This was published on January 15, 2015 on Hatch, our internal version of Medium. See Hatching Inside Medium for context on this collection.

Medium Changed His Life

Last Tuesday, we at Backchannel bumped the story we’d scheduled for that Friday and decided to see if we could find one or two UGC (user-generated content) stories that would clear our bar. Executive Editor Sandra Upson came up with two: one about a self-described “actual teenager” discussing what social networks he and his friends liked, and a story about washing out of Y Combinator. As we do in these cases, we asked the authors if it would be cool to move the story to Backchannel, and if we could do more editing and make them look better.

On Wednesday we noticed that the teen story was taking off. We decided to publish it asap. By the time we got it up, there were upwards of 30K views. And it kept going. And going. We’re not sure how much Backchannel connection helped, but by the end of the next day we already fulfilled our 2015 Q1 OKR of having at least one story go viral.

But that’s our story, not his. Andrew Watts’ story is much better.

Andrew’s story was shared on every possible outlet. Even better, his ideas were being taken seriously and debated as a major topic of the day. Danah Boyd even wrote a testy rejoiner to his post that itself went a bit viral. Andrew become a celebrity of sorts. TechCrunch flew him out to SF to interview him. Of course we invited him to Medium and David Aloi gave him a great tour. In between Medium and TechCrunch, he had lunch at Google. By then he had his second byline on Backchannel, a story we assigned — and paid him for.

The point is this. Andrew Watts, who had no connections whatsoever, decided one day to post to Medium. He thought a handful of people might read it and that was good enough for him. But our platform helped him reach a half a million people. Those readers weren’t click-baited by a phony headline, or lured by some bizarre perversion of humanity, but engaged with a fairly long-form discussion that spurred a lot of further discussion — exactly what Andrew hoped for, times maybe 1000x. As a result, he not only experienced a bit of temporary stardom but got positive exposure to the kind of people he one day wants to work for. And even met some of them. Oh, and he became a professional writer.

It is quite possible, maybe even likely, that many years from now, Andrew Watts will say the turning point of his life was the day he clicked “New Story” on Medium and started to share his thoughts.

He is our new poster child. Er, poster teen.