Turning experience into source material

Spencer Thursfield · Published 2026-08 · Evidence: strongly supported practice

"Publish original research" is easy advice for a newspaper and useless to a potter, until you translate it. A working business generates citable evidence every week; it just doesn't look like research. Here are the forms it takes.

Evidence you already have

• The questions customers ask you. Anonymised and answered properly, they become a FAQ no competitor can copy.
• Before-and-after, with numbers. Skip "transformed" and measure: hours, costs, materials, dates.
• Real prices and how you build them. The page everyone wants and nobody publishes. A pricing-methodology page is close to unfakeable.
• Failure logs. What went wrong, why, and what changed. Failure writing carries the highest trust of any genre, because nobody fakes their mistakes.
• Process photographs. Your actual workbench, van, kiln, worksite. Original images of real work are evidence generic sites cannot manufacture.
• Turnaround and delivery data. "Most reglazes take 9 to 12 days; here are last quarter's actuals" beats "fast turnaround" every time.
• Local knowledge. Which venues, which building stock, which soil, which planning quirks. First-hand geography feeds fan-out questions.

The publishing discipline

Three rules turn anecdote into source material. Be precise: dates, quantities, conditions. Precision makes a claim quotable. Show the method: how many jobs, over what period, measured how. Keep provenance: who observed this, when, and when it was last true. Our study measures these same properties on cited pages. Strongly supported

The honest caveat

No platform promises that evidence earns citations. That association is our hypothesis H3, under test. What is already sure: the commodity alternative competes on cost with the machine summarising it, and loses. Evidence is the one content strategy AI cannot undercut.