Dean Hantzis is no stranger to the startup world. With nearly two decades of development experience, the Boston entrepreneur has held leadership positions at three companies that reached public exits. Now, he is geared up to be chief technology officer for the second time in his career, this time at a Fort Point startup called Tapple.
"We provide a service that helps marketing groups or brands move from mass marketing to mass personalization," Hantzis said.
At its core, Tapple aims to take cues from the physical world and leverage them for digital marketing. Say, for example, I’m at a local taproom for a seasonal beer tasting event. The brewery could put a Tapple-branded QR code on a poster at the entrance. I would try a few beers, share my thoughts with my fellow drinkers. Then, bubbly and satisfied, I could use my iPhone camera to scan the QR code, which would pull up a tapple.io website. There, depending on what the brewery had decided to put on the landing page, I could vote for my favorite beer, read more information about each one, and fill out a form with my name and email.
In turn, the brewery—Tapple’s client—would get information about me for future, targeted marketing.
“With mass marketing, you just push out a bunch of messages, and you get a very small conversion of people interested—the majority of people are turned off, because it’s not relevant to them,” Hantzis said. “Mass marketing is a dying thing. Mass personalization is taking its place. The idea is you can provide contextual relevancy, based on what they’re saying, and target it based on something that means something to the consumer.”
Tapple has three modes of deployment: QR codes, geolocation, and NFC chips. With geolocation, users can pull up the URL “tapple.town” and, once they allow the site to access their location data, see a landing page specific to their location. Tapple also sees potential for NFC chips, the tiny chips that power Apple Pay and other interactions between devices.
“Right now, QR and geolocation have the highest compatibility across devices and market support,” Hantzis said. (NFC chip deployment has been sidelined for the moment.)
https://youtu.be/RSLLL6BK5xQ
For Hantzis, Tapple is a more personal effort than his previous startups, which include Waltham-based LeanWagon and Blue Dolphin Group. Six years ago, his father died of pancreatic cancer.
“It got me thinking about the second half of my life and how I wanted to live it,” he said. “So when I had the idea for Tapple, I had a vision for the culture I wanted to build. Our team needed to be resilient, ambitious, forward-thinking, and positive.”
To that end, Hantzis and his co-founder, CEO James Gray, have built out a tiny but mighty team. Hantzis, Gray, and chief marketing officer Karen Kelly all work essentially full-time out of the WeWork at 51 Melcher St. Other team members give time when they can.
After some eight months in beta mode, Tapple already boasts impressive clients: Havas Street, the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Gibson Sotheby’s International, and more. Havas Street recently deployed Tapple at a national beverage promotion tour, said Kelly. Of the 1,830 people who scanned the Tapple QR code during the tour, 85 percent continued on to fill out their information on the landing page.
Tapple’s team has also brought the marketing effort close to home. Nearly a year ago, Gray approached his local business group, the Wellesley Square Merchants Association. Now, business owners in Wellesley Square are putting up Tapple QR codes in all their storefronts, hoping to give customers a way to learn more about their products without having to find a sales rep, especially on busy days.
“We saw right away that there is engagement there. People are using it,” said Rick Cram, a consultant to the Wellesley Square Merchants’ Association. “Someone might walk by during the day and see [the code]; they don't want to go into the store, but they want to, with a level of anonymity, get some information on the store without going in.”
Hantzis has also brought Tapple to his home neighborhood in South Boston. Often, the CTO strolls through Artists For Humanity (AFH), a nonprofit arts organization just off A Street. The central goal of AFH is to provide studio space and sales opportunities to local teenagers, but it also hosts events in its open, industrial gallery space.
“When we’re doing these big social events, we bring 300 people into our space,” said Andrew Motta, operations director at AFH. “But we’ve got no real way to tell them what we do at, say, a wedding. We find that during these events, there’s people that are really interested in what we do, but finding those dozen people out of the 300 is the issue. We wanted a way to tell our story with the artwork.”
To attain that goal, Motta and his team have installed placards next to each artwork that include Tapple QR codes alongside the artist’s name and the title of the piece. Scan the code, and a Tapple site pops up with a professionally produced video about the piece, information about AFH, and a form where prospective art buyers can fill out their information.
“We think it's a really good route to see if we can sell paintings as a goal,” said AFH marketing director Richard Frank. “But I think it's also just to tie people a little more closely to this space and hope that they'll come back, because we do open studios, and find another way a good touchpoint to reach out to them.”
Tapple is officially emerging from beta mode Tuesday evening with a launch event at its home WeWork on 51 Melcher St. The operation is still completely bootstrapped, with a small full-time team and several others giving time when they can. Part of the reason for tonight’s launch event, aside from marking the startup’s grand debut, is to connect with potential investors.
Next up? Hantzis and his team want to find ways to use real-world information for more meaningful targeted campaigns. Think advertisements for cold popsicles on hot days, or for ticket sales just a few weeks prior to a local Taylor Swift concert. Tapple, of course, will know the weather and concert venues where you are.
I asked Hantzis and Kelly if they vetted clients at all for privacy concerns. For example, if a company that had recently seen multiple or major user data breaches (cough, Equifax) approached Tapple about a marketing campaign, would Tapple make that deal?
It was a good question, Hantzis told me, but given Tapple’s tiny size, it hadn’t come up yet.
“We haven’t necessarily taken action,” Hantzis said. “But it is something that we will absolutely have to do.”
Already, Tapple takes measures to ensure customers are opting in. If I were to fill out my email address on a tapple.town page, I would have to then confirm that signup by using a second form sent to my email.
For Hantzis, the exciting part of his new job is to gamify real-world interactions, to allow them to carry into the digital realm. The marketing bit is an added bonus for him, but it’s a huge one for the brands he works with.
“The idea of getting people to interact in a way that's in the physical world but has a level of gamification in it, that’s where I get really excited,” Hantzis said. “We know that certain games and very simple implementations can be extremely engaging.To bring that to brands, to say, ‘Hey, I want to integrate’—that’s an instant value.”
