Is this the cure for social media's ills?
Is this the cure for social media's ills?
Chatloop thinks it can give users and brands something Meta, TikTok and the rest miss
Hello there,
Today’s edition is a busy one. Our main attraction is a slightly more consumer-focused startup than we’d normally cover here. But while their product is squarely consumer-social, there are plenty of interesting B2B opportunities here too. A ‘reverse mullet’ if you will: party up front, business at the back.
Scroll down to read all about Chatloop. As usual, PreSeed Now members get the full story. PLUS, we’ve got a startup that has just announced early stage funding, and our latest Member Spotlight.
As you might have seen, yesterday I opened up PreSeed Now’s Chat feature inside Substack’s mobile app, which is now available for iOS and Android.
I’d love to know your thoughts about the UK pre-seed funding landscape in 2023. Just install the Substack Reader app (also a good way to read this newsletter) and tap the button below to get involved 👇
– Martin
💸 Just raised
A startup that recently raised early stage funding
Verna, a startup focused on data science for sustainable land management, has raised £860,000 from Vanneck EIS and Octopus Ventures. The startup describes itself as producing “software tools to help grasp opportunities to draw down carbon and boost biodiversity, whilst making sustainable financial returns.”
This follows a £1.4m government innovation contract the startup received in the summer to further develop its ForestFounder data science system.
Member spotlight
Meet a member of the PreSeed Now community
Maureen Blandford
Maureen is a serial entrepreneur who describes herself as “deeply B2B”. She is the founder of a new startup called Serendipitus. What does it do? She explains:
“B2Bs have too much unusable market data and are desperate for real-time insights. Every functional area has insights the others need but they can’t share data and insights effectively because they're mired in legacy, siloed systems. They miss out on company-wide insights, holding back business growth.
“We’re helping those teams break down the siloes (the humans and the tech) to build faster paths to the trustworthy insights they all need.”
That brings back memories of the time I spent temping at a big telco years ago. My entire job was trying to navigate these siloes, and it was eyeopening. If you want to understand more about the problem and how to solve it, Maureen has written the book on that very subject, which you can read online.
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Chatloop thinks it has the cure to social media’s ills
This newsletter is very much focused on B2B and deep tech startups. A slight complication with this is that businesses with a consumer focus are often B2B at their heart. Many social media companies might have recently developed an increasing focus on taking payments directly from users for things like creator subscriptions, but they are largely B2B due to their ad-based models.
It’s with this in mind that I’ve decided to dive into Chatloop today. As the startup’s website puts it, its product turns “web browsing into a social experience, giving you the power to start conversations across any website.”
So far, so consumer, but there’s a lot going on here, and it’s worthy of a proper look as it ties in with the wider shifts we’re seeing from the big social media companies, regulators, and end users.
So what is it?
What Manchester-based Chatloop has built is best thought of as a public or private comments section for any part of any web page. Founder Andrew Barlow says the idea came from his frustration at not being able to share his thoughts on an opinion piece about his favourite football team.
“I was really frustrated because I couldn’t actually express myself. I've just read something and I can't say anything. It was really annoying. So I thought, how cool would it be if you could drop a conversation live onto the screen? And it would anchor to the article, and then I could say what I wanted to, contextually.”
In practice, Chatloop–which launched in beta on iOS and Android yesterday– is a mobile browser with a focus on social interaction. When you see something you want to talk about, you drag the big purple button in the interface onto it and you can start chatting about it, optionally ‘looping’ friends into the conversation if you want their input. These loops can be private or public as you prefer.
Beyond chat, Chatloop supports other kinds of ‘loops’: ‘like’, ‘dislike’, ‘love’, ‘pin’, ‘wishlist’, ‘happy’, and ‘sad’. It’s a mixture of expressive emotions and practical bookmarking options.
Everything old is new again
Can’t you already do this on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or many other social platforms? Barlow says it’s about making social the kinds of things that often aren’t today. A hot news story might go viral, but what about if you want to discuss something that isn’t going to attract much attention on somewhere like Twitter?
“There is a percentage of content that does get shared across social media of course, but there are 480 million websites in the world,” says Barlow. “And most of that content never finds its way onto social media. So there's a disconnect between content and conversation.”
When Barlow demoed Chatloop to me a couple of weeks ago, I got flashbacks to ‘comments on any website’ browser plugin startups I wrote about over a decade ago. They never took off because social media apps proved far more compelling venues to discuss web content.
But maybe Barlow’s onto something now, at a time when traditional social platforms are evolving into finely-tuned content consumption machines like TikTok and Meta’s competing Reels in Facebook and Instagram. These apps are less about sharing your opinions as they are about watching other people’s short-form content for as long as possible.
Even Twitter feels more like a spectator sport these days, where people log on to dunk on the day’s ‘main character’ and score political points, rather than interact with each other in good faith.
Getting businesses in the loop
Barlow sees the most potential for Chatloop in enabling people to comment on items on ecommerce sites, news stories, and sports events. He says Chatloop spoke to media companies and retailers while researching the app’s development, to get feedback on the concept.
On the retail side, Barlow says: “Their response was ‘we've never seen anything like this before. The fact that we can get real time, contextual consumer insights is something that our team are craving. We want to get consumer insights that we can align to a given product, or products.’
“The problem with social media is that people talk about a product, but it's very difficult for the brand then to track that back and say ‘it's definitely about this pair of trainers’, for example.”
Meanwhile, broadcasters are keen to provide their own venue for conversations about their TV shows, rather than deferring to social media platforms. By driving viewers to their website via Chatloop, they could let them interact with each other during the show’s transmission while giving the broadcaster opportunities to capitalise and monetise directly from this attention, as it happens, on their website.
Where’s the money?
As for how Chatloop makes money from this, the startup is going for a freemium approach. Consumers and brands can use the app for free, but brands will eventually be able to upgrade to a premium option that offers things like ‘deal loops’ offering exclusive offers on their website. Consumers will also have a premium option that will give them access to these deals.
Barlow says that this allows businesses to target specific kinds of users without them already being logged into their site.
In a time where tracking people around the web with third-party cookies is becoming more difficult due to privacy concerns and tech from the likes of Apple, not to mention Google’s long-delayed plan to phase these cookies out from Chrome), Chatloop could be appealing.
Chatloop essentially creates an opt-in data collection layer on top of the web. Earlier this year, we covered Tickle, which has a similar pitch with a different approach.
Beyond this, there are plans for an enterprise data product. “We can go to a brand and show them what people are saying about all of their products, live…” says Barlow. “And give them real insights into what consumers think about their products.”
Barlow says the enterprise option would also allow businesses to offer customer support via Chatloop.
Achieving critical mass
Chatloop has a green field of opportunities but these brand benefits and monetisation opportunities can only be realised once it attracts enough users.
With this in mind, Chatloop has options to share loops to other platforms, and will be working with five brands on an open innovation programme in 2023 to drive growth from their customer bases.
They’ve also got an approach which is a little growth-hacky but makes sense. “We're creating business accounts for every business in the UK and the US, which sounds really crazy. But that strategy isn't too dissimilar to that of Trustpilot.”
Barlow is referring to Trustpilot’s tactic of letting users leave reviews about businesses who don’t have a formal presence on the site. This leads those businesses to get involved by claiming those initially ‘unclaimed’ accounts and then encouraging customers to leave positive reviews.
“People are going to be talking on their websites, so they're probably going to want to be in the conversation rather than not,” says Barlow.
Biometric safety?
The safety of social media is increasingly a concern for users, regulators, and governments alike. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how the ability to post comments on any website could be abused on a massive scale by bad actors. Barlow believes Chatloop’s defences against this are more robust than many social platforms.
Chatloop’s approach to user safety begins by biometrically face-scanning every active user when they sign up for an account, using FaceTec technology. While this will no doubt make some more privacy-conscious users uncomfortable (and there is definitely some work to do as the startup matures in terms of making sure it communicates how this tech works, to allay any fears), it has some useful advantages.
Face scanning creates a roadblock for anyone wanting to create bot accounts. And Barlow says it allows Chatloop to ban rule-breakers for life. If a user gets caught abusing someone, for example, any account with the same face scan as theirs can be blocked forever.
The story so far, funding and next steps
Chatloop is Barlow’s second startup, after co-founding digital adoption platform AppLearn in 2011. The new company was born a decade later, in 2021. Barlow says the company currently has eight full-time employees, with two more joining imminently. There’s one thing you won’t find among the head count though…
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