After more than a decade working in marketing for a series of major tech companies, Franklin Morris felt like there had to be an easier way to keep an eye on competitors’ efforts and strategy.
“It seemed to me that what I wanted, as a head of marketing, would be a product that would do something pretty simple, which was track everything my competitors are doing and tell me the important stuff,” Morris said.
Morris talked to other leaders in his industry and found out that he wasn’t the only one who had noticed that need.
“I couldn’t find a product that could do that for less than $50,000 or 60,000 a year. So [I] decided to build it,” he said.
That idea was funded with $20,000 from Geekdom’s Community Fund in October and a series of small investments from friends and former colleagues.
Morris built the tool using artificial intelligence. KeepTabz is a series of AI processes that track competitors’ public information, organize it and then send it out to clients however and whenever they want.
After spending four months building what Morris calls AI agents, he and his co-founder, Vitalii Melnychuk, launched it in April. The company is producing new ways of collecting and, more importantly, sorting vast amounts of publicly available information online.
“We had a number of non-paying beta customers who basically jumped into a complete hot mess of a product on day one,” he said. “There’s a number of customers here in San Antonio. We have people who work at national companies in other places too, and so they’ve been very generous with their time and feedback, and we’ve been fast about actioning on that feedback and changing the product.”
What is KeepTabz?
KeepTabz works on three levels: collecting publicly available data on competitors, organizing it into what’s helpful and sending that to the customer.
“The new features they’re launching, the new pricing that they have. All of these things are just constantly in flux — deals they’re offering, partnerships they’re making. They’re happening kind of in real time across the internet. It’s happening on your competitors’ websites. It’s happening on their social media channels. It’s happening in reviews,” Morris said. “What we do is bring all of that together into a single, centralized platform.”
Morris said a set of AI agents scan through competitors’ online footprints, then bring the data back to KeepTabz, where it’s sorted. Some of it is strategically important. Some of it is just meaningless noise.
Sorting that out is, in many ways, the tricky part.
“The hard, technical challenge to solve here is not actually just to bring all the stuff together,” Morris said. “But to actually really use AI to elevate those things that are important that a leader would need to know about right away, versus the things that are not really actionable and not really important.”
Morris spent time developing what he calls AI agents. Rather than a single entity or person doing this task, KeepTabz has built a series of AI processes for collecting and sorting data.
Then it’s sent to customers via platforms like Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams or whichever mode and format best suits them. Plans start at $49.99 a month.
It’s already being used in San Antonio.
“It helps us stay on top of our competitors, we’re in a pretty crowded market,” said Chris Blomquist, director of demand generation at eSkill.
Blomquist’s company provides testing and evaluation for employers. It’s owned by venture equity firm Scaleworks and based in San Antonio.
Blomquist said eSkill has been using KeepTabz since January to track 15 to 20 competitors, around five of which they pay close attention to. Blomquist said his marketing team has three full-time employees who often have to switch between different roles.
KeepTabz has given them helpful data on their competitors’ movements that Blomquist uses to draw conclusions about opponents’ strategies. He checks the updates he receives daily and follows up with his own research when those updates are notable. The process combines AI with a human check.
That human element is important, Morris said. He still performs checks on customers’ accounts after setting them up to make sure the AI processes he’s laid out function properly. KeepTabz also pulls from public data sources across the internet. Morris has been hesitant to use private or protected data sources where people might store more sensitive or personal information.
Sales, not fundraising
The normally robust software industry hit a bump earlier this year when investors shrank away from the industry due to concerns about AI’s role in software development.
“There’s this ambient fear in the market that basically everybody’s just going to build everything themselves with AI and that all software is going to eventually be swallowed up by an AI model,” Morris said.
But investment has stabilized and even heated up, according to Pat Matthews, who heads pre-seed investment firm Active Capital. Active Capital had its largest-ever exit this year when ProsperOps, one of its investments, was sold to Flexera.
Matthews said AI has increased productivity in the software industry.
“This is the hottest fundraising market I’ve seen,” he said in an email.
Morris has shifted his focus to growing the business, though, instead of chasing investment.
“My focus, originally, was, ‘I gotta raise money.’ That stuff is so time consuming, it shifted to actually acquiring customers. If you walk into a meeting and show people a slide with revenue growth that looks like that,” he said, gesturing upwards. “They’re going to listen.”
Investors don’t always look to San Antonio, Morris added, but the city has advantages. Geekdom has an ecosystem of successful startups. A lower cost of living means it’s cheaper and easier to start companies and try new ideas.
“We have to carve out a different path, and I think it’s a path that a lot of San Antonio startups have to carve out,” Morris said.
It’s a path he plans to stay on. He wants to grow from the five paying customers he started with to 100 by the end of the year.
“My goal is that we become the biggest household competitive tool in the world,” he said. “I don’t want to play small with this.”
