A tech start-up is offering small businesses the chance to widen their customer base with a mobile messaging service that allows both advertising and the opportunity to send low-cost bulk texts.

GoSMS is the product of six months of hard work and absolutely no outside start-up investment, said CEO Marvin Whitfield. The tool allows businesses to contact existing and potential customers for as little as US$0.2 ($1.76).

Bulk text messaging is already utilised by a number of big-name firms, with companies like SMS Communications helping JPS and PriceSmart Jamaica reach both employees and customers by mass SMS.

But Whitfield believes that small businesses in particular need to be brought into the modern-day operation of commerce, which he said is increasingly mobile.

“We realised that too many focus on just the big guys and they don’t try to market to small business,” he said. “The platform is large-enterprise ready, so our product is suitable for those clients. But we are pricing it in such a way that small businesses are also comfortable using it.”

Along with making bulk mobile messaging easier through the use of subscription codes that can automatically add numbers to business’ contact database, GoSMS includes a Facebook component that allows clients to append ads to free texts sent by users through the social network app.

This advertising service also costs a little over a dollar, which is a major plus for smaller companies, said Whitfield.

“We’re actually booked out for that part,” he said. “Small businesses are definitely receptive to that. That’s really where people are falling as far as locally, because they don’t have much to advertise and they have a limited budget.”

Even smaller organisations such as schools and churches can sign up with the business, which was officially rolled out just two months ago, said Whitfield. Its bulk messaging service covers over 500 networks internationally and operates on a prepaid model, within which clients can purchase credit according to the amount of texts they are likely to send.

The company’s CEO also hopes the initiative will be a building block in the eventual creation of a home-grown Silicon Valley, though the future of technology development in Jamaica is hampered by a lack of investor buy-in.

Some of GoSMS’ more innovative features — such as open API, which operates similarly to the process of signing up for an online newsletter subscription by allowing clients to add a widget to their website that collects customers’ mobile numbers — came out of little else but off-the-clock passion for the project, said Whitfield.

“We’re a fully bootstrap company, no external funding,” he told the Jamaica Observer. “In our case we believed that this would motivate other developers, we said let’s dedicate the time necessary to build up a really good product, try to get some traction and then possibly that will show venture capitalists that the talent is here, and they can put some money in the market.”

GoSMS is available everywhere in the Caribbean, and also works in the UK and Canada, but is initially being marketed for regional use with a major push in the works to acquire some market share this year.