Content Tools

Amelia Chagas spent about eight years as a content manager, leading video, book, and web strategies at both enterprises and small and mid-sized businesses. Across those jobs she kept running into the same problem. Content was hard to manage: a content manager had to chase colleagues across many people and tools just to learn where a piece of content stood. She founded Content Tools in 2015, shortly after going through the 500 Startups program, to fix that workflow.

The product combines strategy, creation, distribution, and analytics in one place. Amelia described it as more than a scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite, because it also manages the project workflow, including approvals and planning, so teams don't need separate Google Docs and publishing tools. The company launched in beta around July 2015 and moved out of beta in January 2016. Pricing is subscription-based, and she said customers typically pay somewhere between $100 and $300 per month depending on plan. Early on, the company raised an angel round of $500k. Amelia said the team was preparing to raise a seed round the following year, with a target of roughly $1.5 to $2 million.

Content Tools grew mainly through content marketing. The team publishes a lot of blog posts, and Amelia said most new users arrive through that content. Outbound email makes up a smaller share, around 30% of incoming users. Growth is run by a four-person growth team, two of them full-time on content. Amelia said the company does not spend on paid acquisition, which she described as more expensive than content. The team estimates each new customer costs roughly $500 to acquire, based on the cost of the two content staff and the 20 to 30 new customers they add each month. Agencies also play a role: some of the roughly 700 companies using the platform are customers through their agencies.

The clearest win was retention. Gross churn was around 2-3% per month, and in the most recent month the company had more upsell revenue than churn, producing negative revenue churn for the first time. Amelia said upsells come mostly from agencies adding projects and clients, and from customers adding users, integrations, and publishing channels. The company's customer count is less clear. Amelia said about 700 companies use the platform, but only about 300 pay directly, with the rest paying through agencies.

The weak spot is operations. Amelia said her team is remote, with about 20 to 30 contractors who are not full-time, and that coordinating them is hard. The company has relied on organized Google Drive folders with process documents to hold things together, which she described as workable but time-consuming and not very efficient.

At the time of the interview, Content Tools had about 30 employees, based in Florianopolis, Brazil, for lower costs. Monthly payroll was roughly $65,000 to $70,000. Revenue was about $70,000 per month, and Amelia said it was growing 10-20% month over month. She declined to sell at a $1.5 million offer, saying she saw a larger opportunity in growing businesses that need content tools but are not served by enterprise platforms like Percolate or Contently. Her roadmap focuses on business intelligence, content optimization, and AI-assisted operations.