If you have recently been appointed to lead marketing at a company that has just raised, there is a reasonable chance your first month has looked something like this: a pipeline target that was set before you arrived, a brand refresh the founder has strong and slightly contradictory opinions about, a website last rewritten by an engineer on a Sunday, and — somewhere about two-thirds of the way down the list, usually phrased as though it were the simplest item on it — "thought leadership".
It is not the simplest item on it, as anyone will agree. And if it has been quietly slipping from one week's priorities to the next, you’re not alone.
Why it keeps slipping
The best ideas in a growing company do not live in the marketing team. They live in the founder's head, usually half-articulated; in an engineer's Slack thread explaining why the obvious approach doesn't work; in a sales call where a customer described their problem better than any persona document ever has; and in the support queue, where the real patterns tend to show up first. Turning any of that into something publishable involves a sequence of tasks that each look small and are, collectively, a job:
Booking an hour with a founder whose calendar is a contact sport.
Interviewing them well enough to get the specific story rather than the pitch.
Finding the argument in the transcript, which is rarely where the founder thinks it is.
Shaping a draft that sounds like them on a good day.
Steering it through review without sanding off every edge.
Publishing on a rhythm that survives a product launch, a board meeting and a hiring sprint all landing in the same week.
That sequence is an editorial function, the kind newsrooms build whole roles around. In most Seed to Series B companies it does not exist yet, and so it falls to whoever has the word "marketing" in their title, alongside everything else they were actually hired to do.
What changed when we treated it like a newsroom
I have led content at Public.Digital, working with governments and large organisations where every sentence had to hold up to scrutiny, and as Managing Editor at Threecolts, a B2B SaaS business going through very much the post-raise growth spurt I'm describing. In both places the shift came at the same moment: when content stopped being treated as a series of campaigns, each spun up with great energy and quietly wound down, and started being run more like a small newsroom, with a standing process that produced work whether or not anyone felt especially inspired that week.
That sounds grander than it is but in reality you do not need a big team. You need four things.
One owner of the editorial calendar. Not a committee, and not a shared spreadsheet that everybody edits and nobody reads, but one person who knows what is publishing in the next six weeks and what is stuck.
A standing monthly interview with your founder. Forty-five minutes, recorded, with the questions sent in advance. It is the most efficient way I know to get a founder's thinking onto the page, and it retires the impossible request to "just write something when you get a chance".
A short list of arguments you want to be known for. Three is usually enough. Every piece should advance one of them, which has the pleasant side effect of making it much easier to say no to the ones that don't.
A clear bar for what is good enough to publish. Ideally written down: does this piece say something specific, is there a named person or original data behind it, would someone in our market forward it to a colleague? It saves a surprising number of arguments and protects the founder's name.
Why volume is the tempting answer, and the wrong one
The temptation, under pipeline pressure, is to solve the problem with quantity: more posts, more pages, more drafts generated by tools that nobody has quite the time to edit. I understand the appeal, and for some kinds of content it is perfectly reasonable, but for thought leadership it tends to produce the one outcome worse than silence, which is a founder's name sitting above sentences they would never actually say.
What works better is editorial capacity that sits alongside the marketing lead rather than replacing any part of the job: someone who can interview, ask the best questions, find the angle, edit for voice and keep the process moving, so that marketing keeps ownership of the strategy and the founder keeps ownership of their ideas.
What you get back
Marketing leaders who build this early usually find that a surprising amount of their other work gets easier. Sales has something to send that isn't a deck. Recruiting has something to point candidates towards. The brand refresh has some substance to sit on. And the founder, who may have been a little sceptical of the whole exercise, starts getting messages from people who read their last piece, which tends to do more for internal buy-in than any slide on share of voice ever has.
"Thought leadership" will probably stay on your list. It just doesn't have to stay two-thirds of the way down it.
Talk to us if you need help asking the right questions and writing the thought leadership that will earn you trust and authority in your market.
