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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
7 Data Technology Founders
Content Marketing Lessons
Publish Content on What Your Audience Cares About Right Now
Barr built credibility with her target audience by publishing content on topics that had nothing to do with her product or category. “We often write about topics that are actually not related to Monte Carlo or data observability, but rather topics that are just top of mind for our customers.” When a subject was generating questions and confusion in the community but had no good resources yet, her team moved to fill that gap. “Data mesh was a topic that was super top of mind for folks a few years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And people are like, there’s no resources about the topic and we’re not sure we want to learn more about it. And that was an opportunity for us to help give back to the community and write about a topic that was super top of mind.” The underlying logic is that audience trust compounds when you consistently show up to help people think through what they are already wrestling with, regardless of whether it maps directly to what you sell.
Orient Your Content Around Educating a Market You Are Building
When a category is still forming, buyers cannot evaluate what they do not yet understand. Vinoth oriented Onehouse’s entire content output around closing that understanding gap, describing their blogs as “genuinely trying to educate the market now because this is a new category that we’re trying to build.” The content focused on making the case for a particular approach to cloud data architecture, not on the product itself. As he put it, “most of our marketing efforts have been around trying to help people understand why you should set up your cloud data architecture a certain way. And what are the benefits and sort of things like that.” In a new category, the market has to understand why the problem matters before it can appreciate any solution.
Earn Credibility by Demonstrating Instead of Claiming
Dan built his content strategy around a single governing principle: show, not tell. Rather than producing content that asserted the company’s value, he put the emphasis on demonstration. “We have a philosophy of show, not tell, because no one wants to be told. They want to be shown. So product first.” This extended beyond product walkthroughs to how the company presented itself as an organization. Employees became the faces of the content, grounding the brand in real people rather than polished corporate messaging. “The stars of the show are the employees. And we have a philosophy of show, not tell. It’s all real, bold but legit. Backed up.” The underlying logic was that credibility in a crowded market can’t be claimed outright, it has to be earned through evidence that buyers can see for themselves.
Reveal How Your Team Thinks and Makes Decisions
Most early-stage companies use content to explain their product. Michel took a different approach, publishing articles about how Airbyte operated as a company. The goal was giving the community direct visibility into the team’s thinking: “We published a lot of articles around what does it mean to build a company just for the community to understand, where we were as a company, what was our DNA? And, yeah, just for them to have that visibility into what we’re doing, how we’re behaving, how we’re making decisions.” The payoff was relational, not transactional. “I think in a way that transparency created a lot of trust between the Airbyte team and the community.” Buyers and users trust companies they feel they know. Publishing how you think and make decisions gets you there faster than any product-focused content.
Use a Podcast to Research a Complex Topic While Building an Audience
Satyen wanted to write a book on data culture but kept running into the same wall: too many disciplines, too many threads to pull together into a coherent manuscript. The podcast became the solution to that problem. Rather than staring at a blank page, the team reframed the research process: “maybe we should just do a podcast. Let’s just talk to lots of people who would be interesting and relevant to this subject of building a data culture. And that was supposed to be the fodder for doing something bigger.” The guests ranged widely, from journalists and academics to psychologists and military generals, all connected by the question of how people make decisions with data. The business case held up too. Satyen described showing up to a customer call where the contact mentioned seeing Data Radicals land in their inbox, which he called “pretty cool.” A podcast built around a hard question your market cares about generates both intellectual capital and commercial visibility at the same time.
Anchor Content to Something With Standalone Value for Your Audience
Technical buyers read content to get smarter, not to be sold to. Ian anchored Tonic’s content strategy to open source projects the team believed had genuine utility: “We do blog posts that attach to open source projects that we think are genuinely useful to the community.” The goal was instruction, not promotion. As Ian put it, “We try to do blog posts that are actually instructive and help people level up. So that’s really where we try to focus a lot of our effort, because generally we think that’s valuable to the world and valuable to our customers.” When your content delivers real value independently of your product, your audience has a reason to engage that has nothing to do with your marketing funnel, and that trust compounds over time.
Build Content That Creates a Reason to Reach Out
Abby described content as the mechanism that makes outreach feel earned rather than intrusive. “Content is a great way to engage prospects without being too in their face,” she said. “It provides an open door for conversations and questions.” The standard she set for what content should accomplish was specific: “High value, topical, thought provoking content that fills the knowledge gap for customers and sellers is really critical. Entire campaigns and sales plays can be built around quality content.” The practical implication was simple. “Content gives you a reason to reach out to somebody.”