In 2020, I started a content agency, with no idea how I was going to get my first client.
All I knew was that I had been paid £20 per article as a student writer at university.
When I left my fulltime job in October 2021, I knew of no other way to earn money. So I went back to writing bits and bobs for different businesses.
Don’t laugh at this.
I was writing about things like erectile dysfunction, even though I knew close to nothing about them.
I thought it might be better to learn from the best.
That’s when we chanced upon The Nutgraf, a content agency that had been behind Singaporean bestsellers like Tall Order (the story of Goh Chok Tong), and The Price of Being Fair (the Fairprice story). We thought they were doing great work that we should learn from.
Perhaps you too are trying to write a book, or even to create better content as a marketer. We’re peeling behind the layers of what Nutgraf has done, to see if there are any lessons we can glean.
Good content still works, and lasts
With Nutgraf, you can immediately see from what they have named themselves that they take pride in finding the story, and communicating that story.
The nutgraf is a journalism term for a paragraph that sums up a story in a nutshell.
Founded by three Singaporean journalists, we take pride as storytellers in our content-first approach to strategy and activation.
We capture your message succinctly, and create original content that will lead to business growth and greater brand value.
2 years ago, I met a young man who told me how he had written a book in a month, with the help of ChatGPT. He had merely edited the story that AI gave him.
With the advent of AI today, you might wonder if there’s still a point in what agencies like Nutgraf do, in finding the story like journalists do.
Be journalistic in finding good content
Nutgraf, having been started by journalists, continue to use many of those journalistic skills in understanding the heart of the story. This doesn’t just apply to the books they write. But it translates into the other types of content they produce for the organisations they work with.
Just look at this particular example with the Land Transport Authority of Singapore, which manages the land transport infrastructure and services. They were able to go back in time to find emotionally resonant stories, such as the one below.
With their journalistic skills, they were able to find stories of the 4 civil engineers that had been with LTA over 20 years, shaping the construction of the MRTs we ride today.
Of course, one might ask:
in a world that increasingly prides short-form content, does long-form content still work?
We studied what they did for Maybank to see if it worked.
Part of their initial brief was about simplifying difficult to understand financial jargon into easily digestible articles.
If you look at the traffic, you can see how it initially rose a great deal. But it fell after that.
It’s only to be expected, especially when you’re not consistently publishing great thought leadership articles.
My guess is that Maybank, did not continue to engage Nutgraf, resulting in a fall in the quality of the articles, and a consequent fall in the website’s traffic.
But ultimately, what I think is vital in learning from The Nutgraf is its continued insistence on high quality content. In a world of AI, where articles can easily be churned out like butter, it can sometimes be tempting to take the easy way out and continuously push more prompts into ChatGPT.
Some businesses are already doing this, and using writers to edit those articles.
But what The Nutgraf shows is that there’s still value in finding credible stories through the old-fashioned way of interviewing, reading the past publications, and simply by continuing to take a fly on the wall approach, sitting in on meetings, and being curious about what turns up.
Pick out the stories that people take for granted
But the other part that you might be more interested in is how The Nutgraf writes its books.
One interesting thing for me has seeing its focus on the Singapore Inc story, or how Singapore’s biggest enterprises have been at the forefront of the nation’s development. Because if you look at how widely admired Singapore’s system of government is, we often pay lesser attention to the companies that have been part of that growth story.
Beyond personalities, they have recently moved into covering leading brands such as Fairprice supermarket, Banyan Tree (a hospitality brand), and City Developments Limited (a property development company).
In writing these stories, they have incessantly focused on stories that people take for granted. For example, if you look at the story of Fairprice, the supermarket that has been synonymous with every Singaporean, we might not know the hard work that went into creating a supermarket like that, the battles it had to fight, and the many hairy moments that it went through as an institution.
That’s the beauty of what The Nutgraf does.
It makes the understated obvious.
This might seem like such a simple skill, but done well, it can create phenomenal amounts of value for organisations.
For example, if we take something we do daily, buying eggs at $6.20 (as of August 2024), we might think it’s something simple, and not worth talking about.
But as Peh and his team show in The Price of Being Fair, those eggs, especially during a time of severe supply chain disruption during COVID, wasn’t that simple.
Fairprice needed to figure out a solution fast.
When you’re able to show the backend workings of what you do, some customers begin to appreciate what you do, and this builds fierce customer loyalty. Before Peh wrote about Fairprice’s difficulties procuring chicken or eggs, I would simply think,
it’s just eggs on the shelf.
How hard can that get?
Or when I saw the prices suddenly inflated by a dollar, I would think,
What’s happening to the supermarkets?
When we are able to piece together these fragments of different stories into a coherent narrative, you recreate new brand value from what the organisation is already doing.
And perhaps that’s why The Nutgraf has grown so quickly, from a team of 3 in 2015 to a team of 20 today.
If you average out the average yearly wages of 20 fulltime professionals at $45,000 a year, that’s a yearly revenue of $900,000.
That’s a lot of money for a content agency that initially seemed old-fashioned in its way of seeking out good stories.
And it’s why The Nutgraf is worth learning from.