Maybe Eric Doty didn’t begin his career with a specific interest in writing, but he was always fascinated with language. His journey through academia eventually led him to the Linguistics PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied how language works both in the brain and within AI models. 

He also loved hockey, and Eric blew off steam from his studies by tweeting parodies about his hometown team, the Ottawa Senators. To his surprise, that content went viral, leading Eric to start a full-on blog. As he began to field requests for radio spots and other interviews, he realized he’d unintentionally started his own media site — and he liked it way more than linguistics. 

Eric subsequently left the academic world and used his accidental portfolio to land jobs in content marketing. That’s how he ended up where he is now: working as Content Lead at Dock and Head of Community at Superpath (check out the profile we did on Jimmy Daly, Superpath founder). 

These days, Eric is passionate about being a one-man content team, growing his skillset and developing his (not so) secret superpower: automation.

Why Being a One-Person Content Team Is a Best-Case Scenario

It’s pretty common to hear people bemoan small marketing teams, but Eric prefers it. He’s been the only full-time marketer at all his jobs, and he doesn’t understand all the hate. 

“I get all this marketing about being a one-person team that’s so time-strapped and hating life, and that’s the complete opposite of how I feel,” Eric says. “The downsides are obvious; you don’t have as many people, so you can’t do as much. But the positives completely outweigh the negatives.” 

Here are some of the key benefits of being a lone operator: 

  • All the red tape disappears. Generally, you face fewer rounds of feedback, approvals to wade through, legal reviews — basically, you deal with less of everything that annoys the hell out of marketers. 
  • There are no internal politics. Even if you only have one to two people working for you, personalities can clash, emotions get involved and people can get attached to projects. When it’s just you, you can decide what to do without weighing everyone else’s reactions.
  • You can move so much faster. You are your only roadblock when you’re the only person on the team. Eric notes that many one-person teams get more things done than two- to three-person teams because there’s less onboarding and other admin work that goes into the day-to-day.
  • It allows for a multidisciplinary approach. Eric hasn’t completely abandoned his research background; he still loves spreadsheets, research, automation and coding. But he also loves writing now. In his role, he can wear all the hats instead of just focusing on one thing. (This is also a good way to figure out what you do and don’t like doing!)

If this all sounds pretty sweet to you, you might wonder how to find a gig like Eric’s. The first place he recommends looking is the startup world. 

Want To Be Your Own One-Person Team? Look at Startups 

Startups need people who can do more than one thing.

“From a content perspective,” Eric explains, “if the first marketing hire is, say, a writer, the product marketing or growth marketing skill sets probably aren’t there. Compare that to a T-shaped marketer who’s a strong writer with a wide base of skills — that makes a really attractive first hire to startups.”

There’s also less competition, as people tend to avoid job descriptions that call for broad skill sets. Marketers have been urged to niche down into our respective skill sets, and sometimes that works, but Eric wants the jobs that expect him to do it all. 

“There’s built-in demand, especially in a world where fewer marketing jobs are in-house now,” he states. “I’ve seen in the last five years that the most typical model is to have a very small in-house team and lots of freelancers, rather than a large in-house team. The ability to manage yourself and a bunch of freelancers is super in demand right now.” 

PS: If you’re interested in beefing up your skill set to be a more robust hire, you have a couple of options. You can look for generalist in-house roles at agencies or take on freelance projects for low or flexible rates to learn how to do different things (for example, SEO or HTML). 

Automation Saves Time and Allows You To Focus on Bigger Things 

You obviously can’t wear all of the hats well if you’re doing repetitive, routine tasks day in and out. Eric leans on automation to free up time and headspace. 

If you have to do a task more than five times — whether it’s repeated every week, month, or few months — he recommends you automate it.

“It’s almost always worth the upfront time investment,” Eric emphasizes. “I’m investing in myself and my own time and paying that forward to myself in future months. The best example is my Dock blog workflow. We publish at least eight blogs a month, and there’s so many little, annoying things that have to happen.

“You need all the keywords. There’s the blog brief. You have to link the brief doc to your task management platform. Remember those keywords? They need to be in the brief, too. You’ll need to assign the blog to a writer when the brief is ready and then email back and forth for feedback. Eventually, the blog will get uploaded to your CMS, and you’ll share it.”

That’s a lot of steps to repeat each time! If you’re doing eight to 10 blogs every month, that admin work quickly adds up to a full-time job. Eric knew he couldn’t scale himself without adding more employees and budget. Enter automation, which he calls his “superpower.” 

Here’s an example of one part of the blog process. When Eric publishes a blog, an automatic Slack message goes out to everyone on the team. That helps him create internal visibility and establish his own ROI within the company — and it’s something that could easily be forgotten if it wasn’t automated. 

If you want to get started with automation, here’s Eric’s advice: Start with a real problem you have, and experiment with an automation tool like Zapier (which is free for a certain amount of use). As you learn more, you’ll see you can connect tools to each other, and the benefits tend to be exponential from there. 

And you will likely find that once you begin to automate, you save more than time.

“The biggest thing automation does is free up head space for important things, like thinking,” Eric shares. “Yes, I’m saving time making blogs, but I can reinvest that time making the brief so good for the writer, to the point that I know the output is going to be amazing. It’s about reallocating your mind space for higher-impact things, not just automating things for the sake of being more productive.”