Have you ever wondered who would ever go into that store, or what the demographic of people going to a Friday night baseball game is? This can be extremely important information whether you are simply interested, or whether this type of data is crucial for how you market and brand your products. DoorStat, an up and coming data collection company can give you all of these numbers and more.”Of the hundreds of insights we provide, we’re confident a business will find multiple ways to learn more about their true customers and make more money.” says Cole Harper, CEO.
The startup is one of the first companies in the LA Dodgers Accelerator run by the Dodgers and premiere advertising agency R/GA. On the heels of their upcoming Demo Day, DoorStat’s sits down with LA TechWatch to tell us about their product offering and experience with the program.
Give us a brief description of your company.
DoorStat has technology that can automatically collect and analyze customer demographics and sentiment using video-based software. For example, we could provide the gender ratio, age distribution, ethnicity, and mood trends of fans attending a sporting event, and teams could use that to improve customer experience, validate marketing efforts, or optimize sponsorship opportunities.
What’s the size of the market you are attacking?
Customer analytics is a $125B market and it’s growing at a rapid rate as businesses start to invest more in understanding their true customer personas and customer behavior.
What’s the business model?
SaaS and event-based fees based on the scope of coverage we offer for data collection. However, our clients don’t view our services as an expense – rather, it’s an investment into learning more about their customers, measuring ROI on marketing spend, and translating data into sponsorship retention and acquisition. Even a small project could generate enough data to land a significant sponsor.
What kind of traction have you achieved since joining the Accelerator?
Significant traction. A number of large partnerships have developed across sports, entertainment, and retail channels. Prospective customers have signed up for pilot programs to get a taste of our technology. We’ve hired new employees and have entered new market verticals that were previously untapped.
Your product offering is/can be used across a number of different verticals. Where are you seeing the most growth?
We’ve seen the most growth with real estate companies and property managers that have a strong incentive to measure and compare the health of different properties based on foot traffic, demographic, and even sentiment. The “real estate” vertical sees value in our services because their previous efforts to collect traffic flow and demographics has been through surveyors physically visiting different locations for a short window of time and then extrapolating data. Our technology can run 24/7/365, so it gives a full view into the meaningful insights and trends that help with important business decisions.
What was the experience like working with the Dodgers organization?
The Dodgers really opened their doors and gave us access to all of their resources. It was nice that they had a good understanding of how to utilize our technology and were able to prioritize the various areas they wanted us to focus our time. The Dodgers quickly found a number of keys insights that will help them improve fan experience, understand their fan personas, and optimize their sponsorship relationships. The Dodgers also shared ideas for new ways they saw our company expanding.
What was the experience like working with R/GA?
R/GA went out of their way to give us and other companies structure where there wasn’t enough, introductions where there was opportunity, and solutions where there was an obstacle. The network that they made available to us was unbelievable and will pay dividends well into the future. R/GA has a strong breadth of team members that come from varying backgrounds and have unique perspectives and experiences with which they can draw from. We were blown away by their creative work and the redesign support they gave us to help our brand stand out from the rest.
What was your favorite part about being in LA?
The people of Los Angeles come from all walks of life and really seem to open up their network to support the startup community. LA has an energy to it – one of possibility and creativity – that we haven’t found in any other city. Each neighborhood has a different vibe and culture.
What’s the one thing about your company/progress that you’d like to announce to the world?
We recently completed proprietary developments on an audit and reconciliation that will provide our software with automated machine learning and allow us to guarantee any level of accuracy that a client wants to receive.
