Latest / Content, Briefly / John Collins (Part 1): Intercom, Ramp and falling in love with the customer

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John Collins (Part 1): Intercom, Ramp and falling in love with the customer · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  He actually had set up an RSS feed from the blog to, uh, I think it was campaign monitoring he was using was it, the email tool at the time.
• 0:07
  But literally every Wednesday at 5:30, an email would go out to people who had subscribed with the new blog posts that had been added to the, the blog.
• 0:16
  But it meant that he was forced to write at least one post or source a post every week. That's awesome. That's so interesting. [upbeat music] Hey, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:28
  Today is part one with John Collins. This is actually a repurposed recording of an office hours that we did with John about 18 months ago.
• 0:36
  The next episode will be an update that was just recently recorded about his time as a marketing advisor and consultant over the last couple of years.
• 0:43
  In this one, we talk all about his career at Intercom and Ramp, and I decided to include this in the podcast feed because there's just so much there.
• 0:50
  He talks a lot about the strategies that he created and put into execution at both companies. They're actually very different strategies, so that in it of itself is pretty interesting.
• 0:59
  Anyways, there's just like so much rich stuff in this conversation that I wanted to put in the feed, let people have the opportunity to check out before we have an update with John on his time as an advisor and freelancer, which is totally different and also interesting conversation.
• 1:12
  So that one will be next. But this is a great conversation. It's like I said, 18 months old, but absolutely evergreen. Lots of good stuff in here. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.
• 1:22
  John, you're a legend in the content marketing space. I've always looked up to you, always admired your work. You've done some amazing things at Intercom and Ramp. You're consulting now.
• 1:32
  I have so many questions about all these things. I also wanna let people know if you have questions for John, leave them in the chat. I'll be happy to queue them up.
• 1:38
  First place I would love to start, you came to B2B SaaS content marketing from journalism. Yeah. Like I sort of see the line, you know. Like I see how it impacted the work that you guys did at Intercom, and I wonder...
• 1:49
  I remember I interviewed Geoffrey Keating a few years back, probably five years back- Yep... about Intercom stuff, and just learning about how you guys ran things.
• 1:58
  Pretty amazing, I thought, how, like I assume this came from you, this really strong emphasis on subject matter expertise.
• 2:05
  The content team was serving as a facilitators for subject matter expertise as opposed to just content creators. Is that accurate? And can you kind of talk about that a little bit? Yeah.
• 2:16
  Yeah, no, it's 100%, and not to be provocative in the beginning, but no one really cares what marketers think.
• 2:21
  [laughs] You know, not to be facetious, but you know, we were, particularly in the early days at Intercom, we mostly were selling to like founders and like product people at like early stage startups or, or relatively early stage startups.
• 2:35
  And so to really speak to them in a way that it would resonate with them, it needed to come from the subject matter experts.
• 2:41
  So we used all sorts of ways to make sure we got like the deep insights that those people had into product building because the person who was responsible for the product had to make the decision to integrate Intercom, which for people who don't know, is like a customer communications tool, but you integrate it deeply with your own product.
• 2:56
  So you had to basically speak to those people, give them knowledge that felt, you know, you were adding something to the conversation.
• 3:03
  It's like, and it's always kind of joke that, you know, product people would read your 2,000-word post about like how you do your road mapping process, you know.
• 3:11
  As later as Intercom started to salespeople, it was like, "Give me, give me, you know, you're wasting my time with the headline. Give me, give me what you've got straight away."
• 3:17
  Board people were just like delighted that anyone was writing for them, and like, you know, really appreciated any kind of empathy you could show for their time.
• 3:24
  So like it was really all about that strategy of drawing the subject matter experts. It was really driven by the who we were selling to, right? Yeah.
• 3:30
  And really trying to get a deep understanding of who those people were.
• 3:33
  I mean, you wrote that post at Animals about your blog is not a publication and, you know, I think was kind of saying, you know, we did run a publication, but I think it works because of that audience that we're trying to sell to.
• 3:44
  Yeah. That like it was a community.
• 3:46
  It was people who were gonna like, you know, if they learned anything about product building, Intercom, they would then definitely consider us when they had an opportunity to use us as a product to communicate with their customers.
• 3:56
  That's not gonna work in every instance, and actually I agree with you. I think most people's content marketing is far better to think about as a library rather than a publication. But we had that buy-in from the top.
• 4:06
  One of the co-founders of Intercom, Des Traynor, he famously wrote the first 93 of 100 blog posts on Inside Intercom. Eoghan, who was the CEO, just really got like the potential of it.
• 4:16
  They'd like seen, you know, it work for HubSpot, for Basecamp, for folks like that. And so they really gave us the space and put the investment into it to run a publication.
• 4:25
  So it was really, really powerful, and we made sure that publication was, you know, written mostly by the, the subject matter experts at the company rather than like the content marketers and, you know, whether that meant totally ghost writing something, whether it meant like interviewing someone and just writing that up as their own byline piece.
• 4:40
  You know, some people were great. Like you literally get them in a room and a whiteboard, and then, you know, one of our team would, would create a blog post or, or podcast episode on, on the basis of that.
• 4:47
  But like just figuring out whatever it was that c- it took to get that subject matter expertise and get it into, get it into our output. I don't think a content marketer could have ever pulled that off.
• 4:57
  Like someone with a content marketing background, I mean. Like I feel like it, assume that your journalism background played a pretty significant role in that, you know. And it was a harder way to do it too, right?
• 5:06
  I mean, it's harder to execute, at least I imagine. Yeah. I mean, I think it was.
• 5:10
  One thing I think that I always said to people about it was, you know, 'cause people always go like they, they want the like, "What should I do? Tell me what to do."
• 5:16
  And I'm like, "Well, this worked for us," and I think one of the, one of the reasons it worked for us was it stood out. Um- Definitely... you know, if you think about it at the time- Yeah...
• 5:24
  you like had like a lot of the content marketing that people looked up to at the time was things like HubSpot and Buffer, which was very search orientated. It was, a lot of it was like it was a volume play.
• 5:36
  It was like, do a lot of keyword research, make sure you hit a lot of those keywords. And it worked amazingly for them. Like I'm, I'm not saying it in any judgmental way.
• 5:42
  And so it was like we were a 60-person company, you know, four Irish founders set up in San Francisco in 2011. How many like startups were founded in San Francisco in 2011, [laughs] you know?
• 5:53
  And you're trying to stand out from the noise. And so I think that sort of philosophy of like a publication that like publishes sub-subject matter experts from around the company, it was pretty unique for us.
• 6:03
  And then we really just sort ofYou know, as we showed that worked and we started to get more traction, it was like, okay, how do we double down on this?
• 6:09
  Like, let's do books, but like let's do books that like feel like, you know, they're forty thousand words.
• 6:14
  So like gotta even just down to the little details like an ISSN number, you know, like that they were properly- Yeah, yeah... registered books with a barcode.
• 6:21
  Like, literally we would- someone would put a, like one person would work on it for a quarter.
• 6:25
  Not one person, but like it was like, you know, whether it was like two weeks of my time and four weeks of Jeffrey's time, but like, and a designer four weeks.
• 6:32
  You know, we put a lot of work into that to just kind of like, again, stand out and sort of say, "We're gonna produce high value books."
• 6:38
  Like, you know, at the time, again, a lot of, you know, stuff was like, "Let's do a ten-page PDF and gate it." And it was like- Yeah, yeah... just how do we, how do we stand out from the noise? Yeah. Totally.
• 6:46
  Which I know was never a good idea. Yeah, yeah. I think I read Intercom on Starting Up on my Kindle. I think, I think you published an EPUB version. Yep.
• 6:53
  And I think maybe there was even some of those books became, um, became audiobooks, but sort of released in podcast format too, right? Yeah.
• 7:01
  So that, again, just a big philosophy I always have is like content is e- particularly the kind of content we created at Intercom is expensive to make.
• 7:06
  So just trying to think about like, are there ways to get that into different formats or like repurpose it, reslice it, redice it.
• 7:13
  So first off, again, just going back to trying to make them feel like proper books rather than like... We didn't even call them e-books actually. That was a big thing. We had a rule internally- Oh, yeah.
• 7:21
  That's interesting...
• 7:21
  just never referred to them as e-books 'cause I think e-books particularly, less so maybe now, but like, you know, in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, they were kinda seen as a bit lower value and there was a lot of free e-books out there.
• 7:30
  So we always called it books.
• 7:32
  We made sure they were always available in for your Kindle, your Apple device, or just plain old PDF if you wanted, but just give people the choice and what you'd expect as well if you bought a book from like any of the big publishers as well.
• 7:44
  But then, yeah, we subsequently decided to do them as audiobooks, and then we had a successful podcast, so it was like, just let's chunk them up as like episodic books.
• 7:53
  And then Intercom was starting up, we actually printed them. I printed ten thousand of them. Kind of was like ask death's trainer for forgiveness rather than permission.
• 8:02
  [laughs] But like, it was like they were gonna be about eleven or twelve dollars per piece if we published like I think like two thousand of them.
• 8:08
  And I was like, "Oh, we can get them like six dollars a piece if we go big." Uh, so, [chuckles] um- And you shipped them to people? Like, people ordered them and you shipped individual books out? Yeah.
• 8:18
  We sold them like basically d- I think it was like, I can't remember exactly the pricing at the time, but it was like ten bucks, and then like shipping, depending on where you were.
• 8:25
  Like, we were just about breaking even on them, like barely breaking even on them. But like visitors to the office, we'd give them to the sales team, we'd go on sales calls, I'd bring books- I love it... for conferences.
• 8:36
  You know, so it, it, it was a huge part of our marketing problem for about eighteen months.
• 8:39
  So actually when you think about it, like the unit charge was, was pretty low and it was just again, it's, it stood out at the time. I think like there are plenty of people who've done books at this stage.
• 8:47
  And other people had done like books before us. I mean, we didn't, we didn't invent it, but certainly tried to stand out from like maybe our peers in, in B2B SaaS at the time. Yeah. Wow, that's so interesting.
• 8:57
  I'm picturing like your office just like full of books and like orders come in. You're like- [laughs]... putting them in an envelope, mailing them out. But I assume, like was it they were drop shipped, I assume?
• 9:05
  Uh, yeah. We, we worked initially we had a bit of an issue actually with, um, the printer had a, a service where they actually would, would ship them.
• 9:12
  To be honest, it was a bit hit and miss, and like that was a huge thing for us. Like it had to be perfect. Mm-hmm. You know, like, 'cause it was our brand reputation was on the line.
• 9:19
  So actually we found a, a company that did fulfillment in, in Austin, Texas, that ship all kinds of merch and swag for tech companies, and they did a great job. I mean- That's awesome...
• 9:28
  literally that thing just ran itself in the background and instead it was roughly cost neutral, and we were probably like sometimes, depending on what territory we're in, we were losing money shipping you a book, but other people we were making like maybe a few cents.
• 9:38
  So it was- [laughs]... you know, it all worked out in the end. I think it definitely delivered a lot more value than it cost. So interesting.
• 9:44
  We'll link to that stuff 'cause I want people to be able to see it in, in real life. Yeah.
• 9:47
  You know, the reason that I wrote the blog post about your blog is not a publication was because I was so tired of on sales calls people saying like, like at Animals people saying like, "Oh, you know, we would like to be the Intercom for human resources.
• 9:58
  We'd like to be the Intercom for whatever." And it was kind of a frustrating conversation to have because you can't be. [laughs] I promise you, you can't be. Yeah.
• 10:07
  You know, I- like and part of the argument that we made was like, okay, Intercom, uh, probably raised 100 plus million dollars. You know, content team is, I don't know, 10 people, 12 people probably.
• 10:16
  Do they- they've made a serious commitment to this. Serious commitment. You can't just, you know, do like thought leadership-y style content and say it's Intercom for X.
• 10:26
  But it sounds like, I'm imagining you probably got some of that too, saying like, "Oh, can you help us do this? Like we wanna do the same thing that Intercom's done for our business." Yeah. Totally.
• 10:34
  And like, as I s- I kinda alluded to at the beginning, like it was dependent on the market we were in why it was successful. Also, like Intercom didn't try and be like brilliant at all parts of marketing straight away.
• 10:45
  I mean, I would say like product marketing was really strong. We were really strong at like doing product launches.
• 10:49
  We had like really, you know, good top flow positioning in terms of the product, all that stuff you'd expect from product marketing. We were great at events, and events were a huge partner for content.
• 10:59
  Like we sort of thought of like events as like live content, so we worked very closely with the events team. But, you know, things like PR and like brand marketing and stuff were like followed much later.
• 11:09
  You know, in many ways, like content was our brand marketing for a long time. Design- Right... was another area we invested in hugely.
• 11:14
  But, you know, we weren't trying to do all things at all times, and I actually think that's a,
• 11:18
  that's something I see at the moment with a lot of marketing teams, is like they're trying to do everything out of the gate day one. Mm-hmm.
• 11:24
  And actually I think it's like, you know, we saw content and saw the potential or certainly actually to be fair, Daz and Eoghan saw the, the potential when they, they hired me and like I bought into that vision.
• 11:33
  But yeah, I think that's a big part of it, you know. And as I say, like
• 11:38
  I really kind of like spent the first year really trying to understand the buyers and like whether it was going to like conferences, you know, like early days, 60-person startup, it was like literally like, "Hey, we need people for a stand."
• 11:48
  And I was like, "Yeah. I'll be there. I'll go to a conference." 'Cause I just wanted to eyeball the people who were gonna be buying Intercom and like- Yeah... how do they talk? Like, what do they look like?
• 11:56
  Where do they hang out? Like, where do they read stuff, you know? And just spending time with them and, oh, you know, I know that's obviously in a post-COVID world it's quite different, but like just really...
• 12:05
  And again, this is probably a little bit informed by the product team at, at Intercom, this idea of almost falling in love with the problem.Like fall in love with the, your customer and find out like what are their problems.
• 12:14
  And then I think you figure out like what's the content strategy- That's good... that's gonna reach those people, that's gonna help those people. I love that.
• 12:20
  Fall in love with the customer, [chuckles] because I feel like a lot of content marketers fall in love with content marketing. Yeah.
• 12:24
  You know, like, they sort of like come into this world and start learning about it, and they fall in love with the process of the writing or the research or the optimizing, and there's so- like important skills, like no question about it.
• 12:34
  You have to, you have to learn how to do those things. Totally. It's all in service of this customer, which- Yeah. There's a lot of cookie content marketing.
• 12:41
  It's like, hey, you know, okay, you set up a blog, you do a podcast, you do books.
• 12:44
  But sometimes I don't think there's like enough time spent trying to really understand like, will like, I don't know, maybe selling to like finance teams, will they read a book? Like, do they want a book?
• 12:53
  Is that how they consume content? Is that the best way to deliver it? You know, all that kind of stuff.
• 12:57
  And I think the only way to do that is to get on sales calls or like, obviously things like Gong nowadays, you don't even have to get on sales calls. You can just like watch- Yeah, what a cool tool...
• 13:04
  your sales team's calls. Just whatever way you can, just try and get as much a sense of like the worlds that like your customers and your potential customers inhabit.
• 13:13
  And then from there, I think you start to get creative ways of like how do I reach them. Yeah. I think I would point to Intercom as an example of a company with content culture.
• 13:21
  And like I-- what I mean by that is basically- Yeah... like top-down buy-in on content, you know? Mm-hmm. The founders did it themselves. They were like clearly invested in it.
• 13:28
  Like it sets the team up for success if they're in this environment where everybody wants them to win and kind of believes in them and all that. Is that true? Is that a thing? Yeah. Totally.
• 13:38
  I actually me- was talking to someone earlier today, shared this story, uh, so hopefully Des, who's the co-founder of Intercom, won't mind me sharing it with a larger group.
• 13:45
  But between when I sort of like signed my contract to join Intercom and to actually join, I was like serving out my notice period. I met him for a coffee, and he was like, "I really can't wait for you to join," you know.
• 13:55
  And he was like, "You know, there's so much stuff I like wanna take off my plate." And he was like, he showed me.
• 14:00
  He actually had set up an RSS feed from the blog to, I, I think it was Campaign Monitor he was using as his email tool at the time.
• 14:07
  But literally every Wednesday at five thirty, an email would go out to people who had subscribed with the new blog posts that had been added to the blog.
• 14:16
  But it meant that he was forced to write at least one post or source a post- That's awesome... every week. Like- That's so interesting.
• 14:21
  Uh, uh, someone said, you know, you literally, he had sort of chained his, uh, his legs to the chair, forcing himself to do it.
• 14:28
  But it, it, it forced that discipline, and I think that's a huge thing for something like the, the kind of strategy we, we had at Intercom, is that regularity of publishing and turning up in people's inboxes and adding some value and like giving them something of use every week.
• 14:41
  You know, and sometimes those posts, and I think Des would admit it, you know, like they could be light. You know, it could be just like, "Hey, here's like one of my favorite books, and here's what I learned from it."
• 14:50
  But equally, he was churning out like really high-value stuff about things he'd learned about building software, 'cause they had a consultancy business before that as well, so he'd had, you know, he knew a lot about building product.
• 15:00
  It wasn't just from his experience at Intercom. Yeah, yeah. There was a post, I think it was Des that wrote it like early on about, um, I think it was about the death of mobile apps. Yeah. Does that ring a bell?
• 15:09
  Uh- That like blew up. Yeah. That was, uh, that was, uh, Paul Adams, uh- Oh, okay... who's our head of product. Paul used to write these super in-depth, like two thousand, four thousand word posts.
• 15:20
  The other one he did was like basically a deep dive on how the product team was organized at Intercom.
• 15:24
  Like right down to like what meetings they had, how they made decisions, what like, how they did their road mapping process.
• 15:31
  And that stuff was huge because like every other product team in SaaS, like people are always looking for that kind of information. There was some level of success at Intercom at that stage.
• 15:40
  Like we'd got to maybe Series C at that point, and so, you know, people, people looked up to that content. Yeah. That's so interesting.
• 15:46
  I remember reading the, the mobile apps post and just being like, "I'm not a product person.
• 15:50
  I don't even like really get all this stuff, but I'm just like fascinated that it's like real, that like this person is explaining this thing that they know a ton about and all the problems."
• 15:59
  I was like, "This is really good content," [chuckles] you know? Absolutely. Did you ever get pushback? Was there ever like a campaign that was like a step too far, you know?
• 16:07
  That was like a vision that was like too big that leadership was like, "Whoa, John, slow down a minute."
• 16:11
  Um, well, I think there was definitely some pretty crazy stuff we did on the, particularly on the, more on the event side, and like we did world tours and, you know, wanted to do-- we did a live product launch in Bill Graham Theater in San Francisco, and I think sometimes- Oh, wow...
• 16:25
  we probably got ahead of ourselves a little bit. But I mean, my partner on that, on that, head of the events team, Megan Sherwood, just did some amazing stuff that pushed the company forward, and I think just really,
• 16:35
  you know, some people were uncomfortable, but, you know, it, it really, our brand was way big.
• 16:39
  I think, you know, for, for the size of the company at the time, like our brand in the market was way, way, way bigger as a result.
• 16:44
  But I mean, I think there was always, you know, a, a philosophy at Intercom of like, you know, going back to first principles.
• 16:50
  So there was always like we rarely did stuff that like we hadn't kind of road tested internally, and people had asked like, "And why? And why? And why?" And like, "What's that gonna do for the business?"
• 16:59
  So there's probably way more stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor that I don't even remember at this point [chuckles] than, than ever saw the light of the day, than, than stuff that- Yeah.
• 17:08
  I mean, I think the one thing I suppose, but like we never really cracked at Intercom, and I, I tried a couple of times internally, was video. Like we never figured out like what was- Mm....
• 17:18
  what would the video version of like the Intercom blog have been? Like, you know, could we have given those product lessons, you know, in, in some kind of video format?
• 17:26
  Like that would probably look like a series of Loom videos these days. Maybe we'd like do product teardowns or something. Who knows? I don't know.
• 17:33
  But like that was definitely something I think probably just because of the, the skills that were on the team internally- Yeah... that we didn't, we didn't, uh, we didn't ever crack. Mm-hmm. How about hiring?
• 17:43
  I'm curious how you built the team because not remote, right? You had teams in Dublin and San Francisco. Yeah. And also like it's a specific type of skill set. You're not looking for content creators.
• 17:52
  You're looking for this, I don't know exactly how you would describe it, but a facilitator. We, we... Editors, we call them.
• 17:58
  And actually, we like for a long time, for a period, we actually changed everybody's [chuckles] job title to like editor, like senior editor or like just, you know, content editor.
• 18:07
  But purely because like we wanted to make sure that people were clear that this was, the job was much more like working with subject matter experts-You know, trying to get their views on the blog rather than maybe, you know, the more rounded content marketer, which, you know, I think that you kind of talked about.
• 18:20
  But hiring, because we needed to work with subject matter experts, we-- I was based in Dublin. Uh, Intercom had offices in Dublin and San Francisco from, from day one.
• 18:30
  But then I knew I needed people in San Francisco 'cause about half the company was there, so I was gonna need people to work with the subject matter experts there. So, I mean, it, it was tough.
• 18:37
  Again, like I kinda said, we had like maybe, you know, I don't know, probably a couple hundred venture-backed startups in the same-- founded in the same year in 2011, and then there was more and more coming down the line.
• 18:48
  And you're like this kinda like, you know, Intercom developing a bit of a brand, but like not well-known. So I spent just a lot of time in San Francisco just- Mm. -having coffee meetings.
• 18:57
  Like, "Hey, like, someone knows someone at Slack who works in content."
• 19:00
  Just like, I don't know if I even wanna hire this person necessarily, but like I certainly wanna go and meet them and have coffee and just talk about what's going on and just network like crazy every time I was in San Francisco.
• 19:09
  And so I actually found that, you know, building out a team was something I really enjoyed. Um, finding great people, you know, hiring them, and, uh, and mentoring them. Yeah.
• 19:19
  I mean, Fiona Lee, who I hired to run the content team in San Francisco for me, like I subsequently re-hired her to work with me in, in Ramp when I moved there.
• 19:27
  You know, I just met some fantastic people, and they weren't always like from the obvious like, oh, they've done content for X number of years in this role, like or done content marketing.
• 19:37
  So for instance, Fiona had done like, worked in Google and done support content. She was like working at Caring.com at that point and was doing like much more kind of an SEO-focused strategy.
• 19:46
  But like I really saw that she could like come in and help us grow a team and like grow that kinda editorial machine that we were building in the, in San Francisco and other offices.
• 19:55
  You know, I, I actually applied for an Intercom content role at one point, probably 2015 maybe, 2016, and I actually, I had a call with a, I guess probably a recruiter.
• 20:03
  And, and my whole thing was like, "Maybe they'll let me be remote." [chuckles] And, uh, they like, they, they were very clear. "No, it's not. This is a Dublin-based role." And I was like, "Okay." Yeah.
• 20:12
  And they're like, "Do you wanna kind of start the process?" I think, I think I remember like, I think I remember that conversation where I was like, "Yeah, this guy's pretty good, but do we wanna have remote?"
• 20:19
  [chuckles] It's so funny. Well, my wife and I, like we both have Irish heritage somewhere down the line, so we were like, "I live in Dublin. Like that could be cool."
• 20:25
  I don't-- We talked about it for like ten minutes- [chuckles] -before we were like, "Eh, that's probably not gonna work," and obviously didn't happen. But I did find that to be just sort of...
• 20:31
  I, I mean, I actually, at the time I was like, "Oh, remote's the greatest thing in the world. I would never go back to an office." Like nowadays I'm like, "I would do anything to go to an office.
• 20:39
  I would love to go work with some people in person," you know? I am curious about the transition to Ramp. Mm. You know, how, what, when, where, why. You know, like Ramp, for context, a spend management tool.
• 20:51
  I mean, uh, is that, I'm generalizing a little bit. Was that- Yeah...more or less accurate? Yeah, by corporate cards, which is probably the way that a lot of people would know them. They'd see people using a Ramp card.
• 20:59
  But yeah, they're all kind of suite of kinda expense and spend management software, whether it's like paying your bills, you know, putting budgets, giving teams budgets, and allowing them to manage them themselves.
• 21:09
  The way we talked about it was like we basically wanted like look after all your non-payroll spend. So yeah, they were on a tear. They're like New York-based fintech company.
• 21:17
  And yeah, I went in there just in 2021, like third marketing hire, and just like sort of built out the content and comms function there. But it was a very, very different strategy and, and approach than, than Intercom.
• 21:30
  You know, like I think there was always, like even though we never called it community as such, but like we knew we were kind of building this like community around the content we built, that people were gonna continue to consume it over time and like, you know, it wouldn't always be a, like a really quick conversion path.
• 21:44
  But if you think about like a finance tool like that, you know, people are gonna like, they're gonna be frustrated with the current solution, and they're, they're literally gonna start looking for something else.
• 21:52
  So like it was much more about- Mm. -search from day one and SEO strategy.
• 21:56
  And a lot of customer evidence of like getting, making sure that like we were showing the success that, that customers were having, having with Ramp.
• 22:03
  And a certain amount of like kinda editorial and kinda like really making it clear like how Ramp approached things differently than, say, like Brex or other competitors, like really sort of getting our philosophy out there of like how we were approaching things.
• 22:15
  So like for instance, we went heavily on the fact that like we don't have points or multipliers. We gave you cash back, and just really went strong on trying to get, get that across all the time. Yeah.
• 22:25
  Super proud as a customer, actually. It's really, it's a cool tool. It's really, it's really helpful. Yeah. It's interesting. Were there...
• 22:30
  Like what you just described, was that all obvious like when you walked in the door? Or I guess I'm curious about like the feeling out period. Yeah.
• 22:36
  Like what's the, like you, you're hired, like there's obviously like you're, you're one of the best content marketers ever.
• 22:42
  Like you're gonna come up with something that's great, but like, yeah, I feel like it takes a little bit of time to get your feet under you and figure out like this new customer, this new market. What's your strategy?
• 22:51
  Do you have new constraints- Yeah...to work with potentially? Yeah, no, it was like, I mean, there was, there was all sorts of things that weren't-- Like some of that was apparent from the outside, some of it was not.
• 22:59
  I mean, like one of the things that's really interesting, and I, I actually was speaking to someone today 'cause they've got a similar setup, but the person who is the buyer is not the person who's gonna make sure your tool is successful.
• 23:09
  Uh, so, you know- Mm-hmm...in the instance today, it was someone who's like a technical tool that like they sell to CTOs, but they've got to get the developers to implement it and really like get on side with it.
• 23:18
  Equally at Ramp, you sold generally to a, like a founder or a CFO or head of finance or someone like that.
• 23:24
  But if you think about it, it was actually like the accounting team, like the day-to-day accounting team who were gonna have to like move bills, various other things from like their existing solution to Ramp.
• 23:33
  So we used to talk about this idea of share of wallet, but you'd get in there and like you'd roughly know what their like card spending or their bill payments in a year is and how much of that have you got at any, any given time.
• 23:44
  But it was also from a content perspective, it was like, you know, we've two very different audiences there.
• 23:49
  Like a, a head of finance, a founder of a company is gonna have very different kind of content they're gonna want or consume versus like a-an accountant or a controller, you know, someone who's, uh, actually at the, the coalface of, of finance every day.
• 24:02
  Um, so those kind of things were, were really, really interesting.
• 24:05
  The other thing I suppose that, um, uh, that was different at Ramp and which I think is gonna become, uh, more of a thing is that like I, I oversaw content and, and communications, uh, which was effectively- Mm...uh, yeah, public relations.
• 24:18
  And I just think the way the, the media landscape is going, that you're just gonna see a lot more of that, and just makes a lot more sense.
• 24:24
  That like if you have a team that's internally creating good content, if you can like give-That content to the media and, and sort of-- You know, basically the, the media has never been so under-resourced as it is now, and, and yet they need to do more and more.
• 24:39
  So if you can give them, whether it's like data points and, you know, like we started doing a, a, a quarterly benchmark report about like the spending patterns on Ramp.
• 24:47
  Like, literally what are like ten thousand US businesses spending their money on? Like, what, what's going up? What's going down?
• 24:53
  You know, we did, did, like in summer of twenty twenty-one, we did a big report about back to the office. Like, are people actually going back to the office?
• 25:00
  How much, like, how much are we seeing this in terms of our spend? And it was very interesting.
• 25:03
  You could, you can literally-- I think there was like a, a two-week period in March of twenty twenty-one where suddenly you saw like spending on facilities and like office cleaning and things like that went through the roof because it was obviously like- Yeah...people reop-- Like, oh, no one's been in the office for a year.
• 25:16
  We better like get the office going again.
• 25:18
  Equally, you saw spending on things like people had like a lot of stuff like, I was gonna say Deliveroo, which is the Irish service, but DoorDash and services like that where, you know, obviously they've been letting their team get like maybe lunch once a week at home or whatever.
• 25:30
  Suddenly that, like spending in those categories started to decline. But again, just thinking about like, is there stories in your product?
• 25:38
  Like, is there data points in your product that you can then use for like content in terms of traditional content marketing, but also like get that stuff out to the media and, and, uh, get, get press for, for it as well, which is- That's cool.
• 25:50
  I love that...you'll see a lot more of that. Yeah. I love that. I feel like COVID forced that a little bit too.
• 25:54
  Like, I recall, uh, in like spring twenty twenty, like at still at Animals and, uh, talking with a lot of our customers and, um, realizing that most of these companies, content is their only real direct line of communication to anybody, you know.
• 26:09
  Mm. Whether it's a customer, to the media, to anybody.
• 26:11
  And I feel like that probably some companies really leaned into that and realized that content has maybe this larger role to play, which I think is generally good because, like, these people are well-equipped to do it anyways.
• 26:23
  I'm curious about building a team there. So you probably don't know this. You hired a woman that I went to college with, Stephanie Jordan. Yeah. Stephanie. Yep. People really don't know this.
• 26:30
  University of Delaware has a great track record of turning out excellent content marketers. Greg Ciotti. [laughs] Another University of Delaware alum.
• 26:38
  But I'm curious how you built that team because it's a different role, right? I mean, or I guess it wasn't a different role. Were these people creating more content? Were they... What, what was their life like?
• 26:48
  Well, probably a little bit more traditional content marketers.
• 26:50
  I think a big thing for us as well was we kind of felt like we needed probably a little bit more subject matter expertise, the content team, rather than like the content team being the facilitators of bringing that subject matter expertise in from around the company.
• 27:02
  So actually, you know, Stephanie definitely has specialized a lot more in sort of like the finance content, you know. So I think that was definitely it. I think something, yeah, we were using a lot more agencies.
• 27:12
  I mean, the, the thing is, like just the growth of Ramp in terms of the business meant, you know, there was a kind of a pressure to deliver quickly. So like the way to ramp up quickly obviously is you- Mm.
• 27:23
  Sorry to use the word r-ramp to talk about Ramp, but [laughs] the way you ramp up quickly is to use agencies. So there was a little bit more of, of that as well.
• 27:30
  That like the, the team there was, was managing freelancers and contractors and agencies a lot more than we ever did at, at Intercom. Wow.
• 27:38
  And sort of being that, sort of like bringing that Ramp voice and that Ramp stamp to what those folks were doing and making sure it seemed like coherent to people who are on the receiving end of it.
• 27:46
  Yeah, that's interesting. We made a course at one point about vendor management because I feel like it's emerged as a really important skill. Yep. It's just the easiest way to scale your output.
• 27:54
  But to your point, you have to make it work. It's really not the agency's responsibility ultimately to make it work. Yeah. It's your responsibility- I think what happened-...whoever the point of contact is. Yeah.
• 28:05
  Something I'm seeing, and, uh, it happened at Ramp, there was some agencies hired before, say, they had someone in seat.
• 28:11
  So for instance, there was an SEO agency that was hired, but there was no one really to manage that SEO agency and to really think about like, what are the keywords and are they going after the right stuff?
• 28:20
  And so it didn't work out because you do need like whether it's like, like there's a content person or even an in-house SEO person, whoever, but someone who can closely manage that agency.
• 28:29
  If you aren't doing that, you're not gonna get the value out of the agency. You know, it's not a substitute for having people in-house. It's really like think about it as a way to augment the people you have in-house.
• 28:38
  Right. Do you think about content cadence a lot? Like, uh, do-- I guess when I think about content strategy, the first thing I think of is like budget and then cadence.
• 28:47
  Like how much, you know, and may-maybe this might just be personal bias, but I'm like, okay, I think a, a piece of content costs X, so with this budget, you know, we can do Y number of pieces per month.
• 28:58
  And like, maybe that's not the right place to start, but I am curious, like, yeah, you know, like in both of these cases, you're creating a lot of content. Do you feel the cadence is important?
• 29:06
  Are there peaks and valleys to it? Like where times you're publishing more and going harder?
• 29:10
  Do you believe more in like that even cadence like you mentioned with Des of like the, the Wednesday email going out- Yeah...whether there's an article in it or not?
• 29:17
  I think it's like I, I always kind of use the word regularity as much as sort of cadence, and it's like when we got into doing podcasts at, at Intercom, this was like a lesson that just it was stunning to me.
• 29:28
  But so we decided to do a podcast which, you know, at the time was like, ooh, should we do a branded podcast? Will, will people even listen to a branded podcast? This was twenty fifteen.
• 29:36
  Obviously now, you know, it's a no-brainer. Like, I think nearly every startup, probably more startups doing podcasts than blogs these days, right? But we said we'd be scrappy.
• 29:45
  We'd just try and get ten episodes out, just see if there was an audience.
• 29:48
  Like, would people even listen to sort of, you know, like the similar content to the blog, but, you know, would people even want to consume it as a podcast?
• 29:55
  And so we just got like ten episodes out just to see was there like an audience. As a result, we were being scrappy. We didn't really...
• 30:02
  We just literally kind of like put episodes out when they were ready, and we saw enough to kind of go double down.
• 30:08
  But actually someone who said to me, "Stick to a day, as close as you can to a time, and literally get it out every time."
• 30:14
  Like we went Thursday at five thirty Dublin time, and it was like you could see it in the listenership. Once we went at a regular cadence, it was like listenership started to take off. Wow.
• 30:23
  And then when we went from once every two weeks to every week, it was the same thing. So yeah, I think it's, it's just like get into a cadence that is realistic and deliverable and, you know-Yeah. Yeah.
• 30:34
  E-even simple stuff.
• 30:35
  I used to talk to like, like I'm sure a-anyone who's listened to this doesn't need to be told this, but like, you know, I used to see that thing of people would like start a blog in particular with like a fit of enthusiasm, and they're like, you know, publishing three times a week and, you know, literally they run out of steam after six weeks.
• 30:51
  They've created 18 posts. Yeah. Yeah. But if you published 18 posts once a week over 18 weeks, I guarantee you those exact same posts will have... You'd build an audience much more effectively.
• 31:00
  You know, you'd start to get-- 'Cause as we all know, like it's like a quarter or two of like probably pretty static low growth, and then suddenly it starts to take off.
• 31:07
  I mean, every content marketing of project or team I've worked on has had the same sort of shape of graph.
• 31:12
  So yeah, I think it's cadence, regularity, call it what you want, but yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for figuring that out rather than... And, and just sticking to it.
• 31:20
  And yeah, obviously, as I say, it takes maybe two quarters probably to see the results, but you will start to see early feedback, which means, you know, it's not a case of like, let's just stick to this blindly for six months and see what happens.
• 31:31
  But yeah, I think it's vital to figure out what that, what the cadence you can deliver is, right? Yeah.
• 31:36
  Whether it's like just literally sitting down and going, how much money do we have versus how much does each content piece cost to produce. You mentioned something I wanna just touch on quickly. One of...
• 31:45
  You were right, and I feel like that's like a, like an accepted consensus that content marketing takes a while, but people are also quite impatient and not- Yeah... not always willing to wait.
• 31:55
  And so like I think what you pointed out was that there should be some feed- like it's not that it's just like nobody and then lots of people. Yeah. There's signals, and I wonder if those signals are more anecdotal.
• 32:06
  You know, somebody saying, "Hey, this is real- I really liked this." You know? Yeah. Or like maybe you pick up a, a mention or a link in a place that's like fairly meaningful.
• 32:15
  Like it- even if it doesn't send floods of people your direction, it's like, "Oh, okay, that's good. Like we're making some progress here." Exactly. You shouldn't have to like
• 32:24
  have really complicated like metrics or KPIs or like you should just be able to eyeball it and see like, we're getting qualitative feedback.
• 32:30
  Oh look, this person who's an influencer in the space has like shared our article, or, you know, the CEO like bumped into someone at a conference and said, "Oh, I saw, you know, that blog post you guys put out," or, you know.
• 32:40
  Like you just, you will get that signal, and I actually think sometimes people like over-engineer it to begin with, and then it's like, as a result, they kinda lose their nerve and, you know- Mm...
• 32:51
  can things before it has a chance to really perform. Yeah. We've got like five minutes left. I wanna be respectful of your time. We got a question here from Ryan.
• 32:57
  He says, "Does John have any tips on how to start building an audience through all channels, content, social, email, et cetera?" I would add to that, is it the same audience?
• 33:05
  Like are you reaching the same people in different ways, or do you think of those different channels as reaching potentially different sets of people?
• 33:12
  I don't know if they're different sets, but I mean, obviously you go through all those channels 'cause like you just have to be respectful that some people are gonna wanna consume you in, in, in different ways, and it kinda goes back to the way I thought about the podcast.
• 33:22
  It was like, did it open a new audience or did it open it up to like people at a different time?
• 33:27
  You know, like, "Hey, I'm at the gym, and so, you know, I can't sit down and read a like a 1,200-word Intercom blog post, but I can definitely listen to a podcast."
• 33:36
  So, and you're just giving people that choice of like, "Hey, if you wanna consume this stuff in a different way, we've got a way for you to do it."
• 33:42
  In terms of how to start, like just do all the stuff that doesn't scale, you know?
• 33:47
  Like, you know, I, I think of like Ramp or whatever, when we launched our podcast, it was like, okay, there's 250 people in this company, and we do not have 250 likes on Apple Podcasts. What?
• 33:59
  [laughs] You know, and I used a kind of a word the Irish people use a lot. You know, I was like, "This is crazy." You know, you kinda have to be like, get everyone behind it, you know. We like were very... Like
• 34:12
  content's something that people can get behind.
• 34:14
  And as you said, like some- oftentimes it's the only sort of like channel that people have to sort of like communicate outside the company, or it's like certainly the most visible one.
• 34:22
  And so it's like really just mobilize the whole company behind it, like in the early days.
• 34:27
  You know, and I think just like have all those different touch points so that people, like if they are on your content channels, or, sorry, on your social channels, that they like can get back to your blog, and then there's like an opportunity to subscribe.
• 34:40
  Make it easy for them to like share that content, whether it's like, you know, sign up for newsletter, make it easy for them to share it with a friend.
• 34:46
  Just really, really, yeah, it is a bit of a startup cliché, but just do the like stuff that doesn't scale right at the beginning.
• 34:53
  You know, like every single subscriber or reader you can get is a huge win, and try and get everyone in the company behind you.
• 35:00
  You know, even if there's only 10 people in the company when you're going to do content, that's a network that's 10 times larger than your network. So really, really tap into that. It's tougher now.
• 35:08
  Like there's not like, you know, there used to be sort of like you go, oh, well, we're selling into HR, and like there's this HR community over here that like we just spend time there. We can, you know...
• 35:17
  Most of these communities are fragmented now. It's quite hard to find one place where you can distribute your content or really start building an audience.
• 35:24
  But what I have done it more laterally is just try and like figure out what are those fragmented communities, and maybe target two or three at a time and see which ones work.
• 35:33
  And if you're finding something doesn't work, move on quickly and like, you know, every month you're trying new ones to get your content out.
• 35:39
  And also just I think close the loop in a big way as well between like someone shares, you know, you're, you're starting out and someone shares your content on social, make sure that like, yeah, they come back to like, you know, from the official, the brand handle or whatever, you know.
• 35:52
  Really just make it clear to people that like, you know, whether, as I said, they're internal.
• 35:56
  You know, we used to even have league tables of like the most read blog posts every month and the most read authors on it, so Intercom would try and get like some friendly internal competition going.
• 36:05
  Like just get people excited about it. That was huge for us, that, that sort of internal one.
• 36:09
  We called it Project Dopamine at Intercom, which was just like making sure people get that shot of dopamine when they've gone to the effort of creating content with you, that they know how it's benefited the company and benefits their career as well internally.
• 36:20
  Yeah. Are you up for one more question, John? I know we're, we're basically up on time here. Sure, yeah.
• 36:24
  Sivik asks, "Can you go deeper on how you prioritize and dedicate resources for content across audiences, the example being CFO versus the accountant, and quantifying the differences in the impact?" That's interesting.
• 36:34
  Yeah. I think, look, it's really just making sure you're aligned with the, kind of the company and broader marketing and go-to-market strategy.
• 36:40
  So for instance-Like early on at my time at Ramp, it was very much like we need to get new customers. Like that's top of funnel growth.
• 36:48
  And so it was like much more of a focus on the CFO founder stuff, you know, trying to get more people aware of Ramp. And actually it was comms and PR more than content I think that really helped with that a lot.
• 37:01
  Well, it was probably a combination of the two.
• 37:03
  You know, we were lucky to have sort of raised big fundraising rounds, which grabbed a lot of attention, but like it was really making sure that we were turning that attention into business.
• 37:10
  So like making sure we could convert that, that interest.
• 37:13
  But then obviously, like over time and sort of in later quarters, the company strategy was like, okay, let's think more about, like how do we get more of that share of the wallet?
• 37:21
  How do we expand when we're in these-- Like, we've done the land, now we need to do the expand.
• 37:26
  And so at that point it was thinking about the accountant or it was thinking about the person or the controller or whoever the person was who was gonna run the card program.
• 37:33
  So that was when we added someone to look after customer education and- Mm-hmm...
• 37:36
  run things like onboarding webinars and more content that would like help people get more value out of Ramp once it was actually already in the business.
• 37:43
  But yeah, and, and quantifying the differences in the impact, I think that's like, obviously depending on if you're going after the founder and CFO, it was like, it was leads.
• 37:51
  It was like, yeah, are we getting people into the funnel? Are we getting people to sign up? Whereas for the accountant, the person who ran the card program, it was much more about share of wallet.
• 37:59
  Like, are we expanding within those accounts? And so y- yeah, I mean obviously it'll be different for every, every, uh, every company, but that, that's the way we kind of thought, thought about it. Got it. Really cool.
• 38:09
  Pretty sure it's getting on six PM for you, so I feel like we should wrap up, let you get on with your day. But you're consulting now- Yes... which I'm- Yeah, yeah... which I'm curious to know about. Yeah.
• 38:17
  So yeah, I mean, like I've, I've always been interested in kinda like starting new things. I'm not the kinda guy to come and like run a mature process. So,
• 38:27
  you know, I've, I've, I've kind of also, I think like I had a pretty like run from like pretty full on journalism career to straight into Intercom, seven-year run there. Saw a lot of growth.
• 38:38
  Year and a half at Ramp, saw a lot of growth. So took a few weeks off over the summer, just needed to, to reset and recharge, and now working,
• 38:46
  working a lot on content strategy with clients and also I think, you know, a lot of consultants come along and give you a strategy, but they don't necessarily help you to go and figure out like, how are we actually gonna implement this.
• 38:56
  So doing work as well with them on like the org design, like who do you need to hire in-house for this? What's gonna be going to an agency? Like are there contractors who can do some of this?
• 39:05
  And then even helping sort of like hire those agencies, contractors or even in-house folks- Cool... that to, to deliver on the strategy. That's amazing.
• 39:13
  And is that geared towards the same type of company as Intercom, Ramp? Like sort of you're helping them get it up- get it going from basically the ground up? Uh, yeah.
• 39:21
  I mean, ge- generally I would say the, the sweet spot for me and the like first couple of clients, they have like a marketing team. They may have already started some content efforts so like they see the potential.
• 39:31
  Yeah, I mean, if you haven't like got at least some of the basics of marketing in place, it probably doesn't make sense for me to come and work with you.
• 39:36
  Like you need to have like a sense of like who your buyer is, like what your positioning is, your messaging, all that kind of stuff.
• 39:41
  But yeah, once you've got those things in place, like kind of roughly series A, series B in terms of venture-backed companies, I would say is kind of the, the sweet spot or the one where I've been having a lot of fruitful conversations, and actually both my, both my first clients are, uh, in at that kind of stage.
• 39:55
  So- Cool... excited to see where it goes. That's cool. Can we send people anywhere? Do you have a personal website or is LinkedIn, Twitter, any- anywhere we should- LinkedIn probably just check out...
• 40:04
  What am I on LinkedIn? John Collins Ireland. What is my profile? Oh my gosh, I should know that. [laughs] I will have a website. Yeah. John Colli- LinkedIn, but I'm like /johncollinsireland. Okay, cool.
• 40:14
  Is, is where you'll find me. We'll link to it. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, we'll definitely link to that and, uh, we'll link to all the, the stuff that you mentioned in the notes we put along with the recording here. Great.
• 40:22
  And, uh, just in general, thank you, John. Like, you're just such a wealth of knowledge on this. You have- [laughs]... some amazing experience to share. So we have the, we have the link in the chat now.
• 40:30
  Thank you very much. We're just really grateful for you to come hang out, spend some time with us, and yeah, thank you. Thanks for- No, thanks for- We're super passionate about this...
• 40:39
  uh, and thanks for putting together the, the community. If, if nothing else, it w- like I learn from time to time.
• 40:44
  Uh, I've certainly learned some stuff from you, but if nothing else, it's also a great way to keep in touch with former colleagues on Slack. [laughs] For sure. Oh, yeah.
• 40:50
  That's actually, we find that that's like, you know, our-- when we look at our analytics, we-- there's way more DMs than public messages, and I think a lot of it is that.
• 40:58
  You should, uh, you should have an alumni, uh, product where you- Yeah, yeah... have like content team alums to keep in touch. [laughs] That's a good idea, actually. I kinda like that. [laughs] Um, well, cool.
• 41:07
  Thank you, John. We'll link to all your stuff. Really appreciate it again, and- Okay... have a great day. We'll talk soon. Thanks everyone for listening and yeah, uh, all the great questions. Cheers. Take care.
• 41:19
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