For the next few months, Joseph Teo will be travelling between St. John’s and Moncton, taking his Newfoundland startup HeyOrca! through PropelICT’s Build program.

HeyOrca! is an online platform that helps marketers collaborate on social media content. Working out of the Genesis Centre at Memorial University, it is conducting pilots of the products with marketing agencies.

The company aims to solve the problem agencies and freelance content creators have working with each other and gaining approval for social media posts.

“If you’re marketing for government or for high-value brands, you have to go through the communications department and several layers of management for approvals,” Teo said in an interview at the centre last week. “Our system has an audit trail to see who has given approval; it saves a lot of time.”

The HeyOrca! team — Teo, co-founder Sahand Seifi and web developer Nadia Sajjadi — has developed the product so it’s simple and effective for users, but the really interesting part of the company’s story is how it got where it is and what it means to the broader startup community in St. John’s.

Teo and Seifi first gained notice in the East Coast startup community when their previous project, Student Fresh, reached the finals of Canada’s Business Model Competition in 2014. They had only been working on the project — a matching platform for students seeking part-time work with local businesses — for two months when they entered the competition.

As they continued to work on the product, they focused on students looking for work on social media projects.

“One day, an agency came up to us and said, ‘We don’t want to hire your students but we hear you have a platform that we may be interested in,’” said Teo.

So the company changed tack. It worked with freelancers to understand the process of creating social media content and developed the platform to make it simpler. The company has focused on letting content creators, agencies and brands work closely together with the greatest ease of use possible. The team is integrating its product with software commonly used by marketers, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

HeyOrca! was accepted into the Genesis Centre incubator late last year, and then applied for PropelICT. [Disclaimer: Propel is a client of Entrevestor.]

Teo and the team originally applied for the Launch program, the course for early stage companies being offered in St. John’s. But organizers saw how advanced the company was and encouraged Teo to go into the more advanced Build cohort offered in Moncton.

HeyOrca! was one of six startups, and the first Newfoundland and Labrador company, accepted into Build.

The curriculum focuses more on revenue generation, key for a company at HeyOrca!’s stage of development, and completing the program will give it more sway with potential funders. People within the St. John’s community hope HeyOrca! will establish a pattern other companies will follow.

The team plans to offer the product as a monthly subscription, though it is working on pricing.

“We’re still trying to refine that part of the process,” said Teo. “We’ll have something solid by the end of Build — hopefully before.”