Asheville Startup MobRocket T-Minus 1 Day Until Launch

A local startup is gearing up to blast off May 20th, 2015. MobRocket, brainchild of David Bentley is launching out of the gate with one pursuit in mind: take down popular deals website Groupon. Since its inception in 2008,  Groupon has been helping businesses reach new customers by using their deals related online platform. The premise behind the popular website is that consumers purchase a product at a significantly reduced price. The vendors pay Groupon to promote the deal, and a portion of the profits for the sale in exchange for placing the product in front of customers. The sales giant reaches businesses in over 500 worldwide markets, and is currently valued at over $1 billion dollars.

Why does the four man team at MobRocket want to eliminate Groupon? While it seems like a business would benefit from Groupon’s offerings, the reality is that business owners suffer a loss when they enlist the help of the deals website. After heavily reducing on the price on their product, owners must pay a percentage of sales to Groupon who can take up to 100% of the profit. The worst part is, 58% of people that use the virtual coupon website admit that they won’t ever be a loyal customer. As a small business themselves, the employees of MobRocket hate seeing fellow entrepreneurs suffer to build a loyal customer base.

David Bentley, Chad Slagle, Jacob Voigt, and Josiah Greenewald believe they can knock deals websites out of the game with MobRocket. This free, easy to use online application employs proven methods to gain a wider reach. Incentivized sharing will encourage consumers to reach out to their friends and create a wide, organic reach that will benefit the business involved. The goal for MobRocket is to allow businesses to reach more people, generate more revenue, which in turn will create more jobs and add more money to the local economy.

Unlike LivingSocial, Groupon, and other deals based websites, MobRocket will never have a marketplace. Bentley explains that “consumers are business customers, but when using a discount deal service like Groupon, there is no relationship forged between the business and the consumer.” Instead, the businesses is indebted to the customer. Instead of creating a linear relationship between the business, consumer, and advertising party, MobRocket wants to create a triangle. Businesses will be able to forge relationships with their clientele, creating a loyal consumer and extending the business’s reach.

How does MobRocket plan on doing this? In a word – giveaways. Instead of offering a set number of products at a severely discounted price, the business will offer a chance to win an item or service. MobRocket will promote and spread the giveaway, tracking valuable analytics that the business owner can then use to learn more about their consumers. Each giveaway, or campaign, lasts for the duration of a week. An individual can enter to win by simply providing a first name and email address. Once they enter to win, they are immediately rewarded with a coupon sent to their inbox, courtesy of the business. Entrepreneurs set their own coupon terms and are required to honor the coupon for the period of one month.

If you want more than one chance to win the offered prize, MobRocket encourages you to spread the word about your participation via social media. Every tweet you send earns you one more chance to win, and there is the option to spread the word on Facebook for additional entries as well. Even if you don’t win, you have a valuable coupon to use at a local business. Who doesn’t love a good coupon?

The MobRocket team stepped me through the process of setting up a campaign. The process was simple, painless, and took only 5 minutes to complete. The interface is clean and easy to understand, and even those not comfortable with computers will be able to set up a campaign with ease, as there are no pages to click through or back buttons to worry about. Once the campaign is published, you can login to the MobRocket dashboard and watch the results of your giveaway in real time. Number of entries; what social media platforms the event was shared on; how many people have viewed the campaign; these are just a few bits of data that business owners can use to learn more about consumer usage of campaigns. The staff at MobRocket has seemingly thought of everything including preventative measures that have been put in place to disregard fake shares, so that dishonest consumers will not falsely be awarded a prize.

MobRocket is the first of its kind, and is a mobile first application for the consumer side. While participating in the beta campaign, businesses experienced a  25% conversion rate, which is the highest rate of conversion of all marketing tools that currently exist online. However, a 25% isn’t high enough for MobRocket. The dedicated team is reaching for the stars, and will continue to push for better results, while taking the guesswork out of online marketing for small businesses. This is fresh, untested territory, but the team behind MobRocket is confident that this application will quickly change how online deals websites conduct business.

For more information on MobRocket, watch the video below. The app officially launches May 20th, and can be found at www.mobrocket.com.