How Schematic ran a two-step validation to separate problem pain from build/buy intent | Fynn Glover

**Fynn Glover** (0:00)
Everything that we've done at Schematic, that has led to us raising money, winning customers, like establishing credibility, has come down to a willingness to evangelize the problem that we're trying to solve through non-stop continuous content marketing.

**Brett** (0:16)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, our guest is Fynn Glover, co-founder and CEO of Schematic. Fynn, thanks for being here.

**Fynn Glover** (0:56)
Thanks for having me.

**Brett** (0:56)
Of course, looking forward to the conversation. Let's talk about your first business. Tell us about the media business you built in 2011

**Fynn Glover** (1:02)
Yeah, that business ended up running for about 10 years, and I kind of think about it as three different products over the course of that 10 years. The initial insight was in 2011, if you can kind of go back to like what it was like to use a smartphone at that time, it was really difficult to find local information about where to go outdoors. So like, you might come into San Francisco and Google on like a Blackberry, like what's a good hiking trail near San Francisco, and you might get like a botanical garden as the result. And so I thought that there was an opportunity to create a curated media business, curated in the sense that like local experts would help curate the best places to go outdoors. That was right around the same time that AllTrails, which has become a very popular company, was founded and the approach they were taking was like crowd sourcing information. The approach I was taking was I was hiring writers in local cities and interviewing outdoor experts that I would source from local specialty outdoor retailers.
And we ended up creating a lot of content. And openly, the way the business evolved was outdoor brands like The North Face and Marmot and Arc'teryx, they really wanted hyper local content about where to go outdoors. And so they started paying us. And so we ended up this kind of de facto media business where we were creating loads of sponsored content for outdoor brands for about five years.

**Brett** (2:15)
And obviously, the space you're in today is very different from that space. But what lessons and skills did you pour over and you're specifically kind of looking at from like a marketing perspective? Like you're a content creator, it sounds like before it was even a term to be a content creator. You built a content marketing machine. Is your marketing philosophy very rooted in content still?

**Fynn Glover** (2:37)
Yeah, great question. That's definitely like a thread in my life. I came out of college and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to play pro soccer, so I explored that a bit.
Liberal arts background, didn't feel like I knew enough about the economy, so I worked for a hedge fund for a year. And then I was like, I want to start a company. Like I could say that I wanted to do.
And about a year I had to start in the company, like it wasn't working yet. And I was kind of moonlighting wanting to be a writer. So I think there's always been sort of a thread in me that has wanted to just create written content. But anyway, the first business, yeah, about five years in, a lot of our customers who are commissioning custom content started to ask us to provide more of a content marketing service that we thought we could productize. And so it ended up happening as we started productizing portions of our publishing stack, ended up selling content marketing software to e-commerce businesses. And so I became a software entrepreneur as opposed to a media entrepreneur. And so that business, we ran it for like about five years. We raised venture capital. It was acquired by an e-mail marketing company. I didn't stay long at that company. I joined a cybersecurity company who a good friend of mine was the CEO of, and kind of started to go down a very different path career-wise, like deep into the belly of enterprise software. And for that company, I ran growth and ops and lots of stuff, and pricing and packaging fell on my lap, which is how I got to running the company that I'm running to now. But your question was like, do I believe in content marketing? Everything that we've done at Schematic that has led to us raising money, winning customers, establishing credibility has come down to a willingness to evangelize the problem that we're trying to solve through nonstop continuous content marketing.