Startup Little Hoots working with Today Show, Huffington Post
June 4, 2015 | Bobby Burch
Kansas City-based Little Hoots has scored two high-profile partnerships that are scoring its memory-saving app thousands of additional downloads.
The tech firm is working with the Today Show and the Huffington Post to provide snippets from its 
memory-keeping platform that captures youngsters’ memorable quotations to share with friends and family.
“Whenever they publish one of these Little Hoots articles we see anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 new downloads,” Little Hoots CEO Lacey Ellis said of Huffington Post and the Today Show. “It’s been great for awareness.”
Now available on iOS platforms, the Little Hoots app allows parents to memorialize their kiddos’ quotes, create a “memory tile” for it and then share the comment on Facebook or Instagram. More than 31,000 people have downloaded the app, Ellis said, and family members create up to 500 tiles per day on the platform.
The Today Show most recently featured Little Hoots, sharing such quotations as “Mom, my teeth were born to eat candy,” and “I wish I didn’t have to be born by you guys hugging naked.” Ellis said that Huffington Post Parents will sporadically display Little Hoots’ quotes in blog posts and other feature pieces.
The Little Hoots team is now raising funds to launch an Android version of its app, but it’s already encountering some local hurdles, Ellis said. She said that there’s a gap in Kansas City for the type of investment — seed capital — that Little Hoots needs to grow. The challenges are forcing the company to look for funds outside the Kansas City area.
“We’ve already made connections in Silicon Valley because the people we’ve talked to there seem to understand what we’re doing,” Ellis said. “They’re not as focused on revenue, but rather how we’re getting users and responding to a problem. They can see that vision more than anyone we’ve talked to (in Kansas City,) which is unfortunate because we really want it to be a Kansas City story.”
To learn more on Little Hoots, check out its platform here.
Featured Business
2015 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
KC favorites eye World Cup: How to become ‘the spot’ for visitors without losing KC flavor
Even a visitor can become a repeat customer, said Dulcinea Herrera, stressing the importance of Kansas City businesses making their establishments a destination — not just a one-time stopover or accidental find — for international fans and other out-of-town guests when the FIFA World Cup arrives next summer. The goal: Win them over with intentional…
Meet LaunchKC’s winners: $60K prize today; world headquarters in KC tomorrow
Every iconic company headquartered in Kansas City — from Helzberg Diamonds to Hallmark — started with an entrepreneur hoping to scale a small idea into big impact, said Jim Erickson, teasing a next wave of emerging startups and the latest winners of the LaunchKC grants competition. Eight early-stage companies were announced Monday as recipients of…
Tesseract pairs one-button robotic badge with real-time, multi-industry workforce tracking
A new site management platform — complete with wearable robots designed to automatically document work as it happens — is expected to help construction, infrastructure, and military teams gain real-time clarity across their projects and workforce, said John Boucard. “Instead of relying on spreadsheets, manual reporting, or guesswork, leaders now have continuous visual and sensor…
LISTEN: KoraLabs connects AI to the field, helping agtech grow a more sustainable future
On this episode of our 12-part Plug and Play Topeka podcast series, we speak with Luca Corinzia of KoraLabs — an agtech pioneer based in Switzerland that’s bridging the gap between scattered farm data and actionable insights. KoraLabs’ AI-driven “digital twin” platform integrates field data, satellite imagery, soil and weather models to help agronomists and…