START HERE: How to build your fintech content engine from zero

Let’s be honest. Most content advice starts way too far ahead. It assumes you’ve already got a marketing team, a backlog of posts to share, and an enthusiastic social media following. It talks about “doubling down on what works” as if you’ve already published something. As if your blog isn’t still a blank page.

But for a lot of early-stage fintechs, that’s not where things start.

You’ve launched your product (or you’re close). You’ve got a website, maybe built on Webflow or WordPress. There’s a Blog link in the nav. It’s empty – or worse, there’s a half-finished draft called Our Mission from six months ago.

And now someone – maybe an investor, maybe your own inner voice – is telling you it’s time to “do content”. But what does that actually mean when you don’t have an audience, a plan, or a single post worth sharing?

That’s what this guide is for.

This isn’t about building a big machine. It’s about lighting the first match. Laying the groundwork for content that feels real, useful, and sustainable. I’m going to walk through exactly how to start – not when you’re already flying, but when you’re sat on the runway, wondering where to even begin.

No jargon. No pressure. Just a grounded approach to building your content presence from zero.

Let’s begin.

1. You’re not behind – you’re early

Here’s the first thing to understand: nobody writes their first blog post to a waiting crowd.

The companies and brands you admire? They started with nothing too. The only difference is they started.

The quiet truth is that most early-stage content work happens in the dark. You publish into the void. You second-guess yourself. You wonder if it even matters. That’s normal. It’s not a sign you’ve failed – it’s a sign you’re early. And early is good. Early means you have plenty of time to get it right, without the baggage of bad habits or bloated strategy decks.

Content compounds, but only if you begin.

So you don’t need a content calendar yet. You don’t need six months of posts mapped out. You need a simple plan, one that’s shaped around the stage you’re actually at – not the stage someone else expects you to be.

We’ll get to the how in a moment. But let this land first: you are not behind. Not if you’re here, reading this, and ready to build something honest from the ground up.

Take a deep breath. You’ve got this.

2. Decide what this content is for

Before you start writing, you need to know why you’re writing.

This sounds obvious, but it’s where most early content goes wrong. It’s tempting to start with what you could say: a product update, a founder story, a take on the market. But if you don’t know what your content is meant to do, you’ll end up with a pile of disconnected posts that don’t help your business – or your reader.

So ask yourself, quietly and clearly:

What’s the job of my content right now?

At the very earliest stage, you’re not building thought leadership or capturing SEO traffic at scale. You’re building trust. You’re building clarity. You’re giving people a reason to believe that you understand their problem – and that you’re serious about solving it.

A good guiding question here:

If a potential customer landed on this post, would it move them closer to trusting us?

That doesn’t mean every post has to be about your product. Quite the opposite. But it does mean every post should serve a purpose: explain a core idea, show your values in practice, teach something useful, or give a genuine signal that you know your space.

If your content builds confidence and invites connection, you’re on the right track.

So don’t get caught up chasing traffic or trying to impress your peers. Your first goal is to build a little corner of the internet that your earliest buyers will read and think, “Finally. Someone gets it”.

That’s a solid foundation. Most never get that far.

3. Build a small, clear foundation

I’ve already mentioned that you don’t need a full content calendar. You also don’t need personas or messaging frameworks or 47 blog drafts.

All of those come later. Right now, you need three to five solid, purposeful posts that show what you stand for and who you’re here to help.

These early posts are your scaffolding. They give shape to your ideas, your tone of voice, and your position in the market. You can point to them when a prospect asks what you do. You can share them when someone new follows you. You can build from them later. But most of all, they prove you’ve got something to say – and that you’re willing to show up.

The best early posts often fall into simple, honest categories like:

• “Why we exist.” Not a pitch. The real story of what you saw missing, and why you chose to fix it.
• “What we believe about X.” A strong, opinionated take on something your customers wrestle with – pricing, fraud, growth, regulation. Make it yours.
• “What nobody tells you about Y.” These are gold. Draw from your own experience or frustrations and lay it out plainly (The subtext is always: we’ve been there).

Keep these posts short if that’s what it takes to get them published. Don’t worry about keyword tools or perfect formatting yet. There’s a time to optimise. But if you optimise before you’ve said anything true, it’s just noise with better metadata. The point is to start showing your thinking – clearly, generously, and in your own voice.

That’s what will set you apart. Not polish pretending to be substance.

4. Say things your future clients will actually care about

There’s a kind of panic that sets in when you start creating content from scratch. You worry it won’t sound smart enough. Or that no one will take you seriously unless you mimic what others are doing – white papers, trends analysis, industry news.

But let’s be honest: most of that content isn’t written for buyers. It’s written for LinkedIn likes or investor optics.

If you want traction, speak to the real questions your future customers have. Not your competitors. Not your old boss. Not a hypothetical “C-suite persona” cooked up in a branding deck.

What keeps them up at night? What are they Googling after a rough demo call? What myths are they sick of hearing?

Good early content often looks like:

• “A quick guide to…” Something your ideal customer needs to understand but doesn’t. Break it down without condescension.
• “We used to think this – but here’s what we learned.” Vulnerability works. It also builds trust faster than expertise ever could.
• “What we’d ask if we were in your shoes.” Frame advice as empathy. Show you’ve walked their path – or that you’re actively learning it.

This doesn’t mean every piece needs to convert. Early content is about signal. You’re saying: “We get you. We’re not just trying to sell to you – we’re listening.” That signal helps attract the right readers, and quietly filters out the rest.

5. One good article beats ten half-hearted ones

When you’re starting from zero, it’s easy to think you need to publish constantly. That’s the myth: volume equals momentum.

But what actually builds momentum – real momentum, the kind that earns trust – is one piece of content that lands. One article that answers a real question clearly. One post that gets bookmarked, forwarded, mentioned in a Slack channel.

You’re not behind because you don’t have 20 blog posts. You’re ahead if your first one is genuinely useful.

This is also where most startups burn out: they spin up a “content engine” and feed it noise. Generic SEO posts. AI rewrites of other people’s ideas. Content that reads like it was made by someone with no skin in the game.

If you can only do one thing well this month, do this:

• choose a real question your customer is asking
• write the clearest, most honest answer you can
• add one opinion or insight they wouldn’t get from your competitors.

That’s it. You don’t need five calls to action. You don’t need to optimise the title for Google. You just need to be useful.

Over time, that kind of content compounds. People remember where they felt understood.

6. Write like a person, publish like a process

Let’s say you’ve drafted that first article. It’s helpful. It’s honest. It sounds like a human being wrote it. Great – don’t lose that voice now.

But here’s where a lot of early-stage fintechs freeze: the actual act of publishing feels weirdly formal. What if it’s not perfect? What if it doesn’t get traction? What if someone disagrees?

That’s why it’s useful to separate the writing from the publishing.

Write like a person

No buzzwords. No awkward over-explaining. No trying to impress LinkedIn. Simply explain what you know, how you see it, and why it might help.

Publish like a process

This doesn’t mean automating your soul out of it. It means having a simple checklist:

• A short intro paragraph that sets the problem
• A clear headline (no cleverness needed)
• A helpful structure (like the one you’re reading now)
• A read-through for clarity
• One image if it helps break things up
• Hit publish

Then walk away.

Don’t keep refreshing. Don’t rush to re-share. Don’t stress about whether it worked. The only job is to keep publishing things you’d be glad to have read if you were in your customer’s shoes.

The reward is slow at first, but it’s real. The people who matter will begin to notice.

7. Your voice is a strategic asset

When you’re starting from zero, the temptation is to look outward – to other brands, other voices, other websites – for permission or templates. It’s understandable. But here’s the quiet truth: your voice, your weird take, your early pain points and opinions – that’s the only thing you own outright.

The hardest thing to realise is this: your perspective is the product. Not just your software or your pricing page, but the way you see the world. The market’s full of fintechs who’ve outsourced that view before they understood it. Their content is competent, but hollow.

In the early stages, you’re not trying to sound big. You’re trying to sound right. And in 2025, when every AI tool can churn out 1,000 words of SEO-friendly sameness in seconds, clarity and character are worth more than polish.

That doesn’t mean being loud. It means being specific. What have you seen that others haven’t? What patterns are you watching? What do you wish someone had told you when you were on the other side of the table?

You can’t fake that with a ghostwriter or an agency – at least not yet. But you can write a paragraph, or record a 90-second voice note, or leave a message for your future marketing hire that says, “This is what I actually believe”.

That’s how a voice begins. And once you have that, it’s easier to grow everything else around it.

8. Build the muscle, not the machine

By now, you’ve probably seen the other kind of content advice: the kind that starts with “build a calendar”, “define your funnel” or “hire a content lead”. There’s a time for that. But if you’re still spinning up from zero, what you really need is rhythm – not rigour.

Think of this as building a muscle, not a machine.

Start with a once-a-week habit. Something small but consistent:

• one short post on LinkedIn with a real observation, not a promo
• one 500-word blog answering a question your prospects ask
• one note to your team reflecting on a mistake or insight that’s worth capturing publicly.

You don’t need approval loops or polished decks. You need reps. It’s this early cadence – scrappy but true – that will teach you what matters to your market and what you actually sound like.

Once you’ve built that rhythm (four weeks is enough to feel the groove), then you can start tightening the system. That’s when calendars, libraries, writers, and workflows start to make sense. Not before.

Because until you’ve said something real a few times, there’s nothing to scale.

9. Grow what’s working (and ignore what isn’t)

Once you’ve built up a bit of rhythm – four, maybe six weeks of steady output – you’ll start to see patterns. Some pieces resonate more. Some topics feel easier to write about. Some channels bring useful replies; others are eerily quiet.

This is the time to pay quiet attention, not force artificial metrics.

You don’t need dashboards or attribution models yet. But it’s worth asking:

• Which pieces got shared or screenshotted?
• Did anyone respond in a way that opened a real conversation?
• What do I wish I’d said more about?

The early signals won’t show up in Google Analytics. They’ll show up in LinkedIn DMs. In sales calls. In odd phrases repeated back to you by someone you didn’t realise was reading.

Double down on whatever feels natural and gets noticed. Maybe your CEO’s writing style works better as a newsletter. Maybe a single LinkedIn voice note sparked more interest than three long blogs. Maybe your customer support team is sitting on gold.

Growth doesn’t mean do more. It means gradually shaping your energy around what’s landing.

If one format starts to consistently work – great. Invest a little. You might bring in a part-time writer to help you expand it. Or start keeping a backlog of topic ideas so your future self has something to reach for.

But the trick is to expand without over-formalising. You’re not scaling a content team. You’re strengthening a voice.

10. If you’ve made it this far, you’re already ahead of most

You might not have nailed a content strategy, but you’ve stayed in motion. You’ve resisted the pull to outsource your voice. You’ve given shape to ideas others in your category haven’t even begun to say.

Content at this stage is less about traffic and more about traction. It’s about surfacing your thinking. Building tiny bridges between what you do and what people might one day need. Giving future clients a reason to trust you – even if they’re not ready yet.

It doesn’t matter if your blog is still small or your social posts feel like whispers. That’s normal. You’re not building for tomorrow’s algorithm. You’re building for someone who finds your post six months from now and says, “this is exactly what I needed”.

So if it feels slow, don’t panic. If it feels quiet, that’s okay.

Consistency beats noise. Clarity beats volume. And care – genuine, visible care – beats almost everything else.

My rule of thumb? Start simple. Show up gently. And build the kind of presence you’d want to find if you were in your buyer’s shoes.