Welcome To My Substack!

I'm expanding to new platforms, and a whole lot more...

Photo by Nico Smit on Unsplash

Hey All! If you’re here, you probably know me already.

Since this is my first post, you’re only here if you know me in real life or online - so welcome, and thanks for following me here!

I haven’t shared much about the process of building Delivery Layer / my content strategy, but I thought this would be a good intro to why I’m launching a substack, and much more…

How We Got Here

My initial thesis was that the more I could help people online, the better it would be for Delivery Layer.

I’ve experienced the success of influencer-driven marketing as a strategy in previous roles, and believe that brand is important, even for early stage companies.

So, even though I never posted on social media before (even / especially in my personal life), I decided to jump in and start sharing my hard-earned lessons from almost 20 years of data work.

What Worked?

Audience Growth

My audience growth has been substantial on LinkedIn. Over the last 18 months I’ve gone from 2k followers to 14k followers.

I attribute this to:

• Being authentic - willing to share what I really think, even if it’s not popular

• Putting in the work - I expected that it would take a lot of work to grow an audience, and it has. Good content takes time to create, and while you get better and faster over time, it is a significant time investment

• Having many years of experience - While there are lots of people online sharing their experience working in data, most are pretty junior. I’ve done a lot of interesting things in data during my journey that not many people can write about:

  • Going from “the single data person” to managing a 100 person team

  • Owning the P&L of a $100MM data business

  • Building data infrastructure and products from scratch, and inheriting very old infrastructure

  • Leading the integration of an AI acquisition to replace the core processes of a business with significant revenue

  • Founding a data startup

  • etc…

Audience Quality

I’ve taken a quality first approach to building my audience.

Instead of appealing to a broad set of people on LinkedIn, I’ve specifically held back on “generic” posts that I know could grow my audience faster, and focused only on topics I think are important in the data industry, specifically for senior data people.

LinkedIn’s analytics are terrible so I don’t have the best metrics, but LinkedIn estimates only 12% of my audience as entry-level, which is the opposite of many other people creating on LinkedIn.

Anecdotally, when I browse through my connections, I’ve got mostly very senior data people in my network, which is exactly what I was looking to do.

Receptivity to Outbound

If I send an email to people, they are much more likely to take me up on an offer to chat. This is a real benefit, although it’s tough to know exactly how much of this is attributable to LinkedIn vs. just being a founder.

Nurturing

With any tiny company, part of what you’re buying is the founding team, and posting on LinkedIn lets people get a sense of who I am and what I believe in.

All my customers and serious prospects follow me on LinkedIn and like my posts.

What Didn’t Work?

Demand Gen

Surprisingly, LinkedIn has not been great at driving inbound leads for Delivery Layer.

I attribute that to both:

1. Unrealistic expectations going in. I spoke with someone who has 10X my audience who gets ~10X my inbound leads, so I think my estimate of how much demand an audience generates were incorrect.

2. Me doing a poor job explaining what Delivery Layer does to my audience. I think there are many people in my audience who would really benefit from Delivery Layer that don’t know what Delivery Layer does. I’ll be working on this going forward.

Limited Depth

LinkedIn has a certain type of text post that limits the depth you are able to have with anything you write.

Some types of content need longer than the limit of a LinkedIn post.

While there are LinkedIn articles, they don’t seem to perform as well as posts, and are lacking compared to a platform like substack where you are reading this right now :)

In addition, there are other content types that I wanted to have as evergreen resources vs. posts that disappear after a day.

If I really want to maximize how much I’m helping people through sharing my knowledge, LinkedIn alone can’t do it.

Challenges Covering Data Products / Delivery Layer

I thought the universe of data people would be more interested in customer facing data products than they were.

It’s no surprise that posts on Delivery Layer did worse, because people on all social networks engage less when you talk about your company.

That said, I underestimated how much smaller the engaged audience would be on data products overall vs. when I share general data leadership content.

What Am I Doing Next?

Expanding To Other Platforms

After launching Delivery Layer, focusing my content efforts on LinkedIn for the past 18 months, and growing an initial audience, I’m expanding to other platforms.

The two big themes driving this are:

• The power of video as a medium

• The ability to repackage and distribute content across platforms

I’m a big believer that video is only going to grow in importance, and I want to be doing a lot more video.

In terms of repackaging content - from my perspective, there are only a couple categories of content.

For example, LinkedIn and Twitter are very similar. TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts are all very similar.

The interesting thing is that once you have a point of view on something important to share, there are ways to share that insight across all multiple platforms and content types.

So that’s what I’m planning on doing.

Some ideas I have are a better fit for different platforms, so instead of throwing some ideas out or trying to force them into a LinkedIn post, I’ll just let them be published wherever it makes sense.

For example, this Substack article is a great fit for Substack, but I would never be able to fit this article into a LinkedIn post.

Doing More To Share Specifics About Delivery Layer

It’s a big failure on my part that I haven’t made it more clear what Delivery Layer actually does. I’ll be actively working on that going forward.

Launching A New Site For More In-Depth Professional Development Content

If you remember all the way back at the beginning of this article, the main thesis behind what I’ve been doing has been that the more I can help people online, the better it will be for Delivery Layer.

I’ve been planning out a bunch of content that can help more deeply than any LinkedIn post, and can serve as evergreen products vs. social media posts that quickly disappear.

The only issue is that much of that content doesn’t make sense to live under the Delivery Layer brand.

So, I’m going to be launching a new brand for that content, with details coming soon.

The Risks

This was a challenging decision to make, because wouldn’t splitting the brand name from Delivery Layer get rid of the whole point of doing this in the first place?

If inbound from content is already slower than expected, and this new brand might distract from Delivery Layer even more - both in the market and in terms of my very limited bandwidth - why double down?

Why not stay the course, or maybe even quit the influencer game?

The “Screw It, Let’s Do It”

The risks above are real, and if this turns out to be a bad idea, it will likely be for those reasons.

One of the things I’ve learned from many years of data work advising senior leaders is that every big decision come with major tradeoffs regardless of what you choose.

If I shut down the content strategy and focus only on the Delivery Layer brand, the improved focus and extra hours might unlock a new level of growth.

But at the same time, the opposite might be true. If I shut down content, it might be turning off the best possible growth engine for the company right as it’s building momentum and has a clear path towards driving massive value.

Ultimately, every company needs to have a vision. A point of view on what you’re going to build and how it’s going to work.

Since the beginning I’ve had the following vision for how Delivery Layer was going to be successful:

1. Build the Delivery Layer product to be so good that it would be crazy for anyone to go with another option for a customer facing data application

2. Help enough people that they will be highly aware of the Delivery Layer brand and would go to great lengths to be able to work with Delivery Layer if they had the chance

I still think I’m on path for both those items, so I’m doubling down.

If it turns out to be wrong, I’ll adjust :)

Follow Along!

If you’ve made it this far, it’s a good sign that you will be interested in the future things I write on this platform, so subscribe below now so you won’t miss out!

---