I met the guys from SaveAnAlien a few weeks ago at a VC pre-conference (a workshop to help startups get ready for their presentations – very cool! Read about it here), and as soon as I heard their presentation I decided to write about it for the Jerusalem Post (but see the article here!).

It wasn’t just me – everybody in that croweded room jumped when Raz Friedman started talking about his project. There were five other presentations that day, and as good as the ideas were, it was clear that SaveAnAlien was in a different class!

Why? Two reasons. “Social” isn’t really enough today – there are so many ways to be social, and just sharing avatars or letting your pets play with each other doesn’t differentiate you from the competition, of which there is a great deal in this space.

But SaveAnAlien is about “caring” – you “adopt” a lost soul that you can relate to. It’s not like a let, because an alien has the ability to be a sentient being. After the crash of materialism around the world, idealism is back in a big way - and letting users “save” a being like themselves appeals to a need that users have right now. Eventually, Raz told me, they hope to bring the concept down to this world, with users “adopting” endangered animals, starving children, etc.

The second big difference is that SaveAnAlien takes full advantage of the way cellphones operate to make money – letting users buy credits via SMS, through the phone company. IOW, any kid old enough to have a cellphone and has a plan that includes SMS is a potential customer. As the parent of two kids with iPod Touch devices who are constantly buying small $2 applications, I can tell you that parents fall for this stuff without an argument – the few bucks you spend a month keep them happy, and it’s not worth getting into an argument about.  That’s the nature of “microsales” – the purchaser doesn’t really feel it, but the company doing the selling does!

The result? Big profits for SaveAnAlien! They certainly didn’t invent the idea of buying credits using a social media application on the cellphone, but add that to the app’s premise, and SaveAnAlien becomes a company to watch!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 7:32 am and is filed under cellphones, hi-tech, israel, start-up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.