Jason Lengstorf hosts Learn With Jason, a pair-programming YouTube show with over 30,000 subscribers, was previously VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, and now helps startups build better developer content.
We get into why he thinks of content creation as a process, not a project, the 'buffalo stick' technique for turning one tutorial into ten pieces of content, why changing your company's message every few weeks quietly destroys it, and why he thinks most successful dev tool marketing is boring, not clever.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at [email protected].
Why do you think of building content as a process rather than a project?
The instinct is to treat each piece of content as a standalone unit — come up with an idea, build it, launch it, archive it, and start completely over next time. But if you look at the content that's had the most impact on any of us personally, it's almost always a series, not a one-off. As a creator, that means your goal should be familiarity — the value isn't in a novel presentation or layout, it's in what you actually say. If you iteratively improve how you deliver content and build on what you've done before, you spend far less energy reinventing the format each time and far more energy on the substance.
Doesn't waiting to get the format right matter for quality?
People worry endlessly about having the perfect approach, format, or gear, and wait to publish anything until it feels just right — which leads to far less content overall, with each piece feeling stressful and the cumulative impact much lower. A single, highly produced piece released once a year just doesn't land the way weekly, less polished content does — consistency compounds. Learn With Jason's very first episode in 2018 was literally me and Nader Dabit on a raw Zoom screen-share, barely an overlay graphic in the corner. Every few months after that I added one small thing — Twitch chat, an episode-title overlay, a proper guest name card — always building on what already worked rather than waiting for a complete redesign. Four years and 300-plus episodes later, the show is dramatically more polished, and if I'd waited until I had it all figured out, I'd still be four years into planning with zero episodes published.
Startups face constant uncertainty and new information daily. How do you get them to commit to a consistent message anyway?
This is a bit of tough love, but the most damaging thing a company can do to its own brand is change its message every few weeks. It takes a genuinely long time for a message to reach saturation in a community. Companies that do this well pick one message and repeat it for months — Progressive and Geico have run the same core ad concept for the better part of a decade; even Apple, which changes more often, typically holds one message, like privacy and device security, for six to nine months, repeating it until people start saying it back to you unprompted in casual conversation. Apple has a hundred other things it could talk about — camera quality, chip performance — but if they tried to say all of it at once, none of it would stick.
Have you seen this go wrong firsthand?
At Netlify, we'd regularly launch a feature we thought was genuinely great, go hard on it for a bit, then move on to the next thing — and months later someone would say they wished any company would build exactly the feature we'd already shipped, because it had never actually landed in anyone's memory. We'd then watch a competitor launch the same feature to real fanfare and think, we did that months ago, but never kept talking about it. It's far better to get one message to genuinely land than to have a dozen great messages that all fall flat and get forgotten.
Once a startup has a content process going, how do they get more mileage out of what they're already producing?
I jokingly call this the 'buffalo stick' — a nonsense mashup of 'use every part of the buffalo' and 'kill two birds with one stone,' credited to Sarah Drasner's gift for inventing silly names for genuinely useful ideas. Say you set out to write one tutorial about using a tool. Along the way, you'll talk to an expert about it — that conversation alone is a separate, valuable piece of content. You'll experiment live with different approaches — stream that on Twitch as a co-working session. You'll hit obscure error messages while building the demo — a short, focused post answering exactly that error is genuine SEO gold. The finished demo can become a one-click deploy template. And the whole build process can be recorded and edited into a video. One tutorial you planned to write can become ten distinct pieces of content, each suited to a different way people prefer to learn — by watching, by reading, by listening to a discussion, or by co-working alongside someone.
Does that content reuse actually save meaningful time, or does it just add more work?
It's a real time multiplier. If a tutorial build normally takes 8-16 hours and produces one piece of content, spending maybe 24 hours total to walk away with ten distinct pieces is an excellent return. Written and video tutorials, in particular, overlap so heavily in what you're already doing that skipping one format because you didn't think to capture it is leaving real value on the table — you don't have to do every format, but recognizing that almost everything in your preparation process is already valuable content in its own right changes how much you get out of the same effort.
Can this kind of content multiplication be spread across a whole team rather than falling on one person?
Yes, though it gets tricky fast in practice. On the DX team at Netlify, we once did a coordinated push teaching people to use Contentful across different frameworks — everyone picked a framework, split up the shared pieces like common serverless glue code, and then reused each other's underlying work. We've also had a content person turn an interview into a written article while someone on the press team turned the same demo into a PR angle pitched to podcasts and publications. This only works cleanly if the whole team is aligned on one consistent message — if every team is chasing a different angle because the message keeps shifting, none of these pieces overlap cleanly and everyone ends up working in silos on bespoke projects instead.
Where does that discipline around a single, consistent message actually need to come from?
It has to come from leadership — founders and C-level execs specifically. Even if the CEO has zero involvement in marketing execution, if they keep telling the org 'now our focus is this' every few weeks, they're pulling the strategic rug out from under everyone trying to build something more elaborate than what fits in a three-week sprint. Founders are drinking from a firehose of new metrics, competitor moves, and investor chatter daily, and the urge to adjust constantly feels productive — but tearing up the roadmap every two weeks in response to new information is a great way to guarantee everyone spins their wheels without building any real momentum.
What do you actually tell founders to help them stay on message?
Mostly, that you have to genuinely believe what you're building is good and worth talking about, and take the time early to get clear on who buys your product, why, and what specific problem leads them to choose your tool over alternatives. Once that's genuinely clear, the harder part is just self-control — resisting the urge to constantly adjust based on the latest scrap of industry gossip or competitor news. I love Danny Meyer's restaurant management philosophy of 'constant, gentle pressure' — small, continuous corrections toward the right thing, never a dramatic overhaul, but never letting up either. Supabase is a great real example: one consistent message, one repeatable playbook of memes and launch weeks, pushed on relentlessly — which is exactly why they come to mind immediately in any conversation about databases in the frontend space, regardless of how their product stacks up feature-by-feature against competitors.
Beyond message consistency, what else do you see founders getting wrong?
Over-focusing on one single lever in isolation. Some companies go all-in on raw adoption numbers regardless of fit, sometimes even gamifying signups to drive virality, and end up with a huge top of funnel and a completely broken conversion rate because none of those users actually wanted the product. Others over-invest in brand awareness without having any clarity on who their actual customer is or what problem they're solving, which means they build a brand with no real idea what people should even believe about it. Every step of the funnel, from someone seeing your logo for the first time to signing a six-figure enterprise contract, has to feel like the same consistent story — if it feels great as a solo developer and jarringly different once you hit the sales conversation, that inconsistency is actively costing you conversions.
How does staying on message affect the product roadmap itself, not just marketing?
Enormously — if you know exactly which problem and which customer you're solving for, your roadmap gets much simpler. Without a clear ideal customer profile, every feature request from the community turns into a 'someone asked for this, let's build it' decision, and suddenly you have 20-30 items on the roadmap validated only by the fact that people are talking about them — not by whether those specific people would ever actually pay. Once your messaging is genuinely focused, a new feature request gets tested against a simple question: does this help our stated ideal customer solve the problem we say we solve? If not, it goes on the 'good ideas we're not doing' list. The hard mental shift is moving from a build-everything, see-what-sticks mode to saying no to the vast majority of genuinely good ideas, because focus is what actually moves the needle.
What happens to companies that don't do this early enough?
They often hit a plateau after initial success and realize they never actually understood why they were growing in the first place — they don't know their audience, their market, or why that specific group of people loved the product, so they have no idea how to reach more of them. At that point, you're forced to go back and do all the customer-profile research you skipped, except now there's pressure from investors asking why the numbers have stalled. It's far better to do that research early, before you're forced into it under pressure.
How do you actually figure out who your real market is, concretely?
Hire genuinely good UX researchers, and then actually listen when they tell you something you don't want to hear. Most companies skip this and rely purely on founder gut instinct, which works fine early on but breaks down the moment the company grows past founders who are themselves representative of the target customer. The hard part isn't finding out who your paying customers actually are — a good researcher will tell you clearly — it's accepting it when the answer isn't the exciting, 'cool' business you originally imagined yourself building. So many companies started out thinking they were one kind of business and discovered, through actually listening to that research, that the market wanted something else entirely — the success stories are the ones that listened.
Why do you think so many founders struggle to actually act on that kind of research?
Not because it's hard, but because it's boring. Founders tend to be novelty-seeking people who want to invent things and solve exciting new problems, and building a genuinely strong business is fundamentally about nailing unglamorous fundamentals and following what the research says, which doesn't feel exciting at all. Once you actually have product-market fit, it starts to feel almost too easy — a good researcher tells you exactly what customers already told you they'd pay for, you build precisely that and nothing else, and it works. But founders instinctively want to keep innovating and pushing the envelope, putting maybe 20% or less of their energy into the boring fundamentals — and your own gut as a founder gets progressively less reliable the more successful and specialized you become, since you increasingly understand the problem of building the tool, not the problem of the person who needs to buy it.
What's the one thing you'd want a startup founder to take away from all this?
Trust the process — every piece of content you build is part of an ongoing process, not a standalone project, building on past work toward something better. Reuse everything you create as broadly as you reasonably can. All of that depends on staying on one message and repeating it consistently for at least a quarter, ideally longer. And as you find success, remember your own gut instinct gets less reliable over time — hire people who talk directly to your customers, listen to what they tell you, and have the discipline to do the boring fundamentals instead of chasing the next exciting new idea.