
How Do Startups Founders Manage Social Media Content Creation? - theParzival
How do Startup founders create valuable content and manage your social media profiles while managing your early startups?<p>How do you use your Companies Social Media pages to drive brand loyalty and business growth?
======
Jugurtha
We don't really do that. We'd rather have an engineering blog, but that too
requires someone to write about technical things we do, and we'd rather do
technical things (fix bugs or add features) than write about them at this
stage...

I exchange on HN however.

We're too busy putting out fires with our first users. Product depends on
systems we don't control and users work late into the night, so we also do
support on Slack around the clock.

CEO writes a column for a newspaper sometimes and posts the link to social
media pages. But the columns are not about the company.

~~~
theParzival
Hi Jugurtha, thank you very much for your answer.

But tell me something please, once you have a product and some users/clients,
why don't you use more Social Media? To grow your brand loyalty and business
growth? Social Media is pretty cheap.

What I see is that: 1 - most technical founders don't really like social media
2 - they rather prefer tech blogs, changelogs, subreddits, HK news, etc 3 - it
is to hard to create content and to manage social media profiles 4 - most
technical founders can't see any value on having good social media and feel it
may be a waste of time 5 - once they don't quite understand social media
enough, and to do so they should invest lots of time, they prefer to simply
ignore it and leave it for another time

Am I right in any of my assumptions?

~~~
Jugurtha
> _But tell me something please, once you have a product and some users
> /clients, why don't you use more Social Media? To grow your brand loyalty
> and business growth? Social Media is pretty cheap._

We were mostly a tiny consulting company specialized in data projects, working
_only_ with large organizations that could afford us. We built custom
solutions from end-to-end. In other words, we talk with an organization,
listen to their problem, understand it, build acquisition lines to either get
the existing data or capture it, sometimes manufacturing the hardware to
acquire signals. Then build models (oooh, AI). Then build applications to use
these models, either web or mobile applications, with user access control and
admin features.

We handled everything and offered custom turn-key solutions to very large
organizations and we did not need social media since there was more work than
we could handle.

We did not need social media.

The good thing about this is that you have a tiny team that has worked on
problems in banking, telcos, energy, health, and other domains and built a
variety of systems. And once you have shipped for a client, you become their
"goto" team for other projects. The bad thing is that it is taxing: not easy
for an individual contributor to work on three projects simultaneously, and
not easy to manage ten projects at the same time, have their code base in your
head, contribute to them, know the contracts, and make the necessary decisions
to move them forward either technically or otherwise. The bad thing is that
you tend to go over similar steps (data, model, application) but the solutions
were done with a "custom" solution mindset.

We took advantage of a change in the team's structure some time ago to start
an internal project: a platform that could help us get data projects running
and solve the problems we faced shipping these projects.

It handles data and prevents duplication, gives you a notebook with GPU
support, tracks your models, params, metrics. Enables you to share your work
with domain expert and enables them to play with it so we shorten the feedback
loop (many ML practitioners complain they can't get their notebook/results in
the hands of a domain expert easily). It also deploys your model so you could
use it in the application seamlessly just by hitting an endpoint (i.e: a data
scientist does not need to ask you to deploy it. Self service). And the
applications are simply plugins: this is important because it allows to add
"monitoring" as a plugin. It allows to add "Notebook" as a plugin. We're
shipping features as plugins and it has simplified contribution.

Now: this is an internal platform and we don't have paying users yet. We have
let around 30 students of our colleague to use it for their final year
project, and we're too busy making sure they don't waste time. It is also good
because they've hit some problems that we are fixing. They're benefitting in
terms of compute power and data amount.

The platform is in pre-alpha. We are using it for our own projects to shrink
the time to value for our customers. There are critical features that are
lacking.

We will soon share a landing page for it listing these features and give
access to certain people. We have already given access to some people to play
with it. Some people working at FAANG companies have tried it, but they do not
have the same problems everyone else is having (i.e: they have deployment
engineers, data engineers, ml engineers).

------
brittpart_
Is it for advertising or to create a "brand"?

I would outsource it a photographer or not be so hard on yourself because it
takes copious amounts of effort for little return. Or you could seriously have
fun with it and make it feel like a personal account which people would be
more receptive to. Everyone knows an ad when they see an ad but every time you
generate organic content, people watch because they like you as people. Does
that make sense?

