At this year’s overcrowded and overhyped SXSW conference in Austin, one of the few startups to break through the noise was group text messaging app GroupMe. How did GroupMe win SXSW? Grilled cheese. The company rented an outdoor food shack for something like $10,000 and turned it into the GroupMe Grill with free grilled cheese sandwiches and beer. The grilled cheese, says co-founder Steve Martocci in this episode of Founder Stories, was “an homage” to Phish concerts, where grilled cheese sandwiches are consumed in large quantities (watch the video above).
The GroupMe Grill became a meeting point for attendees of SXSW, and it was one of the places everyone was taking photos of on Instagram (one of the other “winners” of SXSW). Jason Kincaid stopped by and did this video. All in all, two million text messages were sent through SXSW groups during the week of the event.
GroupMe wasn’t the only text messaging startup at SXSW. Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, Textplus, Yobongo, and many others were also there in full force. Does all this competition worry the GroupMe founders? In the video below, CEO Jared Hecht says, “It lights a fire under our ass.” But the proliferation of all of these semi-private group texting apps says something about the “broadcast overload” problem on more open social networks where “conversations are sterile.”
Be sure to watch Part I (on how GroupMe got started) and Part II (on where group texting is going) of this GroupMe interview. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes. (Disclosure: host Chris Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective).
Jared is the Co-Founder of GroupMe, a group messaging service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones and the web. In August 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in October 2011. Previously, Jared led Business Development at Tumblr where he focused on international expansion and strategic partnerships. Before Tumblr, Jared received his BA in Political Science from Columbia University in 2009 where he served...
Steve is the Co-Founder of GroupMe, a group messaging service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones and the web. In August 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in October 2011. Previously, Steve was a Lead Software Engineer at Gilt Groupe. Before joining Gilt, Steve founded Sympact Technologies, a startup focused on developing dynamic images for real-time email marketing, and Bandwith.us, a friends and family ticketing platform...
GroupMe is a group messaging service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones and the web. The service allows you to effortlessly group text with the people in your life that are important to you. It’s totally free and works on every phone. GroupMe is based in New York and was founded in May 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. In August 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft...
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