Brian Egan loves teasing out new ideas, and his innate curiosity has led him down the founder’s path more than once over the past decade or so. His latest venture is Reactable AI, a marketing tool that enables budget-conscious, time-strapped small businesses to manage their social media and marketing without the cost of hiring an outside agency.
Egan cofounded Reactable AI in 2024 with long-time friend and business colleague Michal Malewicz, a design professor turned author and educator. “The idea for Reactable came from Michal when we were working together on a project at my other company, Deep Purple AI consulting,” Egan says.
“Michal mentioned the challenges he was facing trying to market himself as a UX Influencer, and from this conversation the idea for Reactable was born. We tossed the concept around for about two years before we built our initial product, which we tested on Michal’s business before launching it in February of this year.”
The company’s first product is an app for building social media posts that helps users create professional-looking posts quickly and easily. “Basically, it will help SMEs to elevate their content while saving them hours per week,” says Egan, who adds that they called the business Reactable because “it learns and reacts to how the things you create perform. Then it optimises them for better engagement and reach. The more you use Reactable, the better your online content is. It’s like your own personalised marketing agency.”
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Digital marketing has become a must-have for most businesses, but keeping on top of it can be overwhelming. Large companies with deep pockets can afford to pay someone to do it for them. Most smaller operators can’t, and Egan says Reactable AI levels the playing field by giving small businesses the wherewithal to run full digital marketing campaigns in-house.
“Reactable AI is different because it combines our self-learning technology with a unique proprietary UX rule set developed from 25 years of experience of designing for some of the world’s largest brands to ensure that marketing materials convert,” Egan says.
“Unlike others, we focus heavily on mobile-first tools and offer an end-to-end platform that’s flexible and adaptable. Our system builds full campaigns, it focuses on conversion, not just engagement, and it gets smarter with use. It’s collaborative AI, so it respects the user’s voice and edits, and users can retain their own unique style, whether they’re a solo entrepreneur, a small business, a club or a community group. With systems like ChatGPT, it’s obvious if someone has used it to create content. Our product is designed to be personal, not generic, and users can make it theirs.”
Founder investment to date is around €250,000, and Egan is currently on the AI Ecosystem accelerator run by NovaUCD and CeADAR (Ireland’s centre for AI). Asked what an already experienced entrepreneur gets from participating in such a programme, Egan says the most important benefit is time to think.
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“You will always learn something, so that’s the starting point, but I find the time away from the business really valuable because it gives you time to reflect instead of always being caught up in doing,” he says. “You also get asked a lot of probing questions about your business, which can be very useful.”
A software engineer by background and a former recipient of the Marie Curie research fellowship, Egan was heavily involved in the emerging smartphone industry in the early 2000s, though he says he has learned as much, if not more, about business from ideas that didn’t work and from navigating the highs and lows of running his first start-up, Purpledecks, which he founded in 2012.
“I knew nothing about starting a business at the time, so I jumped in at the deep end and went on a very big learning curve,” says Egan, who has recently overseen Purpledecks’ rebranding to Deep Purple AI consulting to align the name with his future vision for the company.
Launching Purpledecks as well as other experiences within the start-up world have coloured how Egan is approaching the development of Reactable AI. He is wary of taking on too much too soon, finely tuned in to customer feedback and believes in being quick to make product adjustments to reflect real-world use.
So, rather than waiting for Reactable’s first product to be absolutely perfect in every last detail before launch, the founders released it for customer testing early. “We wanted to see how well it worked and what needed to change,” Egan says.
To aid the process, the company recruited early adopters in Egan’s hometown of Longford, and he sat beside them as they used the platform so he could see any problems arising at first hand. “We learned so much from watching them go through the process – something you wouldn’t get from online user feedback,” he says.
“We also decided to build out our vision for the business in smaller stages, or by sub-products, that will be launched individually but will eventually add up to a full suite. Our second sub-product is Photo Mixer, which companies or indeed individuals can use to generate photos for their social media posts. Our revenue model is SaaS with an early-bird offer currently available.”
Ironically, Reactable had a very soft launch with no marketing brouhaha. “Michal is a UX influencer with his own platform and a lot of followers around the world. We got about 600 users when we launched, and around 100 of those converted to paying customers, which was a nice steady pace as we wanted to see the app in action and not to overwhelm the platform,” Egan says.
