The Digital Mycelium: My Synergistic Content Creation Ecosystem
The System and Tools That Built My 33K+ Following on Substack and LinkedIn.
When people ask me how I gained 30,000+ followers on LinkedIn or grew my Substack to 7,000+ subscribers in under a year, I’m often speechless.
As my strategy is based on pure intuition.
In this post I want to shine a light on this intuition. Especially on the system and web of tools that have been vital to make my communication ecosystem work.
So, here it is.
Our tools and technologies are becoming increasingly networked and interdependent, and the lines between them are blurring.
—Kevin Kelly
Nothing in an ecology stands alone.
—Nora Bateson
Step 1 — Collection 🐚
To truly write from abundance, I curate and collect a diversity of meaningful ideas through:
Arc, a clean and calm Chrome replacement to organize my tabs 🗂️
Beeper, to have all my messages in one place 💬
Bullet Journal, to reflect on the past, sense the present and envision the future ✍️
Reader, to read, highlight and take notes of all my books and articles (syncs automatically to Sublime and Heptabase) 📚
Airtable, Google Sheets and Google Forms for creating (CRM) databases🗄️
Kumu for visualizing databases into relational maps 🗺️
Sublime to easily collect, share and discover related ideas 🐚
Step 2 — Distillation ⚗️
I distil and refine my ideas and writing with:
Heptabase (previously Obsidian) to make sense of complex topics and visually outline my thoughts and articles 🧠
Claude, Grammarly and ChatGPT to assist with writing and brainstorming and Perplexity and Google Notebook LM to assist with research 🤖
PS: as I fell in love with the ‘digital gardening tool’ Heptabase so much, I became a Heptabase affiliate 🥳 If you become a paying subscriber through the link below, you help support my work at no extra cost to you 🙏
Step 3 — Publishing ⛵
I focus on (publically) nurturing my writing on:
LinkedIn to share learnings, test ideas, ask questions, cultivate connections and drive conversations 🗣️
Substack to share longer-form articles 📝
Step 4 — Reposting 🕸️
By being platform agnostic, you can use other platforms to increase the reach of your message:
LinkedIn posts are reposted on Substack Notes, Instagram and Facebook 🔄
Substack newsletters are republished on Medium and LinkedIn, and reposted on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and in relevant WhatsApp, Facebook, Hylo, Slack, Mighty Networks and Circle networks and communities 📢
Key questions
As I reflect on how I’ve built my communication ecosystem, these questions guide my strategy, and I encourage you to ask them as well.
Where and how do you curate and collect meaningful information?
How do you refine and distil your ideas?
Where do you publically share and nurture your ideas?
Which niche communities, networks and platforms are you connected to that can help amplify your message?
Get Access To My Toolbox 🧰
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
― Marshall McLuhan
I’m a total tool nerd 🤓
That’s why I created a database with all of my favourite tools for paying subscribers
It includes 100+ tools that help with writing, learning, research, project management, scheduling, note-taking, systems mapping, community weaving and much more.
So, here we go.
Here is my database with 100+ tools, sorted by the tools I use often, I use sometimes, I want to try out, or have tried and tested 👇