The founder q and a email, answered in the founder's own words
Ask your list what they want to know and you get two campaigns: the questions themselves, and the answers a fortnight later.
Founder content is hard for two reasons: somebody has to invent a topic, and the brand picks the topic it prefers. The question and answer format solves both at once. The subject matter arrives on its own, and it's the subject matter your customers actually wondered about.
The ask is a send of its own
Collecting the questions is a campaign in its own right, and a good one. A short plain email saying the founder is answering questions next month, reply with yours, pulls engagement out of people who never click anything. It also hands you a list of what your customers wonder about.
- Send the ask from the founder's address, in plain text, with no design on it at all
- Say how many you'll answer, so nobody sits waiting for a personal reply
- Give a deadline. An open invitation produces nothing
- Answer two or three privately as they land, because that encourages the rest
The replies to that first email are worth more than the campaign that follows. They're unprompted, they're in the customer's own words, and they tell you what your whole programme should be dealing with.
Answer the awkward one, or do not bother
Every batch contains one question about price, one about a shortcoming and one about something you'd rather not discuss. Leave all three out and readers notice the curation. It reads as staged.
So include the awkward question, name the person who asked it, and answer it properly. That one decision is the whole difference between this format and a frequently asked questions page with a photograph on it.
Length is the tell
Let the answers vary in length, because real answers do. Two lines for something factual, six paragraphs for the one that deserves it. A set of uniformly polished responses reads as the marketing team writing them. Usually it was.
| Question type | Answer length | Who should write it |
|---|---|---|
| Factual, about the product | Two or three lines | Whoever knows, credited by name |
| About a decision or a trade-off | As long as it needs | The founder, unedited |
| About something that went wrong | Short, direct, no hedging | The founder, checked by nobody else |
Keep the questions in the asker's words, blunt phrasing and all. Tidy them into house style and you've removed the reason the format works.
Quarterly, or when there is something to answer
Monthly turns it into a newsletter and the questions get thinner every time. Quarterly gives your list room to build up real ones, and it keeps the founder's involvement realistic. This format collapses the second somebody else starts writing the answers.
It pairs well with a product change too. A question and answer send after a formulation change, a price rise or a policy update deals with the whole objection in one place, and that's work the lifecycle plan would otherwise spread across several sends.
Every answer has a second home
The answers become product page copy, support macros, structured data and the next frequently asked questions campaign. Writing them once for the email is the cheapest way to get all of it, and they're already in a voice your customers respond to.
Keep an archive page holding every question and answer you've published. On a small brand's site it usually ends up one of the most read pages there is, and it's a page that earns search traffic without anybody planning for it.
Send the ask before you plan anything else
Write four lines from the founder's address inviting questions and send it this week. Inside a day you'll know whether there's a campaign here, and the replies will change what you put in your next three sends either way.
If nothing comes back, your list is colder than the open rate makes it look, and that's a more useful diagnosis than any engagement report will hand you.
Ask first, then answer the hard one
The founder question and answer is two campaigns for the price of one, and it fails in exactly one way: curating out the difficult question. Collect properly with a deadline, keep the asker's own phrasing, let the answers run to different lengths, and publish the one you'd rather skip. Run it quarterly and archive it, and it quietly becomes the most useful page on the site.
FAQs
What if we do not get enough questions?
Seed it with real questions from support, described honestly as things people ask us. Never invent a subscriber. A thin first round is normal, and the second one is usually much stronger once people have seen the format work.
Should the founder really write the answers?
For anything involving a decision or a trade-off, yes. Factual answers can come from whoever knows, credited by name. The moment every answer is written centrally in one voice, you've got a frequently asked questions page with a portrait attached.
Can we edit the questions we receive?
Cut for length and fix a typo, but leave the phrasing and the tone alone. The bluntness is what makes readers believe the questions came from outside the building, and rewriting it into house style is how this campaign usually fails.
How long should the whole email be?
Five or six questions, with the answers running anywhere from two lines to several paragraphs. If one answer needs more room than that, it's a campaign of its own and should be treated as one instead of squeezed in.
Show the people behind it
Founders, the team and the decisions nobody outside the business ever gets to see.
The behind the scenes email that earns its place in a busy inbox
Nobody wants a tour of your warehouse. They want to know why the thing takes three weeks, and what happens in those three weeks.
See the campaign
The meet the team email that makes the next support ticket easier
Organised by job title it is an org chart. Organised by what a customer might need, it is the most useful email in the sequence.
See the campaign
The employee spotlight email that is not internal comms in the wrong inbox
Nobody subscribed to meet your operations assistant. They will happily meet the person who packs the parcel, if that changes something for them.
See the campaignRather we planned the campaigns for you?
Bring your Klaviyo account and next quarter's calendar. We'll tell you which of these sends your list is missing, and which one we'd run first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
