Walk Big is, first and foremost, a content company. Our content is our brand and our brand is our content, but it’s not enough to create content people want to read. Any good content company also needs a content creation system its writers actually want to participate in.

Your content is your writers and your writers are your content. We want our writers to get something back from the content they create from us. That means thinking about what writers want. I may be a CEO now, but I spent the first few years of my career in the early 2000s (back when people still wore watches) as a struggling writer, cranking out content for a variety of entertainment outlets and reviewing terrible movies as a film critic, before starting my own media outlet in Cinema Blend. The one thing I wanted most during that period, and so rarely got, was feedback. When I got it, my writing took huge leaps forward. When I didn’t, I wandered around in a fog wondering where to go next. Writers want to get better. Writers want collaboration. Writers need feedback.

Good writers crave feedback because good writers know that to become even better writers, you need an objective third party to help point out what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right. Most content companies hire writers to create words and toss those words into a void. They give writers their assignments, writers turn them in, and then never hear anything else about them. No feedback, no way to know if they’re doing things right other than to note whether they are ever assigned to write anything else again.

We are a content first company, so Walk Big stresses collaboration. Our content creation system is built on interaction between writers and editors, working together to craft the best content possible. Writers don’t toil away alone in a void. We’ve set up an internal, online community where writers work with their editors standing by in real-time. If writers have questions, someone is always there to answer them. When they’ve finished, the editor who assigned them their story doesn’t just review it and hit publish, they respond back and when warranted let writers know what they did right or wrong. They talk about it, and in the process writers and editors make each other better. And that makes Walk Big better.

What writers really want most is to talk about what they’re writing. Creating great content doesn’t happen in a void. Good content happens with real-time collaboration and communication, the keys to creating any solid content creation system at scale.