building sites; sales and marketing we’re still figuring out,” says Lifson. He says that because the company hasn’t spent any money on marketing or advertising, and has relied entirely on word-of-mouth, organic growth. It serves about 16,000 businesses. Property managers with multiple buildings are a prominent type of customer for the site, Lifson says.
Postling has raised about $700,000 in two equal rounds, from angel investors including Dave McClure, David Cohen, and Gary Vaynerchuk. It’s looking to raise another round of roughly $3 million in the next year or so, Lifson says, to help businesses generate more revenue via social media.
The six-person company’s monthly rates range from $9 to $49, or $5 to $10 per property per month, for businesses with multiple sites to monitor. Postling launched the instant e-mail notification feature in January, and has since seen its monthly revenue double and its number of paying customers triple, Lifson says.
Postling works out of the General Assembly incubator space in New York’s Flatiron district. The city’s diversity of businesses and industries make it a tech hub more connected to the general population, he says.
“The cafes in Palo Alto know about more tech than I do,” he says. “It’s no longer representative of the rest of the country.”
Meanwhile, New York is just the place for Postling, and the types of customers it serves, Lifson says. “You have the pizza place down the street that’s actually a New York pizza place,” he says. They don’t care about fancy technology like check-ins and mobile payments.
