We software developers have a tendency to look for the best suited tool and can spend days researching and playing with them. As an example, I went through multiple blogging systems and various publishing tools in my time. It took me quite a while to learn - and even longer to accept - that the tool doesn’t actually matter for content creation. I can blame the blogging engine as much as I want but the reason for me not writing isn’t the tools fault but mine. Because content creation is a problem no tool will ever solve.

As OpenTechSchool is active in tech education, a field many investors think is the next big thing, we are more and more often approached by startups, who think they found the solution for education content creation and publishing. And if you ask people, why they didn’t write this blog article or created that learning material, they will tell you, they didn’t have the tools available or those sucked or something. But it couldn’t be further from the true reason. With the OpenTechSchool we create and host most of our material in form of basic markdown and text files. It does - literally - not need anything than a Text Editor to create that material, the barrier can barely be lower. So then, why don’t we drown in learning material? Because creating content is hard and requires brains. And no tools ain’t gonna fix that.

Our material explains things very deeply into details as we expect learners to work through it on their own. We were very naive when we decided to build our learning material that way. If we had known from the beginning that for one hour of material a learner works through, it requires about eight hours of writing, researching and reviewing in total, we would probably never have started. Sure whether you use Word or OpenOffice has an impact on the ease of the process but it doesn’t actually make content creation any easier nor will you be better or more prolific because you use one tool instead of the other. And whether I have a WYSIWYG editor or use markdown, which requires a compile time of 4 seconds before being published doesn’t have any impact on my over all writing ability or whether the content is any good.

And that applies to your tool, too. It might make content creation slightly easier but don’t kid yourself into believing its current non-existence is the reason why people don’t publish content in that field. An editor that makes creating of educational videos so much easier to compile, will make it easier for those, who currently use a less good tool but it missing is not the reason why not everybody does it already. So don’t tell me “with our tool everyone can” because a tool can only make process easier. Unless people already publish content, no one will start just because you provide a tool to make that easier.