(The MeNetwork’s COO Craig Page. Photo from the themenetwork.com.)
This is the fifth post in a six-post series recapping the demonstrations that took place at Thursday’s Cornstalks Demo Night. To learn more about the event, see our post, “These six startups will present at tonight’s Cornstalks Demo Night.”
While the mainstream daily deal and coupon sites have users sign up once to receive a constant stream of emails with deals, The MeNetwork, which operates via SMS, doesn’t believe that strategy translates to its platform.
“We have taken the opposite approach to that,” Craig Page, the Omaha startup’s COO, said. “We believe that people with cell phones are not gonna want to turn our cell phones into the exact same thing PCs have become, which is complete spam all the time.
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“So we have created a capability through text, that through our shortcode you can do a search,” Page said. That search, such as “Omaha Happy Hour”, will then return three results of specials near you.
As of the Friday’s Cornstalks Demo Night, The MeNetwork was live in 70 cities, providing deals for such merchants as restaurants, bars and car dealerships. “Anybody that basically has a cash register can use our service,” Page said. And they’re finding even those without one use it, as well. A minister in South Dakota uses it to inform his parishioners of the message of the week’s sermon.
In his demo, Page walked the audience through the The MeNetwork’s “Portal,” the dashboard where the user can do such actions as enter in his or her campaign copy, configure when and how it’ll respond to a text and check stats.
Other Portal features that Page highlight included a pre-populated list of keywords, calendar to select dates and an option to limit number of total texts sent out per campaign.
Going forward, Page said that they have an “iPhone app out to Apple for approval” that will use location-based technology to present MeNetwork deals around a user. The app will also allow users to subscribe to specific merchants to receive alerts each time that merchant posts a new deal.
To see The MeNetwork’s Portal in action, check out the video below. To learn more about The MeNetwork, see our February post: “The MeNetwork putting $500k to work, launching in Omaha tomorrow“.
