Awesome Anusha, Davai and CrowdBooster
Ok, so a few weeks ago I blogged about an event I went to at Techcelerate: The Northern Tech Funding Landscape. There I met some pretty interesting people, and I ended up making a new friend in the shape of the awesome Anusha Su. Not only is Anusha a really genuinely energetic and pleasant person, she is also an uber connected person and has some seriously intimidating tech credentials. Before moving to the UK, Anusha was an exec in a VC firm in Silicon Valley and is on first name terms with major players in the scene out there. Naturally I spoke about Twocial, we got along really well and so we stayed in touch. A few weeks later Anusha was in Manchester so we met for coffee. We were talking about the tech scene in the UK and eventually Twocial. She was really interested and promised to put us in touch with two friends of hers who have cofounded startups broadly in the same space - and that I should really connect with them.
So, that very evening Anusha introduced us via Facebook and within days I had Skype sessions organised with each of them; Maria at Davai and Ricky at Crowdbooster.
The first was with Maria who is a cofounder at Davai. Davai are Seattle based and are focused on the social and mobile experience in the retail sector. Davai offers web and mobile apps to retailers to best target customers and provide them with branded and targeted content. Broadly summarised, the call was focused on our user base and our strategy around quality of data. Davai use a sophisticated algorithm that crawls all of the social networks and platforms and aggregates this for the retail sector. The call was great for me to tell Maria where we’re at, and it was encouraging to hear that Maria had the same thought processes as we did when they were at early stage.
My key take aways from the call were:
- Twitter has a very poor signal to noise ratio (at least in the US it does) and unfiltered can be pretty much regarded as trash
- A way of counteracting that is to create a captive audience (Fans of Facebook profiles, Twitter followers etc) and mine them for good data
- What is your differentiator?
- Do some more detailed competitor research
- Focus on what makes you the natural choice for your killer feature
Maria has so much experience and her product development journey was so similar to ours - so it was great to hear the drivers behind their decision to focus on the retail sector. Maria ended the call with words of encouragement by saying we had an interesting spin and that we should check in with her once we had an Alpha release.
So, lessons learnt and food for thought. I’ll be sure to blog once we’ve had the Skype with Crowdbooster. Until then why not follow us on Twitter @TwocialApp to keep up to date with what we’re upto and when we next meet.
