Last week, I had the immense privilege to be a guest of Jason Calacanis‘s on This Week in Startups. For those of you who don’t know, Jason is the founder of LAUNCH, which helps startups grow through education and financing. Jason is an angel investor, and LAUNCH hosts a few conferences throughout the year as well as having a startup incubator, similar to YC or 500 Startups.

Here’s the video:

Presentation

The presentation I gave was titled “Engineering Scalable Content at Growth Startups”. As Jason astutely pointed out to me, “that’s a lot of buzzwords.”

What I tried to communicate was that most startups, since their founders are technical instead of writers, should not rely on a blog to get them users via “content marketing”. Instead, they should focus on creating something that updates each month, that is an asset to use for marketing consistently, because that is where they will get the most bang for their marketing buck as a non-marketer.

Here is the presentation:

Major Takeaways

Startups are trying to hit escape velocity, but a blog won’t get them there:

Instead, tell stories with the data you have and make it work automagically:

It doesn’t have to look pretty (at first) to have an impact and prove your hypothesis:

And it doesn’t have to take a ton of time at first to see if there is desire for what you are putting out:

Start small, and then scale once you get feedback and know exactly what your audience wants:

Then, you can automate it, both in terms of data gathering, production, and (some) marketing:

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Thanks again Jason and Brian for the opportunity!