Key Takeaways
- Content compounds over time in ways that paid advertising never does.
- The best content strategy is to be genuinely useful to the specific person you are trying to reach.
- Distribution without content is expensive. Content without distribution is invisible.
SA Media grew to 250 million content views not through a large production budget or a breakthrough algorithm discovery. It grew because Saim Abbasi and the team made a consistent bet that genuinely useful content, made for a specific audience with a specific problem, would compound in a way that paid acquisition never could.
That bet has been validated repeatedly, and the principles behind it inform how Saim thinks about content in every business he advises or invests in.
The Compounding Property of Good Content
A well-made piece of content, an article, a video, a guide, that helps someone solve a real problem keeps working long after the moment it was created. It gets shared. It gets referenced. It ranks in search. It becomes part of someone's mental library for the category. None of these things happen with paid advertising, which produces results exactly proportional to spend and stops producing results the moment the spend stops.
The compounding property of content is why SA Media could reach 250 million views without a paid acquisition budget that would have been prohibitive for an early-stage company. The library of content built over the first year kept accumulating views in year two and three. The marginal cost of a view from existing content approaches zero over time.
Useful, Not Promotional
The content that compounds is useful, not promotional. This distinction sounds obvious and is consistently ignored. Most company content is promotional. It talks about the company's product, capabilities, or success. The audience for that content is people who are already customers or who are actively evaluating the product. Neither group needs content to find you.
The content that builds an audience, and eventually converts that audience into customers, solves problems the audience has before they know they need your product. That requires genuine subject matter expertise and the discipline to create value before asking for anything in return.
The Distribution Question
Great content without distribution is invisible. Building the content before building the distribution channel means the work does not compound as fast as it could. Saim's approach at SA Media was to build the distribution mechanism, the social presence, the newsletter, the SEO foundation, in parallel with the content production rather than sequentially. Both elements are necessary and neither is sufficient alone.
"A piece of content that helps someone solve a real problem keeps working for you long after the moment you made it. No ad does that."