Hi, I'm Jan König 👋. I'm one of the founders of Jovo, 28 years old, and live in Berlin. < Go back to learn more.

'Doing things no one else enjoys' as competitive advantage

Last week, we launched the 2.0 beta version of the Jovo Framework after months of work. On Friday afternoon, I sat down and recorded a video for our migration guide:

While working on the big v2 launch, it didn't really make sense to publish any new tutorials and videos, because they would soon become outdated. This is why I couldn't wait to step back into the tutorial game once we're closer to the launch.

That moment, it struck me: I really love (or, I've grown to love) the process of creating content around our tools. The whole thing feels like "learning by teaching" for me.

The second thing I realized: most tool creators hate writing docs and tutorials.
 

You're great at stuff you love

I strongly believe that you can only get really great at something that you truly enjoy doing.

This also means that it's really difficult to compete at something you don't like with people that love it.

And this is what you can turn into a competitive advantage.
 

Do stuff others perceive as tedious

I've already written about this in my IDE of Open Source Software Growth letter: I believe that great docs are extremely important for adoption: They are usually the first interaction between your user and your tool.

Yet, many creators just want to focus on building the actual tool and view writing docs and tutorials as an afterthought. It's just nothing they enjoy doing.

And this is why we decided to embrace this as one of our core drivers of growth: Great docs, great tutorials, great examples. And we also believe this is why other frameworks haven't been as adopted our ours, because they aren't as easy to learn. And to discover: We're getting most of our users from Google searches.
 

What about stuff I don't like?

Of course, there are plenty of other things that you might not like as much as others. It's the same for us. I will talk about how we're dealing with this in an upcoming episode.
 

Is there anything you enjoy that others might not as much?

- Jan

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