Nashville Startup looks to create new opportunities for publishers| Roadsleeper.com
From his home in Music City, Spine wants to give the publishing space a more modern makeover.
The founding team of the startup – Nana B. Nyantekyi, Shannon Terry and Andrew Johnson – include a titan in the digital publishing world, having been part of building comicbook.com, the college football Rivals network, 247Sports and PopCulture.com.
After the acquisition from CBS, the team began to think about how they could streamline the data collection process that publishers need to understand the unique value of their online content.
Founded in 2020, Spiny works with clients such as digital publishers, reporters and content creators to better understand web traffic and subscriber trends. By integrating tools like Slack, Google Analytics, and WordPress, Spiny can help digital publication managers, editorial teams, and advertising teams increase revenue potential.
Current customers include On3 Media, Outsider.com and Leaders.com.
The platform helps publishers “monetize better, generate more revenue and perform better as a business,” said Spiny’s Rohan Bedi. “It’s very difficult to rely on things like pageviews and traffic.” So we boil things down to revenue, which helps a lot.”
Funding in the digital media space
The team heads into the last months of 2022 with the first round of institutional funding.
After beta, Spiny raised a $2.5 million Series A round Nashville Capital Networka company focused on early-stage startups.
“We thought they were the ideal team to tackle the ever-changing landscape impacting the industry, namely first-party data, content monetization and audience growth.” The Spiny team lived it as publishers and they understand the need for tools to manage publishing assets,” said Sid Chambless of Nashville Capital Partner.
Digital publishing is an inherently difficult business as new platforms and content providers continue to grow. Still, the Spiny team is optimistic about the future even as other industries brace for a possible economic downturn in the coming months.
“We don’t feel like the space we’re in or the market we’re in is really going to be affected compared to other areas.” And we have unique product marketing capabilities, because we don’t really have any other companies that do what we do in the same way that we’re doing it. So if it’s time to innovate, why not now?” he added.
Headquartered in Nashville, Spiny also has a strong workforce in Europe as the startup looks to expand internationally. Building in Nashville is strategic, Bedi added, as “a real amount of talent and capital [the city] provider is second to none.”
