By adaptive - May 22nd, 2017

Greenfly, a content platform with an “inside baseball” name, has grown beyond its sports roots in a bid to simplify the process of creating and sharing content.

Consumer-facing entities including brands, celebrities, and sports properties are all increasing custom content creation to share with customers and fans, but that can create hurdles for getting the content made quickly and correctly not to mention shared properly.
That’s where Greenfly comes into play. The Southern California startup founded by a former Major League Baseball player is looking to hit a proverbial home run by helping facilitate the process.
Greenfly Founder Shawn Green, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets among other teams, and CEO Daniel Kirschner sat down with Open Mobile Media’s Robert Gray to discuss the platform’s operations and growth strategy…
 
OMM: What’s the story with the name?
Green: It’s a baseball word. In Major League Baseball, anyone who is asking for something, it’s greenflying.
“Can you greenfly somet ing for my kid’s auction? Sure, I’ll sign a bat and send it over.”
It worked with my name but it’s relevant to what our product does. It’s a request and fulfillment scenario.
It’s inside (baseball).
 
OMM: How did Greenfly get started?
Green:I started it four years ago; it was more of a hobby approach. The idea was very narrow, to have a tool for requesting and receiving video content, very sports focused. I knew there was a broader application but that’s where I started.
The direct path was my initial vision, to create a process that could benefit both sides.
When Daniel came on, we became more social media focused.
 
OMM: How would you describe Greenfly’s platform?
Kirschner:We call it a network orchestration platform—it’s a platform for managing a distributed set of relationships with people that are valuable for creating and/or sharing content…A full-service communication and content-sharing system.
Each of our customers has their own private network. Once that network is plugged into Greenfly they’re able to interact with (their network) very efficiently.
We’re making it easy for them to send briefs to create content and for the content to be created and then be returned through the system.
Our customers can load the content into the system they want to be shared on social and they can share it to people on the system and we can track the analytics--what happens with the share.
 
OMM: Is Greenfly primarily used on mobile devices?
Green:The back end is primarily used through a web portal to log in, you can do it on any browser, but it is optimized for mobile. The other side, the curation and sharing of content by people of value to the company is 100 percent mobile.
Kirschner: It’s important that it’s app-based, not just mobile, so it’s very fluid, very efficient and works even in bad network situations.
 
OMM: How does it work?
Green:A customer logs into the web portal (back end). They invite their network and send out invite codes.
You just download an app and all the instructions come from a media company or brand. If they want you to create a video in landscape, you can’t record it any other way. You can’t mess it up. Some of our customers early on said that was invaluable.
You’re not going to get a second crack at these high-profile people.
Kirschner:You can mobilize hundreds of people to create on-point, on-target content all at the same time but then you have complete control over where it’s shared and how it’s shared. So whether you share that on your own social channels, or prompt (influencers, athletes, etc.) to share on their social channels or both, you get a view of that shared content and how it’s doing.
 
OMM: What types of clients are using Greenfly?
Green: Large global media companies that have lots of different media properties are using Greenfly to leverage talent and to create and share content. Large sports teams and leagues are using Greenfly to create and share content with players, fans, and team and league staff.
And consumer-facing brands activating networks of influencers and endorsers to create and share on point content, either created by the brand or by the influencers and endorser thru the system.
We have one company in the health space that’s activated groups of people suffering chronic conditions telling their stories in a way they can organize into an experience for their viewers.
 
OMM: What’s the uptake been so far?
Kirschner: Incredible demand. Anyone facing the consumer in any way, a brand or media company, has relationships that if they can engage or marshal them properly, they can activate them to tell their stories. Right now to activate them, it is painful and expensive to do that with email, Dropbox or links. That process is not scalable, it might work one-to-one but not for hundreds. We automate all of that and enable these organizations to communicate at scale and in an organized way.
We use push notifications, emails, in-app alerts and we give people the ability to manage that.
 
OMM: How do you monetize the platform?
Kirschner:Subscription-based revenue based on the scope of activity--which is generally defined by the number of contributors on the app.
It’s tiered pricing and goes up as customers increase usage and by the number of properties they have on the platform.

 

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