500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This week's episode is the story of two guys who ran a web design and marketing consulting business.
One day they hatched a plan for a new SaaS product on a plane ride between North Dakota and Atlanta.
By the time they landed, they were fully committed to the idea and had decided what they were going to do next.
Now, this wasn't the first time these two had launched a product.
They had already tried four times without much success.
But this time felt different because their idea would solve a problem their consulting clients were often complaining about.
And perhaps this fifth attempt to build a product might be successful.
They started by writing a blog post about the problem and how their new product would solve that problem.
And they mocked up some screenshots in Photoshop of their product, which didn't exist at the time.
And eventually they found a few potential customers and got feedback from them each step of the way as they started to build their product.
And they also started publishing detailed and actionable blog posts every week.
In fact, they published three times every week and over the last three and a half years they've published over 500 high quality blog posts and their content marketing efforts have paid off for them big time.
Today they have over 100,000 blog subscribers, 7,000 paying customers, and a seven figure SaaS business.
There's a ton of actionable content in this episode and I hope you enjoy it.
Today's Guest is the CEO and co founder of CoSchedule, a content marketing and social media publishing calendar for small businesses and marketing teams.
Co schedule helps more than 7,000 teams organize their content marketing and social media publishing in more than 100 countries around the world.
CoSchedule was founded in 2013 and to date has raised around $500,000 in funding.
My guest has been blogging and speaking about content marketing, social media and startup business for over six years.
He's been featured in Forbes, Social Media examiner and Content Marketing Institute.
So today I'd like to welcome Garrett Moon.
Garrett, welcome to the show.

Garrett Moon (03:03.080)
Yeah, thanks.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (03:06.360)
So one thing I always like to ask my guests is what gets you out of bed every day?
What drives or motivates you to do what you do?

Garrett Moon (03:14.900)
You know, I think at the end of the day my background is in graphic design and marketing and I had a career in Advertising before I became an entrepreneur and startup founder.
But I think the thing that has always driven me is problem solving.
I love to solve problems and figure out things that I don't quite understand and try to put them together and create them.
I love taking on those types of challenges.
So I think graphic design really lends itself well to that.
Early on it was kind of how I exercised that problem solving desire.
And then as I've grown in my career, it's just I keep wanting to upgrade the size of the problem and there's no better way to do that than building a company from scratch and then trying to scale it.
So it's always new problems and I always love trying to figure them out.

Omer (04:06.590)
Now one of the things I forgot to mention in the Intro is that CoSchedule is also the fastest growing startup in North Dakota, right?

Garrett Moon (04:15.980)
Yes, we are.
I'm pretty sure we are.
I can't imagine, I can't imagine we aren't.
So we are and one of the few SaaS startups in North Dakota.
Definitely not the only startup in the state, but certainly one of the fastest growing.
So cool.

Omer (04:31.660)
So as I explained to the audience a little bit about coschedule but tell us in your own words, what is the problem that you're trying to solve and who are the target customers that you're focusing on?

Garrett Moon (04:45.060)
Yeah, so I think one of the always exciting things is when you're able to solve a problem that you've experienced and you're able to kind of scratch your own itch as they call it.
And that is definitely a bit of the story with co schedule.
So the story goes, me and my co founder were running a service based company.
We are a web design and marketing consulting company and we had lots of clients.
We were building them new websites, we were building them mobile apps and you know, different things like that.
And there was always that problem of sure, I built it, that's great, but how do I use it as a tool to grow my business?
And we would always come back to creating content, you know, using email marketing, using social media and bringing all of those things together to drive traffic to your site and to actually use your website as a tool for growth.
And this is back in 2013 and I think world's changed a lot in terms of what people expect.
But even at that time there was an interest in those types of things, but there really wasn't the tools where teams could go and execute that and be successful.
We found that they understood that.
I think social media had really changed People's expectations of how businesses communicate with their customers, but the tools weren't always there to make it easy for them to execute it.
That is really where the spark of the idea came, came for us was seeing those clients struggling.
Us using email marketing and social media as our only method for advertising and marketing our business.
We were experiencing it.
And you kind of sit back eventually and you say, you know, there's gotta be a better way.
And that's kind of what got things rolling for us.

Omer (06:28.880)
So a lot of people have ideas and they do nothing about it.
So what was it about you guys?
So what did you do with that idea?
Did it just.
Was it something you thought about for a while and didn't take any action, or was it the kind of thing that it just felt right and you started putting some time towards it pretty quickly?

Garrett Moon (06:51.210)
Yeah, it was one of those ideas where we started dedicating time to it pretty quickly.
Although I'd say we were definitely careful in terms of how we did it.
And I can get into that a little bit.
But one thing to kind of mention here is that we did have a product prior to CoSchedule that we had built and it was more of a social media dashboard type of tool.
So coschedule was not our first product.
It was probably our third or fourth product really.
But you know, we always talked about the first four as practice, but the.
That, that one in particular got us really into social media as well, into scheduling social media and understanding some of the problems with trying to do it all in one and learning a lot of lessons in terms of how to build a product, take it to market and be successful with it.
So we kind of had that as a basis.
Once we kind of developed the idea for CoSchedule.
What that really started out as was a simple connection between your content creation workflow, which we kind of started with, scoped that just to WordPress, and your social media workflow.
So the very first part of the problem we decided to tackle was do users want to create their blog content and then maybe perhaps right below that piece of blog content, actually schedule a social media to promote that, that very piece of content.
So we actually started looking at building a plugin just to solve that one piece of the problem, which would obviously, you know, lead into a full, full fledged marketing calendar where we are today.
But that was, that's kind of where we started.
And so, you know, kind of getting back to like, you know, was an idea we just took off on right away.
Yeah, I think once we Always say it was hatched on an airplane between here, between North Dakota and Atlanta.
And it was something where once we kind of started putting those two things together, took some of that knowledge we had from working with customers and clients, took some of that knowledge we had from working with our social media tool, it clicked, it made sense.
We knew it was something we wanted to take action on.
You know, day one, as soon as we landed.

Omer (08:49.589)
Did you, did you get funding or look for funding right away or did you guys, were you self funded in the early days?

Garrett Moon (08:57.509)
We self funded for at least for over a little over a year.
So we really wanted to be able to prove traction and really at that time we had a successful business, we had a few team members so we had the ability to build and put some resources into it without having to raise funding.
So really funding at that time wasn't even on our mind.
It was just not really something we were needing.
We had everything we needed to get going.

Omer (09:24.680)
Yeah, I've seen a lot of founders or come across several founders who have had a services business and they have effectively used that as a vehicle to fund the software business with, with different levels of success.
But and obviously it's also a pretty tough situation to be in because you're basically building a business that's going to kill your cash cow at some point.
Right.
Which is your, your services business which is probably paying the majority of the bills in the early days.

Garrett Moon (09:55.350)
Yeah, absolutely.
I would say it's the hardest in many ways it was most exciting but it's the hardest thing I think we've ever tried to do, me and my business partner Justin as entrepreneurs was to balance those two businesses, particularly in the early days before we ended up taking funding for co schedule.
And I always kind of think about it.
One time we had sort of this vision like 5050 we called it and it was for our consulting business.
We thought well what if 50% of our revenue came from and the other 50% came from product?
And that seemed like a really great idea.
But the problem is once you start thinking about that and it's a, it's a big theme I think through probably throughout this interview that I'll touch on again is, is focus is if you're, if you're 50% focused on two things, you're not 100% focused on anything.
And that makes whatever you're trying to do and launch out of your service based company extremely hard.
And that means, you know, so your revenue is split, your time is split, your attention is split, everything is split and so nothing is focused.
And that's a very hard place to be as an entrepreneur, I think.

Omer (11:03.610)
I mean, we could talk for an hour just on focus and the importance of it and figure out how to get focus, but thinking about the idea.
So you kind of developed this idea.
How did you go about transitioning to the software business?
Did you initially pick a one customer to start working with on the software product or how did that transition come about?

Garrett Moon (11:31.140)
Yeah, so the very first thing we did was actually write a blog post.
And it came with a couple things.
We developed a name, we did do that, and we developed sort of a basic structure of what this product would do.
And that kind of encompass sort of a probably a 1.0 type idea or a lot of times what we call it here is a 0.9 version, not even the 1.0, you got to get your MVP.
And then also sort of like, well, where do we think it's going to be?
What's the real goal?
What's the real product we want to build?
And we kind of brainstormed those couple things.
Then maybe we spent maybe a few weeks a month on something like that.
But pretty quickly we took it to some pretty crude mockups just in Photoshop that I had put together.
And they look nice and there was a kind of a quasi logo associated with them and some basic colors, but it was just a picture essentially of what this tool would be.
And we put up a one page splash page.
It was a really simple email signup.
It had two or three bullet points of what we thought the product would do and the problems it would solve and why we thought somebody would want to buy it.
You enter your email address there to get more.
And I think the only other thing we did was along with that was this really simple blog.
And we wrote a blog post and that was it.
That was the first step.
And I always, you know, a big part of our story is content marketing and inbound marketing.
And I always like to say we wrote blog content, we wrote that type of stuff before we wrote code.
And so that was the very first thing we did.
And we were really fortunate that we had some good connections with some people in the WordPress community and were able to get that announcement.
Basically said, this is what we're going to build, we're going to build co schedule and this is what it's going to do.
And we think scheduling is broken, we think it's frustrating to do social media and to do it together and we're going to fix that.
And we just Kind of put it up there, see what happens.
And we got picked up by a handful of WordPress specific sites and marketing sites.
And within the first, you know, 24 hours, we had probably three, three, 400, you know, email signups of people saying that they were interested in that product.
So that was a pretty, a pretty telling moment.
But that was, that was the very first thing that we did to get going.
The second thing that we did was we downloaded a copy of that email list and went through it.
And you throw out all the Gmail addresses, the Yahoo addresses.
We looked for those URLs and pulled those out and identified 10 potential customers that we thought would buy the product or we felt like were in potentially what could be our niche in our market.
And it was a wider variety.
We had a couple people from universities, we had a large nonprofit organization in there.
We probably had a couple more solopreneur or professional bloggers.
So we had a good assortment of people.
And I worked up a probably eight or nine page slide deck keynote and scheduled calls with those people, got on the phone call and did a 10 minute walkthrough of what we thought the app would do and started to ask them questions to get their feedback.
So we really started with, you know, the bare minimum, I think, of what you would need to get a product off the ground.

Omer (14:51.620)
So basically your MVP was a blog post.

Garrett Moon (14:56.100)
It was a blog post and you could maybe include 10 slides in a keynote file as well, but that was it.

Omer (15:03.780)
As you started to talk to people and get feedback, did that significantly change your vision?
I mean, did you have any surprises when you talked to people or did it just validate the problem that you thought needed to be solved?

Garrett Moon (15:18.820)
Some of both, I'd say.
The more so we validated it and I think we understood much better what would motivate somebody to buy it.
And I think we learned a lot with that.
Sometimes when you're selling a product well, it'll save them time or it'll make it easier for them.
You kind of think of some of those basic things, but I think what we came out of it is having a clear picture of why it would save them time.
And we were able to speak more directly to potential customers.
So I think we got a lot of help just in terms of how to market and sell the product.
And I think there's.
And I recorded all of those interviews so the whole team could go back and watch them.
I think you pick up words that customer or potential customers use that you never would have or phrases and that was really, really valuable.
We did definitely have a couple features that we had proposed in that first slide deck that we ended up not building or we put way on the back burner.
Some of them we've now buil, some we still haven't.
And we just kind of learned that those weren't high priorities for users.
So it definitely helped us also prioritize what we were going to build.
So I'd say it was a significant learning experience.
But by and large we were able to validate that we felt we were onto something and that the customers agreed.

Omer (16:39.390)
If you were starting like all over, like from scratch today with the new startup, do you think you would take, you take the same approach like you described in terms of, okay, let's kind of use, create some images on what we think the product is going to look like, let's write a blog post, let's get the word out there and let's start talking to people and kind of finding about their problems and kind of sharing our vision of what we want to build.

Garrett Moon (17:04.420)
That's a great question.
I never really quite thought about it.
I think in many ways I would, I think some of it.
The only thing I could see changing that would just be depending on the size of the audience and the competitiveness of that particular market.
You might want to be more careful potentially as the product has grown, as our platform and our audience size has grown a little bit, there could be some hazards in doing it too soon.
But as a startup, a couple people at a web company, we had nothing to lose at that point.
It was great and we had everything to learn and so there's not a lot of reasons not to do it.
And so I probably would do something like it.
I think the other piece of it that we did is that we continue writing those blog posts.
I blogged once a week about the entire process of building co schedule.
I shared early wireframes, early ideas, got customer feedback and comments and stuff all along the way.
And what it did is it really started to tell the story of our company and that became a very powerful thing that was there for us when we launched.
So, you know, I, in many ways I think of it, all of it was marketing before we launched.
And I would definitely want to do something just like that again.

Omer (18:18.490)
You know, I wanted to sort of spend some time with you learning about what you guys did to, to drive growth.
Obviously on the one side we can look at the fact that you already had a services business, so you had a potential client base that you could tap into.
There of people who could become potential customers for your software product.

Garrett Moon (18:45.370)
Well, actually.

Omer (18:46.730)
Go ahead.

Garrett Moon (18:47.690)
Can I jump in on that?

Omer (18:48.450)
Yeah.

Garrett Moon (18:48.690)
Because I think that's actually a really big potential pitfall, I think for people who are trying to make that transition from service to product.
Because we did that and I kind of had mentioned earlier in the first segment that we had this previous social media tool and that is one of the things that we tried to do with that tool was oh, we can make it instantly sellable to this customer base, which was primarily for us, a localized customer base.
These are people we know either in our hometown or in our home state.
We had some national type clients, but by and large that's who you're selling to.
I think that could be a dangerous path to go down because it doesn't really help you validate a broader marketplace because you're selling to people you already have a relationship with.
So you're leveraging relationships, not just an idea or a problem that somebody has with a SaaS company or startup that's going to have hit massive growth.
You have to be able to sell it to somebody that you've never talked to before, never met before, will never even know who you are and understand them all the way through the funnel.
I think that is actually a really big thing to watch out for and something to specifically not do.
With coschedule, we never had the intention of selling it to service based clients.
We felt that it was really important to just skip past that and I don't know that we ever did.
Maybe there's one or two clients that bought it, but you know, by and large we did not try to do that.

Omer (20:15.430)
That's really interesting because I mean it's a great point because it's one thing selling a product to somebody that already knows you, you've spent face to face time with, they have a track record of working with you versus somebody who's never heard of you, who comes to your website and sees the sign up button.
Yeah.

Garrett Moon (20:37.370)
And people buy things from those that they know like and trust and somebody, one of our clients, they already know like and trust us because they already, they bought something at a much higher ticket value than what we were going to be selling coschedule for.
I think there's also this realization when you're selling SaaS software.
You can't sit in a meeting room and talk to someone to sell them the piece of software.
They have to be able to buy it on their own in order for you to ever hit any sort of meaningful scale.
So I think just kind of setting yourself up for.
For like this is the challenge that we are going to have to accomplish and let's try and figure out how to do it right away is really good.
If you try to lean too far back on current clients, you I think can early on can kind of fail to make some of the changes and do some of the things necessary to kind of have that natural funnel that you're going to need now.

Omer (21:23.810)
One of the things that I'm.
I've really been impressed with CoSchedule is apart from the product is you guys kind of walking the talk and actually what you've done with your own content marketing and the blog that you've developed and a pretty huge audience from what I understand as well.
Was that the primary way that you were acquiring new customers?

Garrett Moon (21:48.920)
It's one of the main ones, yes.
I would say by and large that has been the number one driver of growth for us and we've kind of that early part of the story talks about.
I blogged once a week and talked about just the process building the product.
It took us about nine or 10 months to fully really build out co schedule in the way we needed to and wanted to before we officially launched.
And there were several beta phases and stuff along that way.
And we had a group of people we called co pilots that tested the software for us.
There was a lot of steps in there, but the one thing that was always very consistent was we blogged and shared our story and then towards launch time started converting that blog content to more helpful type of inbound content that just talked about the scheduling process, marketing team tips, the stuff that CoSchedule now publishes on a daily basis almost on the blog.
We just kept the habit going and never stopped.
I think we probably posted three posts a week pretty early on after we launched I think was the goal.
I think now we just too.
But we have published probably pretty close to 500 posts.
If you've read the CoSchedule blog, and you should, it's fantastic.
I don't write for it as much as I used to, but the team has absolutely taken it to a whole other level.
Nathan and our content team beyond when I was writing for it, we've always focused on actionable marketing strategies and marketing tips.
We always call it actionable content marketing.
Our posts are in depth their how to they give you actual stuff that you can use.
You get downloadable worksheets, you get downloadable Excel spreadsheets, things that will actually help you put the stuff you're reading into Action.
And most of our posts are several thousand words, so they're big, meaty posts.
And connecting that to our email list, connecting that to our social strategy, has absolutely been a key to growth.
Our email list now is well over 100,000.
So it's a big size list.

Omer (23:56.960)
Yeah, I think it's a great blog and I would definitely recommend people check that out.
We'll include a link in the show notes to that as well as obviously the product.
Now, everybody looks at a blog like co schedule and others and says, well, they have a huge audience and so it's easy for them.
But everybody starts with zero email subscribers.
Zero.
So how long did it take for you to start to see some traction with your own blog?

Garrett Moon (24:32.060)
You know, I would say we were pretty, you know, in terms of growth, it's always been pretty steady and you know, we've always been pretty good at it.
I think the one thing that I can think of, there's probably maybe two good pivot points that I could point out that were real catalysts for major growth.
Maybe when we kind of jump to another level.
One is users might be familiar with a tool on our site called the Headline Analyzer.
And this is a free tool that we made and I don't know exactly when we launched it, it's been a year and a half, maybe a couple years by now.
But this is a tool where we took co schedule, we worked with a lot of people's blog posts.
We were looking with a lot of their social media stuff.
So we started, I think we had about a million headlines in our system and social media data in terms of number of shares that those headlines had received to go with it.
And so we just kind of stepped back and, and took a look and said, okay, like what, what makes a really viral or a heavily shared post?
A heavily shared post?
Is it because it's a list post?
Is it because it, you know, includes numbers?
What words is it including?
We did a bunch of research on some of the other things that other teams have done in terms of what makes a great headline.
And we put together this free tool called the Headline Analyzer.
And you can type in any headline and we'll give you a score and a complete breakdown of that headline and how to make it better and how to make it more shareable and, you know, more, more likely to go viral, so to speak, type of headline.
It's free on our website, but we attach that to some really useful content.
You know, a little PDF that goes through power words and highly emotional words that Make Better Headlines has some tips on headlines.
And it's just, you know, kind of your old, your most simple approach of, you know, email list building is you come, you use the tool.
We don't gate the tool, but we offer you a helpful PDF when you're there.
And, you know, most of the users that use it, that come back multiple times a week, they've downloaded that thing and it's, it's been helpful to them and it's grown our list.
And I'd say that that tool in itself drew, drew tons of traffic and tons of signups for us.

Omer (26:39.130)
Now, content marketing, there's no shortage of content marketing and social media marketing blogs out there, right?
And in fact, I'd say it's a pretty saturated area that it's kind of overwhelming when you start to look for what's out there.
So how did you guys figure out how to stand out from the crowd when it came to creating your own content?

Garrett Moon (27:02.650)
Yeah, we think of it as the Blue Ocean Strategy, which is a book that I'm sure many of your listeners have read, and it's a great one and you should read it.
But it basically talks about and what you're saying is content marketing is pretty saturated.
And if you think about that as this ocean, that means that the water of content marketing in your industry is bloody with competition.
There's lots of people doing it, everyone's trying to steal the time and attention of your readers, but they're all essentially doing the exact same thing to try and do that.
The idea of a Blue Ocean Strategy is that what is the thing that you're going to be able to do that's going to rise, float you, you'd bring you to the top and take you out of the bloody water so you're not competing against everyone else.
And I think in terms of marketing, that's a concept we applied to our marketing.
And I think that was a really big trigger for us as a way to kind of think differently in terms of how we are approaching our content.
I think there's some other really great examples of startups who have done that, but for us, it was just a matter of like, okay, what are we going to do that's going to rise us to another.
To another level?
What are the things that we can provide that no one else is willing to do or that no one else has thought of to do that will make us stand out and be completely different?
And Headline Analyzer is a great example of that.
Using our data and then giving it back to the community who actually generated the data for us, that was all their content.
And we just took it and looked at it in a different way and gave it back to them and just gave it away.
The other things, our posts are huge.
They're well researched, they're in depth and they're actionable.
They're very, very actionable every single time.
There's always something you're able to take away and you're going to be able to put it into action right away.
I think we're well known for that type of content because we've delivered it consistently now for three years, over and over again, twice a week, always in your inbox, always useful, always actionable.
Another part of that is every post we have includes a download, a resource, a spreadsheet, a worksheet, something that will help you do something with it.
And so I think in content marketing you get a lot of people who are willing to write a 500 word blog post because that's relatively easy.
Get a lot of people who are willing to write a thousand word blog post even because it's still relatively easy.
But once you make it bigger, and it's not just about length in terms of doing the research, doing the homework, spending the time really putting together something that's actually useful and really special, most people won't do that.
And that has by and large been our Blue Ocean strategy and has worked.
And I think you have to be able to figure out what that is.
Another really good example of it many of your users might be familiar with is Groove, the help desk software and their blog.
And I'm sure half of you, most of your readers probably read their blog.
Their story is awesome.
Alex Turnbull has talked about it.
They're going along with 10, 12,000 subscribers on their email list, their normal content marketing blog.
It's going okay, but they were able to kind of completely turn that around and say, what's going to be our Blue Ocean strategy?
Our Blue Ocean strategy is going to be, we're going to publish our numbers and we're going to tell this story of going to 100k per month in revenue and, you know, change everything for them.
It's a totally total way to rise to the top.
And yeah, it gets harder and harder to come up with that every day.
Ours wasn't particularly fancy, but you know, you have to approach it differently.

Omer (30:30.340)
Yeah, I think that's a great point and I think Groove is a great story there as well.
The funny thing is that after they did that, I saw a lot of other startups trying to replicate the exact same thing.
And it kind of goes back to the same point.
Well, no, now you probably need to figure out what's the new thing that's going to help you stand out from everybody who's using that kind of groove approach to do their business.

Garrett Moon (30:57.630)
Exactly.
Yeah.
It only seems to work once, and so you have to.
But, you know, again, I think it's.
The same lesson applies there, though.
It's the hard work.
If you're willing to do the hard work of figuring out what your Blue Ocean strategy is, then you can find one.
If you're not willing to do the hard work and you're just going to copy someone else, that's not a Blue Ocean strategy.
That's just you didn't put the hard work in doing.
Our Blue Ocean strategy was hard work.
It took us twice as long, three times as long days to write a post, but it paid off because we stuck with it and put in the hard work.
And I think that's the differentiating factor is if you take shortcuts, they usually don't.
They usually don't pan out.

Omer (31:38.400)
Yeah.
I think you guys have a great story as well in, in terms of content marketing, but, you know, it sounds like a great story and, and it sounds like everything went really smoothly.
I'm sure in reality it didn't.
Kind of looking back at those, those early days, what didn't go right?
What was one of the, kind of the bigger mistakes that you made that you wish you'd done differently?

Garrett Moon (31:56.470)
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think lessons, mistakes made for us always come back to not listening well enough to our audience and to our customers.
And I think that's always something that you can kind of get distracted by.
And I could say this would be true even for the content that we were creating on our site as well as the product that we were building.
Although I would definitely say the pain of these types of mistakes are felt far more in product.
And I can think of several instances where we built features that we forgot to really understand why our users would want them or if they would buy them or how they would value them, that we got ourselves into situations where we spent tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on development that we ended up having to throw away or really just never could catch on.
And I think the same type of thing could be said for content.
In early days.
I remember spending tons of time getting podcasts, going, scheduling interviews, and doing all of these things to do a podcast.
And it was a way to generate more content.
Podcasts are great.
CoSchedule is launched in the process of launching a really great, actionable content marketing podcast right now.
But at the time that we did it, it caused distraction.
It took too much time, and it.
It got us outside a bit of that blue ocean strategy that we had kind of put together.
So it distracted us from doing what we were really, really good at.
And so we kind of learned with some of those things is that you really have to understand your audience and understand why they're there and what they're relying on you for and make sure you give them that first.
And once you can do that in your sleep, basically, then you can start branching out and trying some other things.
But if you do it too soon and if you don't take them into account, you can get yourself into trouble really fast.
So it's kind of a broad answer, but I think it comes back to focus and knowing what you're good at and doing it, executing it really well, rather than executing a whole bunch of things pretty okay.

Omer (34:02.110)
What I'd like to do is really kind of uncover some practical tips that other founders who are listening to this can kind of go away and maybe apply to their own business.
And specifically, I wanted to talk about how to use a.
An editorial calendar as a way to develop some.
Some rigor and consistency in creating content and just generally some tips that people can use to.
To build an audience and get the word out about the content they're creating.
And, and, you know, for me, this is something, I guess, is personal as well, because I've spent a lot of time with this podcast and in growing an audience there, but I've done very little in terms of blogging.
And, you know, I came to the realization eventually that, hey, there are a lot of people who still don't listen to podcasts.
It's maybe it's just not the kind of thing they want to listen to.
And so there are potentially people who I'm missing out on who could be, you know, part of my audience.
And also as.
As I've done, you know, well over 100 interviews, there's so much stuff that I've learned that I. I can have an opportunity to share that as well in different kind of formats and platforms.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I start to think about that and, and think about, well, what can I do to be more consistent with content marketing?
And I've always felt that having an editorial calendar is.
Is a good way to do that.
And, you know, I spent 10 years at, at MSN in the media business, and you know, that kind of stuff was kind of.
You know, it was just part of everyday business that you had that sort of discipline around you.
But when it comes to doing it yourself, it's.
It's a lot harder, I think.
And so I want to kind of pick your brain on that.
I also signed up for a CO Schedule account, and I've just got to say, I love the bit that once you actually sign up for a paid account, that.
That little video that you have off.
So for people who haven't seen that, you basically get this little video.
And it kind of says it's a message from the CO schedule team.
And it kind of.
It's kind of.
It feels like you're kind of walking into the CO Schedule offices and everybody's welcoming you and everybody's excited, and there's this kind of party going on, and it's just a lot of fun.
And it kind of.

Garrett Moon (36:21.320)
That's a live feed every time.
Every time.

Omer (36:27.800)
That would be impressive.
All right, so let's start with.

Garrett Moon (36:33.240)
Those are always fun.
We update that every once in a while.
It's a fun video to shoot.

Omer (36:36.400)
Yeah, Yeah, I really enjoyed that.
And I think it kind of show the culture of the organization as well, and I think that's really important as well.
So let's talk about getting that kind of rigor and discipline and kind of.
For folks who aren't familiar, what is an editorial calendar and why is it important?

Garrett Moon (36:58.990)
Yeah, I think editorial calendar is as simple as it sounds.
It's a calendar that tells you what you're going to be publishing, and it gives you sort of a plan to follow in terms of, what am I going to publish next week, what am I going to publish the week after that, the month after that?
And editorial calendars can be considered or can be kind of thought of in yearly buckets, where you kind of do a theme per month.
Sometimes a lot of magazine publications, I'm sure you kind of seen that they'll kind of follow those types of themes.
But for most people, in terms of blogging, podcasting, it's a monthly calendar, and you're probably looking at two to three weeks, four weeks ahead of time.
I'm going to publish this post here, this blog post here, and this podcast there.
So it gives you a clear picture of what's coming up.
And I think that's the key to it.
And you talk about consistency and blue ocean strategy right there.
Most people don't put in the hard work to stay consistent.
So if you can figure out that way to Deliver very consistently.
Then you kind of have an advantage right there to start with.
An editorial calendar gives you that plan to follow so you don't have to do it.
Every time you sit down to write

Omer (38:09.470)
a blog post, how do you come up with ideas for the content that you're going to create?

Garrett Moon (38:16.790)
Yeah, I think first thing you have to do, I used to call it a blog storm or a headline storm.
I like to say write 100 headlines.
And don't start with that.
Start with 20 and then write 40, or start with 25, then write 50, then 75.
But give yourself some breathing room.
And that may sound hard, but forcing yourself to get that first set of 100 headlines written out, they don't all have to be good.
And some of them could be one or two words, just a topic, really.
But give yourself a wide variety of ideas to start with, and it allows you to kind of start going back through there and focusing in on things that stand out.
Some sound more fun to write and where you want to go from there.
That's always what I say for step one.

Omer (39:02.020)
Is there some kind of structure to how you come up with those ideas?
Do you focus on some specific themes or is it just literally as simple as just brainstorm the stuff that comes to mind and get that down on paper or computer?

Garrett Moon (39:18.030)
Yes, I think you could start with defining categories is one way to think about it.
Like, what are the categories I have on my site?
And use those to kind of brainstorm groups of headlines for each particular category.
If you don't have categories yet, you haven't even launched a blog, you can make a few up.
I think the biggest thing here is, to me, always with brainstorming, is don't put many rules on it to start with.
Add the rules in later as you learn and understand what you're doing, a little bit more.
100 headlines.
It may not be your next 100 blog posts.
You may only have 20 ideas in there that you actually use.
But sometimes just the activity of getting the bad ones or the throwaway ones out there is useful and it will help you get to the better ideas.
So I always try not to get too structured with it, but I'm sure there's other techniques that might be useful in that.

Omer (40:11.780)
Okay, so you kind of come up with these ideas now.
I guess one of the challenges in also doing that is figuring out which of the ideas are good, which are bad.

Garrett Moon (40:26.500)
Right.

Omer (40:26.900)
And, you know, I may have one idea on the out of my 20 ideas which could potentially, I don't know, generate Thousands of social media shares and engagement and stuff like that.
And I could have the other 19 on my list could be ones that I'll only get, you know, five people a day ever reading, so.

Garrett Moon (40:45.680)
Right.
So, and I think that's another kind of nice thing to do is you have to think about some of your content, maybe in the early days as MVPs.
So you're gonna write a blog post and you're gonna, even when you do a podcast, and we were talking about this not too long ago, you know, we're, we have lots of audience, we have people we can ask, you know, what do you want to hear?
What, what kind of stuff do you listen to now?
How could we be different?
But at the same time we're still going to experiment.
And so one of our goals was try something a little bit different every single episode or every single batch of shows and try to mix it up a little bit because I think you're not going to guess correctly.
Don't try more.
So try to add experimentation directly into your process.
So that may mean taking those 100 headlines, breaking them into three or four different groups of categories.
Maybe it's list content or how to type of content, whatever it might be, or more news based content, current events, type stuff, try them and see which one's getting the most traction.
Which one is easiest sometimes for you to write.
I don't think it's a bad idea to say if you just have a really easy time writing in list posts, for example, 10 things that I learned doing this, five tips for whatever.
There's a great blogger named Michael Hyatt.
Many people might be familiar with him.
He's a fantastic guy, great speaker and author and co schedule customer.
But he writes list posts like nobody's business.
It works really well for him.
It's a format that fits him, it fits how he thinks it works really well.
You translate to his podcast.
I think you could fake yourself out saying, well, I don't want to write so much list based content.
But you know, it works for him and he uses it over and over again very, very successfully.
I mean he's a really successful blogger.
So I think find out what's going to make it that you have to find that kind of magic place where it's easy enough for you, but also, you know, obviously something your audience is going to work and usually if it's something that helps you create really great content, you can make it work.

Omer (42:50.190)
Do you or did you do any keyword research as part of the kind of the figuring Out.
Okay.

Garrett Moon (42:55.430)
Yep.
Every time.
We never publish a post without doing some keyword research.
As simple as there's moz and lots of tools you can use.
Or it's as simple as just doing a search for that topic on Google itself and seeing what's out there and how you want to fit in.
So we never blog without it.

Omer (43:14.990)
Do you start with the headline and then sort of use the keyword research to validate it, or do you sometimes do it the other way around as well?
Just use keyword research as a way to generate ideas for content?

Garrett Moon (43:26.180)
You know, I don't know how every writer does it because I think it's a little bit different.
But I would say most of the time there's a pretty rough headline, at least in place.
We'll probably use our headline analyzer to clean it up a bit and push the score up to where we want it.
We never publish it, for example.
75 I think is the threshold we look for, so we probably change it.
But I think I always think it's valuable to have a headline for first.
I think it doesn't not only helps you know the topic you're going to write about it, but it gives you a kind of a key in on the format.
So like if you're starting how to you're going to approach that post differently than if you're going to say 10 tips for right.
So it gives you some framing.
So.
And I think the way I think about it is, you know, as a SaaS entrepreneur, your audience is going to be totally familiar with the idea of reducing friction.
Like when you get a user to sign up, how do you reduce as much friction as possible to make it as easy as possible for them to get started with your tool?
The same thing goes with your content creation process.
How do you reduce friction?
What time of the day works best for you?
You have to figure that out.
Where does it work best for you?
Does a headline getting your headline written and figured out the day before and then coming back to it tomorrow to write the post, does that help you come at it with a fresh perspective?
What are those little tweaks that help you be successful for a long time?
I used to record an Evernote audio recording of myself just kind of running through the basics of the post as I drove to work.
And so I have the headline and I'd kind of read it right before I took off from my house and I would just start talking and kind of just free talking.
And usually by the time I'd come to work, I would have kind of figured out exactly how I was going to approach things.
I'd have sort of a rough outline.
I'd probably even have sort of a really crude rough draft that I could go through and listen to.
And that worked really well for me.
So I think you have to.
And that's may not going to work for everybody, but you have to figure out how to make it easy for yourself and using Editorial Calendar to set up that schedule and commit to that schedule.
I'm going to publish once a week on this date and then you're holding yourself to it.
You have to hit it.
In CO Schedule, we have tasks, we have reminders and color labeling and all kinds of cool features that will help you stay consistent and plan out that calendar so that you can execute it well.
But at the end of the day, you know, it's still about those personal habits that you build.

Omer (45:53.460)
Now, CO schedule also allows you to or helps you do the social media scheduling and automatically posting your content once it gets published or the day after or things like that, which I think is really cool.
Can you also use CO Schedule to share curated content, which stuff stuff that you haven't published yourself?

Garrett Moon (46:15.930)
Yeah, absolutely.
So we have a Chrome extension that allows you to grab curated content from anywhere around the web and you can add that right to your calendar.
So you can actually see this every day.
You can see what blog posts are going live, what social messages are being sent out.
We cover all the major social networks and give you the tools to be able to manage that entire calendar at a single glance.

Omer (46:40.900)
Cool.
Yeah, no, I'm still learning a lot about CO Schedule.
I kind of like to think I pick up stuff pretty quickly, but there's quite a lot of stuff in there that I'm still surprised about.
When I come across or some stuff that you mentioned and I was like, oh, wow, I kind of completely missed it.

Garrett Moon (47:00.740)
When with social media promotion, I think it's really important to think about when to be successful at content.
You also have to be successful at not just creating it, but actually promoting the content you create.
So that's where the social media side becomes really important.
I think there tends to be a problem where you publish something.
You work hard to create it and you kind of tweet it once and it's done.
You post it on Facebook once.
So we have a lot of really good ways to reuse some of that content, particularly when you're creating stuff just like you are, where it's evergreen and it's good today, it's good tomorrow.
So we have a social cue that allows you to create a whole set of drip messages that we'll send out over time.
And we kind of give you some key, key dates to hit on today, tomorrow, next week, next month, three months from now where you can repeat content.
We have a feature called Templates, which actually lets you create.
It's really cool, lets you create the perfect social sharing plan.
You can fine tune it for every network and you can actually apply it to any blog post in a single click.
So we actually use it to schedule out six months worth of social content at once.
And we apply that template, it schedules 60 messages, we fill in a couple reusable fields, hit save, and the calendar is full.
You can populate your calendar with really well customized, really powerful, useful social content.
Not just like the old, I'm going to repeat the exact same tweet 100 times, that old trick, but actually nice, unique content that is engaging and useful to your audience every single time.
We try to make that as easy as possible.
We also have some Facebook features in the works that will actually allow you to reuse some of those social messages.
So as you find something that does really well, a lot of people like it, they click on it.
It's driving traffic.
You could actually put it into what we're going to call the re queue, and it will actually reschedule when it finds a day where you're not.
You haven't scheduled enough social messages.
We'll actually go pick that one up, stick it in there, and use it to help drive more traffic back to your content.
So really trying to take that promotion side out of it and make that as easy as possible, because it can be tremendously tedious.
And the fact that it's tedious means it's hard and means a lot of people don't do it.
So they're missing out on some of the traffic they could be getting.

Omer (49:15.460)
Yeah, that's a great point, because for many of us, getting to just hit the publish button seems hard enough, right?

Garrett Moon (49:23.940)
It's monumental.

Omer (49:24.740)
Yeah.
But then you realize, no, there's a whole bunch of other stuff I need to do if anyone's ever going to discover this stuff.
So good.
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?

Garrett Moon (49:40.440)
All right, sounds great.

Omer (49:41.280)
I'm ready.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?

Garrett Moon (49:45.800)
You know, I think I'll go back to fundraising or not back to.
I'll cover Fundraising, which we didn't get to too much, but I think somebody told me right before we started raising our round of funding, if you want money, ask for advice.
And if you want advice, ask for money.
And I think that was tremendously valuable in terms of fundraising and actually in many ways of the business that if you can go into a conversation and really respect the person you're talking to, ask them for input and advice to help you, they are going to be very receptive to you.
And it's a great way to build a network and to raise money.

Omer (50:20.690)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
You already recommended the Blue Ocean Strategy.
So if you want to just use that one, that's fine.
Unless you have another one you'd also like to share.

Garrett Moon (50:29.370)
No, Blue Ocean Strategy would definitely be a great one.
But I do have, boy, I have tons of them that I could recommend.
One that might not get recommended very often is a book called Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, A Guide to Growing more Profitably.
And this thing is like the bible of pricing strategy can be very technical.
I definitely haven't absorbed all of it, but it's a fascinating book, super helpful on.
One of the hardest things there is to do in running a business and SaaS company in particular is figuring out your pricing.
So one of my, one of my favorites.
I also get to put a plug in for Linchpin by Seth Godin.
It's old maybe at this point, but actually I still love it.
And we actually have every co schedule team member who joins us, reads Linchpin and gives a book report in their first few months.
So it's an important book to us.
So I can't go without recommending it.

Omer (51:22.350)
It good.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Garrett Moon (51:29.150)
Focus.
Focus.
Like a laser beam.
I think it's, it's absolutely essential.
And you know, it's, it's what's required to do something well.
And I think it's a hard thing for many entrepreneurs, particularly we talk about ideas in this interview.
Entrepreneurs have ideas and sometimes they're taking action on five of them at once.
And like I said, if you're 50% focused on two things, you're never 100% focused on anything.
So there's a guy financial counselor out there and big personality named Dave Ramsey.
And he says gazelle, like intensity is what he has is the way he kind of raises it.
And I think it's essential.

Omer (52:10.910)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit apart from co schedule?

Garrett Moon (52:18.550)
Yeah, you know I don't.
I'm.
I'm just.
I'm so not a productivity nerd in that way.
I am very simple.
I.
My productivity tool is an Evernote note with checkboxes, and I add stuff to the top of it all the time.
And I think the only real hack that I have on it is that I try to clean it up pretty regularly, or I'll just.
Sometimes I'll just add spaces and a horizontal rule just to kind of like hide the extra stuff.
But I think the best one maybe is just try to pick the three or four things you're going to focus on right now and do those.
Sometimes if your task lists get too big and unwieldy, it's just impossible.
It's overwhelming, and it's hard to even tackle it.
So just what's the three things I can focus on that make the biggest impact right now?
Put those to the top of your to do list.
Forget everything else until those three are done, then go find another three.
And you don't need much fancy software to do that.
That for personal productivity.
In terms of team productivity, we use CO schedule for a lot of our projects around here, so there's that as well.

Omer (53:22.460)
That's good advice.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Garrett Moon (53:31.420)
You know, what the world needs is a universal API for sharing tasks across a bunch of different apps.
I mean, I think, like, there's, there's.
I have to dos being generated in all these different places.
And I think it would be great if we had like a.
A unified standard for how tasks are created, sort of like ICS files for calendars.
And I think it could be useful.
I don't know how I would sell it or if it's practical at all, but I've always thought it'd be a great thing to do.
So if somebody in your audience wants to tackle it, they should let me know.

Omer (54:01.950)
I like that because that's one of the things I hit when I started playing around with CO schedule was I like the idea of these task templates where you, when you create a new piece of content or you schedule a new piece of content, you can add a set of predefined tasks to it.
And so for me, with, say with the podcast, it could be, okay, well, this is when the podcast is going to get scheduled, and you sort of go back from that and say, this is the date the interview is going to get recorded, or this is the date the episode needs to be edited.
Or whatever those things are.
And that's sort of great.
Unfortunately, I found I needed to upgrade it on the plan to get to that feature, which probably goes back to stuff you learned from that Strategies and

Garrett Moon (54:43.480)
tactics of pricing that pricing book.
It's a good one.

Omer (54:47.480)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Garrett Moon (54:51.560)
Well, I don't tell them, so that's why no one knows them.
But maybe one would be that I am a studio art major.
I actually have a degree in sculpture and it's conceptual art.
Conceptual sculpture.
I also have one in graphic design, so a little more practical side of me too.
But there's an artist in there somewhere that liked like that creating that kind of thing and don't use it much, but it was always a fun way to think through problems and thinking exercise for me.

Omer (55:20.500)
Yeah, very cool.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Garrett Moon (55:25.460)
Well, I have three kids, three boys, and we all like baseball and the Chicago Cubs, so that we spend a lot of time playing baseball in the backyard, going to the batting cage and rooting for the Cubs, who are having a great season.
So that's one of it.
And maybe the only one is I'm fantastic from I'm from North Dakota.
We have lots of winter, so I like winter sports like snow skiing, which we have no mountains in North Dakota, so we have to go to Montana for that.
But you know, I like the seasons and I like winter too, so awesome.
Baseball, winter, editorial calendars.
You've summed me up right.

Omer (56:05.060)
All right, now if folks want to find out more about CO schedule, they can go to CoSchedule and make sure to check out both the product and the blog because there's a ton of great, great information there if folks want to get in touch with you.
What's the best way for them to do that?

Garrett Moon (56:19.850)
Twitter I pay attention to all the time.
So.
Garrett 2Rs 2T's Moon Is Me on Twitter.

Omer (56:27.130)
Awesome.
Garrett, thanks for joining me today and sharing the story of CoSchedule and also how to how to do a better job with content marketing.
So I'm personally going to apply a lot of the tips that you shared and I'll give you an update in a few months just to see how I'm doing with that.

Garrett Moon (56:44.880)
Yes, let me know.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
I really appreciate you having me on.
Thanks Omer, for the talk.
It was fun.

Omer (56:51.760)
I appreciate that.

Garrett Moon (56:52.520)
Cheers.