Hey, I'm Eric, the founder and CEO of the portfolio and archiving platform Authory.
My main focus here at Authory is on all things product, marketing, and operations. As part of that, I spend a considerable chunk of my time talking to or writing with customers, and I love it! So, if you'd like to say hi, email me at: eric@authory.com
Why I started Authory
Once upon a time, a few years ago, I happened to visit a big news website and by chance, I saw an article by an author I very much liked. I realized that if I'd visited the website just 15 minutes later, I would have missed this particular article, as it would have moved from the front page already. Was there an easy way for me to follow the articles of my favorite journalists, no matter where they were published?
Great question to start researching! So that's just what I did.
Long story short, the options weren't to my liking. There was mainly Twitter, but I wasn't interested in the witty short-form commentary every journo was posting there. I wanted to know about their new articles only and there was way too much chit-chat noise on Twitter. It wasn't good to keep up with their work alone.
How I started Authory
The next step was for me to reach out to journos.
I talked to and wrote with, literally, hundreds of journalists, from many different beats. When I asked them if they would like a central place where all their content is linked, many said yes. But they also said that they wanted their articles to be backed up, and they'd like to sort and categorize them. Slowly but surely, a product was taking shape in my head.
We started with a very, very simple bare-bones version of Authory. It was a simple feed, with no images, and hardly any options to customize anything. But it worked automatically and the journalists signing up didn't have to do a thing. Our system found their articles and added them to their accounts. And that was something that felt like magic to our customers. They started to talk to their colleagues, and Authory started to grow.
Growing Authory
We've come a long way since then. Hugely popular journalists such as David Pogue of CBS and the New York Times, or Steven Levy of Wired, are using our platform, and thousands of others. But it's not only journalists. Nowadays, Authory is used by thousands of journalists, but also by copywriters, content marketers, podcasters, YouTubers, and many more. It's our goal to provide them with the best service to showcase and back up their content.
Given that we've created a service that many in the media industry use, we've been featured by the news as well, e.g. at TechCrunch, TidBits, NiemanLab, and others.
Entrepreneurship before Authory
A bit more about my time before Authory: I studied Business Management at Imperial College London, and right afterward, I relocated to Romania to find a technical cofounder and start my first news startup, Commentarist.
Commentarist
The easiest way to describe Commentarist is to imagine Google News but with a focus on OpEds. The platform was designed to highlight journalistic opinions on current issues, giving readers an option to easily compare opinions along the entire political spectrum.
At its peak, we collaborated with more than 15 of Germany's top news websites. Unfortunately, the platform was not a viable business in the long run, so we eventually closed it.
Followistic
The startup and the news bug had bitten me though, and I had learned a whole lot both about running a business and being in the media industry. So, naturally, I started another company.
It was called Followistic, and it was a B2B SaaS offering for web publishers.
The idea was for publishers to add a widget below their articles that enabled their readers to subscribe to the topics of that specific article. Once subscribed to a certain topic, users would be notified about relevant new pieces by the same publisher automatically. The entire system was ready out of the box, meaning publishers only had to add a single line of code to their content management system, Followistic would do the rest.
Followistic was live on popular German news websites such as Financial Times Germany and stern.de and ran at major international publications like Screen Rant. Eventually, I sold my shares in the company to Seegno, the Portuguese agency that had already become a shareholder before.
Contact
You can find all my writing at authory.com/blog/author/eric and connect with me on LinkedIn!
Feel free to check all my articles below.
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