Deep in the wilds of St. Louis, a little company run by Dan Lohman, Yomi Toba, and Jan Christian Andersen wants to add all the social media things to all the web things. How? With Pushup Social.
Pushup Social essentially adds a social media page to your web page. For example, the Endangered Wolf Center created a social community that lets them share photos, Instagram content, Tweets, and updates with a group of interested visitors. To connect to the system you simply sign in via Facebook or Twitter and then you become part of the action.
Lohman is a repeat entrepreneur and his CTO, Toba, worked at Lockerdome. Anderson has worked with Lohman at Lab1500 in St. Louis. The team is actually seeing amazing increases in social media engagement – over 500% in some cases.
“Website visitors can peer into a community without signing up and we measure these interactions as impressions,” said Lohman. “In August we had more than 150,000 impressions with Pushup spread over our communities. In the last month we also saw a huge increase in time-on-site for our clients, once someone engaged with the Pushup community. Our client’s average time-on-site prior to engaging with the Pushup community is 28 seconds. That jumps to 145 seconds when a member or a visitor engages the social feed.”
The company raised an angel round of $900,000 and has about 300 communities using the platform. They are going to be approaching website builders like Squarespace, WIX, and Weebly but they are already adding about three customers per day. Installation consists of one line of code for most websites.
“The concept for Pushup originated when Yomi Toba was helping his mom build an online community for her charity in Africa,” said Lohman. “She wanted to build her own community of supporters, volunteers, and donors on her website where they could engage directly on the site without being redirected to another platform. After looking though the available solutions on the market, Yomi felt that adding an online community should be as easy as adding Google analytics to your site. He set out to build a solution and, when working on his prototype, Yomi met Dan Lohman and Jan Andersen. They were inspired, teamed up, and together they have made Pushup what it is today.”
The team is also helping athletes and stars build out a quick Pushup page for their extensive social media presences, allowing static websites to gain a little oomph – and, to paraphrase Smash Mouth, we all need a little oomph.
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