Hi there,
Just write.
Our team has worked with 100+ software companies over the past 15 years building complete marketing functions and go-to-markets. The one correlation we’ve been able to draw between content marketing and growth success is this:
CEOs and founders who publish helpful content early can have an exponential impact further down the line.
As a founder (or subject-matter expert) you need to set aside quality time to connect with your audience, listen to their needs and answer their questions—then turn that into reusable content.
Companies that do this outperform most of the other startups we’ve worked with.
Why?
Software startup founders often have unmatched deep domain expertise and a strong knowledge of the problems their product addresses from their experience in the trenches.
The early investment of technical team member(s) to build a strong base of valuable content for your buying audience is a key factor in building an inbound engine.
There is likely someone on your team with an intimate understanding of your customers’ pain points. Whoever they are, make it part of their role to spend a few hours per week creating content.
Start by simply answering the questions your prospects and customers ask you.
Abandon perfection. Don’t worry about length. Just publish answers to the questions.
The cool thing about Google (and other search engines like YouTube, Bing, and LinkedIn, etc.) is that the audience and algorithms will filter out your best work, so you don’t have to write perfect essays.
Quality is important (your content still needs to be coherent and useful), but you need to avoid getting hung up on excellence at the risk of sacrificing quantity and consistency.
Just be genuine and answer your audience’s questions. You can optimize later (more on that in a separate insight).
How do you know when it’s time to turn something into content? As soon as two or more of your customers ask you the same question.
Rather than write the same response over and over in emails or pitch decks, turn the answer into an article (or guide, framework, how-to, template, etc.) for the next prospect looking for the same answer.
An example: the impact of founder-led content
Getting founders into the habit of creating content is challenging. Your time is valuable and the impact from content creation is rarely immediate.
At the end of the day, committing to creating content needs to be a choice made by you (or your team). To help with that decision, we’d like to leave you with this short case study:
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