Today we’d like to introduce you to Pawan Deshpande.
Pawan, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I started Curata (then called HiveFire) with my freshman year roommate from MIT in 2007. We knew a lot about tech, but didn’t know anything about content marketing. I don’t think content marketing was even a phrase then.
Our initial idea was for a consumer app. The basic premise was that if you were interested in a specific topic – puppies, for example – we would aggregate content on that topic. The business model was that we’d put ads on the side that was relevant to the content. So, if the topic was puppies, you’d see ads for dog food, dog toys, etc.
The tech worked really well. We got a lot of good content on there. But we weren’t getting much visibility or traffic. The everyday hobbyist doesn’t know how to market an online destination. So we started looking at other business models: media monitoring, competitive intelligence. We beta’d with some marketing departments. It worked, but the business value was relatively low. A lot of execs will look for five seconds at an email and then delete it.
Then an early customer shared it externally to their broader industry. He didn’t want to blog and be more noise. He wanted to make an online destination just about this topic. Within a few months, they were the go to blog. This was before curation, before content marketing existed. That’s how we landed at this business model.
Then, in 2010, we validated it. The customer said he’d pay $1K for our software. That was the real “aha!” moment that there was some business value here. We said, “This is real. Let’s launch the company.”
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Creating a market for content curation was hard. In the early days, no one knew what curation was. Someone even asked me if we help people cure meats! There was a lot of confusion and fear of curation. There was no clear distinction between legitimate curation, plagiarism, spam blogging and content farming.
This was similar to the early days of email, where then was no distinction between email marketing and spam. They were both very similar, had no dedicated tools (both meant stuffing email addresses in your BCC line and hitting send). But over time, there was a clear difference between the two, with best practices, dedicated tools, and legitimacy for email marketing over spam.
Similarly, we had to forge a path with curation and create best practices, technology, and legitimacy for content curation as a proper means of marketing.
When I started I was coming from an engineering background, and was very naive.
I thought you just wrote code and the checks came in! There’s a lot more to running a company from a leadership standpoint, from public speaking, from sales. These were unexpected things that I initially shied away from, but have come to embrace now.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Curata is a content marketing software company that sells two products: Curata Content Curation Software (CCS), and Curata Content Marketing Platform (CMP).
Content marketing is for people that instinctively ignore and filter out the disruptive ‘hard sell’ of traditional advertising and marketing. i.e. most of us!
Rather than content that talks about why a company or its products or services are so great, content marketing is content a prospect finds valuable. Its content aimed at a reader’s needs and wants, focused on what they care about. Instead of the annoying and distracting ads around content—it’s the content itself. Content marketing doesn’t explicitly promote a brand, but aims to stimulate interest in an organization’s products or services by creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.
Content marketing is a long term strategy that aims to build a relationship with customers and potential customers by giving them something valuable for free, no strings attached. So when it comes to buying time, a customer A) is already aware of an organization’s brand, and B) already trusts and respects that brand. Valuable, informative, entertaining content can include blogs, videos, white papers, podcasts, infographics, webinars, social media, and more.
Businesses use content marketing to generate leads, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage an online community of users.
Curata CCS allows marketers to easily discover and share industry-specific content to blogs, social channels, newsletters and more.
Curata CMP answers the biggest question for content marketers: “How is my content strategy influencing pipeline, leads, and revenue?” Curata CMP’s editorial calendar and powerful analytics enables marketers to optimize and scale their content strategy and create better content, faster.
Curata was founded on the premise that machine learning, AI, and natural language processing can bring significant value from the tsunami of online content being produced, making it easier to more efficiently create better, more relevant content for consumers.
Curata’s unique technology has made it a leader in the content curation space, along with the nascent market of “content intelligence” software.
What were you like growing up?
Since I was in the fourth grade, I’ve been fascinated with computing, programming and online content. I used to amuse myself programming with QBASIC. One of my favorite xkcd comics that really speaks to me is titled 11th grade: http://xkcd.com/519/. It suggests that one weekend messing with the programming language Perl is more valuable to your career than 400 hours of homework and 900 hours of classes. I started coding when I was 9.
In elementary school and middle school, I spent weekends at my father’s office. I would be there, using their high-speed internet to download games and using the color photo copier. He always worked weekends, which had an influence on me.
In high school I found academics interesting, but out of school programming on my own time motivated me more. The prospect of studying computer science full-time at MIT—rather than as an alternative to homework after school—always excited me. I enjoyed competitive wrestling during my time at college.
Here’s one key piece of advice my father gave me: If you have a B product and an A team, or an awesome product and idea but a B team, the A team always wins. The A team can always evolve the B product.
Otherwise, I think a lot of my entrepreneurship has been through my own exploration and discovery. In high school, I programmed a lot of products. My first paycheck came was when I was around 12 through Microsoft Business Central. I was running my own site and had banner ads.
Contact Info:
- Address: 141 Tremont St
- Website: www.curata.com
- Phone: 6172295544
- Email: info@curata.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Curata-143137844662/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/curata
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/362080/
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