In this edition of One Thousand Paths, we get into conversation with Sadhana Balaji, a marketer with a decade of experience in building and scaling content and brand functions at hyper-growth B2B SaaS companies such as Freshworks and Chargebee.
She joins us in a fascinating conversation that touches on what it takes to succeed in content marketing, developing good taste deliberately, how she uses AI in her workflows, and letting go of the illusion of control.
Not a reader? Listen to the original conversation here.
ON EARLY CAREER CHOICES
Sadhana, why don’t you introduce yourself? But just for fun, describe yourself in the third person.
Let's see... Sadhana has been in the B2B tech SaaS content marketing space for quite some time and she is specifically known for her newsletters which started with the Chargebee SaaS/UnSaaS dispatch newsletter. For the longest time a lot of people thought that it was a made-up person behind that newsletter and that was mainly because she wasn't really active outside her job. Very camera shy, very shy in general. Not a people's person. A bit difficult to stay in touch with. Not the best person to reply to messages or calls. But she can be a decent friend, decent colleague, quite helpful at times, and clearly sucks at talking about herself!
Nobody grows up saying “I want to become a content marketer.”What are the decisions that have brought you to where you are currently in your career?
It completely happened by chance. When I got out of university (I studied marketing), I had absolutely no idea about SaaS. In fact, I had to Google when somebody mentioned SaaS for the first time. I had absolutely no clue that you can actually write for a living. One of my professors, who was also my thesis advisor, recognised the skills I had. She suggested that I must explore this as a career path and connected me with an alumnus who used to work at Chargebee then. That’s how this whole thing began.
Until that point, writing was something extremely personal for me. I didn't even have an online blog. It was just something that I do for myself, you know, just to make sense of my feelings or what I'm going through or some idea that I'm just trying to make sense of. So it was completely personal and intimate and just putting your writing out there, just the thought of that was a bit new to me. But when I came across this whole content marketing career path, it felt very organic. I instinctively knew it was right for me, sort of like my ikigai.
What is interesting is that I didn’t make any conscious decisions about my career path. I think that's exactly what landed me in the right place. I just listened to my professor and decided to give it a shot. I kept saying yes. I went to the interview, I said yes, and then I took the job and I just kept doing it. And I think somehow I did the right thing by doing that.
Tell me about two or three inflection points in your career since then. How did they come about?
My biggest inflection point right off the bat is November 2019. I still consider that as my, one of the most pivotal points in my life because it wasn't just about my career. It changed me as a person.
By early 2019, I was four or five years into content marketing and I felt it was time for a change. I started exploring other avenues and interaction design was something that caught my eye. It was essentially the visual side of content and I am a visual person. I love to sketch and all things arts and craft. I thought interaction design perfectly complemented my writing skills as well. I started exploring opportunities and found this university called Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. They're very well reputed in this field and they checked all the boxes in terms of culture, faculty, course structure, etc. I applied, was interviewed and got through. Classes were due to start in January 2020. By October, I quit my job, let go of my house and went back to my hometown to my parents’ house.
So I basically uprooted myself, from my career, from my social life, from my friends, everything that I had built for myself up until that point. I was going to start from zero. And I had all my eggs in that one basket, which was the interaction design course. One day in November 2019, I woke up to an email on my phone from the institute saying that they had some visa issues with the Danish government, because of which they had to permanently cancel the course. Permanently, forever.
Until then I was someone who always wanted to be in control. I had a Plan B for almost everything. But with that one email, everything came crashing down. It was something I could have never foreseen. It gave new meaning to rock bottom. I had no clue what to do next. Should I go back to content marketing? Should I look at other universities? The only thing I knew was that I wanted to get out of that particular phase in life as soon as I could.
How did you tackle that?
I tried thinking of another plan A, plan B, plan C and all that. And within a few weeks, I realized that I was making the same mistakes as before. I was trying to get things under control. But that wasn’t getting me anywhere.
When I said I changed as a person, I realized the importance of letting go and the importance of going with the flow. There’s a beautiful quote that says life is a balance between making things happen and letting things happen. We are all trained to do the first part, but not the second, which is a lot tougher. It’s like a muscle that you need to build—recognise when something is outside of your control, trust the process, let go and see where things lead you.
After November 2019, when I embraced this, life has been a lot smoother, more organic. I'm not saying that I'm perfect now. I still struggle with it. But once you learn to do that, I think it's extremely powerful.
So where did life take you when you let go?
I had been volunteering with SaaSBoomi as a content person. When the SaaSBoomi annual conference came up in January 2020, they asked if I wanted to help out. I went with it. At the conference, I met some amazing people, as always, and I met G (Girish Matrubhootam of Freshworks). He recognised me from my work at Chargebee and asked me what I am up to. I said I’m not doing anything, just exploring.
And he asked me to send him an email when I get back home. Later I reached out to him and we began talking about what I wanted to do next. Like I said, I was getting a bit restless with content marketing, so I felt that I wanted to focus on something bigger, like brand marketing. Content was an important part of it, but it also focused on the creative aspects and it was on a much larger scale. Incidentally, Freshworks were also just putting together their new brand marketing team, and they asked if I wanted to join. I said yes.
I was trusting the process, saying yes to things that were coming my way and going with the flow.
ON CONTENT, BRAND & DEVELOPING TASTE
What are the most valuable skills for a content/brand marketer?
One of the most important skills, if you can call it that, is good taste. It’s not something that can be developed overnight. You can’t take a course on it. It’s something you need to work towards, hone. And obviously, it will keep evolving.
But once you start having that good taste for content—all aspects of it: text, visuals, creativity—that's going to be your superpower. I think that's the one thing that sets good content marketers apart from the others, especially with AI in the mix.
How does one develop good taste? What has influenced yours?
Having a lot of good conversations with people you look up to. That's been extremely influential in my life, in the way I look at content. Akash Sharma, my first manager at Chargebee and now a good friend, has been a big influence on the way I think about content marketing.
If you want to create good content, you also have to consume a lot of good content in whatever format that helps you. I follow specific people that I look up to, not necessarily content-people but rather, people who make good content.
Alan Watts, for example, is one of my favorite content creators. You wouldn't call him a content creator, but for me, he is the best possible example of how you phrase a very abstract and complex topic in a way that the other person understands easily. Also Jason Fried, Paul Graham, Ryan Law. Looking at what content they are consuming, what brands they appreciate, what subjects they talk about and how they talk about it has all helped me.
You needn’t stick to B2B blogs or whatever in your domain. In fact, you should expose yourself to as wide-ranging content as possible. I don’t read a lot of books—in fact, I haven’t finished a single book in my life. I like bite-sized, engaging content that can give me just what I want. Songs, podcasts, blogs, and visual content like videos and movies are all examples.
I developed a love for writing and language because of the songs I listened to, especially the lyrics. I used to note down my favorite lines and words in a notebook and collect quotes from movies. With songs, you need to convey what you're trying to convey in a very few lines. This constraint shaped my craft.
I’m noticing a pattern here. One part is exposure where you take in from as wide a net as possible. The other part is synthesis—where what you read lights up different parts of your brain and you make connections. Give me a behind-the-scenes look at how you do that?
I've always been an Evernote girl! I have this page called Connections on Evernote. Let’s say I listen to a podcast or watch a video, I make notes of the specific points that caught my attention on this page. The page is organized into different ideas, like bullet points. So this one particular piece of content that I consume can go under multiple topics and ideas on that particular Connections page.
This is my ritual. Every now and then, I go back and look at them. And I can see that there are five, six different ideas from different sources, all connecting back to a single topic. That’s when you know this can become something worth publishing.
You’re known for two newsletters that you edited/curated: the Monthly Recurring Report and SaaS/UnSaaS. When these were launched, industry newsletters were only a handful and more intimate. How has the scene changed and what opportunities do you see today?
There’s a lot of content out there, so much that readers are getting overwhelmed too. I don't remember the last time I religiously read a newsletter edition back to back—it's become too much. The space is overcrowded right now.
I think social media hits that perfect sweet spot when it’s done right. It also forces you to make your content as engaging as possible so that people can get that value in just those two minutes that they are exposed to your content before they start scrolling again.
Social media is overcrowded as well but compared to your email inbox, people spend far longer on social media. So it’s easier to reach someone on social media, especially when you combine mediums like audio and video. Banking solely on written content is not going to help as much going forward.
ON AI & WRITING WORKFLOWS
What are your thoughts about content professionals using AI?
I have a big, positive, optimistic outlook on AI because it is going to help us do things a lot easier and it's going to help us focus on the right things. AI is going to take care of the science so that we can focus on the art.
As someone who enjoys the creative side of content and writing, I love that AI is taking care of the grunt work. Everything that doesn’t need taste or human intervention, AI can do that so that we can focus on the things that actually make a difference.
I think we must all use AI regularly because not only will it make your work easier, but whether you like it or not, AI is here to stay. Only when you expose yourself to AI, only when you use it regularly, will you start understanding the blind spots and the strengths and weaknesses of AI, and you will start making better judgment calls on how to use AI to get the best outcomes.
How do you use AI in your workflow? Can you take an example of something you do typically at work and show me how you’d use AI for it.
One thing that I've started using AI for is research. It's extremely fast and efficient. If I’m going to write a content piece, I put together my resources: articles, books, research reports, etc. that can potentially help me with this. I upload all of this to ChatGPT or Claude, give it the outline of what I’m writing about, the specific points I want to focus on, the arguments I am trying to make. I ask AI to read through every single piece—we are talking 10, 20 pieces of content—organize it and identify specific points, data, quotes, stories or examples that I can use to support my content piece.
When I used to do this manually, it used to take me one to two weeks. With AI, I can do this in two days. That’s incredibly helpful because AI is doing semantic matching—and it’s getting more and more contextually intelligent too. Of course, it also hallucinates sometimes, so you need to watch out for that.
Another use case is data analysis. I have my list of keywords that I pull from Ahrefs or SEMrush, and I feed that into ChatGPT. I ask it to organize it in a way that I want to or can easily understand. And it actually gives you a sheet that has exactly the same fields and the sorting and everything that I want. When all this is made easier, I can focus on my craft.
Personal writing is entirely different from business writing, although the latter could benefit from a deft personal touch. How do you see the two?
A key difference I have noticed is that personal writing can be very abstract and subjective, based on the writer’s life experiences or thought processes or feelings. Readers may read it from a completely different lens based on their experiences, context, ideologies and opinions. That’s the beauty of personal writing. Like art, its interpretation can be completely different from what the creator intended.
Business writing, on the other hand, is the exact opposite in terms of intention. We're talking about a specific perspective or a process or a system or a way of working. And we want the reader to understand what we're saying and get on the same page as us.
What is transferable is how you package the ideas. In personal writing, I'm trying to make sense of things that are going on inside my head. I'm going to start at the surface level, breaking that into different points, and picking apart each of those. Then I go deeper and deeper and finally reach the crux of the whole thing.
It’s the same in business writing as well—apply the same flow. I often think of it like the IKEA manual, which is a beautiful piece of content. You start with the list of pieces or the parts in that particular package. Then you give instructions on building those smaller parts. Then you talk about how those smaller parts come together to form that bigger furniture. And then you can even go on to give ideas about how this furniture can be styled in a room.
What works is an organic progression of ideas that aligns with how people think. That’s an easily transferable and important skill to have when you’re creating content.
Any advice for someone new to writing?
Do not start by using AI to write content, as tempting or easy as it may seem. It’s very important to work that writer’s muscle and train it before using any AI tools. This ties back to what I said about taste. Only when you keep writing content regularly and refining it and honing your taste will you be able to recognize what good content is like. And only when you are a good writer yourself can you judge a piece of content that AI has churned out. There’s no easy way out.
Having a good editor is extremely helpful in this process because when you observe the changes or suggestions that the editor is making, it helps you understand the principles of good content.
Another tip that I can share is to bring in stories. Especially in B2B writing, we are going to talk about a lot of frameworks and systems and data and numbers. So you need to soften it because people love stories. It may sound like a cliche, but you need to look for those specific stories that you can interweave into these other concrete, logical facts that you're going to write about. It’s what worked so well for the SaaS/UnSaaS dispatch. We were bringing in stories from non SaaS industries and were connecting them with stories from SaaS industries and they were supporting each other to drive that specific point home. So find those connections, find those surprising elements and use that to enrich your content. AI cannot do this just yet.
ON DATA & DECISION MAKING
What is your relationship with data and metrics? How do you measure the success of any content project, both at the specific asset level and at a larger brand level?
What you measure depends on your role and career stage. When I was a junior writer, I was responsible for the performance of every blog I wrote. But my job wasn’t limited to writing and publishing the blog—I had to get it to a certain level of organic traffic within a specific period of time. Which meant I also had to look at distribution—a social media strategy, including it in the company newsletter, reaching out to other platforms that could feature our posts, reaching out to the people featured in our posts to share it on their socials, and so on.
As my role evolved, my metrics also became broader and broader. Now, I am responsible for overarching organic metrics. That means, what I focus on has also changed. I am not looking at the trees, I am looking at the forest. Instead of tracking the performance of individual blogs, I look at how the blogs are performing together.
How are they linking back to each other? How is the flow? How do the readers experience the content? Are they dropping off somewhere? How can we make sure that they come back or what other pieces of content can we use to engage them? I'm looking at the interconnectedness of the whole content experience, not just on the website, but social media, webinars, guest posts and influencer marketing and so on and so forth.
How do you make some of the big decisions in life?
I don’t have a five-year-plan or a ten-year-plan. But I’ve always had a list of things that I don't want. Irrespective of the area in my life—a job, a manager, the kind of company, friends, or even who I want to marry—I’ve had a list of what I don’t want. This list keeps evolving, especially on the work front.
When we make plans and wishlists, we are discounting the unknowns out there. When we don’t know what’s out there, we can’t put it on our wishlist, even if it turns out to be the best thing for us.
In my case, a lot of my college classmates were joining ad agencies. But my list of things-I-didn’t want included sales, being in client-facing roles and working in large corporates. This ruled out agency roles and made me try out content marketing, which turned out to be my ikigai!
ON BEING A WOMAN IN TECH
What is it like being a woman in tech? I see that you are a part of the Startmate Women’s Fellowship Autumn 2024 cohort. How did the program help you?
When I moved to Sydney two years ago, it was another blank slate. I was completely disconnected from the startup and tech scene here and so was looking for an avenue to connect with people from the ecosystem. The Fellowship was the perfect platform for that because I spent three months with women who are in the exact stage as I am—mid-career and in tech or trying to move from another industry into tech, with a similar family or personal situation as well. It was very supportive and one thing that I've realized is that nothing comes close to women building women up.
It’s beautiful and incredibly powerful if we as women can back each other. Throughout my career, there has been a lot of improvement in diversity and inclusion but we still have a long way to go. What surprised me when I moved from India to Australia is that I realized no matter where you are, no matter what industry you are in, women deal with the same challenges everywhere. It’s not specific to a country or an industry—in one way, this is great because any change we can make, any support we can give, will have a bigger impact than we imagine.
As a woman, you sometimes feel disconnected from the bigger system, support system, all the challenges that you're facing, whether in your career or in your personal life in general. I don't know if it's just me, but we tend to blame ourselves. We think, okay, it's a me-problem, maybe I’m doing something wrong. But when you connect with other women and start talking about these things, the perspective shifts because you realize it's not just you, it’s the system. Everybody, almost every other woman is going through the same thing.
This awareness not just helps us think of solutions, it also makes a shift inside you. It helps your confidence. You look at yourself in a completely different light after that. And that is powerful because it's going to reflect in your work, in the way you're interacting with people from work or in your personal life, in the way you carry yourself, in the way you think about yourself. It's much deeper than your career. It's psychological. And the support system is helpful because you feel empowered. Empowerment is such an overused word, but it is precisely what you feel.
What are you reading/listening/watching right now? Any recommendations?
I think I'm in my podcast phase right now in my life and I've gone back to Alan Watts. I listen to his speeches online. I also religiously listen to 99% Invisible, Radiolab and Freakonomics Radio. None of these are directly related to marketing because that’s what I prefer right now. I want to switch off and go back to other things so that I can make those connections.
Thank you, Sadhana. What a pleasure catching up with you!