Asaf Nevo, CEO & Co-Founder of Pico – Get Personal tells us how to capture first-party data on your digital audience.
First of all, how are you and your family doing?
Asaf Nevo: We’re doing great, it seems like we are done with COVID, and the world is getting back to normal, so everyone is happy. Thanks for asking.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Pico.
Asaf Nevo: I think it’s safe to say that I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. From my required military service to my University studies- I’ve always tried to find ways to innovate general, day-to-day situations, circumstances, etc.
The founding of Pico is actually one of my favorites. Along with another co-founder, Roi Mozer, I successfully operated and ran a popular night-life company in downtown Haifa. Right down the street from where Pico HQ is now. We would constantly try to find fun, interesting ways to bring technology practices into the night-life space. We even tested a machine that allowed our guests to order their own drinks, which got rid of the long queues often found in crowded bars, restaurants, etc.
So after a few years of fun there, we decided we wanted to go full-time into our side project, spoiler alert, it turned out to be Pico. We left our positions, sold our shares, and dove right in. And originally, Pico – Get Personal used to be Pico.buzz and was started as a photo-sharing platform after we noticed that after popular events, such as weddings or birthdays, there was no easy way to share photos with all of the attendees. Mind you- this was before Snapchat, Instagram, and Instagram stories.
The whole idea at the time was to create a way for people, brands, and organizations to share photos easily and for brands to have one dedicated place for user-generated content. That was our pitch anyway.
We eventually pivoted the company to where we are now – a data-driven fan marketing platform powered by AI, and our third co-founder Aviv Paz, joined us as we started to develop, test, and launch the product. We’ve been in the market with a working product since 2017 and have over 50+ teams and leagues as partners. It has been an extremely rewarding process and experience as we have not only seen growth within the company but within our winning team too.
How does Pico market its product/services online?
Asaf Nevo: At Pico, we are targeting Sports teams and Consumer Packaging Goods (CPG) brands meaning we are focusing on a B2B strategy to increase our brand awareness and generate qualified leads. For brand awareness, we are using content marketing tactics such as PR and news about Pico and also magazine interviews, Podcasts interviews, and guest posts which really help with improving our brand name. We believe in passing our experience and knowledge to others. Guest posts are usually very helpful and informative and give great value to our efforts.
To drive quality traffic Pico’s marketing team is working on improving our organic presence and producing content that supports those SEO efforts. In addition, we are updating our social media channels constantly with valuable information that usually talks about our industry rather than talking about the Pico brand itself.
Recently we published a Fan-Marketing Insights report which brings a lot of valuable data that has been collected by 4.2 million data points across a variety of sports fans in 2021, we are very proud of that report, and it can be found here
How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how did you get through it?
Asaf Nevo: Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have actually seen quite a bit of growth. And it isn’t lost on us how fortunate we are to see both growth on the client side as well as the funding side during such an unprecedented time.
Teams traditionally relied on transactional data from their fans – ticket purchases, merch sales, email sign-ups, etc. When COVID hit, the data streams they were so reliant on suddenly stopped. Months and even years prior, we were saying that in order to maintain sustainability within, teams can’t solely rely on the in-game fan experience and need to understand and know their digital fan base – the fans found on social media, apps, forums, websites, and more. And in order to really know them, they need to own the data on them.
The pandemic put a focus on the importance of knowing one’s digital fans, and the demand for our solution increased.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Asaf Nevo: We stay in the game through our game-changing technology that outperforms typical industry KPIs. That drives real business outcomes for our partners through creating new revenue streams and personalized fan experiences and demonstrates the importance of data when it comes to fan marketing.
Your final thoughts?
Asaf Nevo: I’ll leave you with some food for thought and something I really believe in – don’t be afraid of failure. And if you do fail, go out and fail again and try to learn from the failures. Learn from the mistakes and the feedback, and use it to your advantage when you go back and try again. This is the most important muscle needed in order to succeed and experience growth.
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