Kyle
As a small business owner how do you keep track of what your closest competitors are doing? Do you wear blinders and pretend they aren’t there? Do you shop at competitor locations to see what they’re doing? Do you plant spies? Do you set up Google alerts?
While some of these things (except wearing blinders), may seem effective, they all involve time and most small business owners don’t have that. Luckily there is a Denver based startup called Closely that is looking to simplify the monitoring of your competitors in one easy to use dashboard they’re calling Perch.
Perch is currently in a closed beta. The founders at Closely are hoping that Perch will give local merchants a snapshot of competitors marketing activities and help merchants build ideas of how to respond.
“We found that the majority of businesses don’t quite yet understand the level of activity surrounding them,” Closely CEO Perry Evans told Street Fight in an email. “As the application that they learn to rely on for daily tracking and watching, we’re in a front row position for helping them participate.”
Evans, started his career in technology as head of the Mapquest publisher group so he’s very familiar with the benefits of LBS, group deals and the other technologies that are preying and benefiting local merchants.
More after the break
Closely’s Perch dashboard is in mobile app format which gives business owners a competitive edge by always having access to the information they provide. With the mobile app Perch users will be able to access a feed of the online activity of nearby businesses in their category.
They’ll also be able to discover and track how businesses in their category and local area are engaging customers through social media.
The final component allows merchants to monitor things like daily deals and other promotions as well as check in specials.
Closely’s Perch app was built in HTML 5 and will be available on multiple OS’s at launch. Evans told Streetfight that they are working on enhancing features but won’t make an update to the app itself until its officially out of beta which they expect to be within the next few months.
source: Streetfight
