10. TWT’s Approach to Content Team Structure & Goals
- Shashank Mehta Founder and CEO, The Whole Truth Foods
In this snippet, Shashank shares how Truth Be Told built a community-driven writing team, emphasizing the power of mission-driven contributors over in-house writers.
The team for our newsletter, Truth Be Told, is not a large team. We have one editor and one full-time dedicated resource within the company and two part-time resources who run all of this.
We don’t have writers on payroll because our writers come from our community.
These writers include Mukesh Bansal, who founded Myntra and Cure Fit, and Sweta Shivakumar, a renowned food researcher and columnist at the Hindustan Times. They contribute to TBT every once in a while, as they deeply relate to the cause of the publication.
All of these writers are readers of Truth Be Told and want to contribute to the publication. This is the best hack to find great writers. Create great content, and those who read it will want to write for you!
These are highly successful people, and they’ve learned about food and fitness. They have experience and expertise.
We pay them a nominal fee of Rs 10,000 per piece. So they’re not doing this for money. They’re doing it because they believe in the mission. They will not write anything that they don’t believe in.
This is why I make it a point to stay away from the writing process. I don’t want to influence the editorial decision making. If I ever try to go and influence them, they will leave.
Over time, we’ve learned who are the right kind of people to work with, how to engage them and what to make clear upfront. We now have 18 – 20 folks who are like our author panel who write for us every two months.”
Shashank explains how Truth Be Told and Media Labs measure success based on journalistic standards and engagement metrics, avoiding sales targets and focusing on community trust.
It’s important to note that while Truth Be Told was doing long-form health journalism, Media Labs is the internal team producing content for the The Whole Truth brand.
Neither of the two have any business numbers to attain. Instead we did something unique to get feedback and track performance - a qualitative survey.
We’ve done two surveys where Samarth, the editor of the newsletter, wrote to all readers asking for feedback. And it was just an open ended feedback on if they are getting useful stories, do they like the kind of narratives they are getting, and more broadly, if any stories made a difference.
The response was unbelievable. We got 190 long and deeply detailed email responses. In fact, the response on the survey spawned an article of its own on our platform.
We’re actually building two companies: A product company and a content company. On the content side, there are no business goals, but we hold ourselves to high journalistic standards. One of the ways in which a good journalistic outlet would gauge engagement is if their content is leading to the mind shift they wanted.
In long-form writing, engagement metrics are very clear — time spent on the page, the depth to which you scrolled, average read time, and the average number of words read.
There is zero sales target for Media Labs or anyone running Truth Be Told. We don't even talk to them about sales. Their target is having high journalistic and editorial standards, and the driving engagement. They are only measured by the open rate of our newsletter, the time spent on it, and it's NPS.
We measure success like any other great journalistic outlet. Hopefully over time if we do this well, it’ll lead to brand equity where people will trust our brand more because we are investing in educating them rather than trying to sell them things.
They’ll see that we’ve been doing this as a service to the community for a long time and thus they can trust them. It’s our way of earning people’s trust.