Tackk, which offers tools for creating content that combines text, images, audio, and video, is coming out of a beta today and announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in a second round of seed funding.
If the premise sounds a bit general, well, it is. When I wrote about Tackk a year ago, the company described the content that users could create as “e-fliers” — the online equivalent of the fliers that you’d see pinned on the bulletin boards of neighborhood coffee shops. That was pretty broad already, but when I spoke to CEO Christopher Celeste about the funding, he said his goal is to build a “universal content creation tool.”
There were two big advantages for Tackk that Celeste and the company’s co-founder Eric Brockmuller touted in our conversation. First, there’s the simplicity — using the Tackk template, it shouldn’t take much work or expertise to combine different types of media in a non-ugly way. Second, Tackk doesn’t force users to be “locked in,” with all of their media stuck on a single network. Users don’t need to create a Tackk account to create a Tackk, and they can post their content to social networks, as well download the content as a PDF.
Since launching a year ago, Tackk says it has received 700,000 unique visitors (despite minimal marketing), and its users have the used the platform to create photo journals, Craigslist postings, recipes, real estate listings, and more. You can see featured Tackk content here.
Brockmuller told me that Tackk was originally built to serve solely as a content creation platform, but it has added social features since then, like profiles and the ability to follow other users. Celeste said this allows Tackk to address both the creation and the consumption of content, but he added, “We’re not trying to create a Tackk social network. We want to empower people with the ability to tag and organize their content so that they can push it out for discovery.”
The new funding was led by ff Venture Capital, with participation from previous investors Hatch Partners and Drummond Road Capital. Celeste (who joined Tackk from Hatch) said that one of the appealing things about working with ff is that the partners aren’t forcing Tackk to specialize: “They know how to be patient with an early-stage play like this.”
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