After Raising $1.6M, SimpleReach Launches To Become The PageRank Of Social

Pivoting is a part of life for startups. But, generally speaking, most entrepreneurs aren’t going to go out of their way to pivot right when their business starts taking off. But that’s what SimpleReach did. The startup’s first product, The Slide, is a simple widget that lets publishers recommend similar content at the bottom of articles. In just a few months, it was adopted by thousands of publishers, like Freakonomics.com, sparknotes.com, disinfo.com, The Washington Times, and SF Gate — to name a few.

Yet, in spite of strong early growth and graduating from AngelPad’s accelerator program, they decided to pivot. They froze all new signups to The Slide and turned their attention to an idea they believed could have a much larger impact. Today, the NYC-based startup is revealing its new solution, a product founder Eddie Kim calls the “PageRank of social.”

Only time will tell if it was stupid or brilliant, but there’s still the matter of “why?” Well, in pitching The Slide to publishers, the SimpleReach founders would be asked to explain how their content recommendation algorithm worked, and, in doing so, they’d talk about how social was a key component to the algorithm’s secret sauce. In nearly every case, Kim tells us, publishers would struggle to get comfortable with that fact. Underestimating the actual potential of social media, they would just end up scowling and asking to see corroborating data.

Given how important social media strategies are to publishers — of all sizes — he said that the team was continuously struck by the fact that most lacked any significant understanding of how to optimize social sharing or what tools to use, etc. In many cases, publishers would admit that, to get a better understanding of how their social sharing tools were working, they were manually opening hundreds of articles and typing the results into an Excel doc to perform some old-fashioned number crunching.

In asking publishers how they would compare a network’s performance, say, yesterday versus today, which of their authors do the best on Twitter, or what the value of a tweet is versus a reddit upvote or a pageview, they would just sit there blinking.

So the founders went back to the drawing board, and after some serious market analysis, came to the conclusion that there really weren’t any products out there offering an end-to-end solution to solve this demand, nor were really any clear market leaders.

The other thing that’s important to understand is that, when creating their social media strategy, the majority of publishers focus on maximizing the value of Facebook and Twitter. That’s understandable, but the landscape is more diverse than the F/T binary. In fact, for a surprising number, Stubleupon is the leading driver of traffic and Pinterest is obviously quickly gaining ground, especially for evergreen content. Reddit is inconsistent, but cracking the nut behind those upvotes often spells big time traffic.

The challenge, though, is to make sense of each network both individually and in aggregate. Existing tools, like social sharing buttons or shortened URLs, only provide a limited snapshot and are far from providing a holistic view. To really be comprehensive, publishers need to be tracking everything, he says.

To solve this problem, the new SimpleReach integrates with every major social network’s API to let brands, marketers, publishers, and consumers track social engagement for any link in realtime. But, the key for SimpleReach’s platform is that not only is it analyzing millions of social actions and pageviews every day to offer up robust social metrics, it also builds statistical models that enable it to predict which pieces of content will be the most social.

Kim called it a “significant technological undertaking,” part of the reason that 9 of SimpleReach’s 10 employees are engineers or data scientists. And also part of the motivation behind the startup’s recent $1.6 million seed raise from High Peaks and Village Ventures. The funding, he said, is primarily being used to hire engineers and scale its product.

But, getting back to publishers: While it’s easy to view twitter sharing stats for individual posts, finding out (right now) which articles are performing best on twitter out of the hundred published on the platform today? Not so easy.

So, by capturing every social action from the instant its published, then running models against that incoming data, SimpleReach believes it has a better shot at being able to predict how well an article will do. It’s one thing to just add a social sharing button for Twitter, but any tool that’s worth its salt, will capture its data in realtime (for every article ever published) and make it easy to extract insight from that big data. Right?

“We’re able to take all the articles on your site, place them on a trending page and rank which are predicted to drive the most social traffic in the near future,” Kim said, “and it’s this kind of data intelligence that gives us a leg up on the competition.” That, and the fact that most solutions offer a pull-based experience, while SimpleReach wants to use its tech to make data intelligence a push-based experience.

And, in that (most basic) sense, Insight has the flexibility to be interval-based, so that every three hours the solution will push info on which social networks are driving the most traffic. Or it can be event-based, so that it will let users know if an article receives more than two thousand tweets today, for example. And depending on the use case, SimpleReach can offer customers a standard stock of insights or the ability to build custom ones.

As to its business model, the startup already has a handful of paying clients (launch partners include Time Inc, Demand Media, Hearst and many more), but Kim said that they’re focused on the free version and finding it the widest adoption possible. Then using the up-sell freemium software technique.

However, most of the biz models the company is pursuing depend on having a big footprint. It could concentrate on charging publishers, but Kim says he doesn’t think that option is sustainable in the long-term. He thinks the real opportunity is the fact that content marketing is still nascent and is beginning to explode.

“There’s still no way to take a hundred assets across various networks and channels and rank their success. The company that can create and own that standard in market will be huge and will, he says, have created the PageRank for social.

Of course, they were the ones who pivoted before the harvest, thinking that the short-term fold leads to long-term gold. So, they would say that.

Find SimpleReach here.