Sebastian Scheplitz
Founder and editor of Contour Magazine. Founder of Shepard&Young. Operator, founder and advisor across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, based in Dubai.
I grew up in Leipzig in the 1980s and watched a whole country rewrite itself within a few years. The money in people's pockets changed, the names over the shop doors changed, and so did the value of a lifetime's work, and the people who read that change early did far better than the people who waited for someone to explain it.
That is still the lens I write with.
What I have built
I have worked in marketing and leadership since 2000. The early years were brand and commercial roles at SAP, Telefonica, Betsson and HL komm, where I built a new consumer fiber brand that grew its market share from 12 to 27 percent in a single year against the incumbent DSL providers, alongside agency work for Betfair, Bruno Banani and Samsung across Germany, Malta and the United States.
In 2016 I co-founded Translation Royale and WeGotGame, an international marketing and localization business, and took it from zero to seven figures over eight years with a core team of fifteen and a network of more than 500 specialists. When the time came to sell, I ran the trade sale myself, from the first approach to completion. Hotcopy, the AI content platform I co-founded, reached more than 10,000 trial users across ten Asian markets, and I chose to sell its codebase and customer base rather than fund a price war against competitors that had raised ten to twenty million dollars.
Then, as general manager and CMO, I led The Coinomist through a turnaround. It was a 30-person media business with a largely Ukrainian, mostly remote team, many of them working through the war, and it relaunched within four months with a new identity, platform and editorial system, output up 300 percent at lower cost, and its first monetization model.
Since 2025 I have run Shepard&Young, a commercial strategy consultancy for founders and CEOs whose growth has stalled, and delivered commercial diagnostics and growth plans for more than 30 companies across Europe, the Gulf and Asia. I wrote the scoring methodology behind Deckmetric, have reviewed more than 350 pitch decks, mentor founders at the Dubai accelerators Ignyte and FRWRDX, and hold an advisory seat with an Israel-based medical hardware and data company.
From 2000 to 2010 I also coached basketball, winning county and state championships as a player and as a coach, and I was a youth medalist swimmer before that. Coaching is where I learned to watch the whole floor, the spacing, who passes to whom, who stops moving when they get tired, instead of following the ball. I studied business administration, journalism and PR, and Japanese studies at the University of Leipzig, then spent two and a half years at a marketing and commercial academy.
Where I have lived
I have traveled to more than 50 countries, worked from most of them and lived in about ten cities. Kuala Lumpur was home for two years, Spain for one and Bali for longer stretches, and today I am based in Dubai.
Very little of that is on my CV, and all of it ends up in Contour Magazine.
I started Contour Magazine in January 2026 for people who make decisions across borders: where to build, where to live, where to put money, and how to read a place before committing to it. Each piece takes something that happened and follows it to the point where it changes one of those decisions, connecting a market move to the culture underneath it, or a geopolitical shock to the supply chain that carries it into someone's quarter.
My shorthand for the whole idea is go where you can read the room. Put your company, your capital and your life where you understand the unwritten rules well enough to see trouble coming before it arrives.
Alongside the magazine I write the Between series. A World Between Stories is the first book, available through my Amazon author page.
Elsewhere
Get in touch
Write to me at hello@readcontour.com with corrections, disagreements and story ideas. If you want to work with me on a commercial problem, that happens through Shepard&Young.
Short bio
For podcasts, events and press. Use as written or shorten from the end.
Sebastian Scheplitz is the founder and editor of Contour Magazine, an independent magazine on business, culture and the connections between them, and the founder of Shepard&Young, a commercial strategy consultancy. In more than 25 years in marketing and leadership he co-founded and sold two companies, Translation Royale/WeGotGame and Hotcopy, led the turnaround of The Coinomist as general manager and CMO, and worked on more than 100 brands, including Betfair, Betsson, Telefonica and SAP. He wrote the scoring methodology behind Deckmetric and mentors founders at the Dubai accelerators Ignyte and FRWRDX. A former basketball coach, he grew up in Leipzig, has traveled to more than 50 countries and is based in Dubai.