by Janus Boye
How do you best provide organisations with a no nonsense way to gather and organise content?
This was the original problem that Alice Deer and her co-founders Angus & James set out to solve some 10 years ago, when they founded a software firm called Gather. Quickly it became GatherContent and their initial approach was to provide an easy way to collect and structure client content. Painlessly was the keyword back then, where many customers were profoundly loud about how they disliked working with content in their CMS.
Fast forward to today, and Alice has been the CEO in a bootstrapped B2B SaaS business with 20 employees for 10 years. As a co-founder, Alice has been going through all the typical entrepreneurial roles of hiring, dealing with finance, marketing and naturally also speaking with customers.
Earlier this month another big milestone was achieved as GatherContent was acquired by Bynder, so now her role is shifting once again. Now she is General Manager in the GatherContent part of the bigger business based out of her office in Brighton, UK. She is also our expert of the month.
Alice Deer with one of the GatherContent co-founders Angus Edwardson holding up the Bynder logo after the recent acquisition
Being a distributed team before the pandemic
Today many organisations have learned the benefits of having teams that are distributed geographically, but prior to the pandemic, many organisations were still either in person or what is still called remote, meaning organised around a headquarter in the centre.
At GatherContent that’s also how they started. Initially with an office in Aberdeen and then later on paying a bit more rent in London. This went fine for a while, and before the travel restrictions set in, it was also possible to bring the team together for offsites and team building.
In my conversation with Alice, she mentioned how GatherContent relatively quickly realised that having that remote focus, also applied having a center, which wasn’t ideal for the company culture as it created an imbalance. They decided to cancel the London lease and become fully distributed, which according to Alice turned out to be a huge advantage in terms of processes when then pandemic hit, as they were better prepared than most for a situation with everyone working from home.
Leading an innovative and growing startup in a distributed setting is a special kind of challenge which requires trust, warmth, competences and more. Among the company values that Alice has been championing is a focus on wellness, integrity, direct feedback and continuous improvement.
Knowing what good looks like
When it comes to improvement, Alice talked about the importance of knowing what good looks like. Specifically she’s invested quite some time in looking to the best among her peers, and people who've been there and done it, to really level up GatherContent across the business.
As she said:
European founders have much to learn from the US as it is more of a mature market for software startups
Specifically, she found that it is quite easy to reach out to other experts, and many of them are happy to help.
One of the best examples of this was when Alice heard a podcast on scaling after 'Product Market Fit', with Shelley Perry of Scaleogix - who is an expert in Scale-Up stage software companies, with years at Insight Partners & Board positions in prominent SaaS companies like Chargebee under her belt. This led to an incredibly valuable coaching relationship with Alice, Angus & the wider GatherContent team.
She has also done this with other functional areas such as finance and pricing, working with people who have a strong track record in successfully navigating these stages. Pricing IO - particularly Marcos Rivera and Bryant Tolles of KTT Global have also been key drivers of best practices throughout this stage.
What does the wider content stack look like?
Being at the helm of a growing software firm that tackles digital content for over a decade, Alice naturally also has an experienced voice on how you best create content for multiple audiences. Having said that, the tool landscape is shifting at the moment or like she said:
The MarTech ecosystem is rapidly evolving
Behind the scenes, GatherContent has worked on what Alice called “high stakes customer types”, where they’ve focused on how GatherContent can help the customer straight away.
In our conversation, Alice multiple times reminded me both to always keep the big picture in mind, and strongly recommended always to ask questions. This is what she’s been doing much of with simple and powerful questions like these:
What are you trying to solve?
Who are involved in the process?
What other products are you using?
Following the customer needs, has also helped gain a better understanding of how to address workflow, a requirement that has left many customers hanging in the CMS world.
Finally, Alice shared a tip to keep learning about the content stack of the future: Invest the time to explore the tools of the trade as this will provide you with useful inspiration in terms of how to better meet requirements and also to spot emerging trends.
Which books have inspired Alice?
Similar to other experts, during our conversation Alice several times referred to books that have inspired her, changed her view of the big picture and helped form how she’s worked as a co-founder of the business.
Here’s just four books, she recommended including a mini review from her side:
Turn the ship around by David Marquet, which is all about team members becoming accountable. Nothing is better than a team member 'putting their name' against an initiative or functional area and feeling that sense of ownership
Traction by Gino Wickman, which comes with the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Simple tools for running a business well- especially love the concept of Level 10 meetings and how to run a meeting successfully. This is even more significant in Hybrid environments. The 'People Analyser' tool is also very powerful for any manager looking for a common sense framework to apply to performance management.
Crossing the chasm by Geoffrey Moore. This book is gold for anyone driving product innovation connecting that to GTM efforts and revenue growth as a business scales. So many practical takeaways.
Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach. I've always been fascinated by customer journeys and how to make them more seamless. This is even more critical as a PLG (product-led - growth) company with very different touchpoints from sales led organisations. Every software company should be evaluating their customer journey regularly and looking for ways to reduce points of failure, and help their customers get to value as quickly as possible.
Learn more about Alice Deer
You can naturally connect with Alice on LinkedIn.