Jeudi 10 avril 2008, Visite chez Scout Labs avec Jennifer Zeszut.

Activité : Brand Monitoring
Date de création : 2006
Effectif US / Monde : 15
Contact / Intervenant : Jennifer Zeszut, CEO
Site Internet : http://www.scoutlabs.com/

Informations sur l’intervenant (Parcours personnel, profil, etc…)

Jennifer is an entrepreneur who decided to launch her own company after several years of work in Internet companies such as Ebay. As an Internet Marketer she understood that brand monitoring was a huge challenge both for marketer who needed a tools to collect and analyze data and for entrepreneurs to make business. That’s how she got the idea of Scout Labs.

Historique de la société

When Jennifer met Halsey Minor, in 2006, she explained him her project, and he just said : «ok let’s go I want to invest in that product ». This very moment was the beginning of Scout Labs and explain him her project she decided to launch Scout Labs. Margaret Francis and Jochen Frey joined Jennifer and Scout Labs was born. Halsey Minor, Scout Labs’ lead investor, is a technology entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993. Before creating Minor Ventures, Halsey Minor was the lead investor of Salesforce.com and of dozens of other Internet startups. He now owns Minor Ventures, an incubator of startups in San Francisco and Scout Labs is a part of Minor Ventures.

Produit(s) / Services de la société

Scout Labs is a software company based in San Francisco California that is developing the first Web-based, scalable software solution that distills the online cacophony of consumer-generated media into quality insight. The product is mainly targeted towards marketers, brand stewards, product marketing teams, market researchers, PR, media professionals and executives—anyone who cares about what consumers want, think and feel.

Modèle(s) économique(s) / Réseau de distribution

Scout Labs’ business model is simple, the company is an application service provider (ASP) or more generally distributes its software as a service (“on-demand software”). The software is hosted by Scout Labs and customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it. This business model has been proved to be very successful and companies like Salesforce.com represents its success. In such a fast-pace moving business world, software as a service is ideal for business because it gives them freedom and flexibly for the software they uses, thing that they didn’t had before this new type of business model.

Concurrents

For the time being, Scout Labs don’t have « real » competitors. However, a number of companies try to automate part or all of the brand monitoring process. Key competitors include Umbria, BuzzLogic and Nielsen BuzzMetrics. However, as brand monitoring is a very strategic field we can easily bet that more specific competitors will hit the market one day.

Description du cadre de travail

As explained, Scout Labs is part of the Minor Ventures incubator and it shares a floor of a building with 4 other startups: Open DNS, Swivel, 8020 Publishing and Minor Studios.

Questions posées (synthèse)

Questions were about two main topics:
- the products
- the entrepreneur way of life

About the products, Jennifer made us a demo of the products so that we could really see what the product could do and how it can solve marketing issues. By indexing the web ScoutLabs can provide text, video, pictures and conversations to a firm about whatever is needed : a product, a launching, etc. ScoutLabs can even classify the information retrieved into categories such as positive / negative so that you know in real time what your consumers say ! very impressive.

About her entrepreneur career, it wasn’t a desperate goal for Jennifer to start her own business, it just happened like that, she made a report, she got an idea, she meet the good people and she took the challenge. She also explained her how she cope with her family life, she got children but it’s not a problem for her to watch over her business and her family.

Liens utiles

Scout Labs official website: http://www.scoutlabs.com/
Minor Ventures official website: http://www.minorventures.com/
Techcrunch article about Scout Labs:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/11/track-blog-reactions-to-your-brands-with-scout-labs/