👋 Welcome

Hi there! Thank you for considering doing a guest post on High Growth Engineer. I’m looking forward to collaborating with you and sharing your writing with 75k+ subscribers.

Below, you can find my recommended writing guidelines to ensure high readership and a faster iteration process.

✅ Guidelines

Phase 0: Aligned understanding

Before moving forward, we need to align on a few expectations to ensure a smooth process:

  1. By writing and working on your piece together, I am not obligated to send it to my subscribers. If we come to a consensus it isn’t a good fit for the newsletter, then you can still use what we worked on for your own personal use and blog.
  2. Working on this guest post will likely be more work for both of us than what we typically do. On average, I go back-and-forth with guests 4-7 times before finally posting. Guest posts raise the bar for the newsletter, present your interesting story and lessons, and give both of us an opportunity to learn from each other. Some people view guest posts as a quick, “I’ll send you a draft, you post it, and I get famous.” If that’s your expectation, then it’s ok to split ways now before we start together.
  3. The better your post and more polish you add, the better result for you on a wider scale. The guest posts that do the best follow the rest of this document closely and work with me iteratively without skipping steps. By sending this out to 70k+ subscribers, this post can be your time to give your personal brand a big boost, or a time to do the opposite. I want you to get that big boost, as it also helps me. I’m going to do everything I can on my part to help you get there. But you need to be willing to put in the work too. You can expect to spend at least 8-12 hours in total on writing and editing with me.

If all of this works for you, then let’s move to the next phase 🚀

Phase 1: Outline

Provide an outline before writing a first draft and use a few bullets in each section to share what ideas you have with me.

Here is an example of a great outline by Staff SWE, Gourav Khanijoe: See example outline here. Your outline does not need to follow this exact format. I just wanted to show you one as an example.

You can find my newsletter template below. You are not required to use the template, but it is recommended.

At the very least, there should be the following unless discussed ahead of time:

  1. An intriguing intro explaining why the topic is important to the reader
  2. Actionable takeaways with examples mixed with personal stories and anecdotes. Use at least 1-2 visuals to communicate your ideas. They can be Excalidraw diagrams or screenshots of the idea being used in practice. Here’s an example post with a few diagrams.