AskSupportNow pilot projects attract startup's first customers

A year ago, the startup AskSupportNow had just landed $5,000 worth of seed capital to build out its IT platform. Today the Blackstone LaunchPad-based company is running a number of pilot projects with paying customers and aims to begin marketing its software later this year.

"As we started sending out our software, we found more and more bugs, but we have been solving them," says Brian Royster, CEO of AskSupportNow. "It's a lot of work."

The 1-year-old startup is developing a software platform that provides IT services to small- and medium-sized businesses. The platform focuses on pinpointing and solving IT problems before they happen by monitoring hard-drive temperature and the condition of the system's RAM. Check out a video about it here.

There are now three people on the AskSupportNow’s team working out the bugs in the software. They have 13 pilot projects for the software, including a handful of businesses. They plan on wrapping up development of the software later this year and beginning a marketing push in the fall.

All of this was made possible by a few thousand dollars they received from Wayne State University Blackstone LaunchPad’s Warrior Fund.

"The Warrior Fund gave us a pretty good head start," Royster says.

Source: Brian Royster, CEO of AskSupportNow