Immediately after pitching their latest idea to a potential client, South Australians Steve Barrett and Chhai Thach came up with an even better one. They’ve only just launched it, and haven’t seriously advertised it yet, but they have 250+ customers in 15 different countries, including the likes of McDonalds, iiNet and several government departments.
Here’s how the Go Reception story began, in Barrett’s own words.
“As we were handing our visitor passes back I turned to Chhai and said ‘why don’t we just completely digitise this process of signing in and signing out’. He was like ‘that’s an interesting idea’. We went back to the office and started talking and within 24 hours we had decided to build a touch screen visitor management system, utilising the technology we had built for our loyalty platform because it was about scanning codes and logging data.
“So we did a bit of start-up pivot, we used the technology we’d already built and started taking it around Adelaide and asking if people would be interested in using it. We weren’t trying to sell it at the time. We had a lot of positive feedback so we built a basic minimal product, and such was the response that we decided it was good enough to try to sell immediately. We built a website, popped it online, did a little social media advertising, and before we knew it we had people globally downloading it, trying it then subscribing. We went ‘ok, now we’ve got a thing here’.”
Go Reception founders Chhai Thach and Steve Barrett.
What they have is software that allows everything to do with visitor management to be done on an iPad. Visitors can sign in on the screen or simply scan an electronic document sent to their smart phone ahead of time, much like an airline boarding pass.
Their visitor’s pass can also be sent to their phone, or printed. Their hosts will immediately be informed by email or SMS that they have arrived (with a photo if necessary to avoid awkward first introductions) and they will be presented with any information they need to know, or to agree to, as part of the visit. Couriers and employees can also be incorporated into the system, making accurate information about who’s on site and where they can be located available at any time.
The Go Reception interface.
Barrett and Thach, who met at the Adelaide co-working space Majoran (a success story of its own), did the softest of soft launches for Go Reception last October but it was really only in February that they started reaching out to people they thought might be interested. The response from around the world has amazed them, and there are plans in the works for a bigger marketing blitz and an Android version of the product to appeal to Asian markets.