Abby Riggleman

Every week I give you one story-driven content idea you can save and try yourself.

Week 9. Grateful to ______ who ______.

I’m away this week, which is honestly what made me think of it. There’s nothing like being somewhere else to make you realize how much your team is actually carrying, and how rarely you say so out loud.

But here’s what I think everyone gets wrong with these…

Most team appreciation posts don’t really say anything. Grateful for this crew. Couldn’t do it without you. It’s kind, and nobody reading it learns a single thing about your business.

The fix is to aim it at what they actually did. A client did this recently and it pulled 28,000 views and 40 comments, well above their average.

The caption said she’s the first face you see when you walk in, that she knows most customers by name, and that she’s the one who coordinates their donations. She even has a nickname for it, the bun fairy. All specific things she actually does.

And the top comment was a customer saying her attitude lifts them up every time they come in. That’s the whole mechanism.

You name something real, and someone recognizes it from their own life.

The generic post gives them nothing to respond to. The specific one hands them a memory, and people comment on memories.

Do it as a list if you’ve got a few. One person, one thing they did, per card.

Tell me about someone on your team in the comments. What did they do that you’ve never posted about?

Save this one and follow for a new content idea every week!

The first post, I would consider a world-building desire post.

The second post would be a world-building tbelief post.

Both of them are important, but they both serve very different functions.

When you understand the functions and purposes behind the posts that you are making, your content strategy starts to become a lot easier.

If you are a founder-led brand that needs help with your content strategy, ask yourself honestly: Have you only been posting trends and just hoping you’re building your brand world? Let me know in the comments.

Starting a business for your community right now is a quietly radical thing to do.

Everything is getting bigger. Private equity is buying up the places we grew up with, and more of what we buy every year comes from fewer and fewer places, most of them owned by people who’ll never once set foot in the building.

So choosing to build something for the people who actually live near you is a real decision. Nobody talks about it that way though. It just looks like someone working very hard in an unfinished room.

And that’s the advantage, honestly. A big company can outspend you on anything they want, but they can’t be a person people feel like they know.

That’s the one thing that doesn’t scale.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of building it, I see you. And I help founder lean into the biggest asset they have, themselves.

Are you building something right now?

Tell me what it is and why in the comments.

Every week I give you one story-driven content idea you can save and try yourself.

Week 8. Nobody should have to ______, so I built ______.

This one is your mission, and I know that word makes people picture a paragraph on an About page that nobody reads. That’s not what I mean.

I mean the thing that genuinely bothers you about your industry, and what you decided to do about it.

Finish that sentence honestly and you’ve got it.

-Nobody should have to settle for whatever’s available.

-Nobody should have to feel out of place walking in.

-Nobody should have to choose between the two things they care about most.

And then the second half: so here’s what I made instead.

The reason this one matters more than most is that it’s the only story you can tell that isn’t finished yet. Your founder story already happened, so people can hear it but they can’t really join it. A mission is still going, which means someone can decide they’re part of it.

That’s the difference between people who like your business and people who feel like it’s partly theirs.

If nothing comes to mind, start here.

What makes you angry about the way things are usually done in your industry? Answer that and the rest of the sentence writes itself.

Save this one and go find yours.

Ever wondered what it looks like behind the scenes as a creative strategist for founder-led brands?

Here is what planning a week’s worth of content looks like. What industry do you want to see next?

There’s a shift I make with every client, and this is what both ends of it look like.

One has been with me since last October. A hundred and nineteen story posts this year; founder stories, team stories, recurring series, community moments.

About two a week, and just over forty percent of everything they publish. They went from selling around 200 of their signature product a day to over 1,500, out of the same building.

The other came to me this summer. Posting nearly every day, great product, great service, trending content doing fine.

But when I logged the month before we started, only fourteen percent of it was storytelling and there was no recurring series at all. She’d hit a wall and couldn’t tell whether any of it was moving the business.

That’s the difference. Not how often you post, but what’s actually in the posts. Most businesses are using a megaphone, telling people what’s available, over and over and your customers do need some of that.

They just can’t be devoted to a megaphone.

If you’re at the stage where the product works and you’ve got a small team and it’s starting to feel like a real company, that’s who I do this for.

Link in bio.

Every week I give you one story-driven content idea you can save and try yourself.

Week 7. We almost didn’t ______, and here’s what that would have cost us.

Think about a decision that nearly went the other way. The thing you almost cut, the space you almost passed on, the person you almost didn’t hire. Not a disaster you dodged, just a moment where you honestly weren’t sure, and it ended up mattering more than you expected it to.

Tell it in that order. What you almost did, why you hesitated, what changed your mind, and what it turned into.

The reason this one works is that your customers only ever see the version where it worked out. They have no idea how close it was, and I think a decision that nearly went differently is one of the most human things a business can admit to.

If nothing comes to mind right away, try it a few different ways.

-What you almost didn’t do, and it’s now your best seller.
-What you almost didn’t do, that everything else came from.
-What you almost didn’t do, and why you’re glad you did.
-Or just answer this one: what did someone talk you into?

Save this one and go find yours. And follow for a storytelling content idea every week.

This is what a content day looks like!

Most of the founders I work with don’t love social media, and honestly I get it.

But it’s still one of the only places a brand can grow without paying for every single person who sees it, and it’s where a devoted following actually gets built.

So the question was never really whether to be there. It’s what you’re putting up when you are.

And that’s what a day like this is for. You come out of it with hundreds of assets, and they all mean something because we shot them with your story instead of just making the product look nice. That’s the part I think people underestimate, six months later you’re still pulling from it, and something we shot in September ends up being exactly right for a post in February.

If you need someone to figure out what your brand is saying, shoot it properly, and then actually run it, that’s what the creative partnerships are.

Link in bio.

I’ve grown my equipment slowly over the years, and there’s always more equipment that I want, but I feel like I have a good combination of equipment for doing social media content as well as general brand content!

For this shoot, I actually ended up getting to the bakery a little bit before 7 am and then shot until around 12:30.

With this content that I got, it will last us for the month, and some of it can last the rest of the fall season. I’ll definitely have more founder-led content for this client to film, but this helps supplement and build the media library.