Lost in the Content Marketing Forest: How Founders Can Scale Beyond DIY

While most of our clients are larger now, I worked directly with a lot of founders at early-stage startups in my first few months at Draft.dev. I like working with founders; they are passionate, enthusiastic, and typically quick learners. On the flip side, they can be tough to please. Because they care about every detail and know their product better than anyone, some of them can be very hard to work with.

There’s a fine line between having trust issues and high standards, but founders who don’t learn to delegate will be a huge detriment to their business. I could talk about this problem in engineering, product development, and sales, but today I’m going to focus on marketing.

The Mind of a Founder

First, let me say that I empathize with founders who struggle to delegate. Many first-time founders are stepping into their very first management role, and even if they’ve led teams before, they might not have had good role models to guide them in the past.

Plus, a lot is on the line. When you start a business, that business is a piece of you. It’s really hard to sit back and watch other people screw little bits of it up.

Even if with a great team, most founders are used to being “the voice of the company.” This makes it especially hard to pass blogging, customer communication, and sales functions off to others who don’t have the same history and context.

The founders who struggle to scale their content marketing efforts tend to fall into one of the following buckets:

The Perfectionist: Becoming the Approval Bottleneck

My background is in software engineering, so when I first started hiring other writers to produce technical content, it was a struggle. I would comb through every line of code and refactor it based on my preferences. I didn’t realize that nobody reading this tutorial would discount the whole thing if the writer preferred camelCase to snake_case.

Founders who fall into this same trap likely have a long backlog of blog posts to approve. They become the bottleneck, and while the content that finally makes it to the blog will undoubtedly be great, this strategy won’t work at scale.

Perfectionist behaviors include:

• Spending hours rewriting articles that were already 90% there
• Getting stuck on minor style choices that don’t impact value or comprehension
• Creating massive approval backlogs because something feels “not quite right”
• Rejecting work because it’s not how they personally would have written it
• Requesting endless low-impact revisions

The Ideator: Random Content Without Strategic Focus

Another common pitfall is having too many ideas with too little focus. It’s okay to be a little more scattered in your approach to content marketing in the early days, but if your posts randomly oscillate between 300-word release updates, video announcements, 2000-word tutorials, and short news commentary, it’s really hard for readers (or search engines) to know what to expect.

Ideator founders treat their startup’s blog like a personal blog with little focus on keywords, types of content, or formats. Again, it’s fine to do this when you’re early on and just finding your footing, but this is not a scalable content marketing strategy.

Ideator behaviors include:

• Publishing across wildly inconsistent content types and lengths
• No keyword research or SEO strategy informing topic selection
• Following current interests rather than audience needs or business goals
• Constantly changing content direction based on latest inspiration
• Minimal consideration for how pieces work together strategically

The DIYer: Insisting on Personal Content Creation

Finally, some founders just like doing everything themselves. Sometimes it’s a matter of money (I’ll admit, high-quality technical content is not cheap), and sometimes it’s therapeutic. Founders who are strong, prolific writers can pull this off for years, but it gets harder the bigger the company gets.

In the early days, I think it’s fantastic when founders are very involved in their company’s blog. In fact, they should probably be creating most of the content and testing lots of ideas and formats in the first year or two.

But, the story changes if you want to use content marketing as a sustainable, scalable growth channel. This is typically why startups transition away from founder-led blogs by the time they raise a Series A or B and why we usually don’t work with startups before that stage.

DIYer behaviors include:

• Writing every blog post despite having a marketing team
• Refusing to hire writers or agencies even when budget allows
• Using “nobody understands our product like I do” as justification for not delegating
• Treating content creation as stress relief rather than business investment
• Spending limited founder bandwidth on activities that others could handle

The Forest vs. The Trees: Strategic Content Marketing Thinking

While most move on, some founders get stuck in these unscalable content production patterns for way too long. There’s an expression common in the United States that describes them perfectly:

They can’t see the forest for the trees.

The Forest: Consistent, Helpful Content That Serves Your Audience

When it comes to building a scalable content marketing engine, your primary target should be producing helpful content consistently.

When we create something, we think, is it really useful to our customers? Will they thank us for it? I think if you think of things through that lens, it just clarifies what you’re doing in such a simple, elegant way. – Ann Handley

Founders who do manage to scale their content marketing efforts are the ones who face the challenge with this degree of pragmatism. They realize that plenty of people besides them can produce helpful, high-quality content.

Take DigitalOcean’s content marketing strategy. They’ve been running a community-writing program for over a decade where they’ve invested roughly $1000 per article to create dozens of articles per month. With over 5000 tutorials now on the site, they’re now generating something like 10 million visits per month.

Was every article they’ve produced the best piece ever? Did their founders painstakingly and lovingly approve each one?

No. Instead, they allow developers to pitch ideas that they think would be useful and interesting to write about. Over time, these unique pieces of content have snowballed into millions of monthly visitors and a steady stream of new customers. The founders helped set this in motion, but eventually, they stepped away and built processes that allowed their team to scale these content efforts.

While output is just one part of what has made DigitalOcean so successful (promoting their work and >$100 million in funding helped too), increasing your output of useful content is essential to content marketing success.

What “The Forest” Looks Like in Practice:

• Publishing consistently (weekly or bi-weekly minimum)
• Maintaining acceptable quality thresholds (good enough) rather than perfection
• Building topic authority through content clusters around relevant core themes
• Serving reader needs systematically and consistently rather than publishing randomly
• Creating processes that allow others to execute without founder bottlenecks
• Measuring results by traffic, leads, and conversions rather than quality assessments

The Trees: Implementation Details That Consume Founder Attention

So what holds some founders back when it comes to content marketing?

Usually, it’s the details:

• Implementing editorial standards and a style guide
• Creating a publishing calendar
• Setting up a blogging platform
• Finding writers
• Evaluating writers
• Writing briefs
• Picking the perfect image
• Coming up with new ideas
• Hiring an editor
• Promoting your content

There’s a lot to this whole content marketing thing, so rather than document and handoff all these processes, some founders think it will be easier to do it all themselves. In the short term, they’re right, but in the long-term, founders must let go of the trees to keep an eye on the forest.

How to Scale Your Content

If you see yourself in the descriptions above or you know a founder who’s having trouble letting someone else handle their content marketing efforts, here are a few things you can try:

1. Start Small

Let someone on your team write a few blog posts. Try hiring an external editor to do line editing and implement some editorial standards.

You don’t have to immediately outsource your whole content creation process, but you do need to get comfortable passing pieces of it off to other people. As you do, you’ll run into problems. Someone will write a post that isn’t very good or an error will slip by your team and make it to the blog. You’ll realize that 99.99% of these small mistakes don’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things.

2. Invest in a Plan

I typically steer early-stage startups away from consultants, but if you’re at the point where you want to take content marketing more seriously, working with a specialist is an excellent way to get started. A content marketing consultant will usually help you come up with some ideas, do keyword research, and help you implement tools to capture the most value out of each blog post.

We don’t do advising in this area, but I typically recommend Manuel Weiss or John-Henry Scherck to tech startups looking for content marketing advice.

3. Stay Connected to Readers

As you let go of the execution of your content marketing strategy, that doesn’t mean you have to disconnect from readers. Share content on your social media regularly and ask customers, subscribers, and people in your network if they’re reading your blog. Just because you’re not writing everything doesn’t mean you can’t use your blog to accelerate existing relationships.

Conclusion: Seeing the Forest to Scale Your Content Marketing

Scaling content marketing requires a mindset shift from controlling everything to building systems that produce helpful content without founder bottlenecks. The most successful startup content programs all eventually transitioned from founder-led to systematic content engines.

This can be uncomfortable because it requires accepting that others won’t write exactly as you would. Their word choices will differ. Their explanations will take different approaches. Their style will diverge from yours. And that’s fine as long as the content serves the readers’ needs and business goals.

The forest (consistent, helpful content building topic authority and driving organic traffic) matters far more than the trees (perfect execution of every detail). Focus your limited founder time on activities only you can do: setting strategy, building relationships, making key decisions, and representing your company. Let specialists handle the execution.

Start small with incremental delegation. Invest in strategic planning and process documentation. Establish clear quality standards. Hire domain specialists rather than generalist writers. Stay connected to readers without controlling every word. Measure business outcomes rather than subjective quality.

Most importantly, remember that perfect content at low volume loses to good content at high volume. Your competitors publishing 20 solid articles monthly will outrank your 2 perfect articles monthly every time. Let go of the trees so you can tend the forest.

Ready to scale your technical content marketing without sacrificing quality? Draft.dev specializes in high-quality technical content produced by experienced practitioners who require minimal founder involvement. Our network of 300+ technical writers allows you to scale content production while maintaining the technical depth and accuracy your audience demands.

Explore our guides on building effective content plans, creating content marketing strategies, and scaling developer content for additional frameworks supporting systematic content growth.