Engage your fans by sending them physical products with Fooji

Fooji believes the best way for brands to generate strong engagement is to give their fans something special that they didn’t expect. While the surprise and delight concept has always existed, their fan experience platform has made it seamless and scalable on a global level.

Fooji’s integrations with dozens of social channels and on-demand services to help brands engage directly with their fans like never before.

Bryan Weis sat down with Erik Zamudio, cofounder and CBO of Fooji to learn more.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on? What is Fooji?

Erik: Fooji helps the world’s biggest brands acquire and engage with fans by leveraging social media channels and on-demand networks. Fans engage with brands on social media and receive physical products delivered to them within an hour.

Why are you building this? Was there a particular source of inspiration?

Erik: The initial inspiration for Fooji was actually to solve a personal problem that we had in the office — we couldn’t decide what we wanted for lunch. Dumb problem? Definitely. However, it seems like everyone has had this happen as some point. Our solution was to create a platform that allowed you to tweet emojis and receive top rated local food delivered to you for $15 flat. While this B2C model didn’t last long, it did serve as a great way for us to get early press coverage before our pivot to B2B.

How is Fooji different from what already exists in the market?

Erik: Currently there aren’t any other companies playing in this on-demand marketing space. While there are other solutions to bringing social engagement into the physical world, none of them are on-demand.

So far, the primary reason brands have continued to use our platform is due to the results we drive. For media studios, we help drive impressions and directly impact their Nielsen Rating, which has proven to be a major focus for those studios. For CPG companies, we help take new products to market in a unique way, while helping drive social conversation around the launch.

Who are the top competitors in your space right now?

Erik: Our biggest competition are companies like Chirpify, that provide USPS mailing for products. Our advantage is that you can send your fans products within an hour instead of two weeks. This helps keep the engagement and experience in the feed, which has been very helpful in driving user generated content.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Fooji?

Erik: Our primary customer segment is Media and Entertainment. We’ve found that we can deliver the most impact within this vertical. However, we’ve also seen a lot of Consumer Product and Automotive companies take interest in our platform this year.

Traditionally we work with employees in Digital Media and Brand Strategy roles, though we’ve also had a lot of clients who come through Creative.

How are your customers using Fooji?

Erik: Warner Brothers wanted to provide fans with the ultimate single life experience by delivering classic comfort food and beverages during the six-day single life delivered program. Our goal was to increase awareness of the How to Be Single film and drive pre-sale ticket purchases. We surprised fans with weekly deliveries including Chinese food, pizza, wine and pasta. #HowToBeSinglePromo trended on Twitter globally twice, nationally five times, and in every major market, resulting in a 61% click-through-rate to purchase tickets. The program reached more than 44 million fans on Twitter, who engaged with branded content 285,000 times.

We also partnered with Adidas to deliver custom Kris Bryant t-shirts throughout Chicago to celebrate Bryant being named the National League Most Valuable Player 2016. This was a great chance for us to show the real-time nature of our platform with a major brand. The program trended in Chicago and generated 9,700 tweets, 885,000 impressions, and had 5,400 participating fans.

Have there been unique use cases for Fooji for that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Erik: Our partnership with MTV has been one of the most unique to date, with a big focus on live call-to-actions. We currently are running activations with for the relaunch of Friends and first live episodes of Ridiculousness.

For Friends, the CTA exists on the lower third banner ad that plays during the show. Ridiculousness is having the host of the show, Rob Dyrdek, call out the Fooji partnership and drive fans to tweet the CTA. Both of these new methods have worked insanely well, helping us to trend globally and drive more than 40M impressions per night on each show.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Erik: Most of our early success can be attributed to the amount of press coverage we received on day one. Once we realized that our product was buzz worthy, we began to reach out on Twitter to writers and editors at some of the big outlets that made sense for us. This helped drive even more press attention, which ultimately led to our first major client coming in.

Currently we run in-house activations to reward our own fans that have proven to be a great client acquisition channel as well. We require fans to tag or mention their favorite brands, which drives a high volume of tweets that the brand then notices. Typically, brands will reach out after those activations and ask about our capabilities and how we can help them directly.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Erik: The key to Fooji’s early success has been more focused on building relationships than building product. One of the biggest challenges was to prove to social networks and on-demand providers that we were going to be a good partner, and that we could drive volume.

We solved for this by executing on our first activation and driving 4,000 orders to our fulfillment partner. This helped solidify us as a real value-add and allowed us to reach out to other social media channels and on-demand partners.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

Erik: One of our most interesting integrations to date has been into an on-demand massage company called Soothe. We also have integration into an on-demand beauty company called GlamSquad. As we continue to integrate into these types of companies, we’re starting to see more brands take interest in building out entire on-demand experiences for their fans. For example, to promote a movie about Wall Street, we can hook up fans with the Wall Street lifestyle — on-demand massages, champagne, steak and sushi, etc.

What are the top 5–10 tools that you depend on to run the company and how do you use them?

Erik: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a simple pay-as-you-go pricing model, lots of documentation for developers, wide range of services offered and infinite scalability.

We use Slack for quick and immediate conversations both within Fooji and with our clients and partners. Slack makes it possible to communicate instantly with another person without clogging up email inboxes and is essential to reaching our employees that work abroad.

We use GitHub to host our code and manage a good part of our development workflow. We depend on the issue tracking and pull request scheme in place for our daily development.

NodeJS powers most of our platform. It offers plenty of performance, while still remaining powerful, easy to use and flexible. It also has a fantastic open source community that develops packages to make common tasks easier.

We manage all of our Human Resource functions using Zenefits. It handles all the offer letters, on boarding, background checks, health insurance, hour tracking, and time off requests in one place. It makes hiring someone super simple and serves as a central location for any HR needs.

We use G Suite (sheets, drive, docs, etc.) to create shared documents and keep an organized accounting of each campaign.

Trello makes it possible to keep track of projects and send information to the team. We use Trello to hold information in one place for the Creative Team, Sales Team, Project Management, and Engineering.

MixMax monitors all e-mail correspondence and whether or not sales emails are opened, clicked through, etc. We also use the metrics provided by MixMax to incorporate into any of our sales performance presentations.

LinkedIn is used for prospecting and gaining knowledge on contacts within target organizations.

Are you using Fooji and recommend them? You can do it here https://siftery.com/fooji?recommend