Grapevine

While producing shows for Discovery Channel our founder began to notice that personalities on YouTube were getting more views than his primetime TV shows. This inspired him to create Grapevine, a web platform that helps influencers monetize their social channels by partnering with brands. Brands like Walgreens use Grapevine to promote their products with highly relevant YouTubers who use the product in their video and place a link so viewers can buy it.

HOW IT WORKS
Grapevine connects brands with popular YouTube and Instagram influencers to drive sales, signups, and buzz. Today's top influencers use Grapevine to find relevant products to introduce to their audience in exchange for a fee. Our tools make it easy for influencers to track performance, increase their reach, and gain access to career changing opportunities.

Our brand dashboard allows marketers to access influencers with both scale and specificity. Influencer progress and performance is displayed within the brand dashboard where key performance indicators ranging from views to earned media and cost per acquisition are reported. Real time audience analytics and sentiment make monitoring the pulse of a campaign easy.

WHY WE'RE DOING THIS
Grapevine helps brands unlock the power of this channel through marketing automation and no-nonsense analytics. Simultaneously we help influencers realize their full potential by providing powerful tools, networking, and sponsorship opportunities. Grapevine has become the second largest income source for social creators.

TECHNOLOGY
Grapevine is built on an open source stack allowing us to build quickly for users. Our marketing engine provides brands with data they can't get on their own, specifically in-depth engagement stats on their content and performance metrics including the reach, earned media, CPC & CPA of the social influencers they're working with on our platform. We're using predictive analytics to cluster and determine how likely different influencers are to perform well on a given product. This information allows us to programmatically assemble campaigns and not only guarantee views, but also guarantee those views are in front of the right target audience.

RECENT AWARDS:
* 2014 MassChallenge Gold Winner
* 2014 Forbes Under 30 Conference Startup Semi-Finalist
* 2014 AdTech Startup Spotlight Finalist