Featured Startup Pitch: mSpy is targeting businesses and concerned parents with its mobile phone monitoring software

By Andrei Shimanovich, mSpy co-founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: mSpy is advanced smartphone monitoring software that captures any communication taking place on a target smartphone.

Product/Service Description

mSpy is advanced smartphone monitoring software designed to provide a safer and more controlled smartphone experience at home or in the office. It captures an impressive range of data from Android and iOS mobile devices, allowing users to monitor and track call logs, emails, text messages, browsing history, social media chats—including Facebook, Viber, Skype, and WhatsApp, multimedia content, and location. In addition, mSpy can record keystrokes, restrict calls from undesired numbers, block access to programs, websites, and apps, lock devices, and more. We’ve been able to get some good recognition in the smartphone monitoring and parental control spaces—we were the Silver Winner under TopTen Reviews 2013.

Founder’s Story

Originally, I am from Minsk, Belarus, but I’ve worked in the UK for the last nine years, mainly in the financial industry. A few years ago, my friends were going through a rough patch when their company almost went bust due to a security breach. We had been talking about setting up our own business focusing on information security for personal and business purposes for quite some time, and the time seemed right. It helped a lot that among three of us we had the necessary business skills, as well as quite specific technological expertise in this particular area. Personally, I was lobbying the idea of developing a product that would allow parents to have a tighter control over what their kids are up to on their smartphones. My teenage sister was giving me a lot of grief at that point in time—she was constantly tapping away at her smartphone, missing classes, and being quite terrible with curfew, so I was worried about her well-being. Combining the need for parental monitoring as well as business security, we came up with the idea of mSpy. We saw great market potential for a tool to track activities on mobile devices and the product evolved from purely parental control to a multi-purpose mobile tracker that can perform a variety of complex monitoring tasks.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Our marketing strategy revolves mainly around online marketing. Because we deal with an international customer base, we pay a great deal of attention to SEO and localized content to make sure that information about mSpy can be easily found and accessed in many languages. We also engage our customers via social networks, and work with journalists and bloggers to raise awareness of mSpy features, its benefits, as well as about the need for the responsible use of monitoring technology.

Market Opportunity

We feel that the market opportunity is immense, because nowadays people are genuinely curious about ‘spying’ technologies. What we realized quickly after we launched mSpy two years ago was that our users come from many different walks of life, locations and are interested in mSpy for a million various reasons. For example, 40 percent of our customer base consists of parents who want to know what their kids are up to on their smartphones, and about 10 percent are business owners; the rest use mSpy to sort out their relationship problems.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

mSpy has the widest range of monitoring features, and we are constantly adding more functionality. In addition, our pricing is highly competitive since it gets adjusted specifically to meet a customer’s needs, from basic-level monitoring to hard-core tracking.

Business Model

The core of mSpy’s business model is ecommerce via our main site www.mspy.com, as well as its localized domains, where users can find out more information about the product, view the demo, chat online with our customer service representatives, and make a secured purchase.

Our second important stream of revenue comes from our Partner Programme (both affiliates and resellers). We have over 1,000 partners worldwide with whom we have revenue-sharing arrangements.

Current Needs

Seeing the number of customers we have and how they are using it further drives our excitement and commitment to this product. We are currently in the process of opening new distribution channels for mSpy, including retail, as well as developing an advanced monitoring solution for PCs and Macs. We are always on the lookout for talent in mobile development, sales and marketing.

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Headquarters: London

Website: www.mspy.com

Founder: Andrei Shimanovich

Investors: Bootstrapped

Year Founded: 2011

Employees: 40

Twitter: @mSpycom

Facebook: facebook.com/mSpycom

CrunchBase: crunchbase.com/company/mspy-spy-software