Why your content is ruining your Business’s reputation.

Your content is making you forgettable. But why? Let's change that.

This is a topic that has been on my mind recently. I want to clear the room upfront by saying that your content is not inherently bad. It can be good in many cases.

The expertise and experience you have gained from serving the industry as a founder need to be channeled correctly.

Have you ever built MVPs, launched products, raised funds, hired teams, lost customers, negotiated deals, made expensive mistakes, expected your business to unicorn? Don’t lie.

Here’s the thing... You and I both know you’ve learned things about your industry through years and years of grinding. Outsiders don’t perceive that anyway easily.

The Problem With Your Content

Those clickbait titles, free templates, and social praise from LinkedIn hook your attention. You build false expectations in your head, write a post with excitement, and suddenly everything sounds familiar.

You end up getting trapped in a cycle of posting with good intentions, but end up posting just to feel good about yourselves, just to get vanity metrics.

✮ Hi, Suchanda here, Thought Leadership Partner for B2B Founders & CEOs | I Help You Find Your Voice, Transforming Your Ideas And Expertise Into Executive Authority That Gets You Seen, Heard, And Trusted ✮

This is called mental masturbation.

Writing about being a founder but not actually revealing anything about your company. Writing to feel good about yourself, to feel like you are actually improving that is.

In reality, your brain loves collecting those dopamine hits and enforcing the mental masturbation loop further.

The Difference Between Generic Tutorials & Founders Storytelling

Writing tutorials only contents is extremely generic. It makes you aware of knowledge you may have know and highly relying on external factors to build your business.

Let’s say, At the same time there are founders (divided into two groups A & B) that swear by the exact same experience.

Let’s take your industry for example.

• Group A are equipped with generic post about leadership, growth, and productivity.
• Group B understand how to implement those concepts, what’s those decision revealed and there impact.

The magic happens in the last point, for the group B’s content. It forms the basis for communicating through your perspective.

That’s the difference between the two.

Why most founders have no moat

What’s your competitive advantage? Be honest.

The ultimate moat, or the final competitive edge worth paying for, in my opinion, is an opinion.

A perspective that only you can see, because the uniqueness of your life experience created it. That may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate. Especially when anyone can generate 1500 nice sounding words in 10 seconds with AI.

Most founders don’t have one. So they become noise. Your name means nothing until people can associate it with something specific.

That happens when you post what you actually lived through, what it taught you, and mix it with real industry shit you know - and do it consistently.

Many people fail to understand is that some concepts may not work for you. We are human. We are each different in our own unique ways. This is what creates an anti-content-creation mindset. But this is the differentiator, this is the moat.

Find Your Voice: When a Founder Tells Me That He Doesn’t Know What to Write...

I didn’t want to ask about their content calendars. Instead, I want to know more about them. I want to know who they are, what their philosophy is, where their standpoint is in their industry, What they do believe, which kind of myth-busting contradicts others.

That can be anything. That can be on customer acquisition, marketing strategy, fundraising, hiring, or anything else related to business.

These questions are very, very necessary to get to know him better as a founder. As a founder, what does he think about a particular industry? What’s his way of thinking, what’s his mindset, and what makes him unique and different from other people? THAT’S HIS VOICE.

But How to Harness This?

Let’s say my client writes about something specific in his industry, like user retention in the SaaS industry. Well, there are tons of articles on this particular topic saying the same thing... What’s new? Why should we follow you for the same stale information that ChatGPT can write in 2 minutes? And it’s kind of an injustice to your years of expertise that you earned.

But what if you digs deeper into the same topic? Breaking one more layer by explaining: Why does that happen?

If you penetrate further and explains:

• What does it unravel about the company’s pricing strategy?
• Is it a hoax to say that product usage = a sign of customer value?

And so on and so forth.

Can you spot the difference? Here, you also writes about the same topic, but you don’t stay on the surface. You dig deeper and deeper and share your POV through your expertise. You stick to the viral main topic too, but there are thousands of layers underneath it...

Instead of continuously searching for viral content or brutally manufacturing controversial opinions, which indeed hurt your reputation, you can examine your own thoughts, observe keenly what’s your opinion on every aspect of your industry, and then only you can realize there is so much content already within you that can overlap or be controversial in comparison.

— Suchanda Basu

✮ Hi, Suchanda here, Thought Leadership Partner for B2B Founders & CEOs | I Help You Find Your Voice, Transforming Your Ideas And Expertise Into Executive Authority That Gets You Seen, Heard, And Trusted ✮