Péter Szekeres, Co-Founder and CEO of Neticle tells us how the tool collects and analyses an enormous amount of publicly available online content.
First of all, how are you and your family doing?
Péter Szekeres: Thank you for your concern. We’re doing good. The extended Neticle family is also great, especially since pandemic restrictions have mostly been lifted, and we’ve largely returned to a new, bright office space. However, we’ve kept up the habit of focusing on our mental health: we keep track of our team’s overall wellbeing with an in-house survey called Team Health Check. We also make an effort to pay extra attention to each other in seemingly small but important ways. For example, we almost always turn our cameras on for meetings, and we try to make sure that the company updates reach everybody. We’re also working on bringing live events back by organizing smaller gatherings and open-air teambuilding.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Neticle.
Péter Szekeres: Throughout my career, I have been focusing on how automated text analysis and related AI technologies can support decision-making and marketers’ daily work. My tech specialties include Natural Language Processing, fact-based decision support, as well as text-, opinion- and data mining.
I graduated as a Business Information Technologist from Corvinus University of Budapest (BCE). In 2012, two of my fellow BCE graduates – Zoltán Csikós and Róbert Horváth – and I founded the text and media analysis company Neticle. During our studies, we realized that providing solutions to businesses with a lot of textual data was something that we could be good at if we had the necessary tech knowledge. We also really wanted to try our hand at building a startup. That’s how Neticle came to be.
We now manage a company that is one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS scale-ups in Hungary, providing text analytics solutions in 25+ countries, mostly in the CEE, DACH, and Scandinavia regions. Our clientele ranges from SMEs to large enterprises, as the company boosts business decisions with two major products. Neticle Media Intelligence is a smart social listening tool that collects and analyses an enormous amount of publicly available online content – including the text’s underlying sentiments – in real-time. Another flagship product is Zurvey.io, a professional survey maker and feedback analyzer geared for better customer and employee experience.
How does Neticle market its products/services online?
Péter Szekeres: We believe in the power of data-driven decisions, and we strive to show it to as many companies and organizations as possible. In today’s world, most enterprises retain large amounts of textual data, be it in the form of direct customer feedback, call center transcripts, in-house documents, or chatbot conversations (and the list goes on). Of course, there’s also unsolicited feedback all over the internet, which can be collected (and it’s worth doing so). We think that accessing the invaluable insight hidden in these pools of data is not a luxury or something that’s nice to have – it’s instead a necessity in today’s world. Neticle provides clear-cut solutions precisely for this.
How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business, and how did you get through it?
Péter Szekeres: A few of our clients have had to cut back on marketing or PR budgets (especially in the hotel and recreation sector), which affected our cooperation and, therefore, our finances. However, there has been no major setback. Most of our clients know that social listening is a good investment in the long term.
Even in those cases where the cooperation had to be suspended, we try to maintain the partnership and support these companies by leaving some alerts/notifications on for them, which we know is especially important during a crisis.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Péter Szekeres: We rely on multiple channels: our social media platforms – especially LinkedIn and, more recently, Twitter -, online ads, and our connections to local media for PR collaborations. We’ve also worked with agencies to refine our strategy and our websites for a better user experience and a larger reach. We can also call ourselves lucky: we can monitor industry trends and the most engaging topics and plan our marketing strategy accordingly with our own tools.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Péter Szekeres: Our largest competitors are Brandwatch and Talkwalker for Neticle Media Intelligence and Medallia and Luminoso for Zurvey.io. Our greatest advantage is our unique language capability: our NLP engine can learn any new language within 8 weeks and provide text analysis in it with human precision. This means that our solutions are highly relevant, and many regions can benefit from them – there are quite a few languages for which ours is the only available solution.
Your final thoughts?
Péter Szekeres: Let me mention a recent acknowledgment: we’re very proud that HackerNoon.com, a tech website with over 3 million readers globally, has recognized Neticle as the best startup in Budapest. We aim to live up to this title in the future, too!
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