Garrett Moon, CoSchedule
500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing
Garrett Moon is the CEO and co-founder of CoSchedule, a content marketing and social media publishing calendar for small businesses and marketing teams. CoSchedule helps over 7,000 customers 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. This 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. 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 - organizing content creation and social media promotion in one place. They started by writing a blog post about the problem and how their new product would solve it. They mocked up some screenshots in Photoshop of a product that didn't exist yet. Within 24 hours, they had 300-400 email signups from people interested in the idea. Then Garrett did something remarkably disciplined. He went through that email list, threw out all the Gmail and Yahoo addresses, and identified 10 potential customers. He created a slide deck and scheduled calls with each of them to get feedback before writing any code. The SaaS content marketing didn't stop there. Garrett blogged once a week about the entire process of building CoSchedule - sharing wireframes, early ideas, and getting community feedback along the way. After launch, they scaled to three posts per week, published over 500 actionable blog posts, and grew their email list to over 100,000 subscribers. What makes this story different from every other "we used content marketing" narrative is Garrett's Blue Ocean strategy. Instead of competing on volume, CoSchedule published fewer but dramatically better posts - several thousand words each, deeply researched, always actionable, and always including downloadable worksheets or resources. Most competitors wouldn't put in that level of effort. That became their moat. Garrett also shares the painful lessons about building features customers didn't want, why he deliberately avoided selling to his consulting clients, and why focus is the single most important attribute for any entrepreneur.
