* Year established: 2014
* Employees: 30 (global)
* Milestones: Like most successful start-ups, Text Request started with founders who identified a need and bottled a solution. As the story goes, co-founders Brian and Jamey Elrod, husband and wife, were eating at a restaurant one day with a fretful young child. When the time came to ask for a check, the server proved elusive. “Why can’t you just text them?” Jamey asked Brian. And with that simple exchange, the idea for a tech company, that has so far connected 50 million people, was born.
By 2020, the company was logging $6 million in annual revenue from a customer base spread across all 50 states and in every province in Canada. According to the company’s website, Text Request’s three-year growth rate has been 1,399%.
“We saw a massive disconnect that was causing businesses billions of dollars,” attests the company’s origin story on the corporate website. “Customers wanted to communicate through text, but businesses were stuck calling and emailing. That created barriers to lead generation, appointment scheduling, online reviews and more. The problems was businesses had no way to manage those conversations as a team.”