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As any sports franchise can attest, a youth movement has the potential to revitalize the future of a team. It may take a short time or a period of years, but it can all yield positive results with the right crop of new talent.
So too in the entrepreneurial world, where a younger generation of Johnson Countians is using its ingenuity and lending some expertise to helping new or existing businesses in Kansas City. Two brothers are taking their tech-savvy idea and shopping it nationwide, while another group of guys congregates in an underground workspace, trying to cultivate other entrepreneurs’ innovative ideas. Front Flip and BetaBlox are the products of Kansas City’s burgeoning youth movement in business.
Front Flip: Unexpected Happiness
Sean and Matt Beckner would often talk business on their parents’ deck when they were in high school at Shawnee Mission Northwest. Plus, it’s in the genes. Their father, Pat, has had his own commercial real estate business for more than 25 years, so they saw him put his passion into practice.
The Beckner brothers graduated from the University of Kansas School of Business and had both worked in their share of ventures until Matt grew disconcerted at a coffee shop he frequented. He was one of their best customers, and yet something was off.
“One day he was standing there saying, you know, they have no idea how good of a customer I am,” Sean says. “They don’t ever say hey, let me give you an extra shot of espresso or a free pastry today. They didn’t really have that relationship. So Matt went down the street to a different coffee shop.”
Sad thing is, that shop had no idea it drove away a significant revenue generator. And even if it did know, there was no real recourse to ask where Matt had been or to suggest a return visit.
Both Sean, 33, and Matt, 29, live for solving problems. So Matt, the product innovation guru, conceived the idea of a mobile application called Front Flip that would truly embody customer engagement. Front Flip, which was introduced Nov. 4, 2011, helps businesses communicate with customers and drive in traffic, yet it also advances those relationships and ensures that they walk through the door again.
Once the app is downloaded, users can choose from more than 400 Front Flip-compatible businesses in the Kansas City area and then scan a digital scratch card without the annoying residue on your finger. After it’s scratched, a winner can redeem a prize from that business within a 30-minute window. The less fortunate user has to wait another day to try and win. So the scratchability is not unlimited. But scoring a cool prize through a mobile device eliminates the hassle of snipping coupons or carrying scads of loyalty cards. And it goes for both sides of a transaction.
“How would you like to say to your customers, ‘Do you want a chance to win a free large pizza today?’ Or, ‘do you want to win a free appetizer or your shoes for free?’ Or whatever it might be that’ll make sense for that business,” Sean says. “That’s something a lot more fun, a lot more exciting, for an employee. It makes them feel like they’re interacting.”
Business partners also gain access to tracking data concerning demographics and who travels from where. They’re also capable of detecting how frequently a customer stops by. Who hasn’t been back and scanned in the last 30, 60 or even 90 days? Front Flip has it covered. Through the platform, they’re also able to select targeted gifts for their best customers in specific groups. So businesses can send a gift to females from 21 to 45, but males in that age range would receive a different gift. They can follow how gifts are being redeemed and what those percentages are.
Front Flip’s user numbers confirm some explosive growth. After the first two months, the company has approached more than 100,000 scans just in Kansas City. About 25,000 users started scratching away the first month, and by the second month, that had doubled. They’re exceeding 2,000 unique users a day. Compare that to the nationwide launch of another mobile app, Foursquare, which added 5,000 users its first month. Area businesses like SportClips, Pride Cleaners and 54th Street Grill and Bar are seeing a noticeable uptick in business with Front Flip.
Front Flip is planning to expand; speaking from Dallas, Sean Beckner says the goal for 2012 is to initialize the platform in 50 major U.S. cities. “I think with this, it surprises. It’s the fun, it’s a suspense,” Sean says. “We call it unexpected happiness, that you go up to a business, you can scan it on Front Flip and you might win something free and great right there on the spot. We run into people all the time and people thank us for making their day a little bit more fun.”
BetaBlox: Fostering Innovation
Ideas like Front Flip are precisely the kind that seed accelerator BetaBlox is ready to attract and nurture.
BetaBlox comprehensively lends a long-term hand to local businesses at the startup stage. Its team members do all the footwork for the fledgling entrepreneur by providing such services as free Web development, graphic design and photography, and typically do so for up to a six-month period.
Three young Johnson County natives are predominantly heading up the BetaBlox team. Lead investor Weston Bergmann, along with Jonathan Yoder and Alex Altomare, all graduated from high school in 2003: Bergmann and Yoder from Blue Valley North, Altomare from Rockhurst.
Bergmann says the best way to describe what’s going on is they are re-enhanced networks. In isolation, anyone can get the hang of Web development. Well, eventually. But applicants chosen by BetaBlox have all manner of service providers at their disposal, contributing their time and knowledge to mentoring these people until they’re ready to start generating revenue.
“What’s also kind of different,” Bergmann says, “is the intangible benefits of having entrepreneurs be around each other that are working on different projects, but are all in the same stage in business as each other. We’re calling that entrepreneurial cross-pollination, to where you might talk to 100 people a day because you see a bunch of customers and you’re talking to a bunch of different service providers. But ultimately it’s a very lonely experience. By putting all the different companies under one roof while they’re blossoming, it allows them to not feel so alone in the path that they’re taking with their careers.”
The entrepreneurs that BetaBlox consults—10 companies made the cut, while 90 percent of the applications had to be turned down as it opened—congregate and bounce ideas back and forth in the comfort (and isolation) of a huge cave-like space just west of Penn Valley Community College. And BetaBlox doesn’t ask to pay rent. Everywhere you walk, you can pretty much write all over the facility. One wall of every single office is done in IdeaPaint, ready to be scribbled on for impromptu meetings.
A mentorship program with a list of 50-plus people in the Kansas City business community also allows the entrepreneurs to learn the ropes. So does a 16-week class led by ex-Black and Veatch chief financial officer and Johnson County Community College professor Geoff Heathcock. As Heathcock says, it’s not a “Mickey Mouse class” by any stretch.
Heathcock believes in what Bergmann and his crew are doing as they plan to foster innovation. He is more than willing to participate, because they’re like sponges ready to learn, and he’s a proponent of its long-term orientation. And for guys who haven’t even reached 30 yet, that thinking impresses him.
“When they have any kind of question at all, I’m going to be back there to answer their questions and I will mentor them. Because this is important to me,” Heathcock says. “Most incubators don’t have that. They have people that just come in and go out, and they don’t really have ongoing mentors. So I’ve got all the horse sense of a teacher and of a professor, and all the reality of what really needs to be done.”
Bergmann, a veteran of MTV’s Real World franchise, says BetaBlox won’t make a solitary dollar until companies reach a successful liquidation event. Consequently it’s in their best interests to stay in contact with them as much as possible.
Although details couldn’t be divulged, as of January, BetaBlox has officially given the keys to companies specializing in Web-based software and other technology-driven ideas, including some with inherent social networking coded into the software. Bergmann considers the weeks leading up to the Investor Demo Day in January, where the first batch of entrepreneurs finally pitched their ideas to a room full of investors, to be among the best of his life.
“I’ve been dreaming about how I’ve been going to help entrepreneurs since I was a little kid,” Bergmann says, “and here I am implementing a plan that I’ve been putting to paper for the past four years on a different side of the country. And it is all becoming tangible and being realized in front of my eyes.”
Visit frontflip.com to know more about the app and betablox.com to know more about the program and mentoring.
