Overview
The Situation
Social media approvals ran on email, Excel and PowerPoint.
TRIAD Advertising, one of the leading creative agencies in Central Europe, planned client social content in spreadsheets and slide decks. Posts went out for client approval by email. Feedback came back in reply chains, sometimes to the wrong person, sometimes not at all.
The tools that existed at the time were built for social media managers, not for the approval loop between an agency and its clients. They were too complex, and the clients simply refused to learn them.
The Real Problem
The bottleneck wasn't planning. It was approval.
An agency can fix its own internal process. What it can't fix is the client on the other side, who has no reason to adopt a new tool and every reason to keep replying by email.
So the product had a hard constraint from day one: a brand manager had to be able to open it once, understand what was being asked, and click approve. No onboarding, no training, no account setup ritual. Anything that failed that test was worse than the spreadsheet.
TRIAD had in-house developers. That's where we came in.
Our Approach
01
We built from the workflow we could see. We weren't reading a spec. The process we were digitising was running in the same building, with real client deadlines attached to it, so every decision could be checked against how the account teams actually worked. It's the same approach we take today, just with a shorter walk to the client.
02
We scoped the MVP around one question. Not “what should this product do” but “would an agency outside TRIAD pay for this”. Everything that didn't help answer that was cut.
03
We handed it over as it found its market. As Kontentino spun off into its own company and hired its own developers, development moved in-house. We stayed available for specific work rather than trying to hold on to the whole thing.
What We Built
We designed the architecture, defined how the application should work on the backend, and stayed on as technical oversight while it was built. The product decisions were Kontentino's. The technical ones were ours to recommend and defend.
Content Calendar
Client Approval Workflow
Post Previews
Multi-platform Publishing
Every one of these was built in close collaboration with Kontentino's own development team. Nothing here was delivered over a wall.
The Outcome
The MVP worked, and that turned an internal tool into a company.
Agencies outside TRIAD started paying for it. Kontentino spun off, raised no outside funding, and built its own development team. It's the second SaaS product to come out of the group this way, alongside Allfred.
Today it's used in 75+ countries and holds a 4.7 average on G2 across 245 reviews. The platform scaled without going back and rebuilding from scratch.
The part we're prouder of: they don't need us and they still call. Since the handover we've delivered the CMS and language versions of their marketing site, technical consulting on their setup, and a developer working inside their team. He's currently on mobile app improvements, has shipped user invitation states and best time to post in the weekly calendar view, and moves on to refactoring their settings module next.
Testimonial
“We don't need an agency anymore, yet we still call them.”
Read the full review on Clutch.
75+ Countries using Kontentino today
11 years Of continuous collaboration
4 core modules Calendar, approvals, previews, publishing
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