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Projections on Cars? Adway Gets Funding to Pioneer an Unusual Advertising Method
Culver City-based Adway is offering Uber and Lyft drivers hundreds of dollars every month to project ads on the sides of their cars.
So far, the company has signed up about two dozen drivers in Los Angeles, where competitor Firefly faced fierce pushback a few years ago from city officials who sought to ban digital ads on moving vehicles.
Adway promises drivers $50-$350 a month in what they call "passive" income. All the drivers have to do is install a small device that sits just underneath their vehicle's side view mirrors.
CEO and co-founder Sasha Krylov said his wife deserves much of the credit for the idea. A feature on a car she saw called a "puddle light," which projects a logo or image on the ground when one of the doors is opened, caught her attention. She felt the image was trying to communicate something.
"I told her it was just a gimmicky logo," Krylov said. "But I thought to myself, 'what if she was right?'"
It was this epiphany that eventually led Krylov to this moment. Last week, the nearly three-year-old company clinched a $6 million seed round led by Upfront Ventures.
Among its advertisers are Webex by Cisco and poke restaurant Sweetfin. Adway gives these companies an estimate of how many impressions their ads made by determining how many Bluetooth devices came within a certain radius of the vehicle. Krylov said this one-way communication system does not collect personal data from the devices.
Krylov decided to project on the side of the car because, according to him, it was his only option. In his research, he learned that it was illegal in California to project an image on the ground, as the puddle lights do, when the vehicle is moving. The same went for the front and the back of the automobile.
"The only thing that was left, really, was the side of the car," said Krylov. "Coincidentally enough, the side of the car presents the largest possible real estate on the body of the car, which any advertiser would want to capitalize on."
Another early concern was the mere fact that projections do not show up well in daylight, meaning that Adway drivers can only make impressions on customers between dusk and dawn. At first, Krylov worried that this could be a limitation for the company, but he has seen only promising results.
"To our surprise, [it] actually makes a lot of sense if you think about this," Krylov explained. "A lot of traffic is actually concentrated in the evening, between 4 and 7pm, and if we're not talking about summertime, it goes dark around 4, 4:30. And people are more prone to making purchasing decisions after work hours rather than before."
Despite this, looking into hardware options in the future that can allow these projections to be seen during the day is also on the docket for Adway.
"This is what we're building this technology towards," said Krylov. "We just need to start somewhere, and somewhere is now, because there's still a tremendous amount of the market to be seized, and there's an opportunity for us to build a community of intellectual property around this today."
Adway's method of advertising has the potential to stir up controversy. A couple of years ago, L.A. city councilman Bob Blumenfield wrote an op-ed for the "Los Angeles Daily News" condemning San Francisco-based Firefly for their similar advertising method of digital billboards on the roofs of rideshare vehicles.
Behind Her Empire: LOLA Co-Founder Alex Friedman on Building a Better Tampon
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
On this week's episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, meet Alex Friedman, the co-founder of feminine care brand LOLA.
LOLA was created to address the need for more transparency in women's health. It was begun as a passion product to understand whether women would be interested in a tampon product made from healthier ingredients. Wince then, it has grown to create its own feminine care items free from harmful chemicals.
As Friedman and her partner began building LOLA, they realized that what was lacking was a comprehensive understanding of women's health.
"Nobody had any idea what we were talking about," Friedman says. "Ninety-five percent of the people we were meeting with were men. And they didn't have any personal understanding of or empathy for a woman's reproductive experience and had never seen or touched a tampon."
Friedman and her partner were able to "lean into" the knowledge gap, something she says created "warm friendships and relationships" and was "fun and productive."
Friedman started her career at a private equity consulting firm after graduating from Dartmouth. She later attended the Wharton School of Business, and went on to work as an investment consultant and analyst.
She shares how she was able to overcome her fears to take the leap into entrepreneurship — and what other entrepreneurs should keep in mind.
"It's important for founders to be thinking about the problem that they're trying to solve — rather than the company that they want to form — and focus on solving that problem," Friedman says.."Because if it's a real problem, and you solve it correctly, you will have success."
Friedman discusses how motherhood has made her a better communicator, the high value she places on mentorship, her tips for fundraising and how to overcome doubts around business ideas.
Alex Friedman is the co-founder of LOLA.
"I have very little kids, and so I have to communicate very clearly and simply all the time. And I think that actually is a positive for a business leader. Right, as I have just be able to very clearly and quickly articulate expectations. And I have found that that's a positive for me, too."
Want to hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast? Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Engagement Intern Colleen Tufts contributed to this post.
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
Spinn Raises $20M For a More Sustainable Home-Brewed Coffee
One Los Angeles-based coffee startup is hoping to put a new spin on at-home coffee making.
Spinn makes a coffee brewing machine that uses a unique "centrifuge process" and offers coffees from a variety of vendors — without relying on wasteful packaging that its competitors use.
Spinn was able to capitalize on lockdowns that closed grocery stores and coffee shops. Small coffee vendors looked to Spinn's online marketplace to sell their coffee and consumers looked to Spinn's machines to brew coffee at home, said CEO Roderick de Rode.
The company has raised $20 million in a round of funding led by Spark Capital, Amazon's Alexa Fund and Bar 9 Ventures, it said Monday. The money will go toward fulfilling pre-orders the company has for its coffee machines and for hiring additional workers.
Founded in 2015, Spinn hopes to tap into a growing market for at-home coffee machines. Its machine is an all-in-one brewer that make a variety of coffee types — including espresso, americano, cold brew and drip coffee — through a unique "centrifuge" process. It can process around 1,500 types of coffee from around 500 vendors.
Competitors, including Nespresso and Keurig, also offer brewing machines and coffee marketplaces. But de Rode said Spinn's focus on sustainability sets it apart. Their machines don't require filters, reducing the amount of waste produced when brewing coffee.
As working conditions fluctuate between in-person and remote, Spinn is hoping to tailor both to consumers who continue to work remotely and to offices looking to buy coffee machines for returning workers, said de Rode.
To de Rode, consumer interest in coffee is moving in the same direction as wine — People are becoming more aware of the different types and origins of coffees, much like how people have become aware of the nuances in the types of wines, he said, giving Spinn more space to operate.
"Nowadays people know that there's a difference between a Cherot and a Pinot Noir," he said. "You see the same thing happening in coffee."
Spinn's machines are also connected to the internet, and can be controlled through Spinn's app or through Amazon's Alexa.