How To Create Better Content Faster
Adopt a startup mindset to your content production and grow faster
Burbn was a fairly popular app - a location based social network with an option that allowed people to upload a photo with a filter. When growth slowed the founders took a hard look at the data and saw that the only part of the app that people really used was in fact the photo and filters.
They got rid of the social element, re-tooled the app as a way to post mobile pics with filters, called it Instagram and 18 months later sold to Facebook for $1billion
Not quite instant success
Back in ‘07 a couple of guys created airbedandbreakfast.com, they reckoned they could build a social network around people who wanted to crash on a sofa and get breakfast for cheap.
8 years later airbnb.com has a $10billion valuation, offers appartments for a kings ransom and nobody really talks about breakfast.
Takeaways for content marketers
- Startups don’t know what is going to resonate with the public until they take it to market.
- You don’t know what content is going to resonate with the public until you publish
- Startups focus on data to tell them what is working and what isn’t
- Your KPIs are essential if you want to be successful in the future
- Startups ruthlessly cut that which isn’t working and focus on what is
- If you’re not seeing traction with one type of content or on one network, do something else
- Startups focus all day everyday to iterate, yet success still takes years
- No matter how fast you produce content, it can take years before you see results
Your big advantage
Unlike startups, you aren’t depending on revenue from your “content product.” This means you don’t have to move and iterate as quickly as they do in order to survive.
If however you apply the startup mindset to your content production, you will find the quality of your output improves more rapidly. This is turn drives the visibility of your business in search, which is where the new customers are.
Written while listening to: C Major Theme Dev 4 on music2work2
Image credit: Startup by Dennis Skley on Flickr