Latest / Content, Briefly / LaunchNotes: Blake Thorne's Content Strategy for a Series A Startup

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LaunchNotes: Blake Thorne's Content Strategy for a Series A Startup · Content, Briefly

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• 1:36
  [upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here for another episode of Content Briefly. Really happy to have my friend Blake Thorne here today, Director of Content Strategy at Launch Notes.
• 1:48
  Blake, would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself for the people who don't know who you are. We tag you in Slack a lot, um, because of your product marketing expertise.
• 1:57
  Uh, but yeah, maybe just give us a quick background on who you are, what you do, and then could you also tell us about Launch Notes? Yeah, for sure. So first off, thanks for having me. I'm pumped to be here.
• 2:06
  You guys are doing awesome content, and I'm really glad that this, uh, this new podcast project exists. I'm, uh... I, I think I'll end up being your biggest fan of this too. Um, my name's Blake.
• 2:16
  I, uh, have been doing, you know, content related things for feels like forever now. Uh, actually got my start doing journalism in college, so college newspaper, daily newspaper type stuff.
• 2:28
  Call it two thousand and six to two thousand and fifteen, I did newspaper things.
• 2:34
  I jumped over to a content role at a startup called I Done This, which is kind of where our mutual acquaintanceship with Walter got kicked off. I did content at another startup called Statuspage. Moved to Denver.
• 2:49
  That was like a fifteen-person just out of Y Combinator, super fun, more in like the dev tool type space, but that was a great experience. I was kind of marketer number one and, uh, content, uh, content manager there.
• 3:04
  We were acquired by Atlassian and, uh, had the opportunity to jump over to product marketing, which I maybe knew existed but knew nothing about the job, and it was a kind of learn, you know, learn on the job experience, but super fun to explore product marketing at what turned out to be, you know, a pretty iconic company, not just in tech, but in terms of like, doing, doing excellent product marketing and doing excellent, you know, go to market things in an innovative way at Atlassian.
• 3:31
  So learned a ton there. I'm seeing this theme where I kind of pop back and forth from content to product roles.
• 3:38
  Got a chance to stand up product marketing at a, at a company called Process Street, so came in to be the first product marketer and stand up the function back in startup world.
• 3:49
  Did that for about a year, and then for about the last year, I've been at Launch Notes standing up content marketing. Um, so back in a proper content role working with an awesome product marketer.
• 4:01
  We're kind of just building out the marketing function and the marketing team here, working with a bunch of, uh, a bunch of folks I've worked with previously, so having a ton of fun standing up content here.
• 4:11
  And yeah, uh, a bit about Launch Notes. We are a, uh, we're a SaaS company for, uh, product teams, so our kind of flagship product and audience was really around release notes.
• 4:22
  So you think of the way companies, SaaS products, software products especially, like update their products and do development these days.
• 4:31
  It's a lot more small changes more frequently as opposed to the old days, the on-prem server model of like, "Hey, we're gonna do a great big, you know, two dot oh release in February, and next February we'll come out and we'll bundle up everything we worked on all year for the next big release, and we'll do that every year."
• 4:49
  Now, you know, because of agile DevOps, continuous delivery, some of the technology changes, companies just ship small changes more frequently. So that was kind of our flagship product with, uh, with Launch Notes.
• 5:00
  It was just like a better change log designed around that.
• 5:04
  Since then, we've expanded more into the product manager space with things like shareable roadmap, feedback, product insights, kind of building out the toolkit for like a modern product team and a modern product manager.
• 5:19
  So yeah, that's, um, that's kind of Launch Notes in a nutshell so far and, um, what I'm doing is trying to use content to make this the most successful company it can be.
• 5:29
  It seems like Launch Notes is kind of like the perfect marriage of your content and product background that all...
• 5:35
  You sort of get to use the expertise you've built in the product world, you know, your experience with content to bring that together. And I feel like...
• 5:42
  Well, actually, maybe could you help folks understand, I think that, um, or maybe this is just me. I sort of lump product marketers, product managers, other product... Like, you guys use the word product op sometimes.
• 5:53
  I kinda lump those together as one group. I know that they're very distinct. Could you explain a little bit the difference between who a, a product marketer and a product manager are?Yeah.
• 6:02
  So typically the product manager is often gonna sit under, you know, you can kinda think of like the big pillars of like the C-level of the organization and who folks report up to as a good dividing, kind of like division metric, right?
• 6:18
  So typically, product managers will report up to maybe the s- chief technology officer, this kind of R&D organization.
• 6:28
  Maybe there's like a VP of product or chief product officer, but maybe it all kind of goes up to head of product, head of R&D. Um, but really, they're the ones working closest with
• 6:41
  the engineers on what needs to be built, what's being built, how does like the product roadmap help execute on the company strategy.
• 6:51
  So they're doing a ton of, you know, working with customers, talking to the market, getting feedback, working with developers, trying to figure out kind of like what should be built and how and when.
• 7:04
  It's a really compli- it's a really complex, you know, important, complicated job.
• 7:09
  Um, and it's, you know, no surprise one of the, one of the highest paid jobs in tech I think is, you know, being a PM, especially if you're at some FAANG company because it's just like this really mission critical job.
• 7:19
  It's what the e- company's gonna execute on the product side. Close to that is, you know, the product marketers, and the product marketers are usually...
• 7:28
  I, like I've worked reporting up into the marketing, like the chief marketing officer, so you've, you're kind of like cross-disciplinary, like working with the, uh, work with the PM.
• 7:37
  Sometimes product marketers report into like engineering or R&D or head of product. But really product marketing is working on like when things are built, how do we get them out there?
• 7:46
  And also how do we do stuff like competitive intelligence, sales enablement. It can be like a really big job. There's a ton of stuff.
• 7:53
  Like the common refrain you hear from product marketers is like there's so many different things you could be working on. Like you could be working on, you know, an event strategy.
• 8:00
  You could be working on sales enablement and sales decks. You could be working on competitive intelligence. A ton of them work on like pricing and packaging stuff. You could be doing market research.
• 8:09
  You could be doing product launches.
• 8:11
  Um, so it's a lot of like the marketing that is close to the product as opposed to, you know, a lot of folks in content probably do a lot of, you know, brand campaigns, top of the funnel awareness type, type stuff.
• 8:25
  Not to say content marketers don't work closer to product, and that's kinda something I always talk to, you know, content folks about who wanna get closer to product.
• 8:30
  But, but yeah, that's, that's kind of, you know, roughly a way you could think about those three roles.
• 8:35
  And then obviously like you get into the nuances of a specific company, like everyone's a little bit different, but that's, that's kinda like a general way of thinking about them. Got it. Okay, cool. That's very helpful.
• 8:45
  Um, so let's dig into Launch Notes a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about the marketing function? What does the team look like? Where does content fit into it? You know, we're gonna get a...
• 8:58
  Well, you ahead of this episode sent over some really helpful stuff that I wanna dive into regarding, um, the podcast and the community and that type of stuff.
• 9:05
  And maybe like before we get into that, could you kinda give us like the broader picture of like marketing at Launch Notes, what does it look like? Yeah, for sure. So, um, we're at a really exciting stage right now.
• 9:15
  I mean, we, um, launched as a company probably a few years ago, kind of properly around twenty nineteen, twenty twenty. I think they got some seed funding. I jumped in in twenty twenty-two.
• 9:27
  Uh, we announced our Series A in like June, May, June of twenty twenty-two, around there.
• 9:32
  So we're still kind of like in a lot of ways around our product and our marketing function, like kind of getting the gears in place and like trying things and figuring out what'll work for us as opposed to like a later stage or public company where it might be more like, "Hey, this is our go to market.
• 9:46
  It's locked in. We're just executing on that." Like we're still in kind of like discovery mode here, which is super exciting. One thing that's really cool about our,
• 9:54
  our marketing function, one of our co-founders, a guy I worked with at Atlassian named, uh, Jake Brearton, was the lead product marketer on Jira for like, I don't know, a decade or something like- Oh.
• 10:07
  So it's just like a wizard at product marketing. So we have on the founding team like a lot more marketing muscle than you would typically see on a founding team and at, at this stage of company really.
• 10:19
  Like, so that is, um...
• 10:21
  I think that gives us a little wiggle room at the top of the marketing org chart where we can either put off or just be more flexible on like, hey, when we wanna bring in like maybe a VP of marketing role or something like that.
• 10:34
  Um, so Jake kind of oversees a lot of marketing strategy himself. He brought me in, um, to stand up content and, and largely because he had seen at Atlassian and Jira how powerful,
• 10:48
  you know, and efficient really like organic content, content marketing was, especially at scale at an organization like that, and especially like,
• 10:57
  you know, we really saw the compounding impacts of like, hey, we've been doing this content community, the website for pushing two decades at Atlassian, and you really got to see like the, the effects of like that compounding over two decades.
• 11:11
  It was like, okay, like we wanna stand up some of that. So he brought me in to do content.
• 11:15
  At the same time, someone else I had worked with at Atlassian and Statuspage, Steve Klein, jumped in around the same time as me and started building out our, uh, Slack community.
• 11:25
  So we have a community called Launch Awesome that is a free community on Slack.
• 11:29
  I think we just crossed five hundred people, and it's a bunch of, you know, the type of roles we were talking about, product leaders, product marketers, um, product managers, product ops, and they're, you know...
• 11:40
  He's really kind of building that out hand in hand with me on product mar- on, uh, on the kind of organic content and community side.
• 11:49
  And yeah, and we, uh, we added Adam to stand up product marketing, uh, shortly after Steve and I jumped on.
• 11:56
  So now we have Adam doing product marketing and kind of working with our-- We have like a sales leader that he works with super closely as well as like the product manager and the product team.
• 12:05
  So yeah, that's kind of like we've got like the rough shell of a, of a marketing function right now.Definitely a lot of, you know, a lot we can grow into and a lot of like stuff we can fill out, but we've got a pretty lean team right now, and really we're in like a pretty good place.
• 12:19
  Like, we've got a lean team. We can execute. Everyone's like seen, done strategy, but everyone can also kinda like roll up their sleeves and, you know, get shit done too, so.
• 12:29
  Can we talk a little bit about how Launch Notes is approaching marketing as a whole? Because it's, it's kind of int-- I mean, I'm finding it sort of interesting, you know, in, in...
• 12:37
  I'm in the Slack channel, uh, even though I'm not like a proper product person. You guys let me in to kinda like spy a little bit as someone who's very interested in Slack communities.
• 12:45
  And, uh, it seems like it all starts with-- It's not that it starts with Slack. It's that it starts with the customer, and it starts with their problems and their expertise.
• 12:56
  And then it seems like the marketing kind of flows out of that. Is that an accurate way to describe it? Am I oversimplifying, or do you think about it differently? Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. For sure. Yeah.
• 13:06
  And, and we, um, I think we're agnostic about what the kind of like front door to our kind of marketing ecosystem is, whether that's the community or social media or the podcast or the website or the blog or whatever.
• 13:21
  We also have a little bit of like a product virality loop going on with our customers' Launch Notes pages. So, like- Mm. We'll have a public page.
• 13:30
  You know, if you're like Loom or Drought or one of our customers, like, you have a public page that has, like, the Powered by Launch Notes link on it, whether that's for, like, your announcements or your roadmap or something.
• 13:40
  Other, you know, they broadcast that to their audiences. Some folks can find it through that, um, and then sort of discover, like, "Hey, there's a vendor power in this. I wanna check them out."
• 13:49
  So we have a bunch of little kinda, like, feelers out there. Maybe one day we do really hone in on, like, this is where we triple down. But for now, like, we're pretty agnostic on, like, how people find us.
• 14:00
  Um, and like I said, like, we've got some pretty mature, sophisticated founders around, like, marketing. Our other co-founder, Tyler, had done sales for a long time.
• 14:09
  Like, we've got a pretty sophisticated understanding of go-to-market and marketing and sales at the top of our organization, which is super helpful because we're not kind of trapped in this, like, call and response, direct, you know, attribution world where it's like, "Hey, prove to me this is working in two weeks or we're cutting it off."
• 14:29
  So- Yeah. Uh, we're in a really lucky place with that. That's really cool. That's cool.
• 14:33
  How do you think about-- So, like, okay, so you, you know, you sit down to create content, either yourself or have people do it for you. Talk us through that. I mean, you run a podcast, you run a community. Do you...
• 14:45
  Like, are you waiting to see, like, what people are saying before you're starting to think about what you should be writing about? Do you have a list of stuff you wanna cover? Is it some hybrid of those two things?
• 14:55
  Yeah, I would call it a hybrid of those things. Maybe I'll back into...
• 14:58
  You know, one interesting dynamic when I joined up was I mentioned our kind of flagship product offering was around release notes, and that was really in like a product marketer's sweet spot.
• 15:09
  And I remember the early days of Launch Notes even before I joined, it was like, "This is gonna be a tool for product marketers."
• 15:14
  As the sort of company and product strategy has evolved, it still is, and we still have that audience.
• 15:20
  But more and more, like, the product manager has kind of become our bread and butter, and we're, like, finding ourselves, like, selling to, talking to, working with product teams, product managers.
• 15:30
  So that's naturally, like, made the, uh, the audience shift a little bit. So I came into Launch Notes thinking like, "Great, I've done product marketing for a bunch of years.
• 15:38
  Like, I know product marketing inside and out. Like, I can write about product marketing stuff with my eyes closed. This will be super fun." And then, you know, the... And I would...
• 15:45
  This is good advice probably for any content, you know, content marketer is, like, if the company, you know, the sights on who your persona and who your target is as a company can change and, like, that's happened at a bunch of companies I've been with.
• 15:58
  It's like, we think we're selling to this person, turns out we're selling to that person. Mm-hmm. Or we think we need to talk to this person, turns out we need to talk to that person.
• 16:04
  So, like, don't paint yourself into a corner as a, as a content manager or as, like, a, uh, a content lead into, like, only knowing how to do content for one type of person.
• 16:14
  Like, it's okay if you have your specialty and stuff, especially if you're like, "Hey, like, I'm a, you know, I'm a dev content specialist." Like, okay, like, a dev tool company is probably not gonna pivot to HR.
• 16:24
  But it's really good to have a system where you can, like, kinda work horizontally and be like, "All right, if the company's gonna shift, you know, shift its sights over to this persona, like, I know how to, like, kinda move the content ship that direction too."
• 16:36
  Yeah. So we kind of- Makes sense. We kind of pulled that way, right, by focusing more and more on, like, product ops and product management, which was definitely less in my wheelhouse.
• 16:44
  But one thing, you know, I, I would say, like, two things around content that I am pretty opinionated on and, like, pretty inflexible on, like, not, these are not really negotiables, is number one, your content just needs to be grounded in expertise, right?
• 17:00
  Like, people don't want...
• 17:01
  So it's, like, the number one complaint with content marketing, the number one kind of cause behind the scenes when you see content that is just flat or unremarkable or not making an impact is you have some content writer that doesn't know the topic trying to, like, string together something authoritative based on ten minutes of research or based on just opening a blank Google Doc and typing.
• 17:22
  Like, that, that creates flat, bland, bad content that will not stand out.
• 17:26
  And then the number two thing is, um, just, like, publishing at a high cadence, ideally across a bunch of different channels and kind of, like, unique content for each channel.
• 17:36
  But, like, just getting a high volume, and this is one thing I learned from Walter too, was just, like, getting a high volume of content out there.
• 17:43
  I think that's more important than ever, and there's so much noise to stand through.
• 17:47
  Like, you're not gonna break out, you're not gonna make an impression or break through the noise without getting a high volume of content out there.
• 17:56
  And I'm starting to notice now too, like, in sales calls or with podcast guests or, you know, kind of like networking with other people, people are commenting on our content now more.
• 18:06
  And it's not one specific piece or, you know, one specific thing that we've done that they're talking about, but I'm hearing a lot of like, "Man, I'm, like, seeing your guys' stuff."Everywhere.
• 18:17
  Like, you guys are just out there. I'm seeing your stuff all the time. I'm seeing your stuff on LinkedIn. I'm, like, seeing the podcast just, like, going. Like, I think there's a lot of, like, you know...
• 18:27
  Think of, like, old-fashioned, like, brand campaigns. It's like, the idea isn't for them to see a billboard once and buy. It's like, we want you to see the Coca-Cola logo over and over and over and over and over again.
• 18:36
  I think there's an under- underrated part of content strategy that's just, like, get your stuff and your name and your content and your brand out there and out there and out there and out there and out there, so when someone brings you up in a meeting, it's like, "Oh, yeah, Launch Notes."
• 18:48
  Like, I've-- I see their stuff everywhere. They must be legit. That's so fascinating. Actually, I wanna touch on both of those things.
• 18:53
  Let's touch on the cadence thing first because I think that's somewhat counterintuitive.
• 18:56
  You know, there's been this shift in recent years towards quality over quantity, which is a super easy thing to say, but generally what that boils down to is a slower cadence. So- For sure...
• 19:05
  you know, if you-- if you're saying a higher cadence is, is actually really important, does quality become a concern?
• 19:11
  Or when you think about cadence, are you not just thinking about, like, the atomic unit, wh-where maybe the atomic unit is a blog post, but it's like you have one atomic unit which then turns into X number of tweets, LinkedIn posts, TikTok videos, newsletters, webinars, or whatever else you might repurpose it into?
• 19:27
  Yeah. So that's, um... I mean, maybe I'll jump into kind of the, the hub and spoke diagram that I shared with you, 'cause that's where this kind of starts to really, really come into play and really tie to that.
• 19:37
  Like, hey, is this grounded in expertise and actual expert insight? You know, is there some, is there some meat on this bone, right?
• 19:44
  Um, and you don't wanna be doing stuff where it's like, "Hey, we're publishing ten, you know, things a day on our blog," but, like, it's all meaningless.
• 19:52
  And this is where I think, you know, more traditional media organizations do this well. Content has sort of, like, had some, had some rough starts at this.
• 20:01
  Some people are getting a lot better at it, but it's kind of like you said, like, you have a nucleus of content that then you can spin off into a bunch of different stuff. So we have kind of...
• 20:10
  There's this diagram I shared with you. A bunch of people are probably familiar with it. You can look it up.
• 20:14
  It's this, like, nineteen fifties Walt Disney, like, hand-drawn strategy diagram where it's like we've got our feature films in the middle, and we've got all these other, like, kind of flywheels that connect to that and each other.
• 20:27
  So it's like we can make, you know, Snow White, and then we can make a Snow Wh-White ride at Disney World. And people watch the movie, and then they wanna go to the theme park.
• 20:35
  And then they go to the theme park, and they wanna buy the T-shirt. And the merchandise is another thing. And now I wanna buy a Snow White T-shirt.
• 20:40
  Now I'm out there wearing a Snow White T-shirt, and someone sees that and wants to, wants to watch the movie.
• 20:45
  And then they watch the movie, then they wanna go to the park, and then they wanna buy the toy, and they wanna buy the toy for their kid, and their kid wants the Frozen Elsa doll for Christmas.
• 20:52
  And it's like you can see, like, Disney, like, literally still doing that today.
• 20:55
  They've been doing that for, like, seven decades now, and they're, like, one of the, if not the most, you know, valuable media companies in the world because of it. We basically copied that.
• 21:03
  [chuckles] And our version of that is we have put a couple different programs.
• 21:07
  One is our co- is our podcast, where it's, you know, conversations kinda like this, but we're bringing in product managers, product leaders, product ops, product marketing.
• 21:15
  We're bringing them in for, like, in-depth, you know, twenty, thirty-minute conversations. We also have, like, a live version of that that we promote through our community and run through our community.
• 21:26
  Oh, that's interesting. Job with these. Oh, I like that. We should do that. [chuckles] Yeah, you should do this. And it's like, it's just like this, but it's, like, a live event.
• 21:33
  We're using Hop In for it, and it's really cool. Like, it's a live event.
• 21:36
  People can ask questions, and that's cool 'cause we can, like, promote that ahead of time, unlike a podcast where it's like you don't really promote it until, like, the episode is done. But, like- Yeah...
• 21:45
  we also take the recording and put that on our podcast feed and put that on our YouTube channel.
• 21:50
  So we have this, like, center of gravity around long-form audio and video recorded conversations, chiefly the podcasts and the AMAs, right? They're twenty to forty, fifty-minute conversations with experts.
• 22:03
  And not only is that, it's a great sort of center of gravity for the whole strategy because I like to say it's, it's like low friction and high fidelity. There's some friction to it.
• 22:14
  You know, you gotta get the guests, you gotta book, they gotta make time, they gotta come on. But in my experience, like, it's a lot easier to have...
• 22:22
  It's a lot easier of an ask to be like, "Hey, you're an expert in c- in, uh, product management. Come talk for half an hour. We'll record it." Like, that's not that hard.
• 22:30
  That's kind of a thirty-minute ask, as opposed to, like, we just had, uh, Des Traynor, who's the, um, uh, founder and chief strategy officer of Intercom, on the show.
• 22:40
  Like, if I had said like, "Hey, Des, will you write a blog post for us?" That's a way more, like, high friction ask, right? Like, we gotta workshop the topic, there's gonna be reviews and edits, and he's gotta sit down.
• 22:52
  That's way more than a thirty-minute ask. That's a really high friction ask.
• 22:55
  And the other thing is these are, like, high fidel- this is, like, a high fidelity output with the podcasts and AMAs, where, like, you've got the end product is audio, video. You can take quotes out of the video.
• 23:07
  You can spin it up into, um, a blog post, a tweet thread, uh, something on LinkedIn, quote for your website.
• 23:17
  Whatever you wanna do with that is just remixable in so many different ways because it's like we've got this high fidelity output. We've got words, video, audio, infinitely remixable.
• 23:27
  So we get that as the sort of, like, high fidelity, low friction sort of center of gravity, and we're just trying to, like, pump through that too. Like, we're doing AMAs, one or two a month.
• 23:40
  We're doing, like, multiple podcasts. So we-we're doing, like, our own.
• 23:43
  We have, like, a live show on Fridays that we throw on YouTube and put on the podcast feed that is, uh, a couple of us from Launch Notes, just kinda like a more casual conversation about, like, product topics that week.
• 23:54
  So we have all those that then we can spin off into.
• 23:57
  Like I said, if we wanna do, you know, an article about, like, backlog grooming or, like, how to, like, manage your backlog as a product manager, now we have this, like, database of, like, product conversations with experts that we can jump into and literally pull, like, "Hey, cool," like, "we wanna write this."
• 24:14
  Like, we can do, you know-We've probably got a half dozen quotes and insights from the podcast already on this topic.
• 24:22
  If we wanna put together a blog post or a tweet thread or something on LinkedIn about that, or like a short, you know, we're, we've got an agency we're working with that just has direct access to all our videos, and they're cranking out like two or three clips a day and putting them on TikTok.
• 24:35
  And we've seen our like TikTok page in a month grow to like five thousand followers. Oh, wow.
• 24:40
  And we don't have to-- Yeah, I don't have to really do anything because I'm just like, "Hey, guys, like here's the, here's the library of conversations and expertise," and then they just spin that up into clips.
• 24:49
  So it becomes really like scalable in that regard. Um, oh, yeah, there's something else on this topic too. There's a bun- there's a bunch to this topic, man. Like there's- Yeah.
• 24:58
  There's a ton of cool stuff you can do on this. I have more questions. So you actually- Yeah.
• 25:02
  I feel like in that answer, you, you really kinda captured both of your inflexible things, subject matter expertise and cadence. You've kinda tied them into one, which I think is pretty cool. A few follow-up questions.
• 25:14
  I find that it's like everybody knows they should repurpose and remix content, but they don't do it. I think it's an operational thing. They're like, "Who does this?"
• 25:22
  Or they do it for like a couple weeks, and they kinda get tired of it. So the first question is, who does it? And how do you ensure it continues to be done?
• 25:29
  And then, um, the second question is on this like subject matter expertise database thing you mentioned. That's a business. Yeah. If...
• 25:37
  Someone should just build that as a product because if you could just dump all your stuff into a place, and then writers could search for- Yeah...
• 25:42
  anytime someone mentions the word backlog grooming, and you already have quotes from a product leader at a well-known company, like that's amazing.
• 25:50
  So there's a lot here, but do you have a, a formal p-process for that, or are, are there tools you're using to keep all that stuff together?
• 25:57
  So for one, I'm like, yeah, like I really do want this like, this idea of like a library and database.
• 26:02
  Like, not only is like the long form content, like stuff we put out in the world and like valuable in its own right and stuff you can build an audience around and promote and all that.
• 26:09
  There's a ton of value to like having it as this like...
• 26:12
  And I imagine it as like a searchable database like you described, where it's like we have this like record of expertise and insights, and we've kind of flipped it, right?
• 26:21
  The, um, the traditional way of like, "Hey, I wanna do an article about backlog grooming."
• 26:26
  Okay, now I've gotta go find a PM who knows this, and I've gotta schedule an interview and talk to them, and that's gonna get like drawn out for three weeks.
• 26:34
  We now already just have like so many topics we can dive into that I could hire someone who knows nothing about content for, knows nothing about product marketing, but knows content, and then just, you know, unleash them on this like treasure trove of insights and quotes we have, and they can like go do content off of it.
• 26:51
  So we are kind of building that out. We're using a, um, we're using a research tool called Dovetail right now to like throw all this into, generate transcripts. It's searchable.
• 27:03
  I think there's gonna be some cool advances in this kind of field, and I think we'll be able to have something really cool. And that's actually been, I'm kind of sharing this with our, our R&D and design team right now.
• 27:12
  They're getting some value out of putting. So that's super valuable.
• 27:16
  I'd say to your other question around like, around whose job is it to repurpose, uh, I think the value of it, the way we're doing it, is you can kind of take it as a case-by-case thing, and you can kind of scale it out.
• 27:30
  And I could scale out a content team or, you know, you can add freelancers. We've got some freelancers we're working with. I'm doing a bunch of it myself. Steve on the community is doing a bunch of it.
• 27:41
  And it becomes a thing where it's like you can start adding to or growing your content program off of this without having to really do like the typical thing, which is the hardest thing.
• 27:52
  Like if you said like, "Hey, we wanna, uh, let's add a newsletter. We should do like a newsletter. We're doing a newsletter." But say we didn't, and someone was like, "We should do a newsletter."
• 27:59
  Well, the two-- the hard thing's gonna be like, "All right, what's the content gonna be? What are we gonna write about? What are we gonna..." It's like we don't have that.
• 28:05
  Like we have this like treasure trove database of insights and expertise and conversations we can just mine for content from the newsletter. And someone who's good at content but doesn't know the topic can do that.
• 28:17
  Like as you know, like it's kind of a dream job for a junior content marketer really. So we could add folks to that. And I would say the other lesson on this is like we don't really think of it as repurposing.
• 28:28
  I guess you could call it that, but I see a lot of people doing repurposing, and they think like instead of treating it like I'm creating unique content for different channels based off this kind of primary source material, they're kind of just doing like shitty promos for like the original thing.
• 28:45
  So then you see this all the time where it's like, I wrote a blog about something, now I'm gonna like take a highlight from the blog and just like they're always trying to like link back to the blog. Like you see that.
• 28:55
  And instead of saying like, you know, like we're not doing that. Like we're not...
• 28:59
  We'll like take some insights from a conversation and maybe like make a tweet thread or make a LinkedIn post or put something in our newsletter. Maybe it links back to the blog.
• 29:06
  A lot of times it doesn't or back to that original conversation, and I think people miss that, where it's like you can just like create unique content that's consumable within this channel and organic to this channel rather than like a glorified promotion for a link back to your blog.
• 29:22
  That is such a great point. I feel like what you're honing in on it is what I think of as the difference between promotion and distribution. Promotion is- Yeah... "Hey, we wrote this thing.
• 29:31
  Come to our website, so we can count a page view that you've looked at it." Whereas distribution is much more platform native, which by the way, all the platforms- Yeah... prefer, right?
• 29:39
  Like LinkedIn would much rather you create native content for their platform. That's why they don't want you putting links in the post. They... You gotta hide it in the comments. But it- Right.
• 29:47
  But I think it all plays into your kind of point you made earlier about making sure that people see you kind of all over the place, which I think is...
• 29:53
  I actually read recently that if you see a company or, or an individual five times across various platforms, that's like the tipping point where it feels like they're everywhere.
• 30:02
  But five is not actually that many, particularly like you spend all day on the internet, you know, you probably are checking different social platforms, you've got podcasts, you get email.
• 30:10
  Like it's not that difficult actually to get in front of someone five times if you're optimizing for the algorithm that makes sure your stuff is surfaced to those people. For sure. And yeah, like you make a good point.
• 30:20
  Like people, people end up ignoring the nuances of the platform they're creating content for because they're just trying to link back to the thing rather than saying like, "Hey, you know what?
• 30:28
  Like LinkedIn is gonna bury this if I put a, if I slug a link into it," or, "Twitter's gonna bury this if I slug a link into it." But if I just like take the valuable stuff and put it out there, like it could go crazy.
• 30:38
  So, you know, we do a lot of that, and that also ties back to like-Me being very grateful, we have some like pretty sophisticated marketing thinkers at the top of the organization who aren't gonna hit me with like, "Why isn't there a link in that?"
• 30:50
  And, you know, "Why-" It'll be... That's really true. "Why isn't there a UTM tag?" And it's like, okay, like, you're kind of missing, you know, you're, you're sort of missing the forest through the trees here. So yeah.
• 31:01
  Th-that reminded me, I wanted to ask you about metrics. What do you care about right now? Like, what numbers do you care about?
• 31:05
  And also, I'll just sort of highlight the importance of, uh, once you sort of let go of the idea that page views are the only thing that matter, it's a lot easier to reframe your thinking, getting in front of people on various platforms, because you're not just focused on that, on that click or that page view.
• 31:19
  So like, since you're not doing that, right, I assume maybe page views is like on your radar, but like, what, what are you looking at? What do you care about? Yeah. Yeah.
• 31:26
  So I would say like baseline, we do just y-you know, like the, the kind of core engagement metric for whatever channel, like we kind of keep an eye on all of that, right?
• 31:36
  Like, so for our newsletter, like we're watching open rates and click rates. For a blog, we're watching page views.
• 31:42
  For, you know, for the podcast, we're watching, you know, listens and downloads and, you know, like we, we kind of just like do the basics of like, okay, we kinda know how everything's doing.
• 31:52
  We know thing- when things do well or, or not. The kinda core... We kind of keyed in this year on a few things we really, really care about. One of them is just podcast audience.
• 32:00
  Like, we think there's an opportunity to reach a really massive audience with this podcast, and we also think like the inherent value of someone who listens to, like it's such a more in-depth, intimate, you know, a blog article can go viral and way a million people clicked on it, but doesn't really tell you anything about like how memorable of an impression you left on them.
• 32:20
  We really believe like if you're in someone's ears for, you know, hours a week, potentially, like you've built a relationship, they will remember you. So, and we've also seen some other podcasts in our ni-niche.
• 32:34
  We've kind of reverse engineered some of their metrics and triangulated around this idea that like, hey, there is, there is an audi- there's audiences out there, and like if we capture some percentage of it, we'd have a pretty massive audience with the podcast.
• 32:47
  So that's like a major focus area for us this year in terms of like a top-line metric that we're like really trying to push as opposed to just like, "Hey, we care about it. We watch it."
• 32:56
  The other thing we're working to stand up more, like I'm a big believer in this sort of like self-reported attribution.
• 33:02
  I could talk more about what that is if you want to, but like this like self-reported attribution movement that's going on right now, like you're seeing a lot of companies do it and a lot of smart marketers push it.
• 33:13
  We've implemented this on, so I mentioned the Slack community we have, and there's, I should say, different set of sort of like goals and s- you know, kind of anci- uh, sort of dovetail strategy with our, our community too that Steve's kind of championing.
• 33:28
  With the community, we, back in the fall, implemented, like we have a form that you fill out to get into the community.
• 33:33
  We implemented a self-reported attribution field, so we just ask people when they go to s-to join our Launch Awesome Slack community, "How did you hear about us?" Yeah.
• 33:41
  And then we piped that into, uh, we piped that into the community channel in Slack, so we just get, you know, when someone new Slac- signs up, we see, you know, what are the fields we ask for, who they are, what's their LinkedIn, what's their email, what did they type into how did they hear about us?
• 33:54
  And man, that is such a treasure trove. Like it's messy data, right? It's, it's unstructured. It's not as clean of a experience data-wise as you'd get if you just put radio buttons in front of people.
• 34:04
  But the insights just can't be beat.
• 34:06
  Like to start to see the signal, like one example is like today, like some pretty like influential product manager just like tagged us in a question about, uh, great product management communities.
• 34:19
  And we've just seen this like monster list. Like we, we typically sometimes see Twitter show up.
• 34:23
  We've just seen like an endless feed today of people typing in Twitter into that field 'cause it's like, oh yeah, we popped on that, and that might last for like another day or week or whatever, and then it'll go back to some other things.
• 34:34
  But it's such invaluable insights to see like, you know, if we just looked at Google Analytics or attribution software, it'd be like search, direct, un-uncategorized.
• 34:44
  Signal that we're starting to see through that channel is just awesome, and we really want to implement that on the product side.
• 34:51
  So when people go to do, we've got kind of a dual like PLG plus sales, uh, go-to-market motion here, so you can come in and do get a sales request or you can do a free trial.
• 35:00
  Like we just wanna put that field in front of people this year and start to see similar insights on the product side. So like, are people typing in like, "Hey, I listen to your podcast.
• 35:08
  Hey, I saw the AMA with Dave Schools. Hey, I, you know, uh, your friend recommended me, forwarded me, forwarded me a copy of your newsletter, and then I came to check out the product. Looks cool."
• 35:17
  So we're trying to implement that.
• 35:19
  Down the road, I think we could clean up the data and get some more sophistication around it, but step one, we, you know, crawl, walk, run is like a kind of mantra we use a lot here at Launch Now.
• 35:29
  It's like we just wanna get that implemented so we can start to see like if we just ask people how they found out about us, like what are we gonna learn?
• 35:35
  And my suspicion is that it's gonna tell us a lot about, you know, our content, our community, the different programs we're doing, what's making an impact.
• 35:43
  So that's like a major, it's a major kind of like a metric and initiative we have this year. That's awesome. We, we do something similar for our community, and the answers are fascinating.
• 35:52
  Like we had some folks [chuckles] not, we've had a couple people say things like, uh, "My mom thinks I should get into content marketing," [laughs] or like, you know. Yeah.
• 36:01
  Or some-sometimes people will say stuff like really interesting, like they'll say, you know, um, "I was, I was laid off from my, from my job, and I was looking for a new content marketing role."
• 36:11
  And so it's like not only do you find out how, so then they Googled us, but they, you also found out that, um, they have this particular situation, and, uh- Yeah... then you can direct them to stuff that can help them.
• 36:20
  So- It's so funny with the attribution conversation just really quickly, like in SaaS at least, we're all selling these collaborative multi-product, multi-seat experiences, yet we expect like the buying path and buyer journey to be this like single player thing.
• 36:38
  Mm. That's a great point.
• 36:39
  Which is just like a misalignment I think, and it's much more like, "Hey, our chief product officer, you know, heard about you, and then his friend recommended you at a conference, and then this guy-"Listen to the podcast and, you know, like, you'll never get a one hundred percent grasp on all of that, but it's just-- there's just that misalignment there that, that we're trying to close the gap on a little bit.
• 37:01
  Yeah, that's really interesting. I, I remember back in the Animals days when I was doing sales there, we found that, um, when you ask people, "How did you, how'd you hear about us?"
• 37:09
  If you did it on a sales call, you would always get two answers. Never one, always two. And it wa- it was something like you said. It's like, "I read a blog post, and then- Yeah...
• 37:18
  a peer who I really trust recommended I reach out." Or like, you know, "I saw you in a tweet, and then, you know, I heard a podcast where someone on the team was interviewed." So it was always like- Right...
• 37:28
  one thing put us on their radar. The second thing encouraged them to actually, like, book a call or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent.
• 37:35
  Which is, like, impossible to track and, like, no multi-channel attribution is ever gonna discover all of that. I wanna make sure we get you out of here on time.
• 37:40
  I have a couple more just kinda like nuts and bolts questions for you. So you mentioned- Yeah.
• 37:44
  There's, there's you, there's Steve, who runs community, Jake, co-founder with deep product marketing experience, and then there was a- another person you mentioned who you've brought on as a product marketer.
• 37:54
  How do the four of you or, or other people on the team communicate about marketing? Do you have, do you have, like, a weekly standup call? Is it mostly just Slack? Like, is...
• 38:01
  I guess the question I'm getting at is how formal or informal is the way that you all kind of communicate, share insights, plan, strategize, et cetera? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're, um...
• 38:12
  I moved-- As a total company, we're less than fifty people, and it's, like, less than, you know, less than ten or a half dozen. You, you basically outlined the entire marketing team. So, um, it's pretty...
• 38:23
  I would say it's very informal with some, like, kind of benchmarks, uh, intentionally, some, some, like, more formal artifacts sprinkled in. Um, so we're, you know, we're talking to each other on Slack all the time.
• 38:37
  We're very, uh, we're all, so far, a team of, like, "Hey, can you come hop in a huddle real quick?"
• 38:43
  Like, we're big on just, like, the quick call and the informality of, like, the digital version of, like, "Oh, like, can I tap you on the shoulder, and, like, can we jam about this for, like, four minutes or whatever?"
• 38:52
  Not everything needs to be, like, a thirty-minute meeting. So we do a lot of that.
• 38:56
  Also sort of cognizant as we build out the team, people have different styles and sort of, like, neural patterns, and that, that might not work for everyone. But for our group now, it works great.
• 39:05
  We have a weekly, we have a weekly marketing sync. We have a Monday meeting. This is actually kind of a cool thing to talk about. So if you look up this concept called, uh, I think this guy Raj was at Atlassian.
• 39:15
  I think-- I don't wanna give him credit for something if he didn't make it up, but I think he created it, or maybe he yanked it from Google when he worked there, this concept of outbound theory.
• 39:25
  I think he has, like, done some writing about outbound theory. Um, and we basically swiped that concept.
• 39:31
  We have a M- a Monday meeting with all of us on the marketing team, plus our product manager called Outbound Theory, and it's literally just what's getting out this week, and that's product marketing, community, myself on content, product side, and it's very focused on, like, stuff that's actually coming out and not like, "Hey, here's a check-in on something that'll be delivered six months."
• 39:53
  It's more like, what's getting shipped?
• 39:55
  So it kinda keeps us, you know, kinda keeps the fire under us in terms of, like, shipping a lot on the marketing side, and it's, you know, it's very focused to, like, Monday to Friday, what do we got?
• 40:05
  What are we gonna hit on social? What's going on in the community? What's, you know, who's coming on the podcast? What do we got on the blog? Whatever, newsletter. And we just kind of, like, hit that on Mondays.
• 40:15
  Um, and then the other thing I would add is we're big on, you know, getting together in person a handful of times of year. Like- Mm-hmm. Yeah...
• 40:21
  you can't, you can't, you, you can't duplicate the kind of, like, connections and relationships you can build by just, like, getting together, having a couple dinners together, hanging out, doing some work in person.
• 40:32
  Uh, so we just did one of those last week, and we'll probably always have a handful of those on the calendar every year. Yeah, that's awesome. So helpful. Quick follow-up. Is-- You're saying outbound theory or- Theory.
• 40:42
  Okay, cool. We'll, we'll find that. I'll, I'll link that 'cause that I think that's super interesting. Yeah. There's, there's definitely some writing Raj has done on that that's, um, that, that we're fans of. Okay, cool.
• 40:51
  I wanna ask you about the podcast too. Uh, some teams, uh, some teams have podcasts under a content, kind of under the content, um, umbrella. Some, some companies have, uh, podcasts, like, almost like a separate team.
• 41:07
  How do you think about it?
• 41:08
  Like, and, and I guess part of, part of what I'm getting at is do you find that your skills as a content and product marketer translate well to the, to the audio medium, or is that a new thing you've had to learn?
• 41:19
  I think so.
• 41:20
  I mean, I think there's some technical-- There's, there's obviously some technical things you have to figure out, like how to talk, how to have equipment, how to have a good setup, how to book a guest, stuff like that.
• 41:32
  Like, it's not a, it's not like a automatic thing you know how to do, but the core of it, if you're doing content, like, you understand what makes a good story, you understand what is compelling information, you understand what's gonna create good content.
• 41:46
  Like, I would say the, the foundations, if you're, like, a content marketer, and you're like, you've got a really good foundational skill that you can then go build podcasting on top of. Yeah. Okay. Got it.
• 41:57
  That makes sense. And I also wanted to ask you about reporting just quickly before I let you go. Yeah, let's do it. Do, do you have a, you know, is there, like, a spreadsheet you fill out each month? Is there...
• 42:06
  You know, are you exporting stuff from Google Analytics?
• 42:09
  Or, or is it more, like, because you guys are kinda still in this discovery phase and communicating, like, very frequently about this, that you just sort of, you know, you kind of trust your gut that the stuff is either moving in the right direction or it's not?
• 42:21
  I mean, I think we all just have, like, such a tight-knit relationship right now that, like, that hasn't really...
• 42:26
  The one thing we've done to kinda calcify that as an organization is we, um, we stood up, like, an actual annual planning and reporting process.
• 42:34
  So we, uh, we swiped this idea from Salesforce called, like, the V2 Mom, um, which, like, you know, Marc Benioff and Salesforce sort of, like, pioneered this, like, kinda strategy and, um, kind of, like, cadence of planning and strategy and reporting.
• 42:49
  Um, and we've kinda made that fit for us. This is, like, year one of that. So there's, there's some baked into that in terms of, like, "Hey, what are your kind of, like, KPIs? Where exactly are you tracking against it?"
• 43:01
  But again, like, we're, um, I think we're in a lucky place. Like, all of us have-- A lot of us have done the big company. A lot of us have done startups.
• 43:10
  I think we're smart enough to know what we should pick and choose from, like, big company playbook for the stage we're at right now and not just try to blindly, like, be, you know, more bureaucratic than we need to be right now.
• 43:22
  Got it. Makes perfect sense. Blake, can't thank you enough for taking time to chat with us. Dude, where can we send people? Obviously, we'll send folks to Launch Notes.
• 43:29
  I was gonna say we'll send folks to Launch Awesome, the community, but I'm guessing you don't want a bunch of content marketers in there, so we won't do that. Where else?
• 43:35
  You know, I mean, your own Twitter, LinkedIn, newsletter, or anywhere else? Yeah, for sure.
• 43:39
  Um, yeah, you can find me, um, thankfully there aren't a ton of Blake Thorns out there, so you can find me on LinkedIn pretty easily. You can find me on Twitter @blakethorne.
• 43:49
  Super happy to, to jam about content, product marketing. Uh, if anyone wants to talk, I'm kind of an open book. So yeah, find me in those places. Hit me up if you wanna chat. Cool. And how about your newsletter?
• 44:01
  Uh, yeah. So, uh, I've been doing, uh, headtocomputersandwich.com.
• 44:04
  I've been sort of sporadically sharing my thoughts on, uh, artificial intelligence, trying to, trying to get a handle on that and try to do something a little different than just, like, the links roundup.
• 44:14
  Um, so that's been, that's been fun to dive into. So yeah, that's computersandwich.com. Okay, cool. We'll, we'll leave links for all this stuff to people. Um, cool. Blake, awesome. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
• 44:24
  Talk to you soon. Yeah. Thanks, Jimmy. Take care and see ya. [outro music]