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Most Coloradans have found a unique incentive to rise early and venture to the mountains: they want to be one of the first ones down the mountains, in pursuit of the ever-elusive “fresh tracks.” Entrepreneurs have similar motivation to be first to market. Mike Lewis knows the feeling. While it’s hard to accurately gauge who was there first, it is fair to say that President and co-founder Mike Lewis and Kapost have been making fresh tracks in content marketing since 2010.
A 2010 Techstars company Kapost was originally planned to be making tools for media companies to measure the performance and reach of their content. Lewis and CEO Toby Murdock focused on newspapers, magazines and blogs such as Time, Fortune and Mashable. Unbeknownst to them at the time, they were laying the groundwork for a lucrative pivot into content marketing for brands.
The transition between markets began slowly, as Lewis noticed more and more brands were signing up for their service. Lewis’s first reaction was to go to these new market customers and find out why they were signing up. Lewis said he would laugh thinking, “What are you doing? This software isn’t for you.”
It turned out these enterprises were in early phases of creating their own websites and content and wanted to use the same tools media companies were using to measure how effective their branded content was at reaching its audience.
“This started happening more and more,” Lewis said.“It wasn’t until the end of 2011, a year later, we saw that this was a trend. Content marketing was a thing that was happening and we’d already built a product for the media companies, so we sort of had a two-year head start. Even then in 2011 only a very small group of people knew what content marketing was. We just said, ‘We’re going all in on this content marketing trend.’”
The tool kit Lewis and Murdock had designed serendipitously opened the door to a much larger market. That was the beauty of this pivot: the product was already made and tested, it just drew a different market than originally expected. As Lewis put it, “It wasn’t a product pivot… It was an industry pivot.” In this industry, massive corporations could take advantage of Kapost’s advanced analytics features to help measure the potency of their content and increase the return on their investment. In other words, Kapost can help huge companies market with greater efficiency than ever before. Kapost was ready for the big fish and was equipped with the right net.
Ahead of him, Lewis said he saw nothing but untouched fresh powder, blue ocean or whichever analogy you prefer. Taking advantage of all this space in their newfound market place led to tremendous growth for Kapost, as Lewis detailed a fantastic 2013: “We grew in revenue four fold in 2013 and we are planning on growing another three times in 2014. We hit profitability in early 2013 and then raised a round of funding in mid-2013 ($5.5 million) which is helping increase our growth rate. As for employees, we started 2013 as 11 people and ended at 43.”
Lewis and the Kapost team have been actively involved in the Colorado tech community, which has served as the foundation for their growth.
“Techstars and the community around Boulder have been very helpful,” Lewis said.“All of our capital from 2009 to 2013 was from this community and all of our hires were from there, so we’re very fortunate that this is a robust and talented place.”
Lewis and Kapost have made sure throughout this growth to maintain the culture company that makes the company so successful with its clients and makes it a great place to work as well. “We have a no-jerk policy,” Lewis laughs.
For 2014, the Kapost team will continue to streamline and tailor their software as the demand for their services continues to grow: “We continually try to move fast and innovate to keep providing value to our customers,” Lewis said.
Look for Kapost to continue being a leader in educating the market place on content marketing in 2014. Kapost has made a number of resources available for those who want to learn more, including the largest content marketing group on LinkedIn, eBooks and content on their site for those interested in learning more about what content marketing is and what it can do for your company. As content marketing continues to grow into a vital part of a brand’s marketing strategy, so will Kapost.
