I very much enjoyed our recent Write the Docs event called Genesis of a Specialist Technical Marketing Agency. Software engineer turned marketing agency founder Matt Fleming gave a talk on starting his own business. It was hosted at Colony coworking space in Ancoats, and we had a turnout of around 5 people.
This was a small but intimate event where the first half was Matt’s talk and Q&A, and the second half was unstructured discussion. It’s always nice when we get to have more of a social, but using the talk as a springboard.
Read Modify Write
Read Modify Write is the technical marketing agency founded by Matt and his wife in 2017.
Their clients are mainly open source software companies, and their business’s unique selling point is that they connect their clients with technically savvy marketing writers.
Most of their writers are developers who write on the side, or writers with a technical background. This is at odds with most agencies, who typically use unspecialised writers to write content. Matt himself has a background in software development, and he started off writing technical articles for news publications.
“I made a lot of mistakes running this business,” says Matt honestly, which will be undoubtedly true for any business founder. But Read Modify Write has been very successful, largely in part to their particular niche which is technically accurate marketing articles for a company blog or landing page. They are now a full stack marketing agency offering everything from copywriting, to SEO, to branding.
Pivoting from technical writing
Read Mod Write began as a technical writing business but Matt founded that his prospective clients weren’t willing to pay him to write technical documentation.
“It’s easier to sell to people you know than send pitches to companies,” says Matt. Eventually, he found that his prospective clients kept asking him for content marketing – a type of inbound marketing that attracts interest in a company though producing useful content for a target audience.
In the case of software companies, it can be challenging to find writers that have the necessary technical skill to write substantial articles in their niche. Matt enjoys blending marketing copy with a technical slant and he found demand for these skills inside his business network. “Sell to people who already want your product rather than trying to educate people about why they need it,” says Matt. “Our pivots have come from directly talking to our clients about they want.”
Technical marketing
Matt became very good at content marketing and managed to get 10,000 visits in one day for some of his clients – which was a huge improvement on the traffic they had been getting.
“Most writers cannot combine tech-savviness with storytelling,” Matt says. And tech companies just do not trust marketing companies to write this kind of content, because they know there will be errors in the writing that they need to correct. It’s just not worth it.
Even though Matt has found great success with his business, it was an unsuccessful interview that led him to pursue more formal marketing training. When pitching for work, one prospective client asked him what qualifications he had – and Matt’s lack of formal training meant he failed to get the gig.
Getting a foundational understanding of marketing helps you to write better content and you can get paid more. “Some companies just need the reassurance that you have qualifications before they can take the risk working with you,” says Matt.
Final remarks
It was great having Matt to speak and we also had some very fruitful discussions about marketing in general and starting your own business. Marketing is not as easy as you might first think, and the types of techniques you might to need to use depend on your unique circumstances.
There is one piece of advice Matt did share, however.
“Steal everything if you want to be successful,” says Matt – apart from content, of course! Our next talk is Writing Documentation? You Need a Programmer’s Editor by Richard Smedley. Sign up now!
View Matt’s presentation online. Contact me at catherine@awaywithwords.co if you want to get involved in Write the Docs 
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