SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 315: Mom Just Had Baby, $100 Million Raised Augmented Reality, 65 Million Users
23 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is Blippar and how does it work?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 2: How has Blippar achieved significant funding and client relationships?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Rick Siegmund. Rick Siegmund, brick and mortar business. That is his focus. So congratulations, Rick. If you guys want to win $100 every Monday on the show, in order to enter, simply subscribe to the show on iTunes now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444.
Chapter 3: What innovative applications does Blippar offer for brands?
Again, text the word NATHAN to 33444. Top job you're listening to episode 315 of The Top. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to hear from John Bowen. He's the secret financial consultant to Silicon Valley's wealthiest, richest, and most powerful. You're not going to want to miss it.
top tribe good morning everybody our guest this morning is jess butcher and she's a co-founder of blipper the world's leading mobile visual browser currently enjoying rapid international growth as one of the most promising unicorns on the global tech scene as cmo that is chief marketing officer she's led blipper to 60 million app downloads in less than five years and with a blue chip client roster
She's the recipient of numerous awards, including Fortune's Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs and BBC's Global 100 Women. Jessica, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 4: How does Blippar incentivize users to download the app?
Absolutely. Looking forward to it.
Let's have some fun. Okay, first things first. What is Blipper and how do you make money?
Okay, so how we talk about what we do has sort of transitioned quite a bit over the last five years, but your summary just then was very, very apt. We refer to ourselves as a mobile visual browser.
What that means is we harness very sophisticated computer vision and image recognition technologies now to effectively be able to recognize anything in the physical world around us through the eye or camera of the smart device. and immediately recognize it and translate it into a digital content experience. So think search without words.
Chapter 5: What is Blippar's long-term vision for the technology?
Tell us how this is different than augmented reality.
So augmented reality is fascinating and we're very well known for that as a technology. That is obviously the business of putting content as if in the real world. So overlaying the camera's view of the world with enhanced content. So sort of recreating ruins or having bubbles that appear that point your direction in one way or the other.
And we do a lot of that because that's a really exciting application for things like brands and media owners to bring their physical world assets to life in a very fun and visual way. But where we're diversifying now is into making the image recognition actually more the primary tech because how you then deliver information off
that visual recognition doesn't have to be floating as if on that physical thing. It could simply be a sound file that plays that is an audio guide to the piece of art that you're looking at, or could be a web link that opens up immediately that enables you to buy that handbag that you've just seen the person next to you on the train modeling.
So we're enhancing the content applications of what we can do with that visual recognition.
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Chapter 6: How does Blippar differentiate itself from traditional augmented reality?
And AR is a big part of that. And it's something that our brand and advertising partners, which, by the way, is our main monetization source right now. They love AR.
So tell us, Jessica, give us an example of how you're working with one of those guys.
So a number of different ways. So for example, we work with Pepsi and Coke. We've worked with them to turn their products, their bottles, their cans interactive. So as a user, what that means is you would see a can, perhaps during the World Cup, the football World Cup, and it would say, I'm interactive, blip me and bring me to life.
And what you then do as a user is you open up your blipper app on your phone, you simply look at that can and And right in front of your eyes, you don't take any pictures, right in front of your eyes, the can jumps to life.
Chapter 7: What challenges has Blippar faced in user engagement?
You get to play a football game with it. You get to see some of the stars of the World Cup come to life off the can. You get to enter competitions and more. Another example might be a cereal box. So Lucky Charms in the States, for example, if you look at a box of Lucky Charms and you can play a game with the little goblin and get him flying down the rainbows and take your photograph with him.
And again, more educational tools as well that they're doing for children. So it's a fantastic way for brands and advertisers to amplify their physical real world assets and to effectively turn their products into a new media. And this is game changing for them.
Well, yeah, and this space, Jessica, is so brand new. Even to my listeners, it's probably a bit abstract, but virtual reality, augmented reality, and more importantly, how are people going to use that tech to deliver value to the world, which is really where I think, Blipper, you guys are coming into play.
Chapter 8: What insights can we gain from Jessica's entrepreneurial journey?
And look, I think the total funding has raised, what, $99 million, something like that?
Yeah, just over 100 we've raised today.
That's right. Yeah, just over $100 million. So again, you're obviously on to something. Give me an example of a company like Pepsi. You're the CMO, so I don't know if you're actually the one closing the deals, but what are they paying you? Are they paying you like a per project basis or how do they pay?
So it really varies. Obviously, in the early days, a lot of the work we were doing was proofs of concept. So it was a case by case, campaign by campaign type initiative. They'd come to us with a brief. They'd say, we're doing this sponsorship of the World Cup or we're launching this new product or we're doing this press or outdoor campaign. We want to amplify it and make it more experiential.
And we'd enter into a creative and technical brainstorm with them and their agencies about what content we could deliver and how we could really turn this into something that was very proactive, had a long dwell time and a huge number of users buying more of the products in order to engage with that experience.
These days now, we've been in the market long enough that we have long entrenched relationships that are ongoing, more like a retained relationship where we're at CMO level, we're talking about every campaign six to 12 months out rather than six to eight weeks out.
And pricing is down to a number of different factors, from technical and creative design time to technical and performance fees, according to how many interactions the partners get. So it's a combination of consultancy and technical fixed fees.
So Jessica, hold on. I want to stop you real quick because I want to break that down. So let's role play here. Let's say I'm Procter. Are you working with Procter & Gamble?
I can't possibly reveal that right now.
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