SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1179 Why Co-Founder of $20m ARR Company Took Sabbatical to Write "Dream Teams"
16 Oct 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Founded back about eight years ago. They've scaled now to over 100 folks on their team, 300 customers, enterprise customers that pay about six grand a month. So call it around 20 million bucks in AR today. Growing rapidly, 20 million raised. He decided he wasn't the guy to take the company in the CMO role to the next level.
So he took a sabbatical two months, went off and wrote this book called Dream Teams. The importance of really embracing competitive stuff inside of these teams. Let the best idea win. Take the other perspectives view after lunch so you can really get in their shoes. And ultimately, that's what leads to the best ideas.
This is the top entrepreneurs podcast where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
Chapter 2: How did Shane Snow transition from entrepreneur to author?
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Good morning, everyone. My guest today is Shane Snow.
He's an award-winning journalist, celebrated entrepreneur, and the best-selling author of Smart Cuts. He's also author of the forthcoming book, Dream Teams, as well as the co-author of the storytelling, Edge.
He co-founded the content technology company, Contently, which helps creative people and companies tell great stories together and serves on the board of the Contently Foundation for investigative journalism. Shane, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready. So you know this about me.
Most authors I say no to because they just want to promote a book, and it's frankly very boring, and I just eat them alive. But you I made an exception for because you come from a SaaS 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. So Contently didn't start as a SaaS platform. It started as a marketplace, kind of a newfangled talent agency to help laid-off journalists from the New York Times connect with clients.
Turns out that the most profitable clients, the most interesting clients, 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 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, 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. That's the very quick sort of backstory.
But we actually had a point where we were going to have the software portion be free and be subsidized by the marketplace. And we got in this big argument. And the argument was solved by my partners and I deciding to do a test to start selling some features of the project management tool for a monthly fee of $1,000.
And when we sold 13 in the first month, we said, okay, this is the business and here we are. What do people get for a thousand bucks a month? Was it like a number of words or number of articles or what? Back then when we started, 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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Shane face while building Contently?
Part of what happened also, I've been doing research, I've been interviewing uh, people and, uh, and doing my sort of obsessive weekend and night thing. Um, but I realized that I was not the right person to take our company from, you know, the 15 million to a hundred million. You have Shane, you have co-founders though, right? How many co-founders? 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 guide. 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 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.
Well, coming up, we'll talk about why Chrysler failed while Wu Tang succeeded and some other surprising factors behind mergers, marriages, and partnerships. We'll also talk to you. I know you talk about the Wright brothers a lot and what their daily arguments can teach about group problem solving.
So Shane, we'll talk about both those things, but real quick, just since Facebook's hot right now in the news, you got Sheryl Sandberg to do your afterward. Tell us how you got her to agree to that and why she liked the book. So Sheryl, I helped out Cheryl and Adam Grant with their book launch, Option B, which is the book that was kind of inspired by the tragic, untimely death of her husband.
And they wrote about resilience and getting through hard things. And, uh, and they reached out to me asking if, uh, cause I'm a LinkedIn influencer, if I could write about a time when I had to be resilient to get through something and, and promote their book through that. So I wrote probably the most difficult blog post of my life about, uh, and then you can find it pretty easily.
Um, it's, uh, called how I got through the worst days of my life. And, uh, and I wrote this post and it went kind of inadvertently viral, a few million people read it. And so then Cheryl emailed me and kind of with this, uh, this email, Oh my God, uh, thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for helping us with our launch, raising awareness for this important thing.
Um, if I can ever do the same for you, let me know. So I said, would you write the afterward for my book about your philosophy on teamwork, collaboration, working together without falling apart. And so she actually pulled Adam in as a coauthor of her book. And, uh, and we then pulled in a dozen artists from around the world to illustrate, uh, cartoons with some of the salient quotes.
So the afterward of the book is, uh, It's kind of unique, but it's a collaboration, sort of, again, a meta study and people working together. But she is one of the more generous executives of huge, gnarly companies that I've run into. And I was surprised and pleased by that. It doesn't matter whether you're a startup or a huge brand.
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