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ScanSee app aims to boost retail traffic,
two-man team has grown to 24 employees
© Copyright ScanSee Inc, 2011
Dallas Business Journal by Steven R. Thompson, Staff Writer
Related:
Technology, Retailing & Restaurants
Date: Friday, January 13, 2012, 5:00am CST - After about a year and a half of preparation, two Dallas-area entrepreneurs plan to launch a social commerce application, combining various brick-and-mortar retailers’ applications, with the goal of giving back to higher education.
“It’s a marketing channel that links retailers, consumers and suppliers together in real time,” said co-founder and CEO Roy Truitt, who also owns Truco Enterprises, which sells On the Border chips and salsa in grocery stores.
While serving on University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory Board of Visitors, Truitt wanted to find a way for universities to make money. He teamed up with Nate Ungarean, COO, in 2010 to develop “What we try to do is learn from the consumer and have him talk to us,” Ungarean said. “Then you walk into the store and you want to know what is on sale of interest to you. You hit this button and the store gets to tell you their value proposition. We can have a link on there that takes you to the store’s website or their app. It gives the store the ability to deliver a specific message.”
Driving traffic to brick-and-mortar retailers’ websites and applications is a main goal of ScanSee, which will charge a fee for retailers, but is free to consumers.
Truitt said the price for retailers would be around $10 a month, depending on the size of the company. ScanSee has attracted the attention of big-box retailers as well as mom-and-pop shops, Truitt said.
“If you spend $10 with us and if someone walks in your store and hits that button and buys one extra product, two extra products, you paid for it,” Ungarean said. However, ScanSee aims to use the customer preferences reported by the user to build repeat customers for retailers, Ungarean said.
“Our objective for retailers is, ‘Once we get the customer there, how do we drive additional sales that benefit the consumer?’” Ungarean said. “Not just drive sales, but sales that they want and keep them coming back.”
The company is self-funded, but Truitt said they plan to raise about $2 million to $5 million in capital for marketing purposes. UT Austin has been helping test the security of the application, but there is no formal agreement with the university, Truitt said.
There is benefit for both organizations, said Kevin Hegarty, vice president and CFO at the University of Texas at Austin. Hegarty said they are working toward a more formal agreement, but it would require review by the university’s board of regents. “We are trying to be much more entrepreneurial,” Hegarty said. “I’d rather look to these kinds of activities that are interesting and unique for additional revenues then to have to look to students and parents for the additional revenues in the form of tuition increases.”
ScanSee said it will work with a national organization to distribute half of its profits to universities, but hasn’t reached an agreement yet.
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