Content to inspire commitment in open source && cloud native
A big moment in startup maturity is feeling confident your messaging + copywriting resonate with your target audiences. You're finally ready to distribute your value propositions and innovative vision wide across the open source and cloud native ecosystems through content.
For these clients, I employ three styles of developer- and engineer-focused content— editorial, technical, and search optimized—across any asset that supports the KPIs of your developer marketing strategy and your organization's go-to-market motion. We can build a reliable pipeline for your product blog, stack up contributions to your industry's leading publications, or target leaders/CTOs with case studies, white papers, product briefs, and beyond.
Content is your path to:
- Build the required trust and authority to inspire readers to do difficult work, like reconfigure their production environment, just to finish a 'get started' guide
- Transform skeptical developers into product champions by solving their day-to-day technical concerns
- Play to the algorithm's demands while captivating developer/engineering readers into learning about novel approaches to big-picture technical and cultural decisions
- Stand out in crowded fields with developer- and engineer-focused content that feels less like a hard sell and more like a helpful friend
Editorial
Go beyond “thought leadership” and truly stand out from the crowd with content driven by your team's strongest opinions about your industry. Through original research and interviews, I create authoritative content that simplifies complex processes or mental models, then leverage storytelling to help them put leading ideas into action today.
It's your surest path to building trust, inspiring commitment, and delivering the business results you need through content.
Testkube
When the product managers at Testkube wanted to spark controversy and establish a new paradigm in CI/CD pipelines, they tapped me to (ghost)write Are Monolith CI/CD Pipelines Killing Quality in Your Software?.
With an evidence-based breakdown of why the status quo isn't working, this article has generated tens of thousands of pageviews and a surge of signups for their Kubernetes-native testing platform.
CNCF & Argo
The open source Argo project was eager to reach Graduating status in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). To showcase their value to the cloud native community, they partnered with me on a comprehensive project journey report, which detailed community health, development velocity, and contributor diversity.
As part of the report's promotional push, I interviewed Argo's founders and synthesized their experiences into an educational piece, Four lessons that took Argo from first commit to GitOps darling, to spotlight their expertise as open source innovators.
Technical
Your fastest path to winning over managers and leaders with purchasing power is by helping them solve a problem, right now, in as few steps as possible. I can dive into your product and code to develop compelling how-to/tutorial content that spotlights your key value propositions without it feeling like marketing at all.
Once readers understand and trust in the value you create through content, they become hot prospects and product champions.
Tracetest
To help DevRel leaders at Tracetest better position their cloud native testing product as a paradigm-shifter, I wrote The difference between test-driven & observability-driven development. I married thought leadership on testing culture with technical details on distributed tracing to showcase the product's value proposition.
But simply talking about features isn't enough for developers—I wrote real-world code in Node.js to validate every step and showcase in-product processes other back-end developers can follow.
Kubefirst
I plucked the idea behind Leveraging External Secrets Operator from an interview with a Kubefirst founder, then developed the danger of 'secret-scattering' in Kubernetes into a technical article that shows how platform engineers and GitOps teams could avoid the danger with cloud native tooling.
For Kubefirst, an article like this is the best of both worlds: They get to spotlight their opinions and expertise while demonstrating the value of choosing their platform over reinventing the wheel.
Search optimized
Instead of optimizing content around keywords, which results in content that's light on value and feels like something your audience has read before, let's prioritize solving genuine problems.
By leading with solutions, then bracing your content with your target keywords, I help you capture new audiences while establishing your brand as authentic and worthy of their commitment.
GraphGrid
In Graph Thinking: A Simple Explainer for Connected Data, I targeted a high-opportunity keyword to capture searches from developers and engineers eager to grasp a new paradigm. I did comprehensive research on the origins of graph thinking and interviewed multiple GraphGrid experts to synthesize a complex idea into a relatable metaphor, all backed by real-world technical context.
This article is now the cornerstone of GraphGrid's ongoing content strategy.
Kusk
The Kusk team, eager to brand their project with the influential "APIOps" keyword, asked me to write this primer with one important caveat: It needed to respect the reader's time by being as short as possible.
After pitching the "500 words" part of What Is APIOps? (In Less than 500 Words), I turned around an article, ready for syndication on The New Stack, that lives up to its promise, pitches the value prop of Kusk, and has sparked hundreds of responses on social media.
Abdallah Abedraba • Associate Product Manager, Testkube && Kubeshop
With most writers I had to adapt to the writer's technique, process, or their existing knowledge on the topic. Not with Joel. Joel enabled me to explore different ideas that fitted with various experiments I was running, and he adapted to achieve whatever the goal was. I would absolutely work with Joel again whenever I'm looking to create well researched technical content or have a content strategy I want to nail!
If you want to up your content game while having a content writer that adapts and supports your style/vision/knowledge depth/workflow, Joel is the perfect person for it.