The Swyx Mixtape

This week's clip from the Startup To Last podcast: https://www.startuptolast.com/episodes/hardcore-week-building-a-content-site

Further reading on TOFU/MOFU/BOFU: https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/what-is-tofu-mofu-bofu

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Transcript:

Swyx: [00:00:00] I was listening to the Startup to Last podcast by Rick Lindquist, the founder of LegUp Ventures and Tyler King, the founder of Less Annoying CRM. And they were talking about this interesting marketing concepts called TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. And I'm going to let them explain it

Rick Lindquist: [00:00:16] Tofu is top of the funnel T O F U MOFU is middle of the funnel, MOFU and BOFU is bottom of the funnel.  Tyler and I worked this out on one of those trips to Utah one week where bottom of the funnel basically means branded terms like Less Annoying CRM, middle of funnel means like basically the product that you offer, but non-branded, so in Tyler's case, small business CRM, , and then TOFU is basically something that a small business might search in general, like a,  small business tools.

For TOFU content to work, it has to be so creative  and it is truly throwing darts, blindfolded against a dark, like after being spun 10 times at a dartboard, it really is entrepreneurial work.

Whereas like  MOFU and BOFU, especially with where you are now, it's blocking and tackling, it's... what was that saying  that you brought to the podcast once was like, get it to 70% or 90%, or I don't know what it was, but yeah, once you get it to that point, it feels like MOFU and BOFU for where you are,  are there and it's about optimization and doing more of what's already working versus trying to figure something out.

Swyx: [00:01:24] I think it's an interesting mental model, which I wish that I had in my previous work, The main idea is tofu. Content is the viral content that everyone wants to read. But doesn't necessarily connect to your particular business or brand and MOFU and BOFU. Further down the funnel where people are more and more interested in what you specifically are selling. 

So in the next clip, they talk about how tofu is actually damaging to your brand  It might help you go viral, but not actually help with any conversions. So they took it out of their website.  

Tyler King: [00:01:54] 

Like right now, if you go to the blog on less annoying CRMs, like we just redesigned it a little bit for web flow. We used to have three sections.

We  basically, we didn't call it this, but tofu, MOFU, and BOFU. And we basically removed tofu and the blog posts are still there, but there's not a section for it. We could maybe re-add it, but it just links off to Less Annoying business.  , 

Rick Lindquist: [00:02:12] TOFU content on your main product website is so dilutive to the brand.

if it's not related to CRM it's not going to be on less annoying crm.com, which means when someone goes to last long crm.com, they're either like just poking around and saying what it's about, or they're a potential customer.

Tyler King: [00:02:29] for example, to your point, it's so hard to measure conversion rates  from someone hitting your website to signing up for a free trial. Cause it's like, what if they were reading a blog post about whether or not to raise money for their startups?

Like, should we really count that as a failure that they didn't sign up? So, yeah, I like that a lot

Swyx: [00:02:45] As someone who works in developer marketing, I've had to deal with this quite a bit. When we were involved in debates on the company blog about whether the blog should be about the company or whether it should be about. 

 Anything that our customers care about, like front end development or the future of JavaScript. And basically there's a civil war  inside of the company. And I think that happens with a lot of companies. I think you also see the result of some companies going all out on tofu, like digital ocean and log rocket. And that's a very valid marketing strategy, but then to expect to mix it together with 

And BOFU content in the same blog. I think could be a very confusing content strategy. So this terminology really clear things up for me.