The answer to the crisis is Cubeyou. An all-Italian company.
In June 2009, my brother was working for the networking equipment company Cisco Systems in the UK, and I was picking up the pieces of my Bulgarian real estate adventure, brought to its knees by the 2008 financial crisis.
We met in Paris, halfway, and started talking about Google’s brand new Street View technology. It was an amazing innovation. But we felt the most interesting part was missing – an indoor view of the thousands of restaurants, bars, shops and commercial activities which make a city magic and alive. We struck on the idea of allowing people to enjoy a virtual tour of each place before deciding where to go for the evening. Google could keep the streets, we’d manage the interiors, so we founded Cubeyou!
We moved to Milan and set up shop. We weren’t sure what we were doing, but we made the right moves. We created a PowerPoint video to sell the service to local businesses. At first we got tossed out. But after refining our pitch, we quickly were able to close a deal worth €199 for a virtual tour plus a yearly subscription set to begin on 10 October 2010, Cubeyou’s expected public launch date.
In the 10 months leading up to the launch, we signed up over 2500 paying businesses, hired 52 fulltime employees and even secured our first investor, which enabled us to kick off our service in style.
On our D-day, there was a press conference at Milan’s city hall and a flash mob in Piazza Duomo with 500 people. Some 20 newspapers and magazines covered our launch and we had reached out to over 10,000 shops in the city. The future looked bright. But that’s when it all went wrong.
Our technology was not up to scratch and all the hype backfired on us. Our contract sales slumped 50% and we started posting losses. While trying to solve our technical issues, we kept adding new features. We’d lost sight of our ultimate goal and were no longer providing our customers with what they wanted.
It was back to the drawing board, and after two years of product development, we came up with two solid products: a social media management tool and a profiling platform designed to gather information on customers directly from social media.
At this point my brother and I decided to part ways. I took over the profiling platform project under the Cubeyou brand, while Gian founded Social Bullguard (SBG) selling his social customer service product. After plenty of tweaking, SBG has taken off and is now one of the best social customer service platforms in Europe with deals with customers such as BMW, Poste Italiane and Vodafone.
At Cubeyou, we initially focused on research and development. We set up a partnership with the University of Cambridge, raising the use of social data to a completely new level (www.youarewhatyoulike.com) and we brought in artificial intelligence technology in order to transform social online interactions into predictors of purchasing behaviour.
We opened an office in Silicon Valley, with its own sales force, while research and development remained in Europe. This allowed us to leverage the best of both worlds – a large and early adopter market and highly skilled and reliable researchers and coders. At first we sold our technology as a managed service to large corporations, such as Sony, American Insurance and Pepsi, but we soon realized that to scale up we needed to transition to a softwareas- a-service (SaaS) platform. We are now about to release our brand new profiling and media planning platform called Cubeyou XY. Our aim is to shake up the market research industry and its antiquated survey methods by implementing new research technology based on artificial intelligence and big data from social media.
The initial results look promising and several large publishers and agencies have already signed up and started to preview the platform. Only time will tell if it works. We’re betting the rollercoaster won’t stop this time round, and if it does, it means the learning curve has flattened and it’s time to move on.
The answer to the crisis is Cubeyou. An all-Italian company.
