A behind the scenes look at my content strategy
Part 1 of 2: How I built MKT1's content foundation & how to apply this "system" to your startup
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This newsletter is definitely “inside baseball”: I’m sharing how the very lean MKT1 content operation drives outsized impact. By walking through how I’ve built and execute on my content strategy, I hope it helps you create a “fuel” strategy for your B2B startup—even in 2025, when marketing feels like the wild west, with a drought one year and a storm the next.
While writing this, I did wonder if I sounded a little too obsessed with myself. But the truth is, my monthly reach—in terms of audience, views, and revenue—now surpasses that of many venture-backed startups I’ve worked with. That made me realize this might actually be useful. If I can hit these numbers with a team currently including just me, Katie Mitchell part-time, and our podcast producers at Caspian Studios, you can create content that drives real business growth too.
As you read this, remember: marketing content is a product. In my case, my content is quite literally a product I monetize through subscriptions and sponsors. But this same mindset applies to how you should approach content at your B2B startup. Use this newsletter as an example of what it looks like to bring product-like thinking to content strategy and creation.
In this newsletter:
I’m “open-sourcing” my content strategy or telling you how the (vegetarian) sausage is made. This is a 2-part newsletter because I realized there was quite a lot to all of this 4.5 years in!
Which reminds me, you don’t need to have your whole content strategy and system figured out from day one. You can start small and still drive a lot of impact by having a basic foundation in place, and evolve your content system over time—which is exactly what I did.
If you apply similar processes to your venture-backed startup, you can succeed at this too. Yes, even with SEO declining (search is a small part of what drives my growth, I always meant to put more effort in there, but maybe I’m glad I didn’t?)
My guiding principles for making content that’s differentiated and valuable
How I define and use perceptions and content pillars
No dead ends: How I reuse my frameworks (aka “Krameworks”) to reinforce ideas, make content creation easier, and drive growth & revenue.
Part 2: How I create the MKT1 content calendar
My actual content calendar setup for newsletters, podcasts, and LinkedIn
My monthly theming strategy, built around 1 primary piece of content
How I repurpose content across formats without burning out
For paid subscribers: perceptions template, gaccs template, and content roadmap template, contractor & agency list & discounts on tools
Note: While I imagine this newsletter will be valuable to other creators or marketers looking to go solo, like all my content, it is very much intended to guide marketing at B2B startups.
Recommended products & agencies
We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.
Default helps you turn inbound leads into revenue with easier routing, immediate enrichment and faster scheduling. And they just launched website intent automations too, so you can detect and route qualified website visitors to the right reps.
🎁Offer: Mention MKT1 to get $1,000 off and free migration.
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Ten Speed: If you’re looking to speed up your own content plans, reach out to Ten Speed. They partner with startups (including my advisees) on organic growth, full-service SEO & content marketing.
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get $1,000 off your first month.
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42 Agency: From routing logic to fixing scoring, and aligning Hubspot + Salesforce —42 Agency handles the MOPS work your team avoids. 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup scale MOPs and paid campaigns.
🎁Offer: Mention MKT1 to get a free 30 min MOPS support call-–they’ll troubleshoot an issue or audit your set up (available for first 10 startups)
MKT1 content strategy foundation
Nothing I create starts from scratch. Everything is rooted in a (flexible) system that helps me decide what to talk about and how to talk about it. This system also makes it easy to extend one idea into multiple valuable pieces of content. What I’m saying is, there’s a method to the madness…most of the time.
Here’s what’s in my foundation:
Guiding principles
Content pillars or focus topics
Layered content and resource types, aka “no dead ends” appoach
You need a very similar set of things in your foundation. Don’t skip doing this because you think it’s too soon, your team is too small, or you don’t produce enough content. Even with just 1 (or 1.5 people), this is valuable. And while I’ve written about many of these topics before, but hopefully sharing my own examples will help you build your foundation more easily.
Guiding principles for MKT1 content
Before I talk about how I plan and make my content, I thought I’d share my principles. Usually I say don’t copy playbooks, but in this case if you adopt these exact same principles, I think you’ll go far.
1. Add value, every time
Guiding principle description for MKT1: Every LinkedIn post, every newsletter, every template, every podcast, try to add something new to the conversation.
How to implement this principle:
Remember, adding value takes many forms. As I mentioned in this podcast and newsletter, there are lots of ways to contribute thoughts or add to conversations. You can add a net-new thought, build on someone else’s thought in an interesting way, or synthesize a whole bunch of thoughts. You can ask thought-provoking questions. You can share things that are not exactly informative, but instead purely entertaining, and I’d still consider that valuable.
The flipside is also true: You shouldn’t be creating content just to fill a slot on a calendar. If you’re not adding value with a new piece of content, consider not creating it at all.
And most importantly, I believe quality and consistency matter. Consistency doesn’t mean publishing the same day every week though (I’ll never be good at that). It means people should know what to expect from you, and get it.
2. Stay relevant; know my audience and ecosystem
Guiding principle description for MKT1: Keep advising and meeting with founders of GTM tech companies to be able to keep creating the most relevant, high quality content for B2B startup marketing leaders. Without doing this, I’ll lose sight of what’s happening and become irrelevant quickly.
How to implement this principle: For you, this likely means actually watching those sales call recordings, reading support feedback, having direct conversations with prospects and customers, consuming info from influencers in your space wherever it is they hang out (LI, Reddit, industry events, etc).
3. Differentiate
Guiding principle description for MKT1: Share the deepest dives possible on B2B startup marketing topics. Give the high-level strategy or the why, give the how, and actually share the templates and resources to do this.
How to implement this principle:
Your product needs to be differentiated, but so does your content.
This starts from knowing who you are, testing and iterating, and not letting things get diluted by review committees.
What is that thing your company is uniquely suited to do in marketing? For me, I’ve found a gap in content in the ecosystem and something I’m uniquely suited to do with my deep dives. I’ve built multiple marketing teams from scratch at different stage startup, and led them at scale. I’ve worked with founders, VCs, and marketers from 100s of companies (and I’ve been in all those roles myself). This is a 360 perspective not many have, and I’ve leaned in.
4. Be willing to “miss”
Guiding principle description for MKT1: If you aren’t trying new things in marketing regularly that could “fail,” you aren’t doing things that are differentiated. You won’t break out of your current trajectory of growth. You won’t find your step-change drivers.
How to implement this principle:
Content is a “portfolio strategy,” like investing. Make sure every investment has a chance of winning, but recognize that only a couple will win and drive outsized returns.
You might be wondering: can you add value (principle 1) and still be willing to fail (principle 4)? I think so. Something can be genuinely valuable to a specific segment of your audience, even if it doesn’t land broadly or isn’t worth repeating.
5. Avoid random acts of marketing
Guiding principle description for MKT1: Don’t try too many brand-new things at once.
Try for one “big new thing” test at a time. Right now it’s the podcast.
This summer, my “big new thing” is bets on new types of resources for paid subscribers. And this fall it’s a larger bet on community events.
How to implement this principle:
The flipside of being willing to fail and testing new things is going overboard. You can try too many things and can stray too far from your core competencies.
Which leads me to this warning: Following other principles on this list can lead to falling into the random acts of marketing trap 🐏, so you need to remember to focus.
You can also fall into this trap by observing your audience and ecosystem, and wanting to do everything everyone else is doing. This is tempting, but don’t do that. I personally have to remind myself of this all the time.
Example: While it might seem like I do “copycat” things like launching a podcast, I spent years ruminating on the best podcast format that was truly “me” before launching it.
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates and discounts for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including a ton of content marketing templates (audience analysis template, content examples, mapping content to funnel stages, GACCs brief, content roadmap, etc). Active discounts on products we recommend.
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: Content Roadmapping, Content Distribution, Perceptions, How I create the MKT1 content calendar
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which shows how I tell a consistent story by using the perceptions framework, how I plan my topics, and my no dead-ends approach for connecting my content and earning engagement.