A three-person startup that decides to "do content" usually means one person, a half day a
week, and no plan past the first three posts. Six months in, that adds up to roughly twenty
pieces if the half day holds, and most founders are surprised the number is that low. The
problem is rarely the count: nobody decided up front who writes, where it goes, and what it
is allowed to skip.
Twenty pieces is the real six-month number.
A half day a week, minus the weeks that get eaten by a launch or a hire, lands close to twenty
published pieces over six months. That is enough to build a small library, not enough to cover
a topic twice. The founders who plan for twenty from the start pick narrower subjects and
finish them. The ones who plan for fifty end up with a dozen half-pieces and a content
calendar nobody opens. Count what you can actually produce, then write a list that fits the
number, not the other way around.
Half of them should carry the founder's name.
The founder is the only person at the company who can say something nobody else is allowed to
say: why this problem, why now, why this way and not the obvious way. Handing all twenty
pieces to a freelancer or an agency writer removes exactly that voice, and the result reads
like every other company's blog, because the writer is drawing from the same general knowledge
every other writer draws from. Agency-written pieces still earn their place on the explainer
work, the how-this-works posts and the comparison pieces that need research more than opinion.
The founder's half should be the posts where a wrong answer would cost something: a decision
made and later reversed, a customer conversation that changed the pitch, a number that did not
move the way the plan said it would.
Pick one distribution channel before the first piece ships.
A piece with nowhere to go gets read by whoever already subscribes to the blog, which at month
one is close to nobody. Pick the channel the founder already uses, usually LinkedIn, sometimes
a newsletter to existing users, and write every piece with a version for that channel: three
or four lines that make the argument on its own, with the link at the end. We plan every new blog this way: the post and its
distribution get built together, not the post first and the sharing as an afterthought.
Say out loud what twenty pieces will not do.
Twenty pieces will not move organic search in six months on a new domain; that takes longer and
depends on links the content earns, not the content itself. What twenty pieces can do, inside
six months, is give the sales conversation two or three pages worth sending before a call, and
give the founder's own channel something to say every week instead of nothing. Those are the
two jobs this round of content has. A piece that fails both, one that would not help the next
sales call and that nobody reads on the channel it was written for, should not be on the list,
no matter how good the keyword looks on paper.
Attribution tells you if the plan is working, not whether a piece was good.
A founder a few months into tracking attribution
already knows the first signal is never clicks from search. It is whether a prospect mentions a
piece on a call, or whether the founder's own post gets more replies than usual. Those are soft
signals, and they are the right ones to watch for the first two quarters. A spreadsheet that
tracks which piece a lead read right before filling in the form is worth building once leads
exist in enough volume to read anything into it, not before.
Six months from now, the honest test is not how many pieces got published. It is whether a
prospect read two of them before the first call and showed up already agreeing with half of
what COMNIO was going to say. That is what twenty pieces, planned narrow and written half by
the founder, are actually for.
Tell us what you're building.