You’ve probably heard of Groupon. You’ve probably heard of Yik Yak. You’ve probably heard of Yelp. What you probably haven’t heard of is something Upstate entrepreneur Chase Michaels has been working on for six years that, he says, combines the best elements of all three.
The program – DealsOnTheGoGo – is a mouthful to say, but boils down to using geofencing technology to provide real-time advertising, data analytics and return on investment rates for small businesses at a fraction of the costs they’re used to paying, he says.
“The most important consumer a business can have is the consumer that lives there and already wants their product,” says the 53-year-old serial entrepreneur. “Never before has a business been able to get real-time conversion and return on investment rates for advertising.”
Geofencing uses your phone’s GPS to pinpoint your location, and lets you set a radius that limits your searches to what’s nearby. Consumers can choose which deals they want to see within the radius, and get push notifications for what merchants are offering which deals that moment.
The geofencing allows small businesses to send out highly targeted advertisements to people who are more likely to want what they sell, and gives merchants feedback about how many people saw the deal, how many walked into their store, how many people actually bought the offer and what types of people fell into those three categories. The feedback lets merchants adjust their campaigns to optimize the offers and times using anonymous consumer data.
Traditional marketing, he says, “is like throwing a dart at a dartboard and never being able to see if it hit of not,” he says. Early beta testing focused on millennials (62 percent) with smaller groups to test with baby boomers, Generation X and Generation Y, and he’s optimistic that the fast-growing boomer generation will provide an extra boost of activity.
The business model relies on a once-a-month flat fee with subscription-style options depending on the level of analytics businesses want. The starting rate is $199 a month, which is drastically lower than the Groupon model – which gives merchants half of the revenue from the already discounted item – and the 5-7 percent businesses typically allocate in their annual budgets for advertising, he says.
Around 400 merchants have signed on to the concept in Myrtle Beach and 160 in Charleston, and Michaels is hitting the street for Greenville businesses leading up to launch in May. The initial launch will include both Android and iOS across the Greenville, Charleston and Myrtle Beach markets. Plans down the road include a full Spanish-language app to target the 80 percent of the 42 million native Spanish-speaking population, and eventually a push internationally. The diversity of businesses and people in Greenville could lead to reaching more than a thousand merchants across any of his 40 set categories, he says.
“Everybody wants a mobile consumer, but they don’t know how to get it,” he says. “For the last six years, I’ve gotten out of bed thinking somebody’s going to beat me to market… and they haven’t.”
Michaels grew up in an entrepreneurial household in a Nebraska town of 210 people. His family ran a full-service gas station, his mother ran a bar and restaurant and his father held multiple jobs, including delivering mail to rural households in a 60-mile radius from the central town. Michaels started his own business at 23 – a lead-based paint testing firm for realtors in South Carolina – and spent a number of years in Charleston, Greenville and Florida before deciding to relocate all of his administrative employees to the Upstate for DealsOnTheGoGo.
“Everybody likes deals, whether you have $1 million or $10,” he said.
