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We sat down with Patrick Mackaronis, business leader and founder of Brabble, a technology company that provides an all-in-one social media and ecommerce app, to get his thoughts on a changing digital world and how to build trust online.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Brabble?
A: Brabble came about in 2013 and was inspired by our goal of creating a more personable touch to social media and peer-to-peer sales markets through, in many ways, combining the two. We brought concepts of social media sharing (text, video, photo) and combined it with key marketplaces like Craigslist, to create a more social and more trustworthy identity to our sellers.
Q: What inspired you to put social media and e-commerce together?
A: What we’re trying to do is provide a service that is useful for our users and ‘disrupt’ an online world with new technology that legitimately provides a value-add for our users.
A lot of online sellers on Facebook, Instagram or Craigslist see problems with faulty merchandise, fake products, and no real way of verifying anything with anonymous sellers that they’re exchanging information with. We’re trying to bridge the gap between shoppers and buyers and make it more of a level playing-field. Our technology helps create authenticity that can make shoppers feel like they’re actually getting what they paid for, while helping sellers build a strong brand.
Q: You mentioned creating a sense of trust, how do you guys approach building this at Brabble?
A: We try to keep the platform largely transparent and include multiple features that enable our users to share and connect with each other and create a strong sense of trust in the identities that are built through their social media posts. We are offering Brabble users some new options to feature the app with endorsements and in turn get VIP treatment and some key features to further streamline their media sharing use.
Q: How do you build your audiences online?
A: We link our app with other social media networks and have a US patented innovation called *StarTags. It is a link that you can program into your Brabble post, and creates a direct buy or sell link, directly in the app. This sets up our over 500,000 users with the ability to have a seamless P2P sales option, that flows across different media platforms. It also gives users the ability to connect directly with those audiences, and in turn build our Brabble community.
Q: What are the challenges to dominant social media? How does Brabble tackle those issues?
A: Data security and authenticity continues to be a significant problem in social media channels. Unverified accounts and anonymous users can damage the brand we are trying to build, so we are very diligent when it comes to monitoring accounts and making sure our platform supports trustworthy sellers and buyers.
