Who is George Koenig?
I’m an entrepreneur by birth, creative by nature, and a salesman by trade. I’ve spent 22-years in the product content syndication industry (Easy2, Webcollage, and Shotfarm), where I’ve been lucky enough to leverage all three.
What’s the story behind Content Status?
An e-commerce leader for a billion-dollar CPG company said to me, “George, I get the value of syndication, but no one can tell me if my products are live and if my content is current.” That question became more and more popular as syndicators just “drop the content off at the door” without receiving any validation from the retailer. Then a paint company wanted to audit their Walmart.com product pages as they had no idea what was content was live. Next, we started to receive requests to grade the quality of content and the usage of keywords for site-search optimization. These four items became the foundation of our mission, which is to make it fast, easy and affordable for business team to know if their product pages are live, complete, accurate, and site-search optimized.
What was the most difficult part of your experience in the early beginnings?
No question, software development. My co-founder was the architect and lead developer for our MVP, but one person couldn’t create the tool we envisioned for launch. It wasn’t until we added our CTO in late 2020, who brought a ton of industry and team building experience, where we were able to add the fuel to the fire that we needed. We launched 1.0 and we’re plowing through our roadmap with a large development team.
What are you most proud of regarding your business?
We don’t believe in long enterprise sales processes that make business teams wait months before seeing the insights they need. We wanted to build a self-service solution with a free trial that gives them insights minutes after joining without any programming or IT involvement. I’m proud to see our vision for the solution go live, and having our users and partners confirm they’ve reduced effort by 80% while getting more insights on their product pages then they had ever hoped for.
What is your vision for the future of Content Status?
We don’t create content, manage content, or syndicate content. We are, and will stay, 100% focused on offering the easiest and most powerful content auditing tools in the industry. This focus drives our vision of becoming the industry provider content auditing tools, insights, and quality standards used by retailers, brands, and their partners.
What’s your advice for the businesses that are trying to adapt to this economic climate?
Many lessons have been learned over the past year, but for me, the answer is in the question: Always be flexible and able to adapt. Working from home was an entirely new experience for workers in large companies who had to be taught how to connect, Zoom, and Slack there way through their day. Not only did they adapt, but they thrived to the point many teams are staying remote to leverage the increase in efficiency and work/life balance their teams got used to. If they’re smart, they’ll look for ways to keep that type of agile, start-up mentality. We always planned to be a remote-first company so we could build a team of experienced content industry professionals because with online purchases growing as it did in 2020, knowing the status of your product page content is no longer a nice-to-have.
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business.
Because we’ve been remote-first, we had already been using Zoom and Slack. But we also find new apps on sites like App Sumo (my favorite) that solve problems or make us more efficient in ways we weren’t even thinking about. And when you find some apps you like – it saves you thousands since you’re buying lifetime licensees for as little as $49.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
Product Led Growth by Wes Bush, Exactly What to Say by Phil M. Jones, Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. As a founder of a start-up, don’t ask me how many of these I’ve actually had time to finish.
Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
