Roots and Boots: The history of sociomantic labs, Part 3

For this final edition of our three-part miniseries, we wanted to take some time to share what’s next for sociomantic labs. We’re really excited about what we’ve got in the works, but getting here hasn’t been all peaches and cream. Like most startups, we’ve hard to learn some lessons along the way, and we can only hope that others can learn from us, instead of learning the hard way.

Geek & Poke discuss: "The New Social APIs"

A Little Background… On Our Future

The basic direction of the company is to build and provide services that enable companies and businesses to better understand their customer base, to help them tailor their products and more importantly to directly interact and engage with their customers. Those services should use as many information sources as possible to get the best possible understanding of the customer and their behavior. The challenge and the direction for the company will be to apply Social Network Analysis, Semantic Analysis and other analytical methods to a large data set that we aim for.

Lars Kirchhoff
VP of Product Management and Innovations

Tech Startup Life Lesson #1: Selling APIs is rough stuff!

After we developed our social graph and buffed up our database, we excitedly thought that we could immediately move on to the business part of our business by selling access to our awesome web service API.

The non-techies out there might be wondering: what exactly is a web services API? Our first problem was contained in this very question. The people we were pitching our product to were the marketing and advertising folks – not the guys from the  IT departments. So we spent a lot of our pitch time explaining what our product was instead of demonstrating what it could do.

Access to our “web service API” basically just means that we allow companies access to a machine-readable output of all the data that we’ve collected. Unfortunately for us, this business model was a bit of a Catch-22. The trouble was, for these companies to be able to put our data to work, they first had to get someone from inside their company to dedicate the time to design, test, and implement a useful front- or a back-end plug-in option for the data. In order to see the real benefits of our SocialGraph, companies first had to spend internal resources (time, money, brainpower) to design software that could put our data to use for their specific needs. It’s as if we’d written a really amazing, insightful book, and then we’d try to get companies to understand how reading our book could help their business. But if they wanted to take a peek inside the book, first they’d have to design their own special reading glasses to translate the words into a language they could understand and use.

It may sound a little naive now, but of course hindsight’s 20/20.  We knew how good our data was (and is) and understood what it could reveal, so it seemed obvious to us (at first) that companies would be interested in “reading” it. But we learned pretty quickly that the amount of effort required from the customer side was a pretty tall entrance barrier to using our service. “We simply underestimated the complexity of the efforts involved for selling API services,” recalls Lars.

So, having learned just how challenging it is to sell a web service API (even a really good one), we decided to move our product a little closer to our customers. Which leads us to:

Tech Startup Life Lesson #2: Be flexible!

Even though it’s important to “keep your eye on the prize,” a startup that never budges from its intended path is almost surely doomed. No one can know everything from the get-go, so you have to be ready to adapt your mission as you learn.

"Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water." - Lao Tzu

After we realized that companies weren’t jumping at the opportunity to buy access to the API as-is, we began designing  highly customized products for each of our clients, basically doing the job that their IT departments would have done in our initial business model. As much as we like the challenge, each system we designed took up quite a bit of our time and resources—not exactly a scalable business model. As we talked about in our bootstrapping post , these are resources that we would have liked to invest in the development our core product: the sociomantic SocialGraph and all the social network analytics that accompany it.  So we decided that the next step in our growth was to further lower the entrance barrier to our product by designing a slick front-end user interface that many sorts of businesses could use to access the data behind our API.

The Way Things Are

And that pretty much brings us up to speed. We’re currently in the process of designing a new product that will “provide a user interface to access all the possible analytics methods and data we have gathered,” explains Lars. “It will provide businesses with the opportunity to upload their customer base and get the most useful information about the web life of their customers.”

Speaking broadly, this interface will consist of a log-in dashboard for our clients to allow businesses to do things like:

• Easily segment their user base based on demographic or social information
• Identify opinion leaders and hot topics in their customer base
• Understand the social capital of their customers
• Follow and engage with specific customers and turn data into valuable actions

Building a user interface that can meet the needs of many different kinds of businesses is a tough job, but we’re really excited about the challenge.

For our clients who want to deeply integrate our data into their marketing and CRM processes, we will still provide the option to gain access to our SocialGraph through the API. “This will be the step up from just analyzing the data to integrating our results directly into optimization of business processes in each company,” says Lars. This could be used for everything from specialized CRM software to highly individualized online ad targeting.

While we’ll be keeping the finer details of the new product under wraps for just a little while longer, we’re always happy to hear your thoughts and feedback on our growth. We’d love to know what your company would love to know about your customers