Daily Grommet: A place where community counts
Due to the nature of our publication, BostInnovation’s staff is always impressed by a company that can really churn out high quality online content. Lexington-based Daily Grommet does just that, creating awesome videos each day to promote a new invention the site’s visitors have never heard of before. They then sell the featured item for a cut of the profits.
The company’s method of finding new goods involves what founder Jules Pieri calls “Citizen Commerce™” — They find many of the products they profile through recommendations from site visitors.
Apparently, the $3.4M round of funding Daily Grommet received this week has sort of a citizen slant to it also — one of the angel investors backing this round actually owns the company behind a product Daily Grommet has featured and sold. Apparently Mike Huebner, CEO of Atlanta-based Stuffitts, was so satisfied with his experience with Daily Grommet, he called out of the blue a few weeks ago to ask if he could help back the company financially.
“[Mike] was one of our suppliers,” said Pieri today. “He contacted us and mentioned that he’s an angel investor and his strategy is to only invest in companies where he is a customer — where he’s being treated the way anyone else would be treated. That was really exciting for me, because what we did for Stuffitts was nothing extraordinary. I think what we do is extrordinary, but there was nothing about what we did for him that was different from what we do any other day. That was exciting to have that validation.”
Jules Pieri, Founder of Daily Grommet
The Series A round of funding came from a number of angel investors working in concert, including locals Jean Hammond, Nancy Peretsman, John Landry and Jill Preotle,. Also included were returning financial backers Launch Capital and Gerry Laybourne, who founded Nickelodeon. Apparently now we can also add Mike Huebner to that list.
So what will Daily Grommet, which currently has an 11-person team, do with this funding?
Build awareness, develop user experience and hire, according to Pieri. “Commerce, operational and technology need to be upgraded, too,” she said. “We won’t hire a lot, but some. We have to earn our hires still.” One specific thing Pieri pointed out she’d like to improve is the functionality on the site that allows visitors to submit potential Grommets, or featured products. She feels that’s currently too difficult within the site’s user interface.
So will Daily Grommet expand into new markets outside of their already quirky set of featured consumer goods?
“That’s always on our minds,” said Pieri. “We are going to be a failure if we don’t become a $100M company in relatively short order. That does require expansion, but we see so much opportunity within what we do now that you won’t see us look radically different over the next year or so. We’ll stick to expanding Daily Grommet more-or-less as you know it.”
Pieri said the company began trying to raise money around the beginning of the year. “We’ve been successful [with angel investment] so far in that area. It gives us the kind of flexibility and nimbleness we like to have at this early stage,” she said.
Tags: Angel Investors, Daily Grommet, Edu
