Harper Reed, who was the CTO of President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, is now thinking smaller. Specifically, he’s thinking about small businesses.
According to TechCrunch, Reed has founded a startup called Modest that helps small businesses create stores in the form of mobile apps. The venture is backed by former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Greylock Partners, 500 Startups and Base Ventures. Along with CTO Dylan Richard (who previously worked with Reed at Threadless and Crate & Barrel), Reed has brought with him to Modest a number of engineers from the Obama re-election campaign.
“My entire career has been based around commerce,” Reed told TechCrunch. “The Obama campaign was famous for raising boatloads of money online. My question is how do you make conversions better through mobile and email.”
By providing stores for small business in the form of mobile apps, Modest gives consumers access to one-tap buying, pricing, order editing and saved information, all in a single process.
“This product is about one problem that we can do a very good job at solving,” said Reed. “We are just focusing on this small piece of mobile, which is native mobile transactions.”
Modest presently allows for integration with both Shopify and Magento. According to TechCrunch, the platform will soon offer support for Android, Apple Pay and PayPal.
Additionally, Modest operates as freemium model, meaning that it offers free service at a base but small businesses can also opt to pay $200 a month for push notifications, email buying, the ability to offer promo codes and the removal of Modest branding.
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