At a recent pitch event sponsored by The Hatchery, I thought one of the entrepreneurial pitchers received short shrift from the some of the judges.
It ain’t easy having to explain what your company is about, and in the case of NYC-based ShoutEm, perhaps a demo would have helped greatly.
What does ShoutEm do? It’s an iPhone web page generator that makes it simple for the proverbial non-technical type to publish a mobile site. Think of this as more like OnePager, the small biz web site creator I’ve written about, but for mobile.
And by the way, ShoutEm has WordPress and Drupal integrations that give bloggers little excuse not to have a mobile web presence.
ShoutEm CEO Viktor Marohnic was pretty clear that this not a development environment or IDE but rather a content management system-in-a-box for mobile apps.
After playing with ShouteEm’s site designer, you begin to see what he means. ShoutEm lets you pull in RSS feeds, Foursquare checkins, photos, social media, as well as posts from an existing blog site. They also support a push notification message.
ShoutEm lets you publish your blog on an iPhone or iPad.
In fact, I tried my hand at bringing in Technoverse’s own blog stream into ShoutEm and the deed was done faster than you can say Zagreb, Croatia, which is where Marohnic’s 10-person team resides.
Or just about. It worked fine in their dev environment, though I haven’t tested this out on a actual iPhone.
I’m in complete accord with Marohnic’s assessment of his crew of developers as being a “highly skilled engineering term.” From what I trialed, it is clear that these guys have first-rate programming chops.
In watching Marohnic face a volley of comments about ShoutEm going after the lowest level of functionality and tackling the least interesting apps, I though some of the judges didn’t understand the way a small business— restaurant, retail, publishing, repair, etc.—really operates.
ShoutEm, even with its current and admittedly less than rich functionality, could do much for SMBs in terms of marketing, customer engagement, and perhaps even field operations. We are talking about mostly owner-operators with limited IT talents who could quickly publish a reasonable external facing mobile app that does 90% of what’s needed.
ShoutEm’s approach is to deliver quality software, incrementally improve features, and effectively leave the highly customized mobile app market to others (though there is an enterprise option that accepts plugins). Obviously, there’s a lot of competition (Mobile Roadie and others) but I think that with a nice head start, ShoutEm could capture the good will of its audience and become an AppStore favorite in the business category.
As an aside, can you imagine if Starbucks had given a pitch at some of these startups events and the ensuing reactions: “You have lots of competitors! It’s a generic product! Why would anyone pay $2 for … coffee!”
As I’m writing this, I raise my cup of expertly brewed Starbucks espresso to this expertly crafted software.
One quibble: I think the subscription price of $29/month (for a year) could be lowered. How about an introductory offer of $10/month?
ShoutEm will be releasing a new version of their software next month. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Related articles
- Our Favorite Biz Apps: Summer Edition (technoverseblog.com)
- ShoutEm
