Entrepreneur
Justin Graves
Company Information
Infegy
4151 N. Mulberry Dr., Ste. 240
Kansas City, MO 64116
(816) 494-1650
www.infegy.com
Type of Business
Social Media Monitoring
Year Founded 2007
Employees 12
Keys to success
“We’ve been able to do
amazing, amazing things
with a relatively small team.”
Justin Graves
Bllions of conversations are happening through social media every day. People are talking about companies, products and brands—likes, dislikes, complaints and oh so much more. If a company could somehow listen in, it could get valuable insights into consumers’ perceptions and use that intelligence to better meet the demands of the marketplace.
Infegy is listening, and the small company is analyzing those conversations to help some of the biggest brand names on the planet evaluate consumer preferences and identify market trends.
Leading this “ear to social media” effort is Justin Graves, a 27-year-old programmer, entrepreneur and CEO. Justin founded Infegy in 2007 to help companies decipher what’s being said about them online. But the story of Infegy and Social Radar, the company’s product, begins with another Kansas City company.
It Starts with Listening
A marketing agency in town wanted a way to listen to online chatter and analyze what was being said about their clients. So, the agency hired programmers, including Graves, to develop a software tool that could comb websites and mine information on particular topics, companies, brands, etc. For example, if an automotive client wanted to know what was being said about cars, the agency would use the tool to search the Web and aggregate information on automotive topics.
“This explosion of content brings to mind, when you spend a few years at an agency, that perhaps there’s something we can do with this,” Graves said. “There’s all this ‘stuff’ that people are saying on the Web—kind of unfiltered thoughts and opinions—wouldn’t it be interesting if we could extract that and do something with it.”
But Graves saw a bigger picture than even the agency. Instead of searching the Web for content only when it was needed, he envisioned a database that would continuously listen and collect data to make it instantly available.
That, of course, comes with a higher price both in terms of programming and the hardware necessary to collect and store exponentially more information. It’s a tough sell to an agency that never knows when—or if—it might use the stored information, or be able to bill it to a client.
“I decided the best thing to do was to part ways with the agency and start a company to build this,” Graves said. “I thought there was a lot of potential—the kind of software that other agencies could use, as well, and didn’t have the resources to build themselves.”
So, Graves left the agency and spent the next three months in his living room on an old computer building out a web crawling system. Graves recognized he didn’t have the skills to design the graphic user interface for the software tool, so he turned to Adam Coomes, a high school friend who had experience building websites.
The pair worked another three months on the project and then took it back to the marketing agency where Graves had worked, landing the firm as their first client.
“They became a client of ours relatively early, which was incredibly lucky and helpful for us to get the company off the ground,” Graves said.
Graves and Coomes continued development and were able to realize the bigger picture Graves had envisioned at the agency. Today, their database holds nearly five years of data, which can quickly be mined to meet the needs of clients such as Sony, Land Rover, BP, Sprint, NASA, 3M and others.
The breadth of their database is a key advantage over their competitors, since Infegy is monitoring and collecting information beyond just their current clients.
“You can look up anything without telling us ahead of time and get results in about three seconds,” Graves said. “The speed difference here is humongous. The average tool takes eight to 24 hours to look up something new, and you’ll get maybe 15 days of history. We take three seconds and give you nearly five years of history.”
What’s on the Radar
In some ways, Social Radar is similar to an Internet search engine, which crawls the Web collecting and storing information that easily can be accessed by users. That works well when you’re trying to answer a specific question: for example, “What is the best-selling car of all time?” A quick Internet search provides the answer—Toyota Corolla with 32+ million sold.
But, more qualitative questions are tougher: What are people saying about the 2011 Corolla? To get a good idea of the general consensus of consumers, you’d have to sort through millions of blogs, tweets, websites and other online content.
Infegy’s Social Radar does that for you, going one step beyond a search engine. Rather than simply providing information that the user then has to sift through and interpret, Social Radar gathers the information and provides analysis and identifies trends—nearly instantaneously. Companies and marketing agencies can use this information to understand consumer perceptions and trends, focus marketing campaigns and assess results.
Tracking Growth
The company received a boost in 2008 when James Clarke came on board as an advisor. A successful entrepreneur and investor with a strong financial background, including previously managing investments for the Kauffman Foundation, and now a partner in a West Coast investment firm, Clarke’s expertise has helped guide Graves and Infegy as the company has grown.
“At the time, it was still just the two of us working on this,” Graves said, “and we weren’t sure how to move forward, how to make this into a business.”
So, in the kind of interaction that typifies how social media is changing business, Coomes went onto LinkedIn and contacted eight people in the Kansas City area whose profiles included the words “venture capital.”
“Essentially, the message was, ‘We just want to talk to somebody, we’re really not sure what we need,’” Graves said. “James was the only one who replied.”
Over time, Graves said, Clarke helped them take Infegy from a “basement R&D project” to an actual company. Infegy continued to develop and refine the product, enhancing the user interface and eventually launching Social Radar 3 in March 2011, which Graves said is faster and easier to use. And, sales continued to climb.
“We’ve grown sales pretty steadily,” Graves said, “2010 was a very nice year for us. We had really solid growth.”
And, they’ve gotten noticed. Last fall, Business Week named Graves and Coomes as finalists in its annual roundup of “America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs.”
Infegy now has 12 employees on two continents, with satellite sales offices in Chicago and Birmingham, England, and the company is profitable, having doubled revenue for three consecutive years. Clarke expects to see that growth continue.
“I think well before five years, this is a $10 million company. I don’t think that’s a five-year goal, that might be a three-year goal,” he said.
Forecasting the Future
With Infegy hitting its stride, Coomes left the company earlier this year to work on another startup, Zaarly with Bo Fishback, another early Infegy advisor.
Infegy is moving forward with new board members announced this month: Carlos Antequera, president and CEO of Netchemia; Howard Wizig, president and CEO of Vivius and Recovery Data Connect; and Kelly Welch, teaching fellow at the University of Kansas School of Business.
Graves is confident the company can continue to grow organically, and Clarke agrees.
“The more I got into it, the more it became apparent that they didn’t need to raise a whole bunch of money to be successful,” Clarke said.
But whether outside funding is needed, or not, the company is getting looks from venture capitalists. A competitor, Radian6, sold to SalesForce earlier this year for $326 million.
“When that happened, all of a sudden every VC in the world is calling every company in the space to get on board,” Graves said.
Graves said that outside investment isn’t something Infegy has an interest in or a need for now. Unlike a stereotypical dot-com company, Infegy doesn’t need to burn through piles of investor cash hoping to be profitable “someday.” Profitability was on Grave’s mind—and built into the business model—from the beginning, he said, which isn’t necessarily true of other young tech companies.
“People just want to build cool stuff—it’s harder to think about business.
“I recognize that for us, it was more obvious than most. We basically had someone asking for this right from the start,” Graves said. “It was always, ‘Well, if they want it, someone else must want it too, which, luckily, turned out to be correct.”
David Day is executive editor for Thinking Bigger Business magazine. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
