Let me ask you something. If you wrote something today and nobody read it, would you write again tomorrow?
Most people would say no. And I understand why. We live in a world that measures everything in likes, shares, reach and impressions. If the numbers don’t move, the assumption is that nothing is working. That you are wasting your time. That maybe you should stop.
I started blogging around 2009. At that time, IoT was barely a word in people’s vocabulary. Social media was young. And I was writing about telemetry, machine-to-machine communication, and connected devices… to what felt like an empty room. The analytics were humble, to put it kindly. Sometimes a few dozen readers a day. Sometimes less.
But here is what I know now that I didn’t fully appreciate then: that empty room was being recorded.
Planting Seeds Before Anyone Was Hungry
When I wrote in those early years, I wasn’t writing to go viral. I was writing because I had ideas that needed to get out of my head and onto paper. I was processing things I had seen in my career at MIMOS, CELCOM and UTM. I was trying to make sense of where technology was heading, and writing was how I thought through things properly.
There was no content calendar. No SEO strategy. No analytics dashboard I checked obsessively every morning. Just me, a laptop, and the belief that what I was writing about actually mattered, even if the world hadn’t caught up yet.
And then IoT exploded.
Between 2013 and 2015, the conversation around connected devices went from niche to mainstream almost overnight. And suddenly, people were looking for someone who understood the space, someone who had been thinking about it, writing about it, for years. That someone was already there. I had the archive. I had the track record. I had the voice.
That is when I understood what I had been doing all along. I had been building credibility on a platform I owned, quietly, consistently, before there was any social pressure to perform.
The Business That Content Built
When I co-founded FAVORIOT in 2017, I didn’t have to start from zero when it came to reputation. The blog had done years of work. Every article I had written about IoT platforms, smart city infrastructure, the challenges of data connectivity… those were bread crumbs that led people to me long before FAVORIOT existed as a company.
Investors ask you what makes you credible in your space. Customers ask why they should trust you over a larger competitor. Journalists ask why your opinion matters. What I could always point to was the body of work. Not a pitch deck, not a fancy website, but hundreds of posts that showed how I thought, what I believed, and how long I had been in this conversation.
You cannot fake a ten-year archive of consistent ideas.
That is what content does when you treat it seriously over a long period of time. It becomes proof. It becomes your reputation, made searchable and permanent.
When Nobody Is Watching, That Is the Real Test
I want to be honest about something. There were stretches of time when I wondered if I should just stop. The numbers were not rewarding. Nobody was sharing my posts to their thousands of followers. The inbox was quiet.
But I kept asking myself: do I believe what I am writing? Do I think this matters?
The answer was always yes. And that is what kept me going.
Looking back, I think the discipline of writing when nobody was watching was actually what built the quality of my thinking. When you write for an audience that doesn’t exist yet, you can’t rely on trending topics or viral hooks. You have to write something true. You have to be genuinely useful. You have to develop a real point of view, because there’s no performance to hide behind.
That pressure, the pressure of honesty over popularity, sharpened me in ways that no conference or workshop ever could.
The Compound Interest of Ideas
There is a concept in finance called compound interest. Money grows not just from what you put in, but from the returns building on themselves over time. Content works exactly the same way.
A post I wrote in 2011 about sensor networks brought me a speaking invitation in 2014. A talk in 2014 turned into a collaboration in 2016. A collaboration in 2016 led to a client for FAVORIOT in 2019. And so on. The chain of connections is rarely obvious when you are in the middle of it. You only see it clearly when you look backwards.
If I had stopped blogging in 2010 because the numbers were small, none of those downstream opportunities would have existed. The compound interest would never have started accumulating.
This is what people miss when they treat content as a short-term campaign. Content is infrastructure. You build it slowly, you maintain it, and it works for you even when you are sleeping, traveling, or running a startup that demands every hour of your attention.
What I Tell Founders and Professionals Who Ask Me About Content
People often ask me: “Mazlan, should I start a blog? Should I write on LinkedIn? Is it worth it?”
My answer is always the same. Ask yourself not whether anyone will read it today, but whether you believe what you are writing is true and useful. If yes, write it. Then write it again next week. And the week after that.
Stop thinking about content as a marketing activity. Start thinking about it as a thinking habit that happens to be public.
Because the day will come, and I genuinely believe this for anyone with real expertise and something honest to say, the day will come when someone will find that old post you wrote when nobody was looking, and it will open a door you never expected.
I have lived that story more times than I can count. And it all started with a decision to write anyway, even when the room was empty.
So let me leave you with this: what do you know right now, in your field, in your experience, that the world hasn’t fully caught up to yet? Are you writing it down? Are you sharing it?
Because someone out there is about to start searching for exactly what you already know.
Discover more from Dr. Mazlan Abbas
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
