Commissions

Trade press, industry publications, and the outlets your buyers already read. A contributed piece has to survive an editor who did not commission it as a favor. That means an argument, evidence that holds, and a claim somebody could disagree with. Most submitted thought leadership fails on the third one.

The long piece a company needs and cannot write itself. Usually because the people who know the argument are the people with no time to build it, and the people with time do not know which half is load-bearing. I have been on both ends of that inside a software company.

A named idea your team can use in a room without you. This is the harder version and the one worth paying for. A framework has to be portable, checkable, and specific enough to be wrong. There are eleven on this site if you want to see what that looks like.

Vintage release forecasts, market reads, category structure. This is the analyst seat. I wrote these for a living, and the discipline of publishing a call with a date attached is different from writing an opinion.

Both arrangements are normal here and you should know which one you are buying. Some commissioned work carries my byline. Some carries yours or your company's, and my name does not appear. I take both. What does not change is the standard: I do not write an argument I would not put my own name on, whether or not it goes on.

I do not write to a keyword brief, and I do not do volume. If the requirement is twelve posts a quarter, I am the wrong person and there are people who are good at that. I do not write arguments I do not believe. If the piece needs a claim I think is false, I will tell you before we start rather than after you have paid for it. And nothing on this site was commissioned. The essays here are unpaid, nobody reviewed them, and that is what makes them a sample worth reading.