What was your Eureka moment?

The ‘Eureka' moment for Beacon came when we were running a digital marketing agency and were faced with two reoccurring issues.

The first was that at the end of every month, our team spent a substantial amount of time developing reports for clients to show results and justify spend. Secondly, we became increasingly aware that the data provided by platforms (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc) wasn't always accurate or clear. We wanted an unbiased and independent view into what was really happening. Were our clicks really all human, or were some bots being counted as humans, for example?

Underpinned by our ethics of honesty and transparency in data, we set to work looking for an existing analytics tool that was easy to use, would provide accurate and independent data, would show the divide between human and bot clicks and would deliver quick and reliable reports to enable us to make informed decisions about digital marketing spend. 

After extensive research, we found such a platform didn't appear to exist and, as result, Beacon was born. Four years later, Beacon has gone from strength to strength and enables users to optimise budget, increase efficiencies, mitigate against click fraud and consistently improve their digital ROI. 

How did you finance the business?

Beacon is a private UK company, which has received seed funding. 

Any regrets along the way?

My only regret is that I didn't do this 10 years ago! However, this simply wouldn't have been possible as the level of technology wasn't available for us to identify the issue accurately and create Beacon as the solution.

What would you have changed?

Ideally, I would have liked to have raised more seed funding earlier, simply because I would have liked to have accelerated the product development in order to help more digital marketing professionals and businesses realise the level of inaccuracy and waste in digital advertising and do something about it.

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