Stories
The company: Sweepr
The founder: Alan Coleman
The product: Provides technical support on smart home devices
Alan Coleman is not a man to rest on his laurels. A former EY entrepreneur of the year nominee, he reshaped how telco giants like BT, AT&T and T-Mobile USA billed customers with his first software startup BriteBill before selling it to the multinational firm Amdocs for over €60 million in 2016.
Barely a year passed before he was back in startup mode, bootstrapping an even more ambitious project which recently received €9 million in venture capital from Draper Esprit. It is called Sweepr and it aims to provide voice assisted technical support for the home of the very near future.
Like it or not, our domestic lives are going to become ever more connected. Smart fridges, coffee makers and thermostats, all designed for optimum performance, will become ubiquitous. But what happens when they misfire?
“In ten years time, it feels inevitable that it will be pretty antiquated to pick up a phone and talk to someone in a call centre. There is this inexorable shift towards automation,” Coleman told me when we met at Web Summit yesterday.
While few will miss being parked on hold listening to a voice repeat: “your call is important to us”, is even less human contact really the answer?
Coleman is sure it is and furthermore he believes that Sweepr can serve even hardened technophobes.
Francesca Comyn (FC): Tell me about Sweepr.
Alan Coleman (AC): Sweepr is kind of an evolution from the last startup I was involved in BriteBill. We exited in 2016. It focused on customer experiences on billing. Sweepr is taking a look at another big problem area for customers which is technical support. Fundamentally what Sweepr is doing is changing the point of triage, where you get help from within a call centre powered by people to voice assistance and cognitive psychology in your home.
So rather than pick up the phone and wait and explain to an agent your situation, and for them to use diagnostic tools to solve your problem, you can just say ‘hey Alexa, why is Netflix slow’ or ‘why is the internet not working’ and our software starts to do most of the things that an agent will do, except we start it immediately.
Even if we can’t help or fix a problem, the worst outcome for the customer is that we raise a ticket on your behalf for them to call you. The philosophy of the business is solve the problem in the home immediately or take the problem off the customers hands.
FC: That will generate a lot of frivolous requests?
AC: Support now, because of the psychological barrier which is this commitment of time to ring a call centre creates what’s called “silent suffering”. People don’t actually pursue a question they have, or they set the bar high, which means the criticality of the situation has to be really high to motivate you to go try get an answer. That means support in its broadest sense is not being provided.
I think voice is a really power medium to provide support because it allows you to ask the questions that you might think are frivolous or not that important but they all fall within the gamut of support, whether that is making a thing start working again or how do I use the device or product or service in the way that I want to.
FC: How will it work?
AC: The home breaks down into three layers; you have the network , you’ve got the devices and you’ve got the services running on top of the devices, all of those three things are becoming more intertwined. It used to be that a thing was broken and it worked on its own but now a washing machine might have a wifi connection, it might run a service from the cloud and when you say ‘why did my washing machine not go on?’ the answer may be that three or four things have failed.
FC: So Sweepr may not be immediately applicable but it will be when home technology advances are more widespread?
AC: We’re on a journey. Let me tell you how applicable it is now. Comcast was one of my customers in BriteBill. We fixed this problem around confusing bills that drove calls to call centres. That problem was $500 million a year. Technical support for Comcast is $2 billion a year. The ISPs have the most connected products in the most homes, for the longest time, and spend the most money on supporting customers. So 80 to 90 percent of what we are doing right now is working with ISPs to help their problems. We’re also working with other large appliance manufacturers that are beginning to appreciate that their strategic intent to connect everything they make will lead them to this big support challenge.
Another thought is ‘I don’t really want a fridge that connects to the internet. But that belies the fact that you don’t have any free will because if Samsung wants you to have a fridge that connects to the internet they’ll just make all their fridges connect to the internet. If I go to Harvey Norman now and ask for all the televisions that don’t connect to the internet, it’s a pretty small number. That’s happening in all categories.
FC: There is a potential problem in that manufacturers may not offer continued support, as they upgrade their products.
AC: it’s a really interesting area for a few reasons. One, you’ve got legislation going through the European Parliament which prohibits engineering points of failure. That is the stick. The carrot is I’d much rather sell hardware that lasts because I’d much rather sell higher margin software and content on to that device than actually have to manufacture a low margin device. So they’re all trying to get to recurring high margin business models away from, or to complement, the selling of the infrastructure.
FC: So will we see more devices, like phones, where service contracts subsidise the hardware?
AC: Yeah, a good example is a Tesla. You are now able to purchase software only features as you go along with super high margins, pricing to value and so the devices are seen as an infrastructure not as a journey in themselves.
FC: At what stage is Sweepr at?
AC: The company was founded mid to late 2017. We bootstrapped it ourselves, then raised seed funding last August from Frontline of €2.5 million and then we just closed our A round with Draper and that’s another €9 million. We’ve a big opportunity here.
Over the next ten years, we’ll see a fundamental transition into getting help through voice assistance and I hope Sweepr can be an enabling technology.
There will be this world of voice assistance, Alexa, Google assistant. What you’ll probably find is you’ll have more than one but what we do is we sit a layer behind that so when you say ‘hey Alexa ask Virgin Media what’s going on with the tv’ then it’s our software that takes that utterance and starts to solve the problem using diagnostics.
FC: Who are you selling to?
AC: ISPs, B2B2C. We’re selling to large appliance manufactures. Over the next year we’ll start to open it up so smaller appliance manufacturers can use it as well. There’s a longer term vision for what we’re doing. In order to solve the more complicated problems where you have different devices and networks and services working together you need someone to be in charge – one throat to choke.
There is also becoming an opportunity in care layers. So the ISPs who have sunk all this money into ways of creating supported, connected products over the years, will offer to do support on behalf of other customers, like Whirlpool.
“When you say ‘why is the house cold? Is it the boiler or is it the thermostat’, you can’t be expected to go on this journey of discovery. You just want someone to fix it.”
FC: Where did the idea come from?
AC: The trigger point was probably that I try to solve my own problems. I had a couple of wifi problems at home and found the whole discourse with the agents difficult and technical and one thing i should emphasise with Sweepr is our emphasis is on non-technical customers and that’s why our head of user experience is a cognitive psychologist. We provide different answers to different people based on their technical competency.
Anyway I had the wifi issue and my CTO had another issue which all clarified this for us. We both have young sons who play the game Fortnite. They moan and complain about crappy game experiences. Then you start to figure out what could be going wrong and you realise there are seven different things that are working together to give him a good gaming experience; Fortnite servers, Xbox Live, Xbox, the tv, the wifi, the router, the extender and all of these things, or many of them, had come from different places.
So for a non-technical person, is it realistic to expect people to diagnose and take ownership for discovering where the failures are happening. That’s why I think the whole care model has to change, so that something can begin to take a very simple question from a customer and then obfuscate the complexity of analysing what thing has failed here.
When you say ‘why is the house cold? Is it the boiler or is it the thermostat’, you can’t be expected to go on this journey of discovery. You just want someone to fix it.
FC: How many requests for help will be deferred to callbacks?
AC: The rule of thumb metrics is that roughly 80 percent of issues that end up in call centres are resolved in the first call, which means something is done technically or some educational or instructional element is provided to the customer to fix the problem. That 80 percent can be done by us.
FC: What markets are you looking at?
It’s predominantly western Europe, north America that are the key stomping grounds. The money [from Draper] is for surviving for two years to grow the business and hit certain metrics and for deploying the platform into millions of homes. With BriteBill, for example, when it scaled it did 200 million bills every month by selling through ISPs. With Sweepr, we have ambitions the product will be similarly deployed to manage technical support through the same relationships.
We’ve a number (of deals) already in place. We’re going into produtcion with one of the big US ISPs. We’re doing pilots. I can’t say the name just yet because I haven’t got their permission. We would have worked with almost all of the tier one ISPs in the US with BriteBill and those relationships are the ones we are tapping again.
The company: &Open
Founders: Jonathan Legge, Ciara Flood and Mark Legge
The product: Personalised corporate gifts
“Gift a lot less but gift better,” is a creed for Jonathan Legge, co-founder of Dublin based corporate gift platform &Open.
“When we set out, we said we’re going to fix corporate gifting. It’s broken, it’s thoughtless, it’s super wasteful. There’s so much generic merchandise out there, mostly plastic, that nobody wants,” he says.
It is safe to say customers of &Open’s clients will not be receiving tote bags stuffed with pens and notepads any time soon.
In a digital world where brand loyalty can be changed with a swipe or a tap, Legge, who comes from a product design background, is of the view that thoughtless freebies just don’t cut it anymore. Instead of making a hollow gesture &Open delivers, on behalf of its clients, beautifully packaged, responsibly sourced gifts like beeswax candles, blankets, slippers and spinning tops.
Legge is suffering the effects of a late night in Lisbon when we meet at Web Summit, but you wouldn’t know it. He is impeccably turned out.
He founded the company with his brother Mark Legge, who previously worked in project management, and his wife Ciara Flood, a former head buyer with Selfridges in the UK. Having lived for more than a decade in London, the couple returned to Dublin, one reason being that Legge wanted to be closer to his parents as they got older.
The business, primarily a SaaS based software service, had barely opened its doors in February 2017 when it landed its first customer, AirBnB.
It was quite a start.
WeWork, the real estate business which had to scrap its IPO last September, and US car sharing company Turo followed. Nearly three years on, &Open hires 27 people and hopes to bring that number up to 41 by the end of 2020. Legge says the firm is currently negotiating new client contracts but he can’t name names until the deals are across the line.
On the logistics side, partnerships have been forged internationally to provide a global delivery service with warehouses based in North America, Shanghai, Sydney and the Netherlands. “It’s super scalable,” he says.
Legge estimates turnover will hit €10 million in the next 18 months.
Snagging big name brands like AirBnB (who recently renewed a three year contract) has allowed &Open to avoid going down the venture capital route. Bringing in investment was an option they explored earlier this year but Legge is happy to keep control in-house, allowing the business to grow at an organic pace that he and the team are comfortable with.
“While there has been this crazy drive in the last few years to get a crazy amount of vc money and go out there and rip open the market, it’s now more about how you are going to hang onto those customers.” And that is where &Open comes in with its gifting service. “I think we are in the right place at the right time.”
The company: Video Sherpa
The founders: Anna and Andrew Downes
The product: An in-house video marketing platform
“No entrepreneur enters into this thinking they’re going to fail. Everyone thinks they are going to be part of that 10 percent that succeed,” Anna Downes tells me as she takes a short break from pitching the Galway based company’s two month old video marketing product to potential customers at Web Summit in Lisbon.
But Anna, who used to work in marketing, and her husband Andrew, a videographer, know about failure. Their first idea, Show House, a video promotional tool for estate agents and property management companies didn’t go according to a plan. “The estate agents wanted the videos but they didn’t want to make it themselves,” she says.
Disheartened but convinced they could do better, the couple went back to the drawing board and came up with Video Sherpa, a cost cutting business app that gives step by step advice on how to make professional quality videos on your phone. It tells customers what kind of footage to get, how much of it to get and the different variety of shots required to make a video truly engaging.
So far they have had interest from marketing and manufacturing companies in Ireland, the UK and the US. They have around 120 showcase demos in the pipeline which they hope to convert into subscriptions.
Downes explains that many marketing agencies are hired by brands on a retainer. If they can deliver video for social media in-house rather than spend a fortune on outside professionals, that can really boost profits.
The software for Video Sherpa is made by Galway based tech company, Trudo.
The Downes received angel backing to get their product to market and benefitted from Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-Up funding. Anna says to date they have spent €250,000 of the €500,000 seed round.
It all began with a much more modest €15,000 stipend from EI’s New frontiers programme to develop the idea.
“What I found super about New Frontiers was that it wasn’t just challenging the idea, it was really interrogating you in terms of ‘do you really want to be an entrepreneur? Do you really want to leave behind your job and dedicate yourself to this and do you understand what that means and are you ready for the poverty and the pain and the frustration?”
The company: FarmHedge
The founders: John Garvey and Bernardino Frola
The product: An app for farmers that allows them trade from their phone
Bernardino Frola, Chief Technical Officer of FarmHedge was busy making connections from his startup stall at Web Summit when I approached him late yesterday morning.
The tech conference had proved to be a worthwhile experience.
“We met some potential investors and potential partners. There were good people to meet here,” he says, before adding that he hopes the Summit considers staging an agtech platform next year.
Founded in 2017, the company provides a secure app for farmers to buy and sell fertilizers, crops and other products with ease and greater efficiency while retaining privacy around prices.
It is a product Frola believes is sorely needed as many farmers and suppliers are still reliant on email and the phone. Although, he says it is important not to take the personal relationships that underpin farming out of the equation.
Based in Limerick and Dublin, the company is supported by German agribusiness BayWa and Enterprise Ireland.
Having raised €300,000 in corporate seed funding last year, the platform has seen €1 million worth of goods traded over the last year, €500,000 of that in the last three months alone.
Frola says the platform is currently used in more than 700 farms on a monthly basis.
The app officially went live in Austria last September after running trials over the summer and Frola says they are looking to expand in Germany, the UK and Hungary before exploring the American mid-west and New Zealand markets.
