Ideas reign supreme — We raised 2.6 M and hired an ace new VP to continue molding the web’s content into ideas that matter

Why are we here?

For a long while, the Scoop.it team has had a vision that fostering ideas, molding existing content into more valuable forms, and sharing knowledge with their communities of interest is what our platform can do best. Recently, after many conversations and interactions with our community, we realized that these values and behaviors were being adopted by more and more users across the platform. As a team, we immediately resonated with these users and we’re excited to be seeing our vision become more and more concrete as time passes.

At Scoop.it, our core values sit on top of a foundation of never-ending education and learning. We feel that to lose your sense of wonder with the world and to be content with the status quo is the death of innovation, creativity, and the “human condition” to create and iterate. We foster this behavior in each other every day — whether it is learning a skill from another department to help visualize a concept or to create a team Rosetta Stone account to better communicate with each other. We love learning and helping each other learn.

Pursuing the chance to revolutionize the way people learn and re-learn ideas through content sharing online is our big goal. We fundamentally believe that web content, if organized and prioritized correctly, could change the world in immense ways — for the better.

To focus on creating a thriving, world-wide ecosystem of smart people curating incredible content, finding better ways to combine semantic analysis with the human touch to serve up the best content with unique perspectives and insight, organizing and categorizing content by interest, and prioritizing the support of our top curators and giving them the visibility they deserve — we began pursuing additional funding. We are lucky enough to have found a group of investors whose own personal and professional values align with ours, and we were recently awarded 2.6M to create a new way to find and share knowledge online. Our formal press release and related articles can be found here.

How we’re planning to stick around

We love this business and we love our community. We want nothing more than to continue revolutionizing the web content and knowledge sharing spheres. With this in mind, we decided to make becoming a sustainable, long-term company a priority. We’re in this for the long haul — effectively “hitched” to our love of knowledge.

We’ve also noticed in recent past the death of several of our key market competitors. Snip.it and Google Reader, namely, have recently gone “the way of the buffalo,” leaving their huge communities of users behind. We’ve taken in Snip.it “refugees” happily and have began making changes to our platform to make up for the loss of a tool such as Google Reader. After these events, we feel even more strongly that our heretoforth focus on growth with a supporting business model (instead of growth-only or revenue-only) is working. Perhaps, more importantly, our business model is aligned with our mission of helping people share knowledge in a smarter way — while many services rely on ads and turn their users into “the product” they sell, we view each of our users as a customer, which means they deserve respect, support and our attentive ear at all times. Our ability to raise more funding and scoop up a stellar executive hire is testament to that.

So, we hired an ace new Vice President of Monetization. His name is Andrew Federici, and he comes from an awesome past with Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), MTV, and many others. He’s won two Webby awards for his work; we think he’s awesome. His role will be to optimize our premium plans and how we do business with enterprises — and no, he doesn’t want to shove sales messaging down your throat. He is passionate about how curation and social media can be a game-changers for businesses and professionals; he plans to work on making Scoop.it an incredibly viable content marketing and brand development tool for businesses.

But don’t worry. You won’t be seeing lame banner ads from 1999 or “promoted accounts” anytime soon. We believe that everyone has an expertise and everyone should have an equal voice online, and that the quality of your work should speak for you, not how big your marketing budget is.

But you will see some changes in the next few months to our platform. We’re planning some big, awesome stuff to make your Scoop.it experience more valuable, productive, and efficient, as well as a bit more fun. So keep an eye out for notifications about those changes and opportunities to participate in live beta testing. We love your input and value your thoughts and opinions.

In the meantime, we are always interested to hear what you have to say. Please feel free to reach out to any of us here at Scoop.it with your thoughts. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

One last question.. if you could learn about anything in the world, what would it be? Take that answer, type it into the “search” field here, and hit enter.

Rate this post: (No Ratings Yet)

---

Loading...