How GrowthMentor Used Growth Journalism to Publish 270 Blog Posts in 4 Months
Ever wondered how a lean team can produce 270 blog posts in just four months?
GrowthMentor did it with a strategy called Growth Journalism.
For our first ever episode, I was joined by Elisavet Maniou from GrowthMentor, and we dived into how her team pulled this off.
If you’re a marketer trying to scale content production, or a founder looking for better ways to reach your audience, this conversation is full of learnings on scaling content creation, optimizing processes, and staying focused.
What is Growth Journalism?
Growth Journalism is a strategy that involves creating high-value content by capturing authentic stories from industry experts. You can conduct meaningful interviews, share real experiences, and connect directly with the audience to provide unique and actionable insights.
This approach emphasizes genuine community-building and helps establish trust, relationships, and brand authority while scaling content production effectively.
"Growth Journalism is one of my favourite projects at GrowthMentor. We wanted to provide our audience with something truly valuable — real experiences and stories from others that they could learn from." – says Elisavet.
The idea of Growth Journalism came up because Elisavet's team saw many founders and marketers sharing personal insights on LinkedIn, and they wanted to contribute something unique — content that combined real stories from founders with actionable insights.
The goal was twofold: give founders a platform to share their experiences while driving traffic to GrowthMentor's site and converting potential customers through authentic, useful content.
If you haven't heard about GrowthMentor, they are an online mentoring platform that connects vetted mentors with mentees in the areas of marketing, product, and startup development. The platform focuses on building one-on-one relationships that help marketers and founders solve their challenges and grow through personalized guidance from experienced mentors.
You can read how GrowthMentor has helped me and our team at Magic Design in this feature story.
How They Pulled It Off
270 blog posts in four months sounds overwhelming, especially for a lean team. But Elisavet and her team found smart ways to make it work:
- Interviews with Founders: GrowthMentor focused on founders who had gone through well-known accelerators. They conducted interviews, transcribed them, and turned these into blog posts. This approach ensured the content was genuine and relevant, and it also amplified their reach —founders naturally shared the posts within their networks.
- Virtual Assistants + Automation: The team used virtual assistants to handle repetitive tasks like gathering contact information and creating blog drafts from transcriptions. Automation tools (for example Coda, a project management tool) helped streamline project management, keeping everyone on track.
- Use of ChatGPT: They used AI to save time and stay consistent. By developing their own prompts over time, they guided virtual assistants to create quality drafts from the interview transcriptions, speeding up the whole content creation process.
Challenges Along the Way
The project wasn’t without challenges.
Elisavet says: "Some founders were initially skeptical about participating. They were kind of suspicious, asking if we were affiliated with an accelerator that might be a competitor."
But by being transparent and upfront about their goals, they were able to reassure most of these potential contributors.
Another hurdle was maintaining focus.
The core team had to be laser-focused on the project for 4 months, resisting the urge to jump on other shiny opportunities. Which - anyone at a startup knows - is very hard to do!
They relied on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and clear ownership to ensure they're making progress.
Foti, the founder of GrowthMentor also wrote an in-depth playbook about this project that you can find here.
Staying on Track and Optimizing
One key takeaway from Elisavet was the importance of flexibility. The team didn’t just plan the project once and stick to it rigidly— they continuously adjusted the process based on what was working. This adaptive approach allowed them to onboard virtual assistants at the right time, once they were confident in the workflow.
Despite their incredible output, what would Elisavet have done differently if she could tackle this project again? And how can these reflections help you improve your own content strategy?
"I would like to improve the conversion rate. Even though it was great for SEO and awareness, not as founders as we would have liked to turned into paid customers."
The biggest challenge was converting all the traffic into actual paid users in a timely manner. They experienced some founders though converted months or a year after they featured them, when the right time came - and as they remembered GrowthMentor.
One potential solution to increasing the likelihood of conversion would potentially be to create more follow-up sequences and explore partnerships with accelerators to integrate GrowthMentor more deeply into their programs, says Elisavet.
Lessons for Lean Teams
For lean teams trying to replicate something similar, here are the top tips from Elisavet:
- Prepare for Scale: Document your process before you bring in external help. The more clarity you have, the smoother it’ll be when others join in.
- Stay Adaptable: Be ready to adjust your workflow if things aren’t efficient. In their case, making adjustments early led to significant time savings down the road.
- Leverage Automation: Don’t be afraid to use AI and automation tools to handle repetitive tasks — it’ll keep your team focused on what really matters.
- Build Relationships: GrowthMentor gave participating founders visibility by featuring them in SEO optimized content that ranks well, which was a win-win. GrowthMentor also has a high domain authority website, so a backlink from them is very valuable too. The team also shared a free GrowthMentor session as a thank you gift. The relationship-building aspect was key to their success.
Reflecting on the Results
Although not all founders converted into paid GrowthMentor users, the SEO impact was huge.
GrowthMentor started ranking for relevant keywords, building brand awareness, and creating a pipeline for future conversions—something both Elisavet and I agree is often undervalued in B2B marketing. Sometimes, awareness is about planting seeds that grow months or even years later.
Looking Ahead
The concept of Growth Journalism is a powerful tool if your startup is looking to scale content production while fostering genuine community connections. It’s an approach that doesn’t just churn out content — it builds trust, relationships, and authority.
If you want to catch the full episode with Elisavet and stay updated, follow Magic Design & Maria on LinkedIn for more Marketing Mondays with Maria.
