The founders of Glimpse: Anuj Mehta (left), Akash Raju (middle) and Kushal Negi (right) started the … [+] company to offer a new approach to experiential marketing.
Glimpse.
The idea for product placement startup Glimpse was formed from the back of U-Haul truck — well kind of.
In 2019, Akash Raju and his friends, Anuj Mehta and Kushal Negi, started hosting brand pop-ups at their school, Purdue University, in a quest to bring interactive shopping experiences to their rural — and often overlooked — West Lafayette, Indiana, campus. The events showcased local brands and small businesses and the trio ran their first stint out of the back of a moving truck parked in the middle of the school’s property. With graduation looming, the trio realized they could bring the same methodology to a new sector: short-term rentals.
The founders thought the strategy could allow rental hosts to elevate the guest experience while giving brands a way to get their products directly into the hands of consumers. They launched Glimpse in 2020, and the startup now works with more than 150 brands who showcase their products through a network of 8,000 short-term rentals. “We’ve been seeing an incredible pull on both sides of the platform,” Raju tells Forbes. “The main reason is it is a win-win-win situation.”
Glimpse is seeking to sit at the intersection of two growing trends. One is the explosion of short-term rentals since the beginning of the pandemic. Airbnb alone saw 300 million bookings in 2021 and the momentum isn’t expected to slow anytime soon. The other is that as digital privacy legislation keeps getting stricter, brands can’t rely on digital advertising as much as they used to, leaving many companies looking for a new way to reach consumers, Raju says. That pitch has gotten brands including DTC mattress company Purple, canned water startup Liquid Death and massage gun producer Lyric to sign on.
Experiential marketing — like what Glimpse is doing — can be highly effective, Mike Proulx, a vice president and research director at research firm Forrester tells Forbes over email. “When experiential marketing is done well, it creates intrigue and momentum fueled by word-of-mouth – TikTok-rich and Instagrammable moments captured by consumers that get shared out to wider and wider audiences.” He adds a recent survey Forrester ran found that 44% of CMOs were expecting to increase their spending on the strategy in 2022.
Glimpse works by having brands pay the startup a subscription fee based on how many units the products are placed in. Brands get complete control over which properties they showcase in and can track guest engagement. Lyric was one of the early brands that signed on. Hugh Williams, a cofounder and chief marketing officer at Lyric, tells Forbes the company knew it needed to get its signature product — a massage gun — in people’s hands to show them why they should buy from their nascent brand as opposed to one from a more established brand in the sector like Theragun.
“We were having lots of conversations internally about how when someone sees [a Lyric massage gun] and feels it, they are going to fall in love with it,” he says. “So how can we put it in places where we can really efficiently get consumers to experience it?” Lyric started out in ten properties late last year, and has increased its stake since. “From a sales standpoint, the whole partnership has been profitable,” Williams says.
The startup is seeing 40% month-over-month growth on the rental side and is announcing a $6.2 million seed round to build out the team, Raju says. The round was led by GSR Ventures with participation from Origin Ventures, Y Combinator and angel investors including Julia and Kevin Hartz, Bradley Horowitz and Bangaly Kaba. The concept of Glimpse resonated quickly with Yuechen Zhao, a partner at GSR Ventures. Zhao tells Forbes that when he met Glimpse during their 2020 stint at Y Combinator, he and his wife were in the process of setting up their second short-term rental property. Zhao wrote a small check in the company back in 2020 and decided to double down in the latest round. “What Glimpse has demonstrated is that the ROI [for brands] is actually extremely strong,” he says. “Brands see tremendous engagement from guests and ROI in terms of sales when these guests end up purchasing.”
Raju says the company saw 4x quarter-over-quarter growth in Q1 but declined to share specifics. “I think what’s next in the immediate short term is continuing to expand the number of properties,” he says. “Just in the past few months, we have launched a lot of new brands and seeing them continue to scale is the main focus today.”
