Need business intel? Call the young Turks
Twentify began in Istanbul, but it’s a huge help to Canadian companies
A tech company seeks prospects for its new business-management software. A telecom firm needs to know who else is hanging wires on its telephone poles. A fashion designer wants to know what the cool kids are wearing this season on Friday nights. And a restaurant chain is eager to learn how well its newest sandwich is being promoted across the country.
These classic business problems have one thing in common: they can now be solved through crowdsourcing.
Within a few hours, Ottawabased Twentify can mobilize a small army of smartphone-bearing millennials to fill out a survey, snap photographs of retail outlets, pose as a customer or count wires on poles.
With nearly 20,000 Canadians in its “Bounty” database, Twentify wants to be the go-to solution for businesses needing instant intelligence. And with its imminent move into the United States, the company is preparing to go global.
But this is not your usual Canadian success story.
Twentify’s founders live in Istanbul, Turkey, but are supported and mentored by legendary Canadian entrepreneur Sir Terry Matthews (with Mitel, Newbridge, CrossKeys and 100 more successful tech companies under his belt).
Ilker Inanc, a 26-year-old computer science graduate from Istanbul’s Bogazici University, started Twentify with friends and fellow coders Tolga Bakkaloglu and Caglar Bozkurt.
While still in school, they dabbled in startups, including an addon Twitter accessory and management software for car dealerships.
“We always wanted to start a business that would impact the way people live their lives,” Inanc says, “not just do e-commerce.” Success proved elusive. But their initiative was admired in Istanbul’s nascent startup community, and came to the attention of the Netas Wesley Clover Tech Fund, run by Istanbul’s TRPE Investment Partners and funded by local angels as well as Wesley Clover, Matthews’ Ottawa-based investment company.
The fund finds promising Turkish tech entrepreneurs, trains them to identify disruptive business ideas, then invests about $1 million to help them launch impactful startups.
Inanc and team arrived in Ottawa in January 2014 to spend six weeks learning the fine points of ideation and customer development from 25 entrepreneurs in Matthews’ portfolio. At night they stayed in Sir Terry’s home, gaining life lessons over breakfast and dinner.
What lessons did Inanc take home? “Perseverance and hard work,” he says. “Terry always emphasizes that. Even though he’s over 70, he would get up earlier than us and go to bed later. He told us, ‘Never stop doing what you’re doing.’ ”
In Ottawa, Inanc’s team came to see a huge opportunity in crowdsourcing a community of consumers to help corporate clients collect better, speedier business data, through paid tasks such as answering surveys or monitoring retailers’ customer service.
Back in Istanbul, they developed a business plan and launched Twentify in August 2014.
Their first client was Turkey’s DenizBank, which wanted to test the ease of use of its mobile-payment product.
Other early tasks involved inspecting vending machines, checking retailers’ inventories, analyzing users’ fashion habits and monitoring the condition of billboards.
The handy features in today’s cellphones, such as built-in cameras, videos and GPS location tracking, enable Twentify to verify the proper work has been done and analyze the results.
Users might get paid the equivalent of $1 or $2 to complete a survey, or $10 or more if they’re sent into the field.
For students, young workers and stay-at-home parents, it’s extra cash that can pay their mobile bill or buy a few more groceries.
Given that 90 per cent of its users are aged 18 to 34, Twentify is building gamification into its brand, requiring users to complete basic tasks before they can “unlock” more complex, better paying challenges.
Twentify expanded to Canada last November, working out of Matthews’ offices.
Andrew Fraser, business development manager for Twentify Americas, says the first Canadian client was a major consulting firm researching the needs of millennials to devise a “next generation experience” for Via Rail.
Other projects have included focus groups asking women about their personal-finance habits, documenting competitors’ pricing for a major cellphone provider and reporting on the layout of bank branches across the country.
Twentify has 19,000 Canadians in its field force (and 150,000 in Turkey). But Fraser admits customer development can still be a challenge. He likes to ask prospects questions such as, “What data do you need that you don’t have? How do you manage your field assets?
Perseverance and hard work; Terry always emphasizes that ... He told us, ‘Never stop doing what you’re doing.’
How do you ensure standardization of processes and promotions?”
Clients tend to squirm as they try to dress up “random spot checks,” but they usually need time to understand how to turn their processes into tasks consumers can carry out.
Twentify has piloted a few projects in other countries — Mexico, Ukraine, South Africa, Nigeria and Thailand. “We needed to prove that we could set up a user base and get some simple mystery-shopping tasks done in two weeks,” Fraser says. That gave the company confidence to move into the U.S. next month, and then Mexico.
“We want to go global as fast as we can,” Inanc says. After all, who wants to let down Terry Matthews?