July 2, 2020 Update:

Today, Respond Flow relaunched their company with a brand-new interface and a ton of new features and capabilities that include:
+Waves: Mass text message campaigns that allow you to leverage your customers’  information for more personalized campaigns

+Lists: Curate groups of contacts into a list to retarget later with content and automated follow-up campaigns called flows

+Flows: Automated text message follow-up campaigns that take your contacts on journeys just as unique as they are

Their team is constantly growing and will quadruple in size by September. We can’t wait to see what they do next! Check out their new website here.

Now, back to the blog.

May 8, 2020

Say hello to the Respond Flow team- a new addition to our 36°N community! They relocated from Oklahoma City just weeks ago and their team is already growing.

Meet the team!

Martin Langelo Lien, Co-Founder

Born and raised in Norway, Martin moved to America for the first time 5 years ago to study entrepreneurship at OU. He then decided to stay in Oklahoma to work with and build startups. Martin previously worked for an AI omni-channel chatbot and most recently worked with a medical device startup in Oklahoma City.

Austin Graham, Co-Founder

With a masters degree in Machine Learning and wearing cat shirts, Austin left his PhD program to pursue Respond Flow full-time and “build things”. Previously, Austin was a Data Scientist for an education software company and led machine learning implementation for startup Tailwind. Austin is always up for an adventure in his Miata.

Matt Morfopoulos, Co-Founder

Originally from Philadelphia, Matt studied Entrepreneurship at OU. Previously he worked on a new business team for an experiential marketing agency in NYC and most recently managed a sales team at an 11-location Credit Union. In a past life, Matt was a pilates instructor before moving to Oklahoma.

Peter Daggett, Co-Founder

After moving from Western Massachusetts to Oklahoma in 2015, Peter joined the Men’s Gymnastics team at OU where he was a part of 3 NCAA championship teams and the 3rd longest NCAA win-streak in any sport. Since then, Peter joined the Respond Flow team and subsequently graduated with a degree in Entrepreneurship.

Michael Weitzman, Lead Front End Engineer

With no formal education and his life almost completely centered around the guiding principles of Nacho Libre, Michael is passionate about all things UI / UX. He is committed to crafting engaging digital products that front-end users truly enjoy. Michael has led the front-end design and development efforts for companies of all sizes, from startup to enterprise. He is eager to leave his thumbprint on all of Respond Flow’s interfaces, both current and future.

The Respond Flow Story

Respond Flow was the result of a simple problem with a hard solution. While leading a sales team at a medical device startup, Martin was tasked with generating leads through paid ads. After running a few successful Facebook ads, leads were pouring in and leaving their insurance information to get the product. Even though these leads were qualified and wanted to purchase the product, only 9% converted when sales followed-up to set an appointment. The sales team had all of their contact information, but no-one would answer when they tried to reach out. What were actually follow-up calls came off to potential customers as unwanted cold-calls that were often ignored out of spite for robo callers. Emails were no better. With an extremely low open rate, the sales team wasn’t being heard.

Martin decided to test how texting these qualified leads would affect sales performance. After the initial tests, the sales team quickly saw the 9% conversion rate climb to 27%. Now the team had a new problem… everyone was texting all day and not able to work on anything else.

That’s when Martin decided to do some research and see if there was a way to automate these texts. He was convinced that there would be something out there to solve such an easy problem, especially for SMS, which has been around for decades. Surprisingly, there was nothing. Not a single company offered a no-code solution to connect with customers personally through text messages. So they decided to build it.

With their team’s international background, it soon became obvious to Respond Flow that, while the currently available technology was lackluster domestically, there was also no “no-code” SMS software to build human text message campaigns outside of North America. That was when they realized - this could be much bigger than just the best SMS marketing software in America. Respond Flow set out to become the best SMS marketing software in the world.

Talk About Success

It’s been a wild year for the Respond Flow team. In the past year alone the startup:

• Became profitable within the first 2 months of its launch
• Was accepted into Thunder LaunchPad Batch 4
• Partnered with the Tulsa Drillers (little did they know, Tulsa would be their home months later)
• Closed their pre-seed funding round adding Atento Capital and Cortado Ventures to their team
• Hired their first employee, Michael, as the Lead Front End Engineer
• Moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma (they really like it here)

Moving Forward

So, what’s on their docket? Now that their entire team is full time, Respond Flow is looking forward to seeing the company grow faster as they help their users communicate with customers more effectively, especially during post quarantine life. Of course, as they grow they’ll need to increase the size of their texting crew, which is something the entire Respond Flow team is excited for. Most of all, they want to play an active role in 36 Degrees North and the Tulsa startup community.

‍