The Exchanges

Q want to promote a book and it's frankly very boring and I just eat them alive. But you, I mean, an exception for, because you come from a SAS background, you come from a software background. So tell us quickly about Contently and then I'm going to go, why on earth do you decide to write a book? This is like the most difficult thing ever instead of doing Contently.

A So Contently didn't start as a SAS platform. It started as a marketplace, kind of a newfangled talent agency to help, you know, laid off journalists from the New York times connect with clients. It turns out that the most profitable clients, the most interesting clients, uh, when we launched about eight years ago, ended up being brands wanting to do content marketing, which was starting to become this popular thing. And so as we leaned into that, we by necessity had to start building project management tools, um, to help these brands who are connecting with our marketplace. And then that became the business that turned into this full blown sort of like Salesforce for content marketing, uh, for, for managing everything about your content program. And that's turned into Sort of the content operating platform that helps companies, not just with content for marketing, but for HR and a whole bunch of other things. So that's the very quick sort of backstory. But we, we actually had a point where we were going to have the, the software portion be free and be subsidized by the, uh, the marketplace. And we got in this big argument and, uh, and the argument was solved by, uh, my partners and I deciding to do a test To start selling some features of, uh, of the project management tool, uh, for a monthly fee of a thousand dollars, and when we sold 13 in the first month, we said, okay, uh, …

AI assessment note: “Contently didn't start as a SAS platform. It started as a marketplace”

Q You have, Shane, you have co-founders though, right? How many co-founders?

A I have two co-founders. Uh, one's the business guy, one's the tech guy , I was the marketing guy. Um, and, and content guy. So I realized that I was not the CMO that was going to take our company to the next step function. So I hired a replacement and, uh, and after a month of getting her up to speed, I wanted people to stop going around me. Um, and, and really for the mantle to fall on her. And, uh, so I took a two month sabbatical to kind of write for 14 hours a day and, and finish this book. So I, I took some time off to step back and do this and then came back and kind of Became the consultant to her organization rather than the boss. And so that's how I managed to do both these things.

AI assessment note: “I have two co-founders. Uh, one's the business guy, one's the tech guy”

Q Really? Look at that, man. I'm on fire this morning. Good guess. Okay, so you're, you're sitting on this rocket ship. You're eight years in. Started as a marketplace. You shift the model. You're now serving 300 enterprise customers. Paying, call it six grand a month. Call it, call it twenty million in AR right now. Why take time out of your schedule to write a book?

A Uh, so a couple of reasons, you know, one is I think of my identity as a journalist. I'm a journalist who ended up starting this company with a couple of partners. I wrote about business and technology and science. And so, you know, I, I was covering companies like mine is now. Um, and, uh, and so when we started this company, it's in, you know, the field of media and content, which is my industry. Uh, so it was a natural thing to sort of fall into. But, uh, as we started growing the company, I realized that I had deficits in In terms of, uh, you know, how to build an innovative company, and so my first book I wrote, basically I interviewed people, and I took a tour of history and psychology to try and understand how breakthroughs happen, how innovation happens, um, and find patterns for how we can do that, um, so the writing the book was an outgrowth of my journalism work that was an excuse to help our company get better. Um, the second book that I co-authored is about our industry. It's about using storytelling to build relationships and build companies, um, and this new book, Dream Teams, Sort of a similar thing. Um, it's sort of this itch that I've had for a long time as my role went from being the guy who did stuff, right? Every founder, you know, ends up, you know, you, you paint the walls and you take out the garbage and you write the code and you do everything. Uh, my r…

AI assessment note: “writing the book was an outgrowth of my journalism work that was an excuse”

Q Well, what do people get for a thousand bucks a month? Was it like a number of words, or number of articles, or what?

A Uh, back then when we started, it was, uh, it was sort of workflow. So you want your PR people and your lawyers to weigh in on your content you're about to publish. Um, now there's a, there's a, you know, packages and tiers, but it's everything from analytics, uh, document analytics, um, sort of more hardcore workflow integrations and everything you could think of sales and implement tools. Um, so it's kind of everything you'd want to do to, uh, to organize content in a big enterprise. Um, Um, so yeah, depending on the size of your enterprise, the number of seats, it, it very much kind of mimics that standard, uh, kind of marketing automation type of, uh, SAS product, only it's content rather than, than, uh, email.

AI assessment note: “back then when we started, it was, uh, it was sort of workflow.”