Tapiture, the Pinterest for men, raises $825K

With Pinterest catering to women, Tapiture is attempting to fill the hole left in the market

The rise Pinterest was one of the biggest social media stories of last year. A Nielsen report revealed that Pinterest saw the most growth out of any other social network in 2012. And most of the growth came from women. According to a September study from Pew Internet & American Life Project that found that 12% out of 1000 people said they use Pinterest, and of those, the vast majority were women.  A full 19% of online women were said to be on Pinterest.

So, while Pinterest has been able to rise by catering to the ladies, it is leaving a giant hole for another company and appeal to the demographic it is ignoring: men.

Tapiture, a social discovery site aimed directly at catering to that untapped demographic, has raised $825,000 in seed funding through private angel investors, the company announced Tuesday.

The money will be used to advance the company's growth effort, launch an e-commerce solution and drive development of a mobile app. Tapiture is also planning to use the funding to expand its engineering team. The startup currently has  seven employees, and expects to double their team by the middle of the year. Tapiture also plans to grow their Board of Directors by two Board seats from independent directors.

Tapiture says that it will be adding retail buyers, or “Tastemakers," to its full time team, who will then partner with merchants to make products that will then become available to buy directly from Tapiture. The site will also have marketers "host branded experiences to leverage the same community of engaged consumers." The ultimate goal is for the site's partners to reach an audience that is ready to purchase, while also giving Tapture a monetization model. 

“Tapiture is addressing an incredible opportunity to solve the top end problem of the sales funnel, the discovery process, by leveraging the social and interest graph of our engaged community of users,” Tapiture CEO John Ellis said in a statement. “Our seed funding will allow us to aggressively expand our platform that fuels the discovery of cool content and products and generates considerable income for Tapiture and its partners.”

Venice, California-based Tapiture was founded in 2012 by brothers John and Leo Resig of Resignation Media. They are also the founders of theCHIVE.com, and Tapiture was meant to be a compliment to their earlier site, giving it a social media component. When the potential of Tapiture was realized, though, it was spun off into its own entity.

Tapiture is, essentially, a Pinterest for men. It is a social commerce network that helps men discover and purchase products based on behavioral and demographic data. Members simply "Tap" the images they want to share on the site. Images are organized in collections that describe the product or image that they are sharing, and a Buy button is displayed for easy purchase.

Not only is the idea behind Tapiture based on Pinterest, so is the layout of the site, as you can see in the picture from the top of this article.

Despite its young age, the company is already seeing some impressive numbers.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, the site had 8.6 million visits by 4.1 million unique visitors, with engagement levels of nearly seven minutes per visit. Tapiture generated 78 million page views during this same period.

Overall, the site has seen just under one million taps to date. Its currently monthly pageviews are over 25.5 million and it has over 1.3 million unique visitors.

(Image source: https://tapiture.com)