SALT LAKE CITY — A new Utah startup is aiming to make it easier for Beehive State consumers to find deals on the stuff they're looking for by simply sending a text message and waiting for the discounts to start rolling in.
Coup, which launched Saturday, has signed deals with over 600 Utah businesses for a new text-based service that will connect shoppers with discounts on food, products, services and entertainment opportunities. Coup co-founder Doug Hicken said the service is designed to make discovering and redeeming discounts an easy and seamless experience.
“Consumers are spending up to two hours a week searching for local deals across websites, apps or in envelopes,” Hicken said in a statement. “With Coup, you no longer need to download 20 different mobile apps or carry around paper coupons with you.
"Everything is consolidated into one phone number that you can easily text on the go, wherever you are. Users simply text us the kind of deal they’re looking for – pizza, tacos, or even clothing – and our software will instantly text back deals that are guaranteed to work at local businesses.”
Coup co-founder Justin Clegg told the Deseret News his company has developed a distributed streaming system, similar to the software that powers Google Maps or ridehailing apps, that will enable the company to process a huge volume of texted deal requests. The secret? Instead of a human on the other end of the line, a program using natural language processing will assess the request, plug into the Coup search engine and return a text with all the deals, or coupons, that relate to the requested item or topic. And, Clegg said, it will all go down in a flash.
"We've designed Coup from the ground up," Clegg said. "It allows a consumer to make a request ... and deals are returned in a matter of seconds. On the user end, it's a magical process."
While the realm of online customer assistance has seen a proliferation of chatbot-driven systems that use natural language processing to approximate a human interaction, most are clunky at best and, at worst, a source of frustration for those seeking helpful direction. Clegg said Coup's automation is designed to immediately hand off to a human assistant in the event of any hiccups with user requests.
Every year in the U.S., over 300 billion coupons are issued. Of those, only about 1 percent are redeemed. Clegg said the data reflects a scattershot approach that fails to accomplish the goals of both the coupon-issuing business and the deal-seeking consumer. Also, some of the archaic deal delivery strategies, according to Clegg, are just too expensive.
"I don't want to discredit direct mail, but it's clear the return on investment is decreasing," Clegg said. "Many of these services charge as much as $500 a month."
Businesses can get in on Coup's deal-by-text system for as little as $50 per month. Clegg said their discount offerings can be updated, tweaked and/or custom-tailored on the fly, thanks to the technology driving Coup's system.
"Everything is happening in real-time," Clegg said. "As a business owner, I can make changes on Coup's business portal whenever I want."
Clegg said Coup is the debut launch from his business incubator, Square One Labs and expects more messaging products to be forthcoming.
For more info on Coup, visit trycoup.com.