By Business & Finance 
Pictured L-R: Bounce team Max Manning, Josh Stafford, Ronan Dowling-Cullen, Brian O’Mahony, Charlie Butler.
In our Ones to Watch section, we highlight some of the top up and coming businesses in Ireland. This week we feature Bounce.
What is it?
Every year thousands of products are launched into the market and fail. This is incredibly costly for companies who spend hundreds of billions in wasted product development and marketing annually.
The number one reason for this is lack of understanding of users’ motivations, leading to difficulty building a product that their users want. The Bounce founders believe there is one easy solution: you talk to your users.
The Bounce team have built a software platform that makes it incredibly easy for companies to talk to their users. In particular, Bounce is focusing on the ever-elusive 18-30 year old demographic who make up 75% of the workforce, yet 9/10 companies say they can’t understand.
Bounce enables companies to make better decisions and therefore better products by giving them a direct link to their target market so they can understand them better and get their feedback on products. The platform allows companies to ask any questions they want to users, and Bounce promises to take care of everything else from finding the company’s exact target market, getting the feedback and paying users for their time.
Who’s behind it?
The Bounce team is made up of six TCD students. Business students Charlie Butler and Brian O’Mahony have already founded a non-profit organisation for mental health awareness and fundraising, called ‘Tribe’ which has over 1,000 community members and raised over €27,000 for Pieta House since its launch in early March.
Ronan Dowling-Cullen, Josh Stafford and Brandon Dooley make up the development team. Ronan has just received the Gold Medal for Computer Science in Trinity, with three summers experience in Workday as a developer. Brandon and Josh have both matched First Degree Honours in Computer Science in Trinity, as well as a range of industry experience thanks to their time at XSellCo and personal projects in App Development.
Max Manning brings invaluable experience from his Engineering Degree for prototyping and concept testing. He also has first-hand experience in social media advertising and logistical management when he set up and ran Arran Street East coffee shop and pottery business.
How is it funded?
Bounce have participated in and won both Tangent, Trinity’s Ideas Workspace Sprints Accelerator Programme and Trinity’s Dragon’s Den competition. It is currently enrolled in Tangent’s Launchbox Accelerator Programme until September 2019 with office space on Pearse Street and €12,500 in funding.
Future plans?
Over the coming three months, Bounce will be finalising a Beta Test alongside some partnered clients. Once the solution has been successfully tested with trial clients, Bounce plans to move to larger brands in a Soft Launch to around 5,000 respondents with multiple survey types, and a Test Flight App launched via KickStarter. Once the Soft Launch has been completed and Bounce can guarantee a sufficient amount of paid surveys a week for its respondents, the next step is to plan for a full product launch in January-March 2020 with a series of large clients to drive engagement and revenue.
