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How to succeed on a 100+ person marketing team · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] Alex here. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Metricool. I'll be honest about my relationship with social media. I don't love using it personally.
• 0:12
  Unfortunately, social media is an absolute essential for work. Significant amount of Superpath's growth traces back to LinkedIn, but it's the single most distracting part of my week.
• 0:22
  I sit down to write, I open LinkedIn to schedule one post, and 40 minutes later, I'm reading a thread about something that has nothing to do with Superpath or content marketing.
• 0:30
  The other thing that bugs me is that it never closes. There's always one more comment sitting there, one more thing to queue up before tomorrow morning.
• 0:36
  Metricool surveyed people who do this professionally, like me, and more than half said they feel as overwhelmed as I do.
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• 0:56
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• 1:04
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• 1:13
  Start free or get 30 days of any premium plan with our Superpath code. The link and that code are in the show notes. Enjoy the episode. Alex here, and welcome to a new episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:23
  Today, I'm joined by Eric, Rachel, and Jimmy for a meaty discussion of Jimmy's recent article, "How to Succeed as a Content Marketer at a Big Company."
• 1:31
  Jimmy has mainly worked at smaller companies, but earlier this year, he found himself on a 100-person marketing team after Reforge was acquired by Miro.
• 1:39
  In this episode, we talk about the pros and cons of big versus small marketing teams, the power of narrative over numbers, and how to play inside baseball that will get you ahead.
• 1:47
  A quick editor's note: this episode was recorded just one day before Miro was acquired by Bending Spoons, so you won't hear any mention of that big announcement. I love this conversation and know you will, too.
• 1:58
  Onto the episode.
• 1:58
  Okay, so we got a new blog post up on the Superpath blog about my transition to working at a much larger company, and one of the reasons I wanted to write this piece is because in the five-plus years that I was the sole employee of Superpath, I actually felt that my own career journey was not so useful to Superpath members and subscribers any longer because, like, so much of what we were trying to do was provide career advice for people who work in content marketing, and I was kinda only tangentially working in content marketing for that big chunk of time.
• 2:29
  And so over the last roughly 12 months, I've been on, like, a, a whole new content marketing career journey, much more relevant to the rest of the content marketers out there.
• 2:39
  The very short summary is last summer, 2025, I started doing a bit of consulting work for Reforge, 10-ish year old business doing, uh, learning and professional development for product and growth people.
• 2:50
  That turned into a full-time role, and I was only there for maybe five or six months roughly before the company was acquired by Miro. Miro is best known as, like, online whiteboard.
• 3:00
  Part of my job as a marketer there is to try to change or at least improve that perception that people have, but that's kinda what people know it for.
• 3:07
  And Miro's about 1,600 people, and I got put onto a marketing team with 100, at least 100 people, maybe more than that. It's the largest company that I've ever worked for.
• 3:16
  Uh, so anyways, it just, like, gives me this kinda cool opportunity to, like, reflect on this kind of accidental job that I ended up with as a result of this acquisition and a few of the things I've learned.
• 3:25
  One is that, and this is probably my favorite thing, is that having accesses to real resources is just fantastic.
• 3:33
  You know, I've spent so much time in my career working at small, scrappy startups, agencies too, where you just, like, don't really have the budget or the people to do anything big.
• 3:43
  You could easily imagine how you could make a campaign much bigger and reach more people. It's not hard to imagine that it would work really well, but there just isn't money to do it.
• 3:52
  And so at a large company, you have that. My favorite example of this right now is that we have a PR team, and the, our PR team has a series of agencies that they work with around the world.
• 4:00
  The PR folks love thought leadership content, which is what I'm primarily working on. Actually, we just launched a Substack, which is my project, so if you wanna check out the Substack, it's called Up for Renewal.
• 4:08
  But anyways, you know, the, the PR people love this because, like, the thought leadership content ends up being fuel that they can use to help our executives land speaking gigs and podcast interviews and fireside chats and contributed articles on other sites.
• 4:25
  And so we have ended up working together really closely, and it's just been awesome. I've always wanted to work, do something with PR. Like, it is as cool and as useful as I hoped it would be.
• 4:34
  And to work with people who are, like, true specialists in their role too is just wonderful because they know exactly what to do.
• 4:39
  That kinda leads to the, another thing I've been learning, which is that the stakes at a larger company are much higher. So, like, you're gonna write a thought leadership piece.
• 4:45
  You do need to, like, think a little further down the road about what the purpose of it is, how much juice you can squeeze from that effort, too, I think, is probably the right way to put it.
• 4:53
  It's sorta silly to spend the time interviewing the, an executive, writing the piece, getting feedback, getting approval, publishing it, and then have that be the end of that.
• 5:02
  And so I, I would say that we think a lot further down the road about where any work is heading so that we optimize it for kinda, like, the full life cycle that that piece could experience if we really treat it well.
• 5:17
  And then also, like, there's just, there's 100 people on marketing. If everyone's kinda doing their own thing, how insanely chaotic that would be.
• 5:22
  And so the stakes of making sure everyone is aligned and that projects are well-managed and that, uh, work is not duplicated and that type of stuff is very interesting.
• 5:32
  I mean, it's obviously very important, and, like, that's kinda where the, the meetings and the extra time kind of go into.
• 5:38
  But I find that one thing that, that I'm sure we'll talk more about is my, like, bias towards smaller companies and how I felt like this is sort of a waste of time.
• 5:44
  But my stance on that has softened a bit because I sort of see how much work goes into making the machine run smoothly, and I'm like, I'm just, like, super impressed by how good people are at it, and I am inspired to improve my own thinking and skills in that area, kinda like the soft skills of, like, making work happen.
• 6:03
  It gets really hard, and I'm, like, super impressed by so many of the people at Miro. And one last thing, and then I'll stop talking.
• 6:09
  I have been surprised and sort of, I guess, delighted too, I think, is the right word, to see, like, one, just how co-... kind people have been and how far it goes to pass that kindness on.
• 6:21
  Like, when I came on through this acquisition, I wasn't hired. I didn't know anybody. I didn't have a manager yet.
• 6:27
  So you're kinda just, like, hoping someone will kinda hold your hand to get you up and running, and a couple people did that for me, which I'm just, like, hugely grateful for.
• 6:34
  And so now, even though I've only been there for, I don't know, five months or so, there's already... I'm already finding opportunities to, like, be the good teammate to the next person.
• 6:42
  It feels sort of cliche to say like, "Yeah, be a good teammate. Like, take care of people." But I feel...
• 6:46
  It just feels so different at a large company, because there isn't such a bias towards speed and shipping all the time, that there's a little bit more room for it.
• 6:54
  Whereas, like, at a smaller company, at least in my experience, like, people's feelings are often put to the side because we need to get something done and get it out the door, or a customer's mad, or, you know, whatever thing is happening that's a fire right this second.
• 7:05
  And then there's gonna be another one of those tomorrow and the next day. And so, like, you kinda, like, sometimes lose the chance to, like, just, like, get to know people and, like, make it a nice place to work. Okay.
• 7:13
  Sorry, that was me talking for eight straight minutes. [laughs] Obviously, like, happy to unpack some of this stuff. Maybe a place to start, I have a question for, uh, Rachel and Eric.
• 7:21
  Have you guys worked at larger companies where you've, like, kinda dipped your toes into, like, what it's like to work at an organization this large?
• 7:27
  So the largest company I've worked in-house at was about 80 people, and our marketing team, at its height, had 17 people.
• 7:36
  Which, when I tell people that now, the reaction that I normally get is like, "Wow, that's a huge marketing team. I would kill to have 17 people on our marketing team."
• 7:46
  So Jimmy, hearing you say that you were on a team, or you're on a team right now of 100 marketers, I don't... I can't even imagine what that looks like. Obviously, I've interviewed at places.
• 7:58
  Like, I've interviewed at HubSpot, and I've interviewed at the HubSpots of the world. But I've always been scared, question mark, [laughs] of, like, getting lost in a company of that size.
• 8:09
  I've, I've maybe, like, freelanced for some pretty large companies, but I think I've been so insulated from the largeness, 'cause I still just have my one person that's my point of contact.
• 8:20
  So yeah, 17 is my s- is my idea of a really large marketing team. That's still a lot of people, I think. I mean, I'm still adjusting. Jimmy, before I answer, what does a 100-person marketing team look like at Miro?
• 8:34
  Like, is it... I'm assuming- Yeah... it's divided by, like, product segments or something like that. You don't have 100 different roles, right? That is correct.
• 8:41
  So I think I imagined a large marketing team to be, like, a bunch of us marketers all over here doing stuff, but it's fairly spread out. It's spread out across corporate marketing, brand marketing, social, events.
• 8:53
  I'm probably missing a couple things. There isn't a separate content team. Like, there are content marketers on a handful of different teams. So then there's also cross-functional content groups.
• 9:04
  It's not a team, but, like, the c- all of us content folks have a regular call and a Slack channel where we kinda stay in touch about what's happening with content.
• 9:11
  That's probably the most overwhelming thing, actually, is that, as a content marketer, there isn't a dedicated content team, and I kinda get it.
• 9:18
  This is one of those things, um, you know, like in SAS, you see the trend of, like, bundling and unbundling, and I kinda could imagine that exact same thing playing out at a company like this, where you...
• 9:28
  'Cause a couple years ago, actually, Miro did have a content team, and now that team doesn't exist in the way that it used to. That's sorta like the unbundling, and maybe it'll be bundled again one day in the future.
• 9:37
  But yeah, the, the, kind of the cross-functional component of it is a bit confusing, because staying aligned with all of those people is super important, but it also does not ever happen by accident.
• 9:46
  And as, like, a new person, I find myself, not as much now, but especially in the first few months, being like, "Oh, wait, someone, someone's already doing that? I thought I was supposed to do that."
• 9:54
  Or like, "I did this thing," and then someone else had already done it. Or, "Oh, you wanna do this? You need to talk to this person."
• 9:59
  That's kinda, like, where the being a good teammate part kicks in, because, like, I have no idea who does what and, like, how to find them. So that part's a bit confusing.
• 10:07
  I have actually been moved recently to the product marketing team, and I'm the only content person on the product team.
• 10:14
  But I have a home now, and I have a team, and I have a manager, and, like, that's made my life, like, quite a bit simpler. You know, like, I know where to go. I ca- I can go to my manager if I need something.
• 10:22
  I have teammates to talk to if I need stuff, and I don't feel quite as, like, uh, kinda like alone in the wilderness as I did, like, three or four months ago.
• 10:28
  Is any of the stuff that you were doing at Reforge the same stuff you're doing at Miro, or is it just, like, an entirely different thing? I got hired at Reforge to run thought leadership content.
• 10:38
  We started doing that, then I got moved over to product marketing. The work that I was doing up until the acquisition was all product marketing 101. We're gonna launch a new feature. Uh-huh.
• 10:46
  Do something to let people know about it. At Miro, I'm not really doing anything, like, product related, despite sitting on the product marketing team. But I am...
• 10:53
  I launched a Substack, and that was one of the projects that I was going to launch at Reforge. Priorities shifted around, so it didn't happen. So now I'm, like, back to my roots.
• 11:00
  So I really think of, like, thought leadership content as, like, my roots.
• 11:03
  In many ways, like, this, this project got a ton of buy-in from Brian Balfour, s- former CEO of Reforge, and I think that's why it, it's happening. And he said, like, "Jimmy's the guy.
• 11:14
  Jimmy should run it," which was super cool of him to do. So yeah, I guess in some ways, I am now doing the thing that I was hired to do, but, like, a year later. I remember, it was a...
• 11:22
  It's a very specific context, but my own experience of being a co-founder at a six-person company that gets acquired by a 200-person company, and then bringing over a lot of my projects from my six-person company to 200-person company was a very jarring experience, where the speed at which I could do anything just plummeted.
• 11:40
  Yeah.
• 11:40
  [laughs] And I was just like, I could not overcome the frustration of I have an idea, it's shipped two hours later, to, I have an idea, let me float this by my manager to go to the CMO to feel it out on the exec team, to come back to me to be able to implement it maybe three weeks later [laughs] in a smaller format, right?
• 11:59
  But that was a very specific thing, where it was real projects that I had that came across with the acquisition. You know, that's so interesting, because I, I've definitely felt that exact same thing.
• 12:10
  I, I do feel there's a bit of a silver lining to it, at least for me. You know, as you've taken over Superpath, you've probably found so many skeletons in the closet o- of my, like [laughs]
• 12:20
  Little projects I did on a whim. I'm very, uh, distractible. [chuckles] And- Mm-hmm.
• 12:26
  So I actually feel like one thing I really like about working at a large company is, like, I get the green light to do the Substack, and then, you know, my manager's like, "Tell me what the strategy is, and be ready to defend it.
• 12:35
  Assume you, you have resources and budget. You know, here's the designers you're gonna work with on it. This week, I have a call with the CEO who's gonna contribute an article." So, like, I got a call with the CEO.
• 12:42
  So, like, I have to be, like, super focused and prepared and kinda, like, thinking long term about the whole thing. Those are guardrails that, like, just for me personally, I, I find to be really helpful.
• 12:54
  I haven't been at a really big company, but I was in a similar situation to Alex, where I was the only marketer at a very modern 50-person startup with no management structure, a very flat company, and then we got acquired by a Polish company, which also acquired, like, six other companies at the same time.
• 13:12
  It, it was, it was maybe a 500-person company, so I'd say more, like, mid-market rather than super enterprise-y, but we had very enterprise customers.
• 13:20
  But there, I got the experience of, like, navigating the global work cultures in one place. Like, it was, it was remote, but different styles of leadership, different styles of communication, time zones,
• 13:33
  lots of different companies merging into one, like, the mess of that. So, so I've experienced, like, big company mess, but I was again, the only marketer.
• 13:41
  There was one other person who was at the Indian company that was acquired as well, and we sorta, like, stayed siloed from each other, so I, I was kinda just doing everything.
• 13:49
  So, so no, I haven't had the, the chance of working with a really big team. Yeah, and to Alex's point, like, at, at Dock, day-to-day, I'm the only marketer, so anything goes with how I spend my day.
• 13:58
  And I think the thing that I found very freeing once I became a one-person marketing team again is that there was no one to offend when we changed our mind.
• 14:05
  At a large company, like, exactly what you're describing, like, you're making the case for this. You're asking for budget. You've invested a lot of time and effort and energy for good reason.
• 14:14
  Eventually, if someone comes in and goes, "Oh, budget's gone." The CFO comes in one day and just, like, deletes a line off a spreadsheet. Then suddenly- [laughs] Yeah...
• 14:21
  like, that cascades throughout the organization into broken hearts, basically. One, one thing I find [chuckles] nice about working at Dock is, like, I never have to break anyone's heart.
• 14:28
  I'll have to be like, "Hmm, that was a bad idea that I worked on that," and just delete it and move on. It's nice to think about what you're doing, but it's also painful to give things up when you're invested in them.
• 14:37
  Definitely. One thing I'm trying to be super mindful of is there's an article that I've probably shared in Superpath over the years, like, 20 times.
• 14:43
  It was written by this engineer named Dan Luu, and the title of it is something like, uh, like, "Why Some Corporate Engineering Blogs Are Good."
• 14:52
  It's, like, a very bland title, but what the article describes is that this guy, Dan, his personal blog, this is a couple years ago, could easily attract 10 times more subscribers and visitors than a corporate blog, and the reasons are there's no red tape.
• 15:07
  He can say whatever he wants. He can have a strong opinion.
• 15:09
  I always l- thought of that from the content marketing perspective of, like, small content teams are actually probably more likely to be successful if they're small and maybe if they're only one person.
• 15:19
  And I'm trying to, like, be mindful of that now, of like, can you have that kinda, like, lone, hungry wolf mentality and still operate successfully within the context of a larger team?
• 15:28
  And I, I feel like I don't, I don't know.
• 15:30
  I'm being, like, super, super protective of this Substack thing because, like, I feel like I understand exactly what a Substack needs to be successful, and if I don't protect it and do exactly that, sort of, like, fall into the potential temptation of, like, making it feel like marketing, then it's just not gonna work.
• 15:45
  But you gotta be, like, really sort of careful about it. You can't just tell everyone else to F off. That's not gonna work either.
• 15:51
  Explain to people, like, what belongs here, and, like, how will we judge what lives here and what doesn't, so that I don't have to make one-off decisions about am I gonna publish this or, or not publish this?
• 16:00
  Because then it starts to feel personal. Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds like you're trying to answer that question by doing a Substack at a very large company.
• 16:07
  Because a Substack is very much a one-man show kind of content marketing play. If you are able to successfully do that, the answer to your question will be yes. [laughs] You know?
• 16:19
  But I think, like, what you're saying, and one of the things I think that stood out to me a lot about your blog and from my experience, the bigger a company you work with or work at, the higher percentage of your work becomes navigating all the other people that you're working with and their communication styles and their needs, and if you're breaking their heart by changing your mind and getting their investment.
• 16:45
  Yeah. That just becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger piece of your job, to Eric's point too.
• 16:49
  And from the customer perspective, I can do things at Dock, make mistakes nobody ever notices, a- and I can just delete and move on, versus Miro is gonna have a much bigger audience.
• 16:59
  Even Superpath has a much bigger audience, so I just have to, like, pay attention to what I'm doing more, not just in terms of speed and editing and things like that, but also just the, the choices I'm making with content.
• 17:09
  You can't announce something and then get rid of it. You're using a lot of people's attention, and you have to use it for good. Yeah. No, it's a great point.
• 17:15
  I'm very thankful that the, the platform solves some problems for me.
• 17:21
  I think everybody sorta gets that, like, Substack is primarily a creator platform, and so for us to go over there and use it, we kinda have to play by those rules. That's helping me a lot.
• 17:30
  Part of the case I've been trying to make to people is, like, we can't use the company blog for thought leadership, which is, like, a little bit of a tough case to make, even though I believe it.
• 17:37
  It's not a criticism of, like, what other people have been contributing to the company blog for many years. Just, like, the winds have changed a bit.
• 17:43
  Most people, I think, will react better to thought leadership on a third-party platform than they will on a company blog. But I gotta find some data to back that up.
• 17:50
  I, I, I could totally imagine at some point being like, "You know what? I just wanna move really fast again," [laughs] you know, and, like, going backwards.
• 17:57
  Although, honestly, like, if I wanna continue this series of blog posts, then I will probably have to go get a job at a much larger company to see, like, what that's like, 'cause, like, 1,600 people, like, really not even that big relative to, like, the Googles or Metas or Microsofts of the world, which I imagine probably have, like, 100,000-plus people.
• 18:13
  It's hard for me to even fathom what that type of marketing organization would look like. I've been thinking about, like, risk-taking within this context.
• 18:20
  I almost wonder if it's a more interesting time now to be working for a big company. I'm thinking about my own- Context as well, transitioning to a 200-person company, 20-person marketing team in 2022.
• 18:32
  It was so much built on people that had been on five different marketing teams. They're like, "Here's the way we do it. There's no reason to, like, shake things up, no reason to experiment."
• 18:42
  Over time, I mean, picture kind of the, the 2015 to 2022 era, traditional content marketing, and it's, like, becoming less effective over time, but this is how we do it.
• 18:51
  And so there wasn't a lot of space for taking big risks in a way that maybe today, based on what you're saying, it's clear that what we did before isn't what we wanna do moving forward.
• 19:03
  And so maybe there's more space to take bigger risks in a bigger company context than maybe there has been in the past. Do you feel like that might be the case? Yeah, 100%. I think that's a great point.
• 19:13
  Th- two things come to mind. One is, a month or two ago, I read this article for the Superpath blog about people follow people, and here's how to operationalize it.
• 19:21
  Like, the reason I wrote that is 'cause that's exactly what I was thinking about at Miro, and, like, trying to figure out, how are we gonna tap into this? It was relatively easy to get people bought into that idea.
• 19:29
  And then from there, there's, like, a trickle-down of, like, "Okay, if we believe this, then there- here's the platform we should use, and here's the type of content we should publish."
• 19:35
  And we chose for the Substack to be a multi-author publication. A, I think a small risk, but that's our opportunity to get more faces and names and bylines in front of people.
• 19:45
  And then the other thing is, I think there's just, like, an appetite for differentiation right now. I kind of thought that the Substack thing would probably get batted down by somebody.
• 19:56
  Maybe that's just my naiveté of, like, not having worked at a company this large, but it was really easy, actually.
• 20:03
  [laughs] Uh, and, like, when I posted about it on LinkedIn, and a couple people in the comments were like, "Wow, how did you get buy-in for that?" And I was like, "I don't, I don't know. Actually, it was really easy."
• 20:10
  The, the trends are leading us in this direction. I won't be surprised if more companies do literally exactly the same thing.
• 20:16
  Like, when I went to look around for companies who had started Substacks, I could find, like, six. And they were doing some really cool work.
• 20:22
  Substack has some issues with the platform, and there's other ways you could do it.
• 20:25
  But, like, the trend of, like, thought leadership, faces and names, people follow people, there's enough happening there that I think it's relatively easy to make the case for this, at least this type of project right now.
• 20:36
  It's very much like a both/and or, like, a double-edged sword being at a big company and getting buy-in for these kinds of things.
• 20:43
  On one hand, there's just simply more resources and flexibility, I guess, because you have more people and you have more money.
• 20:51
  If you spend a lot of time working on the Substack, and it doesn't really work out, it's not gonna be the end of the world 'cause they have 99 other marketers that are doing other stuff. [laughs] Yeah, that's true.
• 21:00
  You know what I mean? But, like- [laughs]... s- for someone like Eric, like, you can't waste all your time, Eric, doing something that doesn't work out. You have to ship fast, learn fast, and then kind of move on.
• 21:11
  In some ways, small companies have the, maybe, like, the first mover advantage, where, like, they can try something really fast, but then it, they also have to make it work fast or else move on.
• 21:23
  Whereas a big company, I think, has a longer runway to experiment and take more risks. Maybe just different sides of the risk-taking coin.
• 21:32
  I feel like sometimes we harp on big companies for being, like, really entrenched, and that's often the case.
• 21:39
  But I liked what you said, too, about, like, there's a lot of resources at big companies, and that can be a huge win if those resources are available to you. 100%.
• 21:49
  Coming in through an acquisition, I think is probably an important part of this, too. Reforge gets acquired.
• 21:55
  Day one, the 40 of us have a meeting with the, with Miro's CEO, and he was like, "I recognize that Miro has gotten slower as it's gotten bigger. I wanna know what you guys think about how we can move faster."
• 22:06
  Only a handful of people came in with predesignated roles. If I raise my hand and say, like, "Hey, I'm the thought leadership content guy. Like, what if we start a Substack?"
• 22:16
  Kind of to your point, Rachel, like, sure, why not? [laughs] Like, we didn't hire you to do something else.
• 22:20
  You sort of ended up here, uh, without, like, a obvious role on day one, so, like, sure, well, let's give it a shot.
• 22:27
  Yeah, you're 100% right, Rachel, about, like, at, at Dock, if my marketing strategy had not worked out, like, the one or two channels we chose, the company would probably have folded after three years, right?
• 22:38
  Like, we had limited budget, limited runway. We, we haven't raised money again, so we're just spending the money we have. And so i- if my marketing bets hadn't worked out, then the company wouldn't survive.
• 22:50
  Therefore, we, we did a balance of stuff we think will probably work and things that are a little bit risky, but if they pay off, like, they'll have a big payoff.
• 22:57
  So a few lottery tickets here and there paired with some, like, safe long-term strategies, like, f- at the time, was SEO.
• 23:04
  The, the benefit also, though, at a small company was it's really easy to tell what's working because we're only doing a couple things. People will tell me all the time, like, "SEO doesn't work anymore."
• 23:14
  And I'd say, "Well, it was, like, kinda the only thing we did, so, you know, our, our entire pipeline comes from SEO." Like, I don't need to worry too much about attribution 'cause we're only doing a couple things.
• 23:23
  At a very large company, the attribution question in some ways gets harder, but also, like, maybe you stop caring a little bit.
• 23:30
  [laughs] Like, I don't know, Jimmy, if, like, if anyone's coming to you saying, like, "Prove to me that Substack is working," I guess you have subscribers as a number. Subscribers is a number. My manager's awesome.
• 23:38
  Like, he's just super easy to work with, and what he's told me basically is, "I will go to bat for this Substack all day long, as long as you can align it to the company's strategic priorities, and you can give me some numbers to work with."
• 23:50
  And we don't even know what the right number is yet, and actually, one of the ways we kicked this off was by seeding the list with some existing Miro subscribers. We're not starting at zero.
• 23:59
  That helps so much because I don't have to look at the dashboard and have, like, seven subscribers and try to explain to people why this is good. But yeah, no, I am going to have to show data.
• 24:08
  Substack is so, so limited in terms of analytics, and there is no API. You can't hook it up to your data warehouse and, like, track people who have visited both the Substack and a landing page.
• 24:19
  Like, you can't do any of that. So I'm going to have to show numbers that are, like, going up and to the right. Actually, there's a Superpath course on content reporting.
• 24:28
  I was literally just thinking about it today because my manager was saying, like, you know, basically by the end of the September, that's kinda, like, one month in, how are we gonna report on this? What is the format?
• 24:36
  Who are we sending it to? Let's agree on that format so that we can get in the habit of reporting on it. That's going to happen. I will have plenty of freedom, but, like, not total freedom either.
• 24:44
  Rachel, I'm still, I'm still thinking about what you said about you can just try more things at a big company. Mm.
• 24:49
  I, I think, like, a, a really good example, like, outside of content is just the amount of products that Google has had over the years. They've tried so many, like Google Glass and- The, like, Google social media.
• 24:58
  Yeah, Google- Remember that?... Goo- uh, Jeep, Google Plus- Google Plus... or whatever it was called. Yes. Yeah.
• 25:02
  [laughs] Like, the, the amount of things they've launched, and then, like, the things that have stuck, like, it's been maybe one in 100 projects, right? It's like Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps.
• 25:09
  The odd thing works, but when you're that big, like, you can take so many shots, and, like, only a few of them have to hit. So I, I think I'd never thought of being at a big company in that way, but that's super right.
• 25:20
  I've also... I heard reporting on Amazon, 'cause, uh, speaking about a- attribution. Sorry, I've gone on a tangent outside of content, but I think they're good examples.
• 25:29
  When, when Jeff Bezos left as the CEO and a new one came in, realized they had this incredibly horrible, like, attribution problem internally. Someone would enter Amazon through some product, right?
• 25:39
  And then they'd be, like, part of the Amazon ecosystem, and then you, like, claim how much money you're getting from that person, like, by team.
• 25:46
  So, like, the Kindle team would say, "We're responsible for 20% of Amazon's revenue," and then the, the Amazon Fire team would claim whatever. And what they found is, like, everyone was claiming the same customers.
• 25:57
  And so that's what made me think of the, the attribution problem in question.
• 26:01
  I think Jimmy, like, I think one of the themes we've discussed here is that you've kind of solved the problem by, like, siloing yourself a little bit. It's also just a good thing to do at a new company. Get a quick win.
• 26:11
  Do something that, like, you can control on your own without, like, a huge amount of knowledge of the company history. Crank out a project with something you already know how to do.
• 26:19
  I think you've checked lots of boxes there. Totally. I think I mentioned this in the article.
• 26:22
  Well, one thing that happened very early at Miro was that I got paired up with our chief transformation officer, who was gonna do a presentation and, like, needed help with the presentation.
• 26:33
  So we get on a call, and he just kind of does this huge brain dump and is like, "Can you, like, help me? Like, I have ideas, but, like, turn it into a story for me."
• 26:41
  I just kinda, like, applied all the, like, little thought leadershippy tricks that I've learned throughout my career. Like, we're gonna coin our own term.
• 26:47
  You know, we're gonna come up with, like, a visual to represent this idea, like, stuff like this. We, and we nailed it. Like, he was super happy. He delivers the presentation. It goes great.
• 26:55
  He very kindly after that shared the presentation with the whole company and said, "Hey, Jimmy did this," and like, "You guy- people should repurpose this for other parts of marketing."
• 27:02
  I got, like, three months worth of recognition out of that one thing.
• 27:07
  I have no data, no metrics to support the success of that other than a happy executive and a bunch of people who hit me up after that to say, like, "Like, I'm giving a presentation, too. Could you help me do that thing?"
• 27:17
  That has me thinking that the narrative around the Substack is as important, if not more, than the numbers.
• 27:24
  Like, if, if I could make the case that Substack contributed to Miro landing a really great customer, even anecdotally, it will just go so far, and that I actually think we can do.
• 27:35
  Because we have an enterprise sales team. They are also very interested in this.
• 27:38
  I, I do plan to stay on top of that, to, like, make sure that, like, the enterprise sales folks have this mental model that we wrote about on Substack that they can share with a CXO at a large company to help them think about blah, blah, blah.
• 27:50
  You know what I mean? And, like, if I can eventually tie that back, then I think that will just give me so much runway to keep this thing going. The narrative stuff goes so far. The attribution stuff is triggering.
• 27:59
  Like, I'd spent hundreds of hours- [laughs]... trying to clean up attri- like, years.
• 28:03
  Like, I, I ended up just, like, taking on all of the attribution problems from our whole team, which was, like, everybody overstating their own attribution to everything, and me trying to unwind it all.
• 28:14
  Ultimately, I think, you know, even in that whole time, nobody really totally trusted the attribution data.
• 28:19
  I had a salesperson come to me, and they're like, "I just talked to this person who's gonna close, who was hyping you up and what the community was doing."
• 28:27
  That went so much further than, like, any, [laughs] any, like, high level up into the right number. To get those stories and to, like, have those, like, share those around, so impactful.
• 28:37
  And I think the bigger the company, the more impactful.
• 28:41
  Marketing your own marketing is always important, but the bigger the company gets, the more you need to market your own marketing, even if it's just those little stories. Mm-hmm. Like, like Alex and Jimmy are saying.
• 28:53
  The bigger the company gets, the more abstract everything feels and the further away from everything you get.
• 28:59
  And so when you can have this one little story to hold onto, it's just so much more impactful than these, like, abstract charts and graphs. We're not logical people at the end of the day.
• 29:10
  Like, we are a narrative-driven species. We wanna hear a good story. The bigger your team gets, the more you need to have those on your side. Yeah. Numbers suck.
• 29:21
  I recall at Animals, I did a lot of sales in my Animals time, and, like, one of the first things that people would so often say is, "We're just really frustrated that we don't have more traffic on the site," or, like, "If we could double our traffic, like, then we would be good."
• 29:34
  And, and people would say that whether they were getting 1,000 visits a month or 100,000 visits a month, and no one's, like, benchmarking it against anything. It's just this constant feeling of like, it's not enough.
• 29:44
  Thinking about this Substack, like, at what number would I feel like we're good? I, I, I think maybe if we surpassed Lenny's newsletter, that would be, like, the only number- [laughs]...
• 29:55
  that I could show that it was, like, the most successful Substack on the internet. 1 million subscribers. That the numbers alone... Yeah. Lenny's got 1.2. [laughs] I will...
• 30:05
  This is gonna sound like a tangent, but it, I think it is related. One thing that I love about doing a print newsletter is that there's basically no numbers attached. I don't even have deliverability stats.
• 30:18
  I hope that if somebody doesn't get it, they'll let me know, but, like, I don't know. I have mine right here. So there's- Yes. You, you definitely have some deliverability, for sure. Good. Um- And look at that.
• 30:30
  The o- you can't see this in the podcast, but that's opened, right? I was gonna say, did, like, your dog eat part of it? [laughs] Jimmy made the envelope. No, I opened it. That's awesome. Alex is also holding his up.
• 30:38
  I feel bad for not subscribing now. Eric? [laughs] It's all inside. I don't subscribe. I guess I have to. [laughs] Um, I feel like you're legally obligated to as part of the Superpath team. That's true.
• 30:47
  But I'll send you a freebie so you don't feel left out next time. But one of the things that not having numbers forced me to do was find some other way. Numbers aren't the only way to measure something.
• 30:59
  They're just the easiest. One of the things that I do now is I try to pay attention to how many people reach out to me every month and say, like, "Oh, I really liked this issue."
• 31:09
  And some months it's, like, 10 or 20 people, and that's like, okay, this one really landed. Those can be things, too, like, especially with Substack. Are people commenting? Are people reaching out?
• 31:19
  Are people telling your sales team, like, "Oh, I've read this piece"? Is there an idea that's carrying over to these other teams?
• 31:26
  All of those kinds of things Are just as good or even better metrics than like, "Oh, we have a lot of subscribers." Totally. We actually did get a couple comments in the first day or two. That's great.
• 31:37
  Which I don't know why it surprised me so much. You know, like back in the day you would get the email from, I guess it was pronounced Discuss, D-I-S-Q-U-S. Yeah, it was like an embedded comment section. Yeah.
• 31:48
  Yeah, yeah. It was like a, it was like a WordPress plugin, and you'd like get the email- I miss that... that someone commented on your blog, and it like felt so good.
• 31:53
  And I got a couple emails and I was like, "Whoa, it's like 2017 all over again." Actually, to your point though, Rachel, I like went and checked these people's LinkedIns.
• 32:02
  I was like, oh, these people are very senior folks at companies that definitely could be great customers for Miro. Those screenshots are now absolutely going into my monthly report.
• 32:13
  Can I add one more thing before we wrap up? Jimmy, your blog post reminded me what I miss about working at a larger company is marketing's ability to have an internal culture impact.
• 32:23
  I think marketers, we kind of become cheerleaders in a way, or you can make yourself one, and it really embeds you, like within the organization. It sort of increases- Yeah...
• 32:31
  your value as an employee just by using skills you already have. We're very skilled at communicating one to many in a way that salespeople, for example, are not.
• 32:40
  I always found that I could sorta like partner up with the HR team, help them, you know, whatever, make the all hands slides better, or, uh, plan our internal events, and make sure the invites make more sense.
• 32:51
  Even just be like a active Slack participant, things like that, help set the company culture.
• 32:57
  You have an ability to push your own career forward within an organization by doing that, and it, it just sorta comes naturally to a lot of marketers.
• 33:04
  So in your example of doing the thought leadership piece with the, the CTO, I, I think that's a sort of an example of that, where you're, you're able just to like take your marketing skillset, help make an impact on the company in like a different kinda way.
• 33:16
  That was, that was something I, I think that's also the benefit of being at a big company, is that you can have upward mobility just by knowing how to navigate the organization and make a name for yourself.
• 33:26
  I think you're completely right. One other just like tiny little thought that you reminded me of.
• 33:30
  One of the things I've heard from some of the executives that I've interviewed and then written articles on behalf of, is that it was so helpful for them to clarify their own thinking.
• 33:39
  Like, they're super smart, they're super experienced, and they're super busy.
• 33:42
  Taking the time to chat with me and then having me pick their brain about all these things, and then like sending it back to them in like a very clear, organized way, they find to be super helpful.
• 33:51
  I think that this can become like sort of an experimental ground for messaging and positioning also, where like, okay, if one of our executives kinda like notices this pattern, and then we name the pattern, and we write about it and whatever, like it's too untested to become part of our official messaging.
• 34:07
  Sub Stack is like a really nice medium for us to figure out whether or not it resonates.
• 34:13
  This is why I thought of this, is if it resonates internally, that almost says more than if we're just only measuring external signals.
• 34:20
  This little presentation that we did, the term that we coined is now all over our Slack channels.
• 34:25
  I can sort of see this internal benefit now to doing thought leadership on behalf of executives that I wasn't necessarily expecting. And I guess I should figure out how to [laughs]
• 34:33
  make sure that we utilize that if, if this project needs more buy-in in the future. I think that's a good place to end it. Jimmy, thanks for joining us today. Always fun to chat about these articles, guys.
• 34:42
  I, I appreciate it. We didn't talk about AI once. Woo-hoo. Oh. So good job, team. [laughs] Whoa. Good job. Good work. I had a question lined up. Didn't ask it, never will. Yeah. [laughs] [gentle music]