A Chat with Founder of SproutUp, Nitin Jain

“Together, we help products grow.” That is what Washington D.C based startup, SproutUp, is all about. They bring influencers and creators together to help innovation grow. Bigger brands have all the resources they need to grow easily, while emerging brands have more of a challenge. That is where SproutUp comes in. They provide creators with the tools needed to interact with a community of influencers and tech enthusiasts. We had the opportunity to hear from CEO and Co-founder of SproutUp, Nitin Jain, about what makes SproutUp so unique:   

TechDay: What was the inspiration for SproutUp/how did you get involved?

Nitin Jain: The idea for SproutUp seeded at MIT Muddy Charles Pub, when I noticed the struggle of a smart LED bulb creator, Michael Chen, a PhD student at MIT, as he was trying to grow his startup into a successful business. Earlier this year I connected with Tao Ni to co-found SproutUp to resolve many problems that not only we personally experienced but also creators like Michael faced in commercializing emerging products.

The traditional PR and marketing service these brands rely on usually aren’t actively helping them engage their consumers. We wanted to build a collaborative platform for highly innovative brands to excite consumers through hands-on product experience and influencer marketing. Since then we’ve built a strong community that has attracted over 250 influencers and 2500 product enthusiasts with a collective outreach to over 5M consumers who’re committed to helping products grow.    

T: What experiences from your past helped prepare you to start SproutUp?

N: During the 15 years  prior to SproutUp, I often found myself immersed in high innovative startups or entrepreneurial environments. Coming from an engineering educational background, I founded a healthcare IT startup and had a successful exit. Then I worked at IBM to help build and commercialize over 20 products and solutions for the company’s various growth initiatives across sectors including smarter healthcare, Watson and smarter cities. I gained tremendous sales, analytical and strategic experiences at IBM, MIT and my previous startup ventures in taking new products to market. While big brands have the resources to do this easily, I saw emerging brands facing challenges to grow. That’s when I decided to quit my job and launched SproutUp.

T: What are you doing to help transition product creators from early stage to successful viral brands?

N: Spreading brand awareness among consumers and scaling sales are common challenges for emerging products. These brands use traditional PR, paid media, and commercial content that do not actively engage consumers. For consumers, discovering such emerging products is inefficient and making buying-decisions with little understanding of brand, value, and product features is difficult.

We help emerging product creators grow by building a large community of product enthusiasts. These social influencers try out products and create videos or blogs telling a compelling personal story that their followers want to see and trust. This content is useful first and promotional second. Using the power of SproutUp community we further distribute the content so that it is multiplied among prospective target audiences. Cutting the marketing budget to 1/5th, we help creators increase brand visibility to a very large audience and boost up sales by creating a constant buzz on the product.

T: What did you feel like on the best day of your company's existence and why?

N: It feels great when I see the influencers’ passion to try new products, as well as excellent results our product trial campaigns have delivered till date. It shows when we get the products in the hands of social influencers; they create genuine reviews and people are drawn to the authentic content. Our proven results: 2 to 4 times more brand awareness and increasing engagement from less than 0.5% to more than 5% at ~1/3 to 1/5 cost of their current monthly marketing spend. The data validates the value we bring to product creators and influencers.

T: What’s your differentiator?

N: I believe what we are doing at SproutUp is very unique. Consumers have an increasing appetite for highly innovative tech products. However, many brands that built success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo fall short in the market due to a lack of catalyst services that continue to propel them through commercialization. SproutUp helps these up-and-coming brands build awareness through product trial campaigns and influencer marketing, thus generating sales for these products.

SproutUp stands out because we actually get influencers curious and draw them in. Instead of treating product trial as a paid review gig, our influencers passionately opt in with a genuine interest.  We attract and engage with consumers as a community – collaborative dialogue, provide comments on the content and participation in contests. We reduce the marketing budget to one fifth, making it super affordable for product creators.

T: What’s the level of growth you’d be satisfied seeing in the next year?

N: Next year, we’ll continue to grow the community of influencers and excite them with radical products. We’ll also keep creating lots of buzz online and drive sales to 2x-5x for product creators. As our influencer community grows, we’re looking to expand our community members close to a million mark. We’re striving to be the best platform for everyone to discover and champion the most innovative products.

Special thanks to Nitin Jain, CEO and Co-founder of SproutUp