2022 Q2 Update: Our First Public Quarterly Update

We are hyped to share our first public quarterly update!

Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of companies and founders sharing their learnings and wins in public, not only to their cap table or investors. 

For our Q2 update, we broke things down into four key categories: team, clients, capabilities, and market trends. Let’s dive right in.

1. Team

We doubled our team in Q2, bringing on our new content lead Jaya Blanchard and our first head of growth Jason Saltzman. Though we’re still a lean team of four, our new team members enable us to double our content creation bandwidth and build our growth funnel from zero.

On the content front, we’re slowly expanding our client roster and taking on new companies across new market verticals. Our increased team bandwidth helps us service this growth.

On the growth front, we relaunched our site (Verbatim 2.0) and started scaling up our growth and internal marketing function from scratch. Over the next quarter, we’ll be rolling out tactical content across multiple franchises: case studies, partner playbooks, and investor deep dives.

2. Clients

Q2 was a massive quarter for us on the client growth front. We’ve been able to move upmarket and into new verticals like the future of work, fintech, and healthtech – among others. 

In future of work, we partnered with Polywork to scale up their core editorial engine. In fintech, we’ve been working closely with Highbeam around GTM content. Finally, in the healthtech space, we worked with Nue Life to build out targeted educational content while driving social proof.

While we’re slowly moving into new markets, we continue to retain Verbatim’s original focus on eCom infrastructure and B2B Saas tools. In Q2, we partnered with rapidly growing venture-backed companies like OpenStore, Black Crow, and ShoppingGives, among others.

3. Capabilities

Last quarter, we finally ramped up our video creation capabilities. Every piece of content we create stems from live, 1:1 interviews with client customers, partners, investors, or operators.

After the interview, we transcribe the audio and pull out distinct narrative flows to create the end piece of content. While written content output continues to be our bread and butter, a number of the interviewees we spoke with were open to recording video content from the interviews.

Internally, within our growth function, our team can now take these recorded videos, splice them up, and style them using a client’s branding. Critically, these videos help maximize distribution through social channels, and ultimately expand the marketing use cases for each interview.

We just started rolling out video creation across a small handful of clients, though we plan to ramp up this capability throughout Q3 after proving the value of the output last quarter.

4. Market Trends

In the context of the broader market downturn, which has uniquely impacted early-stage, venture-backed companies, content continues to be a crucial lever for GTM motions.

Paid growth and performance spending for B2B SaaS companies as a GTM lever has never been more expensive or less fruitful, especially with the last year's iOS changes on social channels. 

It’s important to note that our core clientele at Verbatim spans pre-seed through Series A and B companies. For Series C-stage companies and beyond, specifically, teams that have already entrenched themselves in their core market verticals, content may not be the best growth lever.

However, at the earliest stages of a GTM motion when a company is entering a market segment for the first time or moving upmarket to a new user segment, content marketing, and editorial is often the most cost-effective engine to turn on. And that’s exactly where Verbatim comes in.