the accordion model: expansion and contraction of content

Last Friday, I led a session on content marketing for another VC firm. One of the concepts I talked about was the accordion model. A couple years ago, I wrote a bit about how I use a sketch model to ideate on my personal content. The accordion model is basically the sketch model through a business lens. 

Differentiating between company and personal content 

My personal content is for the vibes, to find resonance with other people, to think more clearly, to express myself. I publish personal content on this blog and twitter. My business content is to build awareness on our portfolio, investing principles, frameworks, and to learn. I publish business content on the Behind Genius Ventures blog and the Seed to Harvest youtube. 

Over the past three years, I’ve generated millions of impressions and been featured in the Washington Post, Forbes, San Diego’s Union Tribune, Jason Calacanis’s This Week in Startups and Business Insider – and have used this framework to expand our content to increase deal flow, write a book and raise our first fund, all while running a venture firm. 

Today, I’ll use our piece on investing in early stage AI companies as an example of how to leverage the accordion model. Out of 341 million results, it ranks on the first page of Google for the search “investing in early stage AI.”

Step 1: The Keyboard: Build a great community-driven written piece. 

1. Use conversations online and offline to ideate on the question – how do we think about investing in AI? What is the same? What has changed? 
2. Brainstorm on an outline with Andy, our investment analyst. What questions do we want to answer? How much context / intro should we give? 
3. Expand concrete details through Andy’s deep quantitative research and market mapping. What AI companies have exited? Raised money? What does the competitive landscape look like? 
4. Edit down for clarity and conciseness. We’ll often edit a piece from 5 pages to around 3 pages. 

Step 2: The Bellows: Expanding and contracting great content. 

Alright, now we have a great written piece. In the accordion model – this is the keyboard. The keyboard piece works great by itself and guides the rest of the process. 

The next step is the bellows: expansion & contraction. I put together this Bellows Chart below to illustrate how you can expand and contract your content. Keep in mind – this is just the content, not the distribution. 

The keyboard piece you’ve completed sits roughly here on the chart:

Shifting Key: 

I find it’s easiest to shift key in the same format / size and move to a different medium first. By evaluating the content in what works best for a different medium, you’ll often find good jumping off points for expansion and contraction. For example:

I recorded the AI blog piece and published it as a podcast episode and YouTube video – now we have a 20 minute YouTube video on AI (medium format video and podcast). 

Expansion:

If you use the bellows chart, expansion of the content is any shift to the right, to medium or large format in different mediums. 

• Medium Format written: A long industry white paper 
• Large Format written: A book  
• Medium Format speaking: presenting to 100 people

As a result of the video, I got invited to join an AI Shark Tank panel and speak to a USD MBA class. 

Contraction :

Using the bellows chart, contraction of content is any shift to the left, to extra small content. Contracted short content provides more impressions & serves as a top of funnel for your keyboard piece. This step is also when we start to think a lot about distribution. 

Extra small content is usually formatted natively for social media and includes: 

• Tiktok 
• Youtube shorts 
• Instagram reels 
• Copywriting bits for X / Linkedin 

For example – for every main podcast I publish, our podcast editor Tate (my brother!) clips 6 YouTube short videos. They drive the majority of our impressions on YouTube. A note about YouTube – our goal is not to get the most views, but rather to have a highly engaged audience of folks interested in our investing principles. Many previous podcast guests ended up investing in our fund as well. So don’t get discouraged by dips and swings in viewership!

 

In conclusion, you can you use the accordion model to: 

1. Build a great keyboard piece 
2. Shift key through different mediums 
3. Expand to explore deeper concepts 
4. Contract to build top of funnel

Far too often, I see people write great pieces and stop there. If you’ve already invested the time, why not use the accordion model to scale your content? 

Some additional notes –

There’s a great cohort based course called Ship 30 for 30 that explains similar principles if you’re a creator or business writer looking to practice and improve your skills. I completed it in Aug 2022 and it was super helpful (this is not an affiliate link or anything – just a great course!)

Another creator in VC who I think has leveraged this accordion model really well is Meagan Loyst of GenZ VCs. A 2020 Medium article here (I was the first person she interviewed!) turned press articles turned Slack into a global community with 25,000+ members, international speaking opportunities, and more. The seed was her original question of “Who are GenZ VCs, and what are they investing in?” and has been expanded and contracted into many different pieces.  

A bonus piece of this is collaborating with other creators to expand distribution, lemme know if you want to hear more about that!