A Chat With Flimper: Reinventing Social Media Campaigns
We recently sat down with Lucas Glustman, Flimper CEO and Co-Founder. His Social Media startup is making it easy for companies to build targeted Twitter campaigns and enrich their customer’s experience.
On Founding Flimper
We’ve had the idea a couple of years ago while we were community managers. It was really hard for us to manage the information regarding our customers and who their followers are, what were they looking for by following the brand, the aggregated value that was making them to buy the product and how many sales were they getting from social media. This is what we are solving with Flimper and how it came to life. The principal obstacle we had to overcome to implement Flimper was to get all the information about every tweet made at every second and filtering the ones we wanted to in order to tell our customers who was talking about them, what they were saying, where and when.
Fortunately we kept the team that started the process of discovering the need and then we evolved, everything is being made on a lean process, in this way, we are continuously founding the startup. First we started proving the business model with a short campaign that we’ve made at Gap Israel, after looking that we were aggregating value we started coding our MVP, after working day & night we’ve putted the MVP online in only 1 month, after that we’ve started to have some customers and we’ve continued developing by hearing their needs.
On Expansion Plans
While we’re founded in Argentina, we are working in Colombia, Perú, México, Paraguay, Uruaguay, Costa Rica and Panamá. For 2015 we want to have at least 10 customers in every country. Our next Milestones are related with continuing our product and market development. The first quarter of 2015 we are going to launch Flimper for Instagram, Vine for the second quarter and WhatsApp for the forth. About the market development we want to continue conquering Latin America adding Brazil and Ecuador to our operational markets.
On Becoming an Entrepreneur
I became an entrepreneur because of feeling the pain personally while I was a freelance community manager. It was really hard for me to earn money without measurable results of my duty. I had to struggle with the family, my girlfriend and everyone I talked to because I was leaving a well paying job . That’s why I worked as a waiter for a year t night in order to work on Flimper in the day and have some money to live.
The hardest cultural struggle I faced was my family. I came from a wealthy and very conservative family and they didn’t accept the fact I was trying to do my own business instead of continuing the family one: My grandfather was the first to bring a plastic cup to Argentina. But what can I say? I love Social Media Networks :D