Middle Tech Spotlight Series: Adam Koehler

How Dotloop’s $108M Exit Led to Content Credits Taking on Paywalls

Author

Middle Tech
July 07, 2025

July 7th, 2025

In the Spotlight: Adam Koehler

Morning, friends - Logan here. I hope you’re returning from 4th of July weekend with all 10 fingers and a lovely tan.

This week’s episode dives into a founder story that I would love to see more of in our region. Adam Koehler went from a design job at FedEx to co-founding Dotloop and selling it to Zillow for $108 million in 2015. That’s a significant exit - but the part I’m most interest in is that Adam remained in Covington, Kentucky and reinvested his capital and experience into building another startup - Content Credits.

Subscription fatigue, ad collapse, and AI scraping are squeezing publishers from every angle. Content Credits introduces a new monetization layer - letting readers pay $0.25 per article instead of committing to yet another subscription.

In addition to providing an additional monetization layer for publishers, Adam and his team are also taking a new approach to engaging readers via a shared comment section across all the publishers they work with. Their model aims to revitalize the way long form articles are consumed online.

What We Discussed:

Cincinnati’s First 9-figure Exit - How a PropTech startup launched during the financial crisis ended with a $108M acquisition by Zillow and put Cincinnati’s tech ecosystem on the map.

A Paywall Problem Hidden in Plain Sight - Why publishers lose money every time a casual reader hits a subscription block and how Content Credits is helping them recover it.

The Regional Startup Flywheel in Motion - Adam reinvested his Dotloop exit & experience into Northern Kentucky real estate, coworking, and his next venture - fueling the region’s startup momentum.

Gamifying the News - Adding comments, social layers, and rewards to turn passive readers into active participants and drive revenue back to publishers.

We hope you enjoy this episode! If you have any thoughts after listening, feel free to shoot me a message at [email protected]

Have a great week, friends!

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