Adapti.me: Personalised Web Experiences For All
Websites subtly adapting to the user and their environment boost sales and loyalty. Big online players have been deploying these techniques for years, but smaller operations often don’t have the knowhow. Lux Future Lab residents Adapti have the solution: an off-the-shelf, download-and-play application that can personalise any website. We spoke to Co-Founders Antoine Granjon CEO and Bastian Jakobsen COO & CTO.
Interviewed by Stephen Ewans.
LFL: What is special about your website personalisation solution?
Bastian Jakobsen: Age, gender, the weather, location, shopping habits, taste preferences, and more can be understood from the way we act online. Our application gauges these characteristics and adapts the graphics and text on the site to match users needs and wants. Our tool works whether the site is hosted locally or on the cloud, whether they are transactional or informational sites.
Antoine Granjon: Whether clients have a few hundred unique visitors a month or hundreds of thousands, we have an option them. There is a basic package, with two richer services offering the ability to share across an organisation, a wider range of tools, and more advanced analytics tools. We are particularly well suited to smaller operations. For as little as €6 per month, any website can have a look and text content adapted dynamically to each individual user. Our tool gives the key essentials rather than seeking to deal with every eventuality.
LFL: How does the product work?
Bastian Jakobsen: As well as cookies that store user data, there are other ways to build profiles from how PC, tablets and mobiles are used. We track this, and match this to well established ideas drawn from sociology and psychology to offer the content that is more likely to suit each user. We do this while always respecting users’ privacy rights.
Antoine Granjon: We fit into pre-existing sites, and help them adapt. Traditionally, sites would need to have a good idea of their target market before the design phase and create fixed banners and text on this basis. We enable sites to adapt seamlessly with changes in the market, tastes and fashion. Clients just download and install and don’t need to know how to code.
LFL: Can you give examples?
Antoine Granjon: The Luxembourgish food delivery site Foostix are clients, with Adapti changing their site based on each user’s food preferences. We are also working with the French clothing brand Chevignon to adapt their transactional site to the preferences and profile of each user, as well as details such as the weather. But most of our clients are small players without a widely recognised brand name.
LFL: How long have you been working on this project?
Antoine Granjon: We were both studying a digital marketing master’s in Paris, and there was a lot of theoretical discussion about how big-data could be used. We saw the practical application of matching this information to personal behaviour. This led us to found the company in mid 2016, and we moved to the commercial phase in late 2017. We are currently selling to the Luxembourgish and French markets, and next we will address the German speaking world.
Bastian Jakobsen: We began with just the two of us, the team is currently eight strong and we aim to be around 20 by the end of the year as we hire both technical and sales people. We can do this because we have just closed our first fundraising round. We currently have office space for 12 and we are talking with LFL about acquiring future room grow. Once this web tool is perfected, we will start work on an equivalent for mobile apps, and explore options is the world of the internet of things.
LFL: How Lux Future Lab helped in this growth?
Bastian Jakobsen: It’s no exaggeration to say that they saved us. Previously we were working in my apartment’s spare room, us two and two trainees, and it was very cramped. We looked for commercial property but they wanted to tie us in for years, and this wasn’t ideal given that we had no turnover. We also needed somewhere central and attractive to help us recruit the talent we need.
Antoine Granjon: Being in this community and ecosystem really helps. The advice we receive on hiring, management, and marketing is valuable, plus they have introduced us to their networks of contacts. For example we were sceptical about the need to attend trade fairs, as we thought everything could be done online these days. But the events we attended have been very successful and we want to do more. There was also the opportunity to present ourselves to 200 people at a BGL BNP Paribas event in April that featured a presentation by Amazon Web Services.
Watch the video here!