Brooklyn startups with blogs worth reading

Content marketing should be intuitive: do interesting publishing that relates to your work and grow an audience who might become customers, followers and supporters.

Some startups do this well, others don’t. There are those who publish infrequently and without purpose, those that simply shill their product and those see it as a strict a home for press release (which is at least purposeful, but not likely to succeed in more broadly marketing itself).

Then there are those savvy enough to build audience. These blogs complement a startup’s mission, but they do so with an eye more toward contributing to a community of like minds than to simply sell. It takes a real investment in staff time and creativity to make these blogs. No surprise with all the creative types in Brooklyn, some local startups are doing a very nice job with it.

Here’s a few that we’ve found so far and really like:

• The Date Report – this is a blog that you could easily see on a national news site. It covers everything about modern dating. Like this post about the best booty call text message exchange of all time or 15 Steps to Ending the First Date.
• Tinyboy Loves – Tinybop is in the education space, of course. They made The Human Body app. This blog is devoted to smart, enjoyable, educational media for kids. A lot of it is from yesteryear. Warning: may induce nostalgia.
• Pillow Talk – from BangWithFriends. It actually appears that the blogger behind this site has left. It’s a little unclear, but there’s a big gap in posts from August to October, and the tenor really changes. Still, this stuff is evergreen. For example, learn why coffee should be your go-to drink at a bar.
• Makers Row blog – The company feted for helping makers keep their creations local has a blog that’s basically all about its community of makers. They do a lot of profiles of factories designers can use, but they also sometimes do tips for startups, such as how they made their promo gear.
• HUGE, Inc. Ideas Blog – This is a blog about ideas swirling among creative agency and creative types. The main feature on the blog is that every week they do a list of links to article they’ve liked. They provide insights other ways, too, such as giving Huge staff a chance to sound off about ideas they like or posting videos of speakers who have come to Huge’s event space.
• Docracy Blog –  This one is updated so infrequently that it nearly falls into the first category, above, but when it is updated it’s very good. At least, if you’re looking for advice on one of the matters the bloggers cover. It should be no surprise that the posts here tend to be long and detailed – Docracy is a site devoted to legal documents.
• Poutsch’s Optometrics – strangely, this blog is not linked anywhere from the Poutsch website anymore (the company that lets you post one question polls and make them social). Here, they make infographics using the companies data, to compare how the same group of people answered very different questions, such as showing that most unhappy people switch off their phones at night.
• Caseable‘s On The Couch – The larger blog is very new and it has identified a few channels it wants to return to, such as “The Scene” and “The Vibe.” We like “On The Couch” best. They only have one, but it’s a profile of a designer who uses their platform to make funky gadget cases.