Startups need to have an opinion
Over the last five months or so since joining Vertex Ventures, I’ve had the chance to have several great conversations with our portfolio companies, all of which have the same fundamental question: How do I make our messaging and brand stand out in an increasingly noisy world?
In many cases, these startups are doing all the right things, in a procedural sense: They’ve set up a blog or a newsletter, they’re publishing handy how-to guides and product overviews, they’re actively posting on networks like LinkedIn, and they’re being mindful of SEO to help bring inbound web traffic. And yet, they’re not making the splash they hoped. Their blog entries don’t hit on Hacker News or Reddit; they don’t get shared around on social media.
It’s been my observation, in this short time, that the missing ingredient is a willingness to express any kind of opinion. Where so much content is dry and matter-of-fact, an opinion has the power to elicit a real response from its audience. To paraphrase Y Combinator’s famous motto, you have to write something people want to read.
If you do it right, the people who agree with you will join your community and perhaps one day prove to be customers, sales prospects, or potential new recruits. And when people disagree, it can at least start a dialogue — they may never come around, but it might help you refine and focus your own line of thinking.
Either way, having an informed opinion establishes you and your company as a force worth keeping an eye on.
What does it mean to have an opinion?
Before diving into what I mean, I should first say that there’s no magic formula for “going viral,” whatever that means in 2024. Speaking from my own experience as a tech reporter, the blog post you spent twenty minutes writing has a way of traveling further and faster than the deep, considered piece that took weeks to assemble. Anybody who tries to promise you that they can make an individual piece of content a social-media hit is almost certainly lying.
So: Opinions. This seems to have become somewhat of a dirty word lately, probably owing to the fact that when applied to content, “opinion” is often associated with an overheated, under-researched blog or video that has little to no grounding in reality. The concern is well-founded; nobody wants to write something that makes them and their company look out-of-the-loop at best, and completely ignorant and overaggressive at worst.
However, I’d encourage founders to think about expressing opinions less like sharing a hot take, and more like pursuing an opinionated product design. Content is a product, the same as anything else you ship, and it can and should reflect your startup’s unique values and perspective.
In theory, you and your team should be the preeminent experts in your problem space, with a clear view of how things should (or shouldn’t) be done. If you didn’t have that POV and a strong inclination towards improving things, you probably wouldn’t have gotten into entrepreneurship at all.
Expressing that unique perspective builds your brand, educates prospective customers on your approach and what you can bring to the table, and in many cases brings more awareness to the market overall. And if done with the voice of authority and experience, it can start a conversation without falling back on incendiary rhetoric or what you might call “clickbait.” Your readers get the value of your expertise, and you get repaid for it in their attention.
Having an opinion, in practice
So what does this look like in practice?
The first thing to consider is that as my Vertex colleague Chase Roberts astutely pointed out in his own recent blog post, different audiences require different approaches when it comes to content.
What those approaches all have in common, however, is a sense of intention. When you speak to your audience, it’s good to have a sense of what you’re actually trying to tell them. It’s not (just) that you released a product; an opinionated blog post on why or how it came to be gives customers insight into your bigger-picture thinking. Where possible, announcing a big new customer or a funding round is always made more interesting by letting it come with a macro view of what happens next and where things go from here.
By way of counterexample, a lot of the content I see coming out of B2B and cloud startups in our orbit tends to be very technical and straightforward, with a square focus on their product and its features. This is totally understandable; the startups themselves are often in the business of deep tech, with their founders and executives all coming from backgrounds. This kind of content is necessary — you’re speaking the language of your end-users — but it’s not strong enough to bear the weight of a content strategy on its own, and generally doesn’t compel people to share with their own networks.
The antidote is to write with voice — and without the hard sales pitch. If you come on too strong in a blog post or video with pushing your product, people are that much less likely to share it around. Instead, put yourself in the shoes of the reader or viewer. What problem are they having that you can help with? What in your own experience or background might be relevant to that situation?
On that same track, there’s a lot to be said for adding color and perspective on current events. When something happens in your space, there’s a lot of upside to be found in weighing in with something that goes beyond platitudes and offers real explanations of what happened and where things go from here.
There is, of course, a fine line — you don’t want to publish something that alienates future partners, customers, or investors. Still, that’s navigable, and I’d urge you not to let it dissuade you from making your voice heard.
