SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He Built Shopify's Content Machine, Now Working With SaaS Founders
25 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I have two major clients at the moment, and then I do a lot of ad hoc stuff. One of my major clients right now is GoDaddy. So I'm like doing all right.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey, folks. My guest today is Tommy Walker.
He's the founder of The Content Studio, a content marketing consultancy for high-growth B2B SaaS startups and enterprises. Before that, he was the first marketing hire at Shopify Plus and global editor-in-chief at QuickBooks. His long-term goal for The Content Studio is to release training for advanced content marketers. Tommy, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right.
So what year did you join Shopify?
I was there pre-IPOs. It was like 2014, 2015. Yeah, late 2014.
And what was like when you were going through the interview process, what was like the key metric they asked you about? Hey, Tommy, can you increase this?
I didn't have an interview process. I was recruited. So Shopify was really early days back then. It was still not being taken seriously as cloud e-commerce wasn't really a thing back then. So I was brought in from CXL.com. And really, it was just a conversation, you know, hey, you seem like you know what you're talking about on the website that you're currently writing for. We like you.
Let's let's let's make this happen.
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Chapter 2: What motivated Tommy Walker to join Shopify?
But, um, certainly, I mean, I was there for the first 1500 customers, the only marketing hire until the first 1500 customers. So we did something.
What was the initial content plan? What were you doing?
Sure. So the metric that I care the most about is return visitors. And the overall content plan, we had a few different things that we were looking at. Primarily, we were doing some SEO focused stuff. We were doing a lot more thought leadership pieces. But the way that I had structured my team, I also had an away team.
So I had a team of people doing guest blogging in a number of different areas, as well as doing a lot of podcasting at the time. I was becoming a guest on multiple podcasts and sort of championing this whole philosophy of what happens when the software gets out of the way. It's hard to believe now, but at the time, nobody was taking cloud ecommerce software seriously.
So we started to focus on the meta narrative of the blog was what happens when ecommerce software gets out of the way? What are the things that you can focus on now that you don't have to worry about time or budget? Or, you know, technical restraints. So that was kind of the narrative. We were shaping a narrative at the time. And that's really where a lot of the focus was.
And Tommy, what did you use to measure return visitors? Just Google Analytics. Okay. And so when you left, what were like the weekly active readers, I guess?
Yeah, it was right around the 100,000 mark. You know, it wasn't too crazy, but it was just crazy enough.
That was weekly readers that were coming back or monthly?
Yeah, weekly.
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Chapter 3: How did Tommy contribute to Shopify's early marketing efforts?
I had helped build it in the beginning. Um, and it just kind of clicked for me at that time where I was like, well, why don't I go over there and run it? So we scaled that, uh, from five, five to 10 freelance contributors to 40 plus contributors across SEO, social, um, email, like most of your customer facing channels across 16 markets. Um,
And then Intuit had a massive layoff where they laid off 7% of their entire portfolio. I was one of that lucky 715, cried for about 30 minutes and then started my own business shortly thereafter.
Okay, so what are you doing now?
Now I am consulting with other Fortune 1000 companies, building out content marketing functions. That includes everything from content operations and how content gets created and distributed throughout the company to the distribution strategy out into the world, budgeting basically the entire function, building that out or improving it in certain situations as well.
What are your top three ways to find someone listening right now and they want to launch a blog and hire a writer to do this? Do you recommend some of these marketplaces like Verblio, Scripted, Writer Access, Contentfly, or are there other sources that you use?
Yeah, I've actually always, always, always had good luck with ProBlogger, right? The ProBlogger.com community. I've hired New York Times published authors, someone who's written several Four Dummies books, and the award winners. It's amazing what goes out there.
So my recommendation to anybody who is ever going to hire is to actually do something called writing a content code first, which is basically the rules of engagement, defining the soul of your publication, right? Um, so for me, like one of my rules is rule number four is, uh, opinions are bullshit. Do the research, right?
Um, don't talk down to your reader, uh, setting these rules that define the publication, like how you're going to engage with the market. And then from there, writing your advertisements for that and trying to get people on board, not just like, Hey, we need somebody to write stuff for us, but here's the mission that we're on and the narrative that we're trying to build out throughout the market.
Um, for me, that's always been, I have to believe that's the reason why I've been able to attract the talent that I've been able to attract. Um, because it's, it's really, it's really more mission driven than transactional.
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Chapter 4: What was the initial content strategy at Shopify?
Businesses need a point of view more now than ever. And if you are not setting the guidelines on that, the rest of it just becomes, you know, it's the blogger Borg voice, right? It's the same blog over and over again, depending on, you know, and that's obnoxious and terrible to read and nobody likes it.
So what are you best in the world at like hiring and managing a team of freelance writers or going out and finding and really like product SEO?
I would say it's probably the first is really setting those guidelines, that tone, building up the operation itself and connecting people within the company. So it's not just content marketers kind of siloed off on the other side of the business and they're all on a little island. It's more about having an integrated team that you have the right people on board and
And everybody's really representing what that company is. Blogs are, and content marketing as a whole, but blogs in particular are the most frequently published voice of the company. And that's something that needs to be taken very seriously. And that's one of the things that I try to stress both on the senior leadership level, but also with the people that I work with on the ground level.
All right, Tommy, let's wrap up with the famous five here. We're out of time. Number one, favorite book.
Story by Robert McKee.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Not currently. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for doing long tail SEO keyword research?
Ooh, I've actually been getting into Jarvis lately.
jarvis number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night not enough uh anywhere between two to six if i'm lucky all right and what's your situation married single kids married with kids how many kids uh three oh busy guy how old are you i am 36 30 soon close okay happy early birthday uh last last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20
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