Marketing Product SparkToro

How to Use Your First Ten SparkToro Searches

Before SparkToro existed, the process of researching a brand’s audience was a frustrating one. I know, because I helped a lot of friends, especially those pursuing early stage ideas or launching new products. It took forever — usually months, sometimes 6+. The data was always self-reported (which meant it was often wrong). And scale was simply unobtainable. We could survey…
Marketing Product SparkToro Team

SparkToro’s Finally Here

Almost two years ago, Casey Henry and I joined forces on SparkToro in the hopes of solving a thorny, expensive, long-standing problem in the market research world: How to discover the publications & people that influence any group of people online. Though we’re launching at a very scary time in the world, we’re excited to finally share that product with…
Data Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter

On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts that exist on Twitter, technically…
SparkToro Startups

SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs

The Short Version Our new company, SparkToro, LLC has just completed a $1.3mm angel financing. And, because we think our structure might be right for many other businesses, we’re making our documents open-source for anyone to use. The Story SparkToro is, obviously, a product of my and my cofounder, Casey‘s, experiences in the mostly venture-backed worlds of software startups. The…
Marketing SparkToro

Announcing SparkToro “Trending” — a Front Page for the Web Marketing World

Over the last decade, there have been numerous attempts to create an news aggregation tool for web marketers — Threadwatch, Sphinn, Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Alltop — but none of them quite scratched the itch. Plus, almost all of them were susceptible to rampant spam and/or ugly drama+trolling in the comments. Casey (SparkToro’s cofounder) and I have lots of experience in this…