Back in March, we wrote about Aaron Weiche’s latest venture since selling GatherUp, the company he co-founded with Mike Blumenthal, to Traject in November 2019. Aaron left a few months after the sale to do the startup thing all over again.
That thing, Leadferno, originally scheduled to launch in June, is now live. Leadferno’s tagline is “Business Texting and Messaging Made Easy.”
Here’s how we described the business when we covered it back in March.
Leadferno…is all about making it easy for small businesses to communicate with customers in the manner they prefer. And in most cases that manner is SMS or messaging.
The company’s tagline is, “Business Texting and Messaging Made Easy.” And it promotes the following benefits. “Close more leads faster and delight customers with real-time messaging channels like SMS and Facebook messenger from one powerful inbox.”
So in simple terms, Leadferno offers businesses a toolkit to convert lurkers into customers using messaging applications. Leadferno is a SaaS business that runs about $150 per month, per business profile, for up to 10 users. This earns the customer up to 2,000 contact and 2,000 SMS credits per month.
Weiche raised a small seed round to launch the business. But otherwise, he wants to avoid raising more capital as long as he can. He is taking no salary, and getting help from old friends like his GatherUp co-founder Mike Blumenthal, who serves as an advisor.
Leadferno is focused on SMBs in three main categories, home and professional services, and dealers, though more like boat and RV dealers rather than automobile dealers. Aaron reasoned that the former dealer categories were underserved by software. And the latter probably overserved.
The company also plans to sell through a combination of direct sales and channel partners. Because Leadferno is about converting vs. driving traffic, Aaron told us a prospective business needs some existing web traffic in order to make sense as a customer.
Needed More than an MVP
We caught up recently with Aaron and asked him about the launch, why it was delayed, his competitive challenges, and if the business plan has changed at all since we spoke in March. Here are some highlights, lightly edited.
Why was the launch delayed?
“This took a little longer because the space we’re going into is more of a mature space. Especially on the consumer side, when people use their messaging, text messaging, SMS app, more than any other app. There’s a feature set that’s built-in by iOS and Android and things that they do. So I think it is a trickier space to release a typical MVP [minimum viable product] or something really lightweight. So we decided to take a few extra months to polish some of those things up.”
You’ve launched Leadferno initially as a web app. Why did you make that decision?
“Yeah. So we are launching with just a web app to start. Within about six to eight weeks, we’ll have our mobile apps out. So we built with a Google technology called Flutter. That makes the rollout of the native mobile applications easier. So fast follow with that, obviously, the wins there, you know, on the go, business owners push notifications with new messages, all the things that that you would expect there.
“At the end of the day, one of our biggest goals is we want to start conversations. And especially turning website lurkers into conversations. We already have an integration with Facebook Messenger and Instagram messaging. So that’s already in the product. we’ll also be tackling in the next month or two GMB’s messaging tool. So that’ll be integrated as well.”
How has the pandemic impacted demand for what you are doing?
I would have loved to have this product pre-pandemic because I think it definitely forced people into looking at low-touch easy ways to stay involved with the consumer. It made businesses very quickly react and change delivery models and communication models and processes. And I think that’s really good for a product like ours. Because even though text and two-way text for businesses and text blasts, or text marketing have existed for quite a while, I think the adoption rate just really increased through this.”
When a prospect is considering Leadferno, typically who else are they likely to consider?
“Podium is probably the biggest in the space. We’re not going to market with the reputation management side of things that they kind of started with. And then they’ve pivoted more to being a communication and connection product. But that web to chat widget is definitely a big piece of there. So I would expect Podium.”
“There’s another one called HeyMarket. They’ve been around for maybe four or five years more focused on pure SMS. I would expect a comparison there.”
What kinds of channel partners make the most sense for you?
“If you’re building a website, or you’re optimizing to try to gain traffic for a website, conversion really should be a big part of that. And we want to give these agencies and web designers a really great toolset to not only attract visitors but convert them and start conversations.”
What kinds of integrations is Leadfearno looking at in the near, mid, long-term?
“This is probably more in our medium-term roadmap, as we roll out more mature or sophisticated businesses. Probably the biggest one is CRM. Businesses want to be able to update customer records with these conversations. We’ve had some early talks with some industry-focused CRMs in some of the professional service areas like insurance and financial advisors. So they’ll definitely be a play there. It’s probably early 2022 when we get to that on our roadmap.”
