tl;dr – A lightweight way to kickoff your content flywheel is to interview partners, customers, and internal cofounders.

The goal should be to create a promise on why the viewer should read/watch. And deliver on that promise with educational or entertaining content.

Below is a list of podcast questions you can use to make the interviewing easier.

You can jump to the list of the questions at the end of this one-pager.

Content marketing can be effective for developing your startup's brand, growing pipeline, and capturing the small amount of customers currently in active search of a solution.

However, content is expensive, and not all GTM teams are adequately equipped to invest in a production studio or even allocate enough founder time to brainstorm LinkedIn post or YouTube videos.

I think the MVP solution to creating an effective founder-led content flywheel is to interview:

Industry thought leaders
Raving customers
Co-founders and internal engineering leaders

On a remote video call (use Riverside), chat through ideas that will be interesting to the viewer. Don't use this as a "marketing" / pitching session.

Create content that's actually interesting to the viewer. Topics like:

Current state of the industry
Challenges and pain points experienced today by customers
What we're doing internally as a company that's innovative and exciting
Long-term focus

The goal is should be to build an audience of potential customers (they may not be ready to be pitched or sold to at the moment, but the LTV of the relationship justifies the cost of the content investment) by earning their trust through education and brand.

Promise and Delivery

When customers watch or read content, there's a promise (in the form of a hook or thumbnail) and a delivery (in the form of the value of the content).

When the promise is high and the delivery is low, it's called clickbait (10 minutes will forever change the way you make money). When the promise is low and the delivery is high, you create affinity and trust with your audience ("Low-key" data happy hour, informal, no-fluff education).

Simple Podcast Interview Questions

Here are a few simple podcast questions you can use to educate or entertain your respective audience. Use these questions to create engaging content when interviewing industry thought leaders, partners, and internal stakeholders:

If interviewing a partner, what's an outcome that would make this a home run for you?
- What would an ideal outcome look like for whoever's listening to feel like they've gotten value out of this call?
- In an ideal scenario, if a customer has finished listening to this, what would you want them to naturally do? How would you want them to feel?
Walk me through your thought process when you wrote X blogpost or filmed Y video? What were you hoping viewers would get out of it?
What are your controversial opinions around current industry trends (AI / crypto / VC / bootstrapping)?
- What are some trends in the industry that you think are bogus? Legit?
What is a common pain point that you are noticing today?
- In what specific contexts do they experience the pain? How is that showing up?
How are customers solving this problem today?
- What are the pros and cons of each alternative?
- If competitors exist, what’s the difference between your company’s business model and their business model? (You don't have to mention the competitor specifically, instead just position your business model in a category of one. What makes you different?)
  - Why is our company’s business model (and therefore product strategy) long-term or short-term superior?
  - What is our unique advantage over the alternative? Phrase it in terms of what the customer will experience.
    - Premium dental care vs budget dental care. You don’t get a 10 year guarantee, if you go budget. Health is wealth. Pay it now or pay it later.
What is the personal experience that compelled you to working in this space? What's the personal journey that gets you excited about doing your job?
When should customers start talking to you? What are the "symptoms" that they should go to you for?
What’s the call to action for our audience to help you?
Very important to understand your customer and tell them stories that resonate. This understanding of “having been in their shoes” builds trust and resonance.
It's easy to get this wrong and sound salesy when you haven't really spoken to enough customers and can't ground this in stories that are factual / reflective of their day to day life.
Use Gong / Grain recordings of your sales calls to get this right:
- For example, on-prem vs the cloud
- "So they have clusters on premises they are using. And of course, given that they are shared, there is a limited set of resources, so queuing time for them to run the computation is an issue. That's why they are looking to maybe run the jobs in the cloud, but, the cost of the run might be the issue that they are afraid of"

Give these a try and let me know what you think.

Ira