Webfusion

Services connecting consumers with reliable local businesses have been growing rapidly this year. Just last week, Red Beacon won the Tech Crunch 50 award for their service professional booking engine. Webfusion recently spoke with Matt Buchanan of Tuggl, which adds another dimension to the model by considering the community contributions of local organizations:

Tuggl

How did the idea for Tuggl come about? Is there a story behind the domain name?

I co-founded Contractor Marketing Pros in 2005 with the goal of helping home service professionals gain more customers through search marketing and lead generation. In 2007, I received a call that changed my view on what made a company “good.” A local electrician decided to donate a portion of his sales to a children’s hospital and asked if potential customers could see that on our website. What happened was unheard of . . . a 300% increase in customer inquiries. It became clear that customers care, and that given an option, will overwhelmingly choose to use local businesses that support worthy causes.

As for the name tuggl.com, we felt like we needed a ‘non-word’, as what we’re doing doesn’t exist and we needed to define it. Like most start-ups these days, we choose to invest in technology instead of the final vowel.

Community Impact

Your service has a unique twist on community interaction and philanthropy- how do you see Tuggl evolving differently than larger sites such as Yelp and City Search?

We’re trying to entirely remove ourselves from the local advertising space. Our focus is on building a tool for social change that improves the communities we live and work in. It just so happens the way we do that is through connecting people with socially responsible, local businesses. In the end, we hope people see a clear distinction, and that enough of them will choose to use tuggl not just because they
can find what they need, but ultimately because they can actually improve their community.

Tuggl features an inviting design and a bit of humor – what factors went into selecting the branding and design elements for the site?

One of our company’s core values is our commitment to having fun as we attempt to create social change. Both founders have had extensive start-up experience…some good, some bad. So in everything we do, we try to have fun. Our aim was to make sure that came across in our branding.

Where do you see Tuggl headed in the next series of releases? Do you plan to integrate the site with other social apps?

Tuggl is currently integrated with Facebook and Twitter. We’ve found that to be extremely useful in our efforts to attract more people to our community. Because of that, our focus moving forward will be to provide an even richer interaction with these two networks.