A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the concept that you started this around?

Cooper Harris: The reason I had it came from a very mundane moment. I was on my phone. I saw an ad for a really cute pair of shoes. I wanted to buy the shoes. I clicked the ad and went to the page but it took forever. Finally when it loaded, it was not there. It was cumbersome. It annoyed me. I eventually didn’t buy the shoes.

I turned to my engineer friends and said, “Did you see what just happened? This is so absurdly inefficient and also unnecessary. Let’s have an impulse buy button when we want to purchase something in a digital environment.”

Sramana Mitra: When did you start this?

Cooper Harris: About three years ago.

Sramana Mitra: Was that bootstrapped or did you raise money?

Cooper Harris: Both. We bootstrapped the first iteration. We got LOI’s from some very large entities here in California. It’s the influencer-driven entities who could use the technology. I thought that would be an awesome place to go to market.

Sramana Mitra: Explain to me the use case for ICM for instance. You have an LOI from ICM. What does ICM do with this platform?

Cooper Harris: It’s a SaaS platform whereby the clients are celebrities or the brands. That’s the key part – people with things they’re selling. They can commerce-enable those marketing messages. We put a payments button on their marketing message. We call it distributed commerce.

This is pulling up a little bit. There are trillions of these marketing messages ads and emails being pushed out every month all promoting the same stuff and all trying to drive you to one place – the website. It’s a very inefficient, old school way to do things. It’s a relic of the real world where you put up billboards and drive people into a store. In digital, you don’t have to do that. Why in the world are we putting out these pictures if you actually can’t purchase it? It seems a little silly if you think about it.

Sramana Mitra: It depends on what product you are selling and whether people are ready to buy that without going through a lot of investigation.

Cooper Harris: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of traction did you get before you went out and raised money?

Cooper Harris: We did early pilots with a bunch of influencers, a couple influential charities, and then a couple of Fortune 500. We got an influencer campaign with Eminem.

Sramana Mitra: What product was Eminem selling using your technology?

Cooper Harris: Merch and themed items.

Sramana Mitra: His own branded products.

Cooper Harris: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Walk me through a couple more use cases because I think it’s a concept that is not entirely familiar with the audience. It would be helpful to illustrate with a few more examples.

Cooper Harris: That was one instance with Eminem. We work with UN. Charities use us to raise money for their causes. The act of purchasing something is very similar to the act of donation. We enable those. When you get to actual brands, this is where we enable ads versus social posts. One of our first campaign was with Guess jeans. They commerce-enabled their ad campaign. People could purchase either through going back to the site or through impulse purchase.

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about jeans. There’s sizing. How do you deal with that?

Cooper Harris: We have radio buttons where consumers choose their size. It’s just a simple selection. The best way to think about it is it’s the same size as when you buy on mobile. It’s just a lot more streamlined.

Sramana Mitra: How many of you were doing this before you raised money?

Cooper Harris: There were five or six of us at that time. Google and RGA have this really cool program. When they find neat startups, they showcase them at Cannes Lions. It’s the Oscars of innovation in the advertising and marketing world. We were able to go and present our technology to 400 of the biggest brands. I have to credit that with a lot of our early success.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly
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