The hallmark of an entrepreneur is seeing opportunity where others see problems, and Adam Koehler relishes in taking risk, failure, and industry pitfalls, and turning them on their head.
Koehler’s drive for entrepreneurship began with the simple wish to not confine himself to the disadvantages that followed others in his situation. He grew up in a low-income, single-parent home, and did not want that to define him.
“I didn’t want to be poor,” said Koehler to The Epoch Times.
Koehler is the head of digital agency Reversed Out Creative, and during the 2008 real estate market crash, co-founded electronic signature company Dotloop, which was sold to Zillow in 2015 for $108 million. His latest venture, Content Credits, aims to be an alternative to the outdated paywall. His goal is to let publishers capture a vast market of readers who are willing to pay but not subscribe, to serve the consumers suffering subscription fatigue, and help journalists and editors see what their stories are really worth.
Making Your Own Way
Starting in the fifth grade, Koehler began attending the School for Creative and Performing Arts, a public school in Cincinnati.“All the other schools, you got shot at,” he said.
There he found that he had somehow qualified for the drama track, and that he loved drawing. He studied fine art and commercial art his entire time at the school, then at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It was his dream to work on something like “Toy Story,” but he would learn there were no such jobs in Cincinnati. Instead, he took a job at a print and copy shop on the late shift.
Perseverance became a honed skill, and Koehler began freelancing as a graphic designer before he eventually joined an agency where he learned that these companies hire and fire along with the economy’s booms and busts.
“I don’t want my life to be dependent on somebody else,” he said. “You should be the one to determine your future … because nobody cares about your future as much as you do.”
Koehler was investing in real estate at the time, and met business partners and Dotloop co-founders Matt Vorst and Austin Allison around the time he founded his own agency. The software streamlined real estate transaction paperwork, and by Dotloop’s own count, some 90 percent of the nation’s real estate agents signed up on its platform at the time it sold to Zillow. It remains one of the leading electronic signature platforms in real estate.
What Koehler was most proud of in the aftermath was that he was able to share this success.
“Building the agency, I’m able to hire my family, network, I’m able to bring in people that are friends of mine and have the skills,” he said. “When we sold Dotloop, one of the good things is, they expanded the office. They upgraded the office — they upgraded the coffee. … And they were able to pay people more.”
He realized that what began as three guys discussing a business idea in a Panera Bread resulted in unimagined, positive ripple effects.
“There are multiplying effects,” he said. “When you build a company, your city benefits in multiple ways.”
Uplifting the Community
Dotloop’s success story was one of the rare instances that saw venture capital flow to middle America, rather than its typical paths to the East and West coasts.
“We were the first nine-figure exit of a startup in Cincinnati,” Koehler said. “We were able to shine a light on the Cincinnati area.”
It inspired people, Koehler said, including Dotloop employees who then went on to become entrepreneurs in their own right.
“I was able to be part of that history—which is crazy,” he said. “It changes people’s lives completely.”
As someone who seeks out risk and disruption, Koehler has developed best practices and systems to keep his projects resilient and flexible, and tries to encourage others to embrace a little more risk on the side.
Content Credits Technology Strategist Ryan Deacon, the co-founder of app development firm Oracast, has worked with Koehler for about a decade, and said Koehler would be bored doing only one thing.
“He thrives on change, for sure,” Deacon said to The Epoch Times.
Change, risk, and failure all elicit similarly excited responses from Koehler.
“Failure’s the greatest learning experience,” he said, taking out his phone to show that he recently posted a quote on social media by Theodore Roosevelt on the subject: “The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”
Koehler has run for local office and has at least half a dozen side hustles, one of which is hosting the podcast “Side Hustle City.”
“Most people can’t take risks. Well, I’m in a unique position where I can take risks, so I’m like, ‘Let me do this, see if it works, and tell people about it,’” Koehler said. “You can’t just tell people stuff, you actually have to show them the numbers.”
His approach to Content Credits was similar.
He saw the news industry lagging behind the times when it came to technology, just as the real estate industry had when he and his business partners launched Dotloop. It began when he saw that search engines were showing users answers to their searches, which eats away at search traffic—a problem for publishers who rely on ad revenue. He saw another problem in the fact that surveys say the average American has anywhere between four and 12 subscriptions, paying at least $100 monthly—meaning the average reader is loath to pick up yet one more, especially not just to read a single article.
All combined, this means that readers who get their news through social media—the majority of readers, according to Pew Research—are apt to find something interesting on their feed, click through only to hit a paywall, and not return.
“This is like the only industry that I know that scares its customers away,” Koehler said.
So he created a platform that would allow users to, through Content Credits, pay for the article they want to read at a fraction of the cost of the full subscription. The data it generates could show and help publishers and journalists fine-tune the value of content, he added. “That’s something we hope to learn,” he said.
Koehler hopes to gamify the platform through positive encouragement, and branch out to other media beyond news in the future.
“We see problems and want to fix them,” he said.
