I've been running Centori for about a year and a half now (about a year of that has been developing/beta testing) with the mission of making seo and content marketing accessible.
I remember my dad would tell me that what I knew about marketing is far more valuable than the platform I created. That I should focus on productizing my services rather than building a saas product to which I replied "Yes, but my vision is that anyone using this platform could be as good as me" and it hit me.
In creating a startup you make assumptions, the goal of the startup is to find which are correct and which are not so you can put yourself into the best position possible.
Centori hinged on two big assumptions: that businesses care about content marketing/know it is important and that they want a software solution.
The problem is, that there is a sliding scale with the folks who need our services when it comes to how familiar they are with marketing, and how comfortable they are with using technology.
-There's the business owner who wants to start a blog but doesn't know how.
-Or the manager of a small marketing team who needs help scaling.
-And the startup who wants to learn SEO and wants a product to handle it.
All three would benefit from an SEO platform.... but in very different ways. Which is where our pivot comes into play.
If you asked IBM 10 years ago what kind of business they are in they won't say they're in computers, or software - it's consulting. They offer touchless solutions, but they also use their software and hardware to enable businesses to grow. That's the direction I see Centori going in, shifting towards onboarding teams onto our platform, running their marketing operations with us, learning along the way until they no longer need our direct involvement and can work solely of our platform.
And continuing to market and sell the platform as a standalone product for teams that know what they're doing, don't need someone teaching them, and have a smaller budget.
As it stands we have two paid app accounts, and brought on two consulting clients and hope to keep moving in the 'up and to the right' direction!