Hustle is an American company that provides a

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...

text messaging Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile devices, desktops/laptops, or another type of compatible compute ...

platform for areas such as

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

higher education Higher education is tertiary education leading to award of an academic degree. Higher education, also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education, is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after completi ...

, and

non-profits A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

. The platform initiates personal conversation between organizations and their targeted supporters or clients. Hustle was founded in December 2014, by Perry Rosenstein, Roddy Lindsay, and Tyler Brock.

Product

Organizers use the product to assign imported contacts to agents and compose message scripts. Agents deliver messages by repeatedly pressing "Send" from their personal phone. This process differs from blast messaging, in that recipients can respond to agents and initiate conversation. Because Hustle's tool is not an " automatic telephone dialing system" using a " random or sequential number generator," it avoids violating SMS regulations in the

Telephone Consumer Protection Act The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) was passed by the United States Congress in 1991 and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243. It amended the Communications Act of 1934. The TCPA is codified as ...

. When a text message is received, it appears as if it was sent from a local area code. Other political P2P texting platforms include GetThru (used by

ACLU The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

and

AOC Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (; ; born October 13, 1989), also known by her initials AOC, is an American politician and activist. She has served as the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, as a member of ...

) on the Democratic side and RumbleUp and Opn Sesame on the Republican side.

History

Hustle was founded by Perry Rosenstein, a 2008 Obama campaign strategist, Roddy Lindsay, a former

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

software engineer, and

Tyler Brock Tyler Brock (1787–1863?) is a fictional character in the novel ''Tai-Pan''. He is the Tai-pan, or "supreme leader" of Brock & Sons Trading Company, and the novel's antagonist. He is married to Liza Brock and has several children, including h ...

, a former software engineer at

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Serve ...

. The lobbying group

FWD.us FWD.us is a 501(c)(4) pro-immigration lobbying group based in the United States that advocates for prison reform, status for undocumented immigrants, particularly for DACA recipients, and higher levels of immigration visas, particularly for H-1 ...

, an organization Lindsay volunteered for, became Hustle's first client. The Clinton campaign tested the platform in 2015 and later developed Megaphone in-house, a tool with similar mass texting functionality where recipients can start one-on-one conversations. Hustle was one of several digital platforms used for Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign strategy for

GOTV GOtv Africa is a pay television terrestrial service in sub-Saharan Africa owned by broadcaster MultiChoice. It mainly consists of African and international programming. History The terrestrial TV service was founded in October 2011 by MultiCho ...

efforts. The Text for Bernie Team, consisting of around 1,200 volunteers, used Hustle to reach out to voters and volunteers. In Oklahoma, four members of Zach Fang's campaign team brought 381 individuals to the first official campaign event, and later, 338 in Tulsa. In Tulsa, 95 percent of participants reported the reason for their attendance was a text through Hustle. As of 2016, over 10 million text messages have been sent over Hustle, and the largest volume of messages on a single day is 700 thousand. As of 2017, Hustle has initiated more than 38 million conversations with more than 25 million people. In the company's spread into higher education, 30 schools have used Hustle for fundraising. Hustle partnered with Michelle Obama's Better Make Room campaign in 2017, providing access to Hustle analytics and technical support for the campaign's texting tool Up Next. In 2017, Hustle created a partnership with

NGP VAN NGP VAN, Inc. is an American privately owned voter database and web hosting service provider used by the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Democratic campaigns, and other non-profit organizations authorized by the Democratic Part ...

, integrating their My List tool into the Hustle product. Using My List, organizers can import contact lists directly into Hustle. Originally a non-partisan company, Hustle supported their Democratic exclusivity with clients through their partnership with

. In early 2019, Hustle laid off part of its workforce and Roddy Lindsay stepped down as CEO.

Funding

In August 2017, Hustle raised $8 million in venture capital during their

Series A A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

funding round, also led by

Social Capital Social capital is "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively". It involves the effective functioning of social groups through interpersonal relationships ...

. This round, which included new and existing investors such as

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

and

Twilio Twilio () is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using it ...

, puts the company's total funding at $11 million.

References

External links

* {{official, https://www.hustle.com/ Text messaging Companies based in San Francisco Technology companies established in 2014