From stories to blog posts
The last few weeks, I’ve been writing about the process I use to help software startups in emerging technical niches (particularly software for early discovery biotech) figure out what to write about in their blog/newsletter posts, social posts, websites, etc. Last week I described the five parts of a core story. This week, I’m going to describe the final step - how to extract individual topics from these core stories.
In particular, I want to introduce three exercises that allow you to be more deliberate about selecting topics, and make sure you cover the most important things your prospective customers need to know.
The first exercise is to follow one of the characters in the core story through each step and ask yourself: What are the biggest questions they’ll be asking themselves, their peers, Google or ChatGPT when they get to this stage? What’s the piece of information or the concept or the framing that will help them move towards outcomes? Write the thing that they need, and give it a title that fits how they’re likely to be thinking about it.
The second exercise is a variation on this, where instead of following a character through the core story, you follow a stakeholder through the six stages of belief I introduced back in October. Again, the question is what would a stakeholder need to know or understand at each stage to reinforce their trust in you and your solution. This will help you focus on the right parts of the core story, but also inform which aspects you focus on.
The final exercise is more ad hoc but I’ve found useful when things get stale: Choose an idea that’s a bit too nebulous to be a post on its own, ideally one that’s orthogonal to the core story, then look at how it impacts each part of the story. You could explore how fears about AI taking people’s jobs impacts what they work on. Or how teams interact differently in stressful times or slow times. Whatever the topic is, the core story helps to make the nebulous idea more concrete and tangible, while digging up aspects of the core story that you might not have thought of otherwise.
Of course, there’s still plenty of work to be done between outlining, writing and editing. But finding the right topic within the context of a core story makes the outlining easier, which makes the writing easier, which makes the editing easier. More on those topics in future posts.
Thanks for reading Viral Esoterica! In addition to writing this newsletter, my company, Merelogic, helps SaaS teams in emerging technical niches develop targeted and consistent messaging to give prospective buyers conviction that you will reliably solve their most urgent problems. Schedule a discovery call to learn more.