Start-up sings former Moonpig director’s tune
JIVEBIRD, a digital greeting card and ‘eGift’ start-up, is hoping to replicate the success of personalised greeting card site Moonpig, and chief executive Paul Lynton has got its former financial director on board.
JiveBird lets customers link an audio greeting with a song and photo and send it via an app or tablet to a mobile phone. It is funded by the owners, business partners Digital Broadcasters and IP3, and seed investor Mohamed Siddiqui.
The voice greeting can be recorded for up to 30 seconds and the song clip can also be heard for up to 30 seconds.
The company has a music database of tens of thousands of songs and has negotiated exclusive intellectual property rights. The songs are hits recorded by cover artists. For example, the person singing Call Me Maybe, originally recorded by Carly Rae Jepsen, is top cover singer Christie.
Covers of famous songs are commonly used in adverts and were used on the hugely successful Sony PlayStation game Buzz. Paul Lantsbury, consultant finance director for JiveBird, joined Moonpig in 2007 when turnover stood at £1.8million and oversaw an increase to £45million. He also helped to negotiate the sale of Moonpig to Photobox for £120million in 2011.
He said: ‘As soon as I heard about JiveBird, I could envisage the “Moonpig effect” happening again. Because it can be ordered in seconds and delivered instantly, it meets the needs of last-minute card buyers, mainly us men, who have forgotten a special event.’ Lantsbury also said the fact that greetings can be sent to many recipients at the same time broadens its appeal as it ‘could be used for weddings or other announcements’.
Lynton, who has worked with major music industry names including Simon Cowell, EMI and Sony, said: ‘I worked on a similar idea some years ago but at that time the technology did not exist to create today’s package.’
JiveBird is fundraising on Crowd For Angels.