Monte Carlo’s Content Strategy: How They Built Authority in a New Category
Creating content for a category that doesn’t exist yet presents a unique challenge: you can’t rely on existing keywords, established frameworks, or proven formats. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses revealed how they built their content strategy from scratch, starting before the company even officially existed.
Starting Before Day One
“Actually I wrote our first blog post before we actually officially created the company,” Barr reveals. “And my very first blog post was it was called Rise of Data Downtime. And it was actually a description of what it felt like to experience this pain of, hey, I’m responsible for the data. We’re using Data as a company, but the data is wrong all the time and I’m so frustrated by that and I don’t know what to do.”
Customer Language First
Instead of inventing new terminology, Monte Carlo let customer language guide their content. “I think oftentimes it’s easy to market or create content with yourself, with your own company in mind… It’s very different to come from that angle versus what is the language that our customers are using? What words do they use to describe their own problem?”
Beyond Product Marketing
Monte Carlo’s content strategy extends beyond their own product. “We oftentimes write about topics that are actually not related to Monte Carlo or data observability, but rather topics that are just top of mind for our customers,” Barr explains. She offers a specific example: “Data mesh was a topic that was super top of mind for folks a few years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And people are like, there’s no resources about the topic and we’re not sure we want to learn more about it.”
The CEO’s Content Commitment
Content creation wasn’t delegated to marketing – it started at the top. “I probably do between one and three speaking opportunities per week for the last three and a half years or so since we started Monte Carlo,” Barr shares. This commitment to content creation helps maintain authentic customer connection.
Building the Team
Monte Carlo built a specialized content team under Molly Borvick’s leadership. Their approach focuses on “interviewing customers, understanding what’s top of mind for them.” This customer-first approach ensures content remains relevant and valuable.
Category Education
Rather than just promoting their product, Monte Carlo’s content educates the market about the broader category. As Barr notes, “The honest truth is like, your customers don’t care about your company, they don’t care about the category, they don’t care about the fact that you’re trying to create a category. They care about their problems.”
Content Impact Measurement
Success isn’t measured just in views or leads. The real validation comes from customer adoption of terminology and concepts. As Barr notes, customers “started writing blogs using data observability.” This organic adoption of category language indicates content resonance.
For B2B founders building content strategies in new categories, Monte Carlo’s approach offers several key lessons:
- Start creating content before official company launch
- Use customer language rather than invented terminology
- Cover adjacent topics that matter to your audience
- Maintain leadership involvement in content creation
- Focus on customer problems, not category promotion
- Look for organic adoption of concepts as success metrics
The conventional wisdom suggests building content strategies around SEO and existing demand. Monte Carlo’s experience shows that in category creation, the best content strategy might be focusing purely on customer problems and letting the category emerge organically through customer language and needs.
Rather than trying to force new terminology or concepts, they focused on describing real problems in customers’ own words. As Barr summarizes: “The answer lies with your customers. That is just always true and it’s very tempting to think that you know the answer or you have some gut around it or maybe your experiences should impact this. Our customers are just the True North, always and forever.”
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