A lean content flywheel to win as a new entrant

New SaaS businesses have one or more foundational disadvantages compared to their established competitors - a small team, limited resources, an evolving understanding of the target market, a not-yet-there product, unproven messaging, and no established growth channel.

On the other hand, the large and established players have been in the business for a long time, have high brand recall, and have been publishing multi-channel, multi-format content for years. They have built and optimized a well-oiled content machine over time and quickly respond to changing market conditions.

With this context, in today's post, I'm presenting the design of a content flywheel that a new entrant can adopt for growth and momentum.

Frameworks are always helpful, but when it comes to early-stage SaaS businesses, founding teams often find it difficult to customize and apply marketing frameworks to their business. Therefore, in this post, I am venturing into uncharted territory and doing something you won't easily find in the public domain - applying the framework to five early-stage SaaS businesses so that you can see the framework in action and develop a heuristic to apply it to your business.

I don't have any association with any of these companies at the time of writing this post. I've chosen these companies because I find them interesting.

Here are those five new SaaS companies:

1. Dub: A link management company. (Established competitors - Bitly, Rebrandly)
2. PropelAuth: Auth and user management company. (Established competitors - Auth0, Clerk, Frontegg)
3. PostgresML: An MLOps platform. (Closest competitor - MindsDB, Enterprise competitors - DataRobot, Dataiku)
4. Dopt: A product onboarding builder. (Established competitors - Pendo, Appcues, UserPilot)
5. PayloadCMS: An app framework and a headless CMS. (Established competitors - Contentful, Strapi)

So, I will first discuss a content flywheel blueprint and then share four real-life examples by customizing it for these companies.

Let’s dive right in.

Strategic Framework

During the early stages, you have limited resources and need early wins so your humble software can feel like a real business. It is time to focus on the highest-impact actions instead of spreading yourself thin in ten directions.

There are four strategic considerations to discover the highest-impact actions:

1. Essentials
2. Playing to your strengths
3. Model Requirements
4. Blue ocean Opportunities

Essentials

Suppose you are in a room full of your ideal prospects. If the host invites you to the podium to address the gathering, what will you tell the group about your business so that many feel excited about it and become your customers? If there is no time restriction, will you deliver a 2-minute, 300-word short presentation or a more nuanced 2000-word one? Will you preach non-stop or pause in between and work the crowd by asking them questions, listening to their answers, and conversing? What will you tell them during a one-on-one conversation after your presentation when you meet them for the snack break?

The answers to these questions will guide your highest-priority content pieces. This must-have content will set the narrative of your product and the entire business. It will also be a reference for many positioning-related content in the future.

A few examples of such content are:

1. One or more long-form blog posts discussing the pains of your market, your personal experience with them, the genesis of your idea, and the product's strengths.
2. A set of short DMs (message variations for different personas).
3. A cold email sequence.
4. A set of social media posts.
5. A set of videos: product tour, problem-POV-solution video, and use-case videos.

Since you can't always have your ideal prospects together in a room, you need to find ways to talk to them either as a group or individually. Here comes the importance of a channel and distribution. Social media platforms are good channels, and so are cold outreach and communities.

And if you have been on the internet for long enough to know that social platforms have those always-changing algorithms in place and that your existence on their platform is at their mercy, you should explore more sustainable channels that are relatively difficult to build but give you more control—email lists, private groups, and even RSS feeds.

Thus, foundational content and distribution are two essential parts of SaaS content marketing that you should build from day one.

Playing to your strengths

Most teams have strengths - known or unknown to them, that they can leverage, especially at an early stage.

Do you have a groundbreaking product that can amaze the world instantly à la OpenAI?

Have you been building an audience in your previous job?

Have you been a part of a community and/or are known in a community of potential users of your product?

Have you been posting memes on Tumblr or travel videos on YouTube? Can you use those skills for your product's content marketing?

Is there an element of virality in your whole offering?

The possibilities are endless.

Model Requirements

The business model includes everything from sales motion to positioning and pricing. The content strategy must include the model.

For example, if you have a sales-led motion and a 'book a demo' button on the homepage, you must create a master sales deck, a summary deck to attach with after-call emails, detailed call scripts, and content to handle major objections.

On the other hand, if you have adopted a product-led self-serve model, you need to build content to motivate prospects to sign up, guides and tutorials to help them with the onboarding, and behavior-triggered email sequences to boost product engagement.

Different models, different content.

Blue ocean Opportunities

Blue ocean opportunities are difficult to discover but can deliver the highest growth impact. They may or may not inspire awe from the outside world, but they will for sure save your business from failing.

These opportunities can be so subtle that your competitors have never observed them, or they could be those 'things that don't scale' that most competitors find too insignificant to pay any attention to.

But if you can successfully grab a blue ocean opportunity in that soul-breaking early stage, you can have a real business with real clients and revenue.

Content Flywheel

It's time to look at the content flywheel design for early-stage SaaS growth.

But first, let's have a working definition of SaaS growth:

"Growth is improvement in KPIs."

The choice of the key performance indicator depends on the company. Common KPIs are active user count, monthly recurring revenue, and churn rate. To improve these KPIs, you need to focus on the end-to-end user lifecycle—acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, renewals, and referrals.

Having said that, it is also my responsibility as a strategist to accept the ground reality of early-stage SaaS—acquisition takes precedence over everything else, as you can't do much without first acquiring users and clients. Therefore, the early-stage SaaS content flywheel is acquisition-focused.

Early-stage B2B SaaS Content Marketing Flywheel by Thoughtlytics

When it comes to acquisition, a well-known goal of content is to capture prospects' attention. A lot of content—good and bad—is written to capture attention, which is also the reason for clickbait headlines. However, in B2B SaaS, you target highly aware people who do not impulse buy. hus, you've got to win their trust after capturing their attention.. They should like and trust your unique point of view and see you as an authority—a subject matter expert.

Attention, trust, and authority help you capture hot demand in the market. The final supercharged stage of this progression is being able to generate demand—educating people about their pain and the new grand possibilities and, over time, prime them for conversion.

With the framework established, it's time to apply and customize it for real companies!

Since I do not have an insider view of these companies' goals, resources and strategies, I will base the following analysis on the publicly available information. Naturally, the following work is open to fine-tuning and corrections. Please accept it as my best possible attempt to demonstrate the application of the above framework under these information constraints.

Dub

Story

Every experienced marketer knows the importance of short links, link click tracking, click attribution, and analytics in decision-making.

Dub helps marketing teams create and track short links. It competes with established companies like Bitly and Rebrandly. However, unlike its bigger and more famous competitors, Dub is open-sourced. On August 29, 2022, Dub's founder, Steven Tey, made the first commit on Github while working in Vercel. The repository took off, and as of March 25, 2024, it had 15.6K stars and 1.5k forks.

Steven kept building Dub's product and content, along with his personal social media presence, for about 16 months before leaving Vercel at the dawn of 2024 to work on Dub full-time.

Today, you can use the Dub platform or self-host it using open-sourced code.

Content Audit

Dub's blog has ten posts published between September 2022 and March 13, 2024.

Here are their headlines:

• Introducing Dub
• Introducing the Dub Help Center
• Dub.co Migration Assistants
• Introducing Dub.co - the new face of Dub
• Migrating to Turborepo - What to expect
• Introducing New & Improved Analytics for Dub
• Unveiling Dub.co's new chapter
• Pricing Updates
• 301 vs 302 Redirect: Which is better for SEO?
• Introducing Tags 2.0: Filter Analytics by Tags and Multi-tagging

As you can see, most of these posts are product or company updates.

Social Media Presence: Dub's founder, Steven, has a significant social media following, with 43K+ followers on Twitter and 8.8K+ followers on LinkedIn. This is a good enough content distribution power. His social content revolves around open-source tools and Dub's company updates.

Help center and developer docs: Dub has an active help center containing integration guides, API references, and other content for developers to use Dub successfully. Such content helps activate new users.

Customers: Dub has a dedicated page to showcase its customers. It's possible that some of these companies might be self-hosting Dub while others are using the Dub platform directly. Nevertheless, it's an effective way to build trust.

Strategic Considerations

#1 Essentials

Dub has an 'introducing Dub' blog post and comparison pages for Bitly, Rebrandly, and Short.io. These are essential content pages, and it's impressive for the Dub team to build them. However, the content on these pages is largely a plain presentation of information and lacks convincing and conversion capabilities.

To establish the narrative and positioning, Dub will need a lot more content, like long-form blog posts focusing on the product's genesis, the founder's story, and the major pains the company solves. They may have to dig deeper into the motivations of their end-users, i.e., marketers, and the fears of their buyers, i.e., CXOs.

Link management is a well-known topic in marketing with considerable organic search volume. It indicates a potential SEO play.

Organic search potential around link management

Dub's homepage has interesting trust signals, such as a list of customers and testimonials. However, to establish a positioning, words like 'superpowers' and 'supercharge' must accompany more focused messaging and deliver a compelling case. For early-stage companies, narrow but strong messaging often performs better than broad messaging. There is also a scope to optimize creatives.

#2 Playing to your strengths

Community support for Dub as an open-sourced project, the founder's social media presence, and the product's capabilities are strengths that can be leveraged to build the flywheel's momentum.

Dub has a supporting community around it

Content on Twitter and LinkedIn has many benefits but a short lifespan. As a strategy, team Dub should explore ways to 'convert momentarily attention' captured from solid community support and social following into a reliable long-term distribution power.

I suspect that Dub's founder does have an email list, though it's difficult to confirm as I couldn't find satisfactory digital footprints.

To get the most out of the social media attention tailwind, Dub needs a content funnel built around an email list or a private community. The way to do it is to skim off the most engaged followers from social media and direct them to an email list or a private community.

#3 Model Requirements

Dub is a freemium product, with its most popular plan priced at $19 and the highest at $39 at the time of writing this post. This model eliminates any need for account-based sales and favors full self-serve motion.

For a content strategy, this means that Dub does not need sales-related content (e.g., a Sales deck) and can focus on conversion-focused content for two ideal client profiles: marketers and CXOs.

Conversion-focused content for marketers may mean educational content around marketing campaigns, Dub's use cases, and case studies, among many other themes. Team Dub can experiment with different content formats. However, at the onset, I would experiment with long-form blog posts or long-form YouTube videos distributed using attention-grabbing and repetitive short-form content.

Conversion-focused content for CXOs typically means thought-leadership content, keynotes, etc. This is not tactical content and will need authentic insights to be effective.

Interestingly, Dub also has a lead-capture form for Enterprise clients, though the funnel is incomplete.

Instead of leading to a call scheduler, the form submission displays a thank you message.

My guess is that the strategy around enterprise sales is not yet fully developed, and thus, content for it has to wait.

#4 Blue Ocean Opportunities

To discover Dub's blue ocean opportunities, intensive research is required that includes:

• A study of top competitors' content, e.g., Bitly & Rebrandly.
• A study of strategic competitors' content, i.e., companies that rank for queries like 'open sourced URL shortener,' 'free link shortener with analytics,' etc. (Note: It's not Dub).
• Exploration of all ideal client and user profiles to discover their biggest motivations, pains, objections, and apprehensions.
• A comparative study of other products to discover Dub's biggest strengths.

PropelAuth

Story

Authentication, i.e., user-login functionality, and authorization, i.e., subscription-based access to features on a website, are high-risk security concerns. You wouldn't want unauthorized access to user data or ineligible access to premium services. Common DIY methods of implementing these use database lookups, JWT tokens, and the OpenID protocol.

Services from big tech, such as Google's Firebase and Amazon's AWS Cognito, and independent services like Auth0, Clerk, FusionAuth, open-sourced Supabase, etc., provide out-of-the-box authentication and authorization solutions.

PropelAuth is a new entrant in this space with a B2B focus. Founded in 2021 by Andrew Israel, it is backed by Y Combinator. Towards the end of 2021, the team PropelAuth started creating blogs and social content.

Content Audit

PropelAuth has been very consistent with its content creation and has published about 150 blog posts, averaging five posts per month.

PropelAuth Content Audit

In the early days, they set up a separate subdomain for the blog. However, it has not been updated for a long time, so it is safe to assume that all their content is inside the blog subdirectory named '/post.'

I have repeatedly seen subdomain vs. subdirectory discussions about hosting blogs on forums. For SEO, it's better to use a subdirectory, e.g., '/blog,' instead of a subdomain, e.g., blog. domainname.tld. By directing all the traffic to a single subdomain, you maximize its SEO potential. Therefore, PropelAuth made a smart decision to use a subdirectory. Using subdomains benefits large websites that want to separate products and business units and have traffic management concerns.

Let's look at PropelAuth's top blog posts as per Semrush and Moz:

PropelAuth's Top Content (Source: Semrush)

PropelAuth's Top Content (Source: Moz)

Here are PropelAuth's top five blog posts:

1. Generating Chess Puzzles with Genetic Algorithms.
2. Do This Before Launching a New Feature
3. I love building a startup in Rust. I wouldn't pick it again.
4. A Founder’s Guide to Surviving Family Holiday Parties
5. Becoming a Dungeon Master for an Interview.

Clearly, all five of these are top-of-the-funnel posts that end with a 'Ready to get started' call to action followed by a signup button. I do not have conversion data for these posts, but when you read them, you will realize there is not much synergy between the content and the product. People who will be drawn to these posts might not necessarily match PropelAuth's ideal client profiles. Moreover, the content in no way encourages them to sign up. Therefore, there is likely a content-ICP-CTA mismatch, and a better approach is to use a micro-conversion CTA, such as a newsletter signup or lead magnet download, etc. for TOF content.

Now, let's look at their top-ranking keywords:

And, keywords by search intents:

As you can see, most of their high-performing content is top-of-the-funnel informational content.

Refreshingly, one of the best-performing pages is the 'Free Until Funded' page. It details a unique offer where startups get free access to the company's growth plan until they raise $1M. It's a very contextual and conversion-focused page.

The company focuses on early-stage companies. Founders of such companies are likely one of the PropelAuth's ICP. For this reason, they have a private community of early-stage founders.

Regarding social media, the company's founder, Andrew Israel, is quite active on LinkedIn. In addition, they also get considerable traffic from Reddit.

Considering that it is a product that must be integrated with clients' websites, they've created user-friendly documentation and guides. However, documents are hosted on a separate subdomain, and it is tough to comment on the appropriateness of using a subdomain instead of a subdirectory without knowing the reasons behind it.

Before we proceed to the next section, I would like to discuss an important point in marketing research: "Take the research data from martech tools with a pinch of salt." Sometimes, data from two different sources differ, and then you have to figure out more ways to make an informed decision. For example, let's look at Ahref's data for PropelAuth's top posts:

This data does not reconcile with Semrush's data. While designing a content strategy for your business, consider different data sources, including conversion data from your app's database.

Strategic Considerations

#1 Essentials

According to Similarweb's data, PropelAuth attracts 38% of the total traffic via organic search.

By its very nature, top-of-the-funnel content attracts far more traffic than the bottom-of-the-funnel one. However, in the case of PropelAuth, their TOF posts are not in sync with the product positioning.

For example, had the Chess puzzle post been extended to include the following sections:

1. Create a Chess game app using Python Flask.
2. The importance of user management and authorization to facilitate ratings and detect cheating.
3. Positioned PropelAuth as a free solution for auth

Then, it could have leveraged the high incoming traffic for growth.

Most of the content a B2B company creates should include product positioning or its use case, irrespective of the funnel stage. Early-stage companies should not invest their resources in attracting non-targeted traffic.

To their credit, team PropelAuth has rightly built comparison pages with two competitors - Auth0 and Clerk. I suggest building similar comparison pages for competitors focusing on B2B, such as FusionAuth.

#2 Playing to your strengths

Here are some of PropelAuth's strengths w.r.t. content marketing:

1. A well-defined product positioning.
2. A clear focus on early-stage B2B founders using content and community.
3. Being a YCombinator company adds credibility and access to a network.
4. Significant organic search traffic.
5. Auth is a low-churn domain.
6. The founder is active on LinkedIn.

These strengths allow PropelAuth to focus on three areas: acquisition, product integration, and support. Unlike standalone SaaS products, PropelAuth does not have to worry about ongoing product engagement. Once a client integrates it with their website stack, engagement happens automatically. Thus, the product frees the company from creating content for engagement.

The company's founder, Andrew Israel, is active on LinkedIn, regularly posting updates on products and new clients. Content around new clients, success stories of existing clients, and testimonials help show momentum and attract more clients. To this end, they have created a 'Customer Stories' page that has three posts as of March 2024. I would improve the customer stories page, add testimonials from clients with their faces, titles, and company names, or get video testimonials from them.

#3 Model Requirements

PropelAuth is a freemium product with its growth plan priced at $150/month.

As discussed before, they also have a 'free until funded' model in place.

I've extensively worked with Python frameworks to develop web apps for my businesses and have worn many hats together—full-stack developer, product manager, and marketer. Based on those experiences, my hypothesis for PropelAuth is that clients will make a well-researched, well-thought decision to choose an Auth provider. However, once an auth provider has been selected and integrated with the tech stack, most clients will likely stick with the product for a long time until they encounter some kind of product-capability-limits-reached problem.

Under these assumptions, the company's outreach to early-stage founders makes a lot of sense - "catch'em early!."

A potential high-reward play for PropelAuth is to create thought leadership content around early-stage businesses while avoiding the mistake of the content being completely disconnected from the product positioning. Therefore, as long as the thought leadership content exists at the intersection of early-stage B2B business AND Auth, it will lead to sustainable benefits - capturing hot demand and setting up demand generation in motion.

The company can leverage the founder's existing LinkedIn presence to create thought leadership content specifically for LinkedIn in terms of copy and format.

When it comes to copy, there is an opportunity for PropelAuth to up their game. For example, here is a LinkedIn post from their company page that I've tried to rewrite:

Let's rewrite one more post:

For their blog, my suggestion is to focus on the conversion and thus add one more dimension to their topic-selection model:

#4 Blue Ocean Opportunities

When you analyze PropelAuth's bottom-of-the-funnel content against the product's positioning, you will realize that it successfully ranks for the query 'b2b auth' alongside industry leaders Auth0.

However, it does not rank for common queries like 'Auth0 alternatives', 'Auth0 alternatives for b2b', and 'SSO authentication for b2b free'. Understandably, there will be many more high purchase intent bottom-of-the-funnel queries. I am using these three queries just as an example to bring a point home—it is important to rank for commercial intent queries and bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that are in sync with the product's positioning.

Therefore, the Blue Ocean opportunities for PropelAuth exist in thought leadership content, demand generation, and bottom-of-the-funnel high-impact contact around authentication and user management topics.

Another possibility is strategic content for non-tech founders.

Having demonstrated the framework's application for two companies, now is the time to optimize the approach. Hereon, instead of looking at each strategic consideration independently, I will consider their collective impact to drive suggested content strategies.

PostgresML

Story

Founded in 2022, PostgresML is an MLOps platform born out of founders' frustrations with complex solutions available to them while working at Instacart.

It provides a GPU-powered AI database that can be built and managed with SQL. With PostgresML, you can easily build and deploy scalable AI apps. PostgresML brings ML to your database instead of the other way around. This is far more efficient and easy to use than a clunky stack of independent services.

The company's founder & CEO, Montana Low, has been a long-time entrepreneur, having founded several companies in the past 20 years. He has also worked as a software engineer for many companies.

Content Audit

As of March 2024, PostgresML has published about 30 posts on its blog. The publishing schedule is somewhat inconsistent, though they publish an average of about two blog posts a month.

Here are some of their top-performing posts as per data from Semrush and Moz (reconciled):

1. Introducing the OpenAI Switch Kit: Move from closed to open-source AI in minutes
2. Generating LLM embeddings with open source models in PostgresML
3. PostgresML is 8-40x faster than Python HTTP microservices
4. PostgresML is Moving to Rust for our 2.0 Release
5. Scaling PostgresML to 1 Million Requests per Second
6. Making Postgres 30 Percent Faster in Production

Almost all blog posts focus on the product—features, capabilities, engineering updates, and applications. The blog content is largely technical and contains helpful code, data, and images. Each post contains a list of contents for quick navigation, and the site-wide default dark mode goes well with a tech audience. Some posts provide links to their GitHub repository and Discord community. Blog posts published in 2022 also contain a call for early adopters. However, most posts lack a compelling call to action.

When it comes to ranking keywords, the company dominates for the keyword 'postgres ml.' Here are the top-ranking keywords:

I looked at the search volume of these keywords in Google's keyword planner:

As you can see, even though the company ranks for quite a few keywords, most of them have no search volume. We can discount for analytics errors and assume that most of the top ranking keywords have only a little search volume. However, the company's name and positioning make it possible for them to be the top result for the 'Postgres' + 'ml' keywords combination. And these keywords attract significant organic traffic.

PostgresML is an open-sourced product. Its GitHub repository has 5.4K stars and has an MIT license. The open-sourced community supports useful products and helps with early product development and growth.

The company also received better-than-average responses on some of its posts on the dens of the tech community—Hacker News and Reddit. Here are some posts with interesting discussions: HN Post 1, HN Post 2, HN Post 3, and Reddit Posts. These posts reach the target audience directly in ways they like to engage and lead to traffic spikes. The way to capitalize on that traffic spike and build the early momentum is to direct the visitors to a low-commitment funnel - newsletter, Discord community, a lead magnet, and so on.

Here are other important content that the company has created:

1. Documentation to help developers with the integration.
2. A solutions page for its chatbot with an interactive chatbot for prospects to play around.
3. A support channel and a GitHub bot for updates in its Discord community.

Strategic Considerations

PostgresML targets developers, specifically those who work with databases; that's their ICP. When I first visited the website, understanding what they do took me a while. But when I showed the site to my developer friends working in ML, they could understand it in seconds. If it happens to you, don't be in a hurry to declare that their website and copy are not clear enough. Since a business should write for its customers, for all you know, the copy might make a lot of sense to its ICP, i.e., developers. If you don't get it, it's probably not for you.

Developers as a target group are interesting people. They love learning about new tools and supporting those they like but frown upon marketing. They appreciate good documentation & no-fluff content but do not comment or communicate unless necessary. They are often careful about their privacy and wary of providing emails unless they trust you to provide them value. But once they trust you, they will likely advocate for your product.

Essential content for PostgresML should be able to:

1. Explain the product to a tech audience
2. Establish the product's differentiation
3. Help developers easily integrate it with their stack
4. Provide ongoing support to the users

Out of these four requirements, the company already has tech documentation and blog posts around product features and performance.

However, when it comes to establishing the product's differentiation, the company has a lot of room to improve. There are many ways to establish a differentiation, for example:

1. Content around a cause
2. Community
3. Comparison posts
4. Use cases
5. Reviews

PostgreML has published a comparison post with one of its nearest competitors, MindsDB. However, if you read through comments on their Hacker News and Reddit posts, you will realize that prospects often wonder how they compare against tools like Apache's MADlib. Therefore, the company can benefit from creating comparison posts for more competitors.

Sometimes, 'for developers' products are difficult to explain in simple language, so their differentiation and positioning seem difficult to establish. However, difficult-to-create assets also lead to unfair advantage if you could build them. Content creators who understand the product and the market and have a way with words can craft unparalleled content pieces. For example, I once wrote a review of PythonAnywhere that has not only been consistently ranking on SERP for the query 'pythonanywhere review' but has also drawn a lot of users to the company.

PostgresML has a Discord community with about 720 members as of March 2024. It's not a very engaged community, though the support channel has many posts. The thing about building a community is that it is way more than setting up a Slack channel or a Discord server. It's about rallying your target market around a common cause. Here are a few ways to build a developers' community:

1. Championing a cause: Discover themes your audience deeply cares about and derive a cause that goes well with the product's positioning. The cause should be broad enough to resonate with a wide audience within your target market. A cause transcends the scope of your product, but since it has a huge impact on your market's psyche, it often reminds them of your product.
2. 
   
3. For inspiration, let's look at the causes of a few tools:
4. Proton Mail: Privacy
5. Jira: Agile teams
6. Notion: All-in-one workspace
7. Docker: Conquer the complexity
8. Offline meetups: Offline meetups are very effective in building a community for a developer tool. However, the feasibility depends on the availability of the resources.
9. Q&A forums: I would highly recommend the company set up a Q&A forum on its domain, i.e., postgresml.com/forums, encourage users to post queries there, and let search engines crawl the forum's content. Over time, such a forum will boost SEO, help activate new signups, reduce onboarding drop-offs, and bring in new users by helping fence sitters make informed decisions.

Now, let's look at PostgreML's pricing model:

A freemium plan with a usage-based pricing model indicates a bottom-up play. Everything we've discussed above supports this model. However, the bottom-up model needs an extra content layer that targets managers, CXOs, and buyers for efficient monetization.

Dopt

Story

Founded in 2021, Dopt helps you build better onboarding and engagement flows. The company's founder, Alon Bartur, worked in product management for many years before founding Dopt.

Initially named Switchboard, the company changed its name to Dopt in 2022. It competes with Appcues, Pendo, and UserPilot.

Content Audit

Dopt has published 41 posts on its blog as of March 2024 under seven different categories.

These categories cover a wide range of topics and cater to different target personas.

Dopt's blog is hosted on a subdomain. Unless there are compelling reasons, the company can rethink its decision and migrate to a subdirectory.

Let's look at Dopt's top-ranking pages:

Here are their top-ranking blog posts:

1. Why our components are different
2. How to open source code from a private monorepo
3. Building a modern gRPC-powered microservice
4. More than just chatbots

These are middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel topics! Kudos to team Dopt for building these content pieces.

Regarding navigation, each blog post has its category name at the top that links back to the category page. Since the product is about reducing UX friction, the company can think of adding a more intuitive breadcrumb navigation instead. I'm no UX expert; it's a suggestion from the eye of a website visitor.

Dopt has also created:

1. Documentation for developers
2. An example library of components built with Dopt for visitors to understand the product and feel inspired quickly
3. A list of customers for social proof
4. A content piece comparing Dopt with its competitors

Next, let's look at the company's traffic sources:

The company publishes social content on Twitter and LinkedIn, constituting most social traffic. They also have a YouTube channel and a few posts on Reddit.

Their social content consists of product and client updates. The Dopt team appears on podcasts, contributes to independent newsletters, and shares those updates on its social accounts. Their format of choice for social content is video.

They also have a Slack community with a little over 200 members at the time of writing this post.

Strategic Considerations

Dopt targets product managers and creates content for them.

Since the product requires integration, the company also creates content for developers.

It is a freemium product. The nature of the product and pricing model is such that once a client integrates Dopt, they will naturally move up the plan with growth in their user base.

Here are a few content ideas to go about it:

1. Guides: Long-form guides on the topics product managers care about - their challenges and aspirations. Dopt should aspire to create SEO-worthy content for PMs - similar to what UserPilot has done for SaaS marketers.
2. Academy & Courses: Ebooks, video series, and written content around product management.
3. Thought leadership content: Social content - Tweets and LinkedIn posts on project management for establishing Dopt as a worthy product and set in motion long-term demand generation.

They can also create guides and widgets to help users easily switch to Dopt from competing products.

Most product managers know the importance of frictionless onboarding and UX. Due to the work of Dopt's established players, there is also a general consensus on using specialized tools for these flows instead of custom-building them.

To win in the segment in which Dopt operates, one of the most important questions it should answer is 'Why Dopt over others?'. Comparison posts help answer them greatly, but Dopt must go a step further and use short-form, repetitive content to cement its differentiation.

Payload CMS

Story

Founded in 2022, Payload CMS is a developers-first CMS platform that competes with the likes of Contentful and Strapi. You can use it to build websites and internal tools.

Before founding Payload, the company's founder, James Mikrut, worked in web development, UI & UX, and marketing for a long time.

It is a Y Combinator company (YC22).

Content Audit

Payload has a lot of exciting content on its website to establish its positioning and help visitors understand the product. Here's a quick summary:

1. Use Cases: Content management system, enterprise app builder, headless e-commerce, digital asset management.
2. Why Payload: For marketing teams, for agencies, for developers.
3. Content for developers: Documentation, examples, templates.
4. For enterprise clients: Customer stories and individual pages for important enterprise-grade features like SSO, workflows, and a visual editor.
5. Payload vs competitor comparison: Individual pages for Contentful, Strapi, Directus, and WordPress.

Payload has published 72 posts on its blog, with about two posts per month on average. However, the company has an inconsistent publishing schedule—publishing many posts in one month and no posts in the next month.

Most of the blog posts fall under one of the following categories:

• Product Updates
• Product Education
• Use Cases
• Plugins
• Company Updates

Occasionally, the company publishes video content on its YouTube channel around product education that receives commendable engagement - views and comments.

Payload is active on all major social platforms and regularly publishes on Twitter and LinkedIn. Some of its posts have also received positive responses on Hacker News and Reddit, which are hugely beneficial for gaining the trust of the tech community. In my experience, successful Reddit posts have a long lifetime and bring good-quality prospects for months and even years.

Let's look at Payload's top pages:

The appearance of many documentation pages at the top indicates a lot of developer activity.

Overall, Payload's content game seems on point. Let's look at all four strategic considerations together and see if we can find compelling opportunities for Payload.

Strategic Considerations

Payload focuses on developers. It is an open-sourced product with an MIT license, 18.7K stars, and 1.1k forks on GitHub. It also has a Discord community of over 6,000 members. They also allow users to create plugins for Payload. Together, these are solid developer-focused acquisition plays.

Payload is free to use if you want to self-host. To use their service, you can start a project, build a website, and select one of the following plans:

It is a clear bottom-up motion with a community-first approach to acquisition.

Building relations with developers is a time-tested strategy, for they are often passionate and particular about their tools. In the world of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, developers are innovators and early adopters fueling the initial growth.

But, developers love to tinker...and they tinker...forever.

After the early growth, comes the Chasm. And even if you love the bottom-up model, hard business realities will hit and force you to think about monetization. Whether you are seasoning your bottom-up model with a sales motion or not, in the context of a content strategy, this translates to 'getting leadership buy-ins.'

When the tide of initial euphoria, product development, and developer adoption goes out, the hard reality of monetization comes to the fore. It will happen sooner or later; those who prepare well in advance will emerge as winners.

Once you've established a differentiation in developers' minds, it's time to onboard their team and organization. During this phase, you would want to target engineering managers, product managers, and, eventually, CXOs. Payload should take baby steps toward building content that can facilitate it.

To begin with, such content can mean blog posts discussing Payload's use cases, applications, and benefits at an organizational level. Later on, the company can develop advanced content depending on the sophistication of the sales motion.

In conclusion, Payload's next opportunities exist in:

1. SEO content around product differentiation
2. Content for monetization