Nashville Startup Looks To Spin Up New Opportunities For Publishers

From its home in Music City, Spiny wants to give the publishing space a modern makeover. 

The startup’s founding team – Nana B. Nyantekyi, Shannon Terry, and Andrew Johnson – include titans in the digital publishing world, having been part of building up comicbook.com, the online college football network Rivals, 247Sports, and PopCulture.com. 

After an acquisition from CBS, the team started thinking about how they might streamline the data collection process publishers need to understand the specific value of their online content. 

Founded in 2020, Spiny works with customers like digital publishers, news reporters, and content creators to better understand web traffic and subscriber trends. Integrating with tools like Slack, Google Analytics, and Wordpress, Spiny can help digital publishing executives, editorial teams, and ad teams grow revenue opportunities. 

Current customers include On3 Media, Outsider.com, and Leaders.com.

The platform helps publishers “monetize better, make more incremental revenue, and perform better as a business,” said Spiny’s Rohan Bedi. “Relying on things like page views and traffic is really difficult. So we actually boil things right down to revenue, which helps significantly.” 

 

Funding In The Digital Media Space

The team is heading into the last few months of 2022 with its first round of institutional funding. 

Following its beta, Spiny raised a $2.5 million Series A from Nashville Capital Network, a firm focused on early-stage startups. 

“We thought they were the ideal team to tackle the constantly 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 Nashville Capital Partner’s Sid Chambless. 

Digital publishing is an inherently tricky business, as new platforms and content providers continue to pop up. Still, the Spiny team is optimistic about the future even as other industries brace for potential economic slowdown in the coming months. 

“We don’t feel as though the space we’re in or the market we’re in is really going to be that affected in comparison to other areas. And we have unique product market fit, because we don’t really have any other companies doing what it is we do in the same way that we’re doing it. So if there’s a time to innovate, why not now?” he added. 

Headquartered in Nashville, Spiny also has a strong employee presence in Europe as the startup scales internationally. Building in Nashville is strategic, Bedi added, since “the actual amount of talent and resources [the city] provides is second to none.”