The best way to write quality content at scale
My buddy Drake has a data software company called Gravity that serves investors early-stage startup leads. When things were slow, he’d let me run little growth experiments here and there on it, like my own personal sandbox. We tried dm campaigns, ads, newsletters, all sorts of hocus pocus but there was one thing that absolutely slayed: personal content.
Using his data saas, we’d generate insights and post about them on his linkedin. we had built a system that was relatively scalable. One of the most fun things in the world is seeing your friends win. And this campaign ripped big time for Drake.
Within 3 months, Drake’s account exploded.
- 7,000+ LinkedIn followers
- 1,500,000+ LinkedIn impressions
- $4,000+ MRR
- 500+ Newsletter subscribers
- 15 new enterprise demos (~$400k in potential LTV)
Turns out, that play wasn’t isolated to just Drake. Off that insight, I started a content agency to prove it out. For $5k/mo, I would ghostwrite for a select group of B2B saas founders that were too busy to crank out personal content.
At first, things were rocky. I think 1 of the reasons that I was able to produce such great content for Drake was that I had not only known the product so well, but I had known him so well. It was second nature to write for him because I knew exactly what he’d say himself.
So I had to figure out a way to replicate that insight…
The goals:
- get authentic content
- make the system scalable for the founder (low time, low effort)
This started the creation of the original Prompts and to this day, the system I recommend to all busy founders.
Here’s how it works:
1. Come up with a series of prompts to ask
I would go crazy with these, a series of interesting questions about their personal background, the inception of the company, design decisions, customer stories, etc. I would try and ask questions that might spur hot takes or big mistakes.
2. Schedule a 30 minute zoom every 2 weeks
This would give me MORE than enough content to write from. And these calls are simple - I’d think of them like a podcast interview that doesn’t get published. We show up and I’d use the prompts questions as a guide. But be open to wherever the conversation goes.
3. Write the dang content
This part could be tailored differently to who you are as a writer, but for me it would work like building a puzzle. First I’d open up the box to see what I’m working with, which meant downloading the transcript. Then I’d separate out the corner pieces, which meant bucketing out the question with the following answer. Finally, I’d put it all together - re-work the question as a hook and summarize their answer into an engaging story.
You might read that and say “duh”, but it’s not a “duh”. The typical ghostwriting model is broken. It forces the founder to make a choice between high quality content and freedom of time. If you want high quality authentic content, you’re often stuck writing out the content so it’s not just fluff piece after fluff piece. If you want to save time, you’re often caught compromising for content that reads like an industry trade magazine (BORING).
Prompts turns the original ghostwriting model on its head. instead of writing boring industry-agnostic content you get beautiful, authentic stories that sound like the founder actually wrote them. And not to mention in 1/10 of the time.
If you want to implement it as a founder, here’s what I’d recommend:
- find a writer (internal or external) doesn’t matter. And get them up to speed on what the goal is
- have them write prompts
- schedule a 30 min meeting with them every 2 weeks
- give them access to popular twitter / linkedin frameworks
- let em loose
This system allows you to create content that is truly authentic and expert opinions without requiring more than 30-60 minutes a month
