First Round Capital's Content Marketing Strategy to become a media first brand with First Round Review
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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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 startups journey across its first hires, product, customers, and of course, raising money.
Seed funding has truly exploded since 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, 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.
TLDR;
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 engage
Target audience
The Review aims to create a Brand Identity by targeting 3 major audiences:
Founders and makers
Managers
Startup ecosystem - professionals, consultants, mentors, incubators etc
By having a look at its content, it seems to specifically target the following professional profiles:
Established founders who want to learn scale
First-time founders looking to build their products at MVP stage, searching co-founder, etc
Founders wanting to transition from indie maker to CEO
Chiefs across marketing, finance, strategy, sales and operations
Product Managers
Hiring managers
Engineering leaders
Mental health for startup community
People looking to have a career with startups
Brand emotions - If The Review was a person
Articles written by The Review are generally in the long-form range of 3000-4000 words. Since they emphasize bringing industrial thought leadership, their articles are interview-based. The final result is an article that feels like a conversation as if the thought leader is talking to you, while The Review is also explaining the thought process in between. They continue to adopt this approach to date as they saw an increase in audience engagement.
The Review’s content works towards making an impression of a person who:
believes in action and results
wants to guide you
is good with storytelling
is a mentor
is inclusive
has formal tone, yet can explain complex concepts
How does The Review build trust?
Companies put their resources in content marketing to build trust and create an impression of being an industry leader with every stage of customer interaction.
First Round Review is definitely one of the most popular publications whose content the business and technology community enjoy. This is because the real hero of their story is the reader itself - where the content piece serves to benefit the consumer.
Every founder, especially early-stage ones, wishes to get mentored by the leaders they admire. One wishes to have coffee conversations with ‘been there, done that’ folks in the hope to get a direction for their own journey.
The Review permanently etched these coffee conversations and made them available to the world with their articles and podcasts. It’s a good example of what a reader-centric publication would look like.
“One thing we’ve done to differentiate ourselves is focus on long-form content. Because so much of the writing out there is very snackable and short-format, we were thinking how can we set ourselves apart in this noisy ecosystem. We thought, we’ll write longer and be much more granular and tactical so that everything we publish is somehow actionable and can probably be used by the person that day or the next day. That’s the bar we’ve set for ourselves.”
Camille Rickets in conversation with Flipboard
Here’s how it has gathered the popularity and trust to become one:
The venture capital brand: Founded in 2004, First Round Capital is a seed-stage fund with notable companies under its ecosystem like 9Gag, Gumroad, Notion, etc and with IPOs like Roblox, Uber, Warby Parker, etc. This certainly brings in the credibility, contacts and resources to fund The Review’s journalism.
Interview-style long articles with thought leaders: The idea of making thought leaders an integral part of their content creation process instead of simply adding quotes or bylines creates a good sense of trust and impact in their content. It’s like borrowing the credibility of the interview subject, where the leader’s brand value indeed sprinkles some of its legacies onto The Review. These subject matter experts also share their features across their social media and circles which also helps generate buzz.
Going beyond their portfolio companies: Unlike other VC blogs, their content is also not limited to featuring their portfolio companies. They invite thought leaders across domains irrespective of their relationship with them. This, in turn, also amplifies their reach beyond their ecosystem, helping them connect and inspire more potential founders, and turn their readers into brand evangelists.
Strong focus on interview subjects: The team at The Review sharpened their interviewing skills to ensure they get the most wisdom juice out of their interview subjects. Camille also developed a 3-tier approach to taking interviews that helped her create a repeatable system for content creation:
ask the questions at face value
dive deeper by asking ‘how’ they did it
ask for a real-world example
Scouting subjects was the easy part considering the existing network of First Round Capital, but they also circled around Medium, conferences and Tweet threads for discovery. Today, inbound requests and recommendations by existing featured folks are also a part of the pool.
Embracing vulnerability: The Review ensures that their interview subjects are ‘partners’ in the content creation process and not mere ‘source’. Since their content is for educational purposes highlighting their experiences, the subjects tend to feel comfortable sharing their personal anecdotes and low points to help others in the ecosystem.
Consistency: All their articles are consistently written in the interview-style format that has made this writing style synonymous with The Review in the business circle. Using the above mentioned 3-tier interview framework also helped generate consistent output. Their podcast is also an extension of this writing style. Their cadence is publishing articles twice a week.
Writing about mental health: One of its article collections covers mental health as one builds their career and startups across management hierarchy. This makes it relatable and useful as it teaches and advocates self-care in its usual style of writing, a critical topic in business circles.
Writing about women in tech: The Review also highlights the brilliant women leading the tech circles and leadership roles as a special focus.
Graphics with subject matter experts/leaders: The Reviews ensures the people who were interviewed were in the focus of their articles and stood out with their actual photographs or illustrations. The images shared in the content pieces are not usual stock photos but are striking and complement the story.
The Review’s Business Model
Unlike our previous issue with Harvard Business Publishing and Slack, The Review’s main aim is to generate brand awareness and industrial authority. It’s not writing content to generate huge traffic to increase conversions or build a revenue arm. Hence, all the content on its platform is free to consume.
Only a book published under their series ‘First Round Essentials’ on - ‘Management’ is available for purchase with a simple ‘Pay per content’ model. But the same book can be emailed to at free of cost if you sign up for The Review.
The Review’s Content Funnel
For your Information:
A content marketing funnel is an arrangement under which you create targetted content in each stage of your customer’s interaction with your product that range from generating awareness to converting visitors and making final sales.
The Review has focused on its long-form articles as its primary content format. But it has also touched upon other formats like podcasts, books, templates, newsletters, etc to provide maximum value to its venture ecosystem.
On analyzing its content across various platforms to segregate it in terms of 4 funnel stages - Awareness, Education, Sales, and Training, we found as per the publication’s aim, the awareness stage has maximum content creation efforts.
Awareness
“This business was not conversion-driven for me. We wanted to build as big of an audience as we possibly could to expand the group of brilliant founders that we could work with. It was a broad awareness play.”
- Content lessons from Camille Ricketts by Jimmy Daly
The Review receives traffic encompassing 50.15% of direct and 34.04% from search. This shows how simply creating great content can also lead to great traffic numbers than writing specifically for algorithms.
Social:
Out of all the traffic, social contributes only 5.89%. Within this pie, around 43% itself is contributed by Twitter, while 33% is by Linkedin. Pocket is also a network of focus - with it being a great place to target long-form articles, indicating high bookmarking activity among readers. Reddit and Facebook also form the rest of the chunk of traffic.
Some of their content has got more than 10000+ shares across social channels due to activity by influencers. On average their articles generate 2000+ shares.
Audio:
The Review hosts a podcast called ‘In Depth’ in which they interview industry leaders and subject matter experts on growing their companies, teams and themselves.
Newsletters
The Review has a single digest as a newsletter with more than 127,000 subscribers. They share their trending articles, release the latest content and recommend other useful resources. This is one of the key content distribution sources for their content.
Link Building:
With insightful and actionable content strategy, The Review currently has more than 308k+ backlinks with HackerNews, Refind and Medium being top referral sources.
For the purpose of content distribution, they also have syndication partnerships with publications like Fast Company, Quartz, Inc, etc who republish their content with attribution and backlink.
Education
The Review has not done much to create content where it is specifically educating its audience about itself. A majority of their content is not sales oriented. Instead, it focuses on creating the content itself that can be practically applied by entrepreneurs and stakeholders across stages of company building. They want to be the go-to ‘resource’ for their target audience.
Sales
If The Review is the most valuable destination for company-building advice, then we shouldn’t really be talking about ourselves. Being a resource means not talking about ourselves.
Jessi Craige Shikman in an interview with Revision
Since The Review is not really ‘selling’ any product with their content, there isn’t any content developed specifically to ‘sell’ First Round Capital or any of its specific initiatives. They do not have any Call-To-Actions in their stories. The whole strategy is to be to generate awareness and build a brand.
Training
The Review has shared a host of resources across content formats to help its community and readership:
Templates: includes a host of actionable templates on fundraising, financial model, equity compensation, hiring, OKR, etc.
Videos: includes lectures and talks by industry experts across product, hiring, engineering, etc. These videos also are available on their YouTube channel.
Frameworks: includes famous frameworks and mental models one can apply across their life and business to design compensations, business models, make decisions etc.
Decks: includes pitch deck templates specifically designed forSaaS, enterprises, consumer web, etc.
Question Banks: this is a very interesting resource where some hard and necessary questions for various scenarios like hiring, co-founder judgement, conflict management, sales, etc is provided.
Key Takeaways
The Review is a good case study to understand how publications can become customer or reader-centric. It also brings a good formula to create content that gets bookmarked and shared by influencers: creating amazingly useful content combined with storytelling and backed by an existing personal brand (in this case, the industrial thought leaders).
Here are some other major takeaways to keep in mind:
Think of your content pieces like products or SKUs - Define a repeatable system for writing content and iterate it as per results till you find a formula that fits with your brand and audience.
Repurpose your content across social channels and other publications as backlinks, quotes, images to keep the content piece alive.
Work with your strengths - for The Review, it was their network that allowed them easy access to experts and thought leaders. It was natural for them to choose this strategy.
Leverage shares by influencers
Master your presence on a few social platforms where your target audience resides.
Don’t be just a content churning machine. A good content strategy gives equal importance to imagery, website design, distribution, colours, etc.
One needs to keep in mind that the content strategy adopted by The Review is not suitable for every brand out there, however appealing it might sound. As a SaaS or eCommerce platform, you need to get those numbers in website visitors, conversions and customers retained at each stage of the content funnel. The Review can afford to stay free and provide high-quality content - because it can. It’s backed by a venture capital firm, and for them creating awareness, brand identity and industrial authority are of prime importance than ‘selling’.
Suggestions and Ideas for The Review:
The podcast episodes lack show notes that could hamper its SEO. One can have show notes for the episodes like how Buffer
has done with their interview with Camille Ricketts itself.Organize the podcast episodes into themes, similar to how they have done it for their articles.
Create more video content for the YouTube channel. One can have TED-like conferences only for the business and startup ecosystem. At present their Youtube looks haphazard.
Work on truly building a community using the TED Circles model - wherein people can gather together over a piece of content/lecture/podcast or their ‘Must Read’ collection series and discuss the same based on conversation starters defined by The Review. The community can help their readership implement what they are teaching on a peer-to-peer basis.
Engage on social channels with Twitter Spaces, Polls, and other short stints to keep in touch with their followers beyond published articles.
Next: How Mailchimp became a media first brand
We are quite excited to pick up Mailchimp - an Intuit acquired $12 billion bootstrapped email marketing SaaS with very impressive tactics implemented for their content strategy.
From acquiring Courier to focusing on building communities, MailChimp has some cool tricks that SaaS folks subscribed with us here can get inspired from. Stay tuned for the next issue!
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At Merrative, we can work on the strategies mentioned in this case study to manage your publication via books, articles, thought leadership, case studies, reports, podcasts, etc. Hire us as your flexible editorial team via our managed publishing talent marketplace.