Content Marketing Playbooks
How founders use content to grow — the formats that drove signups, the distribution that gave each piece a second life, and the cadence that kept it sustainable for a tiny team.
193 tactics · page 7 of 7
“4020 2020 like 40% building public because we want eyeballs on our project so yeah just talk about what you're doing 20% wisdom bomb you know those like short reposable wisdom like an expert that's okay we need that kind of to drive growth 20% supporting others I think a lot of people are doing very well in that but it's not just about you and then the last 20% is personality like not not talk about everything you like but pick three things you care in your personal life”
Use the 40/20/20/20 content mix — work / wisdom / others / personality
Concrete content mix for a founder-led personal platform: 40% your active building work (asks, updates, decisions), 20% standalone wisdom/insight posts that travel, 20% supporting and amplifying other people, 20% personality — pick exactly 3 personal-life topics you actually care about (family, pets, a hobby) and let those recur. The 80% non-personal mix builds authority; the 20% personality makes you a person worth following.
“the things that we're we're really good at three things writing is like email newsletter Twitter and um podcasting which is just long form conversations and so it's like and the things where we really try to fit into a box Instagram LinkedIn Tik Tok YouTube it sucks and we hate it”
Pick the formats you have natural ease at — quit the ones you fight
Audit each platform against energy spent vs output quality. Khe's answer: newsletter, Twitter, podcast = ease and quality. Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube = forced and bad. He quit the second list. You don't owe every algorithm your attention — pick 2-3 formats where you create from natural strength and ignore the rest, even if those rest are objectively where the audience growth is. Forced output ages badly and burns the creator.
“when I left Wall Street I started a newsletter and the newsletter was basically me writing in public that I'm confused I'm a 35-year-old confused man with a one-year 18-month-old daughter I used to make a lot of money I did a lot of stuff but I'm not happy and I don't know what to do next... the thing that kept me going... it's the I thought it was just that felt this way I felt so alone thank you for making me feel seen”
Confess what you're confused about — confusion content compounds resonance
The strongest content is rarely "here's the answer." It's "here's the confusion I'm sitting with." Khe's most-resonant newsletter content was him writing as a 35-year-old confused man with a baby and no plan, and the response wave was "thank you for making me feel seen." When you're unsure what to write about, write the question you're stuck on — the people on the same path will surface and become your first true audience.
“I personally have been part of several communities that asked me to teach a particular Niche specific topic for a fee and as a Creator I think that's something that I never had anywhere on my radar that I could just teach this specific thing that I know a lot about through the perspective and specific angle of that Community”
Teach as a paid guest inside someone else's niche community — overlooked creator income
Most creators only think of monetization as "my products to my audience." Add a parallel revenue line: get paid to teach a 60-90 minute workshop inside someone else's gated community. The community owner pays for fresh expertise; you get a high-trust audience that already paid to be there. Your same talk gets reshaped per community (small-bets framing, first-gen framing, etc.) and the recording becomes evergreen library content the community keeps showing new members.
“try all of these maybe around 2 3 weeks at a time and every time you try a new strategy really milk the hell out of it for example if you are doing faceless content you can try slideshows you can try videos you can try different ways that you can do the slideshows... and just keep iterating and keep testing until you find one”
Run one viral format hard for 2-3 weeks before pivoting to another
Pick one format — faceless slideshows, talking head, reaction, Reddit, AI UGC — and run it hard for 2-3 weeks before judging it. Inside that window, vary the CTA, the hook, slideshow length, frame structure, and timing exhaustively rather than jumping channels at the first plateau. Most format failures aren't the format — they're premature pivots before exhausting the variants. Only graduate to the next format after you've actually milked the current one.
“this is the creator course that I have built for Sprout more than 50% of the creators that go through this course go viral within the first two weeks and this is completely tailored to our app first we have a type form and then I do a bunch of videos and modules to train our creators... we always have a quiz at the end of each module just to quality check on the creators”
Productize UGC creator onboarding into a course — 50% go viral in 2 weeks
Don't treat UGC creators as freelancers you brief once. Build an actual course: Typeform application → video modules covering your content bank, hooks, formats, scripts → quizzes at the end of each module to gate completion. Encode everything you know about what works on your app into a repeatable curriculum. Nicole's Sprout course gets >50% of creators viral within 2 weeks — the productized training is what turns one virality run into a system.
“I think about writing actually in the opposite direction I think about it as if I invest time in building a library that's a library I can use over and over and over again... I've started uh reposting a lot of my old long form content on Twitter SLX right now and just this morning I saw someone comment and go how do you have so much time to write so much long form every day and I'm sitting there going you have no idea that I'm posting long form essays that I wrote seven years ago”
Build a reusable writing library — not a daily-content treadmill
Most founders frame content as a treadmill — "if I commit to LinkedIn, I have to post forever." Reframe it as library construction: every piece you publish is an asset you can repost, rewrap, recompile, and re-publish for years. Cole reposts 7-year-old long-form essays as fresh Twitter content and readers can't tell. After 12-18 months of consistent shipping you have a multi-year remix arsenal; new readers see today's content as fresh regardless of when it was written.
“if we have to you know use that structure I would clarify the language and call it more something like like reader problem fit like you're not starting with you you're starting with the other person and you're not starting with here's what I want to say you're starting with well what's their problem what's their question”
Optimize for reader-problem-fit, not product-market-fit — write "you content", not "I content"
Reframe writing as reader-problem-fit, not self-expression. Start every piece with the reader's question (not your topic): what does this person actually need to know? Even Harry Potter and David Foster Wallace answer specific questions readers carry into the book. The shift from "here's what I want to say" to "here's what you need" is what unlocks the audience response everyone wants. The product is the reader's outcome; the writing is just the delivery.
“most writing can be reverse engineered back into these four different buckets it's either actionable aspirational analytical or anthropological... what's happening in that moment is your friend loves aspirational books and you hate aspirational books you love actionable books right”
Pick one of the 4A buckets — actionable, aspirational, analytical, or anthropological
Every piece of writing falls into one of four buckets: (1) Actionable — "here's how to do X"; (2) Aspirational — "I was broke, now I'm free, you can be too"; (3) Analytical — "here's what's happening in this trend"; (4) Anthropological — "here's what this group of people is going through." Pick the one you enjoy writing AND the one your target reader prefers consuming. Mismatch creates the "my friend loves this book but I can't get past page one" effect — both writer and reader were valid, the bucket didn't match.
“you as the conduit don't always have to be the source of wisdom or Brilliance one of my favorite examples is Ryan holiday has now dominated this category of stoicism right he invented stoicism right right exactly... his entire career is not based off of his insights it it's based off of Marcus aurelius's insights that he's a conduit for and he makes it very easy and accessible for other people”
Be a conduit, not a source — credibility transfers through curation
You don't need to be original to be valuable as a writer. Ryan Holiday turned Marcus Aurelius into a multi-million-copy stoicism empire. Tony Robbins translated existing financial-literacy ideas into accessible bestsellers. Curated experience counts as credibility — your job is making something already-known easy to access for a specific audience. Pick a body of work nobody in your niche is translating yet and become the conduit, not the source.
“the person who would be your client has a lot of knowledge so they've been in their industry for you know 10 20 30 years they have a significant amount of knowledge but they have a bottleneck called I don't have the time to write... the writer has the complete opposite problem right the writer goes I don't have 30 years of knowledge but I have the time and I have the skill set”
Ghost-writing is symbiotic — clients have time-shaped knowledge problems, writers have writing-shaped time solutions
Ghost-writing is not "writer fakes being the client." It's a two-sided bottleneck trade: the executive / founder has 20-30 years of pattern recognition but no time and no writing skill; the writer has time and writing skill but no decades of pattern recognition. Pair them and both win. The writer accelerates a decade of learning by working alongside the expert; the expert ships the body of work their knowledge deserves. Frame the engagement explicitly as bottleneck-trade, not impersonation.
“ship 30 caters to beginners it caters to I've I've really never written on the internet before how do I get started and it has really humbled me and made me realize that making things simple is difficult if you want to explain it to a beginner you can't you have to you have to have a level of clarity of someone who's mastered it in order to really explain it in a way that a beginner can understand”
Writing for beginners is the hardest writing — and the biggest opportunity
Writing for experts is easier than writing for beginners because experts share vocabulary with you. Writing for true beginners forces ruthless clarity — you can't use any unexplained term. That bar is exactly why most experts can't do it: they don't have the meta-clarity yet, even if they have the underlying mastery. Pick your craft and challenge yourself to write a beginner-grade explainer of it. The reps build the highest leverage writing skill — and beginner content has the largest addressable audience.
“I think they changed it more to like where if something goes viral in the beginning it becomes pumped maximum so it goes like before I would get like 100 retweets now if something viral gets a thousand retweets it goes very far but on the other side uh often many tweets get like two likes... what I love one thing interesting he also increased these long post like now you can write blog posts yes these blog post by definition get a lot of view time because of seconds right these do work really well”
Twitter's algorithm now pumps extreme + long-form — lean into blog-style posts
Twitter/X now measures view-time per tweet — extreme tweets get pumped to viral, normal posts get buried regardless of follower count. Adapt by writing long-form "blog" posts inside Twitter (which by definition rack up view-seconds) and clip them into shorter follow-up tweets. Product updates and ambient content underperform now; longer narrative pieces with a clear hook outperform. Treat Twitter as a publishing platform, not a status feed.