Fuelling the Tech Wildfire

Raoul Bhatt’s software proves that texting isn’t just for kids. It’s for marketers, too
By Caitlin Crawshaw

Raoul Bhatt has a client roster that would make entrepreneurs twice his age choke on their coffee. Think LG, Smirnoff and Garnier. He has staff in four different countries. Yet Bhatt maintains that he’s “just a little Edmonton guy.”

You might raise an eyebrow; obviously he’s anything but typical. Bhatt is the guy at your high school who made it before you snagged your first internship. He’s the smartest guy in the class who decided against university and proved that classroom learning isn’t everything. Today, the 28-year-old has used his strong business instincts, curiosity and guts to create a burgeoning tech empire.

Bhatt owns FireText, a business named after its flagship product: text-to-screen software. It’s similar to online chat rooms: people can compose a text message, send it to a specific phone number, and almost immediately it will be displayed on screen.

If you haven’t heard of it, you’ve probably seen it: this winter, as you tensely awaited the third period of an Oilers game, you may have noticed people taking their eyes off the ice long enough to send a text message to the Jumbotron screen to vote for the game’s most valuable player.

If you’ve recently visited clubs or pubs, you may have spotted a public screen with a hodgepodge of unrelated messages, from communication between friends (“Bob, meet me at the bar”) to spicy flirtation (“To the girl in the pink tube top: you’re hot!”).

Denis Byrne, owner of Edmonton club The Druid, describes FireText as ultimately “a flirting tool,” like a kind of dating service. It entertains patrons, but also helps the bar maintain relationships long after last call: when users send a text, they subscribe to a promotions list and receive information on upcoming events (if they don’t unsubscribe).

But don’t be fooled: FireText is not just for kids. Since taking its first shaky steps two and a half years ago, the company has accumulated about 4,000 customers from a wide range of industries around the world. Large conferences have used the technology to allow participants to send questions to speakers. It’s used at large concerts, like recent gigs by Foo Fighters and 50 Cent. A pizza company recently approached FireText with an idea to have customers vote for their favourite toppings. Communications giant Shaw has approached the company to create a late-night text-messaging chat service.

Speaking over veggie burgers at a Whyte Avenue café (Bhatt is a life-long vegetarian), I believe him when he insists he’s just an Edmonton guy who’s done some neat stuff. His modesty isn’t put on. His charm seems rooted in an honest confidence and curiosity about the world. He has the warmth of a yoga instructor and the enthusiasm of a child in a sandbox. While Bhatt doesn’t deny that money is a happy consequence of his work, it’s the joy of the work that makes it worth it – though it makes work-life balance tricky. “I can get lost in work,” he says. “I could work for 24 hours.”

It’s hard to pinpoint where Bhatt’s career began. In the course of working for the family business, advertising agency HugePhoto, Bhatt cut his teeth on marketing, advertising and design work. Bhatt learnt what he needed in the field while accompanying his dad, Harish, to business meetings, or he taught himself.

Before he’d finished high school Bhatt was taking on projects for the business. At 17, when most teenagers are flipping burgers, he and his older brother Raju designed marketing materials for a new Edmonton music hall, the Winspear Centre for Music. Shortly after, they were asked to design a large poster (about 120 by 60 feet) for a multi-faith conference.

On both occasions, the Bhatt brothers rose to the challenge. “Customers believed in us, and we grew. And the more we grew, the more they believed
in us.”

It was encouragement by both customers and his family that formed a solid foundation for Bhatt’s unshakable confidence. “The real opportunity my father gave me, and my family gave me, was being there for me. That encouragement. It wasn’t financial. It was a shoulder to lean on when you’re at the point of burning out,” he says.

His success seems effortless on first glance, but he readily admits that it’s taken many long nights to make things happen. It took a year to develop the technology and finding local staff was tricky. Ultimately, Bhatt travelled to India to explore outsourcing.

“I went with an empty mind and open eyes to see what was going on, how these guys were doing it. Mercedes, Microsoft, Ford – all of these guys are over there. The greatest asset the East has, which we don’t have, is manpower. Here, we’ve got all kinds of resources, but we don’t have the people,” says Bhatt. “I’ve tried local staff, but the problem is that no matter what you pay them, they don’t work as hard as they do over there.”

It helps that Bhatt speaks Gujarati (his family origins lay in India). The connections he made, however, were entirely the result of cold calls. He hired a team of programmers and web developers and bought a house for office space.

As soon as the company secured its first client – a club in El Paso, Texas – it didn’t take long for FireText to take off like, well, wildfire. It took longer to find local clients, possibly because text messaging has taken longer to become popular in Canada.

“For the first year and a half we didn’t have a single customer here,” Bhatt says. “We had customers in Latin America, China and the U.S. No one here. It didn’t matter how much we tried to convince people. It didn’t matter. We were almost in tears.”

It was a big surprise when Edmonton clients began to find their way to him, and now the market is growing rapidly. He credits much of this success to his overseas staff. People in India are proud to work for an international company and can often support a large family on the income. They’re also bright and good at what they do, he adds.

Today Bhatt has team in Uruguay and a sales team in Philadelphia. The creative aspect of the business remains in Edmonton, with help from his brother.

FireText continues to diversify; soon you may see it in movie theatres, radio stations and shopping malls. And soon FireText will be about more than its flagship product; Bhatt is currently developing four other technologies. (Details are hush-hush for now.)

While you might think a 28-year-old kid would want to sit back and enjoy the first wave of success, Bhatt is determined to continue exploring new options. After all, he says, the most successful people he’s met have been those who are always seeking out new ventures.

“I think when you get to a certain stage, you plateau. The happiness is in the growing stage. It’s learning and discovering new things,” Bhatt says. “They [successful people] don’t stay with one thing…. At 50, they’ve still got that youthful excitement. That’s what I never want to lose.”