5 content marketing and fundraising learnings from Kapwing’s founder Julia Enthoven
Is there a more appropriate way to start a blog than writing about content strategy? Definitely not, so we’re kicking off our brand new Xoogler.co blog with a brief recap and learnings from our last event of the “Founders Lunch” series, who took place at Founders Den, in San Francisco on Nov. 28th.
Julia Enthoven, founder of Kapwing (an online video editor for casual creators), shared some unique insights around content marketing, user acquisition and fundraising: really hot and useful topics for early-stage founders. Julia went through all these mind-boggling dilemmas in her personal experience of starting her company and setting up Kapwing’s blog to deliver stellar content, drive traffic and ultimately, monetize.
Here are the 7 gems Julia shared around content marketing and fundraising:
Content Marketing
1. You can never over invest in SEO — That’s the golden rule here. SEO is a core piece of execution and you cannot avoid doing it. A successful content marketing campaign is not rocket science.
2. Domain or not domain — To optimize for SEO, make sure your proprietary content is hosted on your own domain (www.companyx.com/blog , for example). Don’t use Medium or platforms who do not allow you to host the content under your own domain.
3. Leverage similar communities — This is the fundamental of every growth hack, especially related to content. Your audience is likely already hidden somewhere online. Instead of trying to build one from scratch, try to leverage similar communities. If you write about tech/startup and you’re in Silicon Valley, you can tap into Hackernews and drive traffic from there.
4. Do your homework — Take the time to go back to school with your team and go through some successful case-studies. How Did Etsy grow? How AirBnB is dealing with content? Study and emulate the good practices.
5. Good content helps with fundraising — As simple as it sound. Getting out there and producing valuable piece of content can get the attention of VCs. That’s how Kapwing found one of their investors.
Fundraising
1. It’s really hard — Be prepared to hear over and over that your idea is not good, but don’t give up! Sometimes you just need to refine it to achieve a better product market fit but some other times you just need Persistency.
2. The rule of big numbers — It really applies to fundraising. You should shoot for reaching out to at least 100 investors to get serious attention for just 5 of them. You do the math.
3. Warm intros do the magic — Cold emailing, cold calling investors is seldom a winning strategy. Try to leverage intros as much as you can, the very best ones come from entrepreneurs whose companies are backed by your target investors. If you think you haven’t the required network, here’s one secret: a lot of investors in the Bay have Harvard/Stanford/MIT on their resume, just snowball your way through alumni networks.
4. Sell, sell sell yourself — Every good founder has a lot of doubts and uncertainty about his product and next steps for the business. Be prepared to sell yourself with passion and confidence; don’t be afraid of claiming that you’re the best person to solve this problem. Be confident… not arrogant.
5. “This is a standard clause” — Being a novice in fundraising might be used against you, don’t be fooled by “this is a standard clause.” Everything is up for negotiation.. And et a lawyer’s help to review complex term sheets.
Thanks for reading and happy Xoogling!
