How to get buy-in for a skunkworks content project

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen argues that good companies get disrupted by lean startups not because they're badly run, but because they're well run. A successful company’s primary interest is running and growing the core business because the core business has a track record of success. And so when someone presents a new idea, it gets judged against that context and usually loses.

This creates opportunities for smaller, leaner companies that are willing to try something new. Christensen’s advice to incumbents is to create skunkworks projects within the organization so that a small team can work exactly like a startup would. 

This is true in marketing in a smaller sense, and I experienced it at Miro over the last few months. I launched a Substack (you can check it out here), and when I posted about it on LinkedIn, the first question I got was, “How did you get buy-in for this?” This says something important about content marketing. I think most teams are running an incumbent playbook, meaning they are doing all the things they need to do to support the business, but not experimenting with the next thing that could unlock growth.

In my case, it was relatively easy to get support. I ended up at Miro after it acquired Reforge, where I was leading thought leadership content. Reforge has a great reputation for strong thought leadership content, so we came in with plenty of clout. It certainly didn’t hurt that Reforge’s CEO backed this project (s/o Brian Balfour). Plus, Miro had already identified thought leadership as an opportunity, so I was able to get my plan approved and resourced quickly.

It’s very important to call out that this was basically a skunkworks project because I was a newcomer via an acquisition. After the deal closed, we (the Reforge team) had a short window to be outsiders on the inside. I think it would have been much more difficult to pull someone from marketing off their work to do it, or to hire someone. Not because those people didn’t have the skills, but because they would have been too absorbed in everything else going on in the marketing org to give this project the attention and focus it needed to get off the ground. I don't think this has to be true but it certainly makes it easier.

I’ve heard from quite a few content peers who say that they would absolutely love to work on a project like this. Substack is known for essays and great editorial work. I think most content folks are tired of begging algorithms for attention, and this is a type of creative work that many of us don’t get to do much anymore.

Substack is, of course, just one example. There are all kinds of cool ways to use content outside of AEO/SEO to share ideas, differentiate your brand and elevate your team. Here are my suggestions for making the case.

Start with a hypothesis ladder

First, appeal to logic. I wanted to do this project because I thought it’d be a fun thing to work on, but there has to be a strong business case. This is true for any marketing project, but especially for thought leadership, which is notoriously difficult to measure and therefore hard to resource. I tried to build my case on a series of hypotheses that looked something like this:

• Now is a particularly good time to invest in thought leadership because of all the change happening as a result of AI. It’s a good time to participate in and even lead some of that conversation.
• Decision-makers are actively trying to sharpen their thinking with new mental models and frameworks. 
• Unlocking internal expertise is a great source of new content. It’s a massive source of first-hand information that readers can’t easily get anywhere else. 
• The people follow people trend is likely to continue, and thought leadership is a great way to elevate our own people while also differentiating our brand. 
• Substack is preferable to the company blog because readers are willing to extend a little more trust to a third-party platform. 
• The process of interviewing and ghostwriting for internal leaders can be the catalyst for lots of other content as well (presentations, social, etc.).

The next thing I did was collect examples of companies that were doing similar thought leadership projects to show the team how this looks and feels. And then I vibe-coded a prototype of what I imagined Miro’s would look like, complete with placeholder article titles, to make it feel as real as possible. The phrase “thought leadership content” is far too vague, and I think it’s basically a requirement to make it as tangible as possible in order to get buy-in.

How to measure it (plus, a helpful workaround)

I mentioned that getting buy-in was relatively easy at Miro, but the measurement question came up with every stakeholder that I spoke with. Substack does not have an API, so we cannot easily connect the data to any of our other analytics. It provides some simple things like views and subscribers, but not much beyond that. I think this is actually helpful because it's so limited that you can't spend too much time on it. Instead, we took a slightly different approach.

First, we decided who we were trying to reach. There was a very specific demographic profile that we felt would be the right reader for this publication and likely to buy or upsell into a Miro plan. But rather than starting from scratch, we seeded the list with some subscribers from our existing newsletter. This meant we could handpick people that fit the right demographic profile. It also greatly lessened the need for deep analysis, at least early on, because we could be certain that we were reaching the exact people that we wanted to reach.

Next, we aligned with our campaigns team. I felt it was very important that, while this would be a skunkworks project, it would not be out on an island either. I wanted to make sure that the topics that we wrote about were aligned with the company's strategic priorities. This is a very fine balance because if you go too far in either direction, you risk alienating either readers or the company. It's also important for your stakeholders to know that you are actively going to be supporting launches and other campaigns. It makes everyone feel a lot more comfortable if they know that this is a channel, not a fully autonomous project. 

It is pretty difficult to measure any thought leadership, and this must be acknowledged. This doesn't mean you shouldn't measure it, but rather that you have to find data points that help you at least triangulate your progress. We basically look at all of the metrics that Substack provides, and I vibe-coded a dashboard to make it easy to share with the team. I also made sure the dashboard helps us highlight comments, LinkedIn reactions, and internal feedback so that we can round out that picture with anecdotal evidence of the impact as well.

Why not just use the company blog?

I found that this is the hardest question to answer. If you already have a blog that is resourced with writers and designers, why would you go create a new place to publish content?

I think it's absolutely vital that you do not use the company blog for most thought leadership projects, but you also have to be delicate in explaining why. It isn't that the company blog stinks or that it’s too focused on AEO (though these could be true), it's that the only way a skunkworks project succeeds is if it has its own identity. Thought leadership content mixed in with whatever else is on your blog would water down the impact so much that I'm not even sure it would be worth doing. The blog team will almost certainly want this content on the blog, and I found the most difficult part of this was explaining to them why I didn’t think it would work. I obviously didn’t want it to feel personal, so I leaned on the hypothesis ladder to have that conversation. 

This is a place where it's very helpful to show examples of what other companies are doing. Ramp’s Economics Lab is a perfect example and one that we discussed quite a bit internally. PostHog is doing something similar, Compound has a very cool microsite, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has a personal blog. We drew inspiration from all of these.

Where to start

“Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.”

This fantastic quote from The Innovator's Dilemma is the perfect way to start a conversation with your manager about a new content project. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get the results you’ve always gotten. But to Christensen’s point in the intro, the right time to think about the next project is while the current one is going well.

This is the best opportunity I’ve seen in my 15 years in content marketing to disrupt the playbook and try something new. Everyone is thinking about differentiation now. Someone is going to build the publication your audience wants to read. It might as well be you.

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