Postling, a New York City startup that makes a social media dashboard for small business owners, has attracted another $350,000 in seed financing through the services provided by a San Francisco startup, AngelList.
Postling chief executive, David Lifson, said it was his fourth time “going out” on AngelList, a networking site that matches startups to potential backers. Postling was the second company to ever get funded on AngelList, and Lifson is now a volunteer “scout” in New York City, encouraging other entrpreneurs to use it.
Postling’s six, full-time employees work mostly in offices within the New York City co-work space, General Assemb.ly. With this round, Postling’s total number of investors rises to 24, and its total amount of seed money raised hits $700,000. New investors included: Mark Goines, Peter Lehrman and Mark Birch.
Lifson says his company will use the capital to hire developers, work on new features and keep things running smoothly while he seeks a round of venture funding. He says he’s looking for a $3 million series A.
Postling recently introduced a feature that lets small business owners get notified by e-mail when someone comments on their business related social media accounts, including the wall of their Facebook-business page (a service Facebook, surprisingly hadn’t offered its business users), WordPress blogs, Youtube channels, Yelp pages and more.
Small business clients of Postling include Midtown Comics in Times Square, Paragon Sports in Union Square and Butter Lane cupcakes in the East Village in Manhattan. The startup has some larger clients, too including Nine West and Lexmark.
Since early 2010, Postling’s revenue increased eight times and is now in the tens of thousands range, a meaningful number for an early startup, he remarked. Postling also boasts about 21,000 registered users representing some 10,000 businesses, including sole practitioners from bloggers to plumbers and doctors. Forty percent of the companies using Postling have a brick-and-mortar business.
Lifson also discussed his long-term vision with TechCrunch, saying:
“A lot of people compare us to Hootsuite which I’ve been puzzled by… In our minds we’re designing for the small business owner who spends all day away from the computer, helping patients, running a restaurant and only has five minutes a day to do social media marketing.
We really look up to Mint and Intuit. And we have this whole idea of drilling down into the real problems for real people instead of building fancy things for fancy people. Long term, we’ll be about more than social media.
We want to be a unified marketing dashboard for businesses. Anywhere they spend time on [digital] marketing we want them to come to their Postling dashboard and do it from there.
Maybe they can manage deals they create and distribute, email marketing or more.Everyone sorta knows there’s probably only one or two sites a small business owner will visit every day. We will be one of those two sites.”