How SuperOps built a media company for its niche
Continuing the series on India's super cool startups
Last week, I wrote a story on USPL’s CEO Anjana Reddy for Nucleus, the Atoms blog. The way I concluded is something I hoped readers would pay attention to.
From the blog:
Anjana has been handling the marketing of the company since its inception. Even now, when she has a full time marketing team, she stays involved. As she observes, things have changed a lot in terms of digital, social, and analytics, but the fundamentals are still the same. Being intelligent and standing out has become important as there is too much noise.
Founders who understand marketing have a competitive advantage. Anjana’s success, though attributable to a variety of other reasons, including hard work and perseverance, is also due to her being involved in marketing throughout. She gets it.
Marketing is owned by the CEO, not by the CMO. This is a stretched simplification, but will do for now: Think of the CEO’s job as creation, and the CMO’s as distribution.
In SaaS, founding teams with marketers tend to do better early. I have only anecdotal evidence for this, but you cannot convince me otherwise. Salesforce, Hubspot, Drift, Freshworks - companies where founders have led the marketing push have grown quickly and done phenomenally well. And especially as acquisition gets tougher for startups, having a marketer in the founding team becomes an immediate marker for future success.
It is with this context that we are going to dive into SuperOps, a startup in the MSP space founded by Arvind Parthiban and Jayakumar Karumbasalam.
Arvind is no stranger to this newsletter. In the original super cool startup essay, I had pointed out how Arvind’s first startup Zarget understood PR really well, and played that game to perfection.
As I wrote then:
Zarget understood coolness, understood the glamour of being a startup with a story, and they used it. Since the time they began, they always seemed to be in the news. This was refreshing, because our startups are not necessarily good at PR. Zarget was. There can be many arguments why, but I bet having a marketer in the founding team had something to do with it.
Back in January, I referenced Gary Vaynerchuk’s 2014 blog titled Every company is a media company, a line that subsequently became tech gospel. I’ve believed in that idea since, without ever seeing it in action in India.
Until now.
Let’s start with the timeline.
SuperOps had a soft launch in April 2021. But the marketing team had started putting out content as early as mid 2020. Why so early, you may ask. That’s the wrong question, I’ve answered that already.
The correct question is: What did they start with?
There’s the blog, which began almost immediately, called The Bugle. It has opinion pieces, interviews, and deep dives into the space.
The podcast, SuperPod, interviews professionals from the domain and attracts the attention of everyone who is anyone in the space. This is an important tactic as the podcast scales and becomes a repository of timely interviews.
There’s an e-book on what goes inside an MSP toolkit.
And lately they’ve started innovating on the podcast format, introducing 60 second hits of media they call SuperPod Bytes.
In summary, SuperOps built a sparkling media engine before they launched the product, complete with a targeted blog, a podcast for MSP pros, and even an e-book.
That’s brilliant.
But that’s not what I want to focus on.
What I want to pay attention to is how prolific they’ve been. Go to the website, and have a look at how many blogs and podcast episodes they have published.
And when you’ve seen that, look down at the footer of the website.
Note also just how much great SEO content and landing pages have also been put out and interlinked.
Remember, their marketing started just about a year ago.
Knowing what to do is one thing, executing at this scale is quite another.
Also, why is this kind of search-ready content important for SuperOps? Because SuperOps is playing in an established, clear category, and knows what people will be searching for. They are simply making sure their content come up when people search.
I’ve argued earlier that as an early stage team, you job is to create. That’s what SuperOps have done, and that’s why they are succeeding.
With a marketer at the helm, this was expected, you’d say. And I would agree. But if there’s something to learn from Arvind and team this time, I would point at hiring specialised marketing talent. They have a stellar lineup of marketers and product managers. This is expensive but speeds up execution (as opposed to hiring inexperienced generalists, which is cheaper, but slows you down).
Arvind not only knew what he wanted to do, he knew who he wanted to do these things with. He got them, and they delivered.
SuperOps has built a media company for its niche, and I for one am excited that we have finally been able to nail this. The template is right here, and I hope other founders take the cue.
Post Script
First, a disclaimer: I know a lot about SuperOps because Arvind is my former boss and close advisor. Most of the team are friends, and our marketing philosophies, tuned during our time at Freshworks, are similar (for example, I immediately knew that the 60 second SuperPod Bytes idea was Jammy’s).
But they didn’t ask me to write this, nor did I show a draft to them before publishing.
Also, this is a continuation of my series on super cool startups, in which I’ve covered Rocketlane, CRED, and Reslash. If you are here for the first time, I recommend reading them too.
And finally, this one’s for you, Monica. We miss you.