Now With Less Dust!
A few months ago I started writing for an East Coast startup*. I was writing mostly humor-driven creative content, sprinkled with some site development while we prepared for official launch. At first, I sort of felt like I hit the jackpot. I was one of the only female voices, I was able to inject my specific sense of humor into my work, and I would have it shot directly to a pretty large, previously established audience. I poured my heart into the shit. Staying up until 3am to work on rewrites was no big deal and working with a team of other ambitious young people in my age group was refreshing. As launch grew closer, the editors noticed the things people responded to most were slightly different than the topics I had been writing. The humor bar was set lower, and we were looking at a lot more dick and fart jokes placed side by side with cat... stuff. I'm all for dicks and farts and cats, man. Farting cats with dicks, even. But suddenly I was asked to dumb down the things I knew were funny and introspective, because they wouldn't receive as much traffic. Following that, I was also told to refrain from writing anything female-centric, because the audience wasn't there. Womp. I went from feeling like I had wiggled into an awesome internet hidey-hole to realizing my name was going to be attached to many articles including the word "poo". After 140 characters, the word "poo" loses its nutty luster, I think. I decided to end my participation in the project, and recently read in Business Insider that the startup is doing very well, and is landing over 20 million visitors a month. I don't feel like an asshole for not sticking it out to see if I could've had a little more court for my verbal balls to play in. I would have felt like an asshole for settling. Settling. ::shudder:: Settling is for people who decide drinking PBR because it's cool is worth losing 10 years of alcohol consumption to a shit beer. Never settle. I made the choice to stop working on katality.com when the startup approached me, and I realize now that writing to a few hundred people from my lady-heart is better than to millions from a Whoopie Cushion. I don't know if I'll stick to tumblr long, or re-launch katality, but I'm hoping you all hang with me while I figure out the right combination of food, gaming, and generally weird shit I'm pretty good at preachin' 'bout. *There's no point naming the startup or linking to the article in BI. I genuinely wish them success and admire the drive behind the small team making the thing happen. Just wasn't a good fit for me at the time.
