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After one name change, and a short life spent out of the public eye, Zingero LLC is out of business –- for now. Black Duck Software Inc. co-founder Doug Levin has decided to put his nascent company on ice, citing a lack of investor interest.
Founded in fall of 2008 as Freelodr, Zingero LLC was conceived to be a multi-modal marketing platform for small and large businesses. Levin planned to offer the company’s software to small businesses for free and charge a premium for larger accounts.
Levin said he put Zingero on the back burner because he couldn’t raise the $2 million to $3 million Series A round the company would have needed to make a viable start as a business.
“Zingero fell into the consumer Internet space,” he said. “Even in the best of times it’s hard to fund that type of company in the Boston area. These are the worst of times.”
Levin said when the economy improves he may resuscitate Zingero, but for now he and Zingero business partner Stan Dolberg plan to launch Precipice Consulting LLC, offering services to startups. Levin, who was CEO at Black Duck until he stepped down in September, said he will contribute experience in finance, marketing, engineering and operations. Dolberg, a former chief research officer at Forrester Research Inc., will contribute understanding of market opportunities, Levin said.
Zingero had proposed to offer mom-and-pop merchants and chain retailers a platform for communicating with local customers about sales and promotional offers, and then measure the effectiveness of their campaigns by assigning a code to each. Customers who responded to the offer would present an SMS text message or e-mail as a coupon. The code would be recorded at the point of sale.
“It was like Constant Contact, plus a data service,” Levin said, referring to Waltham-based Constant Contact Inc. (Nasdaq: CTCT), which provides e-mail marketing for small businesses.
Levin said he, Dolberg and a team of three part-time engineers had brought the Zingero product “95 percent” of the way to market. He said he may consider bringing the business back online in 2010 if an economic recovery materializes by then.
In a post this afternoon to his blog, New Software Pathways, Levin wrote that he does not blame venture capital investors for staying away from his startup. “In fact,” he wrote, “seeing the ditch that many of the VCs are in, along with discussions with potential partners and working on the building the Zingero technology, formed the inspiration … to form Precipice Consulting.”
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