Sydney Start-Ups Offer Mystery Shopping and Planning

In Sydney, Australia, Telstra's Muru-D incubator program has given its backing to start-ups including mystery shopping app Snooper and online ad campaign planning service Flobox.

The Snooper Mystery Shopping app was set up by Romain Stas de Richelle and Laurie Wespes, and pays shoppers to collect in-store data - for example taking pictures of supermarket shelves - and share their experience with brands in real time, according to news site www.mumbrella.com.au . The app launched six months ago and currently has 5,000 'snoopers': one current campaign pays users $14 to check their beer is being served properly, with results fed back to Heineken.

Wespes told Mumbrella: 'Snooper came from our frustration in the business world. Rom, my co-founder, was a marketing manager at L'Oreal and he tried to build beautiful marketing strategies that were never implemented in store and I was a consultant at Bain & Company advising brands on their growth strategy and I realised strategy means nothing without execution'.


Machine learning-based marketing platform Flobox is a mere two months old and was founded by four former students from UNSW (University of New South Wales). The tool promises to make online ad campaign planning easier to manage than a spreadsheet and bring strong improvements in digital ad ROI. According to co-founder Steve Liu: 'We had a really limited marketing budget of $2500 spent on Facebook ads. It was our main acquisition channel for our B2C app play. We spent most of our days exporting data from Facebook into Excel spreadsheets then playing with pivot tables to get insights for better performance'.

Web sites: www.snooper-app.com and www.flobox.io .