A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go down the path of your content marketing. You said you published a book. Tell us more about what was the marketing strategy around your code review product?

Jason Cohen: I have to give credit where credit is due. In ITWatchDogs, Gerry had this idea because it had just become possible to self-publish. It was still hard. You would send them a PDF and they’d send you a trial book three weeks later. You had to iterate slowly. It wasn’t cheap. It was weird but you could do it. You could have a real paperback.

Gerry had this idea. He said, “Why don’t we make a product catalog? For the first 20 pages, let’s really pitch this whole idea that we’re doing ITWatchDogs.” The first 20 to 30 pages was a long infomercial on why it’s important and why things quickly burn up when something is wrong with the AC. The reason is you have this 500-watt fan at the back of your server. All of that energy is going to heat. Nothing is moving. Even the spinning hard drive is in oil. Almost all of that turns into heat. It’s really like having a 500-watt heater.

Then you imagine a whole rack of heaters. What happens is, even with the AC, you literally just have heaters everywhere. The whole thing very rapidly goes to 120°F, then everything stops working. We told that story with pictures at the beginning of the book. Then we said, “Let’s give away the book as a catalog.” People came in droves. With one ad and one magazine, we got 20 a day asking for the book, which is pretty good. This is a print magazine by the way.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome lead generation.

Jason Cohen: That worked really well. I decided to take it another step further. This is where you start getting some amazing stuff. I’ll describe how and why. I did the reverse. It wasn’t 20 pages of informative and a 150-page brochure. The first 150 pages is all thought leadership. Here’s how you make a checklist. Here’s what’s important and not important. Here’s how you convince skeptical developers to, at least, try it. Here’s the social aspects involved. Here’s how you get people to think like mentors and gurus. Here’s the data that we got about what’s effective and not. That was almost a whole book.

At the very last chapter, it said, “Thanks for getting all the way here. We have a tool that takes a lot of this drudgery out. We can’t solve the social issues for you but we can take some of the busy work out.” The last 15 pages are a pitch. That made the book very successful because there was a lot to learn from it. I made the cover a bright red. People often call it “the little red book“.

Here’s a fun thing about a book. You don’t throw them away. It’s sacrilegious to throw a book away. If you mail someone a post card or a brochure, it gets thrown away but not a book. A book goes on a shelf somewhere. It’s a brochure that sticks. That’s a powerful thing. If the content is compelling where they literally can open to any page, begin reading, and go “That’s actually interesting.” It also gives us this credibility.

This segment is part 4 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine
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