in their smartphones without using the Internet. “My goal is to make apps that everyday Americans who aren’t techy can use,” he says.
Say you’re traveling out of town on business and you accidentally leave your smartphone—and the phone numbers of all the clients you’re supposed to meet with while you’re away—behind. The ContactPal app would allow you to use a landline to access your mobile phone’s contact list and communicate with the numbers stored there, even if your smartphone is turned off or 3,000 miles away.
Turner says the app works regardless of what kind of smartphone the user has or who the carrier is, and he imagines a lot of different contexts for its use. “I think it could be a fantastic emergency tool for families,” he notes. “I think about Hurricane Katrina—it’s hard to access your smartphone if it’s under water.” Another feature that will be added in the future: a way to grant temporary access to a babysitter or other caregiver instead of writing out a list of important phone numbers.
“Once, I was on my way to Washington, DC, to meet with a client and I left my phone in my friend’s car after she dropped me off at the airport,” Turner says when describing how the idea for ContactPal came about. “I didn’t know the client’s number and, moreover, I didn’t remember my friend’s number. How was I going to get her cell number? It’s not like I could look it up online.”
Turner also recalled the time he noticed a different client, who was in her 60s, deleting numbers out of her iPhone. When he asked her what she was doing, she said she was worried that she was becoming too reliant on her phone to recall important phone numbers, so she was deleting them as a way to force herself to remember. “There had to be a better way,” he says.
So, he reached out to four guys he’d known since his days at MSU. Turner points out that MyGoToNumber’s co-founders—Julian Mardirosian, David Pian, Jackie Brown, and Joshua Shelvin—are not only very diverse in terms of skill sets and professional experience, but also race. “We have African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and dual-race heritage representation,” he says. “We all went our separate financial ways after college, matured, and then came back together to work on this.”
ContactPal has been under development for a year and a half, and Turner says Aubrey Agee at WSU’s Blackstone LaunchPad incubator program has been instrumental in MyGoToNumber’s maturation. “Aubrey really helped us launch and take it to the next level,” he adds. “He made sure I entered the [Accelerate Michigan] competition and he made the right introductions.”
Turner says he and his co-founders are striving to make ContactPal “Detroit and American made.” The ultimate goal is to develop it here and provide jobs as the company goes down the path toward an eventual acquisition. Perhaps even more important to Turner, though, is that young men who look like him or come from a similar background see that they, too, have a future in tech entrepreneurship.
“Often, you read about young entrepreneurs in magazines, but you rarely read about young African American males who are entrepreneurs,” he says. “That lack affects motivation and inspiration. I hope to be one of those faces that lets all people—all colors, all genders—know that the American Dream doesn’t care about skin color.”
