Joe Coleman

Yeah, exactly right.

Yeah, so the way it worked was, it was kind of a, well, it's actually the way these things should happen, which is that we started building out the marketplace.

One of the things we did in the early days to solve the chicken or the egg problem with the marketplace was we ended up building portfolios for designers, or sorry, for journalists.

Scott Belsky, who at the time was running a company called Behance, sold it to Adobe,

He was one of our investors, and he basically said a portfolio tool like Behance should exist for journalists, and he wasn't going to build it.

So he was like, you guys should build it.

And so he did that, and he created a really awesome way for journalists to sign up to Contently and display their work in a way that was super unique and compelling versus a paper resume or a LinkedIn site.

And so that took off in the early days and helped us build out our network of talent.

So we really scaled the supply side of the marketplace pretty quickly.

And then we started looking at, okay, now that we have the writers, how do we think about the demand side of the marketplace, the brands, the media companies, all these people that wanted to tap into this network.

And what ended up happening was we started working with

bigger and bigger companies.

American Express and Coca-Cola were two of our early customers.

And what we realized pretty quickly was that the marketers over there had a lot of other problems that went beyond just finding talent.

So we were talking to our contact at Amex and they had like seven lawyers that needed to look at the piece of content before it could go live, which was shocking to us because we had never worked at a big company.

But she was like, yeah, we create this content, have to go through this process of

just endless revisions and reviews.

And as a result, a lot of the content that gets produced doesn't even ever see the light of day.

And so looking at that kind of case study and a few other things, we realized that we could actually solve a lot of those problems with software first and foremost, by getting them out of email and Excel spreadsheets and you know, Google docs and those kinds of things, and actually building a customized tool for content development, content marketing,

It would help them easily manage the approvals and sign-offs and editing process involved in content marketing.