MEG: Stuzo’s new product helps small businesses go mobile

Stuzo, a Center City web consulting firm, believes every small business should have a great mobile presence, even if they can’t afford it or don’t know how to build one.

That’s why Stuzo is building MEG, a mobile marketing tool for small businesses, with the fine domain of meg.com, said CEO Gunter Pfau. It’s a customizable widget that sits on a small business’s website and aims to make interaction super easy, offering buttons to, say, access that business’s Instagram feed, call them or take advantage of a flash sale. On the back end, it’s one line of Javascript.

See it in action on Companion Pet Hospital’s website (it’s the icon in the lower left corner and while it’s made for mobile, it works on desktop, too).

MEG (Mobile Engagement Gateway) is Stuzo’s answer to the ubiquity of mobile, or, as Pfau puts it, the idea that “mobile is the only platform that matters.” It’s built for quick and easy navigation in mobile, for example, when a user clicks on a MEG button to see a company’s Instagram feed, it happens in a MEG popup box, rather than taking the user away from the company’s website. It’s almost like a tool to turn a website responsive, without changing the website’s design.

The essential MEG apps, like those for social media feeds and phone calls, are free. Stuzo will build premium, specialized apps for a subscription fee ranging between $15 to $180 a month.

It’s the first product from Stuzo Labs, the innovation arm of Stuzo, which has been building social media campaigns for brands since 2007. Stuzo’s services arm funded the roughly $1 million it took to build the product, he said. It’s taken Stuzo roughly a year to get to this soft launch point, with 15 engineers working on the product, including some on its two teams in Ukraine.

Stuzo is launching the tool in Philadelphia and has no immediate plans to expand to other cities, Pfau said, because it wants to work closely with its local customers to both develop MEG further and to offer a high level of customer service.

“We need to become the Zappos of mobile marketing software,” Pfau said.

Current clients include Northern Liberties retailer Duke & Winston and South Philadelphia’s aforementioned Companion Pet Hospital as well as some law firms and real estate agencies.

(And yes, it cost a lot of money for Pfau to get a hold of meg.com. He bought it from two guys who live in Connecticut who had it since 1999. That’s all he would tell us.)