Less than a year after Spot Interactive took on the Discovery Centre in Halifax as its first client, the video-based e-commerce company has quickly amassed a customer base of 600.
The young Charlottetown and Montreal company’s growth is seen in the fact that it recently doubled its staff to 12 and took on investment from private backers. But the strongest evidence is that Spot Interactive had impressive revenue in 2014, considering it was its first year of sales. But in the first 10 weeks of 2015, its sales have been 25 times those of all 2014.
The reason for such astonishing growth is a combination of technology that is both cool and easy to use and a truly imaginative and effective sales strategy.
What Spot Interactive does is allow people to execute an interactive function while they’re watching an online video, with virtually no interruption in the film. So far the focus has been to make an online purchase, but the user could be tweeting, sharing, submitting applications or downloading files, all while a video is playing.
As the viewer watches, a small circle appears on screen. When viewers click on it, a small box appears with descriptive content and forms that allow a sale or other action. It means viewers could watch a video of a beach in Brazil, decide they like it and book a flight without any interruption in the video.
“At the moment the audience is engaged and ready to buy, the point of sale is right in front of them,” CEO Andrew Murray said in an interview last week. “When we developed the capacity to do this last spring, it was very powerful and we got some great feedback.”
Murray first developed the product for some Halifax art galleries he was working with. They had video of their space and he developed a program that let people click on paintings to purchase them. After developing the product further, Spot Interactive made its first sale last spring when the Discovery Centre hired the company to make an online video campaign for it. The resulting video is due to be released this month.
After the Discovery Centre sale, the company developed the product into a software-as-a-service offering that clients could use themselves to add a sales function to any video. It has sold the product to major corporations in Canada, the United States and Japan, and about 600 startups are using Spot Interactive to augment their marketing.
Murray, whose background is in neither technology nor sales but neuroscience, landed these blue-chip customers by being “really creative with our sales procedure.” All these companies have free videos on YouTube as part of their marketing effort. Murray and his collaborators took these videos and embedded point-of-sale devices in them.
If they got a meeting with anyone in a marketing department, they’d use the company’s own video to show the power of the Spot Interactive functionality. As often as not, it led to quick sales.
The growth has been so successful that Murray was able to grow the company mainly through revenue. In December, it attracted funding from Real Ventures in Montreal and members of the East Valley Ventures investment group in Saint John.
Disclaimer: Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support startup companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies and individuals are featured in this column, nor do they review columns before they are published.
