What a $90m Raise Taught us About Thought Leadership

How to tell one story when you’ve just bought five companies

When we worked with a fast-growing London e-commerce software company, it was buying business after business in a roll-up that made perfect sense on a spreadsheet and much less sense to a seller in Ohio who had just discovered that the helpdesk app they loved now belonged to someone else.

That’s the particular chaos of buying companies faster than you can explain why. Each acquisition arrives with its own customers, its own product language and its own small, loyal community, people who chose that tool on purpose and are now quietly reading the announcement to see whether their favourite software is about to be ruined.

The obvious fix would have been a rebrand: new logo, new colours, a tagline about synergy. The fix that actually worked was slower and less glamorous, and it came from a better question. Not what all these products have in common, but what the person who bought them all believes.

The CEO already had the story

He was an ex-Amazon executive with a very specific, slightly contrarian view of where e-commerce was heading: that marketplace sellers were drowning in tools, that growth for its own sake was overrated, and that the businesses that would survive were the ones that understood their own numbers. He said all of this, constantly — in meetings and on calls — and almost none of it was written down anywhere a buyer, an investor or a journalist could find it.

That gap is where most companies’ thought leadership dies. Not for lack of ideas, but because the person with the ideas is running the company and the person with the time to write doesn’t know which ideas matter. Our job is to close that gap: to sit with him, ask the awkward follow-up questions a journalist would ask, discard the takes anyone in the industry could have written, and keep the ones only he could.

What the bylines were actually for

The pieces ran under his name in Forbes and Fast Company. One was about improving your valuation if you’re a SaaS founder thinking about selling. Another argued, against the grain of startup culture, that rapid growth isn’t always good just for the sake of it. A third looked at what investors should consider before putting money into e-commerce. There were articles about work culture too. Written down, those topics sound like standard founder content. In context, each one did a specific job and created a founder’s world view.

The valuation piece spoke to the people he wanted to buy from. Founders of small software companies were his acquisition pipeline, and a thoughtful, generous article about how they could get a better price signalled what kind of buyer he’d be long before any term sheet.

The growth piece spoke to his own customers. A company growing through acquisition is exactly the kind people expect to over-promise. Publicly arguing for disciplined growth told sellers, and the teams we’d just acquired, that the business wasn’t going to burn down the products they relied on.

The investing piece spoke to the money. It was published during the period when the company was raising, and it put his thinking about the market somewhere investors could read it, in his voice and on a masthead they recognised, before and after they met him.

None of those readers needed to be persuaded by a single article. They needed to search for him and find a coherent person: someone with a view, consistent across months and publications, who sounded the same in print as he did in the room.

Where the raise came in

When the company announced its final $90m funding, we coordinated the US press launch with its PR agency, and the story was picked up by TechCrunch. A funding announcement is a moment when a company suddenly has an audience, and that audience immediately looks for context: who is this person, what do they think, why should anyone care. A founder with nothing published leaves journalists and investors to fill that gap themselves. A founder with a body of considered writing has already answered the question.

That’s the part people miss when they call bylines vanity. The article isn’t the point — the point is what a stranger finds when they go looking, and in a raise, an acquisition or a big enterprise deal, someone always goes looking.

What it takes

None of this required a big content team. It took regular access to the CEO, a willingness to push back when an idea was dull, an editor’s instinct for which argument would survive contact with a sceptical reader, and the patience to treat every acquisition, every announcement and every byline as a chapter in one story rather than a separate job.

The companies that do this well aren’t the ones with the most content. They’re the ones whose content all sounds like it comes from the same, interesting mind and experience. And that’s what we do.

Have a story that’s growing faster than you can tell it? hello@thecopyguild.com