The best content strategies have this one thing in common

The secret sauce for content that people actually like

There’s plenty of talk about content strategies in the climate tech world, and we’ve contributed our fair share.

But Meg and I have realized lately that all of the best content strategies have one thing in common: they’re founder-led.

What is founder-led content?

It doesn’t mean your founder creates every concept and writes every article or LinkedIn post. It just means you start with their story, their beliefs, their future visions.

What’s so good about it?

For your content to be more than just ChatGPT summaries and SEO definitions — that is, to be truly thought leadership — your content needs strong opinions. Founders have these in abundance. You don’t start a climate tech company for the work-life balance. You start it because you believe in something.

My founder is our bottleneck. How can I create founder-led content?

Founders are almost always bottlenecks. The best thing you can do is involve them very early on in your content strategy and planning. Interview them as if you’re a journalist, and tease out the key thread — the core belief that drove them to build the company. That becomes your content starting point, and all your pillars and formats can build from there.

Treat your founder as a source to interview, not the creator of (or reviewer of) content. Interview them right at the beginning of your content journey so you can keep using those insights with each new piece of content, rather than having to drag them into every blog article or LinkedIn post. Every so often you may need some fresh input, particularly for bigger pieces. That’s fine, but again, interview them as an SME — don’t ask them to write or review anything.

(If you’re a founder reading this, this is your signal to pass your content marketing over to someone else.)

One great example to inspire you

Part of what prompted this obsession with founder-led content was my discovery of a blog called Wrap-Text by a company called Equals. Some cool things:

• The blog has its own name and theme (how to build a startup)

• It’s hosted entirely on Substack (SEO is clearly not a driving force)

• One of the company’s investors would only sign a check if the founder agreed to write a blog post every week (there’s someone who gets it!)

• The blog therefore became extremely personal and insightful, and is written by the founder and a few other key team members with direct experience with what they’re writing about (building a tech startup)

• One testimonial claims that Equals’ content is so valuable, they would happily pay for it (we’d call that successful content marketing!)

P.S. Here’s a brand new photo of us taken at our offsite a couple weeks ago. We don’t normally look this cool!