A few years ago, CEO Zeke Fairbank was reading an article on social media that he says “really resonated for him.” He thought he would pay for the article—a small sum—but couldn’t. That led him to ask, “Why can’t I?”
“Why can’t I reward the website, the content providers, the post,” he said.
As a semi-retired professional with a finance background, Fairbank wanted to work on a project in the fintech space that would use technology for payments. At that time, he says, no one had a way to “tip” for content on a website—you had to go to a different site, like Paypal or Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee. He aimed to create a one-click solution that made paying content providers easy.
“If somebody wants to make an impulse payment based on something they’ve seen, you’ve got to make it quick,” he said.
That led to ClickTip, a software tool to make it possible to put a click-to-tip button on people’s websites, along with the backend software that completes the payments using Stripe and tracks payments in a dashboard for creators who use it. In early 2022 Fairbank and his team completed the ClickTip tool and website. He then entered the CoBuilders Accelerator, where he says his company “really started to build a business around [ClickTip] and learn how to pitch it.”
Customer surveys and research led iResonate to focus on bloggers and content providers outside of social media tools such as Facebook and Youtube, where those services will likely provide tipping tools.
“The blogosphere is wide open,” Fairbank said.
Coming out of CoBuilders, iResonate won a $10,000 “proof-of-concept” award from the Mississippi Seed Fund. Fairbank was invited to pitch at Innovate Mississippi’s Accelerate conference, where he felt the pitch started to gel.
He said coming out of the conference, he feels he had a good product but now needs traction. So in early 2023, he’s reworking the website, focusing on social media marketing for ClickTip and building awareness, relying on help from his marketing consultant, Elizabeth Abrams, and a growing team.
“I’m putting the feelers out for computer science and marketing people. We’re developing social media marketing to go out and get qualified leads coming into me for people interested in putting the ClickTip button on their websites,” he said.
The startup’s core customers are the bloggers and creators who place the ClickTip button on their websites. But iResonate has features for readers who are frequent tippers—if you register on the site, you can access a dashboard that shows you where you’ve tipped and how much you’ve spent. Fairbank makes the point that ClickTip focuses on single donations—not building author or creator communities.
“In surveying donors, one of the things we’ve discovered is that they weren’t really interested in having the content providers come back to them and say ‘I’ve got some other articles,’ or even have a dialogue with them at all,” Fairbank said. “They just want to make the donation as a ‘thank you’ for the content that resonated with them.”
