Ondsel was building a SaaS for engineering teams and a modification of an open-source CAD software project. They were helping startups collaborate on hardware designs without breaking the bank.

I worked directly with the CTO on this project. Early on, it was clear that getting the service in front of people would be an uphill battle:

The industry is incredibly competitive; leaders have been in business for 30+ years. Getting the door open even by a quarter of an inch is hard enough.

CustDev suggests there are a million uses for a 3D CAD program, but no two people interviewed told the CRO the same thing.

The underlying upstream open-source project needed much investment into UX/UI and features and was hard to market.

The dependence on the upstream project meant that for the collaboration to work, the upstream project would need to adopt some business-like thinking.

Contributors to the upstream project were initially extremely cautious.

The investors (Open Core Ventures) have a playbook for companies they invest in, and it says: use content marketing to grow, make a great product, and then we’ll talk about leads and advertising. I started working on the strategy part after being involved as a tech writer on the blog.

To get anywhere with content, we needed to harmonize several objectives:

Get users outside the FreeCAD bubble to notice the company and what it has been up to

Test our assumptions about the market to contribute to finding the product-market fit

Motivate the upstream team to make changes to how the open-source project operates as an organization

Build a great relationship with thought leaders in the community

We also defined the pace of publishing, channels for boosting the content, ToV, and other specifics crucial to delivering content that resonates with our assumed target audience.

After a while, we reviewed this strategy to shift the focus towards bringing new SaaS registrations through posting more news about the cloud service and our enhanced build of the original desktop software.

Here is what I did for Ondsel.

I tailored it to the company and its ongoing search for a product-market fit.

The content plan needed to consider business objectives, such as KPIs set by investors. The content queue was managed in Jira. The CTO and I had a weekly call to review the queue and discuss priorities and progress.

I wrote dozens of technical blog posts and thought leadership pieces for the blog.

We needed to create visually compelling release videos. I hired and managed a skilled video producer and picked the right voice artist.