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Why Millennials Are Flocking To Friend Finder App Sup

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Ever taken 74 flights in one year? If you have taken even half that number, you probably know the value of bumping into a friendly face at the airport, even if it’s just for a quick coffee in the frequent flyers lounge before you jet off in different directions.

Rich Pleeth knows the feeling all too well, as well as the disappointment that comes with discovering your friend was sat in the next café down, blissfully unaware of your presence. He is the founder of Sup, a new social app aimed at upwardly mobile, time-poor millennials who want to discover whereabouts their friends are, see them more and interact with them as straightforwardly as possible. Think Yo, but with a purpose.

Rich is an ex-googler who has divided his time for the last decade between London and New York, having grown up as a brit abroad in the Netherlands and Hong Kong, before attending Birmingham University, where he studied international relations and politics.

After internships at Orange, Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann Erickson Rich became a Marketing manager at L’Oreal in London, a job he says he loved and hated in equal measure. He joined Google as a Product Marketing Manager in 2010 where he says his “job was to persuade brands to hate us a bit less”.

Google weren’t popular with brands or advertisers (Martin Sorrell, the billionaire head of global advertising network WPP described them as “his worst frenemy”) most likely because it became almost impossible to advertise online without them. “Google put digital at the heart of everything and people didn’t have the right tools to understand it”, says Rich; “today it’s mobile”, but we’ll come to that.

Rich launched Google’s book Think Quarterly whose purpose was to persuade brands to get on board with digital; he ran events and the book featured everyone from celebrated ad-man Rory Sutherland to ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to Richard Reed, the millionaire founder of Innocent Smoothies, a start-up that made it big way before start-ups were the next big thing, now 90% owned by Coke, whose share has cost them close to £100 million.

A restless Rich was on the move again in 2012, leading Google Chrome’s marketing push back in the UK; he led a big push into television ads with Google’s “Cambridge Satchel Company” campaign using the brand as an example of how a small business or start-up could put Google at the centre of its operations.

He also looked after Google doodles in the UK– surely every online marketing fanatic’s dream job? “Yes it was awesome but in reality we had to figure out months in advance what big historical event was happening or piece of news we could celebrate”, he remembers, “then the fantastic Doodle team based in Silicon Valley would create an amazing graphic.” Editing the most famous page on the web? It must have been hard to climb down from that career peak.

Indeed it was – a lack of autonomy and a feeling of being tied down led Rich to change tack and accept a job at GetTaxi (now known as Gett), a start-up that matched taxi-drivers to customers; it may not be the best known way to hail a cab these days (Uber, Lyft, BlaBlaCar, Didi Kuaidi in China), but Rich, who sat on the executive team for 18 months, helped the firm drive 400% year on year growth, raise $150m in funding from billionaire angels and VCs, and increase the company’s valuation from $120m to $1.1 billion. Gett are now in more than 50 cities and still very much part of the conversation when it comes to the battle of the ride sharing apps.

Which brings us to Sup; “I had such a great time working for others and learnt from some of the most inspiring people, but I’d always had the itch to start something myself.”, he told me; all those flights and international travel got him thinking. “I used to miss people by hours or minutes at every destination I found myself in and I discovered nobody was using friend finder apps like Latitude or Find My Friend.

The penny dropped; the biggest problem with friend finder apps was the fact that they were too stalker friendly; Rich himself accidentally rumbled friends engaged in clandestine meetings with other friends from time to time and concluded that a truly successful location discovery app had to have self-imposed limits.

Sup uses a radar based system (no maps involved) that reveals the proximity of friends without revealing their precise geographical location or direction. By randomising people’s exact location users can let others know they are nearby (perimeters can be set from 20-2000 metres) without giving away too much detail; they can even choose to “go dark” when it suits them to be traveling incognito.

Users can choose to be notified when the app discovers friends nearby and given the option to “send a Sup”, instant message or send a 5 second voice message. They can select whether they want to see only their friends or meet new people based on a selection of interests; “privacy is at the heart of the way Sup operates and it’s something we take extremely seriously”, says Rich.

The other major driving force behind the app is to deliver the “beautiful, seamless experience”, so beloved of millennials. Millennials have rapidly become the end game for every mobile app designer; in the US alone there are 92 million of them as compared to 77m baby boomers (51-70) and “generation X” (36-50), plus they are mobile savvy and impatient users for whom simplicity of communication is everything.

From Facebook, with 1.4bn users, to Snapchat with 200m, the battle for the hearts and minds of millennials will be won, Rich believes, by the app which delivers the superior user experience.

“When I quit my job at GetTaxi and started this job, frankly I was terrified”, he remembers; "I woke up on my “first day” and thought, so what do I do now. Get up? Lie in? I would have a 20 minute panic attack every day that I was unemployed.”

Rich threw himself into the task of making friends and influencing people; “I started by sending literally thousands of emails; I went to every networking event I could find. I went to hundreds of meetings; some were terrible, others magical; I told myself that at every event I went to there would be at least one person there who could make a difference to what I was trying to do; sometimes I found them, sometimes not”.

After a few chastening experiences, like being accidentally cc’ed into emails suggesting his ideas and project were doomed to fail (but the founder was cool; “thanks, guys!”), Rich managed to secure funding, most notably from Richard Reed at Innocent, who by now was running his own start-up investment vehicle, JamJar

Rich, who comes across as the model of a modern entrepreneur, hired Alex Barton as CTO; “I actually hadn’t approached him as I thought he would never leave his job, but he called me and said he was offended I hadn’t been in touch! Alex will be a billionaire one day, there’s no doubt in my mind about that!” The two began working from Forever-Beta’s offices in Shoreditch; the goal to create the perfect user experience.

“We use a 4 tick strategy for every new release that we make; we say, is it beautiful, is it seamless, is it a good experience, does it help you to see more of your friends?” Nobody goes home until all of the 4 tick criteria are signed off. Suffice it to say, there have been some late nights.

But it’s not all doom and gloom; “I bought the guys an X-box, we order pizzas in, everybody gets along and shares the same goals”, and perhaps most crucially, “everyone has equity”.

It’s Rich’s reputation that is most on the line, however, and the goals he has set himself, “to meet a world leader by the end of 2016, to create the ultimate app for millennials”, as well as his barrister brother’s demands “he wants to be my ideas guy, with his own office and a whiteboard and a license to “do creative stuff”, mean that this “intensely political person”, as he describes himself, will have his work cut out for the foreseeable future.

He’s had to get used to not drawing a salary, putting his employees first, taking calls from investors day and night; it might have been easier to take the corporate job, with accompanying eye-watering salary, he was offered shortly before he launched Sup. “Not at all, I have no regrets”, he says, Sup is going to be huge, all my friends are excited for me and supportive, I’ve got the passion – it’s going to work!”

Nobody is saying otherwise. Sup solves the ultimate millennial problem; fear of missing out (or FOMO, as it’s become known). Thanks to the alumni networks, the star developer, and the investment, plus a hunger to succeed and a tirelessness that keep him going 7 days a week, Rich and his rose gold (they call it “bro-gold”, because it’s the choice of bros”), iPhone are on a mission – now you know where to find him. Let’s just hope he doesn’t “go dark”. You can download the Sup app here