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Social Sweep

Replaced a US$5,000-a-year licence with a tool I built. Now sold in every Innovatr membership.

Client · Innovatr · Proposed, scoped and built · Mar – Sep 2026

  • Build vs buy
  • Product strategy
  • AI product
  • Research tooling

Built for Innovatr while I ran its brand and marketing. A build-versus-buy call that became a product.

A finished Social Sweep report on Chinese versus German car brands in South Africa, leading with net sentiment, comments analysed and an executive summary.

Build, not buy

Innovatr was about to sign a US$5,000-a-year social listening contract. I proposed building it instead, and did, in a quarter: platform APIs feeding an AI layer, prototyped in Replit, built with Claude.

One question in, receipts out

Ask a plain-language question; it picks the platforms worth reading and returns a report where every claim links to a real comment. No dashboards, no boolean queries.

What building it instead of buying it was worth

US$5k
Saved in licence fees, every yearThe quote it replaced. Building it in-house cost under R10,000.
R6.5–15k
A month, for the memberships that include itThree reports in Starter, unlimited in Unlimited, alongside Innovatr's other research tools.
49
Platforms reachableSocial, search, commerce, reviews and the open web. Each study queries only what the question needs.

Prices from Innovatr's published membership tiers.

Inside the tool

  • Social Sweep's question screen: one plain-language box, a time range, an option to enrich with web search, and the eight platforms it listens across, with a trends radar below.
  • A finished Social Sweep report on Chinese versus German car brands in South Africa, leading with net sentiment, comments analysed, loudest emotion and an executive summary with key takeaways.
  • The evidence view: overall sentiment split, which platform carries the conversation, sentiment over time with spikes flagged, and a ranked emotion mix.

What I'd do differently

I'd launch it with its own price, not only inside memberships. Then it would show what it earns, not just what it saved.