Audience of One

In the crowded venture content landscape, firms are increasingly battling for mindshare—producing podcasts, newsletters, and thought pieces that compete not just with each other, but with professional media companies. Many end up optimizing for broad reach and vanity metrics that look impressive but deliver questionable ROI.

The firms creating genuine competitive advantage through content are taking a fundamentally different approach: building their content strategy around the principle of the "Audience of One."

Rather than creating content for the widest possible audience, these VCs design content that solves specific problems for specific founders in their target sectors. This focused approach delivers disproportionate returns in deal flow, founder relationships, and investor brand—while requiring far fewer resources than broad content campaigns.

Here's why founder-focused content outperforms influence-chasing strategies, and how the best firms are executing it.

The Problem with the Creator Economy Mindset

Many venture firms have adopted a creator economy mindset for their content—prioritizing audience size, engagement metrics, and social sharing. This approach can create the appearance of influence, but it introduces several fundamental problems:

1. Undifferentiated Positioning
When you create content for everyone, you end up creating content for no one. The broader the audience targeted, the more generic the content becomes.

2. Misaligned Metrics
Optimizing for views or followers often means chasing trending topics rather than addressing your target founders' actual challenges. This leads to content that may be popular but fails to attract the right founders or showcase your firm's genuine expertise.

3. Resource Intensity
Building a media operation requires significant ongoing investment in content creation. For most firms, this dilutes focus from their core business of finding and supporting great companies.

4. Fleeting Impact
Even successful broad content has a short shelf life. Today's viral tweet is forgotten tomorrow, making these efforts a constant treadmill with diminishing returns.

Why the "Audience of One" Approach Works Better

Elite firms are shifting to a model where they create content as if they're writing for a single founder in their target ecosystem. This deceptively simple reframing transforms content from a broad awareness play into a precision tool for building relationships with the right founders.

When you design content for an audience of one, several powerful dynamics emerge:

1. Authenticity Becomes Automatic
When writing for a specific founder persona, you naturally avoid the overly polished, jargon-heavy content that plagues VC blogs. The content becomes conversational, practical, and genuinely helpful.

2. Distribution Takes Care of Itself
Content that solves real problems for specific founders spreads organically within those founder communities. A single piece that offers unique insight to enterprise AI founders will reach more of your target audience than dozens of general tech industry commentaries.

3. Signal Over Noise
Founders are drowning in content. By focusing exclusively on their specific challenges, you cut through the noise and position your firm as a trusted ally rather than another source of generic advice.

4. Compounding Value
Unlike trend-chasing content, founder-focused resources remain valuable for years. A great breakdown of enterprise sales compensation structures or technical diligence frameworks becomes a perennial resource that founders return to repeatedly.

How Top Firms Execute This Strategy

The VC firms creating the most effective founder-focused content share several key practices:

Direct Problem-Solving First
Rather than starting with "What should we write about?", they begin with "What specific challenges are our target founders facing today?" This ensures every piece of content directly addresses a founder pain point.

Unusual Ventures exemplifies this approach with their Field Guide for enterprise founders, which tackles highly specific challenges like "The Modern GTM" with detailed frameworks and playbooks. Their guide focuses on practical implementation rather than general principles, making it an essential resource for B2B founders navigating go-to-market challenges.

Proprietary Data Over Opinion
The most valuable content isn't commentary—it's data and frameworks founders can't get anywhere else.

SaaS Capital demonstrates this by publishing detailed benchmarking data in their annual survey of private B2B SaaS companies. Their "2024 SaaS Performance Metrics" and "Growth Benchmarks" reports provide actionable insights on metrics like customer acquisition costs, spending patterns, and retention across different company sizes. This data is invaluable to early-stage founders trying to understand how their metrics compare to peers.

Community-Informed Topics
The best content ideas don't come from internal brainstorming but from direct engagement with founders.

Craft Ventures excels at this approach with their data-driven SaaS metrics content. As shared in David Sacks' "The SaaS Metrics That Matter" publication, they focus on the specific KPIs their target founders care most about, providing benchmarks for early-stage companies and even releasing their internal SaaSGrid tool to help founders calculate these metrics for their own startups.

Utility Over Polish
Many firms get stuck in approval cycles and brand guidelines that delay content and strip it of personality. The most effective teams prioritize usefulness over perfection.

a16z embraces this philosophy with their crypto resources like the "Crypto Canon," which serves as a curated library of the most important articles, videos, and other resources for understanding crypto and web3. While not flashy, it's become an essential starting point for founders entering the space because it solves a specific problem: the need for authoritative educational resources in a complex domain.

How to Implement an "Audience of One" Strategy

If you're looking to shift your content approach toward this more focused model, consider these starting points:

1. Define Your Founder Persona in Extreme Detail
Move beyond basic parameters like "enterprise SaaS founders" to highly specific personas: "Second-time founders building vertical SaaS for heavily regulated industries who have product-market fit but are facing initial enterprise sales hurdles."

2. Conduct Founder Problem Interviews
Speak with 15-20 founders in your target sector with the exclusive goal of understanding their challenges, not evaluating their companies. Ask what problems keep them up at night and what resources they wish existed.

3. Audit Your Existing Content
Review your recent content with a critical eye. For each piece, ask whether it directly addresses a specific challenge faced by your target founders. If not, consider how it could be refocused or replaced.

4. Start Small and Specific
Rather than launching a broad content initiative, begin with solving one narrow problem extraordinarily well. A single, genuinely helpful resource will do more for your founder relationships than a dozen general pieces.

5. Measure the Right Outcomes
Track metrics that reflect real founder engagement rather than broad reach. Unsolicited founder feedback, sharing within founder communities, and direct references in conversations with entrepreneurs are better indicators of impact than view counts.

The Bottom Line

In a world of infinite content, the greatest leverage comes not from speaking to everyone but from deeply serving the specific founders you want to partner with. By designing your content for an audience of one—the exact type of founder you aim to back—you create disproportionate value both for those entrepreneurs and for your firm.

The most successful VC content strategies don't try to reach millions with generic insights. They focus on reaching the right hundreds with exactly the information they need, exactly when they need it.

Looking Forward

Is your firm taking a targeted approach to content, or are you still aiming for broad appeal? What specific founder problems could your unique expertise help solve? Reply directly to this email to share your thoughts—I'd love to feature your perspective in an upcoming edition.