Day One: The Story Behind Slate
Summary
Joe, Co-founder of Slate, shares why he and Shyam are building Slate and the vision behind it. After years of seeing small marketing teams stretched thin, they set out to create a system that helps five people work like fifty by automating repetitive work and freeing marketers to focus on strategy and creativity. This article lays out the mission behind Slate and how the team is building a true Marketing OS for modern marketers.
How it all started
I’m Joe, co-founder of Slate, and I’m supposed to be building the product for our early users right now.
But I wanted to pause and share why we’re building it in the first place.
I started my career as one of the early marketers at Freshworks.
Back then, we were a small, scrappy team trying to punch above our weight, and somehow that team went on to fuel Freshworks’ growth to over $700 million in revenue.
From being a marketer, I eventually moved into building marketing products inside Freshworks.
I worked side by side with marketing teams of all sizes, across different industries and stages of growth.
And that’s when it hit me.
Even with all the new AI tools and automation promises, marketing was still stuck in the old days.
The same bottlenecks, the same spreadsheets, the same exhaustion.
The problem wasn’t creativity. It was capacity.
I knew I wanted to build something new, something that could finally bring marketing and technology together in a way that made teams faster, not busier.
That’s when Shiyam reached out to me.
He was already running TripleDart, a multi-million dollar marketing agency, and facing the exact same challenge from the other side.
We spoke for hours, and it was clear we were both seeing the same thing: marketing teams just couldn’t scale.
So we decided to fix it.
That’s what led us to start Slate.
We pulled together a few of the best engineers I’ve worked with, from my Freshworks days and my close circle, to form a brilliant tech team.
What started as a shared frustration has turned into a mission to create the Marketing OS for the next decade, one that gives marketers back their time, clarity, and creativity.
We asked ourselves:
- What if a small marketing team could feel like a big one?
- What if five people could work like fifty?
- What if the repetitive parts could run on their own, and teams could finally focus on strategy and creativity?
That’s the mission behind Slate.
Why We Called It Slate
Slate represents a clean surface to build on a workspace where every marketing idea can be sketched, tested, and automated into reality.
Marketing has become fragmented: dozens of tools, disconnected workflows, and endless data silos.
We wanted to give growth teams a single environment where every idea can move from hypothesis to execution in a continuous loop.
Slate is that environment.
A complete inbound GTM development system where teams can turn any growth idea into reality from concept to campaign to closed-won.
But more importantly, Slate is the beginning of a new operating model for marketing.
Instead of juggling dashboards and tools, every marketer now manages their own team of AI agents always on, learning, optimizing, and driving outcomes around the clock.
Marketing will soon look less like project management and more like systems engineering dynamic, adaptive, and agent driven.
That’s why we built Slate:
To give marketers a clean slate to build the future of growth.
What Slate Does Today
Content Refresh & Optimization
Search isn’t static. Your best content today can fade tomorrow. Slate helps you keep every page performing at its peak by spotting where rankings or visibility are dropping.
It recommends what to update: headlines, structure, entities, or links.
Your content stays alive, fresh, and tuned to how people (and AI systems) actually search.
Workflow Automations
The things marketing teams repeat every week: research, briefs, reports, and updates can be set up once and run automatically.
No more juggling spreadsheets or jumping between tools. Slate handles the repetitive work so your team can focus on the big ideas.
LLM Visibility Tracker
The way people search is changing. They’re asking tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
If your brand isn’t showing up there, you’re invisible.
The AI Tracker shows you where you stand, where you’re winning, and where you’re missing out.
What’s Next
But this is just the beginning.
The bigger vision is to build a true Marketing OS, a single place where campaigns, ideas, and performance live together.
A system that works alongside your team like extra teammates.
A space where strategy, execution, and measurement flow together.
Our goal is simple: let small teams punch way above their weight.
We believe a five-person team should be able to achieve what today takes fifty, not by burning out, not by cutting corners, but by working smarter, with the right system behind them.
This isn’t just about building a tool.
It’s about solving a pain we’ve lived ourselves.
We’ve been in those seats.
We’ve felt that lack of bandwidth. And we know it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.
We’re still early.
The road ahead is much bigger.
If you’re a marketer reading this, we built Slate for you.
We want your team to feel lighter.
We want you to spend more time on the big ideas and less time stuck in the weeds
To everyone who’s given feedback, tested early versions, or just believed in the idea - thank you.
You’ve shaped what Slate is today, and you’ll keep shaping where it goes.
It’s Day 1 at Slate. And we’re just getting started.
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