Content / Market Fit

Theory & case study

This post is part of our series of practical guides. You can find all our stories on the P9 Medium Channel (Subscribe it to be kept informed).

The first half of this post is about the theory and the second half is a case study.

I recently wrote a post on how I visualize the concept of Product / Market Fit. I use the same concept and analogy when speaking with founders about inbound marketing.

In general these discussions happen in the following context:

• with early stage SaaS companies.
• the founders are interested in trying inbound marketing but they don’t know much about it.

Most of the questions I get at that point are about the tools they should use or about scaling (traffic, lead generation or team).

But the first thing I try to explain is that content is like product, it’s complicated to scale before you get to Product / Market Fit. Before paying for expensive tools and aiming at high numbers it’s better to focus on getting to “Content / Market Fit”.

What’s Content Market Fit?

Behind this terribly bullshity term (I’m sorry for that but drawing a parallel with something that people already know makes it easier to explain) is a simple concept. CMF simply happens when you align Content + Distribution + Customers.

• Content: is simply the content you produce. This content has your voice and can be of plenty different formats.
• Distribution: the channels on which you distribute your content to reach your customers.
• Customers: the people you are selling your tool to.

How do I know I’ve reached CMF?

First, like Product Market Fit you will not come to work one day and suddenly realize “wow now we have CMF” and feel like you’re riding a rocket. No it’s more a collection of small signals that you accumulate one by one and once critical mass is reached you start to feel more confident about where you’re going and what it will take to scale the effort. Some examples of such signals:

Content

• Format: you’ve tried enough different formats to know that you need to focus on the one or two with which you are the most comfortable (articles, white papers, webinars, infographics, podcasts, videos, slides…). No more FOMO (Fear of missing out).
• Brand: you start to feel that your brand is in the making and you realize the importance of it.
• Voice: you found your own voice and you’re not just replicating what other startups do. And this voice is aligned with your company culture.

Distribution

• Channels: you have explored enough different channels to know that you need to focus on the two or three with which you are the most comfortable (social media, newsletters, SEO, paid, events, content platforms…). No more FOMO.
• Channels: you go beyond the obvious content distribution channels (Twitter…) and start to discover / use industry specific channels.

Customers

• Content: your content is relevant for the customers of your product.
• Team: your content team spends enough time with customers and understands / uses your product. They are not in a silo.
• Love: you start to feel that your readers like you and your brand. A good signal is when you see a group of readers coming back and interacting with you regularly.

Second, a high volume of visits is not necessarily a sign of CMF. You can attract a lot of unqualified visitors. It’s better to have a lower volume of visits but to attract the relevant readers.

Different contexts need different approaches

We’re at a point in SaaS where the low hanging fruits categories for content start to be really rare. By low hanging fruits categories I mean categories where the customers are craving for content / solutions to their problems and who are easily reachable.

For example a couple of years ago when not 80% of SaaS companies were doing content marketing, it was relatively easy to create an audience on social media. Now it’s much, much more complicated to catch the attention of readers who are bombarded with content.

When it comes to SaaS content, in the majority of the cases the context is now either:

1. A crowded space: many startups are doing a great job at content marketing.
2. An empty space: no one owns the space and you need to educate the market and to build the distribution channels (both are hard / and take time).

Crowded space. In a crowded space the best way to break out is to come with a new and completely different voice or to leverage better the existing distribution channels — which can be really hard. Example: SEO which now requires considerable expertise to be top ranked.

Empty space. This situation is true for many vertical SaaS which are bringing new solutions to traditional industries. Very often two of the biggest challenges are to educate the market, which takes time, and to build the distribution channels. Customers in these industries might not spend their time on Twitter and Hacker News and online influencers might not exist so you have to become an influencer yourself and to build your distribution channels (ex: create the best newsletter of your industry).

Comments

Content:

• In my experience the most difficult part is to find your own unique voice and to have it aligned with your company culture.

Distribution:

• It’s great to explore many channels at the beginning but from what I’ve seen, successful startups quickly focus on a limited number of them and expand again when they start to “plateau”. Exploration then focus.
• The choice of these first channels generally derives naturally from the founders’ DNA and the company culture.

Customers:

• From my experience the biggest mistake here is to keep your content team in a silo, disconnected from product and customers. Then you end up in a situation where the inbound team writes content because it’s their job and not because it’s only a mean to an aim.
• Another very common situation I see is content bringing the wrong type of readers. It means that your Content — Distribution axis is not aligned with the Customers part.

Tools:

• You don’t need expensive tools to find CMF. It’s like sport beginners who buy expensive gears. It makes a real difference later when you scale but not at the very beginning.
• Tools like Buffer, Google Analytics, Google docs are enough.

Is CMF the end?

• Absolutely not. The next phase is scaling and it can be even more difficult. You not only have to scale your metrics but also your team, keep your voice fresh etc.

Case study: Point Nine Capital

To illustrate my points and to show that we’re eating our own dog food here at Point Nine let do a P9 case study.

Here’s our situation and why I think we have CMF.

1- Content

Format. We’ve tried several formats but we ended up focusing on traditional blog posts. 90% of the content we produce is probably good old blog posts. Some VCs are doing audio podcasts, some are great with videos on Snapchat, we’re good at writing blog posts.

Was it a pondered and deliberate choice? No, as I’ve explained above this choice generally derives from the founders’ DNA and the company culture, Christoph is an awesome writer and it highly influenced Point Nine’s content culture from the start.

Should we explore more formats? Probably but as we are a small team and as focus is better than dispersion in a situation of limited resources, we will do it only if a member of the team really wants to. At Point Nine we don’t have ghost writers and each team member decides whether he wants to write something or not. So it’s not the highest priority right now unless a team member is ready to own it with passion.

Voice and brand. I think that Point Nine has found its own voice which is at the intersection of very serious value added content and WTF stuff (see our newsletter or Christoph’s recent toilet paper post). It’s the WTF part which probably sets us apart from the majority of VCs. Again it’s not a deliberate strategy, it’s really like this when you work at Point Nine and this specific culture is shared by every team member.

2- Context

The “SaaS VC” category starts to be really crowded. Our chance is that Christoph was an early SaaS blogger and he quickly became an influencer. It positively impacted Point Nine brand. I think that we were lucky with timing as one of the first movers in that space. We would start Point Nine from scratch in today’s environment the story would be totally different.

3- Distribution Channels

Our 3 main traffic sources:

• Organic traffic on Christoph’s blog thanks to a lot of evergreen content with a lot of great inbound links = one of the advantages of being a first mover.
• Social media which not only includes Twitter and the likes but also our Medium subscribers.
• Newsletters (million thanks to Mattermark, SaaS Weekly, SaaS Club and more). These belong to the “industry specific channels” I spoke about in the first part of this post.

It’s definitely an area of improvement for us as we should distribute our content on more channels (Quora, Slideshare, LinkedIn…) and leverage better the ones mentioned above but the good thing is that we have a good picture of what works for us and this is aligned with our targets — audience.

4- Customers — Audience

Ok we don’t really have customers but the people we target are definitely SaaS founders, and the good thing is that we manage to reach them on the channels mentioned above.

We escape the “content silo” trap because no one at Point Nine is 100% focus on writing content. We all spend a significant amount of time at the contact of founders either by supporting portfolio companies or on deal flow. Because of that all of us are exposed to the “problems” and questions that SaaS founders have, which influences our content.

5- Tools

Again in terms of tools we’re pretty light and happy so far:

• Content CMS: Christoph & Pawel use their own blog (Blogger and Posthaven) and the rest of the team is on Medium which we chose because it’s the easiest platform to get started and there’s no work required to maintain it. We use Google Docs for writing and commenting our drafts.
• Analytics: for traffic we use Medium built in analytics dashboard and for social media and media in general we use Mention + Twitter analytics.
• Distribution: Buffer

6- Enough Bragging

I think that we got to CMF. But it doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. Far from. Getting to that stage is nice but we have a lot of space for improvements.

7- Other examples

Two other interesting case studies in our space:

• Jason Lemkin who heavily focused on Quora first and has a very unique voice (focus + differentiation)
• Tomasz Tunguz who also focused on its blog with a unique (at that time) focus on metrics and benchmarks.