It All Started with an InMail

I’m the co-founder of Scripted.com, a company that helps businesses create high quality, original content at scale. We recently added Dana Brunetti and Kevin Spacey to our advisory board; Dana and Kevin are two of Hollywood’s biggest proponents of original high quality content, having produced the first original series for Netflix, House of Cards. Here’s the story of how it all happened, thanks to LinkedIn InMail.

Prior to Scripted, we were a screenwriting software company called Scripped that provided a collaborative tool for screenwriters to work on screenplays. Dana created the first screenwriter community in Hollywood, called Triggerstreet Labs, and naturally we were interested in meeting him. I scoured my personal network to try to get a warm introduction, but to no avail. Instead, I opted to send Dana an InMail message in 2009.

I introduced myself, Scripped, and asked to get on his calendar for a meeting. “I think there could potentially be a lot of interesting ways Triggerstreet and Scripped could work together,” I wrote.

Here’s the original message:

Dana responded directly to my InMail. “I just logged in to turn off the connection notifications and saw your message. If you’d still like to chat, reach me via email,” Dana replied, including his contact information.

Dana and I had a terrific first conversation about our respective screenwriting communities, and what we aimed to accomplish. We agreed to do a speaking event together in Palo Alto, and just weeks later he flew up here to a packed house, where we co-hosted an event with the Palo Alto International Film Festival and Talenthouse.

The event was a success, and we continued to email one another and exchange ideas about how to grow and develop our respective communities. By the end of 2011, Scripted raised a seed round of financing, and we pivoted completely away from the entertainment industry to original content creation.

Dana is one of the foremost thinkers when it comes to original content creation, and he introduced us to Kevin toward the end of 2011. That meeting was extraordinarily productive, and it left us wanting to find a way to work together.

Over the past couple of years, my co-founder and I have spent time with Dana in LA and San Francisco. We got to know each other both professionally and personally -- Dana and I co-wrote blog posts for Gigaom, and became fathers within a month of each other. In short, he is a quality person who genuinely wanted to help us grow our business.

Just prior to raising our Series A funding, Dana and I had a lengthy conversation about the business and where we are headed. The most important challenge content marketers will face in the next decade is creating original, high quality content. The days of creating spammy, SEO content are nearly over, and the companies focused on that objective will soon wither away. Dana shares that vision in his business, and our goal in adding Dana and Kevin to our advisory board is to deliver that message to content marketers everywhere. And it all started with an InMail.