Hustle (company)

Hustle is an American company that provides a peer-to-peer text messaging platform for areas such as politics, higher education, and non-profits. The platform initiates personal conversation between organizations and their targeted supporters or clients.[3] Hustle was founded in December 2014, by Perry Rosenstein, Roddy Lindsay, and Tyler Brock.[4][5]

Hustle
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
United States
Founder(s)Roddy Lindsay, Tyler Brock, Perry Rosenstein
CEORoddy Lindsay[1][2]
URLwww.hustle.com
Current statusActive

Product

Organizers use the product to assign imported contacts to agents and compose message scripts. Agents deliver messages by repeatedly pressing "Send" from their personal phone. This process differs from blast messaging, in that recipients can respond to agents and initiate conversation.[3][6] Because Hustle's tool is not an "automatic telephone dialing system" using a "random or sequential number generator," it avoids violating SMS regulations in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.[7] When a text message is received, it appears as if it was sent from a local area code.[8]

Other political P2P texting platforms include GetThru (used by ACLU and AOC) on the Democratic side and RumbleUp and Opn Sesame on the Republican side.[9][10]

History

Hustle was founded by Perry Rosenstein, a 2008 Obama campaign strategist, Roddy Lindsay, a former Facebook software engineer, and Tyler Brock, a former software engineer at MongoDB.[5] The lobbying group FWD.us, an organization Lindsay volunteered for, became Hustle's first client.[11]

The Clinton campaign tested the platform in 2015 and developed Megaphone in-house, a tool with similar mass texting functionality where recipients can start one-on-one conversations.[7][12][13]

Hustle was one of several digital platforms used for Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign strategy[14] for GOTV efforts. The Text for Bernie Team, consisting of around 1,200 volunteers, used Hustle to reach out to voters and volunteers.[8] In Oklahoma, four members of Zach Fang's campaign team brought 381 individuals to the first official campaign event, and later, 338 in Tulsa.[11] In Tulsa, 95 percent of participants reported the reason for their attendance was a text through Hustle.[15]

As of 2016, over 10 million text messages have been sent over Hustle, and the largest volume of messages on a single day is 700 thousand.[11] As of 2017, Hustle has initiated more than 38 million conversations with more than 25 million people.[16] In the company's spread into higher education, 30 schools have used Hustle for fundraising.[3]

Hustle partnered with Michelle Obama's Better Make Room campaign in 2017, providing access to Hustle analytics and technical support for the campaign's texting tool Up Next.[17][18]

In 2017, Hustle created a partnership with NGP VAN, integrating their My List tool into the Hustle product. Using My List, organizers can import contact lists directly into Hustle.[19] Originally a non-partisan company, Hustle supported their Democratic exclusivity with clients through their partnership with NGP VAN.[20][21]

In early 2019, Hustle laid off part of its workforce.[2]

Funding

In November 2015, Hustle raised $3 million in their seed round, led by Social Capital, followed by investment firms including Matrix Partners, Index Ventures, Designer Fund, and Canvas Ventures.[4]

In August 2017, Hustle raised $8 million in venture capital during their Series A funding round, also led by Social Capital.[4][16][22] This round, which included new and existing investors such as Salesforce and Twilio, puts the company's total funding at $11 million.[23]

References
  1. Mak, Aaron. "Get Ready. Presidential Campaigns Are About to Start Texting You All the Time". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 16 February 2020. says Roddy Lindsay, CEO and co-founder of Hustle.
  2. Lindsay, Roddy. "A Note from Hustle's CEO". Medium. Retrieved 16 February 2020. Earlier this week, we made the difficult decision to part ways with a number of our colleagues. In the interest of transparency, I want to communicate the reasons why, and what this means for our customers and partners.
  3. Josh, Constine (2 Aug 2017). "Hustle scores $8M to kill telemarketing with personalized texts – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  4. "Crunchbase – Hustle". Crunchbase. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  5. Chmielewski, Dawn (2 May 2016). "Meet the San Francisco team behind Bernie Sanders's killer organizing app". Recode. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  6. Bazelon, Emily (2016-11-04). "Are Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Targeting Latinos Working?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  7. Gewirtz, David. "Texting for votes: How Clinton campaign uses legal loophole to reach mobile phones | ZDNet". ZDNet. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  8. Scola, Nancy (11 Apr 2016). "Inside Bernie Sanders' vast, virtual ground game". Politico. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  9. "US midterm candidates blitz reluctant voters with texts". ft.com. Retrieved 16 February 2020.
  10. "Text campaigns are changing American politics — and nobody's ready - VICE". vice. Retrieved 16 February 2020.
  11. Sankin, Aaron (2016-04-18). "Hustle, a mass-texting app, is Bernie Sanders's secret weapon". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  12. Delany, Colin (2017-07-05). "Can Peer-to-Peer Solve the Disappearing Voter Problem?". Campaigns & Elections. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  13. Issenberg, Sasha (2016-08-09). "Clinton Campaign Looks to Skirt Texting Regulations to Reach Voters". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  14. Fitts, Alexis (4 Nov 2016). "Saving America With a Text". Wired. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  15. Ukoprina, Jack (2016-11-03). "New Apps Help Campaigns Use Texting to Reach Voters - mGage". mGage. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  16. Newswire, PR (2017-08-02). "Hustle Raises $8 Million In Series A Funding To Transform One-to-One Communication". TheStreet. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  17. Johnson, Sydney (2017-09-21). "Michelle Obama's Better Make Room Campaign Aims to Help Students Text Their Way to College - EdSurge News". EdSurge. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  18. Weaver, Angelica (2017-09-21). "Michelle Obama's Better Make Room campaign and Hustle partner together to support college access-- one text message at a time!". Medium. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  19. Hooper, Catherine (2016-10-03). "Hustle's Peer-to-Peer Text Messaging Platform Announces Real-Time Integration with NGP VAN". PRWeb. Retrieved 2018-04-21.
  20. Miller, Sean (17 Oct 2017). "Hustle Partners with NGP, Leaving Its Non-Partisan Roots Behind". Campaigns & Elections. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  21. Miller, Sean (2016-06-30). "NGP VAN Unveils Volunteer Tools That Counter Non-Partisan Competition". Campaigns & Elections. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
  22. Contee, Cheryl; Hendler, Josh; Menter, Julie (17 Nov 2017). "When It Comes to Fixing Politics, Tech Needs a Reality Check". Civic Hall. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
  23. Jones, Donovan (2017-08-04). "Salesforce And Twilio Invest In Hustle's Personalized Texting Tech". Seeking Alpha. Retrieved 2018-04-21.
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