Tagplay – A Startup Profile

I met Tarmo Virki in Trondheim attending Technoport, he is the founder of the Cofounder Magazine. When he reached out to me and asked me to write about Tagplay, an Icelandic Startup which was selected to be a featured on a #NordicMade tour of NYC and NASDAQ. I was privileged and the blog post to write about the founder of Tagplay was waiting on my finger tips. Following got published in the magazine. Read on

I met Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir, the Founder of Tagplay when she was doing her documentary called the Startup Kids. What really impressed me was how Sesselja and her friend Vala Halldorsdottir had bootstrapped and created a campaign in Kickstarter, raised $25k to get this documentary to life. It was an inspiring documentary. They interviewed a bunch of kids who were starting up companies in Europe and in Silicon Valley. The documentary was a resounding success. They have distributed the content to a number of countries and it was very well received in Iceland. I knew that both of the Founders of Startup Kids the documentary were going places. Vala joined QuizUp and Sesselja has started a new company called Tagplay.

Tagplay solves a very interesting problem, and many of us don’t seem to see it as it is not mainstream yet. Most of our websites are quite static other than a couple of image carousels there is not much happening when someone comes to the website. As more and more companies are starting to rely on Social media like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook to build their brand, they are losing the integration between their domain i.e their website and their social presence. I think what Tagplay is trying to do is very clever, they are integrating the social content into your website so when someone visits your website it is more lively and also shows the culture and the happenings of the company. I think this is an important problem that needs solutions. I am glad that Sesselja has been working to solve this.

We are fundamentally undergoing a transition with regard to how we present ourselves in every channel we have in front of us. I think the age of everyone becoming a freelancer is upon us, very few of us see it. I think it is going to become increasingly important for companies to show why what they are doing is important and how their employees are living outside of the company life also says a lot about the company. Tagplay provides a means for companies to bring life of their stakeholders into their brand. Of course Tagplay allows you to control what gets shown on the website, I think the really cool thing is that it automates the task of integrating Social Feeds or even Hashtags to be easily shown on any website.

Since a lot of what Tagplay does is automated, they provide an API access that allows anyone to build more sophisticated services to websites. Large advertising agencies really need to consider tools like Tagplay as it would really enhance and solve a big problem for a number of their clients. Building a brand is not an easy task, no longer is your brand what you say it is. Your brand is what your customers say it is in the social media. Bringing that level of engagement into your company’s domain really brings the whole brand building exercise all the way. I have always felt that in the age of the social media, very few companies have cleverly leveraged it to build a strong brand presence, tools and services like Tagplay can really enhance that experience. I am pretty sure there are a number of competing services for something like what Tagplay does but what is interesting is that Tagplay has started from Iceland where they have been able to get in front all the local advertising agencies and build a strong presence and product. The polishing has been done and now I am sure Sesselja is on the way to conquer the world. Only last week, I saw that Tagplay made it to the #1 slot on Product Hunt. Not an easy feat but I was not surprised. Watch out for this startup from Iceland.