Winning the 2016 Talent Unleashed Award in Europe for Best Start Up – Tech Innovation, Richard Pleeth of Sup speaks about his business, how they started and how it felt to win at the EU awards.
Sup is a free mobile app that makes chance encounters and moments with friends happen more often — without the creep factor, as we don’t use maps. Sup is the first social app to actually make you more social. We’ve all been there when we check our social feeds and see that a friend we haven’t seen in ages was just round the corner; attending the same festival or event.
Tell us a little about Sup.
My ambition is to make the world more social by alerting users when their friends are nearby to make the world more social. Less staring at screens more seeing friends. Our objective is to make those magical serendipitous moments happen. To become the first successful UK based social app. Our team is all super young and super passionate, we foster an environment of entrepreneurship where everyone has freedom to express themselves, we have a policy of no ‘yes men’ we want our team to challenge the status quo and ensure that we are constantly pushing to achieve more. We have weekly team lunches, and team nights out every two weeks to ensure we operate as one. We have 20% time so that everyone can work on something else they are passionate about and keep everyone on their toes.
What made you start the business?
In 2014 I did 74 flights with my previous role where I was CMO at Gett (on-demand Taxi app), I found that I would always check in on Facebook when I was in a new city or a new airport hoping a friend would message me and tell me they were nearby, it would happen a lot but usually two hours or two days later. I would then also sometimes see on Facebook that friends were nearby when I was home in London and we’d have missed out seeing each other. People don’t use Find my Friends as you can stalk people, we wanted to create a beautiful seamless experience to see your friends more without the creep factor of tracking.
What about your success to date.
Having launched in November we now have 55,000 users, (this number will grow hugely following the release of android) we’re growing at 52% month on month which is extremely exciting, we’ve been featured 3 times on the apple app store. We raised £409,000 in July 2015, seed round investors include JamJar Investments (The Founders of Innocent), The Collective, The Founder of Wahanda, Force Over Mass Capital, Jim Mellon and Pi Capital.
How did it feel to win at the European Awards?
It’s our first awards that we have properly won which is great so hopefully we can get some really great PR out of it and hopefully we can attract some more talent to the business.