This need for high-quality content also presents an opportunity for any startup platform that can help spur the process. Which is just what GAIN is built to do: The startup is a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and the like. Though just a six-person team, GAIN works with heavy hitters including Honda and The Weather Channel, and has enjoyed growing revenue ever year since its launch in 2014. It’s also entirely bootstrapped. Here’s a Q&A with the company’s CEO and cofounder, Albizu Garcia, that covers what they do and how they do it. Unfortunately, managing a content approval process for each piece of content can be a nightmare for both the content creators (i.e. agencies and marketing teams) as well as the final approvers or clients. It can be time-consuming to email posts and feedback back-and-forth and keep track of every edit, comment, or request on each single piece of content. That’s why we created GAIN. GAIN works like your team’s very own content traffic manager, notifying the right people at the right time, gathering feedback from clients and stakeholders, and moving the process along for you until everything is approved.” Being able to self-fund GAIN was key in allowing us to experiment and test our ideas following the Lean Startup methodology. Once we found traction, we continued experimenting using the lean model, and it was quickly apparent that we could continue growing GAIN without having to add headcount to our operation. So far, we are growing quickly, and we have hired carefully based on our revenue, always staying profitable along the way.” Another key issue for me and my co-founder was control. We did not want to lose control or have the added pressure of outside capital on what we were building. The last thing that we wanted was to have to be constantly justifying any changes or pivots that we wanted to make as a company. We decided we would much rather fail on our own terms than raise capital from traditional VCs. All in all, profitability is key to our goals of maintaining independence. It brings a sense of confidence to the team that’s really unmatched. As long as we are lean and efficient about building the best solution and experience for the companies and teams that use GAIN, we have an unlimited runway. We’d rather grow our company team slowly and carefully, instead of dealing with the challenges of assembling and managing a large team in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner.” The primary customers of GAIN are marketing and advertising professionals – mostly creatives and content creators. They are very innovative, so for us, creating a product that is clean, beautiful, and simple to use is our top priority. In the same way that many creatives would rather use iOS devices over Android, even if there are some clear limitations with iOS and Android could be considered to be more powerful and flexible, we’ve worked hard to make using GAIN a pleasing experience for our customers, which helps alleviate any shortcomings our product might have when it comes to a customer’s specific use case.”
