Len Kendall is at his desk in Chicago thinking through the sales strategy for his start-up CentUp, a business that facilitates donations to online content creators – such as bloggers, photographers and illustrators – and charities. Instead of waiting until his strategy is complete, Mr Kendall has chosen to outline his thinking and approach to selling in a blog post entitled This Blog Post Isn’t Free. He sees this approach as a way of testing his idea in public.

Traditionally, if an executive wanted to test an idea, they might consult their peers at an industry gathering or commission some research. Today, many are using the web to think out loud instead. While the internet has long been used by business people to broadcast their thinking to the world, what is new is their willingness to share thoughts-in-development rather than present polished opinions and press release-style communication.

Mr Kendall published his post on Medium, a publishing platform that delivers him a ready-made audience so that he does not need to build up an individual online following. Executives who are not well known often struggle to get enough readers on a traditional blog to make the feedback valuable. Medium aims to solve this by curating series of posts around such themes as “creativity” and “what I learned today” – with the emphasis on the quality of the writing rather than the profile of the writer. “Medium helps me test ideas in public,” Mr Kendall says. “That’s more useful than a traditional blog.”