This bootstrapped startup is helping businesses and brands become more customer-centric and smart

With most businesses focussing on being customer-centric, brands are increasingly looking for quick and accurate answers on what customers want and how they want it.

These include mining relevant data for customers from different platforms, including social media, blogs, review sites, news articles etc. In short, almost everywhere the brand finds a mention.

Traditional methods like insights based on surveys and analysing past data are passe. They are time consuming, and will soon become obsolete in the rapidly changing digital world.

There is a definite need in the market for a platform that provides brands with timely and concrete insights. Consumer analytics platform Rank Me Online aims to provide customers and brands with all the information relevant for growth and development.

Founded in November 2017 by Jyoti Gupta and Deepti Singh Chauhan, Rank Me Online is based in New Delhi. It is certified by the Centre’s Startup India Programme and and is part of its Innovation Stratups category. Their clients include Curefit, Social Konnect, and Pee Safe.

ALSO READ

WATCH: Bootstrapped social analytics startup Vaizle allows users to track progress on Facebook,...

Women in tech

Batchmates from Delhi Technological University, Jyoti and Deepti graduated in Computer Science Engineering in 2012. Jyoti went on to work in companies like Amazon, Directi, Limeroad, and Curefit.

Deepti, on the other hand worked with Cognizant and Samsung after graduation. She also pursued an MBA from IIFT - majoring in marketing.

Having worked with internet companies, both Jyoti and Deepti understood the power the customer wielded in world of new-age internet and social media.

They thought why not help businesses with one clear metric that presents customers’ opinion about a certain product or business.

"With a strong technical background and a passion for building a great product, our aim was to revolutionise the market," says Jyoti, who manages the overall strategy and execution of the product.

Deepti is responsible for Business Development, monitoring industry trends, and business operations. They work with a team of 10.

The founders initially started building the product at Bengaluru. However, being bootstrapped, they needed their parents’ help to provide them with a place to live. They shifted to their hometown New Delhi. The founders invested Rs 20 lakh from their savings to build the product and team, and towards marketing and operational costs.

ALSO READ

Harness the power of analytics for data-driven social media marketing

Analyse like Google

While it’s possible for individuals and businesses to manually search for online mentions and analyse data on their own, it becomes extremely difficult when the data is large. With social media platforms clocking more than a million posts a day, it is not humanly possible to analyse performance in every platform.

This is where Rank Me Online's product - Review Analyzer comes in. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to capture actionables from the customer. It provides insights on what the customer wants, what kind of features they prefer and the additional features they are looking for.

It works like Google Search where the customer/business adds keywords to set context for the project. The platform crawls relevant information using keywords from websites, news, forums, blogs, as well as social media websites. It then creates a structure for the data and analyses it further using the AI engine. 

"Brands can take action on these insights using the customer dashboard. They can also engage with existing as well as potential customers and influencers through the platform," says Jyoti.

Stating an example, Jyoti says that if a customer reviews a cafe online, saying 'coffee was good, but service was bad;' Review Analyzer shows that the coffee was termed positive and service as negative. Now the cafe can directly use this information to start promoting its coffee and internally work on its service.

Analysing tools

Rank Me Online offers the following services :

Social listening: The tool listens to all the brand mentions, competitor mentions and audience mentions thus, helping brands to directly engage with mentions, find leads, and influencers.

Online Reputation Management: The platform monitors and manages the brand reputation online by checking all mentions with sentiment analysis.

Competition, audience and campaign analysis: It analyses audience profiles through AI algorithms and understands market behaviour with ROI measurement.

How it works

Rank Me Online works as a typical SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform. Its target audience are B2C brands, branding agencies, PR agencies, and media houses. It offers its products on a monthly subscription basis, starting at $100 per month.

Once brands sign up for a package, Rank Me Online's account manager works closely with them to understand the requirement and set the goal for the projects.

Its product, Rank Me Evaluator, provides brands with all the services along with competitive analysis starting at $200 per month. It also provides brand and competitor analysis and a consultant who will help brands with market development strategy and improving the Net Promoter Score. These services are offered on a custom pricing model.

"After the projects are set, the brands use the dashboard to directly understand, analyse, and engage with the audience," says Jyoti.

It also provides in-house consultant support on request.

Rank Me Online is currently clocking revenue worth Rs 5 lakh a month and, Jyoti says, "We have a target to make around Rs 25 lakh a month by the end of this financial year."

The analytics business

Rank Me Online started operations 10 months ago and already has more than 2,000 B2B users on the platform. "Our current customer acquisition is mainly through offline sales channels," Jyoti says. Growing at a rate of 20 percent month-on-month, the startup has so far served 800 client projects.

According to Markets and Markets, the brand analytics market size is expected to grow from $2.23 billion in 2016 to $9.54 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 28.6 percent.

It is in direct competition with companies like Brandwatch, Meltwater, and Vaizle.

Unlike its competitors, "Rank Me Online’s Review Analyzer can analyse huge data in a breeze," and that's what sets it apart, says Jyoti.

Future plans

Rank Me Online wishes to own the complete social media intelligence piece . "We plan to raise funds and are looking for investors who can help us in strategic partnerships and initiatives," Jyoti says.

(Rank Me Online was also a part of SheLeadsTech - a Facebook initiative powered by YourStory.)

(Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan)

ALSO READ

How HolacracyOne wants to do away with managers and hierarchies, and empower teams and individu...