TapInfluence names The Resumator’s Promise Phelon CEO

BOULDER – Marketing software firm TapInfluence Inc. has tapped Silicon Valley to help shepherd the company through its next wave of growth, naming tech executive Promise Phelon as chief executive on Thursday.

Phelon replaces co-founder Rustin Banks, who will remain on TapInfluence’s board of directors and move into the role of Chief Product Officer.

“We hit that scaling stage,” Banks, who started the company with Holly Hamann, said in a phone interview this week. “The business started growing very quickly and we realized we needed a scaling CEO, someone who’s been there and done it. … She’s a powerhouse in the scaling space.”

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Phelon joins TapInfluence from The Resumator, which makes recruiting software that helps companies streamline the hiring process. As chief revenue officer there, she led sales, marketing and business development. She also helped raise a $15 million funding round.

Prior to The Resumator, she was founder and CEO of The Phelon Group, a technology-enabled services company that was acquired in 2009. She was also CEO of UpMo, a talent management SaaS firm.

TapInfluence provides a software-as-a-service platform that helps marketers automate the process of finding key online influencers and connecting with them to create sponsored content featuring their brands. In addition to making the connections and managing workflow, the software provides analytics to measure the value each piece of content created in terms of sales and leads.

So a company like Kraft, a TapInfluence customer along with the likes of Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola, could use the service to find influential food bloggers, pay them to create and write about recipes using certain Kraft products, and gauge how much customer action was created from the content produced.

The software is an alternative to placing banner ads on websites and hoping to get clicks.

“The company is growing rapidly because they solve the biggest problem facing marketers today: predictably translating influence into opportunity,” Phelon said in a statement. “Taking the company from an emerging startup to an industry leader is my passion, which made leaving Silicon Valley for Boulder, Colorado an exciting proposition.”

Banks and Hamann founded TapInfluence in 2009, and have raised $9.1 million in venture capital to date, including a $5 million round in September of 2013. The company doesn’t disclose revenue but has been on a rapid growth path. TapInfluence has 32 full-time employees plus some contractors, almost all of whom are based in Boulder and 12 of whom were added over the past year. Banks said he anticipates adding at least a dozen more in the coming year.

Banks said raising another round of funding is not “on the immediate roadmap” for TapInfluence, though that’s something Phelon will be evaluating as the company grows.

“The company’s doing well, and we have the option to push that off,” Banks said. “But of course we’ll be opportunistic because we are growing rapidly.”