Kiwi social media marketing startup eVouch banks NZ$500,000 pre-seed
Summary
The capital will support growing international demand, and to bring on more developer support.Founder Eugene Yao initially launched eVouch as a way to help local restaurants gain business through word of mouth from diners sharing on social media.A few months prior, I had taken a photo of my brunch and posted it on my Instagram. I wanted to build out eVouch to combine the trust inherent in word of mouth with the scale of social media which has great synergy with ecommerce.But then the pandemic arrived, shutting down the hospitality sector in an instant. It doesnt matter if youre a small cafe or a multinational e-commerce chain we exist to make marketing easy, authentic, and automated.He said that unlike referral programmes which ask someone to target only a handful of people in their network, a businesses can potentially tap in to everyone in a customers social network.The app enables businesses to create and upload high quality creative and verify that the creative has been posted, as well as taking care of sending the customer a voucher for their efforts. Its easy, and its frictionless, he said.With eVouch, customers of Shopify websites can post an Instagram story about the brand; and instantly be rewarded for their marketing effort just like influencers. At scale, this democratises marketing to a consumer level, while enabling brands access to the power of word of mouth.GD1 co-managing partner Vignesh Kumar said marketers understand Intuits Scott Cooks adage that a brand is no longer what we tell the consumers it is, it is what consumers tell each other it is.Merchants are feeling the pain of not being able to market in the same way due to changes in iOS; and theyre looking for new ways to reach their audience, he said.What Eugene and the eVouch team have built allows companies to tap into the power of social endorsement, at scale, extending the traditional marketing model of 1:1; to that of 1:1 to many.