1. Choosing the moat
In regulated markets you can’t out-discount or out-feature incumbents overnight. What you can do is out-explain them. We decided early that our moat would be clarity: better breakdowns of rules, workflows and edge cases than anyone else.
2. Designing the architecture
Instead of random blogs, we built a tree:
- Top-level guides for each regulation and geography.
- Deep dives for every process step merchants cared about.
- Playbooks that linked the regulation to our product features.
Every article linked up, down and sideways. That linking, plus consistent schema, is a big part of why we captured so many long-tail searches.
3. Editorial cadence & quality bar
We shipped weekly at first, then moved to a steady but slower cadence once the backbone was built. The rule was simple: if an article didn’t genuinely help a practitioner do their job, we didn’t publish it.
4. Measuring compounding value
Within a year, organic became the largest contributor of opportunities and helped reduce paid CAC by double digits. But the most interesting signal was sales behaviour – reps started using articles as part of their follow-ups and demos.
That’s the real sign of a moat: when content stops being “marketing collateral” and becomes part of how the product is sold and understood.