Scripted is the leading provider of original written content. It provides written content for thousands of customers — ranging from small businesses to large enterprise — through its curated user-base of specialist writers. In this episode of the Crowd, we sit down with Ryan Buckley, Co-Founder and Head of Sales at Scripted.

For more information on Scripted: https://scripted.com/

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Transcript:

 

Kevin: Let’s say you have an idea. You’re going to be the next Etsy or Uber or whatever marketplace you want to create. Power your marketplace with Near Me.

 

Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

Today, I’m super excited about our interview. We’re going to connect with Ryan Buckley, the Co-Founder and Head of Sales at Scripted. Scripted is a marketplace where you can connect companies and brands with great copywriters whether you need a blog post, white paper, website page, article or product description. Scripted can provide you with blog posts, white papers, website pages, articles and product descriptions. Anyways, let’s jump in to the interview.

 

Hello. I’m your host, Kevin Cohen. I’m super excited about today’s interview. Today, I’ll be joined by Ryan Buckley. Ryan is the Co-Founder and Head of Sales at Scripted. Ryan, welcome to the show.

 

Ryan: Glad to be here, Kevin. Thanks for having me.

 

Kevin: Of course. Please tell all of our listeners here today, what is Scripted?

 

Ryan: Scripted makes it easy for businesses to get high quality original content. We have a network of writers that we have vetted and we spend a lot of our time and technology making sure that we have a really high quality supply that meets the needs of our demands which in this case we’re dealing with writers and businesses. We guarantee the quality of our product and streamline the process of getting high quality blog posts, white papers, press releases, guides. Anything you need written, we can provide it easily and on time.

 

Kevin: Before we jump in to our discussion on Scripted, Ryan, I’ve got some rapid fire questions for you. What book do you recommend most often?

 

Ryan: The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I found it’s an easy read with tons of stellar advice. It’s actually one of the best business books I’ve ever read.

 

Kevin: Awesome. Where do you spend most your time online?

 

Ryan: Reddit, Techmeme and chess.com. I really love the chess.com iPhone app as well.

 

Kevin: Awesome. What do you do when you’re not working?

 

Ryan: I like to actually sing and play with my daughter, sing to and play with my daughter, jog, read and I mentioned playing chess earlier. My wife and I have a 12-week-old now and it’s been interesting finding ways to fit my favorite things to do around her needs. Like, jogging is a great match. So we have a jogging stroller. She also likes to hear me play guitar. So I’m finding those win-wins.

 

Kevin: Wonderful. Well, congratulations.

 

Ryan: Thanks.

 

Kevin: And then what peer-to-peer marketplaces or services do you like to use?

 

Ryan: Well, there are the obvious ones like Uber and Lyft and I switch back and forth between those apps. And this isn’t a peer-to-peer marketplace but twice a week we use Zesty for our office catering. And of course, I use Scripted for a lot of my own writing.

 

Kevin: Wonderful. How did you come up with the idea for Scripted?

 

Ryan: Early on, we actually started a screenwriting software company. We thought there was an opportunity to disrupt Hollywood by getting in between studios and writers and we thought the best way to do that would be to create online screenwriting software. So this was 2007 and we launched in 2008. We struggled with this for three years trying to find a good business model that would actually scale. And for many reasons, it was just difficult to actually build a meaningful company around screenwriting and selling screenplays into Hollywood but it turned out that we won the contest for best screenwriting software. We merged with another company and we were the leader for online screenwriting software. It just turned out there wasn’t a whole lot of money there. However, we began to get requests for non-film content starting around 2010 and 2011 and I’m happy to get into this later in the podcast but it was that market pull that eventually led us down the path of building a marketplace for businesses to order content marketing through the web.

 

Kevin: Very nice, very nice. After you pivoted from the screenplay arena and opened up the kimono to a lot of other types of copy, what were some of your early wins?

 

Ryan: Levi’s was actually our very first client. I met them at a lunch at South by Southwest and I was there just as much for the South by Southwest Film as I was for the interactive and there a lot of Scripped – at that time, it was Scripped spelled like ripped. That was the name of the company and there were a lot of screenwriters there, businesses and the film industry who had heard of Scripped. So South By was a great place for us to go. And it turned out that I sat next to a marketing executive from Levi’s at a lunch. I didn’t think much of it at that time but I got her business card. She got mine. And a few months later, we got a call. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was a voicemail and not a call from Walter Haas, Jr. who’s part of the founding Levi’s Dynasty. And I went to UC Berkeley where there’s a Hass Business School named after Walter Haas which I suppose is his grandfather. So it’s really cool to get that message from him.

 

And he said “hey, we were just really curious about you guys. We’re trying to think outside the box. We don’t need a film script but we would love to harness this crowd of screenwriters to do something non-film related.” And they were putting us up against their agency and this was five or four years ago –ish now when crowd sourcing was kind of new and really hot and everyone had to get into crowd sourcing. So they looked at us. They were looking at our crowd and were really curious about that. And I think the total deal size was like less than $10,000 but we enjoyed doing it so much and the writers really enjoyed it that we thought “geez, if Levi’s is willing to work with us, then let’s just start asking our friends.” And I graduated from business school and so had my co-founder. We had friends in marketing positions at larger companies and friends who are starting companies.

 

So we just started asking them. What do you need to have written? Do you need blog posts? Do you need tweets? And unanimously, the answer was yes. There was an incredibly high demand for a consistently high quality source of writing that if we could provide something where the writing is dependable, it’s on time, it’s consistent, they know what to expect, they know what it’s going to cost and we make it easy for them, then it was really clear that there was going to be a real business opportunity there. And I remember those early days. We just didn’t hear no. Just everybody needed writing. So it was a lot of fun just to contact anybody and basically be able to sell into any company.

 

Kevin: And is there a sweet spot, a certain type of copy that constitutes the majority of what you do? Or are you guys all over the board?

 

Ryan: It’s your standard blog post, 400-500 words written about – it’s something insightful about your industry. That’s really our sweet spot where it’s not private knowledge. It’s not something that’s specific to your product that only someone inside your company is going to know but something that can be researched that is still specific to the market that you’re in but can be conjured by someone who doesn’t necessarily work for your company. So in general, I would call it a high quality generic or a blog post with the concept that hasn’t been written before that directly applies to your business.

 

Kevin: What were some of the challenges that you had early on?

 

Ryan: The challenges we had then are really the same that we have now. It’s constantly vetting our writers and dealing with the challenges of scale which are making sure that our quality is high and it doesn’t vary. So we are consistent in the level of quality and the style of writing that we provide. And I’d say something that is new is scaling up our customer support in a way that it doesn’t require us to have an entire call center so providing better FAQs and knowledge bases and tutorial videos and also incorporating customer feedback into our product. And we actually have a really exciting product release scheduled for tomorrow which is March 24. It’s going to be the biggest release we’ve ever had in the history of Scripted actually. We are completely redeveloping our business dashboard, completely new look, completely new code from the front to the back. It’s brand new and it’s actually incorporating a lot of the feedback we’ve received from our clients over the last two years.

 

Kevin: Very cool. So what is your vetting process like for writers? Give us a snapshot of what that looks like.

 

Ryan: Yeah. So first thing they do when they come in is they take an English proficiency test. And this is something that we’ve developed in-house after discovering that the writers who were performing worst in Scripted were consistently making the same types of grammatical mistakes. And these are grammar mistakes that you typically make if you’re not a native English speaker and that’s the target. When we talk to our clients, we’re saying that – most of our writers are in North America, Western Europe and Australia but yes we will work with writers in India if they are native English speakers. So we’re not going to bias necessarily geographically but we do want to make sure that everyone who writes on Scripted writes the same way that a native speaker would.

 

So we discovered a certain type of grammatical error and that usually trips up non-native English speakers and incorporated that into a test that you have to take when you first sign up as a writer on Scripted. And that immediately filters out about 20 percent of writers who sign up. And then after that, you have to give us writing samples. One is to a prompt. The other is an open sample that is per reviewed by writers that we’ve selected. So it’s reviewed by a crowd of other writers, basically their peers within Scripted.

 

And then once that is reviewed three times and the scores above are threshold for the writing sample review, then a writer is able to claim jobs. That gets them through the funnel but the way that we think about it is then the scoring really begins when we can see what our editor feedback gives to those writers as well as business feedback. And this is a constantly running machine that we’ve written on writer quality and editor quality. We are tweaking this algorithm all the time and trying to find new ways to predict whether our writers are going to be successful in Scripted or not.

 

Kevin: And in getting different writers, is it a challenge to get supply on that side of your business?

 

Ryan: Yeah. So the supply side has always been our focus. We had the benefit of like I said in the early days building a community of about 80,000 screenwriters. And when we pivoted over to Scripted, we took, basically invited the best screenwriters from Scripped over to Scripted. We’ve been running contests on Scripped so we knew who the best screenwriters were. And it started with spreadsheet and then it just grew from there. So on the supply side, we did all kinds of scrappy things. Primarily, email marketing worked really, really well and our first 1000 customers came via email and I’d actually credit our Seed round and our Series A to mastering email marketing into small businesses. Most of our revenue came off of that.

 

Kevin: Very cool. Recently, you raised some VC money. What was that like?

 

Ryan: It was hard. It’s always harder than you think. We’ve raised about $15 million to date as Scripted. And it seems like every round we get it close in just the nick of time. And I don’t want to tell you how close we were to the bottom of the barrel the last couple of rounds but it’s kind of a cliché harrowing experience that we’ve gone through. I fully expect that our next rounds will be a heck of a lot easier because now we have the battle scars from having done this before and we know what to expect and we have a really awesome board of directors now who are prepping us. And we know what we need to hit in order to have a really smooth Series C.

 

With that being said, I think particularly for marketplaces it’s really hard to get the flywheel running. It’s really capital intensive. You’re kind of running two businesses at the same time. And because of that, early growth can be kind of slow and most marketplaces don’t have subscription models. So your unit economics and your lifetime value don’t follow the typical SAS model. And I think there are really interesting reasons behind why marketplaces don’t have subscriptions. And unfortunately when we’re going out and fund raising, we’re coming up against businesses that are looking through the same investment checks from the same guys who have metrics that just look vastly different than ours. The strength of a marketplace of course down the road once you get more mature is that this is a flywheel that once it’s going it’s really hard to stop and it’s extremely defensible.

 

So in summary, you have to find a partner at one of these venture firms who believes in the vision and believes that you’ll get there and will look past some of the poor metrics that you’re just bound to have as an early stage marketplace. But they’ll look down the road map and they’ll see what you see two years down the road and get excited about that. So you got to find someone who’s more excited about the future than they are about your numbers today.

 

Kevin: Interesting. So on the demand side, you alluded to the fact that you got Levi’s as an early customer and you’ve had quite a bit of luck or good fortune around that. Has that continued today in terms of your sales? Have you found that you have a consistent amount of buyers out there with a big need?

 

Ryan: Yeah. So we are doing really well in the mid-market in particular the views are  small businesses and also small agencies who have clients as small businesses who need somewhere between 4 and 20 blog posts per month. That customer, especially that customer who has a mature marketing program is perfect for us. Our sales program fits that customer really well. We’re able to do streamlines, online proof with content with no strings attached so they can order a few blog posts, try out our model, test our marketplace, see what kind of writing they get back. And most of the time, a vast majority of the time, they love it and they want to commit to a volume discount. And that’s when our sales team gets involved.

 

For the enterprise side of the market, we’re still figuring out to some degree how to repeat some of the big successes that we’ve had with let’s say the Fortune 100. We worked with a number of ecommerce sites that just needs tons of guide and website landing page copies. So this of course is an SEO play they don’t want just randomly generated keyword rich content. They want it written by someone real who actually understands the topic that they need written about. So it’s important to them that a human is there actually writing it and might even get shared socially or with their friends, sent around by email because it’s so well written. And there are companies out there that have thousands, if not tens of thousands of pages like that, that needs to be written. So those are the deals that we go after on the enterprise side.

 

And then, we also have a third segment of our business that my marketing team is always working on growing and that’s our pure online business. You can actually order content on Scripted, give us a credit card online and never speak to a salesperson, never have to commit to a subscription or retainer but it’s essentially pay as you go, retail like, very much like in Uber or Lyft. You can just buy one piece of content and then come back a week, a month, a quarter later and buy again.

 

Kevin: Yeah. It seems like a big opportunity for you guys is for any business that subscribes to the inbound marketing methodology because that whole methodology requires that you have a consistent stream of blog copy that then is syndicated out to various social media. So obviously, your marketing team should be targeting anybody that’s a fan of HubSpot on Facebook.

 

Ryan: Yeah. We are big fans of HubSpot. They’re a great company and we’re pretty close with them.

 

Kevin: For sure. It’s a relationship that really speaks hand in hand with each other.

 

Ryan: Yup.

 

Kevin: So what are your big objectives for 2015?

 

Ryan: It’s three things, retention, conversion and average spend. Everything on our product road map directly impacts one of those three objectives. And we have a list of tactics that we’ll be trying throughout the year to improve each of them and that ranges from our big dashboard redesign and relaunch that we’re doing tomorrow to back end algorithmic changes to our writer matching process, thinking about new industries to introduce and new ways to refine the types of writers that get in to Scripted and how we’re doing that vetting. There’s a lot. We’ll be introducing some new products, some new writing products later this year as well to help increase the average spend. This our 2015 objective. It’s focusing on those three metrics and that of course all drives down to our bottom line which fortunately has been moving on the right direction.

 

Kevin: For our listeners that are thinking of starting a marketplace or already have one, what advice can you share with them?

 

Ryan: Start early. It’s harder and it takes a lot longer than you think. And you should also plan to build towards a venture capital investment. That just means that everything you do in terms of the systems that you’re setting up, the metrics that you’re tracking, the types of hires that you’re making should be attracted to venture capital firms. And I say that because I’ve looked but have not found an example of a bootstrapped marketplace that actually hit liquidity. And by liquidity, I mean, high scale matching between supply and demand. If you happen to know one or maybe some of your listeners will in the comments respond to this but I have not found a marketplace that was successfully bootstrapped and hit significant scale. I think it just takes too much capital. You’re going to burn money in the beginning.

 

You can maybe bootstrap really slowly but then you’re going to be vulnerable to someone else who has the same marketplace idea who does raise capital. They’re just going to out swing you on both the supply and the demand. So that’s why I say plan for along slug, plan to need to raise capital which means getting things in order. So you make that fund raising process as easy as possible and just fight it out. But understand that once you do hit on a flex-ion point, things start to look a heck of a lot different. And marketplaces for that reason have staying power and they’ll stick around.

 

Kevin: Right. Well, I think there’s almost a misconception by marketplace entrepreneurs that because they’re in a marketplace they don’t have to invest in inventory. And in reality even though you’re not buying inventory directly, you still have supply side inventory costs in the –

 

Ryan: Exactly.

 

Kevin: Yeah. You have supply acquisition cost instead of customer acquisition cost. So you still are buying part of your inventory even though it’s a different form and that just needs to be included in your proforma.  

 

Ryan: Yup, yup. And then also thinking about the impact on your P&L. And this again goes back to thinking ahead of what your VCs are going to see when they look at you. Your take rate on a marketplace ranges from 10 percent or less, in some cases to above 50 percent. We’re in a business where our take rate is above 50 percent but oDesk and others are under 10 usually and that’s just going to be right off the bat. What’s your gross margin? Usually 10 percent gross margin businesses don’t look that good but investors, VCs expect that in marketplaces. But if you can get your take rate higher than that, it’s going to help you in the long run. And in order to do that, you have to create value for your supply. And there’s this whole distant  inter-mediation problem which is going to come up when you pitch to any investor, any marketplace investor. They would want to know what’s going to prevent your demand from reaching around you and going directly to the supply. And you got to have an answer there that it’s the same answer that justifies your take rate.

 

Kevin: Right, right. You just have to make the experience so amazing that it doesn’t make sense. The other thing is – here’s an example of why – it’s actually very easy to go around the controls at Elance and oDesk but one reason why I never recommend anybody do that is because of the escrow functionality and dispute resolution process. If you go around and you have a bad experience and you’ve made the transaction using PayPal, your recourse is very limited. And it can really be a pain in the neck process. So there are a lot of reasons why for a consumer not to go around the process and just stay within a moderated marketplace.

 

Ryan: I completely agree.

 

Kevin: Yup. So where can people learn more about Scripted? Give us your URL. Tell us where they can find out more.

 

Ryan: Absolutely. So scripted.com. Just like it sounds. Scripted.com is our website and all of our products and pricing are available there. Several channels by which to contact us but you can find us by email at support@scripted.com if you have a general inquiry. You can also contact me directly. I am ryan@scripted.com. And our phone number if you want to reach someone here by phone is 1800-797-4470.

 

Kevin: Perfect. And we’ll also have all that information in our show notes.

 

Ryan: Okay. Great.

 

Kevin: Perfect. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for your time today. We look forward to seeing what Scripted does today, tomorrow and in the near future. And we wish you the best of luck.

 

Ryan: Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it.

 

Kevin: So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank Ryan from Scripted for joining us here today. They’re doing great stuff so check them out. If you want to learn more about Scripted, we’ve got all their information in the show notes. Go to www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and go to the podcast listing. Also, if you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go iTunes and leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out. Don’t forget to subscribe while you’re there. Make it a great day and thank you.