How I built a content engine that grew Spike's signups 5x and MRR 3x

When I joined Spike in June 2025 as a Content Marketer, my primary focus was increasing product signups.

But the market was not easy to break into. Spike was competing against PagerDuty and OpsGenie, both well-established players with years of brand recognition.

And standing out in that market required a sharper, more targeted approach.

The BOFU bet

I decided to go BOFU first (Bottom-of-the-funnel content), because what I needed was not traffic but buyers with higher intent.

Someone searching "what is incident management" is learning. Someone searching "OpsGenie alternatives" is already in the market, evaluating options, and close to a decision. I wanted to reach the second person.

So, I built the content strategy around commercial intent. I created a dedicated content cluster for every major competitor. The goal was to be there at the exact moment a buyer was making their decision.

The approach

Before writing the blog posts, I signed up for every competitor I planned to cover. I tested them thoroughly and took notes on what worked and what did not.

Then I made a deliberate decision: if a competitor did something better than Spike, I would say so.

Most alternatives content on the internet is thinly veiled advertising. A list of tools, some G2 ratings, and a conclusion that always favours their product.

But I did the opposite. My goal was to help the reader make a good decision, not push them toward our product before they were ready.

That honesty built trust, drove readers to sign up, and eventually turned them into customers.

The execution

Over the following year, I built out Spike's BOFU content library.

For every major competitor in the space, I wrote comparison posts, alternatives roundups, and tool-specific reviews.

Each post was built around a specific search term with commercial intent, targeting buyers who were already evaluating their options.

The results

Monthly product signups grew 5x and Spike's MRR tripled over the course of the year.

My content drove the signups. And our team effort drove conversions.