Latest / Content, Briefly / Softr: Jakub Rudnik on how to market a product with infinite use cases

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Softr: Jakub Rudnik on how to market a product with infinite use cases · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  I've had a ton of success, like, blog posts, uh, j- like, all that content that we know, as you phrased it, like, that's, that's my bread and butter.
• 0:09
  I've done that everywhere and have had so much success with, you know, the things that we all know convert really well, those listicles, alternatives pages, et cetera. Uh, and that has generally worked here as well.
• 0:20
  But I think that, as I mentioned, the... I, I'm-- I'd really like to go horizontally there, like, let's get anything that anybody's calling our product.
• 0:30
  [on-hold music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today we've got a great conversation with Jacob Rudnick.
• 0:42
  He's the head of content and SEO at a company called Softr, which is a no-code app builder, meaning you could take an Airtable base or a Google Sheet and use that as the basis of an app that folks could log in, interact, take some basic actions.
• 0:57
  I actually use it for two different things. One is a client portal for our marketplace, and another is a way for people to search, browse, help maybe write a request.
• 1:07
  So if you see in our content collab channel in Slack, there's a list every day that gets posted of Help a B2B Writer request. Those all run on Softr.
• 1:15
  Anyways, we talk a lot about what it's like to market a product that can do almost anything for almost anyone. It's sort of a blessing and a curse to have so many use cases for so many different types of people.
• 1:27
  So we talk a little bit about how Jacob's narrowing down the target persona, narrowing down the best use cases for those people, and then how he's actually going about creating content.
• 1:36
  Everything from the awareness stage, helping people understand that no-code is actually an option for them, all the way down to the tutorial stage, where they're trying to learn how to do very specific things within the product.
• 1:47
  Lots of good stuff in here. Really enjoyed this conversation with Jacob Rudnick, and I hope you do too. This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Captain.
• 1:56
  Captain is the hyper-contextual AI-powered tool that can create, engage, and identify.
• 2:01
  It helps you create by turning customer interviews, company announcements, competitor comparisons, and educational material into rich content.
• 2:07
  It helps you engage by automatically including lead magnets, infographics, CTA, table of contents, and even AI-generated conversational podcasts in every piece of content that it creates.
• 2:17
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• 2:19
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• 2:30
  You can learn more in the webinar that we did with them, which will be linked in the show notes and at contentcaptain.io.
• 2:36
  And just PS, the Captain team also created echoreads.io, which turns written content into monologue or two-way dialogue podcasts. You can even just click to clone your own voice so you're the expert speaking.
• 2:47
  It's very cool and starts at just nineteen dollars a month with an option for a free trial. So that's echoreads.io. Thanks so much to our friends at Captain for supporting Superpath.
• 2:57
  Content Briefly is produced by our friends at Minutia. To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes.
• 3:07
  Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with Jacob Rudnick. Our first time meeting. I am a customer of Softr, where you are the head of content and SEO. I have lots of questions for you about that.
• 3:17
  But maybe first, will you tell us a little bit about yourself, Jacob, and about your career to date so far? Also, you've worked for some cool brands, G2, ActiveCampaign, and a few others.
• 3:26
  So yeah, maybe give us, like, kind of the arc of your career to date also. Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
• 3:32
  Really nice to meet you in person finally after, like, years of being connected via LinkedIn and community and stuff like that. Yeah.
• 3:37
  So I'm, uh, head of content at Softr, uh, head of content SEO, and I've been here six or seven months. I started, honestly, even outside of marketing. I've never taken a marketing or a business class in my entire life.
• 3:49
  I'm a history English student that went to J-school, did a journalism master's, was a full-time journalist for a year, freelance journalist, and I was in sports, which means long hours, no pay, all that type of stuff.
• 4:01
  And so I got out, hope- eventually think I'd make my way back in, but got really lucky and was looking at content jobs of all sorts, and the company that I stumbled my way to just by, honestly, accident, was G2 Crowd, which became G2, and I was employee number thirty-ish, right around their series A.
• 4:18
  Oh, that's early. Yeah. Yeah, very early. We were... You know, they hired a bunch of kind of young folks with, I think, good potential that they saw, but without, like, a clear vision for a career.
• 4:26
  A lot of us came from way different backgrounds and grew up with this company, and so went from thirty to maybe four fifty there and- [chuckles]...
• 4:33
  started as a content specialist, which was a little bit of everything in the beginning. You know, it was literally how do we get ten reviews for any product?
• 4:40
  How do we build, you know, ten of those products into a grid and a category and stuff like that? How do we add content to those categories so they'll rank better? Like, what does that even mean?
• 4:50
  What's the playbook there? How do we scale this? All those, like, really V1 things that G2...
• 4:55
  Like, when you go to G2 right now, a lot of that stuff, the first version that we were creating and, you know, over four and a half years there really evolved.
• 5:02
  Like, every six months was a new job, a new problem to solve, new role, all this stuff. And so couple years in there, there was, like, a big vacuum.
• 5:10
  Uh, research director had left, uh, head of SEO had left, and we were kind of losing traction on a lot of SERPs and just traffic for the first time ever, and G2's history was really flatlining, so they're like, "We need some people to kind of figure some of this stuff out."
• 5:23
  So there's a longer story there, but ended up kind of being one of those people that jumped in there and did-- ended up really working on the content strategy and not just categories for the first time, but doing more of, like, TOFU, MOFU stuff that, like, you know, traditional SaaS, like HubSpot-looking content that we had done for the first time.
• 5:40
  So kind of did that, had a lot of successes.
• 5:43
  Like, that first version, they hired a new CMO, kind of jumped in and took over the content marketing team there, scaled it to twenty-two writers.Uh, I left there 2019, did a couple different stops.
• 5:54
  Uh, big ones were Scribe. I went there at series A when they basically had a brand new website. Went from zero blogs to eight hundred blogs in, like, a year and a half. Kinda crazy. Oh, wow.
• 6:02
  Stuff with just two full-time people. Jumped over to ActiveCampaign for a year. So I was there through March and was leading, like, content and video and, uh, localization.
• 6:12
  And then Softr and this opportunity came up, and I love the no-code space, see a ton of potential, love the angel investors and things.
• 6:18
  So it's been a little bit of jumping in the last few years, but really just, like, exciting opportunity after opportunity. So that journey began. It all has-- it felt like an accident.
• 6:27
  I think a lot of people's careers do, but definitely feels like just leading wherever the winds take me, I guess. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool.
• 6:34
  That's really interesting going from journalism to G2, because G2 is not just on page SEO for a blog post.
• 6:42
  Some of what you're describing is, like, learning about site architecture and technical SEO and category, but that's like-- that's, like, real SEO, not just how many times we need to mention the keyword in this blog post to try to get it to rank.
• 6:54
  So that's-- I mean, I just imagine that must have set, like, a really cool foundation for the way that you've gone on to mix content and SEO since then. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.
• 7:02
  And I think it's-- I didn't even realize that in the moment, like, how different some of that was or even that I was doing SEO in some of those ways, right?
• 7:08
  A lot of times we were, like, adding information to databases, like, through a sort of an interface that someone at G2 had built.
• 7:15
  And so you just are, like, inputting data, inputting data, but then seeing how that spits out in that architecture.
• 7:20
  And then as you got more experience, we're pulled into those calls where we're redesigning these sites, or this category, or this content here. We're doing it across thousands of pages.
• 7:29
  Like, oh my gosh, this is, like, really kind of enterprise level SEO that I really haven't seen as much since, but I think it set me up really nicely.
• 7:37
  And so a lot of things, like, that I do now with things are more programmatic, you know, that you wouldn't-- again, like, Softr isn't like G2 in many ways, but some of the stuff where we're creating tons of pages and you want formats in that information architecture and stuff, those lessons have really paid off, even if I'm not using it quite at the scale of G2.
• 7:53
  So yeah. Yeah. Again, I, like, learned-- didn't even know we were doing SEO in the moment sometimes, and then you realize later, like, a lot of that comes back and there's a lot of good lessons in there. Yeah.
• 8:02
  That's really cool. Really cool. So one thing I like to do with folks when they come on is try to understand a little bit about the business and the product, and then talk about how you use content to reach those people.
• 8:13
  In this case, I'm a Softr customer, and I have consumed a ton of Softr content, mostly tutorial style stuff, which is one of the things I was hoping to ask you about. So Softr, maybe I'll try to explain it.
• 8:26
  You tell me if I'm right. It's a way to use no-code to build apps that clients can interact with. So like in Superpath's case, I have two use cases. One is we use it for Help a B2B Writer.
• 8:36
  So Help a B2B Writer queries are stored in Airtable. Airtable is then the database that powers a website where people can go and search and browse all of the requests that come in on a day-to-day basis.
• 8:47
  So if you are in the Slack group and you go to our collaboration channel, you'll see a bunch of links to Help a B2B Writer requests. Those are links to a website which is run on Softr.
• 8:56
  And then the other is a client portal, which we use for our marketplace, which maybe that's, like, a more typical use case for Softr where, again, all the data is stored in Airtable, and I'm giving different people access to that data in a way that shows them only their stuff, not other client stuff, and there's permissions, and the Softr helps me manage the logins and passwords and all that stuff.
• 9:16
  Is that overly simplified or is that m- No, no, no. No, exactly. I think that was a-- that's a great job. I think that last piece is really one of those true value props, right?
• 9:23
  Like, for without code that you can manage how different people see content in a website or a portal. You know, I think the-- for a while we were way more horizontal and trying a lot of different things.
• 9:34
  We're still series A and the company is, you know, only a few years old, honestly. So we're-- it was a lot of seeing what stuck in that client portal.
• 9:40
  You're right, that's one of those core use cases where we've seen a ton of traction.
• 9:43
  There's-- like, that's our ICP where we're having the most success and we're seeing just the most happy, long-lasting customers because, again, they can build something, it looks great for those customers.
• 9:54
  They can use, interact, get all the things they need without, like, very self-service, uh, but only the things they need.
• 9:59
  And you can, you know, both for their own, like, their company, they only see stuff for their company, but also down to the role level, right? Really granular. Yeah. Both at the page level, the block level even.
• 10:09
  So there's a ton of customization in no code. There's definitely other things. It's not just client things, like people will build-- like, we've personally built, like, an employee portal.
• 10:17
  So we manage all of our time off and our benefits and things in the same way. So people do use it for internal only tools, but I agree with the client assessment. That's, like, the most popular use case for us.
• 10:28
  So really any sort of tool. People build all sorts of things. They build websites that are very public facing. They build marketplaces.
• 10:32
  Like, we don't necessarily encourage those, but people have found ways to, like, really make cool things with their business that way. People build CRM or a project management system or whatever else.
• 10:40
  So I think that, like, the flexibility and the customization just allows for a lot of different use cases.
• 10:46
  And for us that-- we'll get into that, I'm sure, but hard as a marketer because you can-- people can do almost anything- Yeah...
• 10:51
  that's like an app, but where really should we be focusing with the 50-person team and the stage we're at and et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot that goes into that. Yeah, totally.
• 11:01
  I don't think Superpath exists without no code. You know, at least not in the way that it currently is, which is basically just me plus some contractors helping me out with a few things because I can't write code.
• 11:12
  But I can build a client portal, you know, and I can customize it to operate the way I want it to operate, and then I can hook it up with Zapier if I want and trigger some automations and things like that, and it's, like, pretty darn good, you know.
• 11:25
  And it's, like, incredibly affordable. Like, I think I pay, you know, 50 bucks a month or something for Softr. It's, like, incredibly affordable for how powerful the tool is. It's also a lot of fun.
• 11:35
  I feel like I haven't, like, seen, like, marketing around this, but, like, building no code is genuinely fun.
• 11:42
  You know, to, like, have this idea of a client portal and then to be able to, you know, in an hour or two whip something up, like, kind of a basic version of it is, is an amazing use of time.
• 11:50
  Like, it's so different than all the other work I do, which is, you know, you have, like, admin stuff or, you know, you gotta schedule your social posts, you got other things, but, like, to actually build something is really satisfying, you know.
• 12:01
  So just in general, I feel like Softr operates in, like, a really cool, optimistic, fun, satisfying, I don't-- whatever all these other adjectives, a space that I wonder if that gives you guys an advantage, you know, as you think about your own marketing.Yeah, it's super interesting, and I love that you say that.
• 12:16
  I agree with it. I don't-- I think that we, we just had an offsite. We were in Europe where the company is based. It was a great couple weeks together and talking about, like, we believe that.
• 12:25
  I think the people that our community really strongly believes that as well. There's a ton. When you've seen no-code and built something like that and felt that magic, it's there.
• 12:33
  But I think the broader population, even in tech, haven't built something with no-code or sometimes don't even realize- Yeah... that they've done no-code related things, right?
• 12:40
  They might have an Airtable database or a Notion, but they didn't realize, like, they wouldn't call that no-code, right? So there's some priming of the, the market just that this is no-code's a thing. It's possible.
• 12:50
  It is easier. And then there's fun. So there's like stages to this.
• 12:53
  But agree, I mean, as we were speaking, so I'm in the middle of a weeks-long dynasty fantasy football draft, and I've been like using all these different tools.
• 13:01
  I'm trying to combine these spreadsheets into a database that I can like create a tool for our league, and I'm not there yet. There's nothing to show you.
• 13:07
  But like I think that there's an awesome use case to like build some like interfaces and some dashboards- Mm-hmm, yeah... with no-code for the league that don't exist in the tool.
• 13:15
  Again, with just a little bit of Zapier and some no-code knowledge. So it is fun, like using it.
• 13:19
  I've seen so many people do it for weird personal projects or side businesses or whatever else, and I think there's the intimidation of building something on your own the first time.
• 13:28
  But once you've done that, I think it does get addictive. We see that with our community and our users for sure. Yeah.
• 13:34
  So that sort of gets to this really interesting content marketing challenge, which is a lot of different types of people can build a lot of different types of things. So where do you start?
• 13:44
  You know, that's a big question, obviously.
• 13:46
  Like, I'm gonna guess that you've narrowed it down to like, there's a couple personas that we know have these couple of use cases which we like have data that shows that they're, you know, it's high value for them, they stick around, that kind of thing.
• 13:58
  Is that like how you think about where your content and SEO efforts are going? Yeah, one hundred percent. A lot of that was done like that.
• 14:05
  You know, the kind of software marketing and leadership in general, very smart, tons of technical people using no-code and even our own tool to build a website and SEO.
• 14:14
  Like we get a few hundred thousand people a month, and it's built off of software. Like that's what's running- That's nice... our website, even though that's not our prime use case. So a ton was done.
• 14:23
  There's like a lot of shots on goal, basically, for anyone can use this for anything, right? That's over-exaggerating to some extent, but we've thrown a lot out there.
• 14:30
  Then we learn who is coming in, where are they signing up, how are they using the product, are they paying, and if they're paying, do they stay, right?
• 14:37
  So for instance, we saw a ton of people using software to build MVPs and like that's great, but often they build an MVP, see traction, then they go and rebuild the tool somewhere else. And so they might stay- Yeah...
• 14:47
  for three months and then leave. And so not that we're against someone doing that necessarily, but as the long-term businesses decision, like there's issues with churn and things like that, right?
• 14:56
  So that's not necessarily the mover we wanna be. Just like you mentioned, like you called it out, client portals, awesome. People build a business. It's awesome for their clients. It's awesome for them.
• 15:04
  Everything's self-service.
• 15:05
  Once you put the resources in there and build all your systems, like you could obviously move that still, but it's affordable, and it's doing exactly what you need, and it's scalable, like awesome.
• 15:14
  So those people are really happy, and they stay for a long time, and then they build on top of that. So they build a client portal, then maybe they build that internal like project management system or something.
• 15:22
  So it's both like really sturdy and dependable and long-lasting, but then those people like build on top of it and keep building their business. And so like client portal, yeah.
• 15:30
  And then for me, I think that that is a big piece with a couple different places like G2, so horizontal. We could write content really about any software category and- Right... we're trying to compete with all those.
• 15:41
  So it's been a lesson for me where I've been at a couple places that are really horizontal, just like software, and I wanna go wide, capture any user that I can and hope, like play that big net.
• 15:51
  But I think there's been a lesson here, even in the six months I've been here, is that focusing really tightly, one, is good for SEO, you know, we get more authority and things like that. The interlinking's really tight.
• 16:01
  We can create nice funnels or, you know, whatever else. There's alignment to other parts of marketing.
• 16:05
  But that other piece is really like the user for one use case is not the same as another as far as like business value, both short and long term, right?
• 16:14
  The, the likelihood that they'll sign up, the likelihood that they'll stay in the product or that they'll spend money with us and then stay with us.
• 16:20
  So really for us, like we've seen portal, any sort of portal people are very happy with and stay with us for a long time.
• 16:26
  So anything around portals is really where I'm focusing now, and then I think we're gonna build that playbook, or we are in the process of building that playbook on, like what content is needed here?
• 16:35
  What do we need to learn? And then we can move to new, new ICPs. And I think we'll go further and further. There will be certainly some testing of both content types and like the use case itself that we go after.
• 16:45
  But really let's start where we're having enough traction and then expand from there and not try to spread ourselves too wide. Right. Right. Does tutorial content fall under your purview? There's a little bit of both.
• 16:57
  So we, uh, just before I started, we hired an awesome community manager, JJ. He's been in the no-code community for a long time. So this is somebody who knows no-code in general, has built courses and all these things.
• 17:07
  Like he's just awesome at building tutorial style content. So he'll do like build, like walk through builds, you know, under an hour he'll build a tool either by himself or with someone.
• 17:16
  He'll just go on, and we'll publish that to YouTube and then, you know, that will come over to me, and we'll turn that into a blog post, for instance.
• 17:23
  There's others that he hasn't gotten to, like how to build X that I'll build with a freelance writer. There's definitely some like bumps there, like how well do they know the product? Do they know that use case?
• 17:33
  Like somebody, again, like JJ, who's been in the space can do that really well. So as we've scaled, we've seen different like levels of success there. But some of that does fall to me.
• 17:42
  So I'm often identifying those keywords, trying to find out like they're really good for conversion, but it's a mix. I think our best success there has been when it's collaborative, right?
• 17:49
  Me optimizing and formatting and all that stuff or leading that direction. Someone like JJ or our product team leading really like what are we building? How are we doing this?
• 17:58
  Showing off the expertise of the product there. JJ recording it, and then we, you know, work together. So I think it's that depends on who's driving.
• 18:06
  For me, it's like if I find an awesome keyword or, you know, really we see a lot like within, we hear from the community or we're seeing in feedback that people are using this use case over and over, and we're seeing keyword volume, like I'll push that direction, but also it'll come from their end too, right?
• 18:20
  We're launching a new data source or a new ICP, they'll lead that, and then I'll go do the optimization or like the back half of it, if that makes sense. So it can go both ways- Got it...
• 18:30
  but certainly a, a team effort at this stage.Got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense.
• 18:34
  I find it interesting because the way that I discovered Softr was I have this Airtable base of requests for help with B2B writer, and my very specific problem was: is there a way that each record in this Airtable base could have its own unique URL so that I could share them?
• 18:51
  And so I'm Googling, like, "How do I use Airtable as a CMS?" Like, "Is there a way to create a URL for each individual record?" And things like that, and I found Softr very quickly.
• 19:00
  And then I'm, like, instantly into tutorials. Like, okay, how does the list block work? Like, Softr, you know, you have blocks w- that help you sort of build apps. How does the list block work?
• 19:09
  Then I'm getting into that, and it's like, okay, how does the sign-in work? So I'm, like, researching how that works. And now, you know, very quickly, like, into the product.
• 19:16
  I probably skipped a lot of the marketing because I had this use case I was trying to solve, and I wonder, I guess you're thinking about both things.
• 19:24
  Like, there's probably people like me who have a problem to solve, and then kinda as you mentioned earlier, this other cohort of people who may not even realize this is possible. Mm-hmm.
• 19:33
  But I'm guessing there's a lot more of those. Like, the TAM there is massive versus, like, the probably smaller pool of people who make their Airtable database do something very specific. Yeah, for sure.
• 19:46
  So we see both sides and the Softr specific content that's, like, how to do something in Softr that a lot of that's being created too, and we certainly update that, but that'll happen in, like, product people, product marketers.
• 19:56
  Like, we support for sure, but that ends up- Yeah... happening very close to the product just because they're so intimate.
• 20:00
  They're the ones building those features and things, and sometimes you even find that in the community where the community has asked for something specifically.
• 20:07
  We don't have a document, but either community members answer that or we'll be in there as well. So I think that could be one way.
• 20:14
  We've also tried to hit these, like, keywords and SEO potential where the intensity will be a little bit lower. It's not-- But this might be where you came in too.
• 20:21
  We've got 30 or 40 blog posts on how to do specific things in Airtable.
• 20:25
  Some are more related than others, but, you know, formatting of that database, how to connect this, how do you turn those into their own URLs, right? We can anticipate the problems that would make for a good Softr user.
• 20:38
  We wanna create those how-tos and then add a section of, okay, now that you have these URLs, this is actually-- You could turn this into a full-blown app with Softr, for instance, like to oversimplify that blog post.
• 20:49
  But we'll show you- Yeah... exactly how to do this, but also here's a way to even maybe enhance, because you didn't know that something like this existed. I think that's very common.
• 20:57
  So there's a little bit all over the place. We have to find people that's more upper funnel, right, than people that are saying, "I want to build a client portal." That's pretty mid heading down the funnel.
• 21:07
  Maybe they don't know the solutions, but they're looking. So we're all over the place for sure, and that's one of the, honestly, the huge opportunities. It makes me really excited, but also it is difficult.
• 21:15
  Where do you focus? Where's what's missing at the moment, right? Is it more about the awareness, or is it that acquisition, or is it the product education to keep people in the product staying longer and not churning?
• 21:25
  So I think we're-- all of those can always be improved, but it's a balance each month, honestly. Like, things change so quickly as we see success or see problems, right, where there's big gaps. Yeah, yeah.
• 21:36
  This content opportunity is just so massive. It's really cool and exciting, but it also feels a little overwhelming.
• 21:41
  You know, like, we're talking about kinda straight up content, like, as we all sort of know it, like create awareness, drive people down a funnel, you know, tutorial, product marketing/tutorial type stuff, user-generated content through the community, which I have discovered quite a few times on my own.
• 21:56
  It seems like Google has prioritized. You know, you see more Reddit threads, you see more- Mm-hmm... like, if I search for something for Zapier, I always get the Zapier community, you know, stuff like that. So it's cool.
• 22:07
  I mean, I, in a sense, I envy you because there's so much fun stuff to work on, and in another sense, I don't [chuckles] because it's very difficult to prioritize. The one other thing I wanted to ask you about was sales.
• 22:17
  Is there a sales function at Softr, or is this straight up PLG? Like 90-something percent PLG. Okay.
• 22:25
  There is, uh, you know, someone who's definitely working in customer success and does that enterprise level sales and, and so he's supporting this all the time, and he's really good, but that both, like, you know, he's building out that motion to some extent and just being really supportive of customers.
• 22:41
  But it hasn't been a big piece of the business. Really, the PLG, like, letting people be self-service, I think that's a lot of just no-code in general.
• 22:48
  Not all no-code businesses are built that way, but we've been really hands-off there and not using, like, the, you know, human resources as sales.
• 22:56
  Rather building, spending that time building product and now finally doing, like, more marketing, but really product and engineering and just make the best product, let community lead a ton of that.
• 23:05
  Now expanding, like, the SEO and other marketing efforts. But yeah, really little sales at this point. Got it, got it. I think you said you've been there six-ish months, right? Yeah, something like that.
• 23:16
  Has there been anything about the content that's surprised you?
• 23:19
  Like, anyth- something, like, you thought would work but hasn't, or something that you thought was like, "Yeah, no," sort of like a throwaway thing that actually has worked really well? Yeah, that's a good question.
• 23:28
  So I've had a ton of success, like blog posts, like all that content that we know, as you phrased it, like, that's my bread and butter.
• 23:37
  Have done that everywhere and have had so much success with, you know, the things that we all know convert really well, those listicles, alternatives pages, et cetera. And that has generally worked here as well.
• 23:47
  But I think that, as I mentioned, I really like to go horizontally there. Like, let's get anything that anybody's calling our product.
• 23:54
  Like, I'll go into our backlinks and see what we've been linked to in other software lists, how people are mentioning us on social.
• 24:00
  Especially with, like, a no-code builder or when I was at Scribe, you know, we were kind of creating a new category, so what people were calling us wasn't necessarily what we were calling ourselves, so finding those- Mm-hmm...
• 24:08
  lists. There was a lot of opportunities there.
• 24:10
  I still really like that play, but I was-- I think in my first few months here, I was trying to do all those and really spreading us thin, spreading us wide instead of going deeper after some of these, like, true ICP.
• 24:21
  So this quarter, I've been more focusing, like anything, again, we do client portal-wise is really crushing. Like, it ranks right away. People engage with it. We know that ICP really well.
• 24:31
  And so this is the mostTechnically complex tool I've had to use. Like, it's easy in some ways, but there's so much you can do that there's so much nuance depending ICP to ICP.
• 24:42
  And so I haven't had to know a product this intimately or know the ins and outs. So I don't know if that's like content.
• 24:49
  I think that is content-wise where I can still publish pretty good blog posts, optimize really well, I can make it rank, but do I really know the product well enough for this ICP and this specific user based on that keyword to really convince them that we're the best?
• 25:01
  That's been my difficulty is like I'm getting onto page one, but the conversions for a client portal, which is like the first use case I knew and is something that makes sense to me, those work really well.
• 25:11
  But some of these other ones, I'm getting a ton of traffic, but I'm not seeing that conversion the same way.
• 25:14
  And I think it's more about my product knowledge and if I'm really understanding that use case and how it connects to a keyword. So I hope that makes sense.
• 25:22
  It's definitely one that the horizontal nature of the product, especially in your early days, there's difficulties, right? Yeah. It's, it's definitely a new problem for me and, and how our content's working. Yeah.
• 25:32
  That's very interesting actually, 'cause you do come across companies probably further along in their life cycle where it's like the content team kind of figures out like, okay, this is the thing that works, so let's just do tons of that.
• 25:43
  And it sounds like you're earlier on in the journey. I mean, also you're dealing with more variables too, you know, more ICPs, more use cases, things like that.
• 25:51
  Which leads me to another thing I wanted to ask you about, which is measurement. Are there a couple of data points that you're mostly focused on?
• 26:00
  You know, really just any kind of insight you can provide into way that you report and measure on content I think would be really interesting. Yeah.
• 26:06
  So I-- when I'm thinking of like new content especially, I've got-- I think about content really in a funnel and, and I'll come back to more Software specific stuff that I think will be helpful.
• 26:14
  But, you know, if I'm just launching new blog posts for the first time or even like this first batch that I'm doing, it's like is it indexing? That's usually a yes, but sometimes you have some issues there, right?
• 26:24
  And so you just have to solve those. Then you're really moving into, like, this is indexing, now is it ranking?
• 26:29
  And so I'm looking at like my impressions, just are those growing in general, and are we picking up keywords, you know, in Ahrefs or Semrush or whatever you're using. Like, are those new pieces picking up those things?
• 26:38
  And as long as I'm seeing momentum, like those numbers are growing, I'm pretty happy in those first couple months.
• 26:44
  Eventually you'll start seeing that traffic and, of course, like traffic for traffic's sake isn't what we're looking for, but as long as we've identified the right keywords and, and things ahead of time, that's all good, and I'll take that traffic there.
• 26:55
  Then I'm certainly watching keywords, like, and how they're not just like the total growing, but the, the positions. But again, these are like early indicators more than anything.
• 27:05
  And then certainly, like, so again, we're all PLG, so I'm definitely looking at free users and then looking at people subscribing, those paid users.
• 27:12
  That's like the simple funnel, but I think there's a lot more here that both I've learned. I think my first taste was at Scribe, where it was my first like true SaaS product rather than a review site.
• 27:22
  But then even at Software, this is kind of evolving for me.
• 27:25
  And so there's like we have ICP specific stuff, so we've set that in to the cohort with different credentials in, uh, Mixpanel, and so we can measure, you know, the people that are coming in with that specific ICP that we want.
• 27:38
  And so we can measure those and people, how they're coming into content or like is the content that we're creating generating those correct users, right? And so that's an interesting one.
• 27:48
  I've never had that measurement before, but that's been really both interesting and then it's been really useful for me is that certain types of content are really generating those, and then those people stay around.
• 27:59
  And so for me, it's not just do we get someone free to sign up, which is great, but really are those people going to be great customers and really happy and can we support them?
• 28:07
  So that's been an interesting one that's much deeper in the-- and connected to product than I've ever been before with metrics with content. We also have like things like our free trial starts.
• 28:16
  So again, we have this free user, we have a paid user, but there's several steps in between, right? So we've got our trial in there, and we've got also different product usage metrics that I can watch as well.
• 28:26
  And so that isn't always with me, but I'm definitely partnering with like our growth team and product team to look at those things and what content is triggering some of those events or that usage. And
• 28:37
  if it's lower than we'd expect, like what can we do? Are there experiments we can run? Is there other content that we can surface in between? So that's often like there is a handoff. It's not all my responsibility.
• 28:47
  I think there's a ton I can learn there and then also support what content needs to be surfaced or is there something we can do in that blog post to help educate, to show somebody like how to even connect, you know, their data source or something like that.
• 28:59
  Like, that's one of those metrics I can see is did someone sign up, then did they connect their data source, right? For you, that was Airtable, but it could be Google Sheets or HubSpot.
• 29:07
  And so maybe there's just little changes in that listicle that we can add or something that we can surface during that onboarding flow. So- Yeah. A lot of different things.
• 29:16
  Those are-- that's probably more in the minutia, but I-- hopefully that can help. Like, that's what we're looking at in the PLG motion and some additional metrics. Yeah, yeah.
• 29:24
  Seems like this is the type of product you just have to be in the weeds because the user is in the weeds. Really cool.
• 29:29
  This is the part in every podcast where I say, "Okay, now you've heard Jacob describe it, go to Software and see what it looks like in person."
• 29:36
  You know, I think it's really helpful to hear it described from the person who's operating it and then go, you know, view it in the same way that a potential customer would.
• 29:46
  I feel like that's where our listeners often get like real inspiration for their own content marketing efforts.
• 29:52
  And also just kind of call out, you know, one thing I love about doing this podcast is every business sends you down a totally different route. It's like, okay, here's the product, here's the customer.
• 30:02
  The way that you reach them, like you kind of have these tools, these levers you can pull, but you end up landing on something so different depending on kind of those foundational things, the product and who the customer is.
• 30:13
  So just really interesting to hear about the work you're doing, and as a customer, I can honestly say the product is great. It's really cool. Yeah.
• 30:20
  It was-- I love that I saw like early in my stage at Software that you were using it, that Superpath, which I'd used before, is like had been, you know, built on top of it and, and all this stuff.
• 30:30
  So I love that, appreciate that. And if people are looking, like, honestly send us, like let me know. I love going through product onboarding and seeing content, you know, and getting my own inspiration.
• 30:40
  But I also think like, so hopefully we've done some stuff really nicely, but also there's tons that we aren't seeing.
• 30:45
  So people, I love when like a writer or a different content director or something sends like, "Have you thought about this?" Or, "This is broken," or- Mm-hmm. "Something's missing here." I don't know.
• 30:53
  Like, it's very easy for us, especially at this stage, to like build, ship, and move to the next project. Ship and move to the next project.
• 30:59
  And often that works really nicely, but, you know, things can not connect or break or change over time. And so all that stuff is always helpful and, you know, just love to connect with other content people. Amazing.
• 31:10
  Well, we'll put links in the show notes to Software obviously, and to your LinkedIn. Is that the best place to send folks to connect with you? Yeah, definitely.
• 31:17
  I talk on there all the time, try to answer all the messages and stuff like that, and just have met a ton of people that way. So love connecting on LinkedIn to content folks. Cool. All right, cool.
• 31:25
  Links will be in the show notes. Jacob, thank you so much for your time. Uh, thank you to the folks at Software for building a great product that I use every day. And, uh, I hope we can do this again soon.
• 31:34
  Maybe we can get an update, you know, twelve months from now, like see how things have evolved. I love it. Let's do that. Thanks, Jimmy. Amazing. Take care. [outro music]