#40 - Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's guests are Camille Ricketts from First Round Capital and Sonal Chokshi from Andreessen Horowitz. So Sonal and Camille both work on content, and they make really great stuff, so I thought it'd be fun to have them come in to discuss and debate their strategies.
As always, if you want to read the transcript or watch the video, you can check out blog.ycombinator.com. All right, here we go. We have a ton of questions about content, content marketing, editorial, from Twitter. So I think we're just gonna jump right into them, okay?

**Camille Ricketts** (0:32)
Sounds good.

**Craig Cannon** (0:33)
Cool. So Adora Chung, partner of YC, asked two questions. First of which is, how do you measure the effectiveness of your content?
Sonal?

**Sonal Chokshi** (0:43)
You're asking me first.

**Camille Ricketts** (0:44)
I'm like ask Camille first.

**Sonal Chokshi** (0:48)
Well, I'm gonna give you guys a cop-out answer, which is, cause I actually think content measurements like one of the hardest things that has not been solved. And I've been looking for tools and things for years. And you know, in media, you have like obvious things like page views and time on site. But I think the number one question is, you have to really tie it to what you're trying to do. And I know that sounds like a really obvious thing, but actually people don't stop to pause and ask themselves, like, what are we trying to measure and why? Like, how does it fit our strategy and our goal? And then also what you measure is what you're actually gonna bother changing, cause why measure something if you're really not gonna do anything about it?
And so things that I value most are things like time on site, engagement and uptake, much more than page views.
But of course, it is kind of a nice high when you get a lot of people reading something or paying attention or listening to something.

**Craig Cannon** (1:36)
And so to make that more specific, what is a good time on site that you're looking for? Do you base it on the word count of an article, of a video, what do you do?

**Sonal Chokshi** (1:44)
Yeah, no, it's not an arbitrary number for sure, cause I actually have a big pet peeve around word length. Like, I hate when people get into religious debates around length, like, short is good, bad is long is bad, or people only do this, and I hate all those rules. Do you guys have word counts on your stuff?

**Camille Ricketts** (2:02)
We don't have word counts, but we write extremely long.

**Sonal Chokshi** (2:04)
Yes, so do we.

**Camille Ricketts** (2:05)
And so we get a lot of people saying, why are you doing that?

**Sonal Chokshi** (2:08)
Yeah, and it works though, right? Your long stuff works.

**Camille Ricketts** (2:10)
It really depends on the content you're trying to share.

**Sonal Chokshi** (2:12)
Yeah, exactly. That's what I hate as a religious debate around it, because that's exactly it. What is the amount of length that you actually need to convey the point? And so it's more about information density to me. Like how many insights are you conveying? Like not like per square foot, but you know what I mean? Like, you know, are you really packing it in or just like, are you just meandering for no reason?
And so the length thing, so to go back to your point about the measurement, like there isn't an actual number because it depends on the length. You know, a 4,000 word piece is gonna take 10 minutes to read. But you get a sense, and I know that seems like a cop-out, but you do get a sense, like this is a piece that has high engagement. Like a lot of people are actually really staying with it. They're not just flipping in and out. And I don't know what the tools you guys use, but I still use Chartbeat, even though we don't have to use Chartbeat because you don't get that kind of traffic like you do in a media outlet.
But it does kind of tell you where people drop off.
And I think that data literally informed how I think about writing and editing and how I think about being an editor.
Because you really pay attention to keeping people hooked for every turn, at least in the first third of a piece before they're committed.

**Craig Cannon** (3:18)
Right, so are you mixing it up with like pull quotes, like images? What do you guys do?

**Sonal Chokshi** (3:22)
You guys probably have a better answer on this.