This week on DevEducate, Shruti Kuber from Restack joins me to talk about how her startup uses an iterative, collaborative approach to planning developer video content that works for their small team – and why starting with a niche audience is helping them create content that is getting noticed.

Talking Points

• Why personas and niching are critical for an early-stage startup
• How a small team can approach content planning
• Where top-down and bottom-up input meet during planning
• Figuring out how to make boring content more interesting
• Where to start with building a community from scratch

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Lightly edited for context

“To create content, it's very important to initially define the personas because when you define who you're making the content for you can understand their pain points better because there's a lot of content available for everything, right?” – Shruti

“Everybody needs our product so… our personas are ‘everybody.’” – Kamran

“Choosing a niche is like choosing the tip of an iceberg to focus on. You actually dive underwater and you see that’s there’s a huge, massive amount of information – a subculture almost.” – Kamran

“With startups nothing is the same. Two weeks later you have a different thing going on – so it’s definitely not possible to set up a persona and then say, okay, this is what you’re going to work on for the next six months. Definitely not possible.” – Shruti

“Even with the persona set, there’s still intent that you need to consider. For lower intent, you are creating awareness type of content and then as go towards the end of the funnel, you’re targeting people with very high intent.” – Shruti

“With trial and error, we figured out that one-month sprints work out really well for us. And then depending on the kind of content we want to do, we come up with smaller content we can produce more often.” – Shruti

“I would definitely say the kind of conversations you have after the content has been watched is the measure of the success.” – Shruti

“Opinionated pieces are much more helpful for people than just saying, oh, it depends on if you wanna do this, do this. If you wanna do this, do that.” – Shruti

“If you search for certain topics on YouTube, you’ll find people with their hoodies on, head down, looking at the screen, mumbling something for 45 minutes. And they’re definitely not appealing.” – Shruti

“Leading indicators might be likes and subscribes or page views and things like that. But it takes a while for the lagging indicators to show up, which would be comments either in person or on the content itself, or people sharing content.” – Kamran

“If you see my Slack, I’m part of like, a MILLION Slack channels and these are usually communities for the tools that I speak about.” – Shruti

Links

• Connect with Shruti on LinkedIn or her website or on Insta
• Check out Restack
• Watch Shruti’s videos on the Restack’s YouTube channel
• Grab my free DevEd Persona Toolkit
• Go on a Sales Safari with Amy Hoy / How to find your audience
• Data Engineering Zoom Camp by DataTalksClub