Relato

At Relato, we're building our platform to help B2B SaaS scale content operations.

Our ambition is to be the content operations platform that’s trusted by the best B2B marketing teams in the world. We will support the needs of modern content teams: content leaders, freelance writers, and agency operators.

We are on a mission to drive business growth through content, with AI as an amplifier of human storytelling.

CEO and Co-Founder

Stonehaven Ventures

Founder & CEO

Waved

Chair Of The Board Of Directors

Factiverse AS

Board of directors

Atelier AS

Board of Directors

Beaufort Solutions

Co-founder & Chair of the Board of Directors

Kapp Securities AS

Co-founder & Board of Directors

Finstart Nordic

Justify

Board Of Directors

boost.ai

I'm building Relato to help B2B content teams scale. Our platform will support the needs of content managers, freelancers, writers, and content teams at agencies. Visit relato.com to learn more and sign up for early access.

About me

I'm a 3 x Co-Founder and CEO in Fintech, Martech, B2B SaaS. Pre-seed investor and BoD. Father & cyclist. 

As Founder & CEO at Stonehaven Ventures, I invest in and support early-stage technology startups. I serve on the board of a number of businesses and advise portfolio companies on technology strategy, growth tactics, e-commerce, and growth.

As Co-founder of Beaufort Solutions, Monio, Kantega, and Signicat I have a deep understanding of technology startups, financial technology (fintech), and electronic identity.

As Head of Strategy at Making Waves, part of The North Alliance, I worked with some of the largest Nordic brands in developing digital strategies, platforms, and solutions.

I split my time between Oslo and Barcelona where I enjoy life with my wife and two children.

Most content managers neglect onboarding freelancers:

⤷ Rush into the first assignment
⤷ Skip the brief; let them run with a keyword
⤷ Offer no real feedback
⤷ Evaluate the relationship based on a single project

🚧 This is skipping 90% of the process to get value from freelancers.

The truth is that too many view using freelancers as a way to offload tasks and not as a strategic partnership.

⤷ “We need to increase content output”
⤷ “How many pieces can you write per month?”
⤷ “I’m too busy to spend time giving feedback”

It’s irrational to skip the process but expect ROI.

🔮 Freelancers can't read your mind. With the right onboarding, they won't need to.

Writers and editors need an in-depth understanding of your strategy to do their best work.

💡 Invest in a proper onboarding process to get maximum value out of the relationship.

Without it, they can't deliver high-quality work that aligns with your organization's goals and makes a positive impact on the business.

➊ Collect strategic material like your content strategy, writing guide, ICP or Buyer Personas, and product information.

➋ Make it all available in a shared space like Google Drive or Notion. Use video walkthroughs to support visual learners.

➌ Book an onboarding call to guide them through the material, answer questions and develop the relationship.

➍ Clarify where and how you’ll communicate. Give freelancers access to your project management tool and confirm if you prefer to communicate via Slack or email.

➎ Write detailed briefs and reiterate your strategy. Provide access to product demos and data when relevant.

➏ Set up a multi-step trial process when evaluating. Give freelancers several chances to demonstrate their ability to deliver work aligned with your strategy.  Allow them to learn and to demonstrate that they can improve.

➐ Provide constructive feedback. Add edits directly to the draft and record a video to add context and connection. Share what worked and what didn’t, providing actionable explanations for both.

➑ Discuss long-term projects. Send a message or book a call to discuss the next steps after the trial process. Along with discussing scope, explain strategic elements that need improvement.


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David Baum

I’ve been building companies for more than two decades. 

🚀 Your tech stack can speed you up or slow you down. 🐌 

Here’s the essential software and tools we use at Relato, an early-stage B2B SaaS:

Google Workspace for email and file storage, docs and sheets
Keynote from Apple for decks. Always.
Testing Audienceful for the first time for our mailing lists. 
Tech and product workflow is on Linear (really miss a native iOS app).
Team collaboration as always on Slack.
Currently not enjoying doing documentation in Notion.
Product design is pure joy with Figma.
We use Google meet for video calls.
Google Calendar for scheduling
tl;dv - AI Meeting Assistant for notetaking and recording (testing alternatives)
Loom for async video.
Hotjar for website visitor session, Insights and heatmaps.
Google Analytics 4 (🤨) for website analytics.
LinkedIn Insights and LinkedIn Sales Navigator
HubSpot for CRM with Clearbit installed.
Loving the free version of RB2B! from Retention.com
Data enrichment with Clay and friends.
Marketing on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.
Buffer for occasional post-scheduling.

We used Stripe Atlas for incorporation support in Delaware.
Banking with Mercury.
Stable takes care of snailmail from the Internal Revenue Service and friends.
OpenPhone for calls, voicemail and workflow.
Accounting on Intuit QuickBooks.
Stripe for payments (when we find a customer willing to pay).

😬 This is far from everything.

Any interest in our current tech stack for dev tools, CMS, website, landing pages and our app?

Let me know in the comments👇

There are a lot of new folks around here, so I decided to kick off the April Relato Update with a quick re-introduction.

I'm David, Co-founder and CEO at Relato, content operations for B2B GTM teams.

I've been around for a while 👴 , so don't hold your breath for this part:

Previously CEO and Co-founder of marketplace lender Monio (acquired by SR-Bank in 2019), Co-founder of technology consultancy Kantega, digital identity pioneer Signicat (acquired by Nordic Capital in 2019), partner and Head of Strategy at Making Waves (acquired by The North Alliance in 2015), CEO at Finstart, fintech VC in the Nordics, and CEO and founder of Stonehaven Ventures, a private multi-stage investment corporation.

Also, I'm an early stage investor in AI startup Factiverse, revenue intelligence platform Breyta.io, UX platform Teston (acquired by UserTesting), ambiance optimization startup Waved, and art marketplace Atelie.

This next part is kind of meta.

⤷ As we develop our content operations platform for B2B marketing teams, we have also been building out content operations for Relato. 

⤷ We are a B2B content marketing team, too. 🤷‍♂️ 

⤷ I’m proud to announce that I have promoted myself to content manager. Sadly no raise, though. 

⤷ We recently published our first two pieces. I really enjoyed creating them with content rockstars Stephanie Trovato and Anna Sonnenberg. They are linked below.

Here are select highlights from last month’s progress:
➊ We’ve published our first (proper) blog posts, Maximizing impact with less and How to Create a Strategy-Led Freelance Onboarding Process.
➋ Thanks in no small part to the excellent work of Stephanie Trovato and Anna Sonnenberg, our website now has a domain rating of 4. 😬 
➌ At this point in time, we don’t care much about writing for a search audience, but it is so nice to register new surprise backlinks.
➍ Product development is humming along. If you know somebody you think should be on our early access list, please tag them in a comment.
➎ People buy from people they like and trust. So, there's no way around founder-led marketing and sales. Founder audience and engagement is something I track. 
➏ Follower count is a vanity metric, but audience growth indicates that the content we share resonates. In March, LinkedIn followers crossed the 5.000 mark, and engagement rose by who knows what percent. Even for a rented platform, LinkedIn Analytics is awful.
➐ We’ve made some nice updates to the UX on our site (new bottom CTA) and blog, Content In Motion.

Peace.

Growth stage CMO: 
We’re using AI to do more with less while we scale content operations.

The content operations:

Your content with a comprehensive brief vs “let them run with a keyword”

No alternative text description for this image

We offer three types of content: good, cheap or fast. You can pick any two.


I spoke with a content director recently who leads an in-house content team of 18, works simultaneously with two agencies and hires an average of 20 freelancers.

This was in a YMYL niche with strict review and approval policies. That, combined with very little trust, resulted in mind-numbing lead times.

Most pieces took months from content brief to first click.

The whole setup was managed in spreadsheets and by email.

Top four takeaways:

⤷ Spreadsheets for content inventory and operations don’t scale gracefully beyond three users.

⤷ Inefficient approval flows 8x lead times on actually publishing content.

⤷ Time spent moving text and attachments in and out of emails compounds quickly.

⤷ A single source of truth for content, a repository or common searchable storage is extremely valuable.

They ended up migrating from spreadsheets to a generic project management tool and a DAM system. 

A content ops specialist worked for months, setting it up with support from the vendor onboarding team.

The results?

⤷ Content velocity is about the same (Volume is down, but that’s because they are in a different phase now).

⤷ Nobody wanted to shift the quality of their work, so that’s about the same. 

⤷ Approvals have been simplified due to a reorg. Time spent on sign-offs is halved.

⤷ Costs are up quite a bit due to the new tool and content operations specialist on staff.

⤷ Leadership is happy because they feel more in control. The new software has a few helpful reports and makes it easier to connect content goals with strategy.

What can you learn from this?

Depending on what you prioritize, content operations can create different outcomes: high quality, low cost or high velocity. You can only have two.

➊ Creating high-quality content within tight budget constraints won't be fast.

➋ High-quality content with high content velocity won't be cheap and is hard to scale.

➌ To the extent that low cost and high velocity are achievable in a YMYL niche, your results will tank as quality suffers.



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This model mimics subtle human expressions so well you almost forget you’re watching a machine.

The subtle raise of an eyebrow and the quick twitch of a smile is almost too good to be true.

Blows my mind to think of what’s to come.

Microsoft Research published a paper on VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time.

Link to more video samples and the research paper below.

Hanna Larsson: Build an audience first, then a business. 🔥 

Jason Cohen: No sense investing heavily in brand before Product/Market Fit. 🚒 

🧐 I have so many questions:
⤷ Isn't the most important part of building an audience investing in your brand?
⤷ Is it actually possible to work on PMF without an audience?
⤷ Isn't the brand integral to PMF?
⤷ Do brandless products actually exist?

If both stances are good advice, building a business involves doing both at the same time; build an audience and work on PMF.

🛩  And pivoting means rebuilding the plane mid-flight.

It's certainly easier to build a business when you already have an audience. Given that it's the right audience for the business.

And investing heavily in brand (or content, for that matter) is a massive waste if you end up pivoting so hard that everything has to change.

What do you think?

Hanna Larsson says "Build an audience first".

Jason Cohen says "No sense in investing in brand before PMF."

Post sales call roadmap presentation: CTO vs CEO.

✋ Here's one for B2B content teams.

📓 I've interviewed more than 50 content marketers in the last three months while building Relato.

😕 One of the most common frustrations for writers in B2B SaaS is dealing with inconsistent or vague briefs.

In many cases, writers aren’t given a brief at all.

This can sometimes work where there is an ongoing relationship, and the writer knows the client’s business well. I totally get content managers looking to speed things up.

🤷‍♂️ But ambiguity leads to increased communication overhead.

💩 Misaligned expectations have a negative impact on quality.

Freelance writers create most of the content in B2B SaaS. But too many find themselves in a loop of emails and calls to clarify requirements.

🛀  Could it be that many B2B marketers want what everybody else has and are really just looking to copy their competition for a place in the SERPS?

How do you brief your writers? Brief? No brief? Let them run with a keyword and wordcount?

The Rippling investor memo is an interesting read on the rebundling opportunity in SaaS.

The recent funding round was their Series F, $200m at $13.5bn valuation.

https://lnkd.in/d-M9ni_T

Venture Capital Investor @ GoHub Ventures | Daily insights about startups and venture capital

Rippling raised $500M in Series A at a $11.25 billion valuation with a contrarian model (compound software business vs point-SaaS)

Check out  its Investor Memo to learn about the investment logics 👇

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