New app, Crescendo, aims to be the Mailchimp for push notifications

Crescendo, a new app which soft-launched a few weeks ago, allows companies to set up accounts, grow an audience and send them push notifications.  To develop its own app with push, a company can spend upwards of $300,000.  Crescendo allows these companies to instead sign up for its service and then customize their own page.  The founder's comments on why he thinks Crescendo will be a winner are consistent with those we heard from our guest speaker in our last class; specifically, Crescendo founder Dave Cascino notes "every other mechanism for reaching audiences is falling off.  Organic reach on Facebook is around 1%.  Twitter is around there, too."  He differs from our guest speaker insofar as he points out the drawbacks of email marketing.  "We've seen an exodus back home to email, but email is fraught with its own problems, too.  Email has the promotions tab, messages still go to spam quite often, it's just this messy-ass place.  The open rates even on a great email are 10-20% on a good day.  So if you have an audience, it's hard even to reach your own freaking audience," states Cascino.

Though still early, open rates for Crescendo's product are over 50% in every test so far.  50% is the baseline Cascino expects.  Cascino has even created a new marketing metric called 0 to 50, which is the time it takes from push being sent out to it reaching a 50% open rate.  Two Crescendo customers, Trap Karaoke and the Tribeca Film Festival have 0 to 50 open rates under 5 minutes.  Think about the effect that this can have on a marketing campaign; being able to reach over 50% of your target audience in under 5 minutes.

Crescendo's goal is to put companies at the forefront of opt-in marketing, meaning marketing to audiences who actually want to receive messages from a particular company.  Contrast that approach with an email marketing campaign that can come from purchased or rented email lists or from opt-out type customer interactions where the customer is unaware that he or she must opt-out.

Crescendo will operates as a SaaS, charging companies a monthly fee to maintain their page.  Cascino will soon begin looking for investment and hopes to raise a Series A somewhere between $1 million and $2 million.  Sounds to me like he could have a winner on his hands.