Chapter 5 · 20 min

The four original jobs

You can leave this chapter when you can assign any draft to one job, or delete it, and you know which job you will protect for 90 days.

4–6 originals a week is enough under 1,000. More than that usually means you stole time from the reply block. Each original does one job. If a draft is doing two jobs, it is doing zero.

Job 1: Explainer

Save a busy person ten minutes. One mechanism, one constraint, one next step. “How Phoenix treats a reply” is an explainer. “My philosophy of building in public” is a sermon. End with a specific case question so people can answer.

Job 2: Scoreboard

Turn the account into a journey. Friday numbers. “Week 3: 12 peer replies/day, 4 unprompted replies, 2 follows from Column A.” Ugly numbers count. Fake hockey sticks train you to lie.

Building a journey people want to follow.
- Daniel Smidstrup (@DanielSmidstrup) https://twitter.com/DanielSmidstrup/status/2089721782886424941

A post you can copy every Friday:

Week [N]. Followers: [start] to [end]. Profile visits: [x] Replies written: [x] Authors who replied back: [x] Killed this week: [format or habit] Doubling next week: [format or habit]

Job 3: Proof artifact

A thing that exists. A screenshot of a working UI. A before/after. A clip. Not “excited to announce.” Luckforest’s milestone posts at 300 / 500 / 900 worked because they were artifacts of a run.

Job 4: Opinion that travels

A sentence a peer would quote. Quotes are weighted like replies. The opinion has to be narrow enough to be wrong. “Distribution matters” cannot be wrong. “A vibe-coded app without a reply block is a private repo with a domain” can be argued with. That argument is the point.

Story is the spine

The four jobs are containers. Story is what makes people stay. Hallam teaches four shapes, and the scoreboard and proof jobs are where they live:

Shape	What it is
The failure	A real loss, told without collapsing your credibility.
The bet	What you committed to and the number you are walking toward: “90 days, 186 to 1,000.”
The journey with a number	“Day 73, $6.2k MRR.” A dated scoreboard with one detail that makes it human.
The transformation	Then versus now, with the ugly middle left in.

Tone rule: vulnerable without losing credibility. Share the stress that cost you something and what you did next. Do not share “I’m a mess and have no idea.” People follow someone who is in the fight and still keeping the scoreboard. Interleave story posts with explainers and proof so you do not story-dump every day.

Proof beats claims. “I help founders grow” earns nothing. A screenshot of the analytics, the invoice, the follower graph or the working tool is the post. If you cannot screenshot it yet, you do not get to claim it yet. Build something screenshot-able this week.

Kill list for originals

Changelogs. Nobody outside the room cares.
“Excited to announce.” Announcements are for lists you already have.
Raw chatbot output. The cadence is visible.
Off-niche hot takes. You train a graph you do not want.
Quote-dunks. Cheap reach, negative gravity.

Weekly mix: two explainers, one scoreboard, one proof, one opinion. If you only have three slots, drop the opinion first, never the scoreboard.

Drill · 20 minutes

Label your last five originals as a job or as kill. Rewrite one kill into one job. Schedule next Friday’s scoreboard with the three numbers you will publish even if they are ugly.