Interview with the CEO: The Early Days of Pitchly

Sep 30, 2022

The Pitchly Story

Recently, we sat down with Pitchly co-founder and CEO Ryan Gerhardy to uncover some stories from the early days of Pitchly.

Founded in 2014 in Des Moines, Iowa, Pitchly has grown immensely over the last 8 years, adding global clients and team members steadily and fine-tuning the product offering. So let's find out a little more about what sparked the idea for this product, what the team has learned along the way, and where Pitchly is headed now.

When did the idea of Pitchly start to form, and what was the catalyst?

I was working in investment banking managing a team of analysts and associates and saw the amount of tedious work being done by the team I asked to win and close deals. My main takeaway from the experience was: don’t employ smart (and expensive) people to perform repetitive work in PowerPoint!

I thought that there had to be a better solution, but there currently wasn't. So that's when me and co-founder Michael Brooks started working on the idea of Pitchly.

What was the #1 problem you created Pitchly to solve?

To give people back time. With so many competing priorities at work and at home now, this seems more important than ever. We want Pitchly to automate the tasks that take away from teams' time and ability to put their specialized and strategic skills to use.

Tell me about an interesting/funny story about the beginning of Pitchly

I was so new to sales that the first customer that stumbled to our website had to ask for a contract to sign - I didn’t pick up the buying signal early enough! I’m proud to say they are still with us today four years later and we have a real sales process in place.

What was the hardest thing to deal with at the beginning?

The time and money it takes to build an intuitive enterprise-ready product which makes the hard things appear simple. It is a large investment of time, people and resources but it is the most important investment you can make in ensuring the future success for clients and the company.

What’s the most exciting thing that’s happened since Pitchly started?

We have built a fantastic team and getting a chance to see them and our clients progress in their careers, their personal lives and achieve their goals has been extremely rewarding.

Where do you see Pitchly going in the future?

We have big plans ahead of us and unlimited opportunities. I see us expanding the use of our Data API and Content API. This will help us create a larger impact for our clients. We also want to help more clients and partners generate relevant live content and documents using their own data and third-party data to deliver impactful outputs throughout their organizations.

Currently we have about 1M live assets in Pitchly, and we're projecting that to grow exponentially over the next few years. If I had to put a number on it I would say more than 100M live assets managed in Pitchly by 2025.