The Content Studio Company Profile (2023)

hey folks my guest today is tommy walker he's the founder of the content studio a content marketing consultancy for high growth b2b sas startups and enterprises before that he was the first marketing hire at shopify plus and global editor-in-chief at quickbooks his long-term goal for the content studio is to release training for advanced content marketers tommy you ready to take the top let's do it all right so what year did you join shopify i was there pre-ipo so it was like 2014 2015. yeah late 2014. and what was like when you were going to the interview process what was like the key metric they asked you about hey tommy can you increase this i didn't have an interview process i was recruited so shopify was really early days back then it was still not being taken seriously as uh cloud ecommerce wasn't really a thing back then um so i was brought in from cxl.com and uh really it was just a conversation you know hey you seem like you know what you're talking about on the website that you're currently writing for uh we like you let's let's let's make this happen so that was called 2014 2015 up through 2017. by the way i didn't it's a small world uh pep just bought a ticker i've always pronounced his name wrong but i think it's pep he bought a ticket to uh my event down here in austin next week because winter is taking off and he's doing some exciting things with his new company so are you still close with him oh yeah is relative but yes we talk on a regular basis and uh yeah no pep's great we can edit that out yeah pep and i are close it's awesome we still talk to each other yeah that's great no big big fan of him okay yeah so you're i mean you are very much in the space if you are it looks your editor-in-chief there back in 2013. so shopify recruits you what was the focus i mean what were like what were you graded on sort of each quarter uh it's it's really interesting at the time it was like the company was so scrappy at the time that it was like let's produce content let's get traffic let's just get a foothold and establish a foothold as a thought leader in this space so when i was there especially when i got into the marketing on the shopify plus side it was let's create content let's make a splash like let's the whole thing was uh breaking down the enterprise um so really at the time it wasn't as metrics focused as it is now most likely um but it certainly was like let's make our impact and make our presence known within the space which is like kind of hard to quantify at this point but um certainly i mean i was there for the first 1500 customers the only marketing hirings of the first 1500 customers so we did something right what was the initial content plan what were you doing sure uh so the metric that i care the most about is return visitors um and the overall content plan we had a few different things that we were looking at primarily we were doing some seo focused stuff we were doing a lot more thought leadership pieces but the way that i had structured my team i also had an away team so i had a team of people doing guest blogging in a number of different areas as well as doing a lot of podcasting at the time i was becoming a guest on multiple podcasts and sort of championing this whole philosophy of what happens when the software gets out of the way it's hard to believe now but at the time nobody was taking cloud ecommerce software seriously so we started to focus on the meta-narrative of the blog was what happens when e-commerce software gets out of the way what are the things that you can focus on now that you don't have to worry about time or budget um or or you know technical restraints so that was kind of the narrative we were shaping a narrative at the time and that's really where a lot of the focus was and tommy what did you use to measure return visitors uh just google analytics okay um and and so what when you left what were like the weekly active readers i guess yeah um it was it was right around right around the hundred thousand mark you know it wasn't it wasn't too crazy but it was just crazy enough no that was weekly readers that were coming back or monthly yeah weekly that's great interesting so why leave uh you know it was shopify was great it's a great company it was it was growing really fast at the time and uh it was fun until it wasn't for me um is really what it came down to it was i mean it's still a great company what didn't you enjoy about it um wow this is tough um it was it was the speed at which it was growing and at the time honestly i was a lot more arrogant and and thought that i was owed more than i really was and uh like you wanted more options yeah i wanted well i wanted more options i wanted more clout uh and and what it came down to was just that i thought i was doing more than i actually was um or that i was capable of more than i was at the time so wow nobody's ever asked me this before nathan um i mean my everyone's gonna be thinking this goes out shopify in the prime year so you should have got an equity sucking it should be on like living in a massive mansion right now like right right and they're rolling in the money so i have to understand why is that not the case yeah yeah yeah yeah no certainly so i was pre-ipo uh i definitely had quite a bit of pre-ipo shares um but yeah what it came down to is really i was i was just i was arrogant at the time thought that i knew what i was doing a little bit more thought i was owed more than i actually was and um and i left i left on my own accord uh but i certainly was was not as uh not as mature as i would be now i would have handled the situation what were you spending monthly on content like paying writers to spin up writing and all this stuff probably about 10 to 12 10 to 12 000. interesting okay uh what's the next step you leave and then what i left i was consulting with quickbooks on the side and i had built out i had helped build out their uh content marketing function within their resource center at the time it was really kind of a repository for the long tail seo phrases um and and you know the you know the type right where it's just every long tail phrase every permutation of a keyword and what i came in there and did was really helped them build out a branded asset um and it became a destination that people wanted to go to wanted to return to return visitors is always my true north metric and the person that i had installed at the time jimmy daly was actually the person who i brought in to run it he had decided that he wanted to go do animals and go more agency side at the time so i was in berlin shooting some videos for oberlo and the the idea of hey like they needed somebody to take this thing over i had helped build it in the beginning um and it just kind of clicked for me at that time where i was like well why don't i go over there and run it so we scaled that uh from five five to ten freelance contributors to 40 plus contributors across seo social um email like most of your customer facing channels across 16 markets um and then intuit had a massive layoff where they laid off seven percent of their entire portfolio i was one of that lucky 715 uh cried for about 30 minutes and then started my own business shortly thereafter okay so what are you doing now now i am consulting with other fortune 1000 companies uh building out content marketing functions um that includes everything from content operations and how content gets created and distributed throughout the company um to the distribution strategy out into the world uh budgeting basically the entire function building that out or improving it in certain situations as well what are your top three ways to find someone listening right now and they want to launch a blog and hire a writer to do this do you recommend some of these marketplaces you know like verbalio scripted writer access content fly or are there other sources that you use yeah i've actually always always always had good luck with problogger right the provoger.com community i've hired new york times published authors someone who's written several for dummies books and the award winners like it's amazing what goes out there so my recommendation to anybody who is ever going to hire is to actually do something by called writing a content code first which is basically the rules of engagement uh defining the soul of your publication right um so for me like one of my rules is rule number four is uh opinions or do the research right um don't talk down to your reader setting these rules that define the publication like how you're going to engage with the market and then from there writing your advertisements for that and trying to get people on board not just like hey we need somebody to write stuff for us but here's the mission that we're on and the narrative that we're trying to build out throughout the market um for me that's always been i have to believe that's the reason why i've been able to attract the talent that i've been able to attract um because it's it's really it's really more mission driven than transactional and so how many of these customers are you working with today uh i have two major clients at the moment and then i do a lot of ad hoc stuff one of my major clients right now is godaddy so i'm like doing all right we just bought uh founderled.com from godaddy thank goodness they got it because i already ordered a bunch of t-shirts and i wasn't gonna have the t-shirts reprinted so i just got notification this morning that we have the community this is a community we're launching to celebrate bootstrap sas founders um we're basically gonna do essentially like tech crunch but just celebrating people that own a hundred percent that broke five million in revenue and give dividends to their team uh so so big fan of godaddy there um tell me about uh what can sass founders expect that they're listening right now and they want to come work with you what should their minimum revenue be what stage should they be at yeah so i do i do two sides of the equation i like to work with high growth um high growth startups um so most of the time that's anywhere between i i prefer to have a million uh mrr is kind of in that like really sweet spot there um and then i work with the enterprise level clients which money's not really an object at that point um and when we work together one of the first things that i really try to do is establish that content code really define that voice that's one of the things that i think a lot of blogs and content marketing strategies as a whole lack that sort of differentiation um and we all kind of default to that you know the keyword based like let's write for robots and the question that i'm actually asking myself now is what if google didn't exist and how do we create content that would carry itself without you know a search engine being the thing to pick it up so um which you know is i'm on an seo podcast so like you know i mean my biggest issue has working with writers is they are too factual and unfortunately in today's world people don't give a about facts what they care about are polarized opinions and so it's really hard for me to push my writers and say insert your freaking opinion in this like like push your goal is to push the audience either love you or hate you in the first three sentences and then they'll read the rest it doesn't matter if they love you or hate but then they'll read the rest right and perspective is like the thing that's missing the most right now in the question and the reason i believe perspective is missing from your authors and just authors in general is because it comes back to that content code we can if you're not defining what that soul of your publication is there's no anchoring into what that perspective is going to be businesses need a point of view more now than ever and if you are not setting the guidelines on that it the rest of it just becomes you know it it's the blogger borg voice right it's the same blog over and over again depending on you know and and that's obnoxious and terrible to read and nobody likes it so so so what are you best in the world at like hiring and managing a team of freelance writers or going out and finding in really like product seo uh i would say it's probably the first is really really setting those guidelines that tone building out the operation um itself and and connecting people within the company so it's not just content marketers kind of siloed off on the other side of the business in in their own little island it's more about having an integrated uh team that you have the right people on board and and everybody's really representing what that company is blogs are um and content marketing as a whole but blogs in particular are the most frequently published voice of the company and that's something that needs to be taken very seriously and that's one of the things that i try to stress both on the senior leadership level but also with the people that i work with on the ground level all right tommy let's wrap up with the famous five here we're out of time number one favorite book uh story by robert mckee number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not currently number three what's your favorite online tool for doing long tail seo keyword research ooh i've actually been getting into jarvis lately jarvis number four how many hours of sleep date every night not enough uh anywhere between two to six if i'm lucky all right and what's your situation married single kids married with kids how many kids uh three ooh busy guy how old are you i am 36. soon close okay happy not smarter and better available what you do guys there you have it first writer shopify plus launched the marketing strategy there agreed to about a hundred thousand weekly active readers and about 1500 customers there on the platform before he left and joined quickbooks after that did the same playbook there then said you know what i like working with founders and companies directly now working with high growth sas companies helping them scale their content marketing specifically hiring and maintaining a con a content code for maybe a freelance writing team they're putting together as they look to scale and drive new cut enterprise accounts tommy thanks for taking us to the top yeah no problem one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on 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