Interview of Jason Crilly, Founder of PageWoo

Jason Crilly is a Founder of PageWoo, a technology platform that allows businesses to create mobile-friendly landing pages for their advertisements. Despite the rise in mobile content consumption, advertisers often struggle to reach high conversion due to the lack of quality mobile landing pages. PageWoo provides optimized pages with fast loading time, clear calls to action, flexibility in customization and tracking analytics that helps businesses achieve their marketing goals. In this interview, Jason shares with us about the growth strategy and the experience of graduating from the first class of StartEngine, an accelerator in Los Angeles.

Here is a part of the transcript:

Giang Biscan: Hi today. It’s Giang Biscan from the TheStartupAngel.com. I have with me today Jason Crilly from PageWoo. Hi Jason?

Jason Crilly: Hi Jane. How’re you?

Giang Biscan: I’m great, thank you. Finally, we’ve finally rescheduled.

Jason Crilly: I know, and thank you guys for coming to StartEngine. We’re really thrilled to have you here.

Giang Biscan: Thank you. And what’s the issue?

Jason Crilly: So, PageWoo creates mobile landing pages for mobile advertisers. Very simple utility, very useful and very new product right now because mobile advertising has been really struggling for years.

Giang Biscan: And now what is the current problem?

Jason Crilly: So, mobile advertising has two problems. One is that they can’t use frequency capping. So on your iPhone or your iPad, there’s no way right now for them to track how many times you see that. That’s really hard for them, because if you get forty or fifty ads the value comes down.

And the other problem is contacts, so it’s really hard to have good, mobile, friendly contact, people just kind of get used to it. The external websites used for making apps, you know, but now they’re probably used to making more web pages.

Giang Biscan: I see.

Jason Crilly: So we make that really easy for people. It’s really easy for them to do that with our advertising.

Giang Biscan: Is there any particular type of business that you target?

Jason Crilly: We work with all types of businesses across the board. So everything from lead jet companies, to affiliates, to ad networks. Really, mobile advertising is one of the best ways to get in front of somebody because they are out there on their phone, you know, ready to experience your brand right there.

Giang Biscan: And, I mean, today, everybody has a smart phone…

Jason Crilly: Everybody. There are more phones on the planet now than there are people.

Giang Biscan: Exactly.

Jason Crilly: Yeah.

Giang Biscan: So, any type of business. So, currently what do they do?

Jason Crilly: Well currently the brands are very successful. Brands and Apps. So, brands will have an agency that will, you know, cost a lot of money.

Giang Biscan: Right.

Jason Crilly: And the agency will create specific contact to go with certain market and introduce a certain format, and it works for them, because they don’t really need conversions. They’re all just trying to get people to get the app experience.

Giang Biscan: Right.

Jason Crilly: So, well currently, the mobile advertisers are only 25% solved.

Giang Biscan: Wow.

Jason Crilly: And that’s because most people just happen to have been shown a deal of value from the guy.

Giang Biscan: So, with your technology, your platform, what do they do? They go into your website, and?

Jason Crilly: So, from our website, you can go on, and you can create the mobile ad page, and you can create the mobile ad itself, and when you’re done with that, we will patch you to one of our ad network partners, such as either Millenial, or Engage, or Sitesculp. And you can go ahead and complete you ad where you want to target your ad box, with certain demographics, what locations you want to advertise to. And then when it’s starting to look like you’re creative, then you’ll already have that tag, because you’ll have it first.

Giang Biscan: Wow.

Jason Crilly: And so you’ll drop your new banner ad on your web page and you can complete the whole process in less than twenty minutes.

Giang Biscan: Wow, very efficient. And what if it cost more for you guys?

Jason Crilly: So we’re in the subscription world where we can reduce the spots where you can come in and you know, try and get one page for free and then the next pricing is, I think it’s going to start around sixty to a hundred dollars a month.

Giang Biscan: Nice, okay. And how does that work with your partner relationship… Do you cut them a percentage or?

Jason Crilly: Well, somebody finds us first. It’s great because the partners cut us a percentage. So we pass people to the ad networks and the ad network pays us from profit. In talking to we work directly to the ad networks, so that when somebody is creating an ad by they can pop up the PageWoo and that case holding the program we share or will pass directly and give for new [00:03:27] from the customers.

Giang Biscan: So, how did you get up to just kind of show setup?

Jason Crilly: StartEngine is one of the biggest things. So we’ve gotten, we’ve great mentors here, people who have been working for us from day one, who have been [00:03:42] they’ve been setting us up with everything that we needed to know.

Giang Biscan: I see. So Jason had mentioned about StartEngine better exploration program in a life full of lease based program. You get into the program 4 months ago? Less than 4 months ago.

Jason Crilly: 3. So, 90 days.

Giang Biscan: Back then you didn’t know who you were.

Jason Crilly: So, we came in, we were doing this for everybody. [00:04:10] and since we were here, we got introduced to the right people, the right mentors who have been with us to help us define what is really valuable in the market space. I think that’s why we are doing up.

Giang Biscan: Okay. And so the launch strategy, other than distribution partner, what else do you have?

Jason Crilly: So, well distributional progress comes with variety of course for us. But we also had built up like we had talked about ourselves more. So, our software service, you come, come to our website and clearly engage. You don’t need to go through others and currently we’re just building new partners that are all we’d been doing the last month.

Giang Biscan: Right. And [00:04:56]

Jason Crilly: So, you get to know what everybody else is doing [00:0502] that’s worse than anybody doing any tacking. It’s like we do something hopefully is when you are creating leaning pages, you might not know which one will perform the best. Some might be better, some might not. So, he let you deal with those pages, more or less play out and see who is performing the best and fluke in that performing page, automatically did the job for you.

Giang Biscan: Nice. And do you have any plans using that because all of your clients for some bit of advertising?

Jason Crilly: Not at the moment. We don’t have any big data plans. Certainly there will be those options in the future. [00:05:38]

Giang Biscan: Who built the site?

Jason Crilly: That was me. Not by myself. I had partners and they were great help. We’ve one of the best creative directors in Las Angeles whose is my cofounder and she is fantastic.

Giang Biscan: What are you doing background?

Jason Crilly: [00:06:04] local finance. She was creative director for our studio and my background as an educator. So, I know how to built things from engine room.

Giang Biscan: So you do it as well as a bank and architecture…?

Jason Crilly: Full stacks, everything from visuals to the working progress and the business logic.

Giang Biscan: So it’s a very solid time that you guys worked together before?

Jason Crilly: Yeah.

Giang Biscan: So, is there any reason why it’s not happening instead of some other types of study?

Jason Crilly: Well, we’re really good at counter and we just send it off to the space where that’s the problem. Mobile marketing right now, one of the biggest content just happens to be our strongest suite. So, you know and it kind of a happy accident, we are happy that we are in it together.

Giang Biscan: Okay. So you mentioned that when you start, you get allot of men tools and advisers. Are there people that are officially on the board?

Jason Crilly: Yeah. We have some great people. We have some official advisors. Ben [00:07:07], he is fantastic. He has helped us rally in almost everything in the fund raising process which is kind of something else. Ben, he was EVP on yahoo for a while and he has his own site. Paul Grant is another advisor of ours. He’s been really helpful from day one. He helped us really focus on what market is supposed to be. Mark McKeclin is head of mobile project and he’s been really help. He has helped us out with market strategy, partner integration that’s really shocking to what these guys need.

Giang Biscan: Hi Chris this is Giang Biscan from ThestartupAngel.com and today we meet two guys Jad Meouchy and Jason Hitchcock from Brandstand, hi guys, how are you?

Jad Meouchy: Very well nice to meet you.

Jason Hitchcock: Thanks for been here.

Giang Biscan: What’s Brandstand?

Jad Meouchy: Brandstand is a tool that can be used to figure out if you visual content is going to designate with lobby 212 before you actually put it out there. So if your stream of energy and you start thinking about, what is bad or something like that or if you’re thinking of a company logo, we can help you test that and tell you which kind of adverts really like this image, so that you are confident before you pick you images out.

Giang Biscan: [00:08:32] like me you telling a company that maybe have gone to another creative agency and created various company’s images, is that right:

Jad Meouchy: Exactly, any small business or any creative agency that you know any business that’s creating, their own creative content but they try to [00:08:48] really can use this tool, an agency [00:08:51].

Giang Biscan: And how do you actually get those, a compliment to say that initial number 3 is better that 2 or 1?

Jad Meouchy: Well that part is really similar to something called the [00:09:05] where you can do it yourself; I think its make your own survey. And the idea is, allot of doing the sub surveys tools that currently exist like [00:09:13] there’s thousands of them. They all fall very short in doing visual media service and so what we’ve done, we’ve created a mechanism that executes on visual media certain methodology better that everybody else, no body is really focusing on that. And so yeah, you put your images into our system, we’ll give you a survey mechanism that is really easy to share, can get on any website, so it’s pretty you…

Jason Hitchcock: It’s a tool [00:09:41].

Giang Biscan: Okay, so is it mobilized or is it [00:09:43]?

Jason Hitchcock: Well it’s mobile and compatible, Brandstand device is very small [00:09:49] is very large, it’s been designed for screen size and so it primarily experiences usually gone through mobile device. But it’s very much well compatible.

Giang Biscan: Thank you, so I think that you’ve kind of an interesting idea for doing a survey if anything I think they still have that so, I think [00:10:08] influence over that, instead of saying that and trying to through all this technical multiple choice question .

Jason Hitchcock: Exactly. The idea behind this is if you want to get this information right now because, if you’re kind of pushy and creative out there, spend some money on it, you are going to want having an informed decision. So right now the way to get that information is by either going to a focus group, which if you go out there, you Google them, you will find between 4 and 10,000 dollars of the [00:10:37] focus group, they are pretty slow. Or you could I guess if you go [00:10:41] people will change what you think, that’s not really an amenable way to do it or you can give someone a [00:10:46] but then you are going to get one of those touch base surveys that, you are going to really have to insist about someone to take.

If you look out there and see the way people are sanitizing issues to taking surveys, you know paying 50 dollars, having this gift cards and you know 3 bucks a response. So we decided to make something that would be an enjoyable experience for the user having to get to see some beautiful images, their [00:11:10] and a little but of information in return. Thanks for your votes, here’s the returns so if like apply something you find learn something cool, and so it’s kind of fun.

Giang Biscan: So, is that whole survey based on…is there any model or is there a subscription or [00:11:24]

Jason Hitchcock: Right now its software and a service, so its 100 dollars a month to up to 1000 dollars a month world class plans and you know, prices in between. Then we do have customization, locking dashboards, so it can be very specific depending on how you are going to use it and…yeah that’s all.

Giang Biscan: Like what exactly do you have in a dashboard?

Jason Hitchcock: In our dashboard?

Giang Biscan: Like the [00:11:51]

Jason Hitchcock: Has the results quick. So we had to jump the results says basically as an info graphic, so that’s where it’s top of base, there’s an ad for it. And when you are tabling the results or when the results come in the formatting has very nice looking info graphics and you can take your time with it and just pull it up and you can see the results pretty colors and nice lines and everything very nicely designed. Beautiful looking dash boards were the results resemble an info graphic like you see on the web.

Jason Hitchcock: Okay. We want to assure people that the results are incredibly obvious. We didn’t want to them waiting through lost of cross tabs and excel spread shit. I just wanted to say. These are the results and their presentation is ready. You can either drop right in the middle of our point.

Giang Biscan: And can the user participate in this survey is their user? So they sign after their [00:12:40] or the whole web site is not. You don’t have added ways of using that [00:12:45]

Jason Hitchcock: Correct. Right now we don’t have a panel but we are working on that. That’s just something for day one.

Giang Biscan: I see okay. [00:12:52]

Jason Hitchcock: So we are growing distributing partners right now so we have a couple that have about 1800- 2000 companies they service right now. Their [00:13:06] for that particular partner buy a slot for each of their customers. So we are looking at really one of this deals puts us on the map.

Giang Biscan: Very good.

Jason Hitchcock: And then once we figure out where the precise imp limitation of that is we plan on scaling that buy showing the competitors or other people that could use this exert process to benefit some other companies. So right now it’s working with the [00:13:38] to alter their dash board. Plus we are going to be working with other networks. So we are going to succeed with a small group and then we will take that case study and lower the price.

Jad Meouchy: And we can mass market the product as well and to mass market to small medium sized business. That will be interesting staff right there. [00:14:03] within thirty days

Giang Biscan: [00:14:12] so are you guys testing like right now?

Jason Hitchcock: Yeah Brandstand id testing it right now and we are liberating over the design so we are making it look polished.

Jad Meouchy: We are defiantly doing the whole lean star thing were we are doing customer development closely with our first group of customers who we were having a lot of back and forward with them to make sure that all the right feature s of their serve them to display the information. The results they way that they would like to see it and to make sure that they just him a value out of it so that we can take this product to similar personas and skill around the…

Giang Biscan: So are your kind of competitors out their? Has there anyone being doing…

Jason Hitchcock: Probably primarily surveyors Meouchy.

Giang Biscan: [00:14:57]

Jason Hitchcock: Well the have image components to their survey. They are not very obvious. They don’t promote them and… we talked to them about them and they particularly have a lot of confidence in them either so I think most of the competitors are survey companies or DIY survey companies that have some sort of image feature in their but it’s not anywhere near the [00:15:24] I guess the joy that ours is and nothing is best tuned for images us ours is. Our tools have [00:15:33} properties to it.

Giang Biscan: And is there something that you would like to go in your house [00:15:38]

Jason Hitchcock: Absolutely in the house. Everybody knows

Giang Biscan: How did you guys meet?

Jason Hitchcock: Well it’s interesting, so I spent a lot…

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