Our Story: Why We Started Argon Labs

Argon Labs was an opportunity disguised as an accident. In fact, it was only supposed to be an experiment, that turned out to be much bigger than we all realized, and why this is only the beginning for us.

In any case, what we know for sure is that content is king and isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Building a great product isn’t enough anymore — it requires equally strong content to back it up, especially in noisy and saturated sectors where providing the most consistent, informative, and perhaps educational content could be more important than just being the loudest.

But before we jump in, let’s rewind the clock a little bit and go back to where we started, why we decided to create Argon Labs (AL), our mission, and why we believe this is going to change content marketing, especially for startups and scale-up technology-enabled businesses.

Let’s get started.

Rewinding The Clock

This entire journey started back in 2022 when we initially launched a venture capital firm called Metagrove Ventures — don’t worry this all comes together eventually.

Metagrove (MGV) was designed to invest in early-stage technology companies, primarily pre-seed and seed. Initially, the premise of MGV was to simply create an investment vehicle to financially support ambitious founders and turn their ideas into reality — it was a hit. Our thesis, go-to-market strategy, and founding team allowed us to create our unique brand and presence in the VC space. Additionally, it was also refreshing for founders to work alongside investors who were fellow founders and operators (engineers, product managers, etc.) who understood the product and the technology.

In addition to the investment, we also provided key strategic support via our community of MGV members across Silicon Valley — who themselves were operators and founders working across several top-tier companies. Support came in multiple forms; from engineering leadership, content creation, marketing, and product-market-fit to operations, fundraising, and hiring.

What we eventually discovered after connecting and meeting with hundreds of founders (literally) is that there was a common denominator — everyone needed help, but more specifically, they required support around building a brand and presence for themselves, knowing full well that this would be an uphill journey being unknown, challenging incumbents, and new to the market.

Initially, we put our founders in touch with our community, fellow investors, and friendly third parties to support, but it soon became apparent that everyone one of those stakeholders was also too busy to entirely help. They provided great assistance when it came to sales, general-purpose marketing, recruiting, and product development, but it was challenging at best to seek out strong value-added feedback around building content around product and technical documentation around very specific products that required certain skills to utilize from the consumer i.e. developers.

With the MGV team’s background in engineering and product, we agreed that it was a good fit to get started and this is where we decided to step in and see if there was an opportunity to lend a hand.

So, let’s go back to the team and why we decided to do this.

Tangible Support

As previously mentioned, MGV was founded by members who themselves were founders and operators across startups in Silicon Valley and APAC. They prided themselves on being able to empathize with the founder’s journey and understand the problem and solution from the ground level. Moreover, they embraced being as hands-on and valuable to the founders in any way possible.

So when there was an opportunity to assist, MGV jumped straight in and decided to work with some of their portfolio founders to see if they could start offering help around technical content marketing. Support initially started with advisory, then evolved into assisting with writing technical content.

In one sense or another, we (the team) wanted to be part of the dream-building process once again — the notion of being able to offer tangible help to entrepreneurs was too good to refuse.

Eventually, we started to get external interest in what we were doing at MGV based on word-of-mouth and ultimately came down to a decision to spin this off into what is now called Argon Labs.

Argon Labs is Born

AL was born in October of 2023 — a necessary spin-off from MGV.

We spun it off because we wanted AL to stand on its own two feet, and also have the flexibility and mandate to work with all clients and provide them the best support we could. This meant that we had to expand the team and begin hiring the right people.

Today, we’re glad to say that AL is now a stand-alone entity that has its own dedicated team of content strategists, principals, writers (also engineers), and editors to focus entirely on the technical content creation process.

The reason this is so important to us is that we are enabling companies, especially fairly nascent ones i.e. startups, to focus on building a great product, and together develop a brand and presence in their space in a much more efficient manner, which allows them to get to market quicker, verify their product, and get the feedback they need from the community.

Ultimately, AL strives to be a long-term partner for our customers as we continue to grow together.

What We Do

So far until this point, we’ve only mentioned technical content marketing from a bird’s eye view.

Let’s break down, step-by-step what this means when it comes to engaging with our clients.

1. Discovery Call — this is usually our first point of contact. It involves sitting down (usually virtually) to discuss the needs of the client around technical content strategy i.e. mission, audience, tone, etc. as well as the types of materials they’re seeking to produce.
2. Onboarding — we then onboard our client through a single-pane-of-glass approach where both sides can monitor and manage the entire process from beginning to end. This helps bring both sides onto the same page. This process captures every interaction and also includes a Kanban board to track overall progress.
3. Topic Briefs/Outlines — this is where we work intimately with a point-of-contact from the client’s side i.e. Head of Marketing, Growth, Product, or even the Founder(s) to map out a series of topics they want to write about. It involves brainstorming from types of material to create i.e. walkthroughs, application notes, API guides, tutorials, comparisons, thought-leadership, listicles, etc. to release dates and audience/tone of voice. Several key topics will come out of this process and will form the foundation for the deliverables.
4. Statement of Work — once everything has been more or less agreed upon, a formal Statement of Work is created to verify and officially summarize the work involved including timelines and deliverables.
5. Execution — this is where we get to work and focus on generating the content. We also ensure that all parties can view the materials in progress to prevent any last-minute surprises.
6. Delivery — once the drafts are completed, these artifacts are usually front-loaded (in batch) to allow for reviews and feedback with enough buffer to make any amendments if needed. The pieces are then released with an agreed cadence by the client.
7. Additional work — as we get closer to the second half of the deliverable release dates, certain clients request additional work, and this is usually discussed to ensure there is a smooth stream of consistent articles being produced, reviewed, and delivered — no gaps!

In any case, we hope this piece gives you more insight into our backstory and our mission in helping the next wave of technology-enabled companies stand out from the crowd in building a brand and presence for themselves through the power of technical content marketing.

Argon Labs is a specialized team that works with subject matter experts to help you ​produce world-class technical content that is easy ​to understand and digestible to help educate, ​inform your audience, and stand out from the rest. We partner with global early-stage to growth-stage ​companies to help advise and build their technical ​marketing programs.