Thanks for the mention, JJ. The reason my articles don’t all receive a ton of claps is due to the fact that my audience is comprised of people who aren’t writers on medium. Their behavior is different because they’re not invested in learning about the platform and how it works.

They’re often VCs, PE folks, marketers, and founders, and they tend not to clap or comment, yet they’ll contact me directly to contract me for projects. Work that garners more claps are personal essays and fiction, which I suppose attracts more writers — but they aren’t my core audience and that’s deliberate on my part.

I never considered claps indicative of impact; I measure success through reads, people who contact me directly and let me know my work has affected them, and new client leads. Everything else is arbitrary.

-f