The Minimum Viable Content Strategy for Pre-Seed Startups

You’ve spent the last six months coding in a dark room, fueled by caffeine and a belief that you’re building something people need. You pushed the final build to production. You have a landing page, a sign-up button, and… crickets.

Now everyone is telling you to “do marketing.” To “create content.” It feels like a four-letter word. You’re a builder, not a writer. You think in systems, APIs, and logic—not in blog posts, social media, and SEO keywords. The advice you find online is for companies with teams, budgets, and existing brands. It’s useless to you.

Let’s cut the crap. You don’t need a massive content marketing machine. You need a Minimum Viable Content (MVC) strategy. Just like an MVP, the goal of MVC isn't to be perfect or comprehensive. It's a lean, targeted system designed to achieve a specific outcome with the least amount of wasted effort: get your first users and validate your core message.

This isn't about blogging into the void. This is about building a repeatable process to turn your product insights into a magnet for your ideal customers.

Stop Thinking "Content," Start Thinking "Conversations"

The biggest mistake founders make is thinking of content as an asset to be produced, like a factory churning out widgets. They follow some generic checklist: “Write 4 blog posts a month. Post on Twitter 3 times a day.” This is a recipe for burnout and failure.

At the pre-seed stage, content is not about production. It’s about starting and scaling conversations with the people you want to serve. Every piece of content should be a proxy for a conversation you’d have with a potential customer.

The Only Two Goals That Matter at Pre-Seed

Forget vanity metrics like traffic, followers, or likes. They mean nothing when your bank account is dwindling. For the next six months, your content has only two jobs:

1. Validation: Content is your cheapest and fastest way to test your messaging. Does anyone actually care about the problem you solve? When you describe it, do people’s eyes light up or glaze over? Before you spend another three months building a feature, you can write a post explaining the problem and the proposed solution. The reaction tells you if you’re on the right track.

2. Attraction: Your goal isn't to attract 10,000 visitors. It’s to attract your first 10, 20, or 50 perfect-fit users. These are the people who feel the pain so acutely they're willing to try a buggy, early-stage product. They are the ones who will give you the feedback you need to survive and find product-market fit.

That’s it. If a content idea doesn't directly contribute to validation or attraction, you don't have time for it.

Your Product is Not the Hero, Your Customer Is

As a technical founder, your instinct is to talk about your product. Its features, its architecture, the elegant code you wrote. Nobody cares. Seriously.

Your customers don't care about your product; they care about their problems. They are the hero of their own story, and they're stuck. They need a guide to help them.

You and your content are the guide. Your product is the tool or weapon you give the hero to win the day.

Stop writing content like this:

• “Announcing Our New AI-Powered Dashboard v2.1”

Start writing content like this:

• “How Finance Teams Can Cut Month-End Reporting Time in Half”

The first title is about you. The second is about them. All your content must be about them.

The MVC Framework: A 3-Part System for Lean Startups

Ready to get started? Here is the simple, three-part system you can execute without hiring anyone. This is your content operating system.

Pillar 1: Identify Your "Watering Holes"

Your ideal customers are already online, gathered in specific places, talking about their problems. I call these “watering holes.” Your job is to find them and listen.

This isn't about finding places to spam your link. It's about ethnographic research. Where do your people go to ask for help, complain about their tools, or share best practices? Your job is to become a member of that community, not a drive-by advertiser.

Examples for a B2B SaaS product:

• For a developer tool: Specific subreddits (r/devops, r/programming), Hacker News, certain Stack Overflow tags, niche Discords.

• For a sales tool: LinkedIn Groups for sales leaders, r/sales, industry-specific forums.

• For a vertical SaaS product (e.g., for dentists): Private Facebook groups for dental practice owners, industry forums like DentalTown.

Your Action Item: Spend two hours this week finding 3-5 of these watering holes. Join them. And for the first week, do not post a single thing. Just read. Listen. Absorb the language they use, the acronyms they type, and the recurring problems that make them angry. This is your source of truth.

Pillar 2: Create "Problem-First" Content Snippets

Forget the 2,000-word blog post for now. Your MVC starts with “content snippets.” These are small, high-value, conversational assets that you deploy in your watering holes.

The goal is to be relentlessly helpful. You’re not selling; you’re solving. You use the knowledge you have to help someone with their problem, which builds trust and establishes your authority.

Types of snippets:

• The Helpful Answer: Someone on Reddit asks, “How do you guys handle [problem that your software solves]?” You write a detailed, 300-word answer that lays out a manual framework for solving it. You don't even mention your product initially. You just provide pure value. If they reply positively, you can say, “Glad that helped! We’re actually building a tool to automate this process, if you’re interested in checking it out.”

• The LinkedIn Framework: You notice a common frustration among your target users. You write a LinkedIn post that says, “Struggling with [Problem]? Here’s the 3-step framework we use to fix it: 1… 2… 3… It saves our users about 10 hours a week.” This educates and teases the value of your product without a hard sell.

These snippets are your testing ground. The ones that get the most engagement—the most “wow, this is helpful!” replies—are your candidates for long-form content.

Pillar 3: The "One-Page" Content Hub

Instead of launching a full-blown blog (which looks sad when it only has two posts), create a single, powerful page on your website. Call it

/resources

/guides

/playbook

This page is your “greatest hits” collection. It’s where you will publish your foundational, long-form content pieces. You don’t need more than one or two to start.

What do you write? You take the content snippet that performed best and expand it into a definitive, 1500+ word guide. This becomes the best resource on the internet for solving that one, specific, painful problem.

This one-page hub serves several purposes:

• It gives you a destination to link back to from your watering holes.

• It consolidates all your authority on one page, which is better for SEO when you're starting out.

• It acts as a powerful lead magnet for your product.

Over time, as you validate more topics, you can add more guides to this page. Eventually, it can evolve into a full blog, but you start lean.

SEO for Founders Who Hate SEO

I get it. SEO feels like a dark art, a rigged game played by consultants who charge a fortune for vague promises. But let’s reframe it. SEO is simply the process of making sure that when someone is actively looking for a solution to a problem you solve, they find you.

It's pure demand capture. And you can do the 20% of the work that gets 80% of the results.

Keyword Research Without the Complicated Tools

You do not need a $100/month subscription to Ahrefs or SEMrush yet. Your best keyword research tools are free:

1. Your Watering Holes: The exact phrases people use to describe their problems are your primary keywords. If they say, “I need a better way to track my freelance project profitability,” then “track freelance project profitability” is your keyword.

2. Google Autocomplete: Go to Google. Start typing in a problem. See what Google suggests. These are real queries from real people.

3. Google’s “People Also Ask”: Search for a problem. Scroll down to the “People Also Ask” box. This is a goldmine of related questions your customers have. Your content should answer them.

The "Bottom-of-Funnel" First Principle

The marketing funnel has three basic layers: Top (Awareness), Middle (Consideration), and Bottom (Decision). At pre-seed, you can’t afford to play at the top of the funnel. You need to live at the bottom.

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords are the queries people use when they are ready to buy or sign up for a solution. They have high commercial intent. Targeting these first is the leanest path to getting actual users.

Examples of BOFU content topics:

• Comparison Posts:

  Plaintext

  Copy

  [Your Product] vs. [Competitor]

• Alternative Posts:

  Plaintext

  Copy

  Best [Competitor] Alternatives

• Use-Case Posts:

  Plaintext

  Copy

  How to [Achieve Outcome] with [Your Product Category]

• Category Posts:

  Plaintext

  Copy

  Best [Your Product Category] Software for [Your Niche]

Your first one or two foundational pieces on your

/resources

Execution: Your First 90-Day Plan

Talk is cheap. Here’s a concrete plan.

Month 1: Listen and Learn (Weeks 1-4)

• Goal: Find your customers and understand their pain in their own words.

• Actions:

  • Identify 3-5 watering holes.

  • Spend 30 minutes a day reading and absorbing. Take notes in a simple doc.

  • Based on your research, identify one high-pain, BOFU topic for your first foundational guide.

  • Outline the guide. It should be the most helpful piece of content on the internet for that specific query.

Month 2: Publish and Participate (Weeks 5-8)

• Goal: Publish your first core asset and start building trust.

• Actions:

  • Write and publish your first 1500+ word guide on your

    Plaintext

    Copy

    /resources

    page.

  • Begin participating helpfully in your watering holes. Spend 30-45 minutes a day answering questions.

  • Where it’s natural and non-spammy, link back to your guide as a resource for those who want to go deeper.

Month 3: Amplify and Analyze (Weeks 9-12)

• Goal: Repurpose your core asset and gather data to inform your next move.

• Actions:

  • Take 3-5 key ideas from your guide and turn them into LinkedIn posts or tweet threads. Always include a link back to the main guide.

  • Set up the free Google Search Console. Look at the “Performance” report. What search queries is your guide starting to appear for? This is real-world data.

  • Use these insights to plan your second foundational guide. Double down on what's working.

When to Scale (and When Not To)

This lean MVC system can easily get you your first 50 customers. You don't need to scale it until you have clear signs of product-market fit and a predictable flow of users from this channel.

When you’re ready, you have two options. You can build it in-house, or you can outsource it. If you're the type of founder who wants to build and manage the systems yourself, a self-service platform like our AI-powered content builder can give you the tools to scale your content engine on your own terms.

But for many founders, time is the scarcest resource. Building and managing a content team is a full-time job in itself. This is where a done-for-you service, which acts as your outsourced marketing team, becomes a massive lever. Instead of managing writers and strategists, you can focus on your product while an expert team executes the plan for you. At AgentWeb, this is exactly what we do for early-stage startups. The investment in such a service often has a clearer ROI than hiring in-house early on, and you can compare the different pricing models to see what fits your runway.

Your initial goal isn't to build a giant marketing department. It's to build a small, efficient engine that proves the model. Once the engine is proven, you can add more fuel.

Ready to put your marketing on autopilot? Book a call with Harsha to walk through your current marketing workflow and see how AgentWeb can help you scale.