27 editions later - Has TalentFirst been worth the effort?

Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigá?ez and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.

Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.

Every week we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.

Summary:

?? 27 editions later - Has TalentFirst been worth the effort?

• Why we launched TalentFirst. What started for fun turned into a real business acceleration tool. Our intentions were very simple, sharing our founders' journey with the rest of the world and more specifically with our dear members, but we doubled down as we noticed significant traction.
• What have we learned while writing TalentFirst. We share some of the milestones TalentFirst has allowed us to reach but also a few lessons learned on the journey of writing weekly editions.
• Happy summer and see you back in September with full energy.

Can a newsletter contribute to the company’s mission?

Many have been there, asking themselves, should I start yet another newsletter? The world is full of newsletters so why should I spend my valuable time on creating another one? Is this really worth it?

We have asked ourselves those questions too, and to be frank we were hesitant, we were not sure we could get anything out of investing these many hours every week to share our perspectives on the talent space and our founders’ journey. This is our 27th release and we cannot believe we have made it this far.

In this post, we are about to dive deeper into how TalentFirst ended up contributing to our company’s mission in ways we didn’t anticipate and also take the chance to wish you a happy summer break as we will be back with our next edition in September. Let’s jump into it.

Started for fun, continued for business

Our approach to article writing started off with some sporadic attempts already in 2020. We released a few blog posts that were not designed as part of a recurring newsletter. That blog was our first attempt to share our journey on building Nova with the intention to start working on our SEO and also generate brand awareness.

We always felt that the talent topic increased in importance month after month and firmly believed that there is still so much to do in order to build talent-centric organizations and societies, this is why we launched Nova in the first place after all.

As we piled up a few articles and thanks to Substack and Linkedin newsletters became cooler once again and we decided to repurpose our blog efforts into a newsletter. This is when we introduced TalentFirst to the world. “Welcome to TalentFirst” presented our vision for the newsletter and elaborated on the key message that “Talentism is the new capitalism”, this was February 2023, ages ago if we think of how many things have happened at Nova in the meantime.

We have kept on posting without a set schedule based on when we had some spare time, in fact in 2023 we released only 6 editions. The turning point came when we noticed one interesting pattern, our daily website visits spiked significantly every time we would release a TalentFirst article, we are talking at least 3x compared to the average day. This was when Dani, our head of Marketing (aka automation ninja and chief emoji officer) came to us proposing that TalentFirst would turn into a more recurring effort aiming at one article per week. That meant taking a lot more time from us but we had the proof it served as a potential lead generation tool and we suspected it could serve multiple other purposes:

1. Since we launched the membership, talking more recurringly to our members meant making them part of our product roadmap but also our emotional and professional journey, establishing stronger virtual bonds with the key stakeholders of our business.
2. We could help other founders who might be facing similar challenges. In fact, if you read through some of our previous releases, we have been as transparent and frank as a human can be, sharing with the public some very sensitive and life-defining moments.
3. We could organically elevate Nova’s brand without investing money into paid channels.

After Dani’s proposal we didn’t doubt much, we were quickly convinced we could use this forum to expand the value created for both our business and for the world at large.

If you are wondering, all our articles are manually written by us, we sometimes ask OpenAI for a few facts and figures but the actual writing is on us. We feel like it’s hard to be genuine and close to our audience to the level we envision for TalentFirst.

What have we achieved in those 27th editions?

We don’t like to pat ourselves on the shoulders but we can be very proud of several milestones TalentFirst allowed us to reach:

1. We surpassed 32K subscribers on Linkedin, a number that goes beyond what we could have thought achievable in this short time.
2. Our weekly editions are read on average by 14.8K readers, our most-read edition was ?????? “The launch of the Nova membership ” series with 23K readers. We guess this is due to the topic being very important for our members but also because there aren’t many businesses that have launched a paid membership and have shared their journey so transparently.
3. Our average website’s daily visits in 12 months multiplied by 4. Of course, we cannot attribute this massive gain to only TalentFirst, but it keeps being a significant engine in our purely organic strategy. We are proud in fact to not have invested a dime in SEM or any Social Media since our launch.
4. Our teams also gained unique insights into our company history and vision as we didn’t explain everything in detail to all of them as some joined very recently. This turns them into more informed brand ambassadors and helps them better explain the company’s decisions to both members and customers. It’s not rare in fact that they would share a TalentFirst article to better explain our stand on certain topics.
5. Members do reach out expressing sometimes gratitude, sometimes offering feedback, or other times sharing their concerns about certain decisions. Establishing this communication bridge has been one of the most valuable outcomes for a community-based business like Nova.

We share these celebrations not to self-assign medals, but to encourage anyone among our readers who might be considering starting a recurring content generation project. If these few bullets are not a strong enough incentive, keep reading so we can share some of the lessons learned on this journey which we hope can make it easier for you to kick things off.

Every story has already been told, but not with your voice

We live in a world where information is overwhelming and it comes in different forms and shapes. From your Instagram feed to your favorite podcast (maybe the Nova one), it’s hard to tell something that hasn’t been already told. Why read our articles if you can listen to Jeff Bezos's experience in building Amazon, right?

This is what we thought too, we did not think we could cut through this noisy world.

However, the first realization is that while many stories have been told, your voice (our voice in this case) and experience are unique by definition, so it has to be the differentiating element of whatever you plan to start.

This is some of the best advice we would have shared with ourselves when starting:

1. Think of concrete stories to be genuine, original, and faster in producing valuable content We started off our Talent First editions focusing heavily on insights generation. This meant curating some external sources, sharing our unique perspective on specific topics, and adding value from a talent expert's perspective. Those editions worked very well however after a while we felt they took a lot of time to create with the level of quality we wanted. We then launched the edition that elaborated on the Nova Talent Report, “Your best employees might be on their way out” and towards the end of the article, we started to share for the first time specific anecdotes picked from a real day working at Nova. We believe that that subtle shift opened our eyes to how easily an edition could come together if we started to identify stories, good and bad, and extrapolate our learning for the readers. We don’t know if the audience appreciated but for us, it all became easier and more engaging.
2. Use a recurring pattern you and your readers can get familiar with As you can notice, every TalentFirst edition follows a similar scheme. A short introduction that stays the same for new readers and subscribers, a summary, a few main sections, and a conclusion. This recurring structure helps us write because it gives us the illusion that we are not starting from 0 all the time and our audience feels familiar with any new edition. If you are starting something out, don’t overthink each new chapter and define some common elements that can help you and the audience engage more.
3. Break content into series when you can We have released 2 series of editions, and both performed very well in terms of engagement. This is because, a bit like a Netflix series, you build some anticipation and expectations. A series of articles forces you to go deeper into a topic that might sound easy to cover in one article, while as you start to dive deeper allows you to extract much more value. Our series on the operating model and Community Building are 2 great examples of this approach.

There are many more lessons and mistakes, but we will stop here for now. This 27th edition is our last before the summer as we will take some time off to recalibrate and recharge our batteries and come back more inspired in September. Q3 and Q4 will be one of the most exciting quarters in Nova’s history as our product will soon include new features that our team has worked on for a while, no spoilers for now…but get ready for a great winter at Nova.

We take this chance to thank you for following TalentFirst every week and for reaching out with your suggestions, comments, and insights. As usual, if you enjoy the content, we’d be grateful if you?share it by email or social media?with other people who might like it or get inspired, even more so during their summer reads. Happy summer!

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