Introducing New Brunswick Startup: Repable
With Propel ICT’s Demo Day coming up on June 21 in Halifax, we’re chatting with all of the New Brunswick companies who will be pitching at the Neptune Theatre.
Today we meet Heather Anne Carson and Sean Power of Moncton/Toronto-based Repable.
1) What’s your pitch?
Competitive gaming (esports) is the fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry. In fact, half of all North American male millennials will watch esports and live streamed video game content this year (and the female audience isn’t far behind.!) Last year, Twitch.tv users alone watched the equivalent of 459,000 years watching other people play video games.
And so naturally, brands want to take advantage of that captive audience of cord cutters who aren’t watching television or paying attention to typical advertising. But first, they need data.
Repable’s analytics platform tracks the players, teams, tournaments and games that make up this ecosystem, providing data driven insights that will help brands find their voice in an industry with over 250 million viewers in 2016 and projected growth of 40% year over year.
In short: we provide data and algorithmic recommendations to help everyone involved make better decisions and to track the success of their investment in the space.
We’re proud to be headquartered in both Toronto, Ontario and Moncton, New Brunswick.
2) What’s your story?
So we (Heather and Sean) are really proud of the fact that we found our co-founder fit before we developed the idea for Repable. While a lot of companies start out as the brainchild of one of the founders, ours was a collaborative effort. We’d known each other for several years but over the last 2 years the startup grind and various speaking gigs managed to bring us to more of the same events and we started talking more often.
Fast forward to late 2015 when Heather expressed interest in starting a product company at the exact moment that Sean was asking himself: “what’s next?”
It was an instantaneous decision. We’d do our next project together. Between Sean’s deep background in Analytics and Data and Heather’s in Operations, PR and Sales, we knew it would be a killer combo.
Heather’s a proud Atlantic Canadian, accomplished entrepreneur, educator, speaker, connector and startup mentor. She’s perhaps best known as a Startup PR and marketing expert having launched, marketed and promoted dozens of companies over the last 8 years in Canada, the US and abroad.
She’s held senior roles at several startup companies, and is a 2nd time founder. (Previously she co-founded Onboardly Media where she was primarily responsible for sales, client services and PR.)
Sean’s an internationally published author, and often speaks on topics relating to technology and business. He’s well-known for his work advising early stage startups, with a particular focus on media and SaaS business models, and is passionate about businesses that revolve around data, analytics, music and gaming.
His past experience / company highlights included Akoha (launched at TechCrunch 50 and TED), PostRank (acquired by Google), CoTweet (acquired by ExactTarget) and Coradiant (acquired by BMC).
He co-authored Web Operations (O’Reilly 2010), Complete Web Monitoring (O’Reilly 2009) and was technical editor for Troubleshooting Linux Firewall for AddisonWesley.
3) What’s next for you?
We’re intently focused on delivering the best possible SaaS analytics solution for brands that are actively investing in the esports and streaming spaces. We’re currently working closely with our Alpha group of customers which is largely made up of professional esports organizations and the brands that sponsor them.
We’re in the process of closing a $1M seed round and anticipate growing to a team of 8 before year end.