FastTest- Paying Per a Thousand Smiles by Alexander Gornyi

The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.

At the beginning of the previous century, Unilever founder William Lever said that half of his ads were a waste of money, but the problem was that he didn’t know which half it was. The situation has changed in this hundred years. Performance marketing employs dozens of analytical systems for precise measurement of each company’s efficiency. And before the iOS privacy restrictions, each display was correctly counted.

But everything remained the same as it used to be in brand advertisements. Nobody knows anything, the quality of clips is only evaluated by the thumbs up/thumbs down system. On today’s average, it appears that a waste of money represents a quarter of ads. And FasTest, the Russian-language startup of the day, aims to find out which half.

The startup pays volunteers to browse the web through a special browser. It replaces the regular ads on web pages with FasTest clients’ test clips and uses the webcam and smart algorithms to follow the user’s reaction. They smile – it means we can check this ad as a working one. If they frown – well, not every banner can be successful. In its real-life campaigns, the advertiser only uses the creative efforts that lead to the most positive emotions in the tests. FasTest calls this approach ‘paying per a thousand smiles’ instead of ‘a thousand displays.’

The startup is at an early stage, but the product’s first version already works, there is revenue from 12 countries.

https://start.fastest.pro/

#russia #bootstrapped #marketing #ai #cv

Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov