Why do startups often have blog pages? is it for SEO?

For over a decade now I've been building and leading Developer Relations teams at developer companies. The reason why so many startups have a blog is because... It's one of the best ways you have to attract users to your service in a high-ROI way.

Think of it like this: you're a startup founder for a developer company. You want to get developers to know about your product, and ideally, try it out. How do you do it? You have a handful of options!

- Paid Advertising (expensive, hard to manage, immediately stops working once you stop advertising)

- Cold outreach (aka, outbound sales and prospecting, it works but nobody likes it and it's labor/time intensive, immediately stops working once you stop it)

- Organic outreach (aka, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.) When I ran DevRel at Stormpath (acquired by Okta), and later Okta, here's a fun secret most people won't know: a majority of our business and new developer users came from our developer blog. Shocking, right? Even at a large post-IPO company like Okta, the developer blog (back when I was there, anyhow), represented a massive portion of ALL website visits.

The amount of influence you have through educational content is truly massive, and can make or break even the largest tech companies.

Fogbugz is just another company, but Joel took the time to write (well) about it in a way that was interesting, relatable and smart. It made you believe that the products they make are interesting and smart.

Paul Graham did the same. YC was humanized via his essays (which didn't really talk about YC.) Patrick MacKenzie made a business making bingo cards, but look at him now.

Fundamentally people do business with people they like. Writing stuff down allows enough personality to come through to give readers "someone to like".

Of course writing quality blogs takes a skillset lacking in most businesses. So yes, there's an element of cargo-cult, in that the result requires more than "we have a blog". Good blogs are enormously valuable- but most blogs are not terribly good.

This is true, but it neglects the "spark" that's required to get some sort of amplification to the content and related downstream benefits. Companies spend money on marketing, events, etc.

For INDIVIDUALS who want the ancillary benefits of educational content, they use tools to create and deploy across multiple channels and also engage with others ("shit post", "reply guy", etc.) that drive attention to their content.

For an individual, driving economic outcomes with educational content (on average) seems like an investment with low probability of success. I suspect that many individuals who create educational content are doing it because they are passionate about the topic, and do not expect any other benefit.

Thanks for posting, something that I'm thinking about a lot in the age of increasing participation in "Tech" and ever-increasing amounts of content while simultaneously divided attention.