Thoughts on Hiring a Writer at Appcues
Jackson Noel, Co-founder, brought me on to Appcues as our first focused marketer in July 2015. He had already brought our blog from 0 to about 4k monthly uniques. He did this by creating the User Onboarding Academy and hustling the Appcues story around the web. Jackson hired a content marketer to pass the torch on a channel he was convinced would help Appcues gain momentum, so he could focus on other initiatives.
When I took over, my main objective was to grow our top of the funnel. over the next 6 months, I lead the charge to 20k monthly unique visitors, and built a process in place for creating solid content and growing our blog audience. We’re at the point now where we want to bring in help to continue to grow this audience. We want them to take it over from me. I’ll spend my time experimenting with other channels for acquisition and working further down our marketing funnel.
So the next person we want to come onboard should be interested in growing us from 20k uniques to 200k and beyond. That’s the mission.
Avoiding burnout; an opportunity
We’ve heard from many marketers that we’ve talked to about this role, that there’s risk of burnout when you hire someone to focus on writing. I’ve definitely experienced the threat of burnout myself. However, The best way I think to handle this is by thinking of this role as writer => editor for the right person. Yeah you’re going to write a lot in your first 3 months. But more and more I get people interested in contributing to the Appcues blog. I hope we can be like KISSmetrics of ConversionXL in few years from now. So good that other writers want to contribute with frequency for free.
And further, by appropriately aligning our company mission of helping people make products users love, we can broaden the scope of our content over time to include our other thoughts and stories to appeal to our ever growing audience over time. It may not make sense to speak in those terms today, however, as we do better to be focused on more specific topics. But look at Help Scout’s blog. We will get there.
Another way I think writers can avoid burnout is by involving a lot of networking into their process. This happens naturally as a content marketer developing stories, and I’ve found it helps improves a writer’s craft, enriches their content and increases their influence/distribution. A nice side-effect of networking is an increase in worth to one's personal brand, which our team members will take with them when they graduate from Appcues.
Describing our ideal candidate
As Jackson and I chatted more about the opportunity, we laid out what the necessary strengths for our ideal candidate might be, and we also listed out what weaknesses we might tolerate. We then tested these ideas against other sources. I spoke with multiple writers on these subjects, I got a ton of feedback on this inbound thread I started, and I pulled from Greg Ciotti and Walter Chen. Many thanks to everyone who lent us a hand!
Here’s what we ended up with:
Strengths
Has clear idea of their writing process
Knows that good writing is grounded in facts and examples
Journalistic in their approach
A storyteller with a high creative output
Doesn’t compromise on quality
Hungry with the initiative to drive endless rapid growth
Tolerable weaknesses
Lack of domain expertise; but should be excited about software and products
Lack of distribution process or channels—we do this well today
Can be a writing specialist; doesn’t need design or video—we have those chops in-house already
Doesn’t need a network, but has to be open to hustling and have networking skills
Getting people interested in the position
I’m all for engaging people organically as possible as we build a process. We believe in our networks and our audience, and we believe we can likely surface the right talent from there. At this stage in our growth, we’ve found that job boards are often a waste of time at this stage in our growth. So we’re taking referrals from the team, friends and customers as we chat casually about the company or specifically about hiring processes.
We’re driving interest as we research for the right candidates. A secondary motive to starting the Inbound thread was to try and get some interest. As is this blog post here.
Soon—if we have to—we’ll start diving deeper into our networks and ask for introductions to Boston companies that have people succeeding in similar roles. Ahem, I’m looking at you Wordstream...and HubSpot...and InsightSquared.
My hope is that anyone who knows someone will refer them to the company. And they will figure out an easy way to get in touch with me. *Cough* Here’s a link *Cough*
