Tapiture Taps Into Successful Social eCommerce and Secures $2.25M in Seed Funding
Santa Monica-based Tapiture has grown in traffic by 300%, monetized from year one and raised $2.25 million in seed funding since its founding in 2012. If Pinterest is catnip for girls, Tapiture was founded to go after the men, but quickly evolved into a more sophisticated artistic social media community. The curated design and photography-driven entertainment site is where GIFs and memes intermingle with stunning photography, video and the ability to purchase in app. If users go to Pinterest to plan things, then they come to Tapiture for a personalized experience based on fancy algorithms that customizes content to their tastes.
There is real technology underneath the hood for a personalized experience at Tapiture. Under CEO John Ellis, Tapiture progressed from category browsing, to a socially-driven content and social media commerce discovery site that was more predictive by incorporating Big Data for a tailored user experience.
“We use machine learning to analyze the behavior. People do not want to be bound by collections,” said Ellis. “We went into this knowing how our users engage with content. We put products they can purchase in the mix. If we see products are trending, we reach out and strike a deal with the vendor and make it for sale on our platform. We are able to correlate the connection between commerce and content through our technology. Amazon can recommend, but it has no understanding of what drives the users to buy. Same on the publisher’s side, they can see what people read, but won’t know why they are purchasing. We can connect the dots,” said Ellis.
Ellis points out a case study where they discovered viewers of a particular movie poster were the common thread among purchases of a particular turntable. They seem unrelated, but the data supports the connection between movie poster views and turntable purchases. Tapiture is a Big Data company.
Ellis describes himself as a lifelong product guy, and lover of design and photography. Prior to founding Tapiture, he spent quality time at big tech companies including Earthlink, Overture and Yahoo. “Frankly what I love about it is I can take a moment out of my day, 5-10 minutes, and get lost in the content, art and design. I am drawn to it. It is so personalized, what I will see and what you will see is different,” said Ellis.
With the mobile app launched in 2014, Tapiture continues to refine its technology to reach its users. So, how does Tapiture ensure such an amazing front page experience every time if users can upload (or “tap”) any type of content? Ellis points this success to starting with a great community coupled with a combo of human curators on staff and technology. The algorithms manage the majority of the work, but a small editorial team monitors and promotes the best content to feature.
Tapiture shaping up to be another Silicon Beach success story. All those long nights sleeping on the office couch have paid off for Ellis, but he recommends a more balanced approach to life, hiring people within your network who share your vision — and of course taking a few minutes of fun and relaxation to “tap” into new worlds to explore using his site.
