Startup Spotlight #78: Letterdrop

Letterdrop is Shopify for content businesses.

Jan 27, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Parthi Loganathan, founder and CEO of Letterdrop, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Letterdrop is Shopify for content businesses. An increasing number of people are creating media businesses online like Morning Brew, The Hustle, Barstool Sports. They want to focus on producing content. We're providing the infrastructure for them to do that.

Startup Spotlight: Letterdrop

Problem: An increasing number of people are creating media businesses online like Morning Brew, The Hustle, Barstool Sports. They want to focus on producing content.

Market: Newsletters are just a part of this market, but traditional news is a $17B industry. This expands to community, courses, and professional development.

Solution: Today, Letterdrop is a newsletter and blogging publishing platform that's flexible, affordable, and integrates with 3rd party solutions. Tomorrow, a platform to handle everything from growth, content publishing on multiple channels, and managing a community of readers.

Team: Currently, the team is me and 4 engineers. Our next hire will be someone to help us with marketing, community, and content to fuel growth.

Recent Success:

Loganathan: Shipping fast and listening to users. We have a Slack community of writers to talk with each other, share tips, get feedback, etc. Keeping your users close and making it easy for them to give you feedback is vital in all stages of product development. It's your competitive advantage as a startup to actually pay attention, listen to users and build relationships.

Recent Struggle:

Loganathan: Being a solo founder is challenging since there's so much to do and you're the bottleneck for a lot of jobs to be done. Speed is the name of the game, especially since we're competing in an existing market with fast-growing players. The way I'm handling it is always keeping in mind the 80/20 rule where you prioritize the 20% of tasks that get 80% of the way there. Also, cautiously trying to hire where required so I can delegate and we can move faster.

Founder Advice:

Loganathan: Your market is the biggest external factor determining your success. In the absence of money being spent and customer demand, you're going to struggle. Hot markets generally mean there's room for more than one player as each takes on different niches. Competition isn't a bad thing - it indicates that you're not imagining an opportunity.

Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Loganathan: Here are two founders you should check out next!

Jeremy Zhang, Founder of Finch: Finch allows applications to access data and make changes across payroll and HR systems through a single API.
James Hawkins, Founder of PostHog: PostHog is a complete product analytics stack that you can host on your infrastructure.

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