PromoRepublic aims to gain serious traction in US

Eagled eyed readers may have seen news of social media marketing startup PromoRepublic  raising an impressive €500 000 investment round led by Sampo Parkkinen this last July and reported via GoodNewsFinland.  The company has one goal in mind: Replicating their success in the US.

You could be forgiven if this news slipped under the radar during early summer celebrations. This comes in addition to the previous total investments of approximately €150 000 over the last three years since founding.

This latest round has provided valuable resources with which to gain growth in their next market – the US. Already with more than one hundred paying customers, the team are ramping up towards the targeted monthly growth rate of 30%. All this is in addition to their positive European market growth figures for this year.

Well traveled

The three founders Max Pecherskyi, Mike Baranovskyi and Valeriy Grabko have a successful track record of creating opportunities and getting into some great startup programs. PromoRepublic have already completed four acceleration programs in four countries: Ukrainian EastLabs, Estonian Startup Wise Guys, Startup Chile and Finnish Startup Sauna. The flexible founders even found themselves in three different continents at times.

Whilst the main office is located in Helsinki, part of the team works in Kiev and communication with US customers and partners, goes through a virtual office in Palo Alto.

Talking to Maksym this week, it was clear that his priority was clear – “in the US we need to replicate the success we’ve had in Europe”.

Calendar of content ideas

PromoRepublic is a service that primarily helps freelance marketers and agencies to create content for social networks. It’s a huge pain for any content marketer to generate ideas for engaging posts every day, as well as supporting them with creative text and visuals. PromoRepublic solves this issue with Сalendar of Content Ideas that provides users with a host of daily facts and other ideas to make posts more engaging.

PromoRepublic focuses on Calendar of Content Ideas, that helps creating social media posts based on holidays, trends, events and more. The startup claims to have the smartest library of templates in the world, which caters to a broad spectrum of industries, so users are able to choose those that fit best and see only relevant content ideas for their business.

Pivot for the US market

Whilst the previous customer focus has primarily been on SMEs, the strategy for the US is very much one of focusing on marketing agencies and freelancers partnering with major players by adding this unique functionality to complement the larger companies offering. Integrations to Hootsuite and Buffer have been made already, with more planned.

Not all smooth sailing

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Last December the company experimented with the Invesdor  crowd-funding equity platform, however whilst progress was made, the change of PromoRepublic’s financing strategy mid-way through the round prevented the continuation of the process.

As part of the second half of this year actions, PromoRepublic have been selected to be at Tech Crunch Disrupt event mid September in San Francisco. Watch out for further news closer to the main Slush event in very end of November. That mega-event is ideal timing for their next investment round, hoping to include US investors.