Create selling, topical content that follows brand guidelines - all at the touch of a button. Sundsvall-based Octopus wants to help companies streamline their content creation and drive sales with the right business data.
- "In a few seconds, we can do what takes several hours in Canva, for example," says Henrik Nygren, founder and CEO.
Many companies want to simplify the process of creating content for social media and digital sales channels. But automation tools are often blunt, and much brand identity is lost along the way. This is the problem the team behind the new content platform Octopus wants to solve.
Founder Henrik Nygren realized the need while working at the digital agency Flatmate in Sundsvall, which had been working successfully with brand identity and e-commerce for many years. The agency had developed a new digital identity for a client who did not want to be dependent on the agency every time they had to produce a post or image.
By setting up a brand profile in Octopus, the user can create stylish and consistent content in different formats, for advertising on social media or e-commerce platforms, at the touch of a button.
- Once we got it together, we felt it was too good to be just a customer-specific solution," says Henrik.
At the next level, Octopus can be linked to business data such as stock levels, search trends or - as in an upcoming pilot - live sports scores. These smart connections can help customers sell more of what they have too much of, present the right products based on what's popular today, or create relevant content during an ongoing event.
Today's customers are mainly in the real estate sector, an industry that has been involved from the start. The long-term strategy is to offer a turnkey solution for the Shopify e-commerce platform with 5 million active stores.
- There we have a large market, and also the opportunity to reach out globally in one ecosystem without creating a lot of different integrations.
Over the past year, the Octopus team has been working to refine the technology in collaboration with customers. In parallel, work is underway to refine the business model and raise capital. Henrik Nygren has also taken a place in BizMaker's incubator program, where he, together with advisors, goes through, among other things, IP strategy, investment preparation work and reviews the possibilities of applying for "soft money" such as Vinnova support.
- BizMaker is a good sounding board, it is very valuable to be able to get a nuanced second opinion on important strategic issues, he says.
In five years, the founders aim for Octopus to have launched against Shopify, have a turnover of SEK 50-60 million and have built a team of 10-15 people. Henrik knows from many years of customer contact that the demand is there, and he can already see that Octopus is working as intended.
- We had a great example when the marketing communicator of one of our clients went on parental leave. Then the content responsibility fell to a girl at the reception who had never worked in communications before. We took a workshop with her and showed her Octopus. Now she's having a blast and feels confident creating content, knowing it follows the guidelines and looks good when she publishes.
Contact
Henrik Nygren, CEO and founder
henrik@theoctopus.se, 070 298 51 06
