START pod: Henk Pretorius & Harry Zhang - Co-founders, Timelaps “Brand Intelligence on Auto-Pilot”

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Watch on YouTube Subscribe to START

‍

Most brands don't know if their marketing is working.

They launch campaigns. Spend real money. Watch the dashboards. Then hope.

Months later, a report arrives explaining what happened.

The campaign is over.
The budget is gone.
The market has already moved.

That's how brand tracking has worked for years.

Henk and Harry are repeat founders with exits behind them - two decades building brand trackers for the world's largest brands on one side, a startup built and sold plus a market research career on the other. They'd watched the same problem from the inside for years.

Tracking was expensive. Slow. Built around snapshots.

Not how brands actually grow.

So they built Timelaps: An AI-native brand tracker that continuously surveys thousands of real consumers and shows whether your marketing is moving the metrics that matter.

Brand awareness.
Consideration.
Preference.
Category ownership.
Brand growth.

Research-grade tracking.
Updated continuously.
Running in days instead of months.
At a fifth of the cost of traditional tracking.

From "What happened?" to "What's happening right now?"

‍

🎙️ Henk Pretorius & Harry Zhang, Co-Founders, Timelaps on Fondo START pod

‍

00:17 Building AI-native brand intelligence for modern brands

00:45 Why brand tracking remains one of marketing's biggest pain points

01:53 How two founders met at ODF and began validating ideas together

02:42 Combining market research expertise with startup experience

03:24 Landing customers from a prototype before building the full product

03:46 Winning Product Hunt with an early demo

04:35 Why the original customer problem never changed

05:30 The limitations of traditional brand tracking and brand audits

06:03 Moving from delayed reports to continuous insights

06:40 The metrics that matter most in brand intelligence

07:35 Making enterprise-grade brand tracking accessible to challenger brands

11:43 Why San Francisco accelerates founder learning and execution

12:47 The "Olympic Games of building companies" mindset

‍

Check out www.timelaps.io