Ramping up see it, click it, buy it

Entrepreneurialism and skateboarding each require perseverance. Just ask Dane Homenick and Adam Wrublowsky — they’re involved with both.

The lifelong skateboarders and longtime friends are the founders of Twenty Point Nine Inc., a tech startup headquartered in Winnipeg’s Exchange District.

Twenty Point Nine is building a white-label technology that looks like a video streaming service, but allows users to purchase items they see in a video as they’re watching it. The company’s flagship product is the Den, a content-streaming service that aims to be the Netflix for skateboarding.

The goal is to make purchasing items while watching video “an unobtrusive experience,” Homenick said.

“You still have to enjoy watching this video and then get the opportunity to purchase something in a way that is super smooth,” he said. “Two taps (and) it’s on its way to your door.”

The backend of the Den includes a partner portal where content owners can upload videos and connect them to their online stores, Homenick said. The Den has real-time access to a content owner’s inventory and, as a result, can let viewers know what products are available for purchase.

Twenty Point Nine has a proprietary technology that tailors the experience to each individual user. If someone is watching a video and a T-shirt in it is available for purchase, the video will only show the viewer the product if it’s available in their size and can be shipped to their location.

The technology has applications beyond skateboarding, Wrublowsky said. He and Homenick envision a day when there is an array of Den-like apps, each tailored to a different sport or cultural industry.

Starting in skateboarding made sense for Homenick and Wrublowsky, who have long been enthusiasts of the sport. Homenick toured North America as a semi-pro skater for years and Wrublowsky did business with many of the big brand names in the space.

After graduating from university, the now-42-year-olds settled into careers in the tech industry.

Prior to Twenty Point Nine, Homenick was a self-employed developer who created more than 75 apps that have reached 21 million users. Wrublowsky was a product and business development executive with Apple.

The two founders discovered a few years ago, through a mutual friend, they both independently had been thinking about the same idea.

For Homenick, it started when he couldn’t find an online version of a video he’d grown up watching repeatedly on a VHS tape.

“Skateboarding as a market is very fragmented,” Homenick said. “The content’s everywhere, it’s very loose and so there’s a way for the best stuff just to go missing and fall through the cracks, and I thought that was pretty sad.

“So the original idea was: how do we build this thing so that it puts everything in one place and … allows people to buy the videos (and) buy things within the videos?”

Homenick and Wrublowsky started Twenty Point Nine four years ago. Since then, they have raised $1.3 million from investors.

The company launched the Den in September 2024. The app is free, but users can upgrade to an ad-free version by subscribing for $7.99 per month or $79 annually.

“I just love skateboarding, love skateboarders, love that industry — very, very passionate about it,” Homenick said. “So to be able to do something in that space makes the hard days a lot easier, right? Because you just love the people that you’re serving. And so it was an easy decision for us to choose skateboarding as our testing ground here.”

Homenick, Wrublowsky and their nine employees celebrated last summer when the app reached 100,000 downloads. Today, it has more than 150,000 users in 162 countries, with the average user spending 28 minutes on the app per session.

(The founders declined to disclose subscription numbers. “What I can say is that our growth exceeds both the industry and our own expectations,” Homenick said.)

Jay Myers, an investor in Twenty Point Nine, attributes the Den’s success to Homenick and Wrublowsky’s deep understanding of skateboarding.

“They weren’t trying to (create) it just as an opportunistic thing where they see this hole or gap in the market,” said Myers, co-founder of Bold Commerce, a local software development company.

“Dane and Adam (are) passionate about the industry … I think that’s really important.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca