How we got an opportunity to turn our social feeds filtering service into a content marketing service while participating in the MIT eTeams accelerator
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In May of 2013, Likehack got invited to MIT eTeams. By that time, we had launched our beta version of the app with blog, Facebook and twitter filtering service to help people get rid of excess information on their social network feeds.
The first insight we got, as a Russian team, was about terminology. We realized that only people who worked in marketing and used content marketing tools really understood what “content curation” meant. And that had been the main catch-phrase on our website, which we intended to be read by a wide audience. Whoops! So we changed our pitch and texts to say that our product filters clutter from social media and provides a full text search for that content. That allowed us to get our point across much better.
The other insight came to us courtesy of the Kendall Square people we spoke to. Many of them told us that there is also a b2b opportunity for our social filtering technology: since every social marketer needs to curate content every day, we could do content curation for business. This is a ready market with already-existing opportunities: there are a lot of great content curating tools for business, like storify.com, scoop.it. curata.com, etc.
We began to communicate with them and discovered, to our surprise, that none of them have the kind of social collaborative filtering technology we have. The beauty of our set-up is that it learns much faster, since it uses real people without coercing them to do something they don’t usually do. So our solution ends up being faster, smarter, and more economical.
As a result, after just five days in Boston, we found two marketing software companies willing to launch a pilot with us and many social marketers eager to acquire an automated solution for sharing cool and relevant links to their social accounts every day with minimal effort. So now, we’ve launched a pilot with couple of those solutions, giving businesses a few opportunities we did not include in the public version to keep it simple and streamlined.
So that’s the story of how LikeHack started to research b2b opportunities for its social content curation technology.
We also got a lot of positive feedback on consumer product, which remains our number one priority. We want to make LikeHack the first thing users load every morning after putting on their slippers and getting the coffee going. After all, why waste precious morning hours scrolling through a hundred links when you can get the best stories of the day on your feeds right away?
(And yes, in case you’re curious, Cambridge and MIT are awesome.)
