WHAMtextâ„  and Mobile Advertising

I had the pleasure of meeting with the two founders of WHAMtext℠ this morning, Jeff Lerner and Matt Whitney. The company offers on demand text message coupons to users of their service. The premise here is that this is demand based so there is no “opt-in” requirements which will you get bombarded by SMS spam.

Here’s how it will work: just text a business name or product and a location (zip code or school code) to 469426 (GoWHAM) and a customized deal will be texted right back to you.

The initial launch plans will focus on college towns and college students, then growing their base in major metropolitan areas over time. To date, these guys have self funded, sought additional support from friends and family and now have the backing of angel investment, primarily out of Dallas.

Although the company is based in Houston, they have not found the support they were hoping for from this market. “If we invented a pipe fitting to go on an oil rig, we would have found funding very easily. However, there seems to be a lack of understanding about information technology and advertising models in Houston which made our search for capital difficult,” said Lerner. “We are committed to Houston and plan to stay here despite advice from others for us to relocate to Austin.”

Historically, their business has been providing discount and savings cards to college students through WHAMcard. “Moving towards an SMS-based model seemed to make sense now that the technology is there to leverage off of,” says Whitney. “Our competition is not consistent and acts more like SMS spam. We feel that we have a unique model that can scale very well.”