Putting Your Content Schedule on Autopilot with Nathan Ellering and CoSchedule

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Nathan Ellering. I didn’t ask before we started recording. Is that right?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, that’s right. You nailed it.

Joe Casabona: All right. Nathan Ellering of CoSchedule, which is a marketing and content strategy calendar. Nathan, how are you doing today?

Nathan Ellering: Oh, I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on the show, Joe.

Joe Casabona: No problem. Thank you so much for joining me. So today we’re going to talk a bit about something that we haven’t talked about a lot on how I built it, which is kind of building the marketing strategy and what content strategy is. Which is great because I am very much a…I call myself a field of dreams developer. I’m very like, if I build it, they will come. And absolutely not how things work anymore. So why don’t we start by you telling us a little bit about yourself and about CoSchedule?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, So I’m Nathan from CoSchedule. I am the marketing or content marketing lead here. And what that means is that I help grow CoSchedule through educational marketing where we teach people how to do something better. And by default, they will understand that CoSchedule is a tool that can help them do that even better as they build some of those skills that I’m helping them learn.

And so I guess about CoSchedule itself, one of the things that’s kind of fun is CoSchedule actually spurred from a different company. And the problem that the company was having was that they were planning blog posts and social media posts, and they were trying to use content marketing to grow their business, but it was just extremely difficult. There’s tons of disorganization and it was just tough to do that. We had this problem and our two co-founders, Garrett and Justine started asking themselves, “Well, we can’t be the only ones who have this problem. We should talk to people and see maybe this is an actual thing that we could build.” 

And so the plan for CoSchedule is actually hatched on an airplane ride from Atlanta back to North Dakota,  where we’re based out of. And when they got back, they started vetting that idea with bloggers about people who, you know, we’re just blogging as, you know, maybe hobbyists or using blogging to grow their business. It was just bloggers at that time. And that was kind of how it started. We found people who were having that similar problem with managing stuff behind the scenes. And that’s kind of where CoSchedule or where our idea came from. 

Joe Casabona: Nice. So it sounds like, you know, something that’s so common on this show is that the product that we’re talking about scratches an itch that the founders had. Or some other problem that was discovered by the founder. So that’s really cool to hear that. Because it, I mean, it means that there’s at least one person who needs it, Right? And that’s you. So, it’s definitely not wasted time and that’s really cool. So, I know we’re going to talk a whole lot about this because I feel like probably content marketing requires a lot of this. But in building the product, what kind of research did you do? Did you look for competition out there or test other products?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, so we knew we had this problem. And after that, it was really just about talking to people to understand if they had a similar problem to us. And I guess one of the things that we did then was with just that idea. We started publishing blog posts and that idea was about basically throwing out the idea and trying to get feedback from people.

And so we actually wrote blog posts about CoSchedule before we ever wrote code. And we kind of thought of that as ideation to building the best tool possible. And what we kind of found out was we had a group of people, some of those early adopters, or, I mean, this is even before we built anything. But we found that they’ve loved this idea, the concept behind the scenes of what CoSchedule could be to help them solve a problem. 

And what happened then is we kind of built an MVP that was CoSchedule as a WordPress plugin. So it was an editorial calendar that helped people manage their blog posts, kind of like a traditional publisher would manage articles for a newspaper. And that launch has an integration with WordPress in 2013. And so that’s kind of how we, how we got started.

Joe Casabona: Nice. So it sounds like you wrote these blog posts that almost served as, you know, an animation. You have storyboarding, right? Where you kind of layout the pieces before you really start animating anything to get an idea of the story. And it kind of sounds like those blog posts served that purpose for you.

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, it’s definitely a great analogy of the storyboard because what we did was we published something that was a really easy thing to do. It’s really easy to write blog posts, it’s harder to write code. And so we focused on this idea of how can we build a tool that people will really appreciate. Just go into it almost knowing that it will be successful before we spend a lot of time doing something. And that’s where that blog posts thing or a theme comes into it.

And I know that, so at our beginnings, this was really Garrett writing these blog posts. Again, one of our co-founders and the way that he kind of describes it is using that idea or a theory from Eric Reese of the minimum viable product: Build, Measure, Learn.

And so what we kind of did was we started with minimum viable content. As kind of what Garrett’s words are. And so we published content, we kind of measure it like that, you know, who said, what would they like if we did this? And then we used their feedback to really plan out that product in what the early iterations look like. 

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So, it sounds like right from the part of your research was, you know, for the blog post part, as well as kind of talking to people, right? So, which feeds in perfectly to the next question, right? Because I talked to a lot of people about my business, I’m part of a mastermind group. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that process and actually getting feedback from people?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah. I think what it was is, we would ship something. We had this idea in our mind, but it was really It’s just an idea until you tell someone. And what we focus on was, you know, those blog posts where like, you know, we might build this, what do you think? And at one point we actually did a preview of what we thought CoSchedule would be just as simple like presentation to a group of people who are giving us feedback. And I mean, nothing was built yet, but we talked to people. And the truth of it is that You can create a product and think it’s going to eat to your point earlier, be the, be the best thing ever. And it’s something that you as a founder think is good, but until you get that feedback and you know what people are doing, it’s just a guess. And we wanted to take a lot of that guesswork out. So it literally is Sitting down with the people in the trenches who had used the tool and talking to them, trying to find that product-market fit before we released. 

And I think that’s a huge reason why we’ve experienced a lot of the success that we have so far is because that mentality still drags on today. We constantly ask our users for their feedback and try to build better features into CoSchedule or new features that will help them solve problems that CoSchedule should be solving for them.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Yeah. And that sounds like, you know, it’s a, It sounds like a great strategy. Cause you talk about the MVP, right? The minimum viable product. And, as I’m primarily a developer and one of the things that I always, always want to do first is I get a great idea. I just want to code it. Like I just started, I just started coding it based on what I think it should be. And maybe that’s good for a few people. But, you know, talking to people and getting the features right from the beginning builds a much better structure for a product. So it sounds like you kind of hit all the really great goalposts of, you know, kind of storyboarding your product and then getting the market research and talking to potential users and then building this product. And it looks like from your homepage, you’ve seen some really great success, right? You’ve got some really nice logos I see on your homepage.

Nathan Ellering: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we work with some really, I guess, kind of big brands out there. It’s been fun. I mean, we launched in 2013, but we’ve really grown rapidly in the past three years. And yeah, I guess with some of the logos up there, I’m trying to jog my memory here, but, the next web, there are others like Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Optimizely, Smart Passive Income. Those are all of our friends and it’s been a pleasure to work with some of those people who are leading their industry and get their feedback to help us even build a better tool.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And do you…I think we’re going to touch on this in the next question actually, but do you work directly with these companies to help them develop their content strategy?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah. So what I do actually is this real niche area of marketing that we call Content Marketing. And that’s how we’ve experienced a lot of the growth that we have. On top of it, I mean, you can’t market a product. That’s terrible. The product team deserves a ton of credit for our growth and it would be my job would be so much harder if CoSchedule wasn’t amazing. 

So that said it’s fun to market a really great tool. And the way that we have marketed it is through this principle or this theory practice called Content Marketing. It’s all about education. So what I try to do is to educate people on how to solve a problem with marketing and it just inherently connects into something that CoSchedule can help them solve. So for example, you’d kind of mentioned that CoSchedule is a marketing strategy calendar. That’s 100%, right? So what I will do in a blog post is teach people how to plan a marketing strategy. Or how to plan a blog post schedule with a calendar or how to plan the perfect social media posting schedule. Then I will literally teach them how to do this without using CoSchedule. But inherently, if they use CoSchedule, they will be able to do what they’re doing that much easier and more efficiently and effectively.

And so that’s kind of how it ties in is a lot of education-based connecting back into the product.

Joe Casabona: And that’s great, right? Cause if somebody logs into CoSchedule, but doesn’t really know how to develop a content strategy, it could be very overwhelming for them. I know you have some, there’s some coaching there when you first log in, but you know, content is a, not an easy thing to come up with, especially kind of in volume.

Nathan Ellering: Yeah. And I think that’s exactly where we want to step in with content is to try to figure out. Again, this goes back to the audience feedback too, because we want to proactively solve their challenges. If I can help people plan a really great marketing strategy, they have that much more reason to use a tool like CoSchedule. Or if someone is already successful with social media, they’ll be even more successful with CoSchedule.

And that’s kind of how we do it is we teach people how to be amazing rockstars to what they do. And then we’re CoSchedule as a tool that can step in is where organization comes into play, or efficiency if they want to start saving time and they want to collaborate better on projects. That’s really where the two connect extremely well.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. So I know that you’re the marketing guy primarily. So, you know, the title question of the show is how did you build it? So why don’t we talk a bit about how you’re building the marketing strategy for CoSchedule?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, it’s been kind of fun. It was… the first marketer who joined CoSchedule back in 2014. And where we started then was just getting on a regular blogging schedule. For a lot of people, that’s extremely difficult to do. But what we kind of said to ourselves is start with that goal of let’s just get two new blog posts out every single week. And if we can do that, then we can do more. And we started,  you know, improving as we went.

And since then, some of our strategies has gone from just getting two of those educational blog posts out there to now we do a weekly podcast kind of like this one.  And we do a video series to show off some of the culture behind the scenes and the people who are building this tool and how they love the work that they’re doing, and therefore building a product that they love and appreciate. And we are also doing tons of webinars to kind of help people learn.

And on top of that, some other things that we’re doing are just, you know, how can we reach a larger audience to help them introduce them to a tool like CoSchedule? And so some of the things that we’re looking at doing now are how can we start writing for some influential publications like Forbes, Inc entrepreneur. How can we get coverage for new feature releases and publications like ‘Inc? you know, possibly tech crunch would be amazing. 

And so that’s kind of where our strategy is going. Is trying to, I guess our tool is very meta, right? Because I’m a marketer who gets to market marketing stuff, which is really fun for me. But we’re trying to get very strategic and all of those things are very focused on goals. And I think that that’s where, you know, as you get more advanced with marketing and as your product develops too,  everything has to connect back to meaningful growth. And that’s exactly where our marketing Roadmap is heading. 

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So this is going a little bit off, of you know, off of the normal list that we have. And I don’t want you to give away what’s this, I’m really bad with colloquialisms. Like we could just have a clip show of me messing up these things, but, I don’t want you to give away the cow with the milk. Is that the saying, right? I don’t want you to give away your whole business. But could you give us like a rough sketch of how you would build a content strategy for someone, you know, trying to market a product, to a WordPress plugin

Nathan Ellering: Yeah. I think one of the things that we do extremely well is,  when we, let’s say you already have a product but you’re iterating on it with a new feature or you, you have the next version 2.0. What we do a lot is we come up with what we call talking points. And I think those are really important and connect back to that idea of feedback. So, for example, we had a feature launch just recently called ReQueue. It’s a social media automation tool. And we went out and we talked to people about, you know, if you had a tool that could send social messages on your behalf to fill the gaps in your social media posting schedule, you know, describe it to us.And we literally had them describe the feature to us or what it would do for them or how they would benefit. And then we use that information in our talking points of how we market this feature. It’s pretty smart because we get to use the words that our audience used to describe a feature that they thought they were going to get.

And so we really use their language to communicate with them. And I guess another thing that we’ve done is after we kind of got their feedback and understood what sort of tool or feature we should build. We did a beta period for the first time ever, actually with that feature and that was a huge marketing play as much as it was a product play because we tested that feature, We got tons of feedback and actually ended up rebuilding a lot of it. And, that was for good, It was for the best because they helped us understand even more what they needed. So we could launch a tool that would not only solve our beta testers problems but really connect to other people like them. 

And that was a big marketing thing. Obviously, the product team did a phenomenal job with that beta test, but it really helped us,  you know, me coming in at the tail end and trying to market this thing, It really made it an easy job for me. So, I mean, that’s a little bit of how we approach product marketing. And I mean, once, once a feature launches. 

Something that we do is we have a feature announcement, blog posts on our blog with that ReQueue future. Specifically, we reached out to some of our friends, you had mentioned some of the logos on our site, we had reached out to one of our friends in Inc. com calmness. And we asked if he would, you know, be willing to kind of write about this, this ReQueue feature. And he actually wrote a whole article on Inc com about ReQueue. So it was, it was amazing. We publish blog posts to promote this thing. We did webinars. we did Social media promotion, we did emails, we did product hunt.  We really, I think one of the things that we do really well with our strategy is that we don’t want to just ship something and forget about it.  That’s something that our co-founder Garrett talks about all the time is how we can launch a feature, but keep reminding our audience about it. And that really cores to our strategy. 

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s awesome. And there’s a lot of really great advice in there. So I just took a lot of notes. you could find everything that we’re talking about in the show notes when you’re listening. So awesome. So you’ve, you’ve talked about how CoSchedule started as a WordPress plugin. And now you’ve recently just launched this new feature, ReQueue. Can you talk a little bit about the middle phase there? Like what transformations has it gone through?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, CoSchedule. It’s been really fun. There’ve been lots of transformations for a very long time. We were just a WordPress plugin. You had to have WordPress to be able to use CoSchedule. We decided that that wasn’t the best thing for growth. So we started working on a way to decouple is what we kind of called it. And so we started integrating with Evernote and Google docs. And then we launched a content editor right in the calendar so that people could create content, not just WordPress blog posts, but any kind of content they would want using some of those features.

And when we did that, we kind of pivoted from a blogger market to marketing to Marketers. And we really thought about a mid-market fit for that because there are other marketing calendars out there that do something similar to what we do but they are extremely high-end tools. And there is this huge gap about finding this product-market fit again, of these mid-mid-level marketers, like that have small teams of maybe two to 10. They just don’t have tools that are designed for teams of that size. And that’s where we were focusing. And that was a huge transformation. 

And kind of after that,  we really started focusing on Amplifying our social media features. So right after we decoupled from WordPress, we did our best time scheduling so that people didn’t have to think about what are the best times to schedule on social media. We just built that into CoSchedule So people don’t have to think about it. We did social templates so that people could schedule dozens of social messages in like five minutes. There was a huge feature request that was actually on the original roadmap that we just made possible recently.

And then social video, social tagging, we have social analytics. Now, we integrated with Pinterest, Instagram and even have this ReQueue social media automation tool. So where we’re at now, and the biggest transformation is that CoSchedule is there for content plus social. And today as it stands, we’re one of the best-selling marketing, editorial calendars in the world.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s phenomenal. And I know you guys have a lot of really great free features, too. I’m going to put my foot in my mouth here if this is wrong. But you have the headline analyzer is that right?

Nathan Ellering: Yep. That is completely free. And anyone can go there, I guess. You probably will throw the link in the show notes for that. Yeah, it’s a completely free tool that helps people write better headlines. Like for this podcast episode, it might help you out.

Joe Casabona: Yep. It definitely has, for my most recent newsletter has seen the most opens because I’m going to say because I use your tool. It’s the only one I’ve used your tool on and it, I mean, there can’t be a coincidence.

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, that makes me really happy. And we also have another free tool called ClickToTweet and that’s a WordPress plugin. So it’s that box.

Joe Casabona: That’s yours too?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: I, man. I’m going to fanboy out a little. I love that. That’s like one of my staples for like every blog. I recommend something about like definitely click to tweet.

Nathan Ellering: Yeah. Yeah. That’s us.

Joe Casabona: Nice! Man, I should’ve known, I probably should’ve known that I use that plugin like all the time.

Nathan Ellering: No, that’s fine. Well, now you know,

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Awesome. Well, definitely, definitely check out both of those things. And the, well, so the second to last question I have here is what are your plans for the future? You know, you talked about where you’ve been, where are you going?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, I think right now we have a super well-rounded social media tool. And that side of our product roadmap, we just kind of finished up that a lot of those ideas were on our original roadmap and we made them 100% amazing. So the next phase is looking at that content side, cause I kind of mentioned we’re content plus social. And that’s a very strategic differentiator for us. So, we’re going to hone that content side and really focus on helping marketers organize projects and organize everything on one calendar.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That sounds fantastic.  And definitely, something to look forward to. So wrapping up here, I always like to ask my guests this question that’s usually set apart from the rest of the notes. But, and you’ve already given us a ton, but do you have any trade secrets for us?

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, I think I’ve kind of talked about this a lot recently. But I like to think of things like skill-building and with skills you have to start, you have to repeat, and then you have to master that process. So if I kind of had to leave you with one thing, it would be start with a minimum viable idea. Well, executed is so much better than a perfect idea that never shifts.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Well, Nathan, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a great conversation.

Nathan Ellering: Yeah, Joe. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. And for those of you listening out there, make sure to check out CoSchedule and all the cool tools that they offer, the free and the paid ones. I’ve used a little bit of everything that they have to offer and I can really vouch for it. 

Thanks so much for listening and thanks to our great guests and fantastic sponsors. If you liked the show, please rate it and subscribe on iTunes in Google play or at Spotify or whatever your podcast app of choice is.

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And finally, until next week, get out there and build something.