Why Founders Should Write (Even If No One Reads It)

Writing is the highest-leverage thinking tool available to founders. It is not content marketing, not personal branding, not audience building — it is the act of forcing clarity on ideas that would otherwise stay vague, untested, and invisible. After 25+ years of building businesses, I’ve found that the quality of my decisions improves in direct proportion to how much I write about them before making them.

I didn’t always believe this. For most of my career, I operated on instinct. Conversations. Whiteboard sessions. Quick decisions made on the move. That worked — until it didn’t. The moments where I got stuck, where FiLLi hit a wall, where I couldn’t explain to my team why we were doing what we were doing — those were almost always moments where I hadn’t thought clearly enough. And the reason I hadn’t thought clearly enough is that I hadn’t written anything down.

Why Should Founders Write?

There’s a popular idea that founders should write to “build an audience.” To attract investors, customers, talent. To become a thought leader.

I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong. But it’s not why I write.

I write because writing is where I find out what I actually think.

There’s a difference between having an idea and being able to explain it. You can feel something is true — a market insight, a strategic direction, a product decision — but until you try to put it in sentences, you don’t know if it holds up.

Writing is the stress test.

When I started building ashmo.io, I didn’t have a clear thesis for why I was doing it. I had a feeling. Something about wanting to own my own platform, wanting to document what I’ve learned, wanting to build something outside of FiLLi that was entirely mine.

But feelings aren’t strategies. The clarity came from writing. From sitting down and trying to articulate — in actual words, on an actual page — what this platform was for, who it was for, and why it mattered to me.

“You don’t write because you have clarity. You write until you have clarity.”

That single insight changed how I think about publishing. The article isn’t the output. The thinking is the output. The article is just the artifact.

What Happens When You Write Regularly?

Something strange happens when you write consistently. You start noticing patterns in your own thinking that you’d never see otherwise.

When I wrote about why brand positioning is the hardest thing, I didn’t set out to write about positioning. I set out to understand why so many founders I’ve met — smart, capable people — kept making the same mistake of staying vague. Halfway through writing it, I realised I was also writing about my own early mistakes at FiLLi. The piece taught me something about myself that I hadn’t consciously understood before.

That’s the hidden value. Writing isn’t just communication. It’s self-diagnosis.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after committing to a regular writing practice:

Before Writing Regularly	After Writing Regularly
Ideas stayed vague and abstract	Ideas became specific and testable
Repeated the same strategic mistakes	Recognised patterns before they repeated
Struggled to explain decisions to my team	Could articulate the “why” clearly
Held too many half-formed thoughts in my head	Externalised thinking, freeing mental space
Confused activity with progress	Distinguished between motion and direction

The table looks tidy. The reality wasn’t. It took months of awkward, poorly-written drafts before writing started to feel like a natural part of how I operate. Most of those early drafts will never see the light of day. That’s fine. They weren’t for anyone else.

Does Anyone Actually Need to Read It?

This is the question that stops most founders from starting. “Who’s going to read this?” “What if nobody cares?” “I’m not a writer.”

I understand every one of those objections because I had all of them.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the readership is secondary. If people read it, great. If they don’t, the writing still did its job — because the job was never to attract an audience. The job was to think clearly.

That said, something interesting happens when you publish anyway. Not when you publish to perform, but when you publish honestly. People who think similarly find you. Slowly. Over time. Not in the viral, thousands-of-followers way. In the quiet, one-email-at-a-time way.

The act of publishing also creates accountability. When an idea is sitting in a private note, I can be lazy with it. I can leave it half-formed and tell myself I’ll finish it later. But when I know it’s going on ashmo.io, I hold myself to a higher standard. Not because anyone’s checking — but because I am.

Publishing is a discipline. And discipline, as I wrote about in patience is not passive, is the version of patience that actually produces results.

Why Don’t More Founders Write?

I think there are three honest reasons.

First, it’s slow. Writing a thoughtful piece takes hours. Sometimes days. In a world where founders are measured on speed — ship fast, iterate fast, decide fast — sitting down to write 1,500 words about what you believe feels like a luxury you can’t afford.

But it’s not a luxury. It’s maintenance. You maintain your car, your body, your relationships. Writing is how you maintain your thinking. Skip it for long enough and the engine starts misfiring — decisions get fuzzy, communication gets muddled, strategy drifts.

Second, it’s exposing. When you write honestly about what you think, you create a record. You can be wrong. You can be judged. You can contradict yourself six months later. That vulnerability is uncomfortable, especially for founders who are expected to project certainty.

I’ve made my peace with this. I’d rather have a public record of how my thinking evolved — including the parts I got wrong — than maintain an illusion of consistency. Real thinking is messy. Pretending otherwise helps no one.

Third, it doesn’t feel like “real work.” Founders are wired for action. Building product. Closing deals. Managing teams. Writing an essay about your beliefs doesn’t feel productive in the same way.

But I’d argue it’s the most productive thing you can do in a week. One hour of clear writing can save you ten hours of misaligned execution. One well-articulated principle can prevent a hundred bad decisions downstream.

How Is Writing Connected to Building?

When I started building ashmo.io, the technical decisions — Astro, Netlify, GitHub, Markdown — were the easy part. The hard part was answering: what is this platform for?

I could have said “it’s my personal website” and moved on. But that answer wasn’t good enough. It didn’t give me a filter for what to include and what to leave out, what to write about and what to skip, how to structure the story I was telling.

The clarity came from writing about it. Not writing copy for the website — writing to myself about why this mattered. Paragraphs that nobody will ever see. Messy, circling, repetitive paragraphs where I kept trying to pin down the thing I actually cared about.

Eventually it crystallised: ashmo.io exists because I want to think in public. Not perform. Not build an audience. Think.

That clarity changed everything downstream. The design got simpler. The content strategy got clearer. The decisions about what to include became obvious.

This is what I mean when I say writing is building. The founder who writes clearly about their vision builds a clearer company. The founder who can articulate their positioning in writing creates a brand that their team can actually execute on. The founder who documents their thinking creates an institutional memory that survives beyond any single conversation.

What About AI? Does Writing Still Matter When Machines Can Do It?

This question comes up constantly now. If AI can generate a competent blog post in thirty seconds, why spend hours writing one yourself?

Because the value was never in the blog post.

The value is in the cognitive work that happens while you write. The connections your brain makes between ideas. The moment where you type a sentence and realise it’s not quite right, and the process of figuring out why it’s not right teaches you something you didn’t know before.

AI can produce text. It cannot produce the thinking that happens inside you while you struggle with text. That struggle is the point.

I use AI tools. I’m building with them. I’m not a purist about this. But the writing I do on ashmo.io — the thinking pieces, the reflections on what I’ve learned — those are mine. Not because I’m precious about authorship, but because the act of writing them is where the learning happens. Outsource the writing and you outsource the thinking.

“AI can write your words. It cannot do your thinking. The founders who understand this distinction will have an unfair advantage.”

What Does a Writing Practice Actually Look Like?

I don’t have a romantic process. I don’t wake up at 5am with a leather journal and a cup of pour-over coffee.

My process looks like this: I notice something — a pattern in business, a mistake I keep making, a question I can’t answer. I open a blank document. I write badly for a while. I come back to it the next day. I delete half of it. I write more. Eventually, something emerges that feels true.

Some pieces take a few hours. Some take weeks. The one you’re reading right now went through four versions before I stopped rewriting it.

The discipline isn’t in the quality of any single piece. It’s in the consistency. Showing up to the blank page even when you don’t feel like you have anything to say — especially when you don’t feel like you have anything to say — because that’s usually when the most honest writing happens.

Is This Really About Writing?

Honestly, I’m not sure.

I think what I’m really talking about is the discipline of externalising your thinking. Writing happens to be the medium that works for me. For someone else it might be sketching, or recording voice notes, or building prototypes.

The point is: get the ideas out of your head and into a form where you can examine them. Where you can stress-test them. Where you can share them with someone and say “does this make sense?” — and actually know whether it does, because you’ve made it concrete enough to evaluate.

For founders, this matters more than most people realise. We make hundreds of decisions a week. Most of them are small. But the big ones — the ones about positioning, about strategy, about what kind of company we’re building — those deserve more than instinct. They deserve the slow, uncomfortable, clarifying work of being written down.

That’s why I built ashmo.io. That’s why I write, even when nobody reads it.

Not because writing is the product. Because thinking is the product. And writing is how I make sure the thinking actually happened.