amping each other up into that classic kind of internet landslide that we see everywhere. So that's the beauty of email newsletters and also of putting someone's name on it is like, well, worse comes to worst. They could just say, well, it was his insane opinion and we've got rid of him. Kate Mueller: [00:50:54] Yeah, he's a loose cannon. Don't worry. We've taken care of it. They could distance themselves from you if they had to. But it also sounds like you kind of grew into defining that voice and grew into defining what the newsletter genre itself actually became, which is, I think, something that's true for all of us, no matter what kind of writing we're doing. That there is that feeling of like, okay, I know kind of technically, these are the ways that these types of documents function. I know X, Y, Z, but the longer you write those things, the more you do kind of build your own definition of what that content type is and how it should be structured, how it should function, what you can get away with, and what you can't get away with in it. Like there's, for me, this is definitely true that even in the KnowledgeOwl Support knowledge base, for example, there's stuff I write now that I would never have written eight years ago. I did not want to veer into best practices eight years ago. I was not comfortable going there. I did not feel that I should be prescriptive in any way. And one of the things I've learned over that time is that there's a good chunk of customers who want you to be prescriptive to say, “Do this, don't do that.” Kate Mueller: [00:52:12] And you can still say, “Take this with a grain of salt, still make your own decisions,” etc. but the folks who want it will come find it. And the people who don't want it won't come read it. Not unlike your newsletter point. You can put it out there and you think in the beginning that feels like a tremendous risk. And then you discover that actually it's not that huge of a risk because mostly it's the folks who really want it, who view it positively and find value from it, who come read the thing. I mean, I'm sure there's something that has backfired somewhere in there for me, but it's not significant enough for me to even remember it. I remember more things like, I had a customer reach out to debate what he thought was a typo, but was actually a style choice in how I had worded something. And so it turned out he thought he was correcting me, and instead I was like, “No, no, that was on purpose.” And it opened this huge style discussion. The beauty of being a writer who writes for other writers, you get some of these conversations. I remember that far more than I remember anybody responding to best practice guidelines I've given them. Mat Patterson: [00:53:17] Yes. Yeah. I mean, you're going to get some of that as well. Kate Mueller: [00:53:21] You have this interesting history in the sense that so much of that work you've done has had your name and your picture on it at the companies that you've been at. And so that has kind of allowed, to some extent, allowed you to build a personal following, even if you are no longer at that company. If people can kind of follow you wherever it is that you've gone, which feels like it must have been a tremendous advantage as you started going out on your own, because as you said, you are getting people who are already familiar with the work that you've done, already know your name, have kind of consciously sought you out because that's the kind of thing that they want, which is the best kind of marketing ever from like a personal brand or personal company standpoint. Well done you. Mat Patterson: [00:54:08] Yeah, totally by accident. But I will absolutely take the win. Kate Mueller: [00:54:12] Yes. Mat Patterson: [00:54:13] Yeah, I never went into it with that plan, I would say. It just sort of happened through Campaign Monitor, literally nobody else wanting to do blog posts. And then the two founders of the company getting a request for someone to speak at a conference, and them both absolutely not wanting to do it and going like, would you do this? You want me to fly from Australia to New York and do a talk? Sure. Off you go. That was the first talk I ever did. What an insane choice that was, by the way, too. Yeah, at the Javits Center in New York. It was mad. Good fun, though, but I really did nearly vomit before that. But it was sort of just going with the flow, which is pretty much my vibe as a person, I would say. The opportunities were there just following that path. I think a good book that I read is called Essentialism by Greg Someone. Kate Mueller: [00:55:15] Greg McKeown, maybe? Mat Patterson: [00:55:16] That's the one. Essentialism, which is basically a whole book, speaking of books, which probably could have been one chapter, but the whole book is really “You will be better off just doing the thing that you're really good at, rather than trying to get good at lots of other things.” And he does say it in a more interesting and more well-rounded way than that, but it did encourage me to not try to be good at everything. I don't have to try and learn to really understand the spreadsheets. I don't have to try and get deep into other parts of the business, which I did used to try to do, I think, in my earlier years, really try and keep on top of everything and try and learn everything. But then you get to know yourself a little bit. I'm like, well, I would be a terrible CEO. It's just an absolute nightmare scenario for me and anyone that I would have to work with. And coming to accept that I think about yourself and, you know what? I'm really good in this area. What if I just got even better there? And that would be more valuable to everybody, to me, to the people that are employing me. And yeah, that's pretty much what I have done, which I would say has caused some friction over the years, but it's probably been for the best for everyone. Kate Mueller: [00:56:36] It's one of those interesting things about working at smaller companies, early stage companies, because you do have the opportunity to wear a lot of hats, and sometimes that can make you feel like you have to try to wear all of those hats. I know this was, for me also very much the case that I felt like, “Oh, well, I'm a smart person. I can learn stuff. We don't have anybody to do X. I will do that now.” And I did that so many times that I eventually got to a point where I was like 80% of my job I don't actually like now because I've done all these things and felt that I needed to keep sustaining them or I should become better at them. And the power of stepping back from some of those to be able to say, “Actually, there's like three things I'm really good at here. And if it's possible, can I mostly just do those three things?” You still end up doing some of that other side stuff, but there is tremendous value to being able to focus your attention, because I would not have called myself a technical writer before I made that shift, because I was doing so many other things that I didn't feel I was putting enough into becoming a better tech writer to be able to say I really was one. And it was only once I said, you know what? I don't need to be doing these 12 things. Kate Mueller: [00:57:53] Someone else can do them, or we don't need to do them at all. Those are the options. And then to focus in on those three things, suddenly I, that freed up time for me to actually study best practices or really go check out the way other people had done stuff, or to just spend more time in my content instead of trying to keep a bunch of other balls in the air at the same time. There is huge power to doing that. And I think for many people, when they go the freelance route, they think they need to try to do a whole bunch of stuff. But I think to some extent, pick a small number of things that you know that you can do well. And as you said, some of these are things that are ideal for you. Some of them are things that are just for now so that you can pay the bills until you get that larger client bank or whatever. But there's huge power to not trying to be like a cafeteria and instead be like, here is my one-page menu. You get these three options here, these five options here, and two options here. And that's it. And I can be really good at that. And I can dial those in and I can give you really great portfolio examples of what I'm capable of doing there. And that should market itself to some extent. Mat Patterson: [00:59:05] Yes, absolutely. I love a one-page menu. Always a good sign. And there is a little bit of kind of inherent conflict in going back to be a freelancer or having your own thing and then of course you have to do a bunch of other things, but to your one-page menu idea, like, I don't have to try and offer every possible service to everybody. I can be, I can say no to things. And I think that's kind of the message of the book, Essentialism, is like, it's okay to say no when it's actually not going to be helpful, rather than just always saying yes and taking on a bunch of things and then doing your main job less well because you don't have any capacity for it anymore. So that was a good, helpful book for me. I recommend it. Kate Mueller: [00:59:52] Oh, thank you for the recommendation. I will find a link to it. We'll include that in the show notes for sure. And I guess maybe on that note, are there any other resources that have been really helpful to you that you would like to share with us, Mat? Mat Patterson: [01:00:05] I mean, a million, but we don't have time for that. I do try. Can I say libraries? They're pretty good. Kate Mueller: [01:00:13] You can say that. I'm a huge fan of libraries. Mat Patterson: [01:00:17] Yeah, I love a library. I think there is just benefit in reading quite broadly in that you never know what's going to just trigger something for you, especially if like the two of us, apparently, you're an analogy person. Just reading almost anything gives you just a different way of thinking about something. And you can make these connections in your brain or in your Obsidian library or whatever it is that you use. That's what I use. So good. That's a tip. I like secondhand bookshops as well, just because who knows what you're going to find. I found this book the other day which I'm going to show you on the screen. Kate Mueller: [01:00:56] Oh my God, How to Write Technical Books. Mat Patterson: [01:00:59] It's from 1952. John Gloag. Kate Mueller: [01:01:03] Gloag. Mat Patterson: [01:01:04] Yeah. Which you know. Kate Mueller: [01:01:06] Oh my gosh. Talk about a potential classic. Mat Patterson: [01:01:09] It's pretty good. It is funny in 1950 how pretty much the exact same problems are coming. And the guy. He just has a much more verbose way of saying it because it's 1950, but. Kate Mueller: [01:01:20] Oh, I love it. Mat Patterson: [01:01:22] Let me give you a sentence, ready? Oh hang on. I'm gonna have to put glasses on for this. Kate Mueller: [01:01:26] Yeah. And also an appropriate moment of silence to prepare, really. Mat Patterson: [01:01:32] Yes, so you can cut it out nicely. Okay. “Technical information need not be conveyed in a dull way, nor should the study of it impose a strain upon the faculties of the reader nor should the filling up of a form demand the initial effort of conquering an innate repulsion.” That's just one sentence. Love it. Kate Mueller: [01:01:50] I mean, bonus points for “innate repulsion.” Oh so good. Mat Patterson: [01:01:54] Don't get to use that one much these days anyway. I just love finding old, I've got some on copywriting back here and I've got some on various other elements. It's better than reading “Top Ten Ways to Blah Blah Blah” on whatever website that's just stolen it from all the other websites that have the same top ten list, but with their own product at the top. Kate Mueller: [01:02:15] Yeah, yeah, certainly more interesting. Kate Mueller: [01:02:18] And if you are an analogy person, it gives you great content to work into whatever it is you're working on. Mat Patterson: [01:02:24] Yeah. There's always good stuff to be had there. Let me give you another book: The Art of X-ray Reading. That's a good one. It's by Roy Peter Clark, the writing teacher. Kate Mueller: [01:02:33] Okay. Mat Patterson: [01:02:34] That basically tells you how to look at a piece of writing and understand how it's structured and how it's put together, and to learn from the writing rather than the content of the writing, if that makes sense. Kate Mueller: [01:02:47] Yeah, that does make sense. Mat Patterson: [01:02:49] And you can do that. Once you have that kind of mindset, you can do that to any other kind of content as well. How does this video actually work and why does it make me want to watch it? And what are they doing that's interesting? Which you can apply to all of your writing. Kate Mueller: [01:03:04] Yeah, it's a little bit like reading the structure rather than reading the content. And there are certain structures that just work better for like, I know this, I have certain structures that I am a little predisposed to just like better, no matter what the content is in them. And it is a bias that I have. But it also means that if something kind of meets that structure, I can go there regardless of what it's about most of the time. Mat Patterson: [01:03:32] Yeah, that same thing is true in music, right? There are certain musical structures that are more pleasing to us. We all know some songs which are popular just because they sort of sound like another popular song, but which in music is not so cool. But if you're doing it in like corporate writing, absolutely fine to just be like, just use the pattern that works, that people expect that they understand how to find the information they need. If you're trying to just communicate something and you're not trying to impress people with how cool you are. In a technical writing perspective, often you're just trying to transmit information and you can do that in an interesting way, but there is no shame in just using the structure that works for that because you're ultimately trying to help them. Kate Mueller: [01:04:13] Also, most of us are not trying to prove how cool we are. We're just. Mat Patterson: [01:04:16] Well, you're in the wrong job if you're trying to prove how cool you are. Kate Mueller: [01:04:19] That's right. If we were trying to be cool, we'd be doing different kinds of writing probably. Mat Patterson: [01:04:22] We wouldn't be on a podcast. Kate Mueller: [01:04:25] That's right, that's right. That's where all the cool people are. I've been told. Especially the folks who host podcasts. They are even cooler. Mat Patterson: [01:04:35] I mean podcasts about customer service. It doesn't get more cool than that. I think we can all agree and let's not say anything else about it. Kate Mueller: [01:04:45] And Mat, also, what is a great piece of advice that you've been given? It does not have to have anything to do with writing. Mat Patterson: [01:04:52] I mean, the thing that I would say, I don't even remember who gave me this advice and it's very obvious advice, but: just stop talking and start listening. It's such a customer service thing that you accidentally jump in with the answer before you've actually understood what it is that they need, because you didn't really listen to the question, or you didn't read the question properly, or you didn't spot that they're confused about their own question. The more you can train yourself to properly listen before you respond, the better. Good relationship life advice as well. And I would say not necessarily advice I have always been good at following, but it's always the advice that I come back to for myself. Kate Mueller: [01:05:37] Yes. I mean, that means that it has value because you keep returning to it. It becomes an aspiration rather than a thing that you successfully have already achieved, right? Mat Patterson: [01:05:49] Yes. Kate Mueller: [01:05:49] A lot of the best advice is more about that, about maybe a little bit how to live rather than what to do. Mat Patterson: [01:05:56] I should just get it tattooed on me somewhere. Kate Mueller: [01:06:03] And also completely random question because I thought of this earlier and then forgot to ask it. So you have the newsletter currently. Is there anything else you do that is explicitly marketing around your services and what you're currently doing? Mat Patterson: [01:06:19] Not right now, because I am in the stage of I've already got too much to fit into the week and so I don't need to. But also, what I learned in my first freelancing career is that you absolutely should be marketing now, when you have all the work you need, because you will need them later. So that is something that I have to get on to. The newsletter is part of that, but I probably want to get back to making some little videos or things that will just get me out there a little bit more for the days when I do need it. Which are coming. They're always coming. Kate Mueller: [01:06:53] Yeah. In the freelance world, it's feast or famine very often. And when you're feasting, it's really hard to make time to plan for the famine. Mat Patterson: [01:07:03] Yeah, famines are boring to talk about and think about. Makes me feel sad. And I don't want to. Kate Mueller: [01:07:08] If you wait until that point to deal with them, they're a lot longer and more painful, I suspect. Mat Patterson: [01:07:14] Yes. Stupid truth. Kate Mueller: [01:07:17] I don't know how anybody could listen to this and not want to follow you, get in touch, or something because you've been a delight. But if folks did listen to this and are like, I would really like to check out what he's doing, what would be the best ways for them to do that? Mat Patterson: [01:07:32] You should go to morehumancontent.com and just sign up for the newsletter. That's probably the easiest way. You can email me directly from that website as well, but you should sign up for the newsletter because it's the best, man. It's the best way to be reminded that I exist, which is important to me, if not to you. And also you'll get a sense of what I'm up to and what I do. Kate Mueller: [01:07:56] Yeah. And you can read about fridges. Mat Patterson: [01:07:58] And you can read about fridges. Kate Mueller: [01:08:00] This week. Mat Patterson: [01:08:01] Yeah. Kate Mueller: [01:08:02] There you go. And whatever random analogy of the week it is. Mat Patterson: [01:08:06] And sometimes it's not even an analogy. Every now and then I have to break the pattern so that I don't become too predictable. Kate Mueller: [01:08:11] Oh that's true. That's true. You've been doing weekly content for a really long time at this point. Mat Patterson: [01:08:20] Yeah. Kate Mueller: [01:08:20] Do you have issues where you struggle coming up with stuff, or have you trained your brain so well at this point that it earmarks things to be used? Mat Patterson: [01:08:32] It is like a deliberate process because it is hard. There are definitely weeks when I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to write about, and I write Help Scout’s newsletter on Monday mornings, for whatever reason that's just how it happens. So I tend to on Sundays, which is definitely something you shouldn't do if you're just getting paid to do a job, but it's just how it has ended up working for me. On Sundays I go to my inbox on Obsidian and I scroll through. Every time I read anything that I think might just be interesting, doesn't have to be about any particular topic, I just kind of send myself a note. And so then I can scroll through here. British Airgraph service. That's just, that's the whole note. There's one that says chicken of tomorrow. Nancy McGee. Sometimes they're just puns. CREmpathy. It's like a CRM and empathy combined. Oh, so that'll turn up in something eventually. Craft versus cruft. Some of these things have been here for years. And every time I look at them, I'm like, no, not today. And then one day it will be the right time and something will connect with that little phrase or that snippet or that link, and it will just be like, yes, I can do something with that today. Found it on the duck web. The duck web, not the dark web, you see. I don't know if that one's ever going to make it, to be honest. It's been there for a number of years. Kate Mueller: [01:10:05] I feel like that's a challenge at this point. Can you clear out the thing that's been in there for years and finally make it happen? The duck web. Mat Patterson: [01:10:15] That'll be. I know where that's going to go now. That's okay. It's just given me an idea. Let me make myself a note before I forget. This has been valuable already, see? Kate Mueller: [01:10:27] See? Not-boring, more human content right here. Mat Patterson: [01:10:31] Absolutely. Kate Mueller: [01:10:32] Well, Mat, thank you so much. This has been an absolutely delightful conversation, and I appreciate you sharing your time and your experience. Mat Patterson: [01:10:40] Oh, thank you so much. It was great fun. Kate Mueller: [01:10:48] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is co-produced by our podcast Head of Operations, Chad Timblin, and me. Post-production is handled by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio with editing by Dillon, transcription by Madi, and general post-production support by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can order The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and other merch from the Merch tab on thenotboringtechwriter.com. You can check out KnowledgeOwl's products at knowledgeowl.com. And if you want to work with me on docs, knowledge management coaching, or revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller, and you are the not-boring tech writer.