RootsRated enjoying extraordinary growth by helping others distribute their content
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The eight teams that comprise the fourth cohort in Launch Tennessee’s “The TENN” master accelerator program bring the curtain down on the experience at a pitch finale set for Wednesday evening at Well Placed Smile, 907 Gleaves Street in Nashville. To register, click here. Ahead of that event, we are running short profiles on each of the teams.)
By Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, PYA
Fynn Glover describes the mission of RootsRated as distributing “content others have developed intelligently across networks that matter to them.”
The Chief Executive Officer of the company founded almost five years ago and profiled last August in this teknovation.biz article told attendees at Knoxville stops on “The TENN Road Show” that Millennials have changed the face of marketing.
“Our customers care more about the experience than products,” he says,
Like many start-ups, RootsRated had a proverbial pivot or what Glover describes as a “second birth” that happened roughly 20 months after its founding.
“Our path into this opportunity was not linear,” he explains in describing the media platform that the company has built to connect users with the best outdoor experiences.
“We harness the collective expertise of high-level local runners, skiers, riders, paddlers, and climbers,” RootsRated says on its webpage. “Then we share it through exclusive stories and destination reviews—curated city by city—about the best trails, runs, routes, crags, and more. RootsRated brings people who love the outdoors together, through insights from locals who are most in the know.”
When we published our article last August, there were 30 cities that had content curated and posted on the RootsRated site. Today, that number has grown to nearly 100.
“Now, we have brands paying us to connect them to their network,” Glover says. “This makes us an indispensable delivery network.”
The growth has been fueled by RootsRated Compass, its new content marketing platform launched in August. “It transformed our business and changed our direction,” Glover says. It also propelled a 300 percent revenue growth to $1.45 million last year.
With what he describes as “deep expertise in outdoors,” Glover says RootsRated in in the process of raising another round of capital to further accelerate its growth in a $44 billion content marketing market.
