First Round Capital's Content Marketing Strategy to become a media first brand with First Round Review

Case Study-3 for Media First Brand

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👋 Hello, I’m Harshala, and welcome to the 🔒 limited access edition 🔒 of Media First Brand. This post has free reading access for 2 weeks from the publishing date, after which it gets archived. On-demand access to archived posts requires a paid subscription.

Each month, I share 2 limited editions and 1 free post:

• 1 detailed content marketing strategy case study of any brand

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First Round Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm that focuses on founders who are just getting started. It aims to be at the initial stages of a startup’s journey across its first hires, product, customers, and of course, raising money.

Seed funding has truly exploded in the past decade, with dedicated asset classes being launched by prominent venture capitalists across the world. As entrepreneurship and technology continue to get disrupted, the competition to fund the next Airbnb, Alibaba, or PayTM that promises more than the coveted 10X returns gets crowded.

Crunchbase data underscores an impressive rise in funding to the smallest startups: Fewer than 3,200 companies received seed funding in the period between 2006 and 2010. A decade later, that had ballooned to more than 23,000 startups.

This has further led to a rise of micro-VC firms, and founder-friendly funding options like crowdfunding using SAFEs, revenue-based financing platforms, etc. This means more options for today’s entrepreneurs to suit their funding needs and investors to park their money.

In such a scenario, standing out is important - and the easiest way to do so is to create a brand that screams prestige and industrial authority.

This is what brings us to the publication of First Round Capital which houses the venture capital firm’s content marketing strategy - The Review.

Let’s explore the publishing philosophy and strategy of The Review and understand how it has contributed to building First Round Capital’s brand.

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TLDR;

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What ideas does The Review sell?

“The First Round has an opportunity to create an entirely new kind of online publication, built for technology entrepreneurs, where they can learn how to build better companies. And they can learn directly from the people actually doing it. Much of its knowledge is still stuck inside the heads of the valley’s best operators, product managers, engineers and marketers. Our goal with First Round Review is to curate this knowledge to make great things happen”

- Josh Kopelman, Partner, First Round Capital

The Review’s main aim is to provide extremely tactical business advice, presented in a warm, conversational, and descriptive voice. It wants to produce high-quality articles that are a blend of Harvard Business Review and New Yorker.

At present, it houses 9 digital magazines across Management, People & Culture, Product, Engineering, Design, Fundraising, Sales, PR & Marketing.

It is committed to:

• bringing knowledge directly from industry experts

• create actionable and tactical content that one can implement

• create content that teaches and engages