Create content TO your audience that solves their problems, not content ABOUT yourself that showcases your growth
Building audience requires sharing genuinely useful frameworks and tactical advice, not just revenue graphs and milestone announcements. Think of potential customers as needing to imprint on you as the knowledgeable partner over months before they're ready to buy.
When to use
When building audience for a two-sided marketplace or service where you need to attract sophisticated suppliers/creators
Don't do this
Building in public content that's mostly revenue updates and 'we're growing!' announcements without teaching anything useful to your target audience
8 Founders Who Did This
Instead of posting about his agency, created valuable free redesigns that solved design problems for specific brands
Created content that solved community problems - posted SQL-generated spreadsheet of Rakuten/AmEx offer combinations that thousands of group members were manually looking for. Content directly addressed their pain point, not promoting SaveWise growth story.
Created content TO his audience that solved their internet addiction problems, not content ABOUT himself that showcased his business growth
Created tutorial content solving AI hallucination problems for the audience, not growth content about CodeGuide
Created focused Twitter accounts (design inspiration for Dispatch, SEO tactics for Boring Marketing) sharing genuinely useful content before pitching products
Used lemlist to cold email prospects (dogfooding), combined with content creation by training 30+ team members to post on LinkedIn, creating value-first content about sales prospecting results
Focused exclusively on engineering management content for 20+ years, writing about specific workplace stereotypes, management jargon, and engineering culture challenges rather than broad leadership topics
Writes content about real struggles, mistakes, and learnings rather than promotional material. Startup diary focuses on helping other founders rather than showcasing Fibery features