Ask anyone who runs a small business what they want, and the answer is almost always the same. Customers, customers, customers. More people walking in or calling to book. It’s the center of their job, and it’s the part they get the least help with.
We led Pie's Series A to help change that.
Small businesses aren’t a side story in the economy. There are more than 36 million of them in this country; they account for nearly half of the economy and most of its new jobs, and they’re the places the rest of us count on: the restaurant on the corner, the mechanic, the dentist, the gym, the salon down the street, the Christmas tree farm. The people who run them are passionate about what they do, but almost none of them want to spend their limited free time learning how to buy keywords, and that is more or less what the last decade of software has asked them to do.
Small businesses spend about $640 billion a year trying to grow, and much of it is often wasted, because the tools weren’t necessarily built to work for SMBs or with each other. The ad platforms charge for clicks, but never find out whether anyone came in and bought. The point-of-sale software a business pays for is sitting on the data that would likely answer that question, and it typically does nothing with it. Agencies are often expensive, and the report they send at the end of the month rarely points to a single new customer.
Every owner knows about the slow stretch they could never explain, but the explanation does exist. It was just scattered across four systems that don’t necessarily talk to each other, and the only one left to piece it together was the owner, after closing, if they had the time and energy.
Pie does that work instead. It runs the business’s ads across all the places that potential customers might look, and it aims them at the customers ready to buy, not just whoever is cheapest to reach. It also aims to make sure your business shows up on Google Maps, Yelp, and inside the AI assistants people use to ask where to go. Pie keeps those listings current so the owner never has to.
And when a customer ultimately reaches out, Pie answers and books the appointment right away. It does all of this to help show the owner what actually brings new customers in, so the spend that works gets more of the budget and the spend that doesn’t can get cut. All of it runs inside software the business already uses, so there is very little new to learn. Once it is on, it runs itself, helping small businesses grow autonomously.
We call it Small Business recursive self-improvement. Pie gets better at winning customers each time it serves another, so other businesses benefit from what Pie has helped others work out.
The founders building Pie have years of experience in this industry. Syed Ali and Akhil Mantripragada ran new ventures at Toast, where they spent years building software for small businesses and shipped some of the first AI products those businesses ever used. Before that, Syed spent years at Square learning how to help win over the platforms that many small businesses run on.
They understand their customers, but more importantly, they empathize with them and want to help improve their lives.
If you run a business that wants more customers, we think you should definitely try a slice of Pie.
The content here does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or investment advisory services.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Lightspeed. Other market participants could take different views. Unless otherwise indicated, the inclusion of any third-party firm and/or company names, brands and/or logos are for representational purposes and does not imply any affiliation with these firms or companies and also does not imply their endorsement of the views expressed by the authors.
Certain information contained herein is based on information from various sources prepared by third parties. While such sources are believed by Lightspeed to be reliable, neither Lightspeed nor its affiliates assume any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information, and such information has not been independently verified by Lightspeed. For more details, please see https://www.lsvp.com/legal.
Authors
