IAM1373 – Software Developer Writes Content Specifically for Software Developers

Karl Hughes is a former startup CTO who is now the founder and CEO of Draft. dev, where they help companies create high-quality technical content designed to reach software developers. He currently lives in Chicago, but his team of 13 full-time and 200+ contract writers is located across the globe.

• CEO Story: Understanding that sometimes there are opportunities that come about when things don’t come according to plan. When the pandemic hit, Karl had to do a part-time job, and was like being pushed out of the nest was a good thing, and Draft. dev started slowly and grew steadily.
• Business Service: Service business offering content writing to developer tools company. Blog posts are written by software engineers for software engineers.
• Secret Sauce: Niche written by software developers for software developers. Focused on what makes developer-focused content.
• CEO Hack: Time tracking. Spending half of the time on growth initiatives.
• CEO Nugget: Your business idea doesn’t have to be entirely unique, the best ideas are a slight remix or variation on a very proven business idea.
• CEO Defined: Being a coach and a cheerleader to leadership staff.

Website: draft.dev

Twitter: @karllhughes

Linkedin: @karllhughes

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Transcription

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00:15 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harker values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Carl Hughes of draft.dev. Carl, super excited to have you on the show.

00:53 – Karl Hughes

Yeah, great to be here, Gresh. Thanks so much.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely excited about all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Carl so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Carl is a former startup CTO who is now the founder and CEO of draft.dev which helps companies create high-quality technical content designed to reach software developers. He currently lives in Chicago, but his team of 13 full-time and 200-plus contract writers is located across the globe. Carl, excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:26 – Karl Hughes

Yeah, let's do it.

01:27 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock here a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:35 – Karl Hughes

Absolutely. So a couple of years ago, right as COVID hit, actually, I was a CTO, I'd been a CTO of a small startup in Chicago for the last 4 or so years. Again, COVID hit and a lot of businesses sort of, hit the skids for different reasons. We were selling to schools, K-12 schools here in the US. And so the big challenge was all these schools just sort of shut down. They had no idea what they were gonna be doing in the next year. So our whole sales funnel dried up and it sort of, you know, went the direction of, okay, let's start looking for new things to work on. The founders ended up selling that company, which, you know, ended up being okay for them.

But I ended up going part-time for a while as I figured out what I wanted to do. And honestly, I just started writing just kind of for fun kind of to see what would happen. I had been writing software for probably close to 10 years at that point, or maybe a little more. And so I figured I'd write technical kind of articles for companies that reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in doing it. Started finding more opportunities and building up a kind of list of customers.

And within 6 months or so, I'd started hiring other writers. So pretty quickly, I just realized it was too much for me to do halftime and I rolled off my old job and draft.dev was born. So yeah, it's grown really quickly since then. This was 2 years ago and now I've got a full-time team of 13, so they'd handle most of the day-to-day operations and I'm sort of learning what it means to be a CEO of a small business.

03:04 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that and to hear the growth. And I think, you know, while the pandemic was happening and everybody still, I guess, still to some degrees trying to figure out like how the chips are going to fall and all of that. It's just so many times you one of the most exciting things I think is, understanding that there are sometimes opportunities that come about from things that don't go according to plan. It sounds like you had that experience.

03:26 – Karl Hughes

Absolutely. I, you know, it's funny, I don't know that I would have had the guts to go out and start my own business. If I hadn't kind of enforced to, and, as silly as it sounds, cause obviously I figured some stuff out, right? It, it, it was scary and it, you know, going out into the unknown, during the pandemic and you're not having a full-time job was all like, there was definitely a lot of anxiety there in the early days, but at the same time, kind of getting pushed out of the nest, so to speak, is really, in a way, it's a good thing. And I'm really glad it happened, even though there were some sleepless nights in between.

04:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you being candid about that. And, you know, a lot of times we don't see the behind the scenes, but I don't know if you've ever heard of the phrase kind of accidental CEOs, where people are accidental, but I almost think there's also like another level of like CEOs of necessity like I've been laid off from jobs. So sometimes it's like, you have to kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, whether you wanted to do it that way or not, you get kind of put in that position.

04:24 – Karl Hughes

Absolutely.

04:26 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. I know I touched on it, you know, when I read your bio you did as well, you told us a little bit about your story. Could you take us through how you serve your clients, what that process looks like, and how you're making that impact?

04:38 – Karl Hughes

Yeah, we're what I like to call a productized service, meaning we offer a service or service business offering content writing to developer tools companies, but we do it in a way that is very productized and repeatable. So we have very strict procedures around things. We have kind of a standard way of operating and running things. And that allows us to scale up our operations a lot faster than a lot of general-purpose consulting businesses would. One of the challenges of scaling any service business is that you've kind of got to, you have to service the clients at a high degree of consistency and quality, but If every client asks you for something completely different than the previous client did, it's really hard to do that.

So we've kind of centered our service around just delivering 1500-word blog posts written by software engineers for software engineers. So a lot of times these are tutorials like how to use a certain web hosting tool, or how to use a certain programming language to solve a particular problem. And companies will post these on their blog as a way to attract developers and eventually sell them on their products or services. So generally speaking, these are, you know, it's a lot of behind-the-scenes tools.

Like most of the companies we work with, you never would have heard of, but they've probably played some part in all the businesses or all the websites you visit on a daily basis. So we're kind of a behind-the-scenes service provider, which, you know, is it maybe less sexy in a way, but I think it's a really good place to be because we're a little less visible than maybe somebody who's doing influencer marketing for Instagram people or something.

06:10 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And it kind of sounds like being able to kind of niche down. And like you said, the productized service, when you find a niche that you're able to serve and that you have that you sound like experience and knowledge of, it really allows you to not have to compete as much and you get to really service your clients and know them on a deeper level than maybe otherwise somebody outside of that service space or knowledge would be able to do.

06:35 – Karl Hughes

Absolutely, niching down was huge for us. We used to, or I guess like a lot of our clients have in the past worked with general-purpose content marketing agencies. The problem they run into is that the writers who write the articles for them don't know enough about software to write code samples do a little demo app or actually talk from a level of experience. On the other hand, we're using only professional software developers as our writers, so we can go really deep into technical nuance that almost no freelance writer would be able to pick up. And so it's a really unique approach, but it also lends itself well, again, to our niche. And it makes us completely differentiated from 99.9% of other content agencies.

07:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, and I appreciate you talking about that because I think when we look at content, and a lot of things, I think, you know, online and digitally, I think when you go to another level, it's not just, you know, posting it to post it, it's actually having and using as a communication tool. So as you said, being able to kind of speak the language to the people you're trying to attract, it's huge to be able to develop that communication, but also I think that connection.

07:36 – Karl Hughes

Yeah, for sure. I think that marketing, I mean, Google's getting smarter about sniffing out just keyword-stuffed fluffy content with no real substance and people are smarter. Your customers are smarter. And, you know, in these kinds of B2B sales, like the companies we service, you end up getting a lot of different stakeholders involved in the sale and they need to understand what the product is, what it does.

And it needs to be helpful content you're producing, not just stuff that hits the right keywords to get you on the first page of Google. So there's, you know, while SEO is important and writing content that can rank is important, I think there's a huge need still in the content marketing world for just really high quality, deep content that has a subject matter expert's perspective.

08:15 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you, you might have already touched on this, but I want to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself individually, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:27 – Karl Hughes

Yeah, definitely that niche of we write for software developers by software developers. That's very unique secret sauce too, it allows us to do a lot of things that other service businesses struggle with. So the first is we can position ourselves really narrowly in a very small niche. There are only about 1500 companies in the world we would ever really want to sell to, which makes, honestly, it makes sales and prospecting really, really simple. It makes it really easy for our salesperson to know, like, is this a good fit or not? Because there are not that many companies that are. And honestly, what that's also good for is it sort of lends itself well to referrals.

So our clients tell other clients who tell other clients and that's just our always been our most consistent channel as we've grown even. And then it helps us as an organization on the operational side really focus on what makes good developer-focused content. And we don't have to bother ourselves with say writing healthcare content or legal content or accounting content, all these other areas that I don't know anything about personally but also the team doesn't know, we can just really get good at this one kind of content. So I think this is an underutilized trick, I'll say that service businesses just go really niche and pick not only a single service you offer but also a single target market and industry that you focus on.

09:48 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:00 – Karl Hughes

So one thing that I picked up early on was time tracking. And it's funny because I don't have a boss. I've never billed for time with this company, but it was really helpful for me to understand what am I actually spending my day doing and whether is it the right thing. And so I asked myself that question constantly. In the early days, I had different categories for time tracking. One was like, how much time am I spending writing articles and editing articles by other writers and doing sales calls and doing marketing? And some things that I early on just made a habit as far as time spent was like, I always wanted to spend at least half of my time on growth initiatives.

So that sales calls, marketing efforts, planning out, you know, what, what channels we're going to use, and then less than half of my time on the actual operations and writing content and delivering stuff to clients. That was really helpful because focusing on growth just allows you to, solve a lot of problems. And so anyway, I think that if you are out there and you're struggling with like giving up and delegating things. You don't know when to get things off your plate. Tracking your time will show you, oh, you're spending 20 hours a week editing. It's time to hire an editor. And some things like that I would kind of learn from my own time tracking.

Also kind of a side benefit of time tracking it forces you to focus on one thing at once. So right now I am doing a podcast recording. It fits into one of my categories, marketing for the business. And I kind of am only focused on that because that's what my time tracker tells me to do. And it's really helpful for me personally, just to, because as a business owner, there's a million things to do every day. Knowing that at this moment, I've got one category that I'm focused on really helps me stay focused and not just bounce in and out of my email inbox, responding to people every second of the day.

11:42 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:57 – Karl Hughes

Oh, this is tough because it's funny. Like I have a theory about advice. You can listen to advice all day long, but at the end of the day, you kinda need to go through it and make some mistakes on your own, right? So if I were giving my younger self business advice, I wouldn't expect my younger self to follow it, but I would still try. So one thing that I think I've maybe learned now that took me a while was that your business idea does not need to be entirely unique. The best business ideas are generally a slight remix or variation on a very proven successful business idea.

What I mean, even if you look at companies like Facebook, I just watched the social network the other day, and you know, it's like the whole idea of Facebook, I know that that story is a little bit, you know, dramatized for movies, but the whole idea of it was very well-trodden and understood. I mean, MySpace had done it, Friendster had done it, and it was a thing that could work and people were interested in. They just did a slight remix where they made it more exclusive.

You had to have an EDU email or a Harvard.edu email at first. And so I think one thing too many young entrepreneurs, including myself, try to get, fall into the trap of is building an idea that is entirely unique or just super novel or reliant on some really cool technology that's barely viable. And instead, I mean, again, like a draft.dev, it's not a super unique idea. It's content marketing. It's been done a million times, but we just took a spin and said, okay, we're only going to do it for software engineers. And I think that really, it just gives the idea a lot more credence. From a practical perspective, it also makes selling your idea a lot easier because we can fit into a company's budget and instead of being like a new line item, they have to invent a way to coerce. We're like in a very established budget called marketing and we know that companies spend hundreds of thousand dollars a month on marketing. We just want to take a small chunk of that to do developer marketing. And so I think like there's a lot of value in that and maybe something that I took too long to really fully internalize.

13:56 – Gresham Harkless

So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Carl, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:06 – Karl Hughes

I love that you asked this question because it's an ever-changing role for me. On day one, it felt completely different than it does now in year 2 with 15 employees or 13 employees full-time. But today, what being a CEO means to me is primarily being a coach and a cheerleader. I am starting now to manage managers directly. And so these are people who are learning to manage other people and grow their teams.

And so I have much less of a direct influence on hiring, much less of a direct influence on telling people how to do the work, but I have to now coach and cheerlead all of our leadership staff. And that was something that this is something I'm still struggling to learn how to do well and improve my own, you know, my, my own perspective on. So I think this is something that if you're going to grow a business beyond just a few people, you really need to think about, how you want to be as far as, method of cheerleading and coaching and how that fits into your personality.

15:08 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Carl, truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

15:25 – Karl Hughes

Yeah, thanks. Nothing too particular to promote at this point. I write a lot about what it's like being a CEO of a small business. So at carllhughes.com or at carl l hughes on Twitter you know we can get the links there I'm sure. But otherwise, I love being a part of this community, and just like knowing you know what it's like to be a CEO and share these experiences with others. And I learned a ton from listening to others' experiences as well. So if you ever have questions, or wanna email me, I can give you that email address as well, Carl at draft.dev. And all of those carls are with a K. So that'll throw you off if you're used to spelling with a C. But that's all I got, Yeah.

16:04 – Gresham Harkless

No, I love it. And to make it even easier to make sure you're using the K and not the C we'll have the links and information like Carl mentioned perfectly in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. And then I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:13 – Karl Hughes

Thanks, Joshua.

16:15 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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