New St. Louis Startup Presents at Collision Conference and Launches Crowdfunding Campaign

Almost everybody today is a writer. Pen Path, a St. Louis startup, has developed analytic software so writers to follow and measure the impact of their work as it is shared throughout the Internet.

There are over 400 million blogs on the Internet, plus on an average day, more than 400 million tweets, 3.2 billion Facebook likes and comments, and 500 million active Google+ and LinkedIn accounts. Almost everybody is, in one way or another, a creator of content. But how do you quantify your post’s impact?

Pen Path - Analytics for writers Extracted from Pen Path crowdfunding video.
Pen Path – Analytics for writers
Extracted from Pen Path crowdfunding video.

Keeping track of how many likes and shares a post gets is part of judging the quality of your content and determining what works, but typically, content creators only see the most immediate and superficial layer of shares and comments. What if a writer could follow his work through the ever-expanding pyramid of social media, where it is shared, shared, and shared again, and be privy to how others have engaged with the post as your article makes its merry way through the deep, dark Internet?

That is the idea behind PenPath, a new St. Louis startup that quantifies influence by measuring the amount of engagements, comments and social shares an article or social media post gets. The idea has received enough traction that PenPath was selected out of hundreds of applications from around the world as one of 30 to pitch at the prestigious Collision Conference’s Spark startup competition. Uber, Vine and Stripe also got their start here.

The application is easy to use. Simply insert the URL of the content into PenPath and you can instantly see when, who, where, and how many times content has been engaged across all social networks, as well as track articles over time, receive notifications from new interactions, and reply to those who recently engaged.

“Imagine what such valuable insights can do for their content’s quality,” says PenPath CEO Alex Cruz. The company also recently began a crowdfunding campaign on Ramen which lasts through June 26.

The invitation to Collision Conference allowed the company to present its technology to leading investors, venture capitalists and more than 1,000 tech industry leaders during the two-day conference and competition. So how did it go?

“Very well,” says Cruz. “We had a goal of meeting investors and we did, generating some interest out of New York and San Francisco.”

For now, the company plans to focus their attention on their crowdfunding campaign and looks to launch the product this summer.

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