The Ledger
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Gomez: Competitors like Contently and Skyword hyperscaled too early without efficiency
“I see these companies, the hyperscale too early, my personal take, and that comes with a cost. They didn't have the efficiency.”
Per-user pricing fails in MarTech and collaborative workflows
“We've tried things like per user pricing and all that stuff, and I've come to the conclusion that it just doesn't work very well in MarTech in general, but, you know, particularly in a business like ours where We want as many people on the system as we can get…”
Contently pays freelance creators over $30M annually
“So it's well over thirty million dollars now, mid thirty millions in terms of what we're actually paying these creators each year, which is awesome.”
Contently posted 71% gross and 90% net retention last quarter
“So our churn across the board this has been something we've been working a lot on in last quarter, it was 71% gross retention and about 90% net retention.”
Contently recognizes only its 15% marketplace take as revenue
“What we've decided to do recently is not count the 85% of the dollar that goes to the writer we just count it as pass-through now, and so we count only the 15% that we take”
Snow: Contently raised $20M, one quarter of competitor funding
“We've raised twenty million dollars in total which is about a quarter of any of our competitors which is great for us because we're, you know, similar size and have an outsized presence in presence in our own content marketing.”
Contently counts seven of the ten most valuable brands as customers
“We work with a big chunk of the Fortune 507 of the 10 world's most valuable brands are our customers.”
Contently's CAC payback period ranges from six to 12 months
“Our payback, it swings anywhere between, you know six months and a year, sort of depending on how we do that quarter and those kinds of things.”
Contently expects to reach a $20M SaaS ARR run rate
“Fast subscription revenue will end the year at about a, on a twenty million dollar or so run rate and then the content component of that is quite a bit larger.”
Contently has raised $20M in equity over seven years
“We've raised about twenty million dollars in equity over the last seven years or so.”
Contently exceeds 90% gross retention in its Fortune customer cohort
“Getting it to be the kind of customers where we do really well, Fortune, and when you look at that cohort we're at 90 plus percent gross retention and then net negative on the MRR churn side.”
Contently pays creators immediately upon submitting first drafts
“And we do things like make sure that they get paid immediately on the submit of their first draft, which is night and day between what they're used to, where journalists will write a column for a magazine and then wait 90 days to get paid.”
Contently's creator network includes 150,000 freelance professionals
“Today that network is around a 150,000 professional journalists, videographers, data researchers, Visual designers have any kind of talent that a brand might need to tell their story in a unique format is in that network.”
Contently's fully loaded CAC averages $40,000
“Right now it's about 40,000. It's sort of, Goes between 30 and 50 K.”
Contently's average new customer starts at a $60K ACV
“The average customer typically starts with a subscription that's somewhere around 60 K and ACV. And that's just on subscription fees.”
Contently charges brands a 15% marketplace take rate
“So we take a pretty small rate of whatever the marketplace transactions are. It's typically around 15% depends on a few variables, but that's sort of where it falls. You know, it's typically where it falls falls in line. Although that's, you know, the way it's…”
Snow: Took two-month sabbatical so team would stop bypassing new CMO
“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 after a month of getting her up to speed, I wanted people to stop going around me. And really for the mantle to fall on her. And so …”
Snow: Contently validated SaaS model by selling 13 subscriptions at $1K
“My partners and I deciding to do a test to start selling some features of the project management tool for a monthly fee of a thousand dollars, and when we sold 13 in the first month, we said, okay this is the business, and here we are.”