A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: One of the questions that comes out of that is what role do you have in showing or not showing products. Does that mean that you’re operating a marketplace of what brands influencers show?

Cooper Harris: Yes, in a sense. It’s able to predict what product to show to whom. We are able to do that now.

Sramana Mitra: You have to recruit the influencer or the brands are recruiting?

Cooper Harris: The brands and the influencers are both our clients. They’re our customers who pay to promote their own products. They’re both on the same side.

Sramana Mitra: But I’m not talking about the guys like Eminem who’s marketing their own products. I’m talking about influencers who are advocating other people’s brands. Are they bringing themselves to the table?

Cooper Harris: To clarify, we have the Eminem’s. To get that out into the world, we enable them to do that via social media and ads. Just to give a concrete example, Vogue is rolling out our email solution next year.

Sramana Mitra: To summarize, you are controlling ad inventory.

Cooper Harris: Yes, to some extent because we are using machine learning to tell these brands where and what to push when. It’s accurate. You want to commerce-enable all your marketing messages. Then you can’t just push that out randomly and hope it works because you have to show it to people who matter and who really will purchase it. What we do is very different. It’s all based on machine learning and, what we call, smart targeting. It’s so good that we only take their money if we make it work. We do take responsibility for deciding who to show what products to.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? This is the fourth quarter of 2018. Did you raise money in the interim?

Cooper Harris: We haven’t really needed to, but we’re hoping to do a growth round next year.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers now?

Cooper Harris: We have about 800.

Sramana Mitra: These are customers who are paying you a monthly subscription of $2,500 a month plus success fee?

Cooper Harris: The tier one guys, yes. It goes down from there depending on how big they are.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution between tier one, tier two, and tier three.

Cooper Harris: It’s fairly even.

Sramana Mitra: You’re catering to three categories basically.

Cooper Harris: Yes. I do want to point out that the reason we can do that is because it’s a totally automated platform. It’s completely self-serve. The brands come in and do everything themselves. We empower them to set the dials they want. Our machine learning goes to work. Because of that, we don’t have to have a ton of account managers. We don’t have a ton of salespeople. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to handle that many brands.

Another thing I want to point out is for our tier one clients, we support them and are very active. For the tier two, we provide less support. For tier three, you have access to technology that was built for Fortune 500 companies. They’re hanging out there by themselves. The reason I call that out is for a small company trying to be lean, you want to be thoughtful about how you allocate your resource and time.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. You cannot commit a level of support that you cannot deliver on. When you pitched us, you told us that you are at about $5 million revenue level.

Cooper Harris: Run rate, yes. I see a very clear split between when we were building the product, finding product-market fit, and then increasing the platform. We organically have 80 to 100 brands every month. Once we found a product that people want, we have spent nothing in customer acquisition, which is crazy.

Sramana Mitra: How do people find you?

Cooper Harris: I think it’s two things. People are dissatisfied with their marketing spend. It’s not performing. They hear about our platform. You can make a sale in the marketing message and we use machine learning to find who to sell their stuff to. We only take money, other than the platform fee, when we make it work.

This is syndicating their shopping carts to millions of sites. They do have control over how they pay. Word of mouth has been great for us. We do also have sales partners. Companies like FedEx who cater to e-commerce brands just send us their brands.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a great story. Well done. I wish you all the best. Thank you for your time.

To learn more about entrepreneurship for women, please study our course on Udemy: Keys To Success for Women Entrepreneurs with Sramana Mitra.

This segment is part 7 in the series : A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly
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