Kyle
When Boston startup PingUp, co-founder and CEO Mark Slater was onhold for an ungodly amount of time with his cable company for a two minute conversation a lightbulb went off in his head. He thought to himself, “wouldn’t it be great if I could text the cable company”. That’s where the idea for Pingup came from, as we’ll learn in just a few minutes in our interview below.
Imagine the ability to text in a tee time at your favorite golf course, or text the auto shop to see if your cars done. Now there’s no need for waiting on hold forever or miss-communicating information with a third party in trying to find out basic information.
Imagine if you could text the restaurant to say you’re running five minutes late. Maybe you would want to text your favorite clothing store to see if they have the pants you love in your size.
None of these elements of conversation take more than a minute on the phone, and even less time via text message. While some people I know don’t get the inherent idea about why texting is such a great method of communication for business, it is.
Texting has become such a natural way of life and as millennials pour into the work force a shift will come and texting will continue to trump actually talking on the phone. Sure people rather hear voices for context in some situations but, “do you have the new jordans in a size 12” doesn’t really require much for context.
All of this is why PingUp will most likely do great. Check out our interview with Pingup below the break.
What is pingup?
Pingup is a web app and iPhone app that lets people communicate with businesses the way they have already chosen to communicate with their friends….by text. The basic idea is that people would rather use text for those short, simple conversations they have everyday. Our mission is to let you have your brief commercial conversations the same way. The genesis for the idea came when our CEO, Mark, was on hold with his cable company. He needed a 2 second answer but had been on hold for a half hour. He thought, “I wish I could just text this in.” and then started down the road of, “Why can’t I text a business?”
Over the last year, we’ve developed the product and we think we’ve done something amazing. A consumer can go to pingup.com or download the iPhone app, set up a user account by simply giving us their name and email and can then search for businesses that they want to communicate with. On the business side, once you’ve set up your User account, you search for your business, click the link that asks, “Is this your business?”, and claim it as your own. Once we’ve verified you, you’re all set and ready to receive and reply to messages. Both Users and businesses can use the system from any computer, tablet or mobile device. It will even send everything to you as SMS, if you like.
One of the major features is that we protect the privacy of both parties. Merchants can never spam a User or push ads to them. Every conversation has to be initiated by the user and the User can close the connection at any time. We consider ourselves part of the Intention Economy and are “pull” not “push”.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Mark Slater is a co-founder and the CEO of Pingup. When he’s not spending his time chasing Stella and Sebastian around M-Street Park, you can usually find him watching Liverpool football club, or meeting with merchants and convincing them that they need to be ready to talk with customers the way customers want to talk with them. Mark was a founding member of Karmaloop, and worked for a time at CMGi. He left London (his home town) to go to BU and is a fully committed Old Malburian.
Bryan Lenett is a co-founder and President of Pingup. He is a technology enthusiast and lover of music, the arts (Lionel Richie), and sports. Bryan’s current mission statement: “Every business should use Pingup to communicate directly with customers.” Bryan was the founder of MediaPal (sold to Veridigm 2007), and Big Ads, an international advertising agency, and has dived into and been involved in various Internet startups and verticals. Originally from Miami, Florida, he’s getting used to the Boston city life.
Where are you based?
We’re based in South Boston. We occupy a typical tech-startup office space in an old loft-like building. It’s open and we’re on top of one another but that’s the best way for a company like us.
What is the problem that Pingup is solving?
For the user, we solve the problem of letting them communicate the way they want to. We let them skip bad hold music and phone trees. They get to ask their question and then put their phone back in their pocket and go about their business.
For the business, we make them far more accessible to their customers and we let them provide better service by not forcing their customers to communicate in a way they no longer want to. It also creates incredible efficiency because one phone attendant can only handle one phone call but that same person can respond to a dozen Pingups by switching between the chats, without anyone being put on hold.
What’s your secret sauce/competitive edge?
Our secret sauce is, without a doubt, the authenticity of the system. There’s actually another service that claims to let you “text any business in Boston” but, they use a call center model, which means that you text the business and some operator tries to get the answer from the business’ website and texts it back to you. In fact, the actual business almost never knows that you reached out at all. We considered that model but decided that it wasn’t in line with our core directives. We connect the consumer directly to the business and let them do their business.
What’s one of the challenges you faced in the startup process?
The biggest challenge is that we have to get businesses to activate before a customer can text them with Pingup. That’s what we’re concentrating on now. We’re working to develop a rich environment of merchants so that the Users will have a good experience. We launched a little more than a week ago and the response has been overwhelming. We’re grateful for that but it’s only motivated us to go at it harder.
What’s next for pingup?
Miami is next. We’re already live there and businesses are signing up every day. It’s a really receptive market for this type of tech and they love new ways for customers to reach them. Their tourist-based economy also means that people will see this there and carry it home with them to wherever they live. We’ve already seen this with business claims in PA, NY and other states.
We’re working on a lot of features and even an enterprise version. Our company policy is that we only talk about what we can deliver today but….you’ll be the first to know!
Linkage:
Find out more about PingUp here at pingup.com
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