— ROLE
Cofounder, fundraiser, founding CTO, CEO
— HIGHLIGHTS
Scalable: Built scalable platform reaching 65 million people per month and logged over 1 billion events per month, without a hiccup.
Simple to Install: Partners ranged from blogs, Shopify sites, to corporate-owned media (workflow is everything!)
Advisers included Alexis Ohanian, Jim Brady
— TECH
Python, Django
Ractive.js
Google BigQuery
AWS (S3, CloudFront)
Antenna was a tool where online readers and shoppers could give one-click feedback on anything.
Designed to address shortcomings with comments and product reviews, the thesis was that making feedback simple and relevant would increase the quantity and quality of feedback received online.
Easily integrated into both media & ecommerce sites, we placed a heavy emphasis on data & engagement metrics to demonstrate the tool helped address both business & community concerns for each brand partner.
As our team grew, I focused on growth, partnering with hundreds of media & ecommerce sites to reach a network of over 65 million monthly unique people.
$1.5m VC raised (IDEA Fund Partners; Rogue Venture Partners; Triangle Startup Factory; National Association of Broadcasters). Plug & Play Member. Small exit to takeover team.
MEDIA
Digital media has been losing ad dollars & audience to social platforms like Facebook since before 2010.
In addition, they struggled to know what content was truly effective, leading to a “race to the bottom” dynamic in content, where emotional listicles would generate more clicks but lower reader loyalty than quality content.
Antenna was designed to enable people actually reading to leave feedback or start inline discussions, in an unobtrusive way. That data was then used to power content recommendations to passive readers, and it worked: Antenna content recommendations outperformed competition by 15% consistently.
ECOMMERCE
Particularly before the dawn of AI, product feedback was limited to meaningless star ratings, or verbose & often bot-written reviews.
This makes it hard for people to find the products that fit them.
We applied Antenna’s one-tap feedback to ecommerce partners, with the goal of increasing conversion and product recommendation quality.
Results were so successful that tier-1 brands like TOMS & eBags signed on, in addition to hundreds of Shopify stores.
Here’s a promotional video I wrote and produced to help brands and store-owners understand how Antenna would help them, spurring growth from 0 to 250+ stores in months.
Antenna worked by being deployed as a Javascript embed on media sites, and for ecommerce, it was an embed as well as Shopify app.
Client-Side Challenge: interacting with text, image, and video content with unlimited potential combinations of HTML/CSS possibilities in media.
Server-Side Challenge: handling 1 billion events per month, without ever affecting partner site speed, on the tiniest of startup technology budgets.
• Ractive.js-based for reliable, non-blocking DOM manipulation with minimal repainting
• Django back-end for configuration
• DigitalOcean + CloudFront + Google BigQuery infrastructure
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