Nestled safely in YouTube's old office in San Mateo, California, Bluepulse founder and chief executive Ben Keighran is hoping his mobile business will become the next big thing in social networking. With $6m in investment from VantagePoint Venture and 16 full-time staff on board, Keighran explains that his biggest problem is hiring enough staff.
Bluepulse founder Ben Keighran
• Explain your business to my Mum.
"Bluepulse is the best way to message and communicate with friends using your phone. You can send messages to everyone in your address book with one click, messages to small or large groups of friends, see who is online and also send instant and direct messages.
"You can also share pictures and videos and show your friends who you are friends with. Another cool thing about Bluepulse is that you can also send regular SMS and email from it as well, meaning that Bluepulse is the killer mobile messaging application.
"To use it, your Mum will need an internet-enabled phone to access bluepulse.com. Tell your Mum she'll really enjoy getting all of those updates from you all day long too..."
• How do you make money?
"We are not currently making any profits, as we are focusing our efforts on building our userbase. We plan to make money in the future by implementing an ad-supported model."
• What's your background?
"I've been a tech guy my whole life. I got my first computer when I was 10 and soon after I borrowed a programming book from a friend. I've been texting for as long as I can remember. I studied computer science at university in Sydney and started Bluepulse as a side project while still a student. It was a family friend who urged me to turn this project into a business."
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"Bluepulse is currently delivering more than 150m messages per month to users in more than 190 countries. Within 12 months, we plan to drastically grow our user base within the United States."
• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
"By definition, the mobile phone is the most personal device in that it is always with us and we don't share it with others. In that sense, Bluepulse is a personalised product because it is optimising this very personal device for messaging with our closest circle of friends. Bluepulse also has a recommendation component to it in that we can see who our friends have become friends with, which is like a friend recommending a friend for us."
• What's your biggest challenge?
"We have so much that we want to do and build that we just can't hire fast enough. I feel like I need to clone myself and have that clone work on hiring 24/7. Scaling to accommodate growth is also a big challenge."
• Name your closest competitors.
"Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook."
• Any weird business experiences so far?
"Raising money is definitely pretty bizarre! If I had the time, I would write a book about this."
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
"I don't think the current environment is anything like the late nineties when companies were going public left, right and center. Last quarter was the first quarter in 30 years when not one venture-backed company went public, so that's not much of a bubble."
• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"To have improved the world's communication, by becoming the killer mobile messaging application."
• What advantages do standalone social networking services like Bluepulse have against their rivals?
• Can they compete against mobile versions of sites like Facebook?
• And would you use it?
