Why I Hired Santa

My alter-ego increases productivity, focus and encourages a consistent voice for my startup, Tap.

On top of that, there are other benefits to having Santa on staff:

• Santa is well known and has a good reputation for someone with ancient celebrity.
• Everyone is Santa. A separate identity means any writing collaborator can take advantage of these same benefits.
• Noone is Santa. Because nobody actually is Santa, within the company we can criticize Santa’s work and tone. You can’t be afraid of hurting the feelings of someone that doesn’t exist.
• It gets lonely as a solo-founder. Now less so.

As a solo-founder and developer, writing is an important part of my process. But it’s hard. It takes a huge effort to produce consistent meaningful content, on top of creating the rest of Tap.

I have two questions I want to focus on for any given piece of writing:

• What’s the story?
• Who’s it for?

These questions define my strategy and need careful alignment with product development. However, until hiring Santa, the questions that occupied my head were:

• What is the tone of this piece?
• What is the purpose of the writing?
• Am I qualified to write on the subject?

These questions are in Santa’s domain now. And the answer of them shouldn’t change from piece to piece.

Anyway, I stumbled into the alter-ego technique, and found out it worked pretty well. It turns out, it’s not just me and there’s some studies on "The Batman Effect" supporting the effectiveness of alter-egos.

If you're interested in finding out how Santa helps Tap grow, follow us on Twitter