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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.
Are you a big-company person or a small-company person? I see myself as a small-company person, but I think that’s a mistake.
Most of us have been told to “niche down” as soon as possible. Find where you fit in the content world, and then stick to it. Become an expert, and increase your prices/salary over time.
The better version of that advice would be to niche down until you’ve reached a ceiling, then branch out wider to make the next step up. But…phrased catchier than that.
As I mentioned last week, I ended up as the first and only marketer at three companies in a row, so that’s kinda my thing now. I enjoy being at small companies because I get to develop and use a wide skill set every day. You learn a lot by doing everything. That makes me an asset to any fresh start-up with a lean budget.
(Working solo also means lots of automation and the ability to pivot strategy or attention on a dime without hurting anyone’s feelings. I like that.)
However, should I ever need to make my next career move, I’d prefer to move to a big company.
Why? Because I think career growth is staircase-shaped. Niching down and becoming an expert in something lets you ladder up once or twice (uh oh, I’m confusing climbing metaphors), but eventually you hit a plateau. To make the next career jump, you need to move sideways for a while with a greater variety of experiences.
Excuse the sports analogy, but there’s lots of evidence that being a multi-sport athlete makes you more likely to succeed in your top sport. For a while, the advice was to specialize as early as possible. But by staying multi-sport, you gain a wider variety of skills, develop different muscle groups, avoid overuse injuries, and are less likely to burn out while still enjoying what you’re doing. Sound relatable?
Jimmy wrote this blog post about his misconceptions about working at a big company, as a fellow self-identifying Small Company Guy.
TL;DR (although it’s actually a short read): working at a big company has helped him develop a bunch of soft skills really quickly. Moving to a bigger company was good for him.
I don’t think this is limited to big-vs.-small-company talk. It applies to in-house vs. freelance too. Or content-only vs. broader roles. Mixing and matching by taking branching career paths, instead of following only one road, will get you where you want to go much faster.
Speaking of big news about small things:
👶 My wife and I are having a baby! We’re expecting a baby girl any day now. The due date is September 17th, but I hope/fear she may come sooner.
Fear not: I'll do the inadvisable and keep writing this weekly newsletter.
Because I will be “off” for three months of paternity leave at Dock, I won’t have the same degree of writing inspiration from my work life, so I’m taking audience requests:
What questions do you have for me? Where do you feel stuck in your career? What do you want to learn more about?
I’ve already received a few good prompts from the Superpath community, including:
How do I balance my full-time job with my work at Superpath?
What ways do you think the internet as a whole will change in the next five years?
Why does a bullet list feel incomplete unless it has three items?
Send me your content/career questions to [email protected], and I’ll be happy to answer them!
Cheers,
- Eric
PS. Our “LinkedIn Post the Most” challenge has been a hit so far. We’ve had 30+ folks pledge to posting at least 10 times on LinkedIn in September for the chance to win Superpath merch. There’s still time to join. You can join Superpath Pro free for 30 days to participate in the challenge.
✍ New on the Blog: How to succeed as a content marketer at a big company
Former Superpath Supreme Leader Jimmy Daly (he insists that we call him that—even in casual conversation) is back with another monthly edition of Notes from Jimmy.
After spending five months as Content Marketing Lead at Miro, Jimmy’s rethinking his assumption that bigger company = boring.
Here are some excerpts from his intro:
In the last 12 months, I went from a company of one to a product marketer at a 40-person startup to a content marketer at a 1,600-person enterprise. My work life has changed dramatically, even if you don’t count all the AI changes over the last year
…
I’m five months into this and I’ve learned a ton, which I’ll share today. I hope that by documenting my own experience, others get a sense of the differences between startups and enterprises. Neither is better or worse, harder or easier. I’ve spent so much time at small companies in my career that I developed a bit of an elitist attitude about working fast and being a generalist. I still think those two things are useful, but I’ve softened my stance. The work and skills are different, but I have to say I’m really enjoying it.
To spoil it a bit for you, Jimmy’s finding that working at a big org is stretching his soft skills in a way that working at a startup never could. It’s good to stay limber.
📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events
Reminder that we have a free event with Beehiiv coming up for everyone:
Where beehiiv Fits in the Owned Media Stack (with CEO Tyler Denk) (Sep 17) — Save your spot
And then we have our usual member events!
To get the invitations to our member events, join Superpath Pro. You get 30 days free, so you can attend all these events!
LinkedIn Post the Most (September Challenge): We're running back a crowd favorite with a new, kitschy title, since building a public brand never goes out of style. Post at least 10 times on LinkedIn this month, link those posts on Slack for everyone to like, and if completed, you'll earn a raffle ticket for some Superpath Swag 💃.
AI Show & Tell (Sep 9 & Oct ): Three community members will show off what they’re building with AI. (Past replays are also available for members.)
Change My Mind (Sep 16): We’ll debate 3-4 hot content takes as a group—with more nuance than you get on LinkedIn. (Past recaps are also available for members.)
Slack AMA (Sep 23): Join us for a live AMA on Slack with Hayley Cornwell Steinberg, Head of Marketing at AirGarage. Her team recently ran a process to hire an In-house Journalist. We invited Hayley to chat about what she's seeing as someone trying to hire a full-time content marketer in 2026.
🎙 New episode of Content, Briefly: Workslopppppppp
Alex is joined this week by alleged real-life human beings Rachel, Ruth, and Chloe for a vent session on workslop.
If you're not familiar with the term, workslop is AI-generated work—typically shared between co-workers—that looks fine on the surface but doesn't hold up under scrutiny, leaving whoever receives it to do more work than they had bargained for. Pass the buck, but make it AI.
It’s not clear whether we’ve reached peak workslop yet, but it’s clear the throw-everything-at-AI free-for-all is starting to give way to something more deliberate, as companies begin setting real rules around how coworkers use AI with each other.
Our content friends got into:
Who gets to decide what counts as workslop?
The vicious cycle where working faster with AI creates more, slower work for someone else
How job descriptions signal a company’s AI culture
Examples of how a few companies are starting to roll out AI-usage guidelines
💬 Great Slack Threads This Week
Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:
When you're writing content for AEO, does brand voice/tone matter anymore?
Has anyone made the jump to FT/remote employment with a client? How did that transition look?
Those of you in smaller teams (i.e., startups, SMB, non-enterprise), how many blog articles do you put out a week? I've been advocating for us to reduce volume for SO LONG and I need a gut check to see how much to still push for it (and what to push for).
First impressions on GPT-6 Astra? Anyone experimented with it yet?
📙 The Reading List
Here are some links that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:
The choices we make about AI now are critical | Bill Gates
Writing with AI: A contrarian view | O’Reilly Radar
AI Loves Reddit, but Redditors Aren't So Sure | The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts
💼 Who’s Hiring?
We’ve brought back a new and improved Superpath Job Board—with a mix of jobs we’ve curated from the open web, plus exclusive featured job listings.
Here are some new roles this week:
⭐ DAK Mortgage is hiring a Senior Financial Editorial Strategist & Writer (Fractional)
Sokin is hiring a Director of Content (Hybrid — London/NYC, Director+, 10+ yrs)
Gorgias is hiring a Director, Content Marketing (Onsite — Toronto/NYC, $202K–229K)
Lambda is hiring a Head of Content (Hybrid — SF Bay Area, $278K–370K)
Jobs are posted on the job board 72 hours late. Superpath Pro members get them within hours of posting.
🆓 Get a free 30-day trial of Superpath Pro
Superpath Pro is our paid community membership. On your free trial, you'll get access to:
A private Slack community with 400+ in-house and freelance content marketers
Monthly 1:1 peer networking calls
Monthly group events with breakout sessions
Monthly AI Show & Tell workshops
Graduate-level content courses
Early access to the Superpath Job Board feed
Niche channels and events for freelancers, content leaders, and more
"Most professional groups boast about their member numbers. Superpath intrigued me for the opposite reason: they deliberately shifted from a massive free community to a much smaller, paid one - so they could focus on it, nurture it, and make it genuinely excellent. And they absolutely deliver."
— Farah Cormack, Senior Marketing Leader