its manufacturing and retailer customers a monthly service fee to host the videos. The company also can help its customers create videos; ShowUhow operates a studio in San Diego where it can record and produce videos. “Our patent-pending platform technology can be deployed on both the Web and smartphones,” says Folsom, who estimates ShowUhow will generate $1 million in revenue this year and $5.8 million in 2011. Instead of focusing their online service on ad-click conversion, Folsom says, “we’re focused on sale, satisfaction, and [customer] retention.”
Folsom says she raised a small amount of angel funding at the outset from investors she knew from previous companies. In August, ShowUhow raised $3 million in Series A funding from Syncom Venture Partners, a Silver Springs, MD, firm that specializes in media, mobile technologies, and Web-based service companies. The startup also announced in August that Giles Bateman, former co-founder of Price Club/Costco and former chairman of CompUSA, had joined its board of directors.
Folsom acknowledges that ShowUhow faces a range of competitors, from in-home service reps to internal call centers and companies such as Chino, CA-based Alorica, which provides a range of “customer contact services” for its business customers. Folsom says amateur users also create a tremendous amount of “how-to” video content that can be found online for free. But the free online content is problematic, and Folsom says most manufacturers wouldn’t seriously consider using them.
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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