SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1281 Contently Pays Creators $30m Annually, Passes $20m in ARR 40% yoy growth
26 Jan 2019
Chapter 1: What is Contently and how does it support creators?
created in 2011 as a marketplace to help really creators, writers, video people, photo people, create content at scale and really get linked up with people that needed their content. Marketplace grew substantially. Now today, they pay out over $30 million a year to these creators. They make $3 million on that 30, so only 15%. They really send most of that through.
Where they make most of their money is on the SaaS model. The company's paying for their creative suite, managing the process of how the content goes out, gets published, and then analyze how the content does. They have 200 customers paying there, doing about, call it 20 million bucks today in ARR, up from about 1.1 million in MR, so about 12, 13, 14 million just a year ago.
They raised 20 million bucks, but again, to the point now where if they had to be in six or seven months profitable, they could. Healthy economics, so they're working on these at least 71% gross retention and 90% net revenue retention kind of quarterly.
Chapter 2: How much does Contently pay its creators annually?
CAC, 40,000 bucks payback between six and 12 months with our team of 100 people based in New York City. 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.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers.
Chapter 3: What is the SaaS model and how does it benefit Contently?
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. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Joe Coleman. He's a lifelong entrepreneur and founded two successful internet companies before his current company called Contently.
In 2012, Joe and his co-founders were named to Inc. 's 30 under 30 list. We'll dive in today.
Chapter 4: What are the current financial metrics of Contently?
Joe, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, let's do it.
All right, so first tell us what Contently does, and then I want to talk about your growth.
Okay, cool. So Contently, our mission is to help companies drive business results with content that engages, educates, and builds trust with their users. So what that means is, in practice, we built a content marketing solution primarily geared towards large enterprise brands, so Fortune 500, those sorts of organizations, and
And what we're trying to help them do is we're helping trying to implement content marketing solutions that actually drive real results for their business. If you look into that a little bit further and think about what Contently does, there's two things that make us really special.
One of the things is that we spent the first couple of years of our business building out a marketplace for freelance creatives. And that's actually how we got started. And so today that network is around 150,000 professional journalists, videographers, data researchers, visual designers, any kind of talent that a brand might need to tell their story in a unique format is in that network.
Largest of kind of the world. The second component to that is the software platform that we've been building for the last five or so years that actually helps brands streamline the content marketing process from start to finish. So not only do you have access to the talent, it's actually integrated into this enterprise software platform that helps you
manage all the organizational change and all the process and sort of red tape and bureaucracy that often marketers run into inside of these big companies. So that's the value proposition at its core. We work with a big chunk of the Fortune 500, seven of the ten world's most valuable brands are our customers. We basically have categories like finance and insurance on lockdown.
We do really well on B2B. Travel is a big emerging category for us. People like Marriott, IHG, those types of companies. So, yeah, that's a sort of quick overview.
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Chapter 5: How does Contently ensure fair payment for freelancers?
We're not, we're not raising capital right now.
Um, yeah, we're, we're in a position now where we're really fine tuning ourselves and marketing machine. Um, We built an excellent marketing team. We also brought in a really strong sales leader and a really strong sales team. The thing about enterprise sales that sucks is you have long ramp-up times for reps. Deals take a while to close.
And so you do all this great work to get the thing in place, and then you got to wait a little while to see all those results. And so we're anticipating kind of end of Q4 this year, Q1 2019, when things are really going to start taking off for us and all that hard work we did figuring out the formulas for sales and marketing. are really gonna take off for us.
And then we'll likely look at another round of funding.
All right, Joe, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
That's a good question.
If you don't have one, don't make one up. That's okay.
I guess I'd have to say the Blue Ocean Strategy. I'm a big fan of that one.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
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