Chris Routh and Ben Tyson of Five and Fifty presenting at LAUNCH Conference on February 23rd. Photo by Ken Yeung via Flickr.
There’s a new deal in town and it’s called Five and Fifty, a Kansas City startup that provides businesses a quick and easy way to create a minimum 50% off deal that last for five hours. People in the local area receive the deal through text message, making it different from Groupon.
“Five and Fifty is the first real-time, self-serve deal site. Think instant Groupon. We solve the ‘slow night’ and perishable problem,” said Chris Routh, CEO of Five and Fifty, in a recent email interview. “Unlike all of the other deal sites, we don’t charge 50% of revenues, we simply take a small flat fee for every deal sent out.”
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As one of the few selected to speak at last week’s LAUNCH Conference, Routh along with CTO Mike Richardson and VP Ben Tyson took their product to San Francisco, where they were one of the few companies selected during interviewing process. “We applied back in late December and really without a product at that point. It was a long shot but we went for it – Jason Calacanis loved us.”
Here’s Five and Fifty’s presentation at LAUNCH:
Video from LaunchConf on YouTube.
“LAUNCH was awesome,” said Routh. “Everyone there had some really cool stuff and I was able to make some friends for life. Almost everyone I talked to was on their second or third startup so the quality of entrepreneurs was really high and made for some great conversations. As far as how it was for the company, it was fantastic. We got a ton of positive press, over 1,000 signups in a day, and a number of big time investors and VC’s interested in us.”
“Dave McClure from 500startups actually wore a shirt that said ‘Believe in your self.’ That pretty much is the philosophy out there. No one is really going to understand what your doing as well as you do so be passionate about it and people will feed on it. The LAUNCH conference really wanted to put people on stage that loved what they were doing.”
Learn more about Five and Fifty on fiveandfifty.com (below) and through the press that followed LAUNCH:
- VentureBeat: “Five and Fifty brings the Groupon approach to instant deals“
- Lockergnome: “Five and Fifty Launches Spontaneous Coupon Deals“
- Into Mobile: “Five and Fifty uses SMS to offer Groupon-like deals“
- Econsultancy.com: “Is real-time the future of group buying?“
Screenshot of fiveandfifty.com
