The Story of Rad Intelligence

Our founder & CEO, Jeremy Barnett had a crazy idea after exiting Trendy Butler in late 2017.  So he assembled a management team that has already gone to war together!  A management team that consists of four (4) former CEO/founder types, three (3) investors from previous ventures, two (2) oddly cool developers, one (1) Serbian track star and two (2) operations specialists! 

The Big Problem... 

We faced this ourselves — our founding team has collectively built 9 online businesses (crazy, we know...) using a combination of Facebook and Influencer marketing.  Oddly, we all suffered from the exact same advertising problems while building these businesses.  Firstly, all of us were overly dependant on Facebook to acquire new customers.  Moreover, influencer marketing had become way too expensive and is fundamentally broken.   

Rad was born..

Back in late 2017, co-founder Mark Decastro and 3 engineers tested the idea of allowing brands to distribute already made digital content (blogs, videos, and articles) across real social media user feeds. The idea was to pay real social media influencers (small, medium, and large) to share already made content with their audience. Our hypothesis was that brands would benefit exponentially by using the network effect of real social media users to distribute already made content.

Lots of pizza and sleeping at the office were required for this vision to become reality and get our product live!  

Here's how RAD works for advertisers.

RAD (our product) is simple, effective and easy to use.  The most important thing we built into our product is full transparency which empowers our clients to really understand each dollar spent.

And here's how influencers share content and make money! 

With Covid-19, the influencer marketing space was flipped upside down on its head. The world has changed into a virtual environment leaving tons of influencers without work and pay.  The RAD platform enables small and medium sized influencers to make side income each month without having to create any new content. This is a lucky twist of fate -- right place, right time.  And we siezed the moment!

And boom — it worked!

Not only did it work, but we crushed expectations.  We tested in Latin America and improved our clients user base by 300%.  We've got something special folks!

Then, we needed to educate the world as to why influencer marketing is broken.

RAD's CEO and Founder Jeremy Barnett made it his mission to tell the world about everything that is wrong with influencer marketing.   We started in our back yard by educating the leaders of tomorrow at USC Marshall's top-ranked MBA program.

USC Marshall | How to use Influencers with Jeremy Barnett

Next, we launched the Rad Intelligence for Influencers Podcast with CEO Jeremy Barnett and CRO Marco Hansell.

Below is a snippet of one of our super fun shows where Marco and I typically interview the best in the game about influencer marketing.  In the below snippet, Marco talk about why RAD is RAD for small and medium sized businesses.   We've been getting the word out and setup a You Tube channel 

Now, we're showing the world!

In September of 2019, we produced our first marketing video made for acquiring users onto our platform. Since Rad Influencer is a marketplace, we needed 1000's of users to ensure we'd be able to deliver meaningful results for advertisers.

Our first user acquisition video for Rad Influencer.

Then, we aligned RAD with Microsoft!

It's always good to sprinkle a little Microsoft into any startup growth plan.  After 6 months and two dozen phone calls..... RAD got approved for the Microsoft for Startups program.  Big thanks to Huaxin Gong (RAD's secret ninja) and Mr. Dean Jones of Microsoft for working with us to get this done.  

In November of 2019, RAD launched!

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected humanity in ways we can't yet comprehend. I’m proud to say our RAD team has never been more unified. Furthermore, our platform has proven to be a source of stability for advertisers and users during this challenging time. Even with so much turmoil, RAD is growing like crazy! We are one of the companies breaking through and don't intend on ever looking back.

Below are some quick clips from some of our early professional investors.

People are starting to listen, here's why...

The need for easy to understand digital advertising solutions have never been greater. Today, online advertisers use over-crowded and complex social media channels like influencer marketing, Facebook and Instagram to drive website visits.  A new virtual economy shows online usage has increased by 70% across the world and people are spending 35% more money online each month --  The opportunity is now! 

New activations with Citizen Net, a Conde’ Nast company, Spin.com, and Noovie demonstrate product adoption as larger brands are starting to shift budget to Rad's platform.  As we continue to get momentum, we've also identifed a need with small & medium sized businesses.   Specifically,  9 out of our 16 clients represent this client type.  Revenue will grow 300% in the second quarter (April, May and June) of 2020.  Our client base has grown from 4 to 16 clients since Jan 1st, 2020.  We expect to continue growing as we move through the second quarter with several new activations and renewals.

It's time to raise some money and put gas on the fire!

Clients are renewing and new campaigns are getting activated weekly. We've identified a specific need for RAD with small and medium sized businesses. We have lots of work to do and opportunity is knocking. For this reason, 40% of the funds raised will be spent on the following technology upgrades. The market we are going after is absolutely huge.  Over $120 billion dollars each year gets spent on digital advertising, just in the United States. 

The total addressable market is growing.

The world is changing.  Uncertainty is a sentiment across several sectors. Despite these unprecedented times, digital media and advertising has never been stronger.  We expect continued sector growth and have positioned RAD to be the gold standard for automated influencer marketing.

Here's how RAD will use the money we raise on Wefunder

• Deeper API integrations with Facebook and Instagram
• Shopify marketplace integrations
• Advertiser onboarding automation
• Advertiser media buying tools
• Content regeneration

The funds raised on Wefunder will be used to create media buying tools for online advertisers using RAD.  Building into the Shopify marketplace and continued API integrations with Facebook and Instagram will require additional development resources to properly deploy.  Lastly, investing resources into the sales automation of small and medium sized advertisers will further demonstrate a scalable business model.