messaging and what was available for me to talk to any of the businesses I interact with— normally through a phone or e-mail. I was shocked to see the only real messaging software that existed were extensions to apps, websites, and the like. That was the genesis.
Whoever I would present this [software] to at the various companies as a channel to their customers, those individuals wanted to deal with the other companies they were working with through this kind of channel.
Now Pypestream is in excess of 50 people, with offices in San Francisco and New York. We have a large gas utility onboard who wants their 1.4 million customers to interface with the platform instead of calling their call center. In exchange for them agreeing to do that, they would get a discount on their utility bill.
There’s a massive [return on investment] play behind using a messaging system instead of a call center or an app. That’s really around the artificial intelligence that can be switched on in the backend that can answer a lot of the queries, and respond to what consumers require in terms of customer service or support—with the ability to tailor those response messages with some human touch and personalization.
In the same amount of time it takes for one phone call, you could be having up to 16 concurrent message conversations. It’s a very efficient, drastic shift in cost savings.
X: How is this type of messaging different from social media contact with businesses?
RS: Using social media to interact with a company is more about broadcasting something to that company in an open forum. By nature, we are conversationalists. There’s a desire to have conversations, which are there to potentially expose something that people generally don’t want exposed in a public forum.
If you tweet to a company that your cable isn’t working, they may tweet back that your credit card was declined. No one really wants that in an open forum. You do have direct messaging; it’s very one-layered in its functionality. You couldn’t have them see why the credit card was declined, and then try it again.
With conversations in Pypestream, we’ve made it so private and secure that you can update your payment inside the message. No one else is going to see it. You can ask for a statement because it interfaces with the backend of the bank.
With a tweet, they’ll basically tell you to notify the call center, and on a secure line change your credit card. Messaging is the next generation of what social media really is. Social media was fine as a bridge into messaging.
Quite frankly, you wouldn’t do anything on Facebook that you would do with a call center. You wouldn’t change your flight on Facebook; you wouldn’t change your seats on Facebook; you wouldn’t update your credit card details, or ask your doctor for your blood results.
You can now do that in a messenger.
X: How do you plan to scale up?
RS: Our main focus as a business is handling the demand from the two markets we’re addressing. The first is the self-serve, SMB [small and medium-size business] market. Those businesses are finding us through media and word of mouth. We have a waitlist of a couple of thousand companies. Now we’re staffing up to on-board those businesses.
We also have an enterprise side. This is where we go to businesses that have existing call centers and very complex back ends and integrate our software. Any outputs that come from those existing systems can now be channeled through Pypestream. We’re staffing up heavily on integrators and developers that can build our back end into all these legacy systems.
X: Do you have any outside funding?
RS: We’re pretty well-funded by individuals; we have no venture capital. We’re being inundated with inbound contacts because the market’s realizing that messaging is the next evolutionary channel. We’ve raised around $4.5 million to date.
One of the advantages to keeping out of VC hands—we can afford to make quick decisions.
