(Part 2/2) Content Marketing for Founders - Fundamentals, Challenges, Distribution Strategies (feat. Dessire Ugarte)
Krish Palaniappan
Developer & Architect @ Snowpal. We offer domain-agnostic APIs to reduce cost, risk, effort, & ultimately, time to market. Run in your infrastructure or pay by use/subscription on AWS Marketplace (products.snowpal.com).
In this podcast episode, Desi Ugarte discusses the importance of distribution in content marketing. She emphasizes that creating great content is not enough; it must be actively shared and distributed to reach the intended audience. Desi explains that distribution involves sharing content on various channels, such as social media, subreddits, and industry-specific platforms. She advises against giving up on content that doesn't initially perform well, suggesting that it may just need some adjustments or context. Desi also highlights the importance of persistence and not giving up, using examples from the music and business industries to illustrate the value of perseverance in content marketing. In this conversation, Dessi and Krish discuss various aspects of content marketing. They emphasize the importance of change and adaptation, encouraging entrepreneurs to be open to modifying their products and strategies. They also highlight the need to avoid being married to one idea and instead make incremental changes to improve content and products. The conversation delves into the debate of quality versus quantity in content marketing, with Dessi emphasizing the importance of resonating with the target audience. They also discuss the impact of language on content resonance and the considerations for choosing the right channels for content distribution. Finally, they explore the decision of hiring a developer versus hiring a content marketer and provide a summary of the key takeaways.
Takeaways
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
01:06 Recap of Previous Podcast and Introduction to Distribution
03:30 Importance of Distribution in Content Marketing
09:21 Types of Content and Channels for Distribution
13:44 Quality vs Quantity of Content
17:31 Dealing with Content that Doesn't Perform Well
22:27 Avoiding Dramatic Changes and Learning from Mistakes
27:07 Persistence and Not Giving Up
31:02 Examples of Persistence in Content Marketing
38:39 Importance of Setting Context in Content
43:29 Motivation to Keep Going
44:47 The Importance of Change and Adaptation
49:15 Don't Be Married to Your Ideas
50:36 Making Incremental Changes
56:48 Quality vs Quantity in Content Marketing
01:01:00 Language Considerations in Content Marketing
01:04:11 Choosing the Right Channels for Content Distribution
01:08:18 The Impact of Language on Content Resonance
01:21:46 Hiring a Developer vs Hiring a Content Marketer
01:27:20 Summary and Closing Thoughts
?Transcript
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (00:01.526)
Hey everyone, welcome to Snowpals Software Development and Architecture Podcast. We have a very special guest with us today. We have Desi Ugarte, who's a digital marketer with eight years of experience in the field. She has a diverse background in content marketing and has worked in the NGO sector. Desi founded a successful slow fashion marketplace in Guatemala. In the past three years, Desi has specialized in content marketing for developers and has worked for tech open source startups such as MedUSA, Strapi.
and currently AppSmith. Desi, thank you so much for taking time to having a conversation.
Dessi (00:36.906)
Thank you for the invite. I'm happy to be here.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (00:39.826)
And folks, this is the second podcast in this series. We're gonna have, I'm pretty sure it's more because the first one, please go back and watch it before you watch this one, so you get context to this podcast. In the first one, Desi told us what content marketing is, a number of examples. We talked about the what, the why, the who, and a bit of the how as well. How are you gonna create content?
You know how you need to keep your focus make it narrow enough So you're not trying to solve world hunger on day one I mean, I'm paraphrasing a lot of the conversations we had but definitely go check that out because there's some brilliantly technical content That they see shared with us and I don't want you to miss it. So with that said Let's continue the conversation where we left of this he was sorry very Interrupted you in the last podcast because I said let's save that for the next one was you were going to talk about
distribution, right? Let's start there. Can you tell us a little bit about distribution when it comes to content marketing?
Dessi (01:44.762)
Yeah, so distribution is very important. It's fundamental for content marketing. It's worthless to create content if you won't share it, if you won't distribute it, because you can create as much content as you want, but it's less likely to reach people without any effort.
Like it should be, you should have like a very well positioned website and it should be like an amazing article targeting specific keywords for it to reach an audience without you making any specific effort to distribute. So basically you have to distribute every, like the content you create. That's the basics of...
of content marketing.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (02:43.694)
So what you're saying is I cannot create this brilliant article, put it on my desk and wait for the world to come and see. That's not going to happen. No, right. But you know, but the tricky part is a lot of us know that creating brilliant content and putting it on a desk, obviously, I was just making a joke that will not reach. But where we all, a lot of us, including me, do not understand this. OK, I think I create content. I'm not putting it on my desk.
Dessi (02:51.415)
No. Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (03:12.554)
I'm just publishing it somewhere. And I'm like, okay, I've done my job. I created content, it's brilliant in my mind and I published it, my job is done. Let me move on to something else. No, my job is not done. And you know better than I know why it's not done. Please let us know why it's not done.
Dessi (03:16.585)
Yeah.
Dessi (03:26.08)
Yeah.
Dessi (03:30.17)
Yeah, so distributing your content is important because that's the way you will reach the people that you're trying to reach, the audience that you're trying to reach. So as I told you, it has to be a really great piece of content and you have, you must have already well positioned website or invest in a lot of content that is targeting specific keywords.
to actually have traffic on your website without doing absolutely anything. But usually that's not the way it works. You have to distribute it. And when I say distributed, it means sharing your content in different channels and not just social media, but there are so many channels where you can distribute your content. So
When you work in a bigger company, you're a content marketer that works in a company that has a lot of budget for the content marketing department. You have to build that distribution strategy, right? And you have to put all its distributing content takes a lot of time and effort. It's it's not just about, oh, I publish it on social media, especially when we are talking about social media nowadays.
saturated with so many content, right? So no, it's not just about, okay, I publish it and then my done is job. Bigger companies that have a specific content marketing department, they invest a lot of resources and there is some specific strategy, but if you have a small business and you're getting started, then it's important for you to define your channels.
and where it's most likely that your audience is looking for content. And in that specific channels is where you should share your content. So for example, let's say that you... Going back to the examples that I had already given in the past,
Dessi (05:47.446)
a backend developers. It's most likely that you will find them, let's say in YouTube, Twitter, or Reddit. You don't have to be in all of these channels, especially if you're getting started, because it's a lot. Creating content for social media, it takes time and it's a lot of effort, especially YouTube video content, it takes a lot of effort and time, right? So you can get started with one, let's say Twitter, and then take some time.
to research about this channel. What, how many times you should post every day, in what time, like it will depend on the audience that you're trying to reach. It's at the beginning, okay, let's say that at mornings it's more likely that I reach people. I will start using these specific hashtags that are related to my company.
So if my project is related to JavaScript, you can try to use one, two hashtags. Don't use too many hashtags because that can be spammy, right? So define some, try to research what are the basics you need to start sharing. And when you are getting started, share on your social media channels, not just on the social media.
channel that you created for your project or your company. You have to get started on your own social media platform because it's where you already have people. And there is people that will be, maybe they will not, your friends in your Twitter account won't consume what your product or the service, your service, but they can share, help you to share like.
retweet and that will help you to reach an audience, a bigger audience, someone that is actually interested. Then when we talk about social media, for example LinkedIn, Twitter, it's tricky, right? Having an organic, high volume of reaches is very difficult. But there are other ways to distribute, so you can share if you write a blog post and this is
Dessi (08:11.822)
Now here is how everything is connected. If you're creating a piece of content that is targeting a specific audience, you already know that your audience are developers that work in this specific industry, and they are back-end developers. Then your content will be around that. And that content, okay, you write a blog post in your website.
you can share that blog post as well in Medium or in DevTool or in Hashto, all the three of them. You can share it in there and then you can go to Reddit and look for subreddits that are where the people that is in those subreddits will be interested in this topic. So that is how the workflow of distribution usually works and there are more
factors that you can take into consideration to measure the results, to see what it works and what doesn't work. But to get started, you can get started in there.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (09:21.826)
Well, these are, it's lovely. There's so many points. I started to take notes and I'm like, I don't wanna miss anything. So I stopped writing and I was just listening to you, right? Let's go into these items even more. This is a brilliant foundation for this conversation. Now you mentioned that depending on what you're selling and who you're selling, you determine that you're gonna start distributing it. You figured that you're gonna have to write, not just write, actually let me pause there for a moment. I wanna ask something before.
Dessi (09:29.587)
I'm out.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (09:51.486)
We are talking distribution here, Desi, but you mentioned blogging and writing. Let's say, let me add a couple of more things and you tell me what else is there or how we should go about these items. Say videos, podcasting, articles on say LinkedIn or Medium, blogging of some kind. What else? What are some other things? Are these other...
Dessi (09:57.206)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (10:18.614)
Like I just started with two or three items. Like, can you tell us what other aspects are there in terms of content that I've completely missed here? And even if it's these items, how we should go about doing it.
Dessi (10:32.29)
I think that, so there are many types, like many types of content that you can create. Also email is very popular, email marketing, then also eBooks, white papers, case studies. You can create a lot of content. There is a lot of content stacks and you can create a lot of art blog. You can share one blog post every day. You can share two social media posts.
every day, one video every day, you can create a lot of content, which is for one person or two, three people company, it's too much, right? But let's say that you, that's your objective is to create as much content as possible. It, as I said before, it's useless if you don't.
have a distribution strategy in place, right? Or distributing your content, right? Not if you can put a strategy in place, but when you're getting started, you usually just get started, right? And I think the best is to put a few pieces out there, distribute the content, see what work, what piece of content is the one
that is people are actually liking commenting and so on and then a repurpose that piece of content. So if you publish let's say a blog post talking about how you can integrate your product going back to what we're talking right tech and let's say an open source project and how to integrate your project with another technology and
people are starting to liking it, to share it, leave comments and you get positive feedback, then create a video about it. Because that means that people wants to learn about it. So create one video explaining the same thing of the tutorial because it's really important to understand that not everyone consumes the same type of content. Like...
Dessi (12:51.498)
Some people like to read, some people like to watch videos, other people prefer podcasts. So if you already have one good piece of content, instead of creating one piece every day that is different and you are not measuring if it is working, you're not distributing, focus on a few pieces of content, distribute them and the one that performs the best, then repurpose it and then create a thread on Twitter or a carousel on...
Instagram or LinkedIn. There are different ways to repurpose that content or optimize it, improve it, because if it is already good it can be better. So I will say focus on quality content instead of quantity. Some people can... This is a controversial point.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (13:44.21)
No, we'll, okay. Yeah, I'm gonna interrupt you there. I'm gonna say, first of all, Desi, it's not fair. I thought when I got into this podcast, I thought you're gonna tell me, Krish, do this one little thing that you're not doing right, and that's it. That's all you have to do. But the more and more I talk to you, Desi, it sounds like you're telling us that we're gonna have to work harder, is what it sounds like to me. There's no silver bullet or the magic wand. I thought Desi's gonna say, Krish.
just do that one little thing you didn't do and that's it. Every problem is going to be solved. No, I'm just kidding. What you mentioned is brilliant because it resonates with me. I'm a developer just by way of background. I've been doing this for a long time. I've been writing, building code, writing software. And like I tell to a lot of the people, people who know me and the people who have starting to know through my podcasting, I have no other talents to be honest, right? The only talent I have...
Dessi (14:14.91)
No.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (14:38.582)
is being able to create software. And I'm not joking when I say that because I would have loved to know how to play an instrument. I have a lot of respect for musicians. I'd have loved to know how to draw because when you're trying to communicate something to your team, I rely on tools that where you write code and creates diagrams. That works for people like me because we don't have the skill to draw, but I really would like to draw. So I tell the team that this is exactly how I want for something to look like, but I cannot present my thoughts in a diagram unless I rely on a...
code to diagramming tool. And the reason I mentioned this is, even for somebody like me, who may or may not have the non-engineering skills, not the non-binary, like the zeros or ones, right? Content marketing as we're having this conversation, they see it's very technical, but it's also a lot of art is what it comes across to me as. It's not necessarily just science. If something were just science or just art,
Dessi (15:32.608)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (15:36.658)
Not that it's easy, but if it's just one or the other, I think it's relatively easier than if it's a mix of both. Unfortunately, many things in life happen to be a mix of both, as much as I would like for them to be one or the other. As you're talking through this, in my mind, I'm like, this is highly technical, the items you're talking about, what kind of content do you create? Who do you create that content for? How do you distribute that content? How do you tell?
Dessi (15:45.552)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (16:05.026)
whether this content is reaching the people you want for it to reach, what time you post this content. A lot of that is, it sounds subjective, but not really, right? There is a quantifiable mechanism because you are able to tell what works, what doesn't work, you go with the analytics and then you make those adjustments, right? But let me give you a difficult, I'm gonna give you a difficult quest. I, let's say, this is not a manufactured story, it's a true story, right? I do these technical podcasts.
Dessi (16:14.582)
and
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (16:33.142)
to share a lot of our experience as we build our products and solutions at Snowpals. We have B2B, B2C products, APIs, you name it, we've got something in that space. One of the things we do is we have a mobile app on the App Store and Play Store. And the app is built on Flutter and Dart. There was a time where we implemented caching. It was a complex implementation, but it's all some, it worked really well for us. It was a unique solution.
We came up with a design, we implemented it, and it worked brilliantly. And we were like, this is awesome. So we wanted to share it with the community. So we create a video explaining the problem, explaining the solution. And then we're like, this is golden. This is the content we've been waiting for. There's a difficult problem. We found out we came up with our own solution. It works in a brilliant manner. The world is going to just drink this Kool-Aid and absorb it. We post this content.
Dessi (17:10.251)
Mm.
Dessi (17:18.237)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (17:31.018)
and we get millions of views. No, I'm kidding. Everything I said was true up until the point where we got the millions of views. Now, this is a real example, even though it's a very specific example. If I told you, Desi, we did everything that we thought we should have done. What did we do wrong here?
Dessi (17:43.133)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (17:51.282)
It's funny what something you said, and it's something that I think it comes to our mind when we're getting started with content marketing. This piece of content that I'm creating is brilliant. So when I press publish, it will go viral, right? And it doesn't work like that. Like.
I mean, as I told you at the, in the first podcast at the beginning, there is content everywhere, everywhere. And we consume content from so many different platforms every day, all day long. Right. So your piece of content is one in, in thousands of pieces of content that go out every day.
And I will say your piece of content is probably there were three that were published around the world that were similar in the same day, you know, so just publishing is not enough. You have to share the piece of content and when you have already an audience, so let's say I can give an example. For example, when I started working.
at Strapi. Strapi is an open source product and they have a big audience. It's a big audience that uses the open source product because they also have pay tires. So when I joined the company, the audience was already there. So if I share something, let's say on Twitter, it's easier to reach people because there's already an audience in there.
But if you still don't have an audience built, if there isn't people that is already using, and in your case, right, that you just wanted to share it with the community because you felt that it was valuable, it was a process for you, a good learning, and you could save a lot of mistakes to others, which is the case with open source product, right? Giving to the community to help them save time in building things from scratch, right?
Dessi (20:18.866)
You have to share it in your case. You didn't have an audience. Okay. So, uh, share it in your social media channels. Who are most likely to be interested on this, on this topic, probably people that already use the platform or the technologies you used. So you can go to the subreddits of those technologies.
and share, hey, I wrote this tutorial to explain how I did this with this technology. And people are familiar because they are in that subreddit because they like that technology. You could actually even, which is something that I do when the people of the community in AppSmith, which is something that I used to do at Strapi as well, they reach out to me and they tell me, hey, I wrote this tutorial. We reviewed that the tutorial is actually accurate and everything. And if it is a...
an accurate tutorial. It doesn't have to be perfect, but if it is something created by the community, we share it because we find it very valuable that the community is taking time to actually create content. So you could have done that, for example, you could have reached out the technologies that you used or other. The thing is that when you create content, it's not just about creating. There's still a long process after creating it. And
If that distribution doesn't, like if you don't see any results, that could mean as well that the piece of content wasn't as good as you thought. And that's okay as well. That's normal. And in content marketing, we sometimes I feel that have a hard time accepting that out loud. We publish a lot of content that in the end we thought it was going to be good.
but it wasn't good and it didn't have the results that we expected. We did the contribution process. We did everything right. It didn't have like any re but why, why didn't work? Because the piece of content wasn't that good. And that's okay as well.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (22:27.55)
Wow. So this is many things you said there, right? You mentioned, okay, you create the content, you believe the content is good, and maybe it's good, maybe it's not. You find out. And even if it's good content, you need to distribute that. We'll go back to the distribution that we started at the beginning of this podcast, right? Now I created this content. It is no good if I did not distribute it to the right channels. That's the starting point.
I want to come back to the type of content. That's why I digressed a little bit, but going back to the earlier part of what you were trying to explain there. This is a video content and you post it and you mentioned you figure if it's Flutter, you try to find the communities that are interested in Flutter and you post it over there because just posting it in a random place, I mean, just because, you know, let me pause for a moment and talk about this for a second slightly differently. We posted this on many places, including YouTube.
And then when we didn't see the response we were expecting or hoping I should say, I was like, okay, try to dig a little bit deeper into YouTube as a platform. How much content is getting posted to YouTube? And I did the math, Desi. I'm gonna ask this question just to see like a quiz. On any given day, if I asked you, Desi, how much do you think gets uploaded to YouTube?
Dessi (23:36.307)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (23:53.538)
Do you have like a number, like the amount of content, like video content that gets uploaded to YouTube on a single day in a 24 hour period? Do you want to take a guess on what that, the size of that content is?
Dessi (24:08.462)
I don't know, but I am pretty sure it's more than a million.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (24:13.158)
No, I'll tell you what I did was, and this was from some time ago, so hopefully the math is correct. I just looked up, I didn't find this number anywhere, but I was curious, so I'm gonna share it and take it to the grain of salt. If a baby were born at midnight, right? A baby was born at midnight, and then 24 hours go by, and the baby turns to be one day old, right? Just one day, the baby's like a new baby, one day old. Imagine for a moment that there was no other content on YouTube.
Dessi (24:18.24)
Yeah.
Dessi (24:23.046)
Yeah.
Dessi (24:28.935)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (24:42.446)
prayer to the time the baby was born. Like 11.59 p.m., 59th second of the previous day, pretend that YouTube had zero content. And pretend that after the first day, YouTube will not have any new content either. So all the content that is going to be on YouTube is only what got posted during that 24 hour period. Now the baby grows up. I wanted to ask myself to, I was just talking to my mom, actually, I want to explain it to my mother.
And I've come up with better examples when I've actually been able to explain software to my mom who's very smart, but she's not an engineer. So I have to have other examples to explain engineering. And it's actually broadened my skills of being able to explain to folks who may not be in this space. And I asked my mom the same question. As it turns out, they see the number that I calculated is, if the baby wanted to watch every piece of content that got uploaded to YouTube in the 24 hour period and nothing else before or after,
We are making those assumptions, right? There was no content before, there's no content after. The math, if my math is more or less accurate, I think the baby would need to be 90 years of age before that baby can actually consume that content that was posted on that one day. I needed to do that for my own sanity because when I posted this, I was like, even if it's my own opinion of us creating this problem, solving this problem and posting it, even though...
Dessi (25:44.834)
Mm.
Dessi (25:57.25)
See ya.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (26:10.346)
maybe it was not content good enough to go viral, I don't know, but you sometimes believe that the content deserves more views than it may have gotten. You know what I mean, whatever the number is. In our case, it was very simple because I think it got two views, like which a lot of what we post on YouTube still hovers around that range. And even the two, you have to take it to the grain of salt because my mom supports her son. So she's very diligently watching this, even if she doesn't understand head or tail.
Dessi (26:19.486)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (26:24.296)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (26:37.61)
So if I say two views, one of it is my own mom. So it really was one other person possibly, right? So now you're wondering, this is terrible. This content cannot be so bad that only two people found value in this. Then you realize people have a lot to consume. It's YouTube alone has, the baby has to turn 90 years of age if that number is even remotely true. If you try to digest that for a second, it's just absolutely insane. So how do you find? So we are at the mercy of algorithms.
Dessi (27:01.77)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (27:07.318)
technology and a lot of the, even, you know, it might sound hypocritical being in the world of software calling that we are at the mercy of technology, but that is the truth, right? That is the truth. Sorry for this long winded example there, but let's say we created that content, we posted it. We posted that on LinkedIn, on Medium, on YouTube. Is there a point where you give up on that particular piece of content and do something else?
or before you give up on that single piece of, I mean, it's not a big deal to give up on one single piece of content, but I'm just saying it could be not just one content, it could be an approach that you're giving up on. It could be a methodology that you're giving up on, right? It's not just a single video because that's much easier to give up on. Does there come a point where you're like, nah, this is not working, we must be doing something fundamentally wrong? And how do we help ourselves to getting to that point of revelation? Because it doesn't happen soon enough.
Dessi (27:51.212)
Yeah.
Dessi (28:06.914)
So I think it depends. It depends on the priorities that you have, that your business have, that you as a, if you're a founder, if you're as a founder, you have. If the message that you're sharing in that piece of content is the basics of everything, then you could give it a try by.
sharing the message in a different way. So not giving up to the, I will say don't give up to that piece of content that easily, but transform it, give it, yeah, something that we were talking at the beginning, the storytelling might be wrong. You can go through it and it's okay. It's okay to like say, okay, this didn't work and try to redo it and.
Let's say if it is a blog post, okay, it's not about writing a new blog post but changing that piece of editing that piece of content day doing some benchmarking if You're trying to target some keywords. So do a keywords research so you can Try to give it another Continue not giving up on the piece of content basically, but if
You have a lot of things in your to do, right? A lot of things you're trying to communicate. This was not the biggest and most important message. You already posted them, reposted them, distributed the content that didn't work, then give up to it and jump to the next one. Because it's, as I mentioned it before, it's okay.
It's okay to have a piece of content that is not performing well. If you already posted once, then reposted two, three times more in the, in two weeks, let's say, if you already distributed it in different subreddits, a charity, hacker news, then posted it in medium that in nowhere, it didn't perform in any place. If you didn't get any feedback.
Dessi (30:30.014)
Probably it's, it's time to move on. Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (30:34.214)
move on to the next one, right? Beautiful. So let me take two examples, but I'm gonna take two examples to sort of make that point, you know, share my two cents on it. I'll take the example of one of my favorite, my most favorite composer. His name is A.R. Rahman, right? He's an Indian composer who composes music. I would say predominantly in India, but he does a lot of fabbitt work in Hollywood and in the US and the West as well.
He was a composer for like Slumdog Millionaire, if you watch that. It was not one of his best, not even close to his best compositions, but he got like a couple of Oscars and Grammys for that. I want to take that as an example because he's been composing music for 30 years. And I almost exclusively only listen to his compositions, right? It's just very close to my heart. He got and after doing that for 20 years, he became very popular. I mean, he's been popular for a long time, but he became popular in the US as well. You know, to the point a lot of people do.
recognize his name or face after he got those Grammys and Oscars. Now, I want to take that as an example. If he treated that as content for a moment, right? If he treated music as content, is that his best composition? No. Is that close to one of his best compositions?
Dessi (31:42.248)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (31:49.116)
Sorry.
Can you hear me? OK. OK, can you repeat again the question?
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (31:52.938)
Yep, yeah, I can hear you.
Oh, sorry, sorry. Now I was just saying, I was just taking an example of this composer, Rahman, right? He got a couple of Oscars for this movie. I was just saying that, was that his best composition ever? Not really. Was it even close to one of his best compositions? In my opinion, not even close, not even close, right? He's got a lot of other brilliant albums and compositions and some of his best compositions.
Dessi (32:03.957)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (32:08.98)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (32:13.819)
and
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (32:22.194)
actually were the biggest flops, I think, right? From a monetary standpoint. Now what inspires me, you know, you take, draw inspiration from a lot of people as humans, right? We find inspiration from different sources. The inspiration that I take, excuse me, personally, Desi from him is, just because he may have spent six months on a particular album and he gave his time and it was not popular, it was not a hit, it was a flop, it was an utter flop, I should say, right? In some cases.
that does not reflect in his next composition or the one after, because every next composition is as though he's starting afresh. What happened previously should have no bearing or imp... I mean, you have some learnings, sure, but you have to be careful about those learnings because some of the mistakes I've made and I continue to make is you do something, like you create a piece of content, right? I'm talking content marketing, but this is applicable to things beyond content marketing. You don't expect, find the results you're expecting.
Dessi (33:05.066)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (33:22.218)
you make seismic changes, dramatically changes. And then the next thing doesn't work, you make dramatically changes. And that pattern keeps continuing, right? Now, if Rehman did that, I'm not sure it would have helped him. If there were two flops or three consecutive flops, he's had a lot of those. The approach to making music, I don't think has fundamentally changed from what I see. He gives it his best, he approaches every problem as though it is unique, even though he probably is...
Dessi (33:36.452)
I'm in.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (33:50.882)
carrying over some learnings. All I'm trying to make, making a long winded point here, which is you need to have some learnings from the mistakes, but you have to be careful not to have the wrong learnings meaning. Maybe you created good content, maybe you posted it, maybe it was not just the right, there needs to be an element of luck as well. If you make dramatically changes, then you're not gonna help yourself, but you're gonna hurt yourself, but it's very human to want to make those dramatic changes.
I mean, first of all, does that make sense to you? And if it does, how do you recommend we approach this?
Dessi (34:26.342)
Yeah, I think as you said, making dramatic changes to your strut like, okay, if this didn't work, then I will make the opposite next time. That doesn't in my work, but it might not necessarily work, you know? And it will be tricky question because it will depend. I think.
For example, if you come to me with a piece of content that you tell me, okay, what do you think I can give you? Like, okay, I can give you my feedback. Right. I think this, I think you can change this and that and try this new thing. Right. And all any view and or I could tell you, yeah, this doesn't work. I don't think this will ever work. You should change it completely. Right.
It's very particular for each case, I will say, but I don't think if you already have something in place that is based on things that you read or not on instinct, because I know that I usually we say, okay, I have this great idea and I will go for it. I will follow my instinct, but it doesn't work like that. You really do need to.
Maybe you don't work in a big company and do a specific research, but you can do your research on what is working right now. If this is your audience, where it's more likely that this audience will be. You have to base the things that you are doing on something, not on instinct. Right? So if you're basing the things that you're doing on something specific, you're not inventing like...
you're not inventing how your strategy of content marketing works. It's based, based on something. Then I will say, don't change it completely because as you said, maybe that piece of content was really good, but it lacked context. It lacked something you skipped one step. There was something that was missing maybe at the beginning that it didn't give, uh, you're, you wrote a blog post, but at the beginning of the blog post.
Dessi (36:44.49)
you didn't give context to people. So they came to the piece of content, they thought what is this person is talking about and then they left. So that means that you don't have to change everything but you didn't give enough context or sometimes it's also not the right moment for that piece of content. As you said, the fact that it doesn't perform that well, it doesn't mean that the content that is in there, it doesn't have that.
it can have value but maybe it's not the most valuable thing for your audience and that is why you have to question yourself okay this is valuable but not enough so what is the audience expecting and also those do my product can could my product bring that value to the people because that way then maybe you should change everything in your content strategy
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (37:41.342)
You know, lovely, right? You said something there. I want to restate it just so people, you know, just want to say it again. You mentioned that you write a post. Maybe it's good, but in the first paragraph, you probably didn't set the context well. Now, you know, it sounds like a simple enough mistake, but when I hear you say it, they say it resonates with me, right? Very strongly, because a lot of times when you write this, you have thoughts and you capture those thoughts.
and say on Medium or LinkedIn. How many times have I thought about the first paragraph and setting the context consciously speaking, right? You're writing some, as an engineer, you're doing something, you wanna write something, you go back there, you write a post and you hit publish and you think it's fine. Maybe there is value in that post, maybe the first paragraph didn't set the foundation right. So even a simple mistake like that can cost you that person reading it or resharing it, right? So...
Dessi (38:18.248)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (38:32.432)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (38:39.234)
The unfortunately, you know, when you code, when you make a mistake, the compiler will tell you if it's a compiled language. Otherwise the interpreter is gonna tell you at some point, but what I'm saying is it's gonna be, hey Krish, this doesn't work. It doesn't make sense, or it's gonna have these red squiggly lines. Or even if it doesn't have the red squiggly lines, when you test it, it doesn't work, right? And maybe even if it does work, your test pass,
Dessi (38:56.362)
No.
Dessi (39:01.821)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (39:04.894)
It goes to the testing team or the functional, somebody else is doing user, you know, customer testing or UTA or whatnot. When it goes to the user acceptance testing, somebody figures out that this does not work in these other cases, for instance. These are more concrete, right? But unfortunately, when it comes to content marketing, that feedback is not, it cannot be, it's just subjective. It is not concrete. I mean, sure you can run analytics again, figure out later.
but that feedback may or may not be immediate, correct? So that makes it all the more challenging because you're not sure if this thing works, if it doesn't work. And even if you, you know, if things are hunky dory and you get millions of views, there's no problem. But it's like, you know, if you write code and you never have bugs, you would never learn how to write better code because you got lucky all the time. The only time you learn how to write better code is when your code does not scale. Then you figure out what are scalable issues, what are performance issues.
Dessi (39:41.781)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (40:03.778)
How can I architect this better the next time? If everything you did turn into gold, it's awesome if it continue to behave that way, otherwise there is gonna be a bit of a problem, right? So I just want to reiterate the beautiful thing that you just said. It could be a great article, just didn't have a great start to the article, so it's no good. I have a related question, but let me give you a second example. I watched last week tonight, yesterday, John Oliver's last week tonight. I don't know if you watched that show. I love John Oliver.
Dessi (40:20.844)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (40:30.82)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (40:32.542)
He talked about Elon Musk, that was from yesterday, I believe, right? Now Musk, some people love him, some not so much, right? He's one of those personalities. But regardless, I recommend that people watch it because John Oliver, I personally like him. He mentioned that, he took an example, right? He said some good things, not so good things. He said people are on both sides of the Musk front. I think the SpaceX had four launches.
Dessi (40:41.398)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (41:02.262)
The first four launches failed. And if he, I believe it's the fourth, I believe the third one fail or the fourth one fail, I don't recall, it's one of those. He had one last attempt at getting that done, right? One last attempt. Otherwise they would have had to shut down the company. It turned out all right. It was a successful launch. And now SpaceX is valued at $180 billion as a private company. Now, I mean, it's...
Probably inarguable that Musk is one of the biggest geniuses of our times. But even for such a genius, if that next attempt failed then Musk could have been a failed SpaceX founder, right? That he did not get that to work. Does that change the truth of his intellect or intelligence? Not really, but it changes the world's perspective of what somebody can or cannot do. Now, the reason I mentioned that is
Dessi (41:43.668)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (41:56.191)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (41:58.966)
They asked him, what would have happened? Would you have given up at that point? He goes, no, giving up was never an option. Now you could say, you know, you could react to it one of two ways. Sure, if you're the world's richest man, maybe giving up doesn't have to be an option, but he was not born the world's richest man, right? He became the world's richest man by not giving up. So I think it was very profound hearing it from even him saying that, because you know, this is very casual in his conversation.
No, giving up is never an option. Now, I wanna take that and add my toes in saying every step of this journey in building a business, this thought is gonna crop up all the time. It's an easy thing to do, right? It's difficult and easy at the same time. You know what? I keep writing, I keep blogging, I keep creating content, things don't work out and you're like, you know what? Maybe I have other talents, maybe this is not the talent I have, right? That's a possibility.
Dessi (42:41.953)
Mm-hmm.
领英推荐
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (42:59.126)
But I think it's a terrible advice to give somebody because unless you give up on yourself, nothing is lost, correct? Unless you keep trying. So I just want to reiterate the point because having gone through this journey personally, I created content not with a purpose years ago. I've been writing and creating content because I enjoy doing that as an engineer. You're writing code, this was a break from the routine. I started doing this initially thinking it was
Dessi (43:09.782)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (43:29.358)
relaxation? Yes and no, right? It is enjoyable to create this, but it's not relaxation, right? It's very stressful too. It's got a lot of technicalities like you mentioned. So if someone came to you and said, they say, I've tried everything. I've created content. I think I've posted in different places. Things are not working. What would be your, if you had, if you were forced to motivate this person? I know
Dessi (43:36.958)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (43:57.862)
Self-motivation is the best solution. But if you had to motivate people, what would you tell people? They could be out of college, they could have done this for many years, they could have done this for like three decades. It does not matter, right? What would be your advice to people who try it, still haven't gotten content to actually work?
Dessi (44:17.826)
So I think I agree if you should not give up with what you said about not giving up. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. If you truly believe in what you're doing, you should not give up. And even if you failed, you're already focusing on content marketing. You already publish a lot of blog posts. Share on social media, share on different subreddits. Nothing, right?
But you really want this to work. You truly believe in yourself, in your product. Okay, yeah, it's don't give up, but you cannot continue doing the same thing. Because it won't work. It didn't work. It's most likely that it won't work. And I don't think people that don't give up
is they keep doing the same thing you need to and here this is connected with what we were talking before. Should I change everything? Should I just modify a few things? You can get started by modifying a few things but if you keep trying, keep trying, keep trying, changing a few things, base yourself in research, I will say maybe your product is actually not solving any issue. That's that's the thought.
that comes to my mind when if you come and tell me that you have tried everything and you have based the work that you have done in research, right? Probably your product, you thought it was a great idea, but it was actually not solving a specific problem. That is why people cannot relate to it and people doesn't agree with you and your content. So
Do you have to give up? No, but you have to be open to change. And this is a learning that I had when I started the business in Guatemala, that I should never get married with the idea of my starting idea of my business. Don't marry with that idea because that blinds you.
Dessi (46:40.578)
If you're married to the idea, then you think you wanted to make it work, even if it doesn't solve people's problems. And then you are condemning, you are setting yourself to fail. So don't, you can be sure of yourself, be sure of a project that
can have different phases that can evolve in different directions if the first direction doesn't work. So that is what I will say about not giving up. Okay, don't give up, but don't marry one idea because if that idea doesn't work, it won't work. And yeah, and sometimes I think it cannot.
It can be something as simple as that it's a good idea, but it's not the right moment, you know? So be open to change the product, the way you communicate to everything. And also something that is possible is that it could be a great idea right now. And people consume your content, consume your product, your service. But tomorrow it will stop working because the world evolves.
And you have to be open to change like what happened to Blockbuster. That's the perfect example. It worked. It was a great idea. People consumed it, consumed that and people could relate. But the world evolved and Blockbuster didn't evolve. They were married with the idea. The idea was a success at the beginning. So open.
being open to change and that's a must in content marketing because content marketing is evolving every day. So you have to be learning and open to change as well.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (48:46.946)
You know, I'm going to tell if people forget everything about the conversation, they should go back. I'm going to jot this down. Minute 45 to 48 of what Desi is saying. I hope people watch every minute of this because it's what you're sharing is absolutely brilliant. But I want to reiterate what you said in the last three minutes, which is just couldn't have been said any better and more succinctly. You said do not be mad at the idea. This is it's such an important statement, Desi.
And it's easier said than done sometimes because you know, we start this whole thing because we believe in what we're doing. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. It takes a lot of sacrifice to quit something else, not make that money and start doing something of your own, meaning you actually truly believe in solving that problem. And then when you in reality sets in at some point thinking, you know what? Maybe this is not what I anticipated or maybe your third point. Let me connect it to the first one, which is.
Dessi (49:18.731)
and it's.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (49:42.43)
Maybe there was a problem when you started solving it, maybe two years went by or three years went by, you have a fantastic solution, except that the market dynamics have changed. The macro and microeconomics has changed so much that isn't the problem, the way you actually envision that to be. So if you now are married to that idea, it's a problem. And now here is where there is a conundrum, right? You've invested three years of your time into that effort.
You've given everything you possibly can. And you're not sure, you know, I'm not sure if you've seen the graphic where somebody's like digging in a tunnel and they're trying to strike gold or diamond, and they just give up right before the last moment. But because we don't know how far we have gone. So it's very hard to tell whether we are close but not close enough, or if this idea is not as good as an idea. So these are very difficult questions with no straightforward answers.
Dessi (50:29.282)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (50:34.653)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (50:36.354)
But I think we need to ask ourselves those questions very, very consistently, right? So it's beautifully said. And the second thing you said there was, do not give up, but that does not mean you don't change what you're doing, right? I wanna reiterate that point. We're gonna have to make those changes because you can't, you know, I think it was one of Albert Einstein's code, right? You can't repeat the same actions and expect different results. It just doesn't happen. But I wanna add one more thing there.
Dessi (50:49.905)
Yeah.
Dessi (51:01.659)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (51:04.702)
I'm going to take a coding example because that's the only thing I can think of at this time. When you're debugging something, say you're addressing a scalability problem or maybe a feature bug or something. Sometimes I've seen developers, even good developers, make like four different changes, four different changes to try and solve the problem. Now let me take a different example as well to give a slightly different context but very related.
Let's say you write 200 lines of code and things don't work. Maybe this might be a better example than the other one, I don't know. If you write 200 lines of code without testing, and then something doesn't work, now you have to debug 200 lines of code that you just wrote, right? It doesn't make any sense. If you wrote 20 lines of code, and then confirm that it worked before you wrote the 21st line of code, then if something did not work, you only have to...
debug the last 20 lines of code that you wrote, not the last 200 lines of code that you wrote. And what I mean by that is you have to make changes, but those changes have to be ever so slightly different. Meaning, if you make drastic changes and things don't work, how do you tell what works and what doesn't work? I think it's important to change, but it's also important to change in incremental manner, not in exponential manner. I mean, does that make sense?
Dessi (52:19.87)
Yeah.
Dessi (52:26.802)
Yeah, exactly.
Dessi (52:30.95)
Yeah, I think that's a mistake sometimes people make when something fails. We feel like it fails. It didn't work. It failed. So I'll stop or I'll change completely. And then you could have changed something. You could have, okay, research. Okay, did I structure well the content that I was?
that I put together, let's say a blog post, did an introduction to the blog post, did I give enough context or information and then not taking the time to step back, look at what you did, see how you can improve it, how you can change it and just quitting to it. You don't know. You have no idea if there was missing just one thing.
for it to succeed. And that's, it's linked to what we were talking, quitting, quitting to just giving up because it didn't work, which I did want to mention. It's okay as well to give up on something. If you don't have the energy anymore because you're to burn out because there's also a lot of guilt sometimes. And this happens with startups as well. You want it to work and you try and you try
you are in a point that you're burned out about putting so much energy in it didn't work and it's okay to step back say this is not the moment try something else and then you can maybe come back with a different idea or the idea more evolved that's okay as well i said okay it's fine like keep pushing for it but if you don't feel like keep pushing for it that's okay as well but if you keep pushing for it
Don't keep pushing for the same thing without changes. And don't, as you said, don't make dramatically changes that don't let you understand what is working, what is not working.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (54:38.09)
Perfect, right? So giving up is, you're saying it's okay to give up on maybe an idea because it may have, you've given everything you possibly could, things change and it doesn't work. You're not giving up on yourself. That's the bigger problem, right? You go to the next idea, you try to work on the next thing. If it doesn't work, you go to the third, because you know, you see examples of people who've tried 10 or 12 different things before the 13th one made all of the difference, for instance, right? And then it's important to appreciate the journey because the destination maybe is important.
Dessi (54:51.456)
and
Dessi (55:02.538)
Yeah.
Dessi (55:06.219)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (55:07.81)
But I think the journey is no less important, correct? It's, you know, I think I read someone's code that said, you know, spurts of happiness along the way probably are more important than this one thing that you wanna achieve, right? Let's say I will only be happy when I get that first million or the 10th million or whatever that target is for you, as opposed to appreciating little things, you know, small victories, right? Small victories.
Dessi (55:10.838)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (55:34.614)
You've never ever written before. You muster the courage to write and you hit publish. That's a big step because I can tell you, I know a lot of developers who've never written and blogged and I tell people I read somewhere that it actually improves your engineering abilities if you actually start blogging. And then people are like, oh, I didn't know that, but it doesn't matter. Whatever it is that you're uncomfortable doing, you're gonna have to try doing it. That's only way.
Dessi (55:53.326)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (56:02.71)
That's the only way for you to become comfortable or become less uncomfortable doing that same thing, for instance, right? I think it's important to recognize that. But you mentioned quality and quantity, and you said that it's a controversial topic and we didn't go into that. Now, let me throw this question. I think, I'm just saying, if I play the, let's say I wear this hat and I play the character that says, you know, Desi, quality doesn't matter.
Dessi (56:07.285)
Yeah.
Dessi (56:17.472)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (56:30.398)
If I publish to every possible platform, I do it 10 times a day, I create lots of videos, lots of images, lots of content, something is gonna work because I'm casting this wide net. Why should I focus on quality if quantity is the way to go? What would you say for that?
Dessi (56:48.91)
The reason why I say it's a controversial topic is because it's a conversation that I have had with a few people so far. Quantity over quality, right? And there have been a few people that tell me, you know, after ChatGPT started and me as a content marketer, I started creating content with ChatGPT, right?
It's really easy. You make a question, then you publish that in your blog. You're targeting certain keywords. Then you're sharing the content, and then you will attract a lot of traffic to the website because you're targeting a lot of keywords that are popular. And you do it with five articles every day because you're not writing it. You're not focusing on the.
on the quality but on the quantity and it is actually working. It is actually attracting a lot of traffic to your website. So when I hear that, I'm like, okay, so your value, the value for you is traffic, right? That's the only goal that you're looking for with your content marketing strategy. What happens then with the people that arrive
to your website. What do they do? They read what they needed to read and then they leave, right? You're not, it's very likely you're not converting that those people that are arriving to your website because you're just giving them information. The content is just informational. It's not a transactional. You're not giving something extra for them to try it out. The product, you know?
you, the conversion doesn't happen beyond website views and traffic. I, it's, I cannot think right now, maybe a news, a news, uh, website that could work perfectly well, right? Like this Buzzfeed that they rely a lot of on AI generated content. It works because that's a success metric for them.
Dessi (59:07.622)
But for let's talk about an open source product, a tech startup. Probably you want people to convert to try your product. You're the amount of the you are creating a lot of content every day, but it's very likely people are converting. So it's actually not useful, you know? So that is why I say it's.
very controversial because it depends on your success metrics. And here is when things become like more higher level and when the business is growing, you really have to define what are your goals in content marketing? What are you trying to do? Is it website traffic? But okay. Or is it retention on the content? Like how many minutes people spend on your content or is actually conversion?
and conversion for you is clicks, clicks on the call to action, or it's actually project creation. Like what is your goal with content marketing? And it's, it's not as simple as I'm telling it to you right now, because actually you can have a few different goals. And that is why the tops, the funnel stages in marketing exist, because you have different
pieces of content that will target different funnel stages. You can have top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel content. But here is more specific for content marketers. Or even it could be, for example, an engineer founder in a startup, but if you're at that stage, I will say, okay, hire a content marketer and that person will take care of it.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:01:00.478)
You know, this is, I thought when I click record, I was gonna have a very casual, relaxing conversation about content marketing. This is much more technical than the bug I would have worked on solving, to be honest with you. This is extremely technical. So I wanna say, what you mentioned there was, you mentioned you have to define your success metric. If your success metric is just coming to the page and reading it, great. But if that means to translate to conversions, then maybe quantity may not.
Dessi (01:01:13.634)
Oh, my God.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:01:28.746)
necessarily be the answer, right? If you can have quality and quantity, sure, why not? If you can have the cake and eat it too, that's great. But if you can't have the cake and eat it too, you're gonna have to make some conscious decisions. Because when you read these articles, it's not terribly difficult sometimes to tell, at least at this early stages of chat GPD. For me, when I'm reading something, somehow I feel like when humans are writing it, there seems to be this personal touch and I feel that personal connection is perhaps missing.
Dessi (01:01:29.781)
Yeah.
Dessi (01:01:51.882)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:01:55.814)
AI is going to get smarter. Maybe it'll bridge that gap. But till that happens, there is an element of human personalization, if you will, that humans are bringing to the table. So the quality does matter. In those cases, when you're reading it, does it resonate with you? Can I connect to that writing? Can I connect to that video? How does it make me feel after I watch it or after I read it? It's almost like an aftertaste as well. Sometimes you go to a place you have...
Dessi (01:02:04.904)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:02:25.43)
have this dessert, it's great, right? But after you eat it, you have this guilt conscience, like should I have eaten this? Maybe, maybe not. You know, I call it the aftertaste. You know, I have a different aftertaste after I eat bok choy and garlic. Maybe it's not super attractive when I'm eating it, not necessarily not all the time, but after I eat bok choy and garlic, I feel great aftertaste, meaning I feel no guilt, I feel.
Dessi (01:02:46.518)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:02:53.802)
I feel like I did a workout or something of that nature. Even if it's a silly example, I think it's important to recognize that after you consume content, how does it make you feel about that? I mean, do you wanna consume the same type of content repeatedly? So, right? Your points are super technical to the point. Each of them, if I made notes, I'll have like a hundred questions about each of those items. But this, I think that there's a lot more I wanna cover, but I've...
Dessi (01:03:07.68)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:03:23.958)
this, I'm trying to see if the audience should digest this before we take it, continue this conversation. At least for me, I have a lot more questions. Are there items, let me ask you a couple of things. This is, if people are watching this, if they're like, hey, can a content marketer who's a lot more experienced, a lot smarter than I am, tell us what are some places we should possibly post or distribute this content to? Like in your experience,
If you could recommend a few places that folks watching this and assume that they are gonna be engineers or developers who may not have done this before, some of them may be in this space, some may be not. If they have to get started, what would be some tips that you might give them for them to get started?
Dessi (01:04:11.098)
Yeah, so for the general audience, it will depend. It will depend on who's your target audience, what's your product. But if we talk about specifically about engineer, founders that are getting started with their project or business, first I will say what we said at the beginning, you have to be sure who is your audience, right?
And then I will say, get started with one channel. Don't get overwhelmed to be everywhere. Don't, I have to be on LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube. No, you get started with one channel. It's the best. Top two channels. And the audience, if you're an engineer, usually where are engineers consuming content? In my experience, the best channels might be Twitter.
They might be Reddit and YouTube. But it also depends on your audience as well. So are you targeting back in? And here is the specifics are important because do you wanna talk with the engineers is just to try your open source project or engineering managers, decision makers, because then.
the channel might change, then it might be linkering instead of Twitter, you know, so define, give it a try, trying it out and not working is okay as well, and then you can try another channel and then try little by little and then I will say, the more specific it is, your content will always be on the same line.
You will always give in value to the around a specific topic. And that is why it's very important to understand who you are talking to, because that way, your guides, your tutorials, and what you are communicating will resound and make sense because these are pinpoints that these people are having every day. You're not talking one day to.
Dessi (01:06:32.47)
some engineers and then with decision-makers and then everything is all over the place and then people is not engaging because they don't know what to expect from what you will share. So, it's good if you're getting started, it's good for you to focus. When the company starts growing, it changes. It becomes a bit more complex. But at the beginning, the best you can do is...
to get started in one point and choose your channels. And also it's important that if you work, if you will focus on video content, choose Twitch or YouTube or one specific channel. Don't go one day on this platform, the other day on the other one, because then it becomes confusing too much for you. It's beginning one channel.
Blog content, do you have a website? If you don't have one website, go medium or dev2. Choose one and stay there. You can republish in other places, but centralize your content in one place, like a hub of content.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:07:51.378)
Again, another set of brilliant points that we'll have to go into deeper and deeper, but let me ask you the language that we need. Let me take an example, right? Let's say I have great content and I've found good ways to publish that or distribute that content. I could be making several mistakes and we talked about a number of mistakes that we could make and we could possibly, we should try to avoid. One thing we may not have talked about so far, I wanna bring that up here is language.
If I created brilliant content and published that purely in English, in videos and in articles, and I was targeting, say, South America, right? I had the opportunity to work with some brilliant people, engineers, and product managers based out of South America in the last few years. I'm looking forward to doing more work in that space, in that region. But I noticed...
Spanish and then if you go to Brazil Portuguese for instance, those are the more common languages Now would I be correct in saying if I created great content but only resorted to english as the language And targeted south america, I could possibly fall short. Is that a fair statement to make? What are your thoughts on?
Dessi (01:08:49.972)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (01:09:08.735)
Uh, I, for me, it doesn't make sense if your, your audience is in South America to, I understand maybe the intention for everyone to understand. So English is the most speaking language. So then I will write it in or create it in English. But then if your audience is in South America where the main language people speak is English,
Dessi (01:09:37.302)
For me, what will make more sense is to create it in Spanish. What you can do if you want to reach a more broad audience is to facilitate the platform that you're using to generate subtitles or localizations so you can have it in different languages. But then we're talking like, I think when you're getting started,
I think for example, YouTube might be easier, but yeah, when you're getting started, just publishing the piece of content is already a lot of work, right? But I will say, because if you are creating content in English, I don't think you're like I will, my thoughts are you're not targeting your main audience then it's not South America. You want to reach like a broad.
audience. So it's odd.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:10:37.742)
Correct. I think you said it right. So basically, the point I'm trying to make here is these are difficult decisions to make, because the topic is general enough. I mean, Flutter caching, whether it's done in America, or in India, or in South America, and Brazil, or Mexico, or Africa, or South Asia, or Australia, it doesn't change. Engineering is pretty much the same. Yet the video or the article, if it happened to have been created in a certain language, then
Dessi (01:11:00.88)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:11:07.154)
that it's going to be missing. It's going to miss the mark when it's posted. Posting that same video in Portuguese might resonate a lot better in Brazil than if it's posted in English, for instance. If I took India, for instance, depending on, again, if you're posting it in certain parts of India, Hindi is an official language. It's more commonly spoken. I.
Dessi (01:11:21.269)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:11:31.766)
come from the southern part of India, one of the states where our language is, we have so many different languages back in India. Europe has French and German and there's N number of languages in Europe as well. So I guess, is it fair to say, Desi, then not everybody can afford to post content in all languages that they're interested in, but is it fair to say that it's almost like not...
having the cake and eating it too, there will be a difference. And if you're able to post it in different languages to target those markets, can we safely say that you're gonna have broader impact? Is that a safe statement to make?
Dessi (01:12:16.15)
I think, yeah, but you do need to invest a lot. So I think that at an early stage, I don't know if that's the smartest thing to do. Well, if you have the money, you can just go ahead. Why not? But me personally, I will not do that. And usually, what I have seen...
for tech startups is that the main language is English because they know that they will reach a broad, like a huge, like the chances of reaching a broad audience are more because yeah, many people speak English, but usually what I see is that our startups that they have the clear focus that they want to monetize and they probably will.
get started by monetizing in the US. So that's why the main language is English. But then if you know that you want to get started, for example, in South America, you tell me that the main language of your content is English, you're telling me that you don't know your audience. You didn't do the research to understand that there is a lot of people that don't speak English.
and that they won't understand your language. So yeah, that's part of knowing who are you talking to.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:13:49.698)
Right. And you know, if you can afford to create content in English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, French, German, Tamil, whatever, right? I've listed a bunch of languages. If you can afford to create content in all these languages, then more power to you, right? But unfortunately, most of us cannot afford to create content because it's not just translating that content.
There's different levels of complexity, right? It's one thing to say I can take the content and translate it, but that does not mean it's gonna resonate. Somebody who understands Spanish as a language and the people speaking Spanish in South America, right? You originally, you mentioned you're from Guatemala, right? So you understand the culture of a region better. So not only would you be creating content in that language, but you'd be creating content that resonates with the audience in that part of the world. So I wanna make...
Dessi (01:14:16.766)
Yeah.
Dessi (01:14:36.488)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (01:14:43.721)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:14:44.394)
I want to make that separation. It's one thing to say I can create content. I'll take a very specific example, right? I tried creating, my native tongue is Tamil. It's one of the oldest languages in the world. It's, I come from the southern part of India, a state called Tamil Nadu. I posted content and I reached out to some people about technical content. I'm like, hey, do you enjoy this content? The feedback I got, I expected a lot of different kinds of feedback, but not what I actually received.
I was given feedbacks, increased, this is good, but unfortunately your content is in English. And I'm like, my response was, and the problem is, and the reason I had that question was not because, you know, it was not condescending, just to be very clear, right? It was because I grew up in a part of India where, you know, English is a very commonly spoken language in India, right? It's, you know, if you're in India, there's a fair chance people understand that language. To what extent they understand might vary.
Dessi (01:15:28.8)
me.
Dessi (01:15:35.97)
Please.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:15:43.986)
But there's a very high chance that they do understand the language, right? It's just the way, at least the way I, you know, if I'm not wrong. So my question was, well, we understand the language. So what is the problem? And the answer from the developer was I have no problems with understanding English, but that's not how I think. I always think in my native tongue, and then I translate that to English, even though I understand English. So when you're teaching
Dessi (01:16:04.939)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:16:12.534)
software in English, it doesn't resonate with me as much as if you were to taught software in my native tongue. Now, this is very interesting to me, Desi, personally, because even though my native tongue is very different, even though I can speak my native tongue, I can write to a large extent in my native tongue, I could never speak engineering or a lot of topics in my native tongue. My brain doesn't even think that way, right? So on one side, I'm not a native English speaker. On another side, I unfortunately only start
Dessi (01:16:34.462)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:16:42.142)
I start thinking the problem in English, not in my native tongue. So I tried to do like four or five videos and then it was a disaster because even though I made a conscious effort to create that content in my native tongue, 70% of that was English, even inadvertently so. I was speaking in English and I was just talking in Tamil and switched back to English and 70% of it turned out to be in English. So I was like, you know what? I'm not, I'm not going to do this. It's not working out. Right. So it's one thing.
Dessi (01:16:45.039)
Bye.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:17:10.818)
that you have to speak that language and two is it has to also resonate with that audience. How to speak, what topics you cover, even if it's engineering is gonna be quite different. So it'd be awesome if we can create very localized content. But like you mentioned, we may or may not be able to afford. It's hard enough to afford to hire one content marketer in one language. It's gonna be even harder, you know, monetarily to do that, right? I mean, does that? I know I said a lot of things there, but.
Does that make sense to you when you listen to that?
Dessi (01:17:44.354)
Yeah, I think it's when you start creating content in a different language that is not the main language that you had in mind to create the content because you're trying to target a specific audience. If you're the one that is getting started on the business and it doesn't resonate with you, then I think it's a tricky...
point, you know? I, for example, I know that in India, a lot of people speak English. And if I want to target people in India, okay, I could create the content in English and probably it will be okay. There will be people that is like, okay, no, because it's not in my native language. So I won't read it. I won't consume it. So yeah, that can happen, right?
But for example, if I think in Guatemala, that's not the case. If you, if I want to target people in Guatemala, the content has to be Spanish. If I create in English, there will be an audience, like an audience that will understand the content. But I know that a lot of people don't speak English or maybe they don't speak it that well. So, and that's common. It's not like India that almost ever. So.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:19:07.982)
Right.
Dessi (01:19:09.058)
I have to create the content in Spanish and that's a fact. I live in France and I think people in France, I think people prefer the content in French. And if you create the content in English, okay, if they need it, they will consume it, but they will probably prefer the content in French. So if you wanna target people in France,
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:19:34.154)
Right, exactly.
Dessi (01:19:38.466)
I will suggest to you to write the content in French because they are most likely to consume it. There are a lot of startups that decide that the main language will be in English and then they start creating things in English. But I know that people will prefer in French. And of course, if you ask people, everyone will say, okay, yeah, I will prefer it in my own language. Because that's the...
That's the way I see it. Like the way I process information is in my own language, but understanding the culture that you're targeting, like the demographics and the culture will help you to understand if you should go for content in English or you should go for content in the main language. I think it's very cultural and it's part of that doing that research to understand the audience.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:20:35.362)
So what are you telling me, Desi's? I need to know after the podcast, I need to go create the Flutter caching video in English and Spanish and Portuguese and Arabic and French and Hindi and Tamil and Albi in good shape, right? No, I'm just messing with you, but I think you make great points there. Now, people watching this far, this is just amazing, the learnings I've had from the conversation here. People are watching this and they're like, hey, you know what?
Dessi (01:20:43.767)
No.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:21:04.414)
I have money to hire one person. I'm gonna ask you a really difficult question, a very manufactured question, right? Cause all the other questions I'm sure, easy enough, this is gonna be a difficult one. I need a developer, I need a content marketer. But you know what? I cannot have them both because I only have money to fill one position. These two positions couldn't be any more different from each other. So I can either hire Krish to write some code.
Dessi (01:21:09.17)
Thank you.
Dessi (01:21:15.285)
Yeah.
Dessi (01:21:20.192)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:21:33.026)
or I can hire DC to help me with content marketing. If I asked you this question, agreed it's a manufactured question, what would your answer be? Who should they be hiring?
Dessi (01:21:46.978)
I think it will depend on your product. If you make me that question, I will ask you, what's your product? What are you selling? Or what is, what you're, like, if we say, like, if we talk about it in the context of an engineering founder that is asking me that for his startup, he has an open source product and he will be the first employee that this person is going to hire.
I will say go for the engineer because you need to work on the product first, you know, and if you can get some extra budget, you can always outsource some marketing services. But if you're telling me that you have, you're selling stuff online.
And should I hire an engineer for a website or a content marketer to start putting content together to sell more? I will say hire the content marketing marketer and then outsource the engineering service because for the longterm you will most likely need
the market there to work on the strategy to sell more. So it will depend actually on who is asking that and also in what stage, but if it is at the very beginning, yeah, that's what I can, I will answer, yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:23:26.494)
Okay, I'm gonna challenge you there and make it even more manufactured, the question. Because the reason I say this is, I'm an engineering founder, right? And there are a lot of engineering founders. How you approach a problem as an engineering founder is very different from how you might approach the same problem as a non-engineering founder, right? That's, I'm gonna have different conversations about that, but I think it's, I would say, I reckon it's fair enough to say, make that statement, at least in my opinion. Now, let's say,
You mentioned that if you don't have anything, you have to first build it, correct? That's a fair statement to make, but I'm going to play the devil's advocate as an engineer. What if I tell you, Desi, sure, I don't have anything to sell. So it seems like a fair point that you have to make it before you start socializing and writing about it. But at the same time, I want to flip the coin here. I'm going to say, well, why should I even make it if I there might not be a market for this? So maybe my first hire
Dessi (01:24:00.47)
Mm-hmm.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:24:25.514)
should not be a developer. It actually should be a content marketer who's gonna write about it, who's gonna create content and they're gonna find out if I should even be building such a thing. So if I pose that question to you and said, maybe hiring the developer, maybe hiring Krish is not a good idea as the first hire, hiring Desi is the good idea. Why would you say that? If you had to disagree with me, how would you disagree?
Dessi (01:24:36.533)
Mm-hmm.
Dessi (01:24:52.542)
Yeah, I think it's not a content marketer. What you need, if you're trying to understand if your idea of the business or the project, it makes sense, it's answering a problem or a need or not. You need something else. You need other type of service and maybe.
Or maybe you could even get a mentoring or a specific process, or you need to pay for something else, which is something that I can eat. It's not on the content marketing role to define if the, if your product will succeed or not, if it is solving up. Actually, you already have to give something solid about your product, product to the content market there. You're, you have to.
already give the basics to the content marketer because from that the content marketer creates a content strategy. The content marketer needs to understand what is the product, if it is already working the product or not, who is the audience, who is the personas you're targeting, all that kind of stuff. It's something that you need to give to the marketer because from that the marketer will
a strategy.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:26:19.626)
Wow, you know, I was hoping that we could tell the content marketer, Hey, I'm going to solve world hunger. Tell me what to do. I'm just kidding. You're saying we need to be very specific with what you're trying to trying to address here. Right. So I think, sorry.
Dessi (01:26:28.357)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, just curious. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just will have to leave in a few minutes because I
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:26:39.146)
Oh, no, that's fine. I'm gonna wrap this. Yep, my bad. It's, I want to, it was just way too interesting for me. And I was just, couldn't even get to that point, but this is awesome. I think this is a good point, Desi, to wrap this. And then we can continue having this conversation. Before I press stop, I want to say two things. One is thank you very, very much, first of all, for taking time to having this conversation because more than enjoying the conversation as much as I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Dessi (01:26:54.78)
Yeah.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:27:06.626)
There's plenty for learning that's come out of this conversation as well. I'm, I'm no, it's going to be no different for folks who are going to be watching and tuning in as well. But as closing thoughts, do you want to say something before I hit stop here?
Dessi (01:27:20.33)
I think content marketing is a very broad topic today. We talked mostly about people that is getting started, specifically tech. We even talk about a few more things, right? But I will summarize that when you're getting started, just assume when you, let's say you...
Publish your project, you launch your project, right, or your product. And don't assume people, just assume people don't understand anything. So explain things, explain what it is, what it does, the what, the who, the why, and how, right? But from that, do it step by step.
choose one channel, summarizing everything, choose one channel, start with one specific piece of content, distribute it, and give it a try a few times and see how it works, and don't close yourself if it doesn't work. It's normal that the first tries, you fail.
Today, I'm a content marketer that has some experience now, a few years of experience in marketing. And I still publish a lot of things that don't work. And that's normal. That's OK. But with time, it gives you learnings of what mistakes do not repeat, what to repeat, and also be open. I think that's a good, another learning.
be open to change because if you're not open to change, I think you set yourself to failure. And that's it.
Krish (saas.snowpal.com ) (01:29:16.45)
Thank you. I'm going to end this video with Desi's voice resonating in people's minds. So I'm not going to say anything more. This was awesome. Thank you so much, Desi. Thank you.
Dessi (01:29:25.494)
Thank you. Thank you very much, Krish.
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