Flatfile saves startup ParrotMob months of data importer development to focus on sales growth

For vendors looking to connect with their clients, research shows that open rates for email is only about 20 percent. For text messages, though, the open rate can be as high as 98 percent. Entrepreneur Osa Gaius enables companies to take full advantage of higher engagement avenues with his startup company ParrotMob. With ParrotMob, businesses create SMS campaigns and connect target messages where customers naturally want to engage.

In this post, we uncover:

1. The need for a streamlined data exchange solution

2. Flatfile’s data importer means more time to drive growth

3. Future plans with Flatfile

Gaius created ParrotMob to be a forward-leaning organization focused on creating the next generation of B2C communication. His goal: to make mobile messaging delightful for both consumers and businesses. The company’s first product is an advanced Conversational Commerce platform for eCommerce stores. 

“I worked for an email marketing company, and many customers would tell us they were selling to Gen Z and millennials who were not opening or responding to emails and they were looking for a better way to contact them,” Gaius said. “Some said they were texting customers but were doing it either manually or by importing a CSV into another system.”

ParrotMob is an SMS conversational commerce platform 

The need for a streamlined data import solution

To get started with ParrotMob’s platform, customer contact data needs to be imported,  including names, phone numbers, and email addresses. Gaius attempted to handle this requirement by building an in-house data importer.

“There were a lot of challenges with the importer I built,” said Gaius. “We didn’t have a good fuzzy matching capability. So if a column didn’t fit a certain schema, we would just ignore it. Customers told us that was terrible. We also didn’t have a good solution for letting people manually enter contacts.”

Gaius plotted out building a better version of the in-house data importer to address some of the challenges. As an alternative to building a custom data importer, he also considered buying an importer, but didn’t think there was one on the market with the specific features he needed. And then: Flatfile came across his desk.

“My first thought was that finding Flatfile was going to save me a few months of my summer,” Gaius recalled. “It had all the features we needed.”

“Flatfile provides a unique value prop for us,” Gaius continued. “High value customers have a lot more data that they want to pull into our system and Flatfile now allows us to do that easily. The initial feedback we got was a lot of excitement because our importer was simply not as good as Flatfile’s data importer. A lot of our users were incredibly happy, and we got some good responses in terms of customers being able to easily import their contacts.”

Flatfile’s data importer means more time to drive growth

Gaius knew that wearing the hats of both a developer and CEO was going to be tough to balance. Finding Flatfile to take a huge chunk of development time off his plate was a significant benefit.

“Building out a data importer that had the features we needed was going to take a good deal of my focus,” he said, “I spend half my time writing software and the other half doing sales. Having Flatfile has been very helpful for allowing me to better utilize my time. Now I can work on features customers are asking for.”

“Being a developer and CEO it is crucial that I find places where I can save time and be efficient,” he went on. “Having a tool like Flatfile lets me focus on selling the product rather than building a data importer and that’s a huge service to us.”

Future plans with Flatfile

Gaius sees several areas where Flatfile can contribute to the growth of ParrotMob. Some customers want to import information that the company doesn’t currently support, like addresses, tags and other customer data.

“That’s a place where we could really leverage Flatfile,” said Gaius. “It will essentially let people import arbitrary data they want to use within our system to segment or filter what they need, but that we don’t necessarily need ourselves. That’s a place where in the next few months Flatfile can really save us a great deal of time serving those users. 

Overall, Flatfile has been a tremendous asset for us, and that’s critical for a startup like us.”

About ParrotMob

ParrotMob helps customers jumpstart sales with text messaging. The Conversational Commerce platform allows businesses to engage customers in a channel that offers high open and click rates and helps recover abandoned carts. Leading stores like Haoma and Unapologetic partner with ParrotMob to stay up to date with their mobile campaigns. For more information visit https://www.getparrot.com/

About Flatfile

Flatfile's mission is to remove barriers between humans and data. With AI-assisted data onboarding, they eliminate repetitive work and make B2B data transactions fast, intuitive, and error-free. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data should be structured and cleaned, enabling customers and teams to spend more time using their data instead of fixing it. Flatfile has transformed over 300 million rows of data for companies like ClickUp, Blackbaud, Benevity, and Toast. To learn more about Flatfile’s data onboarding platform email hello@flatfile.io or get started for free at flatfile.com.