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It’s a “done-for-you” service. I build the strategy, my team runs the content, and your posts sound like you on a good day, without you writing them.

It’s the same approach that’s helped dozens of execs grow their audience, stand out from competitors, and source deals. Andy Byrne went from 12K to 24K followers and 6M+ views at Clari, with dozens of inbound demos along the way. Mac Reddin at Commsor sourced two enterprise deals in our first week.

Right now I’m taking on three CEOs to start.

If “get serious about LinkedIn” has been on your to-list since last year’s planning offsite, book a call and we’ll get started.

P.S. The best-fit clients for this are CEOs who want to be the face of their company, can tell stories, and can hit publish without a PR and legal review on every post. If that’s you, I’d love to talk.

A few months ago I helped a SaaS company called Kallidus write their POV. After running a couple of workshops with their two co-founders and head of marketing, it was time to work with their content lead, Claire.

Claire is awesome. She was bought in, understood, and agreed with the vision for the company and the point of view that reflected it.

Her biggest question in our first meeting was, “Where do I start? What do I do? How do I bring this to life?”

She’s hungry and ambitious and smart, the exact type of marketer to succeed at this challenge.

And it’s the right question. You can have the sharpest POV in your category and a mission your CMO loves, and still stare at a blank editorial calendar wondering what to publish on Tuesday.

I’m a lazy marketer. I want the most outcome for the least amount of work. Sue me. 

And I’ve never confessed this publically, but as a previous Head of Content, I genuinely didn’t like building editorial calendars. Still don’t.

But that doesn’t mean I handed the job over to a keyword tool.

Because I don’t know a single legendary brand that was built off a keyword list.

Reeder Kristin, my Chief of Staff, told me that in her last marketing role, she was handed a spreadsheet of SEO keywords and told to go write blogs. Her words: “I wanted to die.”

That bothers me to my bones because it tells me whoever was running that strategy didn’t know their market. And worse, didn’t care to really try. 

SEO keywords tell you what’s already being said. 

Thought leadership is about creating and leading conversations. You’re trying to be the spark that starts a new way of thinking. And you won’t find your audience’s real hurdles on an SEO report. For example, the low-volume ones you’d skip might be the expensive, high-risk problems that matter most.

So I gave Claire an exercise I call 40 Hurdles.

Every content strategy needs what I call a Big Promise.

Where are you taking people?

What are you helping them achieve?

Who are you helping them become?

I don’t want to give away all of Kallidus’ secret sauce, so let’s make up an example. 

Let’s say you sell marketing software and your Big Promise is to help legacy marketers become AI-native marketers. That’s the promised land.

Imagine an Olympic hurdle race. The track is already laid out for you. Every hurdle is sitting there in order, and you just have to get over them to reach the finish line.

Your audience’s path to the promised land works the same way.

A hurdle is any challenge that’s in the way of them achieving their goal. So you write down every single one between where they are today (“I have a ChatGPT login”) and where you’re taking them (AI-native marketer).

Some are practical:

Some are emotional, and they deserve airtime too:

(Don’t ignore those feels. It’s ok to get a little “woo woo.”)

Keep going until you hit 40. 

Once you have them, you have an editorial calendar that isn’t just for the year. It’s infinite.

You want to get as close to firsthand as possible. 

You have to do anything and everything you can to understand them.

Listen to your sales calls. Hear your market’s problems — and most importantly, how they phrase it word-for-word. Then go to Reddit. It’s the best place to find the raw wording and phrasing people use when they’re stuck.

Then talk to your co-founders, your exec team, and your CMO. Go to customer marketing, customer success, your account managers, because they hear these problems every week.

When you have a ton of the right ideas, you can pick and go a lot faster than you can think.

I pick using three lenses.

1. What’s trending right now? A new model drops and everyone’s debating Opus vs Fable. That hurdle just jumped to the front of the line. You’ll get way more bang for your buck covering it now than in three months.

2. Which problem (hurdle) happens most often? Prompting. Your audience does it dozens of times a day, so “I keep writing the same prompts over and over” is a constant pain, and a perfect setup to teach them Claude Skills. 

3. What’s the biggest, most expensive problem? It might not happen often, but when it does, it hurts. Like accidentally sending an AI slop grenade to an executive and torching your reputation in one email.

Bounce between all three. Some hurdles are tactical and some are strategic, and mixing them keeps your audience (and you) from getting bored.

But what happens when you pitch your 40 hurdles to your boss and get pushback?

That’s next week. I’m going to teach you how to defend your content strategy.

Which has helped me protect my creative freedom and get promoted.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

Did you enjoy this episode of The Reeder? If so, you’d make me sing “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan if you shared this link with one person with a quick “You’ll love this newsletter. Totally worth signing up.”

Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

Follow me on LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram | TikTok

This is the full content engine and demand generation system I ran as Head of Content at Gong and Clari.

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