Meet the Atlanta Predictive Analytics Startup Helping Brands Launch Their Next Successful Product

Startup founders and corporate leaders alike must master the art of the pivot in order to get new products on shelves. 

But such a pivot can mean costly market and product research studies. 

Father-and-son team Dillon Hall and Tim Hall experienced this problem first hand, so they built a predictive analytics SaaS tool to streamline the process. 

Simporter, founded in Atlanta in 2018, cross-analyzes customer reviews, search traffic, social media data, and historical sales data to “identify unmet consumer needs,” Dillon Hall told Hypepotamus. “Fortune 500s use our software to identify their next best-selling product, as well as validate their product concepts with our proprietary new launch forecasting algorithms.”

Both of the Halls felt the pain points of product research while working on previous startups. 

“When I was growing up, my father, Tim, founded a company for children’s cameras that grew very quickly in Atlanta. Once the iPhone established itself, though, they lost their niche and had to pivot to focus on new product lines,” Dillon told Hypepotamus. “They used a lot of guessing, consumer panels, and traditional market research but never ended up truly rebounding, enduring many product launch failures.” 

“Prior to Simporter, I had founded another automation-focused startup, Brillify, and was working in a Google-funded lab that focused on Big Data. We spoke in-depth about the issues behind the old-fashioned market research industry and, ultimately, we combined his consumer product expertise with my data science and automation background to create Simporter, which automates and increases the accuracy of new product research for consumer product companies.” 

To date, Hall says Consumer Insights teams at large Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies — like Danone and Unilever — are the largest cohort of users. “These companies have so much data at their fingers but the main issue is around using that data. Our software is designed not to just provide data but to also focus on actionable recommendations that are easy to understand and to implement,” he added.

The team, which currently has five Atlanta-based employees and 30 people in Kyiv, just raised a $600,000 seed round. Led by European-based Startup Wise Guys, the round also included investors like Mitch Barns, the former CEO of Nielsen, Ben Strom, and angel investors from Denmark, Estonia, and Japan. 

Hall told Hypepotamus that the seed round will be used to expand the Simporter team, particularly on the customer success and marketing side.

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