When a pair of female tech entrepreneurs calls their new social media product Hashpipe, it’s a safe bet that they tend to think outside the box.

Yet the story of how Julia Rivard-Dexter and Leah Skerry devised and commercialized Hashpipe reveals more than just original thinking. It also shows a cunning and disciplined strategy that is gaining revenues quickly.

Rivard-Dexter and Skerry are the principals of Norex, a creative web strategy company based in Halifax. In 2012, it incubated Pursu.it, a crowdfunding site for high-level athletes that has raised almost $300,000 for Canadian athletes. Norex is now spinning out Swell, the crowdfunding engine that powers Pursu.it, so that clients can launch their own crowdfunding sites.

Earlier this year, the Norex team came up with an idea for Hashpipe, a new product that would gather together hashtags from a range of social media outlets and present them all on a single online canvas. So let’s say there is an event like the Olympics, Hashpipe will find all the social media posts from Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Facebook that have the hashtag #sochi2014 and present them all on one screen. Videos on Vine even play as the reader scrolls through the posts.

“You’ve seen the tweet rolls at conferences,” said Rivard-Dexter in an interview at the Norex headquarters last week. “This app pulls in various types of feed so it’s a much more multimedia type of experience. It works really well, especially at events.”

Just visiting the Norex offices highlights the off-the-wall thinking at this outfit. The company is housed in a Victorian home in Halifax’s hardscrabble north end. When you enter, you immediately notice to your left a wall full of black-and-white framed photos of people with horses’ heads. To your right is a room full of programmers, who applaud en masse each time someone enters the building.

It’s a surreal spot, but the zaniness is balanced with discipline. Shortly after Norex conceived of Hashpipe, the team began to discuss the project with large clients. These clients, like Fox Sports and the Canadian Olympic Committee, became so interested that they began to ask when it would be ready.

That created urgency. So Rivard-Dexter and Skerry took their whole team out of the headquarters for a week this summer and set up shop in Volta, the tech incubator in downtown Halifax. It created a focused atmosphere in which the whole team concentrated on coding Hashpipe, and allowed the regular Volta tenants to provide feedback on how it was proceeding.

Now, just eight months after conceiving of the project, Hashpipe is generating revenues. The Olympic committee is due to launch the product soon, and Fox is planning to use it at big college sports events. The team hopes the product will even be adopted at a consumer level by, say, college kids at their parties. One of its selling points is its simplicity.

“When you’re a marketing manager, there are a lot of tools that require a lot of time, but this is quick and easy,” said Skerry.

It also has a memorable brand, and the principals emphasize they are determined to stick with a name that could be considered controversial.

“Leah and I love the brand so much because it’s so sticky,” said Rivard-Dexter. “People remember it.”