Born in Dubai and grown in Toronto, Crowdbabble is another startup success story to join Ryerson’s DMZ.
The social media analytics tool is set to disrupt the market, one social media platform at a time.
Crowdbabble targets marketers and pulls data from their companies’ social media accounts, automatically putting it into easily consumable reports. Clients can also add their competitors’ accounts to compare results.
“A lot of times marketers will do social media analytics, but they’ll have to get the data themselves, analyze it and make graphs and present it, and that can take eight hours – even longer than that,” Bhavin Prajapati, Crowdbabble’s “growth hacker,” said.
“With us, this process is shrunken down to maybe an hour, or even less. You get all the reports and it looks fancy automatically.”
Abbas Alidina, founder and CEO of Crowdbabble, built the tool for a marketing agency he was working for in Dubai.
The agency was bought out, but Alidina kept the tool for himself and later developed it into a company with the help of Crowdbabble’s chief strategy officer, Andrew Grubb.
The two applied to the Ryerson Futures Inc. program and managed to land Crowdbabble a highly competitive spot in the DMZ last spring. That gave them mentorship, media exposure and access to DMZ facilities and meeting rooms.
One of the things that distinguishes Crowdbabble from other analytics tools is its low-price plans. The cheapest plan starts at $49 per month, making the tool more accessible to other startups and small businesses than its competitors.
“If you want to be disruptive, you’ve got to make certain sacrifices, especially with your prices,” Prajapati said.
For Crowdbabble, it’s about offering as much data as possible, and Prajapati said competitors just aren’t doing that.
All social media platforms have an application programming interface with 10 points of data that users can keep track of. Most analytics companies do two or four, but Crowdbabble’s platform is capable of tracking all 10.
Prajapati’s title is growth hacker, but he also handles customer service, spearheads design work, plans with developers and comes up with ideas to improve Crowdbabble based on data from user experiences.
Prajapati, who joined the app’s team last August, credits much of the company’s success to the team’s ability to adapt to industry changes.
Currently, Crowdbabble is a web app designed primarily for desktop browsers, but the company is developing plans to shift the app to be mobile-centric.
“The nature of the way marketing reports are done, it hasn’t shifted to mobile yet,” Prajapati said. “It’s still very much an office environment where you have a report and you present it on a screen. As things change, we’ll adapt.”
Social media strategist, writer and blogger. I drink more coffee than I should & I create the best workout playlists on the planet.