This is Your Blog on AWS Content
The power of writing for a larger market, and surfing bigger waves.
Our Blog Before and After AWS Content
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and the chart above essentially sums up the reason we are writing this article. A bit more color, however, is worthwhile.
Initial Hypothesis
Prior to March 27th, we had primarily written content about Terraform and Google Cloud. We knew that Google Cloud has a market share that is a third the size of AWS, but hypothesized that our content would face less competition, be more differentiated, and lead to the same amount of traffic. Additionally, our engineering team had significantly more applied experience in Google Cloud at that point in time.
Sponsoring Posts
When your company is just starting out, you try many different strategies for driving engagement with your brand and product until you find what repeatedly works. One thing we have tried is posting our blog posts on LinkedIn, and then sponsoring those LinkedIn posts. Across the two waves of sponsored views seen on the main graphic, we spent around ~$250 sponsoring blog posts on LinkedIn.
While we did see a clear increase in views when running the campaign, the views were of very poor quality, with Read rates below 10%. In other words, not a great Return on Investment.
This is Your Blog on AWS Content
When we wrote our first blog post on a technical problem in AWS, however, we immediately saw our largest organic engagement numbers by far. The stark difference invalidated our initial hypothesis. We suspect that the ratio of consumers to producers of AWS content is higher than for Google Cloud content, and so even though our AWS content was competing against more authors, there were likely many more readers per author.
Larger Takeaways for Your Business
While there are interesting, and immediate implications of these results for determining your next blog post subject, the most import lessons can come when we step back and apply this data to business strategy more generally.
Market size matters. A lot.
The size of your total addressable market matters immensely when trying to sell something (be it content, software, or consumer products). We under-estimated this impact initially, thinking that GCP content would have a sufficiently large audience.
When surfing, wave size matters more than skill.
The counter example to the prior point aligns with our initial hypothesis, that being a bigger fish in a smaller pond is a good strategy. Our content for GCP was/is probably more unique than what we have produced for AWS so far. And yet, when riding the “bigger wave” that is AWS, our content was much more successful in engaging with readers, even though the skill and effort we put into each post was equal.
Don’t underestimate the value of being first, especially when switching costs are high.
This has been covered extensively in other excellent articles, but despite (in our opinion) having a much more difficult development experience than Google Cloud, AWS is the cloud king by a wide margin. The “light switch” affect of writing about AWS vs. GCP had on our blog’s viewership numbers is simply a symptom of this fact.
This market share dominance, we believe, is primarily because AWS was first in the space by a large margin. In a space like cloud computing, where the investment in and cost of switching to another service provider is so significant, these early years as the only player in the market have resulted in an enormous “lock-in” advantage for AWS. This comes not only from individual companies being locked-in, but engineers who have spent years getting certified in and building expertise in AWS. As a result, AWS has dominant market share despite having a generally inferior product.
Getting to market first and securing initial customers is so valuable that you should be biased towards shipping a product earlier than may be comfortable. With an early, larger customer base locked-in, you will encourage blogs to write about your product instead of your competitor’s — further snowballing your incumbency advantage. 😃
—
If you have any questions or suggestions as to how we can improve this post, please comment below.
—
dragondrop.cloud’s mission is to automate developer best practices while working with Infrastructure as Code. Our flagship product, cloud-concierge, allows developers to codify their cloud, detect drift, estimate cloud costs and security risks, and more — while delivering the results via a Pull Request. For enterprises running cloud-concierge at scale, we provide a management platform. To learn more, schedule a demo or get started today!
