Latest / Content, Briefly / Equals: Matt Hodges on keeping content simple

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Equals: Matt Hodges on keeping content simple · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
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• 0:54
  There is zero SEO keyword strategy with our blog. Zero. None.
• 0:59
  Our strategy is very simply, and this was instilled in us from our experience at Intercom, where at the time at Intercom, and I'm talking in twenty-fourteen, which is when I, I'd first joined, so that's what I can speak to my direct experience from.
• 1:13
  And John, I think, joined three months after me in his role as head of content and took over the blog at that point off Des, effectively. You know, we wrote content for our audience,
• 1:27
  and our audience was people building SaaS products that we would want to read. That, that was the strategy. [on-hold music] Hi folks, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:43
  Today, we're talking to Matt Hodges, who's the director of product marketing at a company called Equals, which is a data analysis tool. Remarkable for a couple of reasons. One is that their content is just fantastic.
• 1:54
  And when I say it's fantastic, like just, just go there. It's called Wrap Text. They run it on Substack. Obviously, there's a link in the show notes, so you can just go check it out quickly.
• 2:02
  But it strikes me as totally refreshing in a few different ways. You know, the Substack component of it is interesting in and of itself, and basically the thesis there is how quickly and simply can we do this?
• 2:13
  Like, how can we just avoid all complexity and just get the stuff we want out fast? And that is sort of the ethos that powers the rest of their content as well.
• 2:21
  Like, most of what they're writing about is things they're learning while they're building a company. There's kind of like a retro feel to it in a way, just sort of vlogging. And it's great. Really.
• 2:31
  Like, I really enjoyed it. You can go and read the post and learn something. It doesn't feel like content marketing. It doesn't look like content marketing.
• 2:37
  I think there's some lessons here for a lot of us who are grappling with what is content gonna look like in twenty twenty-five for our business.
• 2:46
  While this may not be the exact direction for everybody, there's something really important here, which is they're just creating stuff for the people that they want to reach, and they're sort of stripping away some of the gamification, for lack of a better word, that goes into content to get it into distribution channels or optimize it for this or that.
• 3:02
  And it's good stuff. It's really good stuff. And Matt was very generous with some of his experience and knowledge on this, and really enjoyed this conversation, as always, and I hope you do too. Take care.
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• 4:17
  Hey everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today. Very excited to have Matt Hodges all the way from across the world, basically, Sydney, Australia. And, uh, you run product marketing at Equals.
• 4:27
  That alone is a topic I would like to talk about because this is a content podcast, but there's a ton of stuff I want to get into. Maybe first, Matt, will you just give us an intro of yourself?
• 4:35
  You've had a very interesting career to date, roles at Atlassian, Intercom, Loom, now Equals. Like just give us an overview. Yeah, sure.
• 4:44
  Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Jimmy, and good day everyone that's listening. I am in Sydney, and it's, uh, not too bright and early for me, but, uh, I've had a couple of coffees, so I should be good to go.
• 4:52
  [chuckles] So where do I start? I first got into tech, uh, by landing a role at Atlassian back in two thousand and eight when I had no idea what I was doing.
• 5:02
  I'd worked in sales before that, selling Apple computers, and Atlassian turned out to be a great move for me. It was in Sydney at the time. They moved me to San Francisco.
• 5:09
  And I was in a sales role initially at Atlassian, an inside sales role where I just helped people learn how to use Confluence and help them get started.
• 5:17
  Not a typical, you know, quota-carrying role, more of a, what you'd call today customer success role, but in the era pre-SaaS.
• 5:24
  You know, fast-forward six years later, I ended up moving to San Francisco, running product marketing for their collaboration business. And yeah, just had a wonderful time there and learnt so much.
• 5:33
  And then, uh, ended up going to Intercom as, uh, their first marketer, which was another great move for me.
• 5:39
  I just was lucky to get two great companies with amazing teams back to back and spent another five and a half years at Intercom, mostly in product marketing and, and marketing leadership roles, and did a little in a product leadership role for a year and a bit before I left.
• 5:53
  But learnt tons in that time, especially around content, which I'm sure we'll probably dive into today, and I can talk more about what I learnt at Intercom in my time there on the content front.
• 6:02
  But Intercom was really my first pure SaaS business that I worked for, as if you know the history of Atlassian, it started as on-prem and then-Eventually became a SaaS business, and now they're, you know, all in on SaaS.
• 6:15
  And from Intercom, I went to Loom. I met Loom actually, uh, it's so full circle.
• 6:21
  I'd decided to leave Intercom and move back to Australia with my, you know, now growing family, my wife and, uh, my one daughter at the time.
• 6:28
  And when I made that decision, I opened up the conversation of where I was gonna work next.
• 6:33
  And Ben, who was first employee at Intercom and head of growth for a long time and someone that I worked in the trenches with in the early stages during hypergrowth, he actually introduced me to Joe, the co-founder and CEO of Loom at the time.
• 6:47
  Nice. And that's how I ended up going to Loom.
• 6:50
  Um, so I moved to Sydney after three months in the SF office and worked remotely for Loom and, um, stood up marketing there in, in the first, uh, you know, in the 18 months that I was there, again, during hypergrowth.
• 7:01
  And you talk about content there as well. And, um, you know, long story short, burnt out, needed to take some time off.
• 7:08
  Took some time off, and did another stint at Atlassian, did some consulting and, and now I'm at Equals. And, uh, I'm at Equals with Bobby and Ben, the, the two co-founders. Bobby's the CEO. Ben is the CPO.
• 7:20
  I'm sorry if you can hear [chuckles] something in the background. You heard your- One of our neighbor's kids trying to go to school. [chuckles] But, uh, I know Bobby and Ben very well.
• 7:28
  We worked together very closely at Intercom, and that's why one of the main reasons I'm at Equals is because of both of them, and I just know how brilliant they both are, and we work really w-well together and, uh, they had a great opportunity.
• 7:38
  And it's probably the only reason I'm able to work remotely from Australia with a company that's primarily East Coast-based in the US. Oh, interesting. And it's now been a year and a half that I've been at Equals. Okay.
• 7:49
  Very cool. Seems like a theme of very product-focused companies that you've been attracted to. Yes, absolutely. Like, I'd say when I joined Atlassian at the start, I really didn't know what I was doing.
• 8:00
  You know, I, I mentioned that was my f-kinda first role in tech, and I'd got introduced to Scott and Mike there through university, actually. We did the same program at university.
• 8:09
  They're a few years ahead of me, but they sponsored the program that I was in, and my course coordinator put me in touch with them when they were looking to build out a inside sales team in Sydney and, and that's kinda how I landed there.
• 8:21
  But obviously learnt a lot about a product-first company, Atlassian being one of the first in the kinda on-prem space, at least before SaaS was even a thing.
• 8:30
  And then it was really when I moved to Intercom after that, where I, I think I really learnt a lot more about building world-class product design, just by working so closely with Des Traynor and Paul Adams and Ellen McCabe and, and the whole team there.
• 8:44
  And so I, I've always had, I think, a deep appreciation for product outside of software. Like, you know, I love gadgets, I love... I'm a huge Apple fanboy.
• 8:52
  I love playing with products and tinkering with things, and that kinda has carried through with software.
• 8:56
  And so the, the companies I've joined since, you know, my first stint at Atlassian have always been ones where it's been a product that I've wanted to use myself or could really see it being, you know, a best-in-class product in the market.
• 9:09
  Yeah. I think Loom is a... was probably another good example of that.
• 9:11
  I, I remember playing with it when I just came across it on Product Hunt before I even knew anyone there or what they were doing, and kinda forgot about it after I'd used it.
• 9:19
  I'd remember the experience being really good and going, "Oh, this is probably one of the better screen recorders I've ever used." And then nine months later, Ben introduces me to the CEO and I'm like, "Oh, Loom.
• 9:28
  That was that product I tried on Product Hunt. I'll take a, take a meeting with, with Joe. They build a really good product." So...
• 9:34
  And then Equals is similar, except with Equals I'm not the, I'm not the ICP, which I think is the main difference to my time at Loom and my time at Intercom- Oh, yeah...
• 9:43
  and my time at Atlassian, where the products that I was marketing were products that I was a buyer or primary user of. Right.
• 9:49
  Which is not really the case at, at Equals, which has been a different, I guess, learning curve for me. Yeah, yeah. What is Equals? Will you tell us about the product and the business? Yeah.
• 9:57
  I mean, very simply, it's a next generation spreadsheet, if you were to put it in a category.
• 10:03
  And what we do is we take the best of the traditional spreadsheet world, so Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and we have built all of the things that you would want those spreadsheets to do but have not been built for.
• 10:16
  Specifically connecting it directly to your live data sources wherever they live, whether that's your own, you know, Postgres database, whether it's Salesforce, whether it's Stripe, whether it's HubSpot, the list goes on.
• 10:27
  We allow you to directly connect to those data sources, pull that data into the familiar spreadsheet format, query it, explore it, play with it, and then build all of your analyses and dashboards in the familiar format, I guess, of a spreadsheet.
• 10:40
  And so we are very much used by finance professionals and at this stage, operators at early stage companies who have a lot of data that they need to analyze.
• 10:51
  They don't need a full-blown business intelligence or, uh, data warehouse solution, and they want the flexibility and familiarity of a spreadsheet format.
• 11:00
  And so that's what we've built, and our primary use case at the moment is selling to teams who need to stand up their annual recurring revenue reporting or ARR reporting.
• 11:10
  So we sell primarily right now to, uh, and build for early stage SaaS businesses, you know, Series A, Series B stage, who are in that phase of needing world-class reporting for their board, for their investors, and so we help them stand them up and, and do it all within Equals- Very cool...
• 11:26
  from data all the way through to a published dashboard. Very cool. Really cool. Your role at Equals, you're in product marketing. You're in charge of content as well. I mean, I don't know if you consider that to be
• 11:36
  separate- Yeah... or there's a Venn diagram in there of like- Totally... product and content. I'd be curious, what's the scope of your role there? I mean, I, I'm also wondering- Yeah...
• 11:45
  relatively young company, you may have your hands on lots- Yes... of different things. Yeah, it's, uh, definitely the latter.
• 11:51
  And, um, I think, you know, something that was instilled in Bobby, Ben, and I, we, you know, we all worked together at Intercom, as did a number of other people on the Equals team, is we're not really, you know, too hung up on titles.
• 12:02
  And so when I joined back in June of last year, 2023... Am I getting my years right? Yeah. That was the role at the time. They wanted someone to come in and run product marketing.
• 12:13
  We actually had someone else that had just been hired in more of a demand gen facing role-And so when I was hired, I was, I was hired to do product marketing, traditional product marketing.
• 12:21
  So own the website, figure out how do we position and message ourselves, you know, you know, which are the customers that we're going after, and then how do we build collateral to help them make the decision to buy Equals and then be successful when they start using it.
• 12:33
  Mm-hmm. But, um, naturally, as the, as all startups go, you know, you get your hands in different things and the team changes.
• 12:39
  And so I'd say my role right now is head of marketing, even though that's not really my, my title publicly.
• 12:45
  And yeah, I look after content, and I have a PMM on my team, Joanne, who's fantastic, who helps me with a lot of all the things, not just product marketing, but also the content.
• 12:54
  And, uh, now more recently, we've started to experiment with paid advertising as well. Yeah, I have my hands in a lot of different things, but I'd say, you know,
• 13:03
  60% of my work is pure product marketing, so making sure that we have the right position in the market, and as we build new product, which we do on a very frequent impulse, click that we're consistently evolving how we think about who we are and who we're selling to, and making sure that's reflected in all our marketing, which obviously then impacts content strategy.
• 13:22
  And so I started focusing on content... Oh, when, when did I join? So June last year.
• 13:28
  Then it wasn't really until about October last year that I really sunk my teeth into our content strategy and specifically just kind of rebooted our content efforts through our vlog, Wrap Text, which existed before I joined.
• 13:40
  It, it existed from day one. Bobby had- Oh, it did? Okay. Had stood it up. I was gonna ask you that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bobby had stood it up.
• 13:46
  You know, he tells the fun story of Des Traynor, who is co-founder and, uh, I think he's... forget what his role is now at Intercom. He was chief strategy officer for a long time.
• 13:54
  That might still be his strategy, but Des does everything and everything at Intercom. But, um, Des was, uh, you know, a huge proponent of content and big part of Intercom's content strategy and still is today.
• 14:04
  I think he spoke at Web Summit this week, and he said to Bobby, "I'll write you a check if you commit to writing a post every week." [chuckles] And, uh, so Bobby lived up to that promise.
• 14:14
  And if you go back to the earliest days of Wrap Text, which you can do in our archives, you can see Bobby was posting every single week before we even had a product in market.
• 14:23
  And that was something that he kept up consistently. And then as you know, product got to market and he got more busy, he needed to get more involved in things like sales, that kinda fell off a little bit.
• 14:33
  And so when I joined, we weren't posting as frequently. We didn't really have a strategy around what we were posting and why. We'd always just posted on topics that were of interest to us, which is...
• 14:47
  I think it's still at the heart of our strategy, but it's a lot more refined today and a lot more targeted, focused on writing content for people we know we wanna sell to.
• 14:56
  I wrote up a, you know, a very simple strategy doc, which was, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? What does success look like? Which are the three questions I ask myself when we start any new initiative,
• 15:07
  and really just align the team behind like re, I guess, um, revamping, revamping is the wrong word, just like going back to where we started with the content that we were writing, but doing so in a more focused fashion and, and scalable fashion.
• 15:19
  And we, you know, officially kicked that off in October last year, so it's been a little more than 12 months since we started that. And there was a move to Substack in there, moving off another platform in January.
• 15:31
  And yeah, I'll kind of pause there and, and kind of let you figure out where you wanna go from there 'cause I'm talking a lot. There's so much I wanna unpack there.
• 15:38
  The Des Traynor, you know, contingency about writing a post a week is just so fantastic. I mean, I think I read somewhere once that Des wrote the first 100 posts on the Intercom blog. Yes.
• 15:48
  He personally wrote like 96 of them or something like that, like- Yeah. Really a believer in that, and interesting because it's not about, you know, uh, optimizing for keywords and trying to build organic traffic.
• 15:59
  It was like building the muscle of- Yeah... telling stories, testing things out, understanding what resonates, like that type of thing. And it, in Intercom's case certainly, it seems like in Equals' case too,
• 16:11
  instills a culture of storytelling and sharing and educating- Yeah... that is very hard to, to do later on. You know, like- Yeah...
• 16:20
  a company that's already Series C or Series D isn't going to start doing this type of content now. Highly unlikely. Like, it has to happen from top down at very earliest days is my guess. And so like when I...
• 16:33
  I actually was not aware of Wrap Text, which is the content brand for Equals- Yep... until John Collins mentioned it to me and I went down the rabbit hole, and I found it striking for a few reasons. One, Substack.
• 16:44
  I'm very, very curious about that. Will definitely ask you a few questions about it. Two was that it just didn't really feel like content marketing.
• 16:51
  It was early stage startup folks writing for other early stage startup folks. Like, you know, "Here's, uh, how we made a great pitch deck that helped us raise money."
• 17:02
  You know, "Here's a pricing experiment that we did and what we learned from it." You know, a kinda, "Here's wrap up from our, you know, 2023," like all the things we learned. Stuff that you're like, it's rich content.
• 17:12
  There's so much good experience and great lessons in there, and none of it feels like- Yeah... it's packaged up for content, and it's almost too simple. That's like the- [chuckles]...
• 17:24
  confounding part about it is like, what if everybody just did this? [chuckles] You know? Yeah. It's so much more interesting. Anyway, so there's a ton there. Maybe could we start maybe just to talk a little bit about
• 17:34
  topic selection? You know, like- Yep... there's... transparency is baked into this. As I mentioned, there's like a cultural element to this where it seems like everybody's super bought in. Like what is a...
• 17:46
  How do you and the team talk about this? Like how do you talk about what you're gonna write about? Are there off limits topics? Are there... Like are you tempted to chase keywords?
• 17:54
  Like how are you kinda like thinking about this and- Sure... talking about it with your team? Yep.
• 17:58
  I'd say first thing, and we can come back to it and how the, I wouldn't say thinking, but our focus on it has slightly evolved, is there is zero SEO keyword strategy with our blog, zero, none.
• 18:10
  Our strategy is very simply, and this was instilled in us from our experience at Intercom, where at the time at Intercom, and I'm talking in 2014, which is when I first joined, so that's what I can speak to my direct experience from-And John, I think, joined three months after me in his role as head of content, and took over the blog at that point off Des effectively.
• 18:33
  You know, we wrote content for our audience, and our audience was people building SaaS products that we would wanna read. That was the strategy. Like we are our own audience. We're building a product for ourselves.
• 18:47
  Let's write about stuff that we would wanna read. And we were the subject matter experts.
• 18:52
  And when I say we, I'm talking Des on product strategy, Paul Adams on product and design strategy, Emmett Connolly, who's still there as well as VP of product design, I think is his current title.
• 19:03
  And then, you know, Owen would write the odd post every now and then.
• 19:07
  Then when I joined, I started writing about marketing and, you know, Bobby would write about finance, Ben would write about growth, and there was many contributions across the whole company.
• 19:16
  But at the end of the day, it was like, what are the topics of interest to people like us to help them build their own companies?
• 19:22
  If we can establish a relationship and build trust and credibility with those people, not trying to sell them anything, then we know that that's gonna pay off in dividends down the line, because when they do have a need for Intercom, they're going to think of us and they're going to trust us, and they're gonna hopefully think that we know our shit and that we build great products 'cause we put so much time and effort into the content that we produce.
• 19:45
  Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, you know, you-- I wouldn't call it content marketing, I call it content. We're just producing content.
• 19:51
  And so like that was instilled in us, and we'd seen that strategy work so well at Intercom in the early days. We really just carried that over to Equals.
• 20:01
  I will say that at Intercom, that strategy obviously morphed and evolved as naturally we figured out our product strategy and we started going after more markets than others and we, you know, went more upmarket, and by more upmarket I don't mean enterprise.
• 20:15
  We just started selling to slightly bigger companies. And so as our product strategy evolved, our marketing strategy had to evolve with it. And naturally, that impacted the types of content that we wrote about.
• 20:28
  And then as we got a little bit more professional, I would say, and, you know, John built out his team, then we did start to focus on keywords, and we expanded beyond written, and we started doing a podcast, and we started doing video, and then we had a whole events arm alongside of that.
• 20:41
  And so yeah, we learned so much from Intercom and then just instinctively knew that we wanted to do the same thing at Equals. So there wasn't really a moment of needing to get the team aligned.
• 20:51
  It was more about getting the team committed to this being important and something that we wanted to do a really good job of.
• 20:59
  Like in the spirit of less is more, let's focus on producing less things in marketing as a whole, not for the blog, but focus on doing less so that we can put more time and attention into the blog and make sure that every post we write each week is quality- Yeah...
• 21:14
  and that people will get value from it. And right now, you know, well, in the earlier days, our audience was, again, it was people like us, early-stage founders and operators like Bobby and Ben trying to figure it out.
• 21:26
  So let's just share
• 21:28
  all the lessons we've learned, the mistakes we're making with them, and we'll build trust and credibility with them such that when they have a need for Equals in the future, because hopefully they've just learned about Equals naturally through reading our content, that they'll come to us and they'll see us as, uh, you know, experts in the particular fields and, and topics that we're writing about.
• 21:47
  And so that's really the un- underlying strategy. In terms of topic selection, it's evolved quite a bit in the last, I'd say like four months. Um, basically our process is very simple. Our strategy is one post a week.
• 22:00
  We commit to posting as much as we can, and I'd say we hold to this 95% of the time. Every Tuesday at around 8:00 a.m.
• 22:07
  Eastern, we publish a post on Wraptex, which is posted on Substack and, and goes out to, you know, subscribers on Substack. Every Tuesday, 8:00 a.m., a post goes out.
• 22:16
  I manage the content calendar in a Linear project, and it's just a list. We have a backlog of ideas with names attached to them.
• 22:26
  So whether it's Chris, whether it's Bobby, whether it's Ben, whether it's me, whether it's Diane, Janie, who's our, um, head of engineering, wants to start publishing on engineering. I need to reply to him today.
• 22:37
  Uh, and so we have this backlog of, of topics, and I usually plan like three to four weeks out.
• 22:43
  I just in our go-to-market sync every my Tuesday, Bobby and Chris's Monday, we look at the calendar, and we make sure that whoever's name is attached to a topic that we wanna write about over the next four weeks is committed to that.
• 22:56
  And each post usually takes a week to turn around in total. Not like a week of time spent on it, but whoever owns the post will write it.
• 23:05
  They'll send it to me and someone else on the team on, on their Friday, sometimes their Saturday.
• 23:11
  And, you know, I'll spend my Monday editing and making any necessary visuals that need to, to be created to support the post, and then we publish on Tuesday. It's very simple.
• 23:21
  And then I mentioned, you know, before you start hitting record, I think that, you know, John Collins is a very good friend of ours, and we're working with him right now.
• 23:27
  He's helping us produce some of that content, uh, at the moment 'cause we've got a lot of other things going on.
• 23:32
  And so he, um, interviews, um, at the moment it's Bobby and, and Chris, who's our head of finance and analytics, who are writing most of the posts at the moment, which I'll speak to why in a moment.
• 23:43
  And, um, John interviews them, um, gets the, the meat of the post out of them, writes a skeleton, and then Bobby and Chris make it their own.
• 23:51
  And I think Bobby and Chris, while they're not content marketers, have written so much at this point. Like, I think Bobby's... I have it in my Equals dashboard. Bobby's up to probably, you know, 70 posts at this point.
• 24:06
  Oh, wow. Uh, Chris is probably up to about 10. Um, like they're just, they're just both great writers because they've built that muscle.
• 24:14
  And so there's not as much editing that's required by, by John or, or myself, you know, and they really make the post their own.
• 24:20
  And I think that's another thing I'm pretty proud of is like when you read a post from each of the individuals, I think you can get a sense that it's them writing, not the brand.And it's not like reading a corporate blog where, you know, you go through an editorial team and all the personality is stripped out of the, the post itself.
• 24:35
  And so that's really how we pick topics.
• 24:38
  And then just to go one layer deeper, as we've like learned so much in the last six months around, uh, go to market and who we are actually really good at building for and selling to right now, and for what particular use case, we have stopped posting on such a broad range of topics.
• 24:57
  So I haven't posted about marketing as much. I've done a lot of posts on pricing. I haven't been posting about pricing as much.
• 25:03
  And really right now we're just focusing on posting content for either heads of finance or CEOs, first-time operators at early-stage startups who need to stand up finance or are kinda like figuring out how to report on their business for the first time or do so- Mm-hmm.
• 25:18
  Got it...in a better fashion. So that's what a lot of the content we're producing now is really focused on. So it's a bit more narrow and focused, but it's still in the vein of lessons learned. Yeah.
• 25:28
  Just an observation listening to you talk about that is j- I'm just thinking about how complicated content marketing has become over the last ten years.
• 25:36
  You know, like I think as content marketing became a, a practice, it got kinda clogged up.
• 25:41
  Like you could just do content marketing and do all these things related to content marketing and kinda lose sight pretty easily actually of like, why, why are we doing this? Who's gonna read this? Yeah.
• 25:51
  You know, and it's like in a weird way, the disruption happening in content marketing right now, driven primarily by AI, is I think forcing a lot of companies to think about if we can't just milk their search algorithm all the time like we're used to, like what else are we gonna do?
• 26:05
  You know what I mean? Yeah. And I think a lot of companies right now are trying to think through, how do we strip it down? How do we just make stuff people wanna consume, read, watch, listen to, et cetera?
• 26:15
  Different companies will come to different solutions, like this is one of them. You know, this is one avenue- Yeah...a company may take. Just sort of a, a breath of fresh air, honestly, to hear you talk about the way.
• 26:25
  It just feels like... And it, it kind of reminds me of like my earlier days in content when it was just like, just write about stuff we know and let's see if people read it. You know- Very okay...if they read it, cool.
• 26:34
  If they don't, we'll do something else, you know? [chuckles] How about Substack? I mean, now that I have a better understanding of what content looks like at Equals, it, it makes more sense to me.
• 26:42
  It's like this is probably the simplest, fastest, easiest way to do this, right?
• 26:46
  Like- Yeah...that sounds like the, like a very important value for the rest of the marketing and, you know, the tool you choose to get the stuff to people mirrors that. Yep.
• 26:57
  So I won't name the vendor that we were using before. I don't wanna throw shade on, uh, what we were using in the past. It was a fine solution, but it just didn't have everything that we needed.
• 27:04
  So we moved to Substack in January of this year, just migrated all of our content over. The primary, I think, impetus was we decided that we didn't wanna build something ourselves.
• 27:16
  This is pretty natural, I think, for a product-led company to want to build everything themselves. But we wanted something off the shelf that was simple, easy to customize,
• 27:27
  and had a better sign-up experience or subscription experience compared to the tool that we had been using. And so- That's really native- I won't share the-...to Substack- Yeah...right? Like- Oh, that...
• 27:37
  It's just a seamless subscription. The product they want you to opt in. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it was night and day.
• 27:42
  Like I've shared, if you go to Wraptex, I wrote a post about why and how we moved to Substack, and you can just see it in the subscription trend. Like our subscription rate looked like this.
• 27:54
  It grew very, very minimally, and we had a lot of views, but people weren't subscribing, and we were more focused on audience over views, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm.
• 28:03
  Building an audience versus trying to optimize the number of views. And then moved to Substack and boom, overnight this trajectory has been like that, and it continues to be. And so that was a big part of it.
• 28:17
  And we weren't too fussed on like customizing the design. We have always been, you know, less is more. Let's just let people focus on the reading aspect.
• 28:27
  We wanna brand it a little bit, but we don't need to go and create like a bespoke-looking blog 'cause it was more about the actual content than the look and feel of the blog itself.
• 28:37
  And it was something that I was able to do pretty much on my own. Like I was able to migrate the whole thing.
• 28:41
  All I needed Ben's help with, who's our chief product officer, was to set up the domain and then redirect all of our old posts to the new domain.
• 28:50
  And so it was a very seamless migration experience, and so far it's been a good move for us. That's really cool. We... So we use Webflow. I really don't have any...
• 28:59
  It's not that I dislike Webflow, it's just, it doesn't make publishing content super easy, you know? Yeah. And I sometimes wish, like, God, I just wish there was, like what is the fastest possible way I could do this?
• 29:10
  Because if I get lost in like the 20 fields I have to put in and all this other stuff I have to do, it's just like I start to lose interest kinda quickly. Yeah.
• 29:18
  But I wonder too, for your particular audience, I bet Substack is a pretty... It's recognizable. Yes.
• 29:25
  I'm guessing that the folks that you wanna reach are already reading other Substacks, which probably makes it- Yeah...a more natural fit for this audience than it may be for others. Yeah, definitely.
• 29:35
  You know, I think selling to early stage, primarily B2B SaaS companies, you actually can see in Substack where there's overlap with your readership and other Substacks.
• 29:44
  And so- Oh, nice...a big one for us is Lenny, Lenny's newsletter. There's a lot of overlap there.
• 29:49
  Obviously, he has a much bigger audience than we do, but we get a lot of people coming into us from Lenny's blog newsletter.
• 29:55
  [coughs] And so, yeah, I'd say even if it isn't recognizable for the people that do know Substack, that's another tick of credibility almost, that this is something that I'm happy to subscribe to 'cause I know it's Substack and I know I'm not gonna get spammed with bad content.
• 30:09
  Yeah. And so that was not really part of the consideration. I'd like come across Substack because of I'd seen folks like Lenny publish on it, and I was like, "That's how I knew of Substack."
• 30:20
  And I was like, "I'll explore whether we could potentially use it." And I literally... I think this is in the post. I pinged Ben and Bobby, and I said, "Hey, have we ever considered using Substack for our blog?"
• 30:28
  And they're like, "No, but we could." And so I quickly put together a Substack. I sent it toBen and Bobby and they're like, "Okay, let's do it. Let's move over." And then, you know, two weeks later, we were on Substack.
• 30:38
  That's awesome. You know, it's not without its, it's not without its quirks. Like, no product is perfect, but it does the job for us.
• 30:44
  You know, at some point, I'm sure we'll open the question again and probably ask John for his expert input again, which is should we host this on our own site?
• 30:52
  But I think Ben made a really good point at the time that there's just something about blogs that are hosted on the same domain as the corporate marketing site that they don't feel... I don't know.
• 31:04
  There, there's a different feel to a separate blog, a separate publication, and an editorial experience than a corporate blog. Definitely.
• 31:11
  And so that was one of the reasons why we didn't h-host it on our own domain as well. Yeah. Interesting. Actually, that reminds me of Inside Intercom,
• 31:19
  which was, I think, Intercom's blog back in the day, which was also subdomain. I don't know what it ran on, but it was all separate from the rest of the- Yeah... website. Very interesting.
• 31:29
  You know, this may be an unfair question to ask you, but I'm curious, like, when you look at the content landscape, like, you're owning this content channel for Equals.
• 31:38
  You know, you've come up in marketing and product marketing. You know, a lot, a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast, maybe they were journalists who came into content marketing, for example. Yeah.
• 31:46
  Um, so this is the main thing they've been thinking about for a long time.
• 31:49
  I'm just sort of curious, like, on your observations about content marketing right now as someone who has been thinking about content, but also a lot of other m-marketing-related things over the last ten-plus years.
• 31:59
  Yeah. Yeah. I'd say... Well, there's a couple of thoughts that come to mind. First is, I think, the changing landscape of content due to AI and what role does AI have to play.
• 32:11
  I'd say that we're probably not, like, leveraging AI to the degree that we could be, purely just because of bandwidth and time and not having the time to, like, even think about how we could use it.
• 32:21
  But for us right now, AI just really helps with the editing process. I can't imagine a world where we would ever-- and this is maybe my close-mindedness and my bias towards, like, really authentic content.
• 32:32
  I can't imagine us ever, like, starting content with AI. Yeah.
• 32:37
  It's more, for me, it speeds up the editing process and makes sure that I don't have typos and horrendous gram-grammatical errors, and it's really good at that, and it helps me, like, make things more concise.
• 32:46
  I use it very frequently in the editing process. But I think there's more we could be doing with AI and not just on written content, but other formats.
• 32:55
  And so, you know, we haven't really gone deep on what we could be doing outside of the written word.
• 33:00
  You know, we've written books as well, a book, and then also a written guide that lives on our website, and those are also parts of our content strategy and actually tightly connected to the blog, but they're all written.
• 33:11
  And so I think AI, I think opens the door to doing more with different formats because you can produce things like video, which is another very engaging format that I know we don't do enough of right now and should be doing more of.
• 33:24
  Um, so I think that's one area. Like, I think how can, you know, content marketers leverage AI and do so without losing the authenticity of what makes great content really great?
• 33:35
  That kinda dovetails into my kinda second observation. I think far too many companies write content that looks the same. I don't know.
• 33:44
  I have an eye for when I know something's been written by AI or has been ghostwritten for someone. Like, it doesn't feel authentic or organic, and everyone adopts the same playbook. Like, we've adopted a playbook really.
• 34:00
  Like, we've taken the playbook from Intercom, and we're using that playbook at, at Equals.
• 34:04
  And I think, you know, even now I've started to see, you know, our viewership as we've focused, like, kind of really narrowed in and focused on a particular audience.
• 34:14
  We're having to rethink how do we think about the performance of our content because naturally, our views are gonna go down because we're focusing on a narrower, more niche audience, but that doesn't mean the content isn't performing.
• 34:26
  Yeah. And so I know that's a bit of a tangent to the original question, and I think of content as being broader than just a blog or a podcast.
• 34:35
  And so if I was to, like, share a company that I look at, and I'm not a user of it, I'm not an investor, I have no affiliation with them at all, where I'm like, "I think they do content really well."
• 34:45
  When I say content, I mean holistically, and they stand out to me, and I look at their content and I go, "That's well done."
• 34:51
  I might not like, you know, specific aspects of the design, but it's, uh, PostHog if you're familiar with PostHog. No, I have to look that up. Check them out.
• 34:59
  I don't even try and describe what they do, but they build a suite of tools for businesses that build and take products to market. So they do everything from feature flagging to, I think, AD testing.
• 35:13
  They have a bunch of stuff that they do. I'm sorry I'm not going PostHog, describing PostHog's product to us, but the way in which they talk about themselves and the content they produce really stands out.
• 35:23
  They clearly have a lot of fun with it, and to me, it's them writing, like, for themselves, knowing that they'll appeal to a certain demographic and audience. Yeah. And you don't see many companies do that.
• 35:36
  And, you know, I think we try to do that with our own marketing site too. We just try to be very direct and try to have a bit of fun with it without trying too hard 'cause I think that's the danger.
• 35:46
  When you try too hard, it doesn't work and it falls flat. Yeah. But I think PostHog do a particularly good job of it on their marketing site with the content that they produce and also in their ads.
• 35:55
  And so yeah, I think, you know, coming back to your original question, like, I think so much content looks the same, and it feels the same, and it follows the same format.
• 36:03
  And the challenge, I think, for not just marketers, but for companies, is how do you create something that's authentic and true to your brand and your voice so that you do stand out?
• 36:16
  Because there's just so much for people to consume these days that if you're not doing something different, you just kinda fade in.
• 36:23
  And so I think it's the challenge, and you constantly have to reinvent, you know, not monthly or, or quarterly, but, you know, there's usually a new wave.
• 36:30
  And then when someone sees something that's working, everyone adopts it, and then everything looks the same again. Cool. Matt, thank you so much. I mean, I'm just so appreciative of what you're doing. You know, it's like
• 36:41
  I probably fall into your target persona, and I love the stuff. Like, I, I love reading it, you know. And I would really encourage folks, like, now you've heard the story, go to RapDeck.
• 36:52
  We'll have a link in the show notes to make it easy. Go there. See it for yourself. And, you know, I feel like that's when the rubber meets the road for listeners. Like, can you...
• 36:59
  Once, once you've heard the story and now you see it live, what can you glean for, you know, like, your own content efforts? So anyways, we'll make... We'll-- Like I said, link will be in the show notes.
• 37:08
  Can we put a link to your LinkedIn? Is that the best place to send folks to connect with you? Yeah, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, your LinkedIn is great, by the way.
• 37:14
  I mean, you've shared quite a few learnings about content. I mean, among other things, but some of the content stuff to me, like, really stood out as a content person. So encourage folks to go check that out too.
• 37:24
  And- Thank you. Thanks, Jimmy... great to meet you, Matt. Thanks for all the kind words. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for having me. Yeah, we'll get you on with your day.
• 37:29
  Thanks so much, and, uh, maybe we can do a round two sometime and see how things have evolved- Absolutely... over the course of a year or so. Yeah, open to that for sure. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Jimmy. Thanks, Matt.
• 37:39
  Take care. Enjoy your evening. Bye for now. Bye. [outro music]