RantRally: A New Way to Be Social and Share Your Message

Monika Jansen Mar 27, 2012 Tweet

Looking for a new way to communicate with your friends, family, and customers?  The just-launched DC-based startup RantRally is a social site that lets you record messages and quickly and easily share those messages with others. Your listeners will immediately know it’s you, providing an emotional connection and human element that text lacks.

It’s super easy to use: call a toll free number, leave a message, and your “Rant” attaches to your profile and is available for anyone to hear.  You can share your audio posts on Twitter and Facebook and via email, and you can also embed the audio on your blog or website.

The idea initially came to co-founder Michael Harris, who is a developer, while waiting for a meeting to begin.  “I was online and came across a site that was political-based and let people call and leave messages that would then be posted in real-time on the site.  I thought, ‘This is a great idea!’ I got it instantly – how really easy it is to get your voice on the Internet.  But I could see a lot of room for improvement, since this service was not social at all.  There was no way to share your messages from that site.”

Harris actually launched RantRally a year ago with a focus on B2B, and though he was getting feedback, the concept wasn’t going anywhere.  So, he did what all good startup founders do and decided to look for a co-founder.  He met Juancarlo Morales through CoFoundersLab, who immediately saw that this was better as a B2C application.

RantRally is based on the Twitter model with audio instead of text, but it also improves on the model a bit.  As Harris pointed out, “There is an issue of authenticity on Twitter.  A lot of celebrities have ghostwriters for their Twitter accounts, so they don’t even really know what they’re tweeting.  With audio, you instantly know who the person is on the other side of that message.”

While the focus right now is on a great user experience, future B2B applications are in the works.  “RantRally is a great way to set up a feedback loop with customers, and other ideas we have for its use include audio polling and public service announcements.  We are working on a feature that will parse audio to text right now, because there really are a lot of applications out there.”

Stay tuned! In the meantime, give it a try and let us know what you think – leave a comment below!