Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to let people know you exist.

Companies that get content marketing right from the start tend to see higher rates of success due to the ratio of attention versus time—you can write a blog post in a day, but it takes weeks of prep work and a lot of money to attend an event. Writing about features, functionality, and your overall vision for the company is a low-cost way to gather input and reactions to the company's direction.

Content topics

One of the best places to source content is from the friction you experience in your daily work. Instead of setting aside time to think about blog post ideas, document your most frustrating work moments. Take note of heated discussions and debates within your team and community. The best fodder for exciting content is when you feel like you’re running into a wall on an issue or have an ah-ha moment. These experiences are authentic; chances are, you aren’t alone in whatever friction you feel.

1. Building in Public: Appeals to technical audiences by exposing how technical decisions are made and implemented.

2. The Startup Journey: Appeals to your community and potential customers in a relatable way. It humanizes your business and gives customers, investors, employees, and audiences something to connect with emotionally.

3. Take a Stance: Establishes you as a forward-thinker with strong opinions about your industry. It sparks broad discussion and is a way to gain name recognition and traction.

Angle & Audience	How to talk about it
Building in Public Technical	The problem and the criteria for implementation. The potential solutions Final decision and tradeoffs made The process of implementation, including challenges
The Startup Journey Community	Share vision & mission progress updates Explain how you're building differently Share big company milestones and tie them back to the overall mission and vision. Recognize, spotlight, and thank contributors
Take a Stance Industry	Share an opinion on newly released technology Challenge strongly held beliefs about commonly accepted ways of doing things and propose an alternative Propose solutions to a commonly known or felt issue

Hiring writers

We do not recommend hiring a full-time writer or content marketer at the pre-Seed stage. Depending on your content marketing strategy, it may be useful to hire a freelance or contract writer for support. When working with writers, it's important to establish clear expectations and communication channels.

Always establish clear ownership of the content. Contractors should assign all copyrights to the company they are contracted by. This means you are free to use, modify, and share the content anyway you choose.

We highly suggest you have the contract writers ghostwrite for you and publish under your name. This will help position you as a thought leader. The default OCV contract stipulates that content will be published under the founder's name.

Competitor content

Startups are underdogs—the odds of success are not in your favor, and you are competing with large, established companies. Getting early attention and awareness is key to the company’s success. Creating competitive content that picks on the weaknesses of the industry leader is one way to leverage an established company’s clout to bring attention to your company.

As a general rule, focus on the largest competitor that is primarily known for the same type of product as yours. Don’t go after other small underdogs. The bigger and more popular the company, the less likely you'll face backlash for commenting on what they are failing at. It’s unlikely the company will react because you are too small. And if they do, it’s great awareness for your company.

Create a Google Doc and set up Google alerts to start recording the company’s activities. Start by looking at recent, negative press. Go back a few years if necessary. You can break up the activities into two categories:

1. Product: Create a product comparison and identify areas where the product is weak. Look for where there have been numerous customer complaints.

2. Newsjacking: Start a list of decisions the company has made that have received negative attention. For example: deprecating a favorite feature, increasing prices, or hiding a security breach.

Select a competitive angle and double down on it. What is the issue that stands out the most? Deeply research the issue and write an opinion piece on the decision and its impact on users or the industry. Make diagrams, charts, and other visuals when applicable.

If others have written about the issue or shared how they were impacted by a decision the company made, reach out and ask to interview them about their experience and perspective. This can be an informal interview. Ask to record and make sure you get permission to quote them.

If the company makes an announcement, especially if it’s potentially controversial or impactful, be prepared to generate a rapid response to the news.

Examples:

1. Rocky Linux responds to the news of Red Hat closing off RHEL code

2. Salesforce stages an “End of Software” protest at Siebel’s Annual conference and follows up with an “End of Software party”

3. GitLab responds to the news of GitHub being acquired by Microsoft

Optimizing blog post titles

Titles should include 2+ nerdy keywords. Some examples of nerdy words include names of competitors, names of complimentary software, coding languages, popular open source projects, and trendy engineering concepts. Here are the most common elements of great blog post titles:

1. Controversial opinions

2. Exciting takeaways

3. Numbers and percentages

4. Names of companies or projects and names for trendy concepts

Avoid generic and clickbait blog post titles. The character count should not exceed 80 characters.

Title examples

Titles that are specific and make a statement do better than titles that are lofty and generic. Avoid overly simplistic blog post titles like “Autoscaling 101” or “Choosing the best software for your needs.” The title should give away the most interesting key point of the article.

Generic title (boring)	Specific title (interesting)
Kubernetes autoscaling 101: How to choose the best solution for your needs	Event-driven autoscaling saves 60% of cloud costs compared to HPA
The downsides of SSO	Centralizing your sign-ins with SSO decreases your attack surface and increases your attack vector
Backups, versions, and project restoration: how all these pieces fit together	FreeCAD’s handling of backups and versions doesn’t serve users, Ondsel fixes this

Examples of excellent blog posts:

1. JSONnet is the perfect solution for real-time monitoring with Ceph dashboards

2. Here's how we resolved an ancient flamewar by slowing the conversation down

3. Using Ceph for local storage is an anti-pattern that kills performance

4. When forums suck: The high cost of cheap conversation

5. FreeCAD's Copy+Paste is a hot mess

6. Mining for gold in the issue tracker

Examples of how to improve titles:

Bad (generic)	Better (More specific)	Best (Crux front and center)
A pricing framework for startups	Good, better, best: A pricing framework	Your premium product offering should cost 10X more than the entry-level option
Open source business tips	How we run our business on open source software	Why we’re ditching Google Docs for Next Cloud
AI: Gaming uses	How to use AI tools to create engaging games	Make game assets 5X faster than Unity with Stable Diffusion
Building a software startup	Managing a hyper-growth startup requires rapid growth	Growth solves everything: How to achieve 20% WoW user growth

Blog post images and media

Try to include supplemental images and media in your blog posts.

1. Include graphs and charts to visually represent any data you are presenting.

2. Include tables to visually identify any comparisons you are making.

3. Include screenshots of relevant software or code.

4. Include videos if they provide supplemental information or context. Make sure to summarize the content of the video within the article.

Stock photos

Don’t use stock imagery in your blog posts. It comes across as unauthentic and incredible. It’s better to include no image than to include a stock image. Screenshots showing what you are referring to in the blog post are good alternatives to stock imagery.

Content distribution

New companies need to work hard to get their content in front of their desired audience and build that audience. Publishing on third-party sites, cross-posting to various social publishing networks, leveraging industry influencers, sharing content on appropriate discussion forums, and pitching press are just a few ways to start distributing content to gain attention.

The strategy is going to look different for each company but start by asking yourself a few simple questions:

1. Does my project have an active community, and do I have good standing there? If the answer is yes, leverage this. Share content with your community on forums and ask them to contribute through guest posts, tutorials, or video content.

2. What specific publications are my customers reading? Make a list of the top three and develop a few pitches specifically for publication on their site. Reach out to OCV’s Head of Content for assistance pitching publishers.

3. Who are the biggest influencers in the industry, and do I have any mutual connections? This could be someone with a YouTube channel, a large social media following, or a well-known speaker.

4. Are there industry-adjacent companies with reputable blogs I can guest publish on? Think about companies that could be potential product partners in the future. They should be speaking to a similar audience.

Cross-posting

Consider publishing to third-party sites that allow cross-posting. Cross-posting is when you publish an article on more than one site. Include a link back to the original article on your website. Cross-posting on a third party site gets your content in front of a relevant audience while you build up brand recognition and a social media following.

Link sharing on forums

Share links to content on community sites like Hacker News, Reddit, and any other forum relevant to your business. Follow the contributor guidelines for each forum. Don’t spam these spaces.

Hacker News

Hacker News is a link-sharing site run by Y-Combinator that focuses on computer science and entrepreneurship. The primary guideline for submitting content to Hacker News is “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.” Content that goes viral on Hacker News can generate tens of thousands of website views. This is an excellent way to gain the attention of the developer community.

Hacker News is a community, so please familiarize yourself with the guidelines before participating. Anyone can create an account, and you gain karma points over time through participation. Users earn karma points when their submissions and comments are upvoted and lose karma points when they are downvoted. Users need 30 karma points to flag a submission and 500 karma points to downvote. Karma points do not affect submissions. Creating genuinely exciting content with a great title is the best way to get your submission upvoted.

“Self-promotion” on Hacker News means sharing your own content, it does not mean the content itself is self-promotional. Avoid being shadow banned by the moderators by regularly sharing content that is not your own.

Getting your content organically shared on Hacker News may be challenging without much social media following. It’s OK to post links to your content on Hacker News, but it’s better when someone else posts. Here are some general tips for contributing to the Hacker News community:

1. Regularly share content that is not your own. A good ratio is 5:1. For every 5 articles you share, one can be your own content.

2. Look at the homepage daily and interact with content that is interesting to you by upvoting and participating in the discussion thread.

3. Search for topics that are of interest to you and read the discussions. This may spark new content ideas for you to write about.

4. If a discussion is happening on a topic you are an expert in, contribute to the conversation.