I started creating content the moment we launched our startup in 2013.
As a first-time founder, I had no idea what I was doing when it came to B2B SaaS marketing, so it made sense to start simple and just teach what I knew to my ideal customer. I recorded videos on my laptop about sales topics and posted them on YouTube.
Looking back over a decade later, I can confidently say Close wouldn’t have been able to scale without investing the (sometimes painful) time and energy into that early founder-led content marketing.
Close was built on a killer product, too, don’t get me wrong—but a killer product can’t scale into a successful business if people don’t know about it. And if you’re an unknown startup, people won’t become your customers until they trust you.
By putting myself out there as a founder, I’ve been able to prove to my ideal customers—hungry entrepreneurs, founders, and salespeople—that I care about them and their problems. When people trust that I’m invested in their success, they know I’m not about to risk my reputation by selling them a shitty CRM!
Simply educating people has proven more effective and durable than any other marketing tactic or strategy we’ve tried. When you consistently produce compelling, authentic, and genuinely helpful content, you can build a completely different relationship with your customers.
I’ll tell you how I approached founder-led content—and how you can do it, too.
Finding the Motivation
Back then, our niche was full of content that sucked—plain and simple. The market was polluted with outdated, sleazy sales advice that was so obviously unhelpful it was almost offensive.
I believed I had something more valuable to say to salespeople and entrepreneurs. Having worked in sales for a long time, I developed my own opinions on the subject.
I saw a need in the market to educate a new crop of tech founders hungry for sales help, so I started sharing stories and telling people my perspective—things I wish somebody had told me when I started.
I was creating content with the goal of increasing website visits and conversions, and by that measure, the strategy was a success. But I also saw something else—customers were applying my advice and, more importantly, it was working for them.
When you genuinely help people achieve their goals, they build a relationship with you based on trust. You can’t necessarily measure “founder trust” on your KPI dashboards, but over time, your founder brand can create far more durable trust in your business than paid marketing and advertising can.
If you’re a founder wondering if you can make the time to invest in founder-led content, just know that it will become pretty easy to find the motivation when you begin to see the impact your insights and advice have on real people.
Finding Your Topics
When you first start doing content, you might panic at the thought of coming up with new topics every day. My suggestion: keep it simple and listen to your customers.
Back then, I didn’t want to over-engineer some sort of content schedule. I wasn’t doing SEO keyword research to determine what topics I would discuss. (Frankly, I didn’t know how!)
Instead, I had two major sources of inspiration for topics:
- Problems my ideal customers were bringing me
- Things we were learning as we were building our startup
For example, we once had a near-death experience where we had to negotiate our way out of a deal. I had saved us half a million dollars by simply being quiet and letting the other party negotiate with themselves. It was a profound lesson I learned by accident, but I instantly thought it would make a great story for other business leaders if they ever found themselves in this position.
The story had a valuable lesson built in: silence can be a powerful negotiation tactic. That’s a story worth sharing.
My interactions with founders became the stories I told in my content. If one founder had this problem, many more would surely have the same problem. You, too, can start with a strategy as simple as this.
When you make yourself available to your ideal customer, you hear what their problems are. If you can provide solutions they find useful, that can generate many ideas.
In the beginning, I would get my inspiration from these one-on-one interactions with customers, but eventually, as I began speaking at conferences and on podcasts, people would send me questions on their own.
You’ll know your founder-content machine is truly working when you get to the point where your audience tells you what they want to learn from you.
Finding Your Voice
When I first started speaking publicly at events, I made the mistake of thinking that my “personal brand” was all about me. I wanted to appear as polished as possible, to speak perfectly, and to have everyone in the room admire me. I’ll admit I had a bit of an ego about it.
One day, a friend saw me speak at a conference. I thought I had delivered an impeccable speech, but afterward, my friend told me that it sucked. I was devastated.
He said that while my speech was technically well-delivered, I lost all my personality once I hit the stage. I became a faceless tech founder saying the same stuff, in the same way, as every other faceless tech founder. I didn’t have my own voice because I was too concerned with how others perceived me.
That conversation flipped a switch in me. I spent so much time trying to please everyone that I pleased no one. I wasn’t compelling—and if I wasn’t, how could I ever provide value to the audience?
After my existential crisis, I went back to the drawing board. I decided that I needed to answer two questions:
- What does the audience need?
- What can I uniquely provide to them that no one else can?
I realized that what the audience needed was: a kick in the ass.
A kick in the ass with love, of course. But a kick in the ass all the same.
I was speaking to founders and entrepreneurs whose main problem was that they were daydreaming and wasting time and energy on things that didn’t matter. I saw it every day.
What I could uniquely offer them was a brash, confident dose of truth and motivation—what I like to call “friendly strength.”
I started wearing leather jackets, joking around more, being irreverent, dropping f-bombs, yelling until I went hoarse, and bouncing around on stage with a boisterous energy and swagger I didn’t actually have. It was a wildly exaggerated version of myself, but one I felt I could have some fun with.
Most importantly, the audience began paying attention to my advice when I delivered it with the “Steli persona” because they needed it. All the generic, dispassionate advice they were getting from business blogs made it harder for them to make the right decisions. They needed a loud, assertive voice telling them to stop fucking around and showing them what they needed to change to succeed.
I let the audience determine what my founder brand would be. Adopting this “friendly strength” tone then informed every YouTube video I made, podcast I hosted, and book I wrote.
You’ll need to avoid the temptation to craft your founder persona in a way that glorifies you and your ego. It’s not about you—it’s about your customers.
In the same way your customers’ needs guide your product decisions, they should also guide your founder brand. Let them tell you what it is about you that resonates with them.
Finding the Time
I can already sense you panicking about finding the time to work on your founder brand and content in your jam-packed schedule. You’re busy doing practical founder shit! Someone’s gotta keep the lights on!
My willingness to create content was there in the early days, but the execution wasn’t. I was just “too busy,” I thought. What I needed was the simplest route to execution.
It would take me weeks to write a blog post. My colleagues were getting impatient that I was a bottleneck to publishing my own content.
One day, an employee said to me, “Listen, asshole—just record what you want to say in a voice memo on your phone and send it to me. I’ll write a blog based on that.”
That was easy enough for me to do. I’d record a 10-minute voice memo, stream-of-consciousness style, and I didn’t worry if it was polished. Within a day, my writer would turn in a blog much better than I could have written alone.
Once I began recording my thoughts in voice memos, I realized that I could publish them on YouTube if I recorded them on video instead.
To make my life even easier, I would record my YouTube videos right after a call with a customer so that the story was fresh in my mind. Creating content is far less daunting when it only costs an extra 10 minutes at the end of a phone call.
As the business grew and we hired more marketing-focused people, we added more pieces to the content machine. We were able to turn any YouTube video into a blog, podcast episode, and gated content like ebooks, which allowed us to sign up subscribers for more of our content.
We organically stumbled onto a practice now known as “content repurposing,” or using one piece of content in many different formats to get more mileage out of it.
Start by learning where your customers spend time most and meeting them there. For Close, it was YouTube. For your startup, it might be LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok.
If you can find your own path of least resistance to creating content, you can make the time. Breaking through the first bottleneck is the hardest. Do what you can at first, then add more pieces later.
In all honesty, investing the time to produce founder content has been a struggle for me over the years. My motivation and willingness to prioritize content has ebbed and flowed based on other stressors, both in the business and life in general.
After many years of going all-in on content, I eventually became burnt out and handed the reins over to a content marketing staff to keep the strategy alive without me—a move that, as always, came with its own set of problems. But that is a story for a future article.
But Does Founder-Led Content Actually Work?
Hey, it worked for us.
In the early days, we had no other marketing channels. Content was it. The results were self-evident: Content drives website visits, which drives trials, which drives conversions to closed deals.
Your mileage may vary depending on your business, but our numbers don’t lie—content has provided the most durable ROI of any marketing channel.
Founder content is an especially useful strategy for startups because unless you’re flush with VC cash, chances are you can’t outspend your competitors on advertising. You’ll need to find more creative ways to differentiate your startup in the market. Founder content can be a secret weapon for differentiating against more established brands.
The big competitors in your market shouldn't have a monopoly on educating customers. Don’t let yourself believe you shouldn’t discuss a topic just because “everyone else has talked about [insert topic] already.” That’s bullshit. Do you think no one had ever talked about tech sales before I did?
Your company exists because you believe you do something better than your competitors. If that’s true, no one can talk about your customers’ problems like you can because no one else has your perspective. Just say the damn thing and put it out there.
When your startup is unknown, you face the uphill battle of earning people’s trust because your company has zero reputation. As a founder, you can take charge of building your reputation as someone who cares about helping your customers succeed.
A strong founder brand helps remove prospects' doubts about your startup and gets them excited about trying your solution.
So get out there, say the things you want to say, and above all else, make sure you’re delivering value to the people whose opinions matter most—your customers.
