On To The Next Adventure

For the first time in years, my name is not at the bottom of the Mattermark Daily or Raise The Bar newsletters. As of Tuesday, I’m no longer an employee of Mattermark.

My two years and eleven months there started with a DM to @DanielleMorrill, which I expanded on in my post “A Journey from My Tent in Afghanistan to Silicon Valley". This post is a brief reflection on two projects I spent much of my time working on at Mattermark and a personal announcement letting you know that I’m open to new opportunities.

I enjoyed curating newsletters for Mattermark, so to keep that going I’ll be writing my own with startup related content. Get my new weekly newsletter.

Building Passionate Communities

The Mattermark Daily

On September 22, 2014, the day I joined Mattermark, I started writing the Mattermark Daily. It was a bit overwhelming to send it on my first day, and it took nearly a month to get comfortable with writing it. Understanding the structure of the email, sources of content to follow, and how to know which articles to feature was a muscle that took some time to strengthen, but I think I figured it out. From my first day at Mattermark until my last, I grew the newsletter list from ~12,000 to ~105,000 subscribers. A good amount of organic press mentions, word-of-mouth, and incredible readers sharing the newsletter with their social networks drove that subscriber growth. Alongside the newsletter, there was no specific Twitter profile for Mattermark Daily when I started, so I created it. From my perspective, it was imperative to build a Twitter community around that brand outside of Mattermark’s own Twitter handle because the newsletter content was always so dynamic and nuanced. Since starting that in November 2014 it has grown to ~12,300 followers with lots of engagement every day. Thank you all for supporting the Mattermark Daily newsletter. ??

Raise The Bar

After Mattermark raised a Series B, it made sense to expand their target audience to the “modern sales” ecosystem. Modern sales is still an evolving cohort, but it mostly encompasses data-driven sales teams at businesses with (generally) 50+ employees building a software company. This expanded market was exciting to think of, begin developing products for, and simply learn more about. Mattermark’s blog was 90% focused on venture capital and startup ecosystem related content with Alex Wilhelm at the helm as the Editor-in-Chief. It took a concerted effort to reach out to and enable sales related writers to be guest contributors to Mattermark’s blog, but I managed to get the ball rolling. It was exciting to see “Sales Insights” (the post category) content published on the blog and to begin making headway into this new audience segment. Throughout this evolution, it occurred to me that the Mattermark Daily newsletter catered to a different audience than the new one we aimed to cultivate. With that insight and a couple of months of mulling it over, I brought up the idea to start a newsletter called Raise The Bar (based on one of Mattermark’s company values) specifically for the “modern sales” audience to read. The Mattermark team supported the idea and on December 31, 2016, Danielle Morrill, CEO of Mattermark, published the announcement “Raise the Bar: Our New Newsletter for Developing Sales, Marketing, & Growth Expertise”.

I was on vacation in LA thinking we’d launch it after New Year’s Eve break, but it was published, and we were off to the races. Within the past 8 months, Raise The Bar grew from 0 to ~8,000 subscribers. It was a whirlwind rethinking the newsletter structure, scrambling to collect as many quality sources as I could, and write two newsletters a day, but wow, it was worth it. Even though we had an existing community with the Mattermark Daily, I was able to build an entirely new one. Thank you all for supporting the Raise The Bar newsletter. ??

Looking Forward To Whatever’s Next

I’ve learned so much working at Mattermark and I’m grateful for the whole experience working with such a talented team!

I’m available and open to new opportunities. Feel free to reach out if you have anything interesting you want to discuss (intros welcomed).

Areas of interest; early stage startups, content marketing, newsletter curation (obviously), community building, investment portfolio support.

For fun, I’ll publish a weekly newsletter with great posts by investors, founders, sales, and marketing experts. I’d be so happy to have you as a reader! Subscribe here.

Let’s stay connected:

Twitter: @Thinker, LinkedIn, email: [email protected]

Thank you to Danielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, Andy Sparks, and everyone else at Mattermark that gave me the chance to work at such a great company.

Much love ??,

Nick