BackType

BackType operated as a social media analytics company, providing marketing intelligence to help businesses measure and understand their social impact. The company was founded in 2008 by Christopher Golda and Michael Montano, two Canadian engineers who had participated in the Y Combinator accelerator program. Initially conceived as a blog comment search engine, the founders recognized the emerging need for broader social media analytics well before the market fully developed.

The founders, both alumni of the University of Toronto's Electrical and Computer Engineering program, demonstrated significant focus and technical acumen from the start. After the YC program, they faced visa delays, compelling them to return to Canada and code from their parents' homes for about six months before they could establish themselves in a San Francisco condo that served as their live/work space. The business model was centered on a SaaS platform that provided analytics dashboards. One of its key products was BackTweets, which allowed publishers to track the reach of their content on Twitter, identify influential users, and measure how tweets converted to tangible metrics like web traffic and sales. BackType served a notable client list that included The New York Times, Bitly, SlideShare, and Microsoft.

A significant technological asset developed by BackType was 'Storm', a distributed, real-time computation system described as the “Hadoop of realtime processing.” This technology was a core reason for its strategic acquisition. In July 2011, Twitter acquired BackType to integrate its team and technology, particularly to enhance the tools available to Twitter's publishing partners. Following the acquisition, the BackType team was integrated into Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, and its core products were discontinued to be rebuilt under the Twitter brand. The Storm framework was later open-sourced and became a top-level Apache Software Foundation project. The acquisition was a pivotal moment, signaling Twitter's strategic move to bring essential third-party analytics functions in-house. BackType had secured approximately $1.3 million in funding from investors including True Ventures, Lowercase Capital, and Founder Collective prior to its sale.

Keywords: social media analytics, marketing intelligence, BackTweets, Twitter acquisition, Christopher Golda, Michael Montano, Y Combinator, social media measurement, tweet analytics, real-time data processing, Apache Storm, publisher tools, social impact analysis, conversation tracking, blog comment search, SaaS analytics, online influence, data engineering, distributed computation, social data analysis