Summary
It’s no secret that driving customer engagement is a winning strategy for any business or cause. But that’s often easier said than done. Countable created a platform to enable brands, companies, and social causes to directly engage with their customers and followers.
We sat down with founder Bart Myers to talk about Countable’s conception, the platform’s flexibility, and where things are heading in the future…
Funding Round Details
For those who don’t know, what is the genesis story of Countable?
I founded Countable back in 2014, originally as a consumer media platform. With a team of technologists and journalists, we gave audiences a way to take action on the news. Countable quickly grew into a diverse community who took more than 40M actions on the platform. This was an unheard of level of engagement and drove massive demand to use our platform.
It was upon this foundation that Countable Pro, our enterprise arm, evolved to drive engagement and impact on behalf of leading brands, organizations, companies, movements, and causes by providing them with the Impact Hub—a branded platform with the full power of Countable’s engagement functionality, customized for their own communities and goals. With our 2019 acquisition of Brigade and Causes.com (the first Facebook app), Countable expanded its network to reach a total of over 190M users worldwide, offering yet another channel for organizations and movements to reach and grow their audiences.
How do you plan on allocating funds raised in this round to scale the business?
This is an incredible moment in time with unprecedented changes happening around the world in response to COVID-19. Communities, events, companies — really everything — is becoming virtual. The demand for Countable is surging, and we need capital to meet that demand. Our intention is to primarily use the funds to make key hires and drive R&D.
Who are your target customers and how do they use the product?
Countable works with trailblazing customers across industries, from Starbucks to Levi’s Strauss and Co., Patagonia, Uber, The Environmental Defense Fund, presidential campaigns, and many others. Working with teams that span corporate social impact to public policy, human resources, media, entertainment, issue advocacy, and more, our customers all share a sense of mission-driven purpose, and the desire to more deeply engage and activate their audiences digitally.
Customers leverage Countable’s Impact Hub solution—a brand-safe and content-driven platform architected for actionability, audience re-engagement, and measurable impact. Designed to turn passive audiences into invested communities, the Impact Hub encompasses tools for user-generated content, advocacy, polling, petitions, and more. With Countable, organizations, companies, and causes grow and activate communities and change the world for the better.
Do you have any competition, if so, how do you differentiate?
Customers frequently turn to Countable in place of expensive, piecemeal, and home-grown solutions that prove frustrating at best and fail to achieve mission-critical goals at worst. Countable’s all-encompassing solution provides a streamlined channel for communications, updates, resources, and engagement, upgrading customers from a haphazard combination of Slack, Facebook Groups, unruly email lists, and one-off landing pages.
What are the biggest risks associated with your business?
Our solutions have been designed with nimble flexibility— an approach that has always opened doors to new clients and industries, and that has enabled us to creatively stretch our tools to meet niche client needs through innovative applications of our solutions. The next phase for Countable’s products must balance this flexibility with speed and massive scale. It is with this in mind that our product roadmap includes an ambitious pursuit of a self-service model, in which clients will be able to access, customize, and build-upon Countable’s platform should they so choose. This will open the doors for our sales team to attract an even broader pool of organizations, companies, and causes large and small.
How is your team uniquely positioned to win out in this market?
Countable is uniquely positioned to empower companies, organizations, and causes with the tools to grow and activate audiences. Building trusted digital environments for community, action, and impact is in Countable’s DNA and has been core to our mission from the very start.
Today’s digital landscape has been turned on its head. As the world struggles to grasp all of the lasting implications of the COVID-19 outbreak, there are a few things that we know for certain. One is that companies and organizations have lost access to the tried-and-true channels that had always been core to reaching their audiences and driving impact. Across the board, there is a desperate need for new and better digital solutions. Industries from retail to technology to healthcare are changed for good, and only those that gracefully adapt to a new digital landscape during this time with speed, humility, and empathy will succeed as the dust settles.
Long before COVID-19 turned the world upside down, revealing the cracks in our digital landscape, Countable was providing new channels for digital communication and impact. It is for this reason that we were able to get up-and running quickly with COVID-19 resources and solutions, supporting customers including Benevity, a network of healthcare providers in Puerto Rico, and The Partnership for New York. Our solutions are already optimized for content, re-engagement, brand safety, moderation, and measurable impact. The current market, and the long-lasting digital landscape that’s taking shape around us, is amplifying the need for the very solutions that Countable has invested years in developing. There is no time to waste.
What does your business model look like?
Our model consists of a one-time set-up fee, and a monthly platform licensing fee—a self-sustaining model designed to scale with the complexity and functionality offered to clients. In many cases, the foundational platform is already so advanced and optimized that we can waive set-up fees in an effort to offer discounted solutions for deserving organizations and movements.
Moreover, the platform is designed flexibly for almost any use-case or community structure—public, private, application-based, or even federated (with a central hub and a wide reaching network of sub-communities based on shared issues or geographies). In this way, new deals are positioned to grow exponentially, based on the size of clients’ audiences and the complexity of functionality required to meet their unique impact goals.
As you think about the business 5-10 years down the road, what do you see exit opportunities looking like?
Marc Andreessen’s “Software Eating the World” thesis has gone into high gear in the COVID-19 world. We’re seeing a tsunami of trends driving people to come together virtually for nearly everything we do. This is impacting the need for purpose-driven communities to deliver outcomes or impact – coming together on their own terms (not Facebook’s or Twitter’s) safely and effectively. Our platform is the leader in this emerging vertical powering the world’s leading enterprises, causes and campaigns and over the coming years will do so for everyone from schools to neighborhoods to cities to small businesses. This is an expansive vision that will lead to an extremely valuable and successful enterprise modeled on Salesforce, Zoom, and Slack.
Why equity crowdfunding?
We believe in aligning our business, our customers and investors around a common mission. Equity crowdfunding is a powerful way to help introduce potential investors into our business, who in turn can help us spread the word, attract and delight new customers to our platform, and who can share in the benefits of it.
We at KingsCrowd are excited to see where Bart and his team take the company. Countable is currently raising on SeedInvest.
