Eric Eldon

There are plenty of companies trying to create new forms of group texting or social networking. There are far fewer who are trying to offer a messaging service that crosses the web, email and mobile devices in a seamless way. Facebook is perhaps the most obvious example, but its utility is social — you might not want to use it for work, or for organizing your kids’ little league game, or for communicating with the parents of a class you’re teaching.

Enter SendHub, a startup in this year’s Y Combinator class, that has already started to get some serious traction by focusing on professionals. The company offers a clean interface for creating and organizing groups of people, and communicating back and forth with them over their desired format.

The result is that it has been growing fast. When Sarah Perez covered SendHub in February, the company was sending 30,000 messages a month. Now, it’s sending around that amount per week. Check out the graph below. The numbers are still small, but they’re in the right direction. YC partner Paul Graham says that its growth looks like AirBnB’s in the early days.

What types of users are causing this growth? A few big partnerships are helping, including one with Teach For America and another with the Florida Department of Education, cofounders Garrett Johnson and Ash Rust tell me. But some people are using it for social purposes as well, including a group of cross-fit trainers who coordinate times to work out. And there’s a variety of folks who veer into Facebook Messaging territory by communicating with each other to keep social activities like beer crawls together.

How does the app work? You’ll need to go to the website, sign up with Facebook or Google or a new user account, then enter the information of the people you want to share with. You can do it manually, or import CSV docs from Gmail, Outlook and other email clients. You’ll also get a new local phone number (the company uses Twilio’s voice messaging platform on the backend).

Then you can start writing messages and texting them out to people. Other users can also join using a keyword you choose. So a local business could invite existing customers via uploading its CSV file of them and asking new users to text in to sign up (which is how most people are joining). You get a unique new phone number, and you’re asked to either add contacts manually or via a bulk importer.

Users who receive the texts are also sent a link to go back and rate the message or block the sender. So if a local business starts spamming too many deals, they’ll be able to get feedback quickly.

But why did the growth take off? The founder joined YC with a product in hand, but they tell me they got a bunch of design help that has made the site easier to use for people. Other cofounders with specific technical skills have also helped them with scaling their services for new waves of users. And, they also got encouraged to focus on every single user who called in. Right now, they’re sleeping shifts so they can respond to any issues 24 hours a day.

Where to next? “Email and social will be our primary focus in the short term, Rust says, but we expect voice will be an important frontier for us to develop.”

“We did a basic integration and we’re seeing over 3,000 calls a month. IM is attractive, but it’s not requested nearly as much.”

These types of messaging apps are inherently viral, but sometimes have trouble making money as a result of too much success (see: GroupMe, Beluga). SendHub provides a set of premium features instead. If you want to go above 1,000 messages a month, you’ll need to pay at least $10 a month. If you want more than three groups, larger API requests, the ability to bring your own number, phone support, or a branded profile page,  you’ll need to buy more expensive options.

The team still has a couple things to work out. In testing it out, the bulk importer had some trouble uploading my contact list. And the interface has some oddities, like an error message telling you that you need to type in a ten digit telephone number, which appears as you’re typing your number in. But all in all it feels right, and the engagement numbers seem to indicate that many more users will, too.

Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.

The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users.

Glancee works extra hard to match interests while minimizing the stalker feel. The main screen shows the Facebook profile photos of nearby people, but does not show a map of where they are, and it only summarizes the number of friends and interests in common. If you click through to the other person’s profile page, then you’ll see a list of Facebook friends in common as well as their interests versus yours.

The app compares your Likes in common with Wikipedia listings to identify similar categorical interests. Examples I’ve seen: If the other person likes The New Yorker, a line of text might say “You like The Econoimst.” If they like The Sopranos, it says “You like Mad men.” Sometimes these comparisons end up better than others, but overall the feature does succeed in showing you things loosely in common that might not have been obvious if you only compare Likes.

The app also goes very easy on notifications. During the past week I’ve been using Glancee, it’s sent maybe ten of them to me. I have to go to the app to see who’s nearby.

If you want to talk to anyone, a chat feature lets you message or voice call with them. A “News” tab on the home page shows you people with an especially large number of commonalities, as well as people who have visited your profile, or the activity of people you’ve communicated with. Also, the app goes very easy on your battery life.

In terms of future business models, Glancee’s ideas are along the lines of other location apps: targeting nearby ads, deals, etc. based on the users behavior.

Before I share my personal opinion about Glancee, I should point out that there are many other location apps that somehow use ambient location to try to create quality new connections. But very few are directly comparable to each other. Glancee cofounder Andrea Vaccari noted on my Highlight post that there’s also JoinMingle, Gatsby, Ban.jo, Shoutflow, Blendr, and Unsocial. And of course, there are many more location apps that have been around for years, like Loopt and Foursquare, not to mention Google Latitude or Facebook Places.

Briefly, here are the other things that some of these non-checkin apps are trying to do. JoinMingle is explicitly for professional networking, Gatsby provides a very opaque means of connecting in that it pairs you with specific people for one-hour-limited conversations, Ban.jo aggregates every other location service that it can, Blendr is dating-oriented, and Unsocial is designed around meeting people at conferences and other events. Shoutflow is the most similar that I’ve seen to Highlight and Glancee, but it’s not available in the US iTunes App Store so I haven’t personally used it. So, none of these apps appear to be that directly competitive to Glancee and Highlight (there’s lots more to say about each of these other apps, but they’re not what this article is about, sorry).

Glancee and Highlight are the ones that I’ve used that have provided social experiences that I have found to be meaningful. But, because I live in San Francisco and I’m a tech reporter, Highlight has been much more visceral for me. Being able to see exactly where other users are in relation to me makes a big difference considering that I’m in a city of hundreds of thousands of people sandwiched in a few square miles. So does the fact that it only shows people in a few blocks radius. And so does the fact that I get pinged by it whenever anyone is near. These are crucial subtle differences that totally reshape the user experience. Specifically, Highlight has been connecting me with long-lost friends and interesting new people in the tech world, who I’ve ended up having impromptu meetings with, and Glancee hasn’t.

But that’s just my tech-bubble perspective. Glancee is doing a lot of things right, and considering that a large portion of the US population does not live in dense urban areas, this could be the app for them. If you’re in a suburb or a spread-out small city or a rural area, the miles-radius range is more appropriate, and a neighborhood map is less relevant. Also, if you don’t like aggressive notifications and you like a long battery life, you’re going to like it more than Highlight.

But there’s always this caveat: Ambient location is not just something to build a company around, it is a feature that Facebook or Foursquare or any other big company doing location could also do very easily. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them test ambient out if any of these startups get serious traction. So readers, may each of you find the ambient location app that’s right for you.