Content Marketing for Open Core Startups
If you haven’t read Open Core Ventures’ Public Handbook for open source startups, head over and do so right away. In this post, I’m going to talk about something that they talk about prominently: content marketing for early stage open source startups.
The folks at Open Core Ventures recommend publishing one blog post per week, starting a year and a half before you expect to close your seed round. That is very early! This seems like an excellent idea to me — though since I’ve never seen a company / founder who has actually done it, I suspect it’s fairly rare for founders to actually follow through on it. If you’re serious about following the very good advice from OCV, here’s my advice about content marketing.
I’ve ended up writing a lot today, so here’s the tldr: If you’re a founder/CEO who’s not a very good writer, instead of hiring someone to do your content marketing for you in the early days, hire someone to help you become a better writer and to be your task-master to make sure something gets published every week.
Good content marketing can never be completely outsourced. I used to manage content marketing for clients, before I started focusing on positioning and messaging, and a big part of why I moved towards working on positioning and messaging is that I often worked with companies that clearly had no idea what value their product provided, or even what market category the product should be in. I definitely never had anyone give me the equivalent of the positioning canvas that my current clients get when we finish working together. If you can’t give your content marketer / content writer this information, they aren’t going to create content that’s good. It will be generic.
Even the most experienced content writer is not going to know your product, your project, your problem space or your user market as well as you do — that should be obvious. This means that if you are going to hire a writer, you have to take the time to tell them what you know.
There are two reasons for outsourcing your content marketing (and I’m talking here at the early stages of a company, not once you’re building out a marketing organization). They are:
You (the founder) suck at writing
You (the founder) can not force yourself to stay consistent in publishing content
Hiring a content marketer / content writer because you don’t have time and want to focus on other things is a bad idea at this stage, because you will need to spend time working with them if you want to get real value out of the relationship and the content it produces. You need to be providing the direction, the opinions and the technical expertise to make them successful, and that requires an investment of time. Good writers work fast. It would not surprise me to see a founder paying a content writer and having the founder and the writer putting in equal amounts of time each for each blog post.
The benefits of publishing a blog post every week go beyond raising awareness about your project/company. Writing well is not about using fancy turns of phrase. It is about organizing your thoughts and being able to convey them simply and succinctly. Writing and publishing a blog post every week gives founders a way to practice communicating about their project, about their worldview and about their vision for a better future. It’s also an opportunity to think through what you’re learning and incorporate feedback you’ve been getting into your message.
Being able to organize your thoughts and communicate them to others is a really important skill for any startup founder, so the actual act of writing is beneficial. It would be beneficial even if no one saw the results, but of course the whole point is to use what you’re writing to gain awareness, test your hypothesis and see how people respond to different messages.
So what’s my advice for very early stage founders who want to follow OCV’s playbook on publishing a blog post every week?
Know what you want to say and who your audience is. This might change as your project/company matures, but you need to start out with an opinion, a problem space, a value proposition and knowing who your audience is. Use a positioning canvas or messaging template (or both) to write all those things down.
If you hire someone to help with writing, the relationship should be more like a coach than like outsourced hands. The person should help you improve your own writing and communication skills, and you shouldn't expect to just send a check and get some published blog posts in return.
Eventually you’ll have other things to do as CEO, and you can pass off content marketing then. But even then, as CEO you need to be involved in decisions about what your company is saying and who the audience is. Those are high-level positioning questions, but they are massively important to your content marketing and I’ve seen a lot of companies expect their contract writers to figure it out on their own. That’s not a good idea.
This post has been about blogging, but that is not the only form of content marketing out there. The other type you should consider very early on is contributed articles, where you publish articles in news outlets or on other company’s blogs.
Blog posts shouldn’t be too long (under 1,000 words). They should focus one thing.
Blog posts are ephemeral content. Do not aim for perfection. I’ve seen a lot of founders spend months agonizing over a blog post that is supposed to encapsulate everything about their startup. Just press publish, and do a better job the next time.
Blog posts should have an author, and it should be one of the founders. (This is in contrast to having blog posts just under the company name).
Oh, I almost forgot. Can you just get ChatGPT to write for me? No. The whole point of content marketing is to say something new, and to say something opinionated. If you’re publishing blog posts that ChatGPT could have written, that’s a red flag that you’re not writing good content.
Overall, content marketing is relatively cheap, high ROI form of marketing that’s especially well suited to the open source ecosystem, because blogging is how most open source projects approach evangelism. I agree with OCV that open source startups should have an aggressive content marketing strategy starting as soon as possible. Hopefully this post helps you get started sooner rather than later.