Tincre Platform Launch

You might see some ads over the next few weeks. Yeah, that's right, ads. In your face. In your news apps, in your social media channels, on that one website you read while you're supposed to be working. But I don't mean all the regular ads you see.

Wherever you are, you have a chance to be marketed ads telling you that you can run better ads, for cheaper, and more easily, from Tincre.

We finally grew our company into the powerhouse you didn't think we would. Now tincre.com is the web's home for ads. You can launch your campaign or even spin up an entire agency in just minutes! But enough of that nonsense, what goes into making something like Tincre.com? To answer that, I'll need you to leap head first into the product with me.

Ready? You better be. Let's go!

Motivation - what does Tincre need and why?

If you've been following our firm, you know that we have several ad software brands across multiple industries like the not-for-profit, music and entertainment, and political industries. These brands all "dogfood" our own integration software, which allows them and other companies to spin up entire, full-function ad agencies with their branding, messaging and domain. Think Shopify but for the B2B ad-agency landscape.

Listening to our business

Our vision firing into 2023 was to amp up these in-house brands while simultaneously helping to grow our first integration partners. One great example of those partners is UNDRCVR Ads, now the digital agency arm of the entertainment management agency UNDRCVR by John Frank and Eddie Levy.

The funny thing is, we nearly let the wheels fall off the bus while doing this, biting off slightly more than we could chew. Fortunately, our first few integrations were wildly successful, generating over a quarter million bucks of revenue in their first year.

The new tincre.com is us listening to that success -- our clients' success -- and adapting to better serve them, allowing those clients to generate an agency. Users can also run ads, however, the agency app is a giant leap forward for the Tincre ads ecosystem.

Product requirements

Our firm makes money in four ways:

• when our users run ads,
• when our users buy management subscriptions,
• when integration partner users run ads, and
• when integration partner users buy management subscriptions.

We subsequently occur costs along those lines:

• when we market to get new users,
• when we upsell and market to get sell new subscriptions,
• when we assist integration partners to get new users,
• when we assist integration partners to sell management subscriptions.

As you might guess, assisting our integration partners versus selling our own users is very efficient from the perspective of scaling. That said, our up-front costs on those integration partners is quite high, since much of how we assist them in the sale process is through software.

Enter the turnkey digital agency

Our software takes a client's branding - their logos, their colors, and their copy - and spits out a well-engineered digital agency that those clients can send to their clients.

The agency software includes things like:

• a customized marketing/landing page,
• managed and secure user login/logout (authentication),
• user dashboards,
• user marketing data tracking and delivery,
• AI chat and search,
• campaign launchers,
• complete ad account setup,
• secure and fully managed user payments,
• integration account payments (our integration partners get paid 70% of the software usage fee!),
• user notifications and emails,
• mobile web-apps,
• ad-brand marketing recommendations, and
• fully-managed customer (user) support.

And that's not even all of it!

What does this have to do with tincre.com?

Tincre.com uses all of the integration software out of the box alongside custom marketing pages. As previously mentioned, we dogfood our own software which makes it easier for us to deliver not just what clients want, but more importantly, what they need.

Breaking down tincre.com components

At Tincre we call all of our marketing integration software Promo. Promo consists of open-source components with proprietary "glue" software that ties it all together. This structure also allows us to leverage best-in-breed third party developer tools and services, such as the Tailwindcss team's TailwindUI for design, starter templates, and other assistance. Yes, our apps look a lot like their provided templates - and we're proud of it! The Tailwind people do a ton of great work that our clients and us get to leverage!

The marketing landing

Critical to any business online today is a pretty, effective and useful marketing landing site. That's what you end up on when you click an ad for the business and (hopefully) through which you end up scrolling.

Dashboard

The user dashboard is what you see when a user first logs in, after the initial walkthrough. It's subtle, but that seemingly simple dashboard has to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the user experience passable (we've still got a lot of work to do!).

Initial "run campaign" view

For example, when a user arrives at the tincre.com or our integration brands' dashboards for the first time, the user is presented with a set of options to run a campaign, which outlines several common types of ad campaigns typically run across the web.

Campaigns view

After a user runs their first campaign, the campaign dashboard shows up with selectable-time series graphs, downloadable data, and all their campaigns sorted by status, such as currently running, previously run, or campaigns that need to be paid (campaigns can't run until they're funded!).

Campaign detail view

When a user clicks on one of those campaigns, they're taken to a detail page that allows that user to dig into that campaign's data with finer granularity, on a day-to-day basis.

Cool stuff under the hood

Subtleties abound throughout this experience. For example, the chat bot changes its capabilities based on the view of the user, i.e. it's different between the main dashboard view and campaign detail views. The Promo dashboard frontend automatically talks to the backend to make this all happen, seamlessly.

Secure auth

Running ads is making an investment. Plain and simple. That means security of our integrations' platforms is one of the most important features we work on for our integration clients. And security shouldn't hold end-users back; it has to be clean, simple, and secure.

Payments

End users need to pay for ads but setting up online payments across borders, card carriers, merchant accounts, buy-now-pay-later entities, apple pay, google pay and more is incredibly cumbersome. That's why payments are completely integrated into our integration software so our clients get secure, effortless and robust payments built-into their agency.

Making it easy and frictionless to pay is a pillar of any successful business, especially an online agency. The payments that power tincre.com ads are the exact same as the ones that power our agency app.

User data

Tincre ads generate a ton of data. Think of it this way: each campaign is like a company on a stock market, except there are hundreds of markets with the same stock at the same time generating data.

And let's be real. Nobody's marketing agency has serious scientists working on their campaigns. That is, unless the client is Nike with their latest 10M USD ad launch budget. But Tincre packages the power of a data science team right into each user's dashboard, distilling down all the ad data into just what the user needs. We proudly keep our users from the Proctor and Gamble level data that the major ad platforms push onto their users.

And the best part? Nike can use a Tincre-powered agency, too. We build into the product a subscription-based Pro team which allows us to design custom reporting, strategy and creative assistance.

Useful chat

Tincre.com's marketing page, dashboard and campaign detail views all have Promo Chat, a customized LLM AI agent for Tincre ads.

On the marketing endpoints, the chat agent is made to sell ads, generate user logins and tell jokes. It comes with Google ReCaptcha enterprise protection under the hood, helping to keep clients safe from bot and spam attacks.

Inside the dashboard, the chat agent switches into a helpful assistant that can answer questions about data and specific campaigns. And the assistant becomes even more detailed after a user clicks into a campaign, able to answer specific questions about metrics on certain days, such as "what were the cost per views on January 18th, 2024?" or "list all the media assets uploaded for this campaign."

Support

And as the most integral aspect of our software, clients get a fully-managed support system and human team able to respond to user queries. All Tincre integrations come with this built in and that includes tincre.com.

Each campaign has a "support" button which generates a detailed support email that goes to the app's support email. For example, the UNDRCVR Ads support email goes to team@undrcvrads.com, fully managed by Tincre's support specialists.

Next up

We'll dive into each of these components from a more technical and deeper business perspective in our next few articles. In the meantime, let us know what you think in the comments!

A huge thanks

Thank you to our clients, our supporters, investors, family and all of our readers here for helping us turn Tincre into the awesome company, product and team it is.

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