Today we’d like to introduce you to Fynn Glover.
Fynn, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was born and raised in Chattanooga, TN. After high school, I went to college in Richmond, VA and played soccer. For most of my life, my dream was to be a pro soccer player. After college, I played semi-pro for a while, but by my early 20’s, I started to get interested in entrepreneurship and business.
In 2012, I founded RootsRated.com, a website for outdoor enthusiasts and adventure travelers. After working on that for several years, it was clear to me that what we knew as a publisher — about content creation and audience building — was valuable to brands who were increasingly shifting their marketing from traditional advertising to content marketing.
In 2016, we released our first content marketing software platform and then set about growing that new business. In 2018, we moved the company to Atlanta and rebranded from RootsRated to Matcha. Why Matcha? Like the ancient tea, which provides a really sustained energy lift to the drinker, our goal is to provide small businesses with the tools they need to grow sustainably. On a personal note, my wife and I have three dogs (one hound mix rescue and two toy poodles). We love distance running and cycling, reading history and fiction, and walking our dogs.
Has it been a smooth road?
Very few roads in life are without bumps and potholes. In the context of company building, there are familiar market-related struggles (e.g. building something customers love before you run out of cash, attracting and retaining employees, managing stakeholder expectations, etc). Struggles are essential to the creation of anything meaningful.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Matcha is a technology startup that provides marketing software to small businesses, usually ecommerce merchants, who may be pure-play ecommerce stores or omnichannel retailers. Matcha provides the world’s largest marketplace of legally licensable and professionally-written articles for small businesses, making it easy for marketers to publish and customize articles directly to their blogs and measure the impact of blog articles on traffic, leads, and revenue.
Our mission is to provide small businesses with the tools they need to grow sustainably. What does grow sustainably mean? For us, it means providing tools that help small businesses attract, inspire, and educate their customers, rather than pester, interrupt, and over-sell their customers.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
We’re a software startup, so our success hinges largely on the employees we’re able to attract and retain, and access to capital to fund the business through various stages of growth. Atlanta has a strong and burgeoning tech community (both for talent and investors), and that’s why we chose to locate the business here.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I was born and raised in Chattanooga, but my dad was born and raised in Atlanta, so growing up, we’d come to visit his parents a couple of times a year. Being from Chattanooga, you’re often taught to view Atlanta as the big city to the south with horrible traffic jams on the way to the airport. When I moved to Atlanta, that mindset was quickly eliminated, and I’ve come to absolutely love Atlanta. There are several things I’ve noted that really impress me about this city:
– Shade Trees — On Saturdays, my wife and I walk to the Freedom Parkway Farmers Market. It’s really beautiful and takes place under the oaks and maples of the Carter Center. On my first visit to the market, we sat next to a woman who was originally from southeast Texas. She turned to me and said, “Don’t you just love the shade trees?” I do, very much, love the shade trees, and the preservation of Atlanta’s old hardwoods is a massive environmental, public health, and aesthetic accomplishment. I’m blown away on a daily basis by the beauty of the trees in this city, and the preservation of what must be the most intact urban canopy of any major city. On a similar front, I think Atlanta has a really special network of neighborhood parks. I’m a big fan of Coan Park in Kirkwood/Edgewood!
– Palpable Higher Education — With GA Tech, GA State, Emory, SCAD, KSU… Atlanta feels like a city on the rise. The influence of its institutions of higher education are palpable and inspiring.
– A path to better connectivity — The Atlanta Beltline is an incredible example of the power of connecting communities via walkable and bikeable pathways. I encourage anyone who loves this city to read City on the Verge by Mark Pendegrast for a history of Atlanta, told through the lens of the Beltline’s founding. That the Beltline would happen was never a certainty, and there is still much to be done.
– Attitude of the people — This city has a vibrancy and vitality that’s hard not to notice everyday. You can see and feel a spirit of progress in its public art, its festivals, the pride in new organizations like Atlanta United, as well as its corporate mainstays like Delta, Home Depot, and Coca-cola, its new companies and growing technology industry, its solopreneurs hustling to create and build. My sense is that the people here loathe stagnation and are in Atlanta to build one of the great cities of the 21st century.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.getmatcha.com
- Email: marketing@matcha.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/matchacontent
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matchacontent
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/matchacontent
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matchacontent/
Image Credit:
Perry Smyre
Suggest a story: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
