#freelance-talk
Thread
A local startup founder I've been talking to and nurturing. It made want to throw up in my mouth a little to read this, but I'd hate to say it, he might have a point. Thoughts?
An content writer. Tell him to keep doing it himself.
This is kind of defacto market research. And when you're doing market research, one person's take is just a singular, potentially very non-representative data point.
This kind of reminds me of when an unhappy customer at a diner goes on Yelp with lots of opinions about how that business should be run, but those opinions ignore any context about who the diner's ideal customer is and how their business model works and are just hyper-optimized for how to please that person: "if they don't provide the half gallon of free ketchup I drink with every meal, they're going to go out of business!"
For your specific context, it might be worth asking yourself whether this person is even an ICP and at all knowledgeable about marketing strategies. Those two messages make it sound like the founder's first rodeo.
So, I've been in content for 16 years. Every few years, an "expert" friend of mine tries to sell me on the next big marketing trend. First, it was spinning out Amazon self-published titles, then it was Pinterest self-promotional groups, then it was courses built on other people's Twitter threads.
The only common thread in this person's "success" was that they never made a single original thing. They only repackaged other people's work. Were they making money? Sure, but they had to continually pivot as their strategy caught on and thousands of other people started doing it. I imagine it's exhausting never having anything valuable to say of your own.
It sounds like this business (and other experts) may be similarly putting method over message. Let it be. You can't help them, and not all businesses are like this.