Bessemer built an engaged list of 15k founders

They knew there was more they could be doing

Christine Deakers is obsessed with founders. As the Global Head of Content at Bessemer, a venture capital firm whose portfolio includes LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitch, it’s critical that she’s able to speak to time-pressed founders on the issues that matter most to them. “We’re in a business where it matters that the top 1% of founders and entrepreneurs read our stuff,” she says. Whatever founders want to know, she wants to know too. 

It’s a philosophy that’s undergirded Bessemer’s publication, Atlas, for years—and earned the team a dedicated following of founders and entrepreneurs as Bessemer’s experts have tackled hot topics spanning everything from raising capital to finding talent. But she also knew there was more she could be doing to engage her founder audience, especially when it came to cracking dense topics into accessible formats.

One such topic? Pricing. One of the most important decisions a startup will ever make is how to price their products. Pricing affects everything from making money (obviously) to what kinds of customers they can target to how their growth trajectory looks to potential investors. 

Having coached hundreds of startups along their own journeys to figuring out their pricing, Christine and the team knew they wanted to create a canonical resource. They hired a research team and interviewed more than 35 experts in software as a service pricing.

What they ended up with was a whopping academic whitepaper—comprehensive, but insurmountable to busy readers. “It was really an internal resource,” says Christine. “The whitepaper was incredibly substantive, but I knew it wasn’t something that we’d be able to share externally.” She thought about splitting it into a series of articles and reached out to Fenwick to get our take. 

We took a look at her research—and came back with an alternative proposal that would end up launching an entirely new high-performing content channel for Bessemer. 

Thinking outside the blog post 

Before we share what we did, let’s review Christine’s specific goals. “Our mission in our content is to share venture insights that matter, but in accessible terms,” she says. “The white paper explained a lot of strategies and gave some tactics, but it really just didn't break it down or explain it to a founder who has never done this before or to a go-to-market team.” Her first goal was to package the content in a way that founders could more easily consume—get rid of the dense, academic language, break the one white paper down into a series of shorter pieces, and offer step-by-step advice founders could easily follow. 

Beyond that, Christine wanted the piece to support her broader content marketing goals—getting on the radar of that top 1% founder audience. “The other goal was how do we grow our audience? How do we offer something other than just a series of articles?” In short, how could they use this content to stand out from the torrent of content for founders?

Fenwick’s take: In our experience, writing articles isn’t always the best approach. Growing a blog takes time, consistent publishing, backlinks, search optimization. It’s typically a multi-year project. If that’s your approach, be ready for the timeline.

A series of blog posts would accomplish one of those goals, but not the other. Sure, it would make it easier for founders to digest the content—but not for them to find and consume it. We thought we could do better. While brainstorming with the team, one key question kept coming up: What if this was a course? 

A course, of course

We developed a plan to break the whitepaper into seven key lessons that would take startup execs through everything they need to know about pricing strategy. Through these lessons, they would learn about understanding their customers’ needs, common pricing approaches, and how to pick a path towards sustainable growth. 

And here’s where it gets interesting: The course would be totally free and delivered as an email nurture. People who signed up would get one new lesson each week (with links to the others so they could binge the rest, if they so desired). Creating this as an email course flips the traditional gated content bargain on its head: Instead of forcing readers to hand over their emails to access a PDF, we drip it to them via email. This is easier for busy founders. We bring the content to them in bite-sized chunks. The content itself wasn’t even gated—all the lessons would be available on Bessemer’s blog. The emails were a courtesy and accountability tool. 

All the lessons would be available on Bessemer’s blog. The emails were just available as a courtesy and an accountability tool.

Christine was enthused. “It was one of our first campaigns where we were specifically asking people to subscribe for unique content,” she says. “It was a proof of concept that we could get people to subscribe to content from us.” 

But more importantly, it resonated on a deeper level. “The idea of offering a course seemed aligned with our brand values, which at Bessemer includes curiosity, intellectual honesty, collaboration, and the spirit of open sourcing,” she explains. “It not only felt like a strategic way to develop our audience, but also part of the ethos of Bessemer—to give our core audience exactly what they need from an education standpoint along their business journey.” 

And that expression of intellectual generosity would, as it turns out, lead to an incredible new growth channel—and a cascade of additional courses. 

Class is now in session 

When Bessemer launched their pricing course in May of 2021, they weren’t entirely sure what to expect. An email course was new and experimental for them. Would people actually sign up? 

But they knew they were onto something with the content—and were pretty sure it would resonate with their audience of founders and early-stage company decision-makers. “This is pretty niche content when you think about—it’s SaaS pricing,” says Christine. But it is something their audience of founders and operators care about deeply. 

That intrigue translated into engagement: Within five months of launching the pricing course, Bessemer had close to 30,000 views and more than 1,700 individuals subscribed to the course. 

“We saw a significant uptick,” says Christine. “And just in general, we found it was a really interesting new way to engage our audience on a deeper level and grow it.” It’s been such a successful strategy that we helped Bessemer repeat it twice more. First, for their go-to-market course which got more than 1,600 sign-ups within the first 48 hours of its launch and again for their leadership health course, which also quickly amassed more than 1,500 signups. 

Fenwick’s take: Of course, those courses feed their email newsletter. After subscribers show they’re enjoying the course, they are dropped onto the newsletter as well, with the option of opting out.

Their initial course has grown too, with the pricing course at 4,000 subscribers—making this an attractive form of evergreen content that Bessemer can rely on. While they’ve seen some traffic on social media, they’re more likely to be shared on “dark social,” with founders and leaders direct-messaging the materials to each other. 

Christine doesn’t think this is such a bad thing: “When I think about the psychology of it, if you're a leader, you're not likely going to share something that kind of shows that you might not know about that topic,” says Christine. “Content can be a way to have these more private conversations at scale.” 

In the investment world—if your content is a well-kept secret, something that you’re initiated into by trusted friends and associates, that’s actually a net positive: “Sometimes the most impactful work is when people don’t share it externally, they actually just have deeper conversations,” she says. “And that goes back to a philosophy I have, which is that content can scale the connection between an organization and the audience they want to serve. 

“We see these courses as ways to repackage content, re-engage our current audience, and grow our readership. In a way, we are doing strategic consulting to our founders through content—with the help and leadership of Fenwick, of course.”