Greenville entrepreneurs solving a vexing tech problem for small businesses

In a house-turned-small-business off Pendleton Street in the Village of West Greenville, a neon sign is mounted over the living room mantel. It reads “Supermoon.”

At a makeshift conference table a few feet away sit John Barnett and Daniel Dye, co-founders of the company of the same name.

Barnett and Dye have known one another for 20 years. The men have each built their own businesses, sold them and invested in others.

Both Barnett and Dye’s LinkedIn profiles tell those stories quite well.

Spend time skimming them, you’ll find weighty names and brands: Boomerang, Propel HR, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter.

This time they’re building something together: a subscriber-based, AI-powered, customer communications and relations tool built for small businesses.

“We just kept coming back to the fact small business are using email to communicate with customers, sharing a Gmail or Outlook inbox among a handful of employees — never really knowing how conversation strings were coming together,” Barnett said.

What’s in a name

They chose “Supermoon” for their startup because the name is simple, easy to spell and performs well for the search engines.

“We really liked the name,” Barnett said. “It’s futuristic, friendly … has a ‘shooting for the moon’ idea and the word ‘super’ in it … and it’s fun to say.”

“And no one else is using it,” Dye added. “There’s all kinds of marketing ability with it.”

In other words, it’s practical, which is at the heart of what these two tech entrepreneurs are up to.

“We started building the team in November 2022, prototyping, talking to small businesses here in the Village,” Barnett said.

In those conversations, Barnett discovered small-business owners whose products sell far beyond the walls of their storefronts to points around the world.

“Small businesses live and die on the basics of running a business, and it’s hard.” Barnett said. “So we asked them the kinds of questions any small-business owner has encountered — what are your daily problems? How do you communicate with your customers? What are the daily pain points? If you could fix one thing, what would it be?”

They also appreciate the need for solutions that are both affordable and can do what they claim.

“What we’re building now is something that brings utility,” Dye said. “When it’s just you, you can take care of everything. But when you hire that first employee who is speaking on behalf of your brand, you don’t know what they’re going to say, how they’ll say it, or how long they’ll take to respond. With a shared inbox, now you can know. And the AI helps organize and take the rough edges off the ends of the communications spectrum.”