Plot announces $3M round led by Alexis Ohanian at Seven Seven Six

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Today, we’re excited to announce Plot has raised a $3M seed round led by Seven Seven Six, with participation from Trust Fund, Potluck Ventures, Visible Hands, Broom Ventures and several individual investors.

We want to give a special thanks to Alexis Ohanian, Katelin Holloway, and the entire Seven Seven Six team for their unwavering belief in our vision and for providing an exceptional platform for early-stage startups to thrive. As a firm that champions female entrepreneurship, their commitment to transforming the landscape for women leaders who are driving global change is truly inspiring. Ethan and I are honored to be welcomed into the Seven Seven Six family.

Our investors are truly brilliant, with unparalleled expertise as both seasoned founders and industry experts. Their unique insights on how to scale billion-dollar enterprises are invaluable to us, and we are motivated by their perspectives to aim ever higher.

Our founding team includes my co-founder CTO Ethan Phan – formerly at TrialSpark and Microsoft, and one of the most brilliant engineers I’ve ever met – and me, a former brand strategist at Apple turned agency owner turned founder. (Shout out to Y-Combinator’s co-founder matching program, highly recommended!)

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What is Plot?

Today, content creation feels like an arm’s race. Marketers are executing 50+ campaigns and content pieces a year, each with different teams internally and externally. Creative teams have to manage the entire workflow through creative review: stitching files, tracking spreadsheets, completing approvals cycles — all while managing our resources to ensure everything is within scope.

Creatives need a single source of truth: a safe place to centralize decisions, track approvals, and feedback that allows effective cross-collaboration across workstreams. 

Enter, Plot. A creative operations platform to help streamline creative development by allowing teams to: 

• deliver unparalleled project visibility across the entire workstream
• access deliverables across any file format
• manage resources in a single source of truth. 

Whether you’re working with freelancers, agencies, content creators or managing stakeholders — Plot streamlines operations. We believe if we build a powerful source of truth in which to operate creative workflow, we open up room for our creativity allowing individuals to focus on their craft and deliver a masterpiece. 

Why we started Plot

My name is Megan, and I’m the co-founder of Plot. I’m not a typical startup founder. I don’t have a background in engineering, product management, or anything code-related. In fact, I've spent my entire career in the creative world, inspired by amazing creatives who bring wild ideas to life. But too often, the process of making those ideas live and breathe was deflating: my fellow creatives and I were spending 80% of our time on operations and the remaining 20% of our time on actual creative work — you know, the thing we love to do. 

In my role as a brand strategist at Apple, I had every possible tool at my disposal and top-tier collaborators. Sounds sexy, right? Yet even the advantages of a trillion dollar company couldn’t smooth over the endless stream of emails and slack channels, in search of the latest deliverable. My ability to track projects across teams relied heavily on my ability to stay on top of endless versions of spreadsheets, tools and fragmented creative review cycles.

I thought, if I were on the side of an agency — would I be closer to the creative? Would I be able to streamline operations and do more of the fun work? I decided to start my own creative agency, Sweater Story, hoping the answer was “yes”. (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t.)

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The pain I felt at Apple on the brand side, was the same pain I felt on the agency side. I began to dig into the industry and found out I wasn’t the only one experiencing this problem.

On average, creatives juggle 20+ tools and lose 13 hours of productive time per week with no clear solution to manage creative operations. 

So we decided to build Plot to provide just that. 

Why Now

In today's world, content demands are increasing and diversifying. For creatives, it's a marathon and a sprint: highly iterative deliverables are produced day-of alongside big, sexy commercials that take months to plan. Remote work and innovations like chatGPT only add to the challenges, as creative teams work to produce content at ever-increasing speeds across multiple channels.

With the massive injection of different tools into the creative landscape and the velocity of content produced by brands, in 2023, this problem has reached a tipping point. 

To streamline creative operations, there are three critical areas we focus on: 

• Tools: integrate with tools for each phase of a project and discipline of work 
• Assets: a centralized place for the team to access all final content and its deliverables like its version, approval, and decisions
• Resourcing: allow teams to efficiently allocate their time and manage projects seamlessly 

We’ve built incredible tools to allow product managers and engineers to build and design great products. It’s time for a tool that enables creatives to deliver great marketing. 

Who is Plot for?

Plot is an end-to-end creative operations platform designed for marketers, agencies, freelancers, and content creators who want to simplify their operations and collaborate more effectively.

Unlike other project management tools, Plot is tailored specifically for creative teams, providing organization and structure to help them collaborate seamlessly. You don’t need to be a certified project manager to use our platform. In fact, we welcome messy creatives who need a simple, beautiful, and intuitive platform to streamline their workflow and achieve their goals.

The Wrap Up

Thank you to all of our early supporters and users who helped make Plot 1.0 possible. With this new round of financing, we will accelerate product development and launch publicly to bring this vision to life, so that creatives can deliver their masterpieces without operations getting in the way. In this new world, we can flip the 80-20 ratio in creative’s favor, while operations hum along in the background. 

Join the waitlist to be a part of our beta platform alongside creatives like you, who are itching to create. 

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Cheers friends,

Megan & Ethan

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If you’re curious about our fundraising story and how we closed our round in 3 weeks — join our waitlist to find out.