Every founder would like to think they have a cool story about how they got where they are, but Michael Africk and Perry Tell are the real deal. Africk was a Disney recording artist who opened for 'NSync and Britney Spears, Tell was a guitarist for the 80s band Figures on a Beach, and now they're doing something that's completely unrelated — at least on the surface.
Africk and Tell are the founders of Inmoji, an adtech startup based in Boston and San Francisco, and they're among the entrepreneurs who are proving that emojis can be big business. The company has now raised a total of $9 million from local investors like PayPal vet David Chang and Boston Syndicates, as well as Workday alum Ravi Malireddy.
Inmoji provides a platform for making clickable emojis that are baked right into a number of messaging services, including Kik, Viber, ooVoo and Badoo, and dozens of big brands have used it, including Disney, Starbucks, Universal and Netflix. The platform is also available on Apple iMessage through a downloadable app.
The results so far have been impressive. In 2016, the company's clickable emojis had more than 8 billion impressions and 47 million clicks, and Africk told me that Inmoji's click-through rate has been over 100 percent. That means for every time an emoji is sent, it's been clicked on at least once. Links can lead to a variety of destinations, ranging from videos and movie showtimes to store locations and anything else that can be distilled into a hyperlink.
Inmoji's campaign for Disney's "Finding Dory," for instance, received 18 million impressions, 1 million clicks and 1 million shares within a month. Africk said that in some cases customers are spending their entire budgets in a matter of days for campaigns that were originally meant to last a month.
"We’re letting the results do the talking. They’re fucking great."
"We’re letting the results do the talking. They’re fucking great," Africk, the company's CEO, said. "People are clicking like mad on these things."
To Africk, the popularity of emojis, combined with the personable nature of messaging, is what has made Inmoji a compelling contender in the ad engagement space. Instead of appearing in Facebook newsfeeds or pop-up windows, Inmoji uses emojis as a "Trojan horse" to get ads into a user's messaging stream, Africk said.
When Africk and Tell, the company's COO, first started Inmoji, Africk said convincing brands to try out a new ad platform was a hard sell at first, though it did help that both of them already had a number of contacts in the entertainment industry. They've also both been in the startup game for a while now — the first venture they founded together was Xlr8 Mobile, a mobile content provider that was founded before the proliferation of smartphones.
If there's anything else that Africk has brought over from his music career, he said it's his ability to get in front of an audience and sell himself. "When you stand in front of a thousand people and sing, you feel comfortable telling investors why your app is worth it," he said.
