A Great Product Hunt Fluke — How BlueLight met Marquette University
I was on the jetway to board a flight, at 730 AM in September 2014, when I got a message on my phone from my friend Michael Lyden. I read “Dude, you’re on Product Hunt and starting well!”
I responded back, in disbelief, “seriously?”. Someone from Boston had posted BlueLight as “Uber for Dangerous Situations”. While I think that description is true in its connotation, it’s definitely not how we would describe ourselves. Nevertheless, we were on Product Hunt.
At that time, our company, BlueLight, was in the middle of making significant architecture and design changes to provide a dramatically enhanced service. The last thing we wanted was external attention, or so we thought. We saw our website traffic immediately pick up with the posting, but we decided that the timing wasn’t right and we tweeted @producthunt to take us down. They did so after it was clear that we didn’t have product available nor were we taking pre-orders. The whole thing lasted 2 hours.
Still, in those 2 hours, 300 people came to our site and 80 signed up for our waiting list. Always the opportunist, I decided to email these folks and find out why they were interested in BlueLight (especially at that point when there was really limited information about the service). Most people responded that they were interested in it for personal use, but I had a particularly interesting response from a guy named Tim Cigelske:
The good part for Tim was that BlueLight worked exceptionally well at campuses. We add the campus to our network so that calls for help are routed to their security force if the caller is in their campus area. If not, the call would go to 911 or whichever set of responders is most appropriate to responsd based on the caller’s position. Campuses were part of the original inspiration for BlueLight.
The bad part for Tim was that we were initially focused on the Bay Area and Boston as our target regions. Every campus in both of those areas were part of BlueLight’s network and we were planning our operations accordingly. Why would we focus on Milwaukee?
Tim did something that really perked my ears. He offered to have his campus help us test. Keep in mind, BlueLight is bringing a fundamentally new interface to market on how people get emergency response and what information is passed along. We’re asking people to use us instead of dialing 911. Definitely not trivial. Having another dispatch center to test with us is huge.
Tim and I quickly set up a time to talk on the phone. He made it clear that Marquette had some challenges with safety on their campus and this could be really valuable to them. The only challenge was that we were further along on Android (because Motiejus, my teammate who leads Android, is amazing and Android allows for quicker iteration). Tim had an iPhone.
I didn’t let that small detail get in my way though, I just had to get an Android phone to him. Why not send him my own? I spoke with my team, including my wife who was going to help me ship it, and we decided that we were going to send Tim my Nexus 4 and set up the Marquette campus while the phone was in the air (it only takes us two hours to set up a campus with no integration on the campus’s end).
Tim received the phone in the mail that already had BlueLight set up. He was supposed to try it out with Marquette dispatch ahead of some safety related meetings they had coming up. However, it was the inauguration of the new President, Dr. Lovell, and Tim couldn’t get around to testing BlueLight ahead of time.
So, in one of those trials by fire, Tim decided to test it out for the first time in a meeting with Marquette administration, including the Chief of Public Safety and VP of Strategic Planning. What happened?
It worked beautifully. Tim’s Android phone connected them to Marquette’s Department of Public Safety and provided the dispatcher with his exact location, which is critical for emergency response. Everyone was stunned.
He called me a couple days later to explain all of this. Two weeks later I was on a plane to Milwaukee (it was my first time going there — it’s awesome). After three days of meetings, it was decided that Marquette University was partnering with BlueLight to bring better safety to their students.
For the BlueLight team, the pressure was on to our iPhone app to market as soon as we could — we had people waiting for us in Milwaukee!
Where are we today?
In the 17 days since the iPhone version of BlueLight has been available, over 10% of Marquette students now have BlueLight on their smartphones. This number is growing quickly.
BlueLight’s partnership with Marquette has been featured in USA Today and in Local News. A Marquette student wrote one of the best pieces on BlueLight I have ever seen.
“At first, I wasn’t sure how something as simple as an app could achieve that feeling of safety, but I ran the features anyway. To my surprise, I quickly noticed a difference . . . BlueLight was the app I’d never known I needed”
— Jasmine Gonzalez in the Marquette Wire
BlueLight is now routing many emergency calls per week and we will be shortly turning on new campuses that have come to us. This is in addition to the nearly 400 campuses in the USA where BlueLight has been requested (we’ll be coming to your campus soon!).
We’ve also had a lot of great stories and interactions with students.
An outsider could write off Product Hunt as a place for tech early adopters obsessed with the latest shiny toy, but that would be a shallow interpretation. It’s actually a vibrant community of people, as demonstrated by the fact that I now consider Tim a great friend. I’ve won a free round of beers with him, by proving that Goosebumps had a choose-your-own-adventure series, and even sought his wife’s perspectives as a young mother for future product initiatives.
As Tim said about Product Hunt, “Go for the tech. Stay for the community.”
We couldn’t have done this without our Product Hunt fluke.
BlueLight is now on Product Hunt. Join the discussion!
Download BlueLight on the App Store or on Google Play
I’m the CEO and Founder of BlueLight. You can follow BlueLight @bluelightsafe and me @preetnation
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