I’ve been doing a lot of outreach lately. Generally this looks a little something like this:
Hey! It’s me! An entrepreneur with a nascent product idea and a bunch of questions. You’re somebody I want to serve - want to connect and chat?
I’m shipping out these bad boys left and right. My conversion rate is abysmal, but with enough persistence I’ve been lucky enough to score some engaging conversations with data practitioners. Ultimately though, I’m not optimistic that this technique will allow me to wrangle the type of network I need to become customer obsessed.
Something far more promising is the wide world of content marketing. Content marketing is publishing things of value for free while collecting the side channel benefits of establishing a brand. This is a new domain to me. This never came up in my computer science education, and I never thought about this while debugging segmentation faults at Ocient or pounding out pandas code at Citadel. If I did not have a gnawing interest in starting my own organization, I perhaps may have gone my entire life without ever producing content for the purposes of marketing. Every day I thank God for allowing me to narrowly avoid such a tragedy.
In all seriousness, content marketing is pretty cool because it puts a lot of useful stuff out into the world for free. The canonical example of completely radical content marketing is Red Bull. Red Bull sells sugary juice that gets you wired. That might not sound appealing, but perhaps you’d like to revisit that thought after watching a man plummet from space to the Earth’s surface in 4k, or maybe after watching a man skydive between two planes? Live a little, man.
The same concept generalizes to more technical fields as well. Whether you’re a celebrity like the Seattle Day Guy demonstrating that you’re a trustworthy consultant, or you’re the founder of a Snowflake optimization company showing that you are knowledgeable about Snowflake internals, or a $236 million gorilla in a competitive data observability market proving you understand your customer’s problems, placing proof into the public arena is an invaluable tool. Perhaps even the most valuable tool, when you are competing in a very crowded space with little product differentiation. Step aside CEO - the most coveted position of 2030 will be Head of Propaganda.
But, as I’m sure you’re all wondering, how does this affect Phil Dakin? Well, the main takeaway is that producing content online will be a fundamental part of basically any business I start. It seems to me that the only community of people that I have hyper-privileged access to is high-frequency trading recruiters, and in my mind I’ve already done my part as a foot soldier in the war for efficient markets. The question, then, is what type of content would I like to produce?
In my novice mind, I see myself starting with two types of content. The first is informative; these are pieces that explore a specific topic, generally do not express a specific view, and aggregate information from other sources for easier digestion. I’ve tried my hand at a few pieces in this category, for instance my Spark RAPIDs article. The second is opinionated; these are pieces that serve as commentary, perhaps are even intended to entertain, and provide a certain view that I have. This piece itself is an example. A better example, one to strive towards, is Benn’s Substack.
My biggest problem with writing informative pieces is vacillation on their true underlying worth. It was difficult for me to write this Monte Carlo article because I was constantly going back and forth on the value of aggregating information that has already been arranged so nicely by MC’s content people elsewhere. But, in the content game, the only true decider of the value of the article is the readership. Does it get virtual Medium claps and eyeballs, or not? Plus, why am I so worried about producing something of little value, anyway? The punishment for a zero-value piece of content on the internet is simply the pain of echoing silence. There is no great loss besides the time I spent sitting at my desk in Notion, pounding away keys and referencing my source materials.
With the commentary pieces, my main issue is lack of experience. I’ve probably only written a handful of longform, first-person, riffing-style diatribes, and the mechanics feel a bit rusty. There are some nice techniques like brain dumping that seem to help, but, as with anything, it is only practice that will make perfect. But, the idea of improving at opinionated writing is at its core somewhat hilarious. Not so much the improving at the mechanics - there’s nothing funny about a subordinate clause, or the imperfect tense. What is funny is the idea of actually improving my opinions, by taking the time to spit out bad ones.
So, if you stay tuned in, and there’s no problem with the reception, expect to see a mix of informative and opinionated pieces. My head will keep talking. If you see me be less than honest, tell me - I want to know.
If you’re reading this and work in data engineering, I’d love to chat with you! I’m an entrepreneur with some nascent product ideas, and a lot of questions.