Why we wrote the strategy before we wrote a single post

A look inside how we built the Build in Public campaign for Instant Crush — and why we'd never skip this step again.

We could have just started posting

We had every excuse to skip this step.

Instant Crush is small. Our team is small. Our audience is small. We had a working product, a clear sense of what we wanted to say, and an itch to start showing up on LinkedIn. The fastest thing would have been to open a fresh doc, write five posts, and hit publish.

We didn't. Instead we spent real time writing a strategy and brief for a campaign we hadn't run yet. Ten sections. Positioning. Audience. Objectives. Pillars. Cadence. The lot. If you're in the same spot — small team, limited time, a product to sell — that probably sounds like overkill. It isn't. And the point of this post is to explain why.

What a strategy actually does

A strategy isn't a plan. A plan is a list of things you're going to do. A strategy is the answer to a different question: why these things and not other things?

When you don't have a strategy, every content decision is a fresh argument. Should this post be about us or about them? Should we lead with the product or with the problem? Should we write something useful or something provocative? Without a strategic foundation, you answer those questions with gut feel, and gut feel changes every Tuesday.

When you do have a strategy, those arguments are already settled. You don't decide each post from scratch. You check it against the foundation and either ship it or kill it.

That's the whole job of a strategy: make future decisions cheaper.

How the Instant Crush campaign strategy came together

The campaign brief we ended up with is called Build in Public. The premise is simple: we use Instant Crush's own marketing thinking to build Instant Crush, and we share everything as we go. That sounds like a creative concept. It isn't — not yet. It's the visible top of a much bigger iceberg, and writing the strategy was the work of building the iceberg underneath.

First, the why. Before we wrote anything tactical, we had to be honest about where we are. Small audience. Small customer base. A target audience — SME founders running marketing themselves — who can't yet tell the difference between good marketing advice and bad. That diagnosis matters because it rules out a lot of options. You can't run a product-led campaign when nobody trusts you yet. You can't lean on case studies when you don't have many. The strategy had to be about earning trust before asking for anything.

Then, positioning. This was the hardest part and the part we kept circling back to. Instant Crush gives marketing direction — it's not a tool that replaces a marketer's decisions, it's a platform that gives founders the direction to decide well. Getting that one word right ("direction," not "decision") changes how every future post reads. We caught it because we were forced to write the positioning down and then read it back as someone seeing the brand for the first time.

Then, objectives. Three of them, linked. Attitudinal (how we want people to think), behavioural (what we want them to do), commercial (what we want it to mean for the business). The order matters. You can't shortcut from "we want customers" to "post on LinkedIn" — there are two steps in between, and skipping them is how most campaigns die.

Then, the concept. Build in Public came out of the strategy, not the other way around. Once we'd written down that we needed to earn trust, that our audience faces the same constraints we do, and that the product itself is the proof point — the campaign concept basically wrote itself. "Use Instant Crush to build Instant Crush." It works because everything underneath it works.

Then, the pillars. Four content streams, designed so that any post from any pillar makes sense to a first-time viewer. Authority (how we think), transparency (what we're building), proof (what we're learning), generosity (what you should know). Without these, every post would either repeat itself or wander.

Why you always need a strategy — even (especially) when you're small

There's a popular idea that strategy is for big companies with big budgets, and small businesses should just "test and learn." That idea has hurt a lot of small businesses.

The smaller you are, the more a strategy matters. Not less.

Big companies can absorb waste. They have enough volume, enough budget, and enough surface area that a few off-brand posts or a confused campaign won't sink them. You don't. Every post you publish either compounds your positioning or dilutes it. Every euro you spend either reinforces the brand or muddies it. You can't afford to be ambiguous about who you are, because you don't have the air cover to recover from it.

A strategy gives a small business three things it can't get any other way:
Focus. When you know what you stand for, you also know what you don't. That makes saying no easier — to bad opportunities, to off-brief content, to platforms that don't fit, to advice from people who don't know your business.

Consistency. People don't remember a brand because they saw it once. They remember it because they saw the same idea, framed the same way, over and over. A strategy is what makes that possible across months of content created by different people on different days.

A test for everything else. Once the strategy exists, every piece of content, every asset, every decision can be checked against it. Does this serve the positioning? Does it fit a pillar? Would a first-time viewer understand what we are? If the answer is no, the work goes back. If the answer is yes, the work ships.

Strategy as context, not constraint

The misunderstanding people have about strategy is that they think it's a cage. Write the brief, then you're locked in.
The opposite is true. Strategy is context. It's the shared understanding that lets everyone — founders, freelancers, agencies, future hires — produce work that fits together without having to re-litigate the basics every time.

When we sit down to write a LinkedIn post for Instant Crush now, we don't start from a blank page. We start from a brief that tells us who we're talking to, what they need to believe, what we sound like, which pillar this post serves, and what a first-time viewer should walk away thinking. The post itself is faster to write, sharper when it's done, and more likely to land than anything we'd have produced without that context.

The same goes for everything else. The newsletter draws from the same pillars. The website copy reinforces the same positioning. The sales conversations use the same language. When a freelancer or agency joins, they get the brief on day one and they can produce work that sounds like us, instead of work that sounds like them guessing what we sound like.

That's what a strategy buys you. Not a cage. A shared brain.

The test we apply to every piece of content

We built a checklist into the brief itself. Before anything gets published, we ask five questions:

• - Does this serve one of the four pillars?
• - Does it reinforce the positioning?

- Would a first-time viewer understand what Instant Crush is and why it matters?
- Is it specific, not generic?

- Does it show the agentic platform thinking, not just tell?

If a post fails any of these, it doesn't get published — or it gets rewritten until it doesn't fail them.
That checklist isn't a creative brake. It's a quality filter. And the only reason it exists is because the strategy exists. Without the strategy, those questions have no answers.

The bigger point

Most marketing fails not because of bad execution but because of missing strategy. The posts look fine. The ads look fine. The website looks fine. But nothing holds together, because there was no foundation telling everything how to fit.

If you're a founder running your own marketing, the single best thing you can do is not write more posts. It's to sit down — once — and write the strategy underneath them. A few pages. Honest about who you are, who you're for, what you want them to believe, and what you want them to do.

It will feel like you're not making progress. You are. You're making every future decision faster, sharper, and more likely to work.
We wrote ours before we posted anything. We'd do it the same way again.

Download the "Building Instant Crush with Instant Crush" strategy here.