Fliike is the first product for the French start-up Smiirl which is based around 3 skills - marketing, design and embedded systems. Smiirl is one of the 12 companies that have been selected for the Le Camping, season 4.
Smiirl specializes in making products for businesses with an aim to reduce the gap between the physical and the virtual world. "Smiirl is developing an ecosystem of innovative, connected objects that shorten the link between the digital and physical worlds."
Coming on to Fliike, as I have already mentioned Fliike is the first physical Facebook 'Like' counter and it also happens to be Smiirl's debut product. It helps businesses proudly flaunt their number of 'Likes' on Facebook. All that you have to do is plug in Fliike, connect it to your Facebook page via a WiFi connection and let it do the work from there.
Fliike has been designed specially for local businesses, public places and marketing departments. According to their website, "We designed it for business owners to enable them to proudly display their popularity in the digital community."
Smiirl was found in the October of 2012 and Fliike was launched just a few months back and since then it has created a buzz in the market. To know more about Fliike we got in touch with the CEO of Smiirl, Gauthier Nadaud. Read on our exclusive interview with Gauthier.
Happy reading!
1. Hi Gauthier, please introduce yourself to the E-junkie readers.
Hi everyone, I'm Gauthier, CEO of Smiirl! I started this project one year ago and worked before in advertising and music business in France.
2. What is Smiirl? What inspired you and the other co-founders to come up with it?
Smiirl is a company that aim to shorten the link between physical and digital identities of a given local business or public place through connected objects. The first one we made is called Fliike, it's the first physical facebook fan counter designed to be set up in a shop/store/restaurant.
3. Tell us something about your first product - Fliike. What design did you have to surmount to get the product to fruition?
We chose to use a mechanical display, because we think there is a real deal in creating a physical movement by activating a totally digital concept: the "Like". We had a lot of work on re-creating the split-flap display at lower costs than available.
4. To be honest with you (and I guess you already know that), Fliike is an amazing product. It's based on a very simple concept. What was it actually that inspired you guys to work on it?
We had this idea by asking ourselves what is the best moment to convince a client to become a facebook fan of a given shop and the answer is clear: at the moment they are actually IN the shop.We had to make a cool and design object that shows and gamify the act of "liking" a facebook page on site.
5. How is Fliike going to benefit small businesses?
Fliike is going to benefit small businesses because it's a simple tool which display the digital & social proof that you managed to build around you shop. By doing that it will act as drive-to-store tool that shows that many people liked your shop. It will also be a drive-to-social because we believe a lot of conversation on social networks will begin via this object.6. How do you plan to promote Fliike? What do you think is the ideal mix of social, online and offline promotion? What about word-of-mouth promotion?
We launched Fliike a month ago and for now we only send few mails to journalists. We are very happy that the product seduced a lot of people and we already got an amazing press cover. For the future we'll mainly do online promotion and our goal is to build a strong sales network with retailers all around the world. We also believe that word-of-mouth will be strong as soon as we'll deliver the first Fliikes.
7. Fliike has received appreciation by the people. How does it feel? What is the biggest compliment that you have received for designing Fliike?
The first feeling is: "ok we didn't waste our time and time from people that helped on this project", the second is: "ok we have a lot of incoming messages to deal with, how are we gonna do that ?". For the biggest compliment, I don't really know, we received some very encouraging messages from all around the world..but when you see that Facebook ordered a Fliike for their HQ in California you begin to think that you managed to build something cool....8. What is the fondest memory that you and the other co-founders have of the process of conceiving Fliike to having it up and running ?
For all of us I think it's getting accepted at LeCamping, the #1 tech accelerator in France. For me it's when I saw for the first time our prototype working...
9. What other designers do you look up to? If you could peek inside the toolbox of any one other contemporary designer, whose would it be and why?
As for myself I'd love that Smiirl as company will one day be able to invite for few months young designers from all over the world to work with us, like our own couch-surfing-for-designer program.
10. Personally, what activities do you enjoy in your free time? Are you more of an indoor or outdoor guy?
I don't have much free time right now ;) I love music so going to concert is something I really enjoy. I like to think that I'm a outdoor guy, I love sailing for example but I can also play 24 hours in a row a cool video game ;)
11. What are your future plans? Are you guys working on some other awe-inspiring products?
As a company we have a lot of plans to release other objects linked to other social networks. For now we have to focus on the production of Fliikes but as soon as possible we'll work on our next concepts...
12. What advice would you like to give to aspiring and budding entrepreneurs/designers?
Don't ask yourself too much questions, never walk alone, bootstrap a maximum, learn/read everything you can on every subject possible.
Thanks Gauthier for taking out the time and doing this interview with us. We'd like to wish you and everyone at Smiirl the very best for the future.
Stay tuned for more of such exclusive interviews from E-junkie.
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