EverybodySafe.com looks to create market for 'communications insurance'

Jacob Hargrave is confident that his company has identified and solved a big problem, but it’s finding a market for that solution that will determine whether EverybodySafe.com succeeds.

The problem became apparent to Hargrave a few years ago when his father was admitted to the hospital after suffering an heart attack. Hargrave received a call from his father who said that he was about to undergo triple-coronary-bypass surgery and had been in the hospital for three days. But the call was the first Hargrave had heard about any of it.

When Hargrave’s father was admitted, he was unconscious, so a hospital worker simply grabbed his driver’s license, looked his name up in the phone book, dialed the number and left a voicemail. The worker was following standard procedure, but that didn’t help much because Hargrave’s father lived alone. So Hargrave was left to wonder why he had to wait so long to find out his loved one’s life was in danger.

“This is something the public doesn’t think about, but if they did, it’d scare the hell out of them,” he said.

And so the concept for EveryBodySafe.com was born. The company provides what Hargrave calls “communications insurance” — a service that involves calling, texting and e-mailing an unlimited number of emergency contacts when one of the company’s customers winds up in the hospital.

Here’s how it works: The company provides customers with an ID card, dog tags and stickers that can be affixed to cell phones or drivers licenses. Those pieces of identification include a unique customer number and the phone number to EverybodySafe.com’s operators. When a customer is brought to an hospital after an accident, an hospital worker in theory sees the ID, calls the number and speaks with an operator, who sends out emergency notices to all the contacts listed in the customer’s account. Customers can also send out “I’m OK” notices themselves, such as when they’ve completed a long day of travels or made it unharmed through an earthquake, for example.

The four-employee company is self-funded, with about $1 million behind it. Hargrave said the company is open to venture money, but doesn’t necessarily need it.

So far EverybodySafe.com has “slight revenue” from having signed up about 1,000 customers/beta-testers, but hopes to hit 1 million by the end of the year, Hargrave says. To do that, Hargrave has wisely decided to bypass the consumer market — and the costly advertising that penetrating that market would require — and is going straight to employers. The company is in discussions that Hargrave hopes result in deals that would entail large employers adding EveryBodySafe.com’s services to their health coverage.

That mirrors the approach taken by Alert Notification LLC, a Tennessee company that Hargrave identified as the leader in the market EverybodySafe.com is trying to reach. Alert Notification has an unspecified number of corporate customers, including (pdf) Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Alert Notification has been around for about 10 years and was also started after an emergency hospital experience with an unconscious relative, CEO Robert Smith said. Smith wasn’t familiar with EverybodySafe.com, but said a number of startups have entered the emergency notifications market to compete with his firm in recent years. Smith was gracious but very tight-lipped about his firm, declining to provide numbers on employees, customers, or sales.

While it might look easy to set up a Web site and contract with a call center, the barriers to entry are much higher, Smith said. For example, a startup likely would need “substantial working capital” to not only fund the many business development initiatives crucial to survival, but to convince customers that the company will still be around in a few years.

“People are buying peace of mind,” Smith said. “They want performance. They want guarantees.”