Any tech/solo founder interested to try our "Content Marketing as a service" ?
Hi all, I found most of the tech/solo founders don't have time to market their product. As per 50% rule, should spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.
Content marketing is a proven strategy to get traction and get your product found by potential customers.
https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-50-rule/
I'm doing a quick experiment to see if my idea ("Content Marketing as a service") has legs. If anyone is interested, I'm happy to get you a 600-word quality content blog for $20 (introductory price) backed by satisfaction guarantee or else money back.
If you are ready, please email me at sateeshkumar44@gmail.com and we shall take it from there.
Hello IH's, thought of posting a quick update on my project GRAVITY (created new login).
I'm currently building the website and some content for my blog.
Woo hoo....FOUR customers have reached out to me from IH. Thanks to Courtland/IH forum and awesome community.
I'm working with them actively and learning along the way.
I put together a feedback form (https://gravityhq.typeform.com/to/FuXDAS) to understand Indie Hackers current challenges with Content Marketing.
If you could spare 2 to 5 minutes to give your valuable inputs, it helps me to shape the product better.
Edit:
As a token of gratitude for your time, I would love to extend the 600-word blog post for $20 offer.
Thank you.
-Sateesh
The idea of content marketing as a service is a good one, but to me it's only appealing if it is a very high quality article. In my space (developer dependency management) the content marketing I'm looking to do is highly technical in nature, so a generic "50 ways to X" is not appealing at all. http://www.usermagnet.io has the same issue in my eyes.
If I were to pursue this idea, I'd be looking to niche down really tight into the technical writing space (or somewhere else), saying something like "We work with real developers to write technical content marketing posts"
Thanks Daniel for your great feedback, will surely work on that.
Cool idea Sateesh! If you're willing to share, can I ask how your process works?
There are a lot of steps involved in content marketing, including deciding on a topic, doing the necessary research, writing the post, deploying/hosting it, and then promoting it. Which steps do you help with? And how do you make it so affordable?
Thanks for your great question Courtland, yeah there are many steps involved, but for now I'm testing my hypothesis with just "research and writing a quality blog post" for the customer.
The current work flow is, customer provides details about
That's it.
Once the order is received, I personally make sure I understand completely about the product/ service customer is offering and do necessary research for my writer (native English) to write up the post.
And I'm offering a free revision to make any changes as per customer feedback backed by 100% satisfaction gaurantee or money return.
So technically no risk for the customer to try our service.
For now, hosting the post and promoting are to be done by customer (not part of our experiment). But happy to lend a hand if required.
To be honest, it costs me about $45 to $60 to get a quality blog post written by a native English writer. However for this experiment, I'm personally paying the difference out of my pocket.
Once I get enough customer validation and satisfaction, then will start offering complete
Content marketing suite (long /short form blog posts, infographics, intro videos, ebook/guides, social media management etc)
My aim is to make content marketing more affordable and flexible for startups than any current solutions in the market.
Any inputs are much appreciated.
I agree a bit with ZackBurt. The #1 factor involved in successful content marketing, in my experience, is quality. If English is not your first language, writing high quality content will be a natural disadvantage for you. Even if others write it, it will be hard for you to evaluate.
Also, I realize you are just validating right now, but I think the best the endgame would be to charge a lot more money for a lot more in-depth pieces... $1000+ per article. If you could go above and beyond and actually write winners, then people will pay this easily.
Thanks for your feedback. I agree evaluation is now a little challenge, so I'm working my way up to hone the skill.
Can you please clarify a quick doubt?
Your advice is, to begin with a niche group (enterprises /funded startups) and cater them with in-depth articles?
or begin with early startups at a small price point ($80 to $100) and later move to bigger ones ?
Please clarify.
For an MVP, begin with small startups. I think you just need to get some content out there, and small startups will more readily agree than big companies.
However, if I were you and I was able to validate the idea, then my entire business model after validating would be to land big deals with big clients. I would only work with small clients to build up an initial portfolio to help me land my first big client.
Thank you so much for your inputs.
Quick question:
implies that you are hiring out the actual writers. Is that true? Where are you sourcing them, are you planning on taking a cut from their pay, and how transparent is that process to the end-user (the person paying for content)? Just trying to make sure I understand your model.
That's right Alex, until I validate my idea with a few paying customers, I can't afford to have my own team.
So working with a couple of vetted freelance writers I sourced (and used before) from https://talent.hubstaff.com
Yes, I will be taking a 10 to 15% cut from their pay to cover my costs and will eventually Will have my own team.
The process is completely transparent as mentioned above and here.
But rest be assured, all our services would be 100% satisfaction gaurantee or money back.
Please let me know if you have any followup questions. Happy to clarify
I don't mean to be rude, but "rest be assured", the tense of "would be", and "gaurantee" [sic] are indicators that you aren't an expert in English writing and aren't necessarily best suited to execute this particular business.
Thanks for your feedback.
I'm not a native English writer/speaker.
And If you have read my previous comments, I clearly mentioned that I only do the research for the content and let a native English writer do the actual writing.
So I don't believe language is an issue here.
Yeah, I'm not buying it. I think you should instead offer this exact service but for companies who speak your native language.
Wrote you an email
Thank you, just replied your email.