CrowdReach president Trey Rust has many responsibilities but few titles, an anomaly among tech startups. It’s a knack for simplification that he put to good use when creating his web and mobile communications platform that helps small businesses and organizations accomplish a not-so-simple task: marketing themselves directly to customers and supporters. “For business owners who are working hard to focus on all aspects of their company, communication needs to be really easy to incorporate into daily operations,” says Rust.
Restaurant owners, yoga instructors, even pastors who purchase CrowdReach subscriptions can visit the website or log into the app, then create messages to send across e-mail, text, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Customers receive messages based on their preferred medium—important, warns Rust, because “if you are communicating where people aren’t listening, you’re never going to be heard.”
The technology’s CrowdPleaser feature allows users to send real-time promotions to tailored lists or to all clients within a specified range (for example, a bakery might message all their contacts in a five-mile radius with a buy-one-get-one deal for that morning only).
The company hasn’t even celebrated its first birthday yet, but is already expanding into King Street’s new Pacific Box & Crate development in the coming weeks—proof that keeping it simple pays off.
