Qoints, the Toronto-based performance benchmarking tool for digital marketers, was revealed as the winner of Northumberland’s third annual N100 Startup Competition. The win netted the company $100,000 in convertible debt towards their fundraising goal of $750,000.
“Having an experienced lead investor is a major milestone for our fundraising efforts,” said Cory Rosenfield, co-founder and CEO of Qoints. “The capital injection will be used to help grow Qoints’ engineering resources, data science capabilities and client success teams,” said Rosenfield.
Brand marketers use Qoints to inform their tactical and budgeting decisions around digital promotions such as contests, giveaways and loyalty programs. Projecting, measuring and comparing these programs is a real headache for brands as well as the agencies that work on their behalf; Qoints centralizes the data and anonymously compares it to others in the same space to provide competitive intelligence back to the marketer.
The concept was borne out of the founders’ previous digital agency, where they specialized in running digital promotions for large brands. Customers began asking for projections before committing budgets, and benchmarks to gauge their final performance against. Cory and Harris realized that no such benchmarks existed, and developed Qoints to solve the gap in the quickly-expanding digital market. They joined local accelerator INcubes in the summer of 2013 and honed the concept by meeting with as many agencies and brand marketers as possible. Brands such as 3M and Kinder were among the first to test the product’s viability.
Today, Qoints is piloting its beta with a number of international agencies desperate to gain a leg up on the rest of the market and objectively demonstrate to brand clients how to get the best bang for their bucks online. Brands looking to run compliance on their agencies or bring some of their digital initiatives in-house have also shown interest in using the tool. The company is also looking to expand its team, both in Toronto and now in Northumberland County as well.
Harris Maxwell, COO of Qoints, at the Round 1 N100 Pitch Contest earlier this year.
“Qoints promises to deliver on a major pipeline of business development and we look forward to being a part of their acceleration and future success,” said Wendy Curtis, Executive Director of Northumberland CFDC — the organization that runs N100. Qoints will be spearheading an annual hiring fair in Northumberland, along with a number of other initiatives that will drive direct economic benefits back to the region.