A Founderâs Story: Tickaroo Live Coverage with a Super Tool!
The following article was translated from an interview with GrĂźnderkĂźche, originally published here.
Blogging was yesterday, today weâre live- with the help of tools like Tickaroo! In our latest company portrait in our Founding Stories series, learn how its live content technology works!
Tickaroo revolutionizes live coverage â our modern live content technology is a complete solution for professional reporters in the news, sports and event industries. Whether liveblog, livestream, or push notifications, Tickarooâs live content tools are easily integrated into websites, Content Management Systems, native apps, and social media channels, thereby allowing you to effectively reach your target audiences.
With its live content tool, Tickaroo provides a comprehensive solution for professional reporters seeking to reach their audiences in real time. With liveblogs, (aka live tickers) journalists can flexibly create, display, organize, and distribute news, event and sports coverage in real time. Our technology supports not only journalists and their reporting, but also media houses, event organizers, and sports clubs who are able to incorporate live content into their various products, thus reaching their audiences effectively and efficiently. Hobby reporters can also profit from our technology thanks to the free consumer version of Tickaroo, the Tickaroo Free app which is available for iOS, Android, and the web.
Moreover, we offer media, publishing houses and event organizers our livestreaming and push notifications products so as to provide them with more opportunities to reach their target audience. With our Digital Media Services, our in-house engineers also work on digital solutions like apps or interactive websites.
Our biggest competitors are scribbleLIVE and Storify.
Our USPs, what separates from our competition:
Our software provides our users with an intelligent user management system, integration of ad and partner content, extensive tracking capabilities, and additional services such as our Tickaroo Marketplace and Push Service. Each individual real-time story, as well as a variety of multimedia content can be integrated into any given product such as a website or CMS. Additionally, we offer scalable, completely automated high-performance hosting, while ensuring with our top-notch synchronization algorithm that offline data is never lost.
Hereâs how we got the ideaâŚ
Before founding Tickaroo, we worked a great deal in the app development industry. During the building of an app for a local amateur soccer team, we realized that decent tools for live coverage of lower sports leagues were just not available. A standard format that was simple to use was lacking. Our vision was to create a trustworthy tool that could make quick, simple, real-time diffusion of events and stats as flexible and diverse as possible.
This is how the idea turned into a companyâŚ
After our idea became a concrete plan, we went to the notary and then began to develop our app. After some time, we tested different versions with some of our first teams, for example the guys from Regiokick, as well as a variety of content providers.
Every company needs a name. We got ours like thisâŚ
Tickaroo can credit its name to a typo: Tick aro(und the w)o(rld). The domain was available, and the name has a tendency to stick with you.
This is our vision and the next planned milestonesâŚ
For the near future, we have set for ourselves the goal of continuing to build up our customer and partner networks, in addition to continuing to develop our livestreaming offerings as well as data analysis development.
How big was your team in the beginning? How big is it now?
Our team has grown from 3 in the very beginning to 30 employees today.
Of all of our Marketing and PR Campaigns the best/most important campaigns wereâŚ
What really helped us was an image campaign that we were able to distribute via kicker. Marketing generally is run primarily online through the sharing of content via the Tickaroo Sharing feature. What helps us of course is also the positive word of mouth from companies that use our products and of course from the dedicated hobby reporters.
Customer Service: This is how we expand upon our customer satisfactionâŚ
We try to build a stable and user-friendly product. Therefore, good customer service and competent advising are incredibly important to us: our top priority!
We would never do this again, or we will not be making this mistake againâŚ
For 2015, we had a redesign of Tickaroo planned, which eventually turned into a complete relaunch: almost all components were rewritten, which made this process take so much longer and cost so much more than originally planned. Looking back, we should have only updated the components that would contribute to a faster and market-based development. Usability, stability and performance are very important to us; however, we could have left some things from the old version. This is why, in the future we will seek to do a goal-oriented redesign instead of a relaunch if we need it.
Crises? We mastered them throughâŚ
Communication, Communication, Communication. With partners and customers as well as with coworkers and investors in order to find compromises and solutions.
Heroes and Role Models and one question that we would ask themÂ
Michael Jordan: With all of the life experiences that you now have, would you have made any professional decisions differently?
Elon Musk: How much do you sleep?Â
Work-Life-Balance: This is how we stay healthy and motivatedâŚ
Baseball, running, biking to work, yoga, martial arts, walking barefoot in the office, idea brainstorming
4 Internet sites that we couldnât live or work without:
kicker.de, Jira, the verge, and of course Tickaroo
4 Mobile apps that we couldnât live or work without:
Tickaroo, kicker App, Mail, Hipchat
Guy Kawasaki, Ben Horowitz, Kobe Bryant
3 Books that as a Founder you must absolutely have read:
The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
For some additional company information check out the article!Â
It was a pleasure answering your questions, GrĂźnderkĂźche!Â