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A new content sharing and social data company quietly put up its AngelList page yesterday in preparation to officially launch a Series A round and take pre-beta signups next week.
The company, UP, is an “intersection of gamified social sharing, daily deals and Big Data,” founder Simon Turner said. By incentivizing content-sharers with points redeemable at a Groupon-like store, UP aims to “reward relevant, engaging content not share-share-sharing.”
On the other side of the equation, UP gets content-producers (aka partners) on board by giving them a whole suite of sharing tools as well as a ton of data on the content-sharers.
“Partners get the locations, demographics of their top-sharers, what other types of content they’re sharing, what their friends are sharing and the types of rewards they’re redeeming for,” Turner said. “Also, it’s network specific. Maybe your Twitter following responds to one thing and you Facebook following doesn’t, these insights allow you to make changes.”
Other social data platforms provide similar insights, but can only use public-facing data. Since UP users consent to share their info (or choose to remain anonymous like on LinkedIn), UP has an advantage over social data competitors.
Businesses like Lululemon, Toms Shoes, Wine Awesomeness and Listen Headphones are already in talks with the 7-person UP team to try out the platform. It’s free for partners and for users but will monetized in a year or two.
Before monetizing, UP “needs to build the critical mass, get the data and analytics and test a few revenue models prior to launching them full-scale.” For now, the company will raise a Series A round to add to its pool of capital, which currently stands at $60,000 from a seed round from Turner and CEO Travis Steffen. But since UP’s “business model is a bit more likened to what Twitter was,” they need to wait to build up data to monetize.
“I’ve sold four tech companies in the last four years, none have been venture-backed on purpose,” Steffen said. “If it all possible, I don’t raise capital from investors. Don’t give up equity if you don’t have to.”
The last company that Steffen sold, online personal trainer WorkoutBOX, was also a joint effort between him and Turner. While the two were working together on WorkoutBOX (albeit remotely), the idea for UP came up about 10 months ago.
Now, as UP ventures into its early stages, Turner and Steffen are betting they will “disrupt a couple different industries at the same time by tying them all together and being a little bit more creative.”
