Tell us how you came to be the Founder of Narrato.
It’s actually a decade-old journey leading up to Narrato. I started my entrepreneurial journey with a content agency – Godot Media – which creates thousands of pieces of great content for its global clients. When you are working with content at this scale, with a big team and a large number of clients, you immediately see how critical a streamlined content workflow is. Even though Godot has always been a tech-oriented firm, our internally developed automation solutions, and off-the-shelf content optimization and project management software always struggled to keep up with the content process’ complexity. A similar sentiment was being echoed by our clients and partners about their content operations. And as teams are going remote and the content creation is getting more complex – the problem is getting exaggerated.
These pain points led us to believe that the world urgently needs a content creation and collaboration platform that can bring all content processes and people together. Generic project management software, document and drive solutions, and scattered content optimization software stack just don’t work.
That’s what we are building Narrato to be – one place to create and manage content smartly.
What are some of the common challenges customers approach Narrato with?
The most common challenges our customers come to us with are:
- Wanting to manage their content, and content team and other stakeholders (like clients and approvers) from a single platform.
- Want a single destination of truth for all content creation work – where they can track content creation through its lifecycle.
- Looking for a content planning software – that helps them ideate, plan and organize resources for the work.
- A platform that keeps all content created and being created neatly organized for easy access.
- A tool that allows them to optimize content for the web and create content faster.
- Consolidated content publishing management is another request we often get.
How AI is revolutionizing Content Creation and Management?
AI can play a critical role in both content creation and management.
An AI writing assistant (what we are building inside Narrato) can help you create better content faster. It can help throughout the lifecycle of content creation. The writing assistant can generate ideas and outlines, create some of the content (magically and automatically), help improve grammar and readability, and also help optimize content for SEO, sentiment, audience and web or mobile consumption. Narrato users are already enjoying some of these capabilities, and we are adding more every month to cover all these aspects.
AI can also assist in areas such as content performance analytics, content process optimization, and feedback loops to offer better content creation and process improvement suggestions. These are top of our minds too as we build Narrato.
What are some of the unique lessons you have learned from your customers being the Founder at Narrato?
Customers are our greatest teachers. Every time we talk to a customer or get feedback on email or Slack support community – we learn so much more about what Narrato should or could be. For example, there were several features that we thought were lower in the priority order before launch. But after hearing from users, we soon realized how critical they are to our users’ content processes (e.g. content versioning). Talking to customers helped us prioritize our product development efforts and also helped us evolve our product vision.
We also learned that AI content creation and planning assistant is going to be one of the most powerful features of Narrato. It will allow content teams and creators to create quality content faster and with the audience focus for great results.
What do you think separates Narrato from the rest of the market?
There is a big gap in the present software market for an integrated solution for content teams and creators. Software teams have Github, marketing teams can rely on Hubspot for bringing together a lot of marketing tools. But content teams are having to rely on generic software for project management or hyper verticalized tools for content optimization. With Narrato, we are addressing this gap in the market to offer an integrated solution for content creation and collaboration.
Can you give us a sneak peek into some of the upcoming product upgrades that your customers can look forward to?
These are the top three areas in which users will see features rolling out every few weeks:
- AI writing assistant – Our writing assistant already offers awesome grammar, readability and content optimization suggestions. Soon it will also be offering AI content generation and paraphrasing support plus assistance with content ideas and outline generation. Our content SEO, brief generation and content optimization features will follow through soon after.
- Enhanced workflow automation – Custom and automatic workflows, notifications, tasks assignments and more workflow automations are coming through soon as well.
- Enhanced publishing support – Publishing is the end goal of all content. So we understand how important it is to support this aspect of the content process. So besides publishing integrations with top CMS and social media, we’ll also be offering a flexible API soon.
As Narrato continues to grow, what advice would you give other startups and scaleups?
Listen to your customers and spend a lot of time talking to them. And when you do that, take note of the problems, not the features they are requesting. In technology ventures, building a solid product is the path to business success. Your product needs to solve your customers’ problems and do that elegantly.
This is not to say startups should not invest in marketing, promotion and sales – that’s equally important. But all your promotional efforts would be a waste if the product does not deliver on the promise.
What is that one quote that has stayed with you throughout your professional life?
Every problem has a solution. You just need to look hard enough for it. And yes, never give up.
Sophia Solanki Bio
Sophia is an entrepreneur with 15+ years of experience building great products and businesses for the content and digital marketing industry. Besides, Narrato, she has also previously co-founded Godot Media, a content services agency and Drumup, a content recommendations and social media management SAAS. Her LinkedIn and Twitter .
About Narrato
Narrato is an AI powered content creation, collaboration and workflow management platform for content teams, creators, marketing teams, agencies, and businesses. Narrato lets users create and optimize content faster, plan and manage content projects, automate workflow, and keep a content repository. Narrato also has a content marketplace for ordering content. Currently, you can request a free access to Narrato Workspace (till Nov, 2021).