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Denver-based Closely, founded in early 2010 by Perry Evans, a MapQuest, Jabber and Local Matters alum, announced today its raise of $3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Grotech Ventures, with Steadfast Venture Capital and CNF Investments also participating.
Closely’s initial work was a platform product aimed at big media companies. Two years ago, the firm created Perch, an app focused on what Evans describes as “the local and small business ecosystem of digital marketing.” Perch allows business owners to monitor the social media activity of competitors in real time. This new funding will be used to build out Perch and expand support for small businesses throughout North America.
After creating a prototype, efforts to scale Perch started a year ago. The app has since been recognized as the 2013 Appy Awards Best Business App Winner, and made the Forbes list of 15 must-have apps.
“We noticed how much money was sitting on the sidelines, as small businesses shifted behavior from traditional to new tools for advertising and marketing,” said Evans. “The biggest thing we observed was that the average small business owner was overwhelmed with the complexity of staying on top of what’s going on, understanding their choices, and sifting through all these things.”
He describes Perch’s mission as helping the small business owner learn best practices for their category or type of business, but receiving insights based on consumer behavior and competitors’ activities: “They can watch, learn, and discover what they should be doing.”
Evans said that when they released version 2.0 of Perch nine to 12 months after the prototype was made available, the app had between 10,000 and 15,000 users. Now, Perch has nearly 40,000 users, and is on track to add 10,000 users a month moving forward.
The Perch app is free to users, and uses a “Mint-like model” where supply-side partner service providers like Constant Contact, GoDaddy and Duda support the app and benefit from its ability to match digital marketing products and service provides to the right small business at the right time.
“This new model is geared to build better relationships with small business owners,” said Evans. “The cost of sales to small businesses is going through the roof, owners are tired and frustrated, and dealing with 30-plus cold calls a month from digital marketing service providers.”
Evans said Closely has taken a lean approach to staffing. He said they expect to add three or four new positions "to get to the right size for what we need in 2014,” and more in 2015.
One direction the company is researching is how Perch might be used as a tool by marketing agencies to better serve their clients, or to give small business owners who don’t want to do all the work themselves a way to hand that off to a third-party to manage it for them.
