Today we’d like to introduce you to Franklin Morris.
Hi Franklin, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m a creative by background. I have a bachelor’s and master’s in creative writing, and was a professional musician early in life. I parlayed that into a career as a creative marketer, first working for bigger brands like Dell, IBM, and Rackspace. Mid-career, I was a creative director at a national advertising and marketing agency. I then moved out to San Francisco to join the startup world, where I worked for a series of earlier-stage software companies, leading different facets of marketing. I ultimately am a VP of marketing for an early-stage software company. I broke from that trajectory about a year ago to found my own software company called KeepTabz.
As the CEO of KeepTabz, I’m building a product to address a pain that I felt as a marketer in my myriad different roles. The markets we’re building and selling in as marketers are really complex, and the tools we have to keep tabs on what’s happening in the market aren’t sufficient or keeping up.
We’ve built out a competitive intelligence and market intelligence tool that tracks everything happening in your competitive market:
– News
– Reviews
– Social posts
– Advertising
– Performance
– Mentions in communities
– Email marketing
It tracks it all in a single app, connects into ChatGPT and Claude, and then helps you find insights and trends there that you, as a marketing leader or business owner, can use to stay ahead of your competition.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth road … that’s funny. Not even remotely building a business has probably been one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. I think there are some struggles that are consistent across software companies, from fundraising to hiring the right talent, but I think the biggest struggle is just acquiring early customers when you’re a new company without a big brand name and a reputation behind you. Building that trust, you have to really be 10x better than any solution on the market today, and so that’s what we’re striving to do now to solve this problem in a way that our customers are just wowed by.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about KeepTabz?
Market intelligence is one of the most fundamental parts of marketing. It’s literally in the name of the discipline, and yet it’s something that often gets pushed aside and shortchanged. Understanding the dynamics of the market, of what competitors are doing, what they’re building, how they’re promoting, and how they’re acquiring customers, can be a prototype for business success in your own company.
Today, we find that businesses are handling that a couple of ways:
1. They’re doing it just opportunistically, maybe going in, having a bunch of tabs open, refreshing what customers are doing, and following what they’re doing on social a bit. It’s ad hoc. It probably happens a couple of times a week between other tasks. It’s nobody’s job, so it kind of gets done half-assedly.
2. For people who do take competitive intelligence and market intelligence seriously, they’re often either using very expensive enterprise tools or hiring very expensive consultants to come in and analyze data.
I think we’re the first software solution on the market that can really accomplish 90% of what some of these big, expensive consultancies do in an automated fashion, and actually gives businesses the powerful insights and direction on their market to take action and make decisions.
Some companies use us to just “keep tabs” in the background on everything their competitors are up to. Some use our agentic reporting features to understand specifically how to execute well in a single marketing channel, like ads or social media. Some, like agencies, are using us for research on a bunch of marketing channels that AI doesn’t have direct access to before a big client pitch or when coming up with a campaign idea. Because our AI is pulling from a lot of these sources that AI can’t crawl directly and because it’s been trained by real marketers, the analysis, advice, and output are far and above better than what you’d get by just using AI alone.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
If you’re building a software business like ours, the only true measure of success is how acutely you can solve a customer’s acute pain. Our success as a product and company is tied to making our customers as successful as possible. The better we can help their businesses thrive, the more ours will.
Pricing:
- We offer a free trial so customers can see the intelligence we’re pulling on their competitors
- Lite Plan – $99 / mo – Companies can track their biggest competitors
- Agency / Pro Plan – $249/mo – Track market intelligence and run reports on a handful of different markets for clients
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.keeptabz.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/keeptabz/
