Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable on an interim basis.
Please meet John-Henry, Your Freelance SEO & Content Strategist ✏️
John-Henry was referred to us by Ari Klein, a rockstar advisor on the Awesome People List.
He’s trusted by the leading enterprise B2B SaaS platforms like Lattice, Front, Podia, Gremlin, Postscript, and Heap.
John-Henry built the early foundations for DocSend’s digital marketing operations. At DocSend, he owned and grew inbound account sign-ups by 300% and increased SEO traffic by 15X.
Check out his free webinar on content strategy for B2B SaaS companies. It’s the same framework that helped LaunchDarkly (raised $330M+) nearly 2X their SEO traffic in Q1 and Q2.
Fun fact about John-Henry: he dreams of opening a dog rescue for big fat buddies that need a better diet and a second chance at a great life 🐶.
Hire him to map out your entire buyer journey to content and keywords, develop your SEO & content strategy, and build collaborative processes for content ops.
He focuses on Series A+ startups that know their core buyer persona and have someone internally who can help drive SEO efforts (sorry pre-seed and seed founders, you’ll get there soon 🚀).
Series A+ and need an expert in SEO & digital marketing? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
He was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here 🙏
Crowdsource content from your team, they’re the experts
B2B buyers want authentic content that explains the problem and solution.
To create effective content that generates a meaningful pipeline, collaborate across departments.
For example, I work with a revops (revenue operations) company that sells automation tools to sales execs. They need content that’s authentic, authoritative, and insightful. It’s nearly impossible to write expert-level content with freelance writers who don’t fully understand revops.
To produce publish-worthy content, we hosted a teamwide 24-hour content hackathon. Sales engineers, enterprise AEs, and revops teams came together to create content briefs, notes, and insights for 30+ pieces of content.
The result was educational content that engaged buyers and increased traffic to their site.
This trend continues today. For the past two years, this company has increased their web traffic by creating amazing revops content. I highly recommend cross-team content hackathons.
🐦Recommended Twitter Thread: Lenny Rachitsky breaks down Datadog’s content growth strategy.
Your go-to-market strategy dictates your SEO and content strategy
Let’s examine product led-growth (PLG) vs. top-down sales.
PLG is seamless. It gives users instant access to its product at no cost. Boom, instant gratification ✨
Top-down sales creates friction in the onboarding and sales process. There are meetings, forms, and contracts 💰
Let’s compare Zapier to Tray.io.
Zapier uses PLG. It allows website visitors to dive right into their product.
Tray.io takes a top-down approach. It funnels prospective customers into a dragged-out sales conversation with complex multi-step forms. Tray.io reveals little about its product or specific integrations.
How can Tray.io compete with Zapier? Tray.io focuses heavily on educational content to entice users to fill out their forms. In top-down sales, you must capture intrigue with your content and drive people to your CTA (call to action, like collecting email addresses).
You need to have high-quality content if you want to rank for SEO
Surprise! Welcome to 2021! All the topics you want to write about and rank for in search have been covered.
It’s not enough to just publish and hope for the best like you could 5-10 years ago. You need to routinely produce great content that’s better than the competition. This requires investment.
Our client Gremlin, a “chaos engineering platform” helps companies build applications and websites. Gremlin needed educational content about chaos monkey, their popular, open-source engineering tool.
We created a huge library of well-written content that’s technically sound and ranks for thousands of long-tail keywords (the words Gremlin customers are searching for). Their resources smoke the competitions’. Gremlin’s investment in high-quality content is a huge competitive advantage. Now they own all their keywords and it would be hard to unseat them with SEO.
Need an expert in SEO & digital marketing? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to any of the folks in this email (including the PS section 🎉).
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures (join the syndicate here)
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This week’s YOLO content 🥳
Get up to speed on DeFi and Crypto
As many of you know, I have fallen deep down the crypto rabbit hole… ok, to be fair, this started in 2017 😅. One of the things about Web3 that drives me nuts is that it can feel foreign and inaccessible. So, I asked for your DeFi 101 resources on twitter and you delivered:
Here are a handful that stood out:
DeFi Masterclass by Anand Iyer and Kendric Van der Carr - This was the top twitter choice. It’s a 4-week, hands-on course that builds confidence and fluency in all things DeFi.
Nat Eliason’s DeFi Orientation - This was the second most popular option. Learn the basics of DeFi in 1-hour through “Mastering the Basics” and then head off to “Advanced Topics” to become a pro. They have an engaged Discord.
Buying Your First Crypto - HAX’s program is unique because it focuses on new gen-z investors. This 90 min, instructor-led class meets 2X week and provides 1:1 support from instructors and alumni.
SheFi - This program educates womxn on the new financial economy enabled by Web 3.0 and blockchain technology and instills confidence to start investing.
Crypto Cheetahs Course - This one is also focused on womxn and goes beyond just DeFi. Learn the fundamentals of crypto and how to invest in it with a group of awesome like-minded womxn.
*FREE* Killer Fundraising Workshop💵 📣
My good friend Jason Yeh focuses on helping founders fundraise. I recommend him to everyone. He’s hosting a fundraising workshop. If you’re tired of all the confusing VC games, Jason’s workshop is a must! He’s a former Greycroft investor turned founder (his startup Tape was acquired by Hustle in 2020), so you’re in good hands!
Awesome People Continued 🚀
Most recent features
Adrian is one of those unicorn engineers who can code, has product sense, and has led teams. He founded Chilipepper, a tool to create beautiful Notion forms, and Parretir, a natural language processing tool to analyze SEC filings. You can hire him part-time to build software or help define and manage products, including the initial discovery of customer problems.
Alex is a founding member of Tack Advisors, a recruiting and career development firm that specializes in administrative roles. She leads biz dev and client strategy. Throughout her career, Alex has built and launched several communities including a community of 30K+ administrative professionals at Tack.
Michal is your comms, brand, & fundraising pro. He helps startups with fundraising narrative, messaging, and media relations. He can help you raise early-stage venture capital (pre-seed through Series B), define your product and brand voice, and show you how to get TechCrunch coverage.
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!
Part-time opportunities
Want to make some extra $$$ and work on interesting projects? The Awesome People job board is filled with awesome flexible advising and consulting roles. They’re perfect for fun-employed folks, self-employed folks, and moonlighters!
Awesome People Bounty Board
Yes! That’s right! Get paid to do cool shit for awesome people. Help with this newsletter, work on deals, or suggest whatever you want. Check out the bounty board and respond to this email with how you want to get involved!
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