Accelerator backing helps Kiwi innovators produce analytics tool that’s snapping up revenue abroad.
While they’re now the team behind a hugely successful analytics tool for video-messaging app Snapchat, Mish Guru initially had their sights set on horse hooves.
Mish Guru entered Creative HQ’s Callaghan Innovation-backed Lightning Lab in 2014: an intensive, four-month business acceleration programme that provides support and resources to tech start-ups trying to enter the global market. The Mish Guru team’s original concept was for automated horseshoeing technology, but after middling feedback and a failed practical experiment, they were forced to lick their wounds and start from scratch. Co-founder Tom Harding describes what followed not as “a pivot”, but “a complete rebirth of a business”. Moving into developing concepts for a video depository platform, and then to studying existing video platforms, the team noticed the void for analytics with Snapchat and haven’t looked back since.
While skepticism was rife at first, very few marketers will now dismiss the power and reach of Snapchat. A platform boasting approximately 10 billion daily video views, Snapchat is a social media behemoth (worth an estimated $20 billion) that’s quite literally shifting the way people communicate. The catch for marketers is that Snapchat doesn’t offer analytics, making it difficult to evaluate how any of their content performs.
Mish Guru solves this problem, as well as expanding the user’s creative freedom. Allowing marketers the same flexibility and insight they’d have with other social media channels, Mish Guru provides them with a dashboard that hands over total control of content and scheduling - while also offering data and insight into how content performs.
Mish Guru emerged from the Lightning Lab accelerator winning over investors and clients alike, and quickly joined CreativeHQ’s incubator programme, based in Wellington. CreativeHQ look for radical, exciting ideas and provide world-class support and development services to turn business concepts into viable, high growth companies. It was here Mish Guru really refined their product and proposition. The company has since grown into a team of nine and is now based in New York, which has the highest concentration of marketers and advertising agencies in the United States.
We have a product we know solves a very real problem. For us, it’s a case of how do we get this into the hands of as many people as possible
- Tom Harding, co-founder
Harding acknowledges the roles of Creative HQ and the Lightning Lab accelerator as integral in getting them to where they are. “The reality is we may have given up during that difficult period where things aren’t happening as quick as you want them to”, says Harding. But through perseverance, collaboration and support, Mish Guru adapted and thrived. The company plans to keep building upwards, all the while making sure they are malleable and well-aligned with the platform their tool supports. The rapid growth of Mish Guru speaks for itself - and unlike the ten-second snaps they make their living off, there’s no limit in sight.
How we helped
Through the Callaghan Innovation-funded Lightning Lab Accelerator and Creative HQ, Mish Guru gained:
- in-depth, tailored mentoring
- a hub of like-minded entrepreneurs to bounce off and access to a network of contacts
- a platform to pitch to investors
- an amazing workspace and the time and focus to really flesh out their ideas
- a structured environment to plan milestones, sort out venture governance and measure traction
The result was 20% month-on-month growth revenue.
