A field guide to being the first writer at a startup

If you’re the first of your discipline at a company (and especially at a startup) chances are that your job amounts to some combination of evangelizing, creating new processes, and — oh yeah — doing the actual work. (If you’re the first researcher or designer at your company, you can probably relate.)

While I’m certainly not the only person who writes at Opendoor, I am the first person dedicated to writing, and I often wonder whether I’m starting things off on the right foot for future writers. Here are some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned while navigating this experience:

1. Make a style guide.

I created a writing style guide right after I started at Opendoor. I did this for two reasons:

1. I felt a preemptive strike was my best chance of getting everyone to use the oxford comma.
2. I knew that if we could all agree on a set of rules, it would be easier for us to have productive discussions about writing.

The guide helped us to develop rules that ground our decisions. I included one of those rules below with an example, but before I get into that, here’s a little useful context about Opendoor:

Opendoor’s mission is to empower everyone with the freedom to move. We’ll make a competitive offer to purchase homes so that you can skip the painful steps like showings and prep work. This is pretty remarkable if you think about it, so one of our rules is to be straightforward and tell it like it is. That’s how we developed this rule:

Let the product speak for itself.

Before the guide, we might have written something like:

• There’s no better way to get a competitive offer for your home.

And after the guide, we’d write something like:

• Your Opendoor offer is backed by decades of local real estate expertise and the most current market data.

The second version demonstrates our value, instead of relying on hyperbole.

From sales team scripts to homepage copy, your style guide is a living document that encapsulates the voice of the company. It establishes a benchmark set of rules and creative boundaries that anyone can draw from.

It’s also an especially useful resource for new hires who are just beginning to wrap their heads around the brand. At a startup, it sometimes feels like one day you turn around and there are five new people writing on behalf of the company. The style guide will help you address that scale.

There are tons of blog posts about creating a style guide, so I won’t get into that, but here are a few resources that fill me with copywriting envy:

• Shopify Polaris
• MailChimp Voice and Tone
• Anything written by John Saito

2. Share and evolve your style guide.

So you just make the style guide and you’re done, right? Eh, not so much. Your style guide should be built to evolve with discussion and debate.

You can’t define the voice of a company on your own. It takes a variety of perspectives and input from people across the organization. Trust me when I say that your friends in product, marketing, and design will be key allies who strengthen the style guide.

The designers I talked to suggested that I add length limits and casing styles for buttons. Marketing pointed out that my guide was very focused on home sellers and worked with me to develop examples that applied to home buyers as well.

You should accept that the guide won’t be static. It’s meant to reflect the language your company uses to express itself at a given time. That language will change constantly, especially at startups where policies and positioning are constantly shifting. Your job is to keep the guide in line with those changes.

3. Don’t be a black box.

It seems that the longer you do something, the more intuitive it becomes. For me, it’s difficult to explain why I split a thought into two sentences, why I reframed a question, or why I opened a blog post with this line instead of that one.

Even though it’s difficult, I can’t overstate how important it is to share your thinking. This forces you to be conscious about why you’re making certain decisions. It also brings your partners into your process, so what you’re suggesting doesn’t come out of left field. One way to share thinking is by providing multiple options.

Imagine you’re coming up with an ad for a surf shop, and you show your partner this headline:

A new wave of surf gear.

Maybe it’s fun, but it’s only one of the routes you could take. So instead of one option, why not show several? I’d also recommend briefly explaining the tradeoffs you’re making with each option. This helps people look at things on a spectrum and calibrate what is or isn’t working.

Option 1: A new wave of surf gear.

• Pro: It emphasizes that the shop has more than just surfboards.
• Con: Besides saying it’s new, this doesn’t tell me why this gear is special.

Option 2: Comes with a lifetime warranty you’ll never need.

• Pro: Clearly focuses on our competitive advantage of durability.
• Con: We’re putting all our chips on durability. Is this important to customers?

Option 3: Even tidal waves will get out of your way.

• Pro: Glorifies the customer and how they’ll feel using the surfboard. The customer is the hero.
• Con: Provides little detail about the equipment.

This type of process is admittedly more up-front work, but I find that it spurs productive conversations, and people really appreciate it. Sometimes it even causes you to adjust your strategy altogether.

4. Encourage and support others who write.

One thing that’s really cool about Opendoor is that there’s a genuine culture of empowering others. Within my first few weeks, a product designer slash engineer taught me how to make copy changes in our codebase. His perspective is that sometimes the best way to help people is to empower them and get out of their way.

You’ll learn pretty quickly in a startup that if you don’t create ways for people to help you (or help themselves) you’ll quickly become responsible for more work than you can handle.

Even if you’re the first person with a writer title, you’re not the only writer in your company. There are folks in Marketing, PR, Legal, Biz Ops, Design, Engineering, and a million other places who write on behalf of the company. Your job is to support them. In fact, you’ll learn just as much from them as they’ll learn from you.

There are numerous ways to empower others to write. Here are a few:

• Give your partners a heads up about the barriers (what can we say, what can’t we say) that they may run into in a given writing project.
• Point them toward some existing copy that they can make use of.
• Work with them to create a general outline of the content.
• Act as a suggester, and provide feedback instead of writing everything yourself.

As it turns out, sharing your writing guide is another great way to do this. It magnifies your efforts, making it so an engineer can write the initial copy for a transactional email without having to talk to you, for instance. Share what you know and empower others. It’ll make your life a whole lot easier.

Whether you’re the first writer at a company or you work with a copywriter, I hope these tips are insightful. If you’re interested in learning more about Opendoor, check out the open positions on our careers page. Our design team is growing, and we’d love to hear from you.