Innovative business ideas: SMS messaging for groups

Posted on July 20, 2008

You would say that sending text messages from your mobile phone is old technology and that is way too hard to type in something to make it worthwhile.  And then, we have  mobile phone advertising -  I guess this is not  news either, and that you saw everything that could be done there.

But… Hold on. We then have young entrepreneur Derek Johnson that while being a college student that in 2007 saw an opportunity to grow a business around text messaging for groups: “We started Tatango to solve a simple problem that many of us faced trying to manage and organize groups we belonged to. We needed an easier way to communicate with fellow group members who were constantly on the go and not in front of a computer. We knew what we had developed was pretty amazing, but never could have imagined it spreading to athletic teams, bloggers, politicians, schools, celebrities, parents, churches, musicians and organizations which are so diverse from one another.”

The service grew within a few months of launch to over 400,000 users and over 15 million text messages. That’s quite amazing for a business started in the parents basement.

See Derek’s interview on Entrepreneur-interviews to find out how you can turn a simple idea into an innovative business.

Related posts

» Filed Under Innovative Business Ideas, Interviews Tags: Tags:

Comments

4 Responses to “Innovative business ideas: SMS messaging for groups”

  1. Shawn on July 28th, 2008 5:44 am

    I don’t know if great business starts always have to be tremendously innovative. Sometimes I think it’s sufficient that they meet a need.

  2. Tatango » Blog Archive » Tatango in the Press on July 28th, 2008 7:51 pm

    [...] Small Business Entrepreneur wrote: Innovative business ideas: SMS messaging for groups [...]

  3. admin on August 6th, 2008 11:44 pm

    Hi Shawn,

    Postponing the starting point for a business in order to wait for an innovative idea it’s probably the single major mistake people do and never actually get to start a business.

    In fact most businesses start by replicating something that it’s already on the marketing, and along the way discover how to make it better and become successful.

  4. Anup on October 24th, 2008 1:13 am

    I agree, smart entrepreneurs enter a space which is profitable and then differentiate their offering as they go along. This is called the ‘hedgehog’ concept in Jim Collin’s book ‘Good to Great’

    http://www.econfirm.com.au is one such example.

Leave a Reply




  • Archives