How Matthew Holman Learned the Real Role Content Plays in Building a Company

When Matthew Holman first started Subscription Prescription, content was not an afterthought. It was the business’s entry point. The company, which helps ecommerce brands grow subscription revenue through consulting and strategy, originally began as a newsletter built for people in the Shopify subscription ecosystem.

At the time, Holman saw content as a way to build visibility and credibility around subscription commerce. But over time, his founder content journey became less about publishing consistently and more about understanding how content shapes trust, positioning, and business growth.

What began as helpful content slowly evolved into something more strategic. Along the way, he learned that content and company brand are deeply connected, especially when founders themselves become closely linked to how audiences interpret expertise.

The Early View on Content

For Holman, content was there from the beginning. But it was not originally designed to promote consulting services directly.

“When we first started Subscription Prescription, content was actually the starting point. It originally began as a newsletter,” he explains. The aim initially was to access people in the Shopify and ecommerce subscription space through a content marketing section.

At the time, most subscription content came from software companies promoting their own tools. Holman noticed that much of it felt self-serving. “There was no real independent thinking around this space,” he says critically.

He believed there was room for something better.

“I wanted the newsletter to feel independent, not like a hard software pitch. I saw an opportunity to create content that was more useful, more independent, and more focused on how brands could actually grow subscription revenue.”

The theory was to first get people to think of them as experts who can help with their business, and that this expertise would help them to sell their software.

When Content Started to Matter

Content really started to matter when the market started responding favorably to the expertise they were trying to project.

“People were engaging with the newsletter and telling us the content was valuable. They saw us as people who genuinely understood subscription businesses.”

What surprised him most was that people were not just asking about software. They also wanted strategic guidance for their businesses.

“That showed me content was doing more than creating awareness,” he opines. “It was building trust and revealing demand for consulting. People trusted our thinking enough to ask for deeper help.”

That realization changed how he viewed founder brand content.

The Friction Founders Face with Content

The original content worked in one sense: people genuinely found it helpful. But Holman eventually discovered that it was not clearly connected enough to the actual business behind it.

The content built trust, but it did not clearly explain that there was a consulting service behind it. Some early calls felt confusing because prospects thought they were simply “hopping on to talk shop, rather than a practicing consultancy.”

At the same time, content became harder to manage as the company grew. Holman was trying to create useful content, choose the right platforms, stay visible, and understand what actually drove revenue without feeling pressure to be everywhere, among others.

There was also the question every founder eventually faces: Is this actually working?

When Holman’s business partner asked whether their spending on content was producing results, he says his first reaction was defensive. But after reviewing where clients had come from, he observed that content had quietly become one of the company’s biggest sources of leads and referrals.

The Turning Point

The biggest shift happened when Holman stopped trying to make content universally agreeable.

“The major shift happened when I realized content needed to be more opinionated and more clearly tied to the business,” he explains.

Instead of only publishing educational advice, such as tips, he began taking stronger positions on subscription growth strategy. One of his central ideas became that acquisition mattered more than retention in solving subscription problems. “That thesis gave the content more structure and a stronger point of view,” notes Holman.

Consulting work also started feeding the content itself. Customer questions, sales calls, and repeated operational problems became material for newsletters, podcast discussions, and social posts.

Rather than treating content as separate from the business, it became integrated into the business’s daily conversations.

How Content Changed the Business

Once the messaging became clearer and more intentional, the impact was easier to see.

For example, about half of Holman’s clients began coming through social media DMs from people who had followed his content over time. Another 25% came through partner referrals, many of which were reinforced by consistent visibility online.

The content also improved sales conversations. Prospects arrived already familiar with his thinking, his positioning, and the kinds of problems Subscription Prescription solved.

Holman also discovered that reach was not always the most important metric. In some cases, smaller audiences performed better.

“Twitter drove more calls than LinkedIn, even though my Twitter audience was much smaller,” he says. “The audience was simply more focused and more intent-driven.”

That changed his perception of founder thought leadership and visibility. Bigger audiences are not automatically better audiences.

The Lesson for Other Founders

Looking back, Holman believes many founders misunderstand content because they assume publishing itself is the work.

“To me, content only works if it connects to the right audience, the right platform, and the right business outcome.”

He believes many founders should not wait too long to start showing up.

According to him, “you cannot get discovered for being talented if you are not showing up anywhere. Waiting usually just means staying invisible longer.” But his biggest takeaway is about the importance of strategic visibility.

“I learned that showing up consistently in the right spaces matters far more than trying to be everywhere at once,” says Holman.

Closing

For Holman, the biggest shift was realizing that content had to be more opinionated and establish a clearer connection with the business.

Over time, it became part of how Subscription Prescription communicated expertise, built trust, and stayed visible in a crowded market. The newsletter that started as a way to enter conversations eventually became one of the company’s strongest growth channels.

He now sees content less as a publishing exercise and more as long-term reputation building. His founder content journey has also modified how he thought about visibility: smaller audiences can create bigger opportunities.

Hence, the goal shouldn’t be to reach everyone. It should rather be to consistently show up in the right places with something meaningful to say.