In one sentence, what is your product/service?

Interactly lets you create automated virtual interactions by asking one or more video questions and inviting people to respond with a webcam or audio.

 

What problem(s) does it solve?

Imagine any situation where one person needs to talk to a lot of people, and Interactly can do it better. Interactly enables you to keep the personal touch in the interaction by using video, while at the same time automating it so people can leave a better impression and make it more engaging.

Interactly has been created in such a way that it allows you to create any kind of interaction, automate it and scale it while still keeping it personal and intuititive. Because it is so easy to use, Interactly can be used to improve many kinds of interactions.

One is the job interview process. For each job, about 100 people apply. Unfortunately, the average physical interview involves travel expenses, the time of multiple interviewers physically being present, scheduling inefficiencies and a lot more.

On average, a job interview costs nearly €500 in expenses. With Interactly, all the recruiter has to do is create the interaction that they expect to have with the candidates once, and then invite them to respond. With just the click of a few buttons, they can do 100 interviews and then discuss and review the candidates in their own time.

Another problem that Interactly solves is the challenge of qualitative market research. Both quantitative and qualitative market research costs businesses a lot of time and money. With qualitative research, the expenses per interview range in the hundreds of euros.

Quantitative research may be a lot cheaper, but the results are also less and less reliable nowadays and the fact that users are only able to answer multiple choice questions seriously negates the scope of quantitative research possibilities.

Interactly is directly in between quantitative and qualitative research methods, offering the price of quantitative research while offering the open ended information of qualitative research methods.

Other problems that Interactly tackles include customer testimonials, consumer reviews, management reporting, sales pitches, video contests and much much more. Basically, the sky is the limit and we’re inviting people to get creative with Interactly’s capabilities to show us even more possibilities.

 

What are your immediate goals?

Currently Interactly is in Private Beta. We are still creating new partnerships, gathering customers and improving the software. We expect to be able to launch the Public Beta in September.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building the tech or your team?

There were two major challenges that we had to overcome.

First of all, it was astonishingly difficult to create a reliable video recording service in the browser, due to the large diversity in browser environments. Additionally when Chrome released its own version of Flash it made life very difficult for us.

We are now confident that we’re ahead of the game in this regard with the amount of development and experience that we have invested into offering this and we know that this also gives us a competitive edge over companies entering our market.

Second, it was a major challenge to effectively communicate the potential of Interactly to end-users. The problem we’re repeatedly facing is that there are simply too many possibilities of what we can do with Interactly, and communicating that is quite a challenge. We currently have a solid strategy in place for approaching and conquering each individual market.

How will the company make money?

We charge a subscription fee per month starting at $49. It’s zero-risk to set it up and invite people, and you’re only ever charged for the responses you choose to view and share.

Who is in your team?

  • Rogier Trimpe, below, CEO and Business founder with a background in international business and computer geek who loves product development, design, animation and thinking out of the box. 
  • Michiel Trimpe, CTO and Technical founder, at the top of the Dutch development freelance world, with extensive experience working for large multinationals and a background in technical business studies. 
  • Pedro Canelas, Lead Designer and co-founder, lives and works from Brazil and co-founded another startup before this. Pedro has 8+ years of experience and a degree in User Experience and Design.

 

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years’ time?

We’d like to be the go to place for people to work better and faster while interacting on a personal level. We’d like to be the first thing that people think of when they start to work on something. We want people to think “Can I do this better if I use Interactly?”

Our vision is to conquer the market with a great product that allows the average user to create their own interactions and workflows as easily as they can create a PowerPoint presentation.

We expect to create a new communications paradigm that will make businesses and people more effective than they’ve ever been before.

Other than your own, what are your favorite websites / apps / tools?

We’re all fervent Hacker News readers. We measure our traffic with Mixpanel and Clicky. We define our sprints and tasks on Trello. We collaborate on FlowDock and we all have our own little tools that are too many to mention.