#FridayFeedback: 2 Things I Didn't Know on Monday

With the soft launch of Fresh Security on Wednesday, this week has been focussed on marketing and communicating our values. We have a lot to learn, and it takes time to digest all the details. But two stand-out ideas from this week are:

1. Micro-stories are rocket fuel for a team
2. blog.freshsec.com vs freshsec.com/blog are different, and it matters

Micro-stories are rocket fuel for a team

Micro-stories are the two-sentence stories that we tell each other to help us understand who we are and what we are doing. Time and again this week, I noticed these stories being shared.

"I just talked to X, and they didn't sign a supplier contract, because they used Fresh Security and found..."

I'm sure I heard some of the stories a dozen times, but each time it gave a little boost - that's why we are doing it. That's why we're building Fresh Security.

blog.freshsec.com vs freshsec.com/blog are different, and it matters

Blogging is meant to be easy. Write. Publish. Done. Well, that's the theory at least, but as ever the devil is in the detail. When we were setting up the blog, there was a 3-minute conversation: Where do we host the blog? What domain? We decided to use blog.freshsec.com because we had a set of processes that we could reuse and it "would all be fine".

We were wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, but we certainly made a mistake.

As a new domain, we need to earn the trust of search engines and prove over time that we are creating useful content about cybersecurity. As Cloudflare (https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-best-practices-workers-part-1/) explains:

"A subdomain is equal and distinct from a root domain. This means that a subdomain's keywords are treated separately from the root domain."

So there is absolutely nothing wrong with using a subdomain for a blog... It just takes twice as much content for search engines to recognise our contribution. As a time-poor startup, that's something we'll be changing sooner rather than later.

Hope you have a great weekend.

J