When I started Vancouver Tech Journal, it wasn’t a grand plan. It was an email. That’s it—a simple summary of what was happening in Vancouver’s tech scene.
There were no ads, no business model, no community roadmap. Just consistency. I wrote it, sent it, and did it again.
What most people don’t see is what came before VTJ: roughly 75 other blogs and websites I started that went nowhere. Each one taught me something—about writing, about audience, about the internet—and then quietly died. And that’s fine. Those “failures” were the training ground.
Eventually, one project hit: a little tech newsletter I started “off the side of my desk” while working in government, because I missed writing.
And here’s the thing people underestimate:
You get an unbelievable amount of credit simply for doing the work consistently.
Everyone has ideas. Few people execute them. Fewer still stick with them long enough for compounding to kick in.
For VTJ, compounding looked like this:
5 subscribers → 10 → 50 → 100 → 1000 → 30k in 3 cities
A gated “ecosystem guide” that drove hundreds of signups in a day
The Overstory acquisition and paid growth
In-person events that became core to the local ecosystem
None of that was a moonshot. It was stacking small, boring actions over and over.
MrBeast tells creators who ask him for advice: “Go make 100 videos, then we’ll talk.” By the time you’ve shipped 100 of anything, you’ve learned 90% of what you need.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s this:
Execute in public. Let people see the work. Keep going long after you’re bored of explaining it.
That’s how momentum builds.