Earlier this year, Bump Technologies received a phone call from Apple, Inc. letting the co-founders know its flagship product, Bump, was the one billionth app to be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. Thanks to the resulting media coverage, Bump is one of the most popular apps in the store, and investor firm Sequoia Ventures is anxious to flood the new company with $3 million in first-round funding.
Bump is a nifty little app that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users exchange contact information by simply tapping their devices together. The data is then sent into the cloud by one device, and retrieved from the server by the other -- all in the blink of an eye.
David Lieb, co-founder and president of Bump Technologies says the idea was born out of his frustration over how difficult it is to enter contact information into cell phones. "Back in 2005, I was at a breakfast meeting with some new colleagues," he writes. "While exchanging phone numbers with some of them, I made my usual whiny comment about how somebody should figure out a way to automate the process. A colleague asked, 'Well, if you are going to whine about it, how would you design it?' My reply: 'I don't know, but I should be able to just bump my phone against theirs', but I didn't know how to make that work with the current mobile phones at that time.
"Fast forward to 2008, when one of our other founders and I left our jobs to go to business school. During the first week, we each typed the names and numbers of dozens of our new classmates into our phones, and we decided enough was enough. We noticed that almost all of our classmates had smartphones with data connections and new types of sensors -- and we realized that we could finally make exchanging contact information as easy and secure as just bumping phones together."
Bump Technologies doesn't charge for the basic app and has no plans to do so "for the entire foreseeable future." The company does, however, plan to release a premium version for a one-time fee that will allow users to exchange multiple contacts at once and set up different profiles for work, school, etc. No doubt at least a portion of the new $3 million cash influx will go toward quicker production of this new paid version of Bump. Techcrunch's Jason Kincaid claims it will be used to "extend Bump beyond the iPhone (I suspect we'll see an Android version), and to expand the team."
Bump Technologies looks like a startup that did everything right. They saw a need, researched the market, released a freemium app, then slowly worked on developing a paid version of their product. The sheer stroke of luck that resulted in Bump being the one billionth App Store download no doubt catapulted them to the front of the line of entrepreneurs waiting to get on a venture capitalist's radar.
The moral of the story? If you have an idea for a startup, run with it. You never know where you'll end up.
Posted at 08:21AM Nov 03, 2009
by Joann Yates in Sun
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