Three College of Charleston alumni are part of a company that recently launched a new iPhone app that seeks to revolutionize the way people find out about local events.
And while the event app, Sovi, helps users narrow event searches to their local area, the three alumni behind the software are themselves spread around the country.
Trey Pringle ’09, lives in San Francisco. Pringle founded Sovi with Tom Evans, a graduate of the University of South Carolina. Hannah Tate ’10, the company’s marketing director, lives in Nashville, Tenn. McLain Scales ’11, Sovi’s community manager, is based in Greenville, S.C.
All three alumni hail from Greenville, but they met for the first time while attending the College. They stayed in touch after graduation and now bring their differing academic backgrounds to bear around the tech start-up.
Trey Pringle ’09
Like many software apps, Sovi was created to address a problem. “When my friends would come into town, I had to consult like thirty different websites to see what was going on,” Pringle says of his experience while living in Atlanta in 2012. “It was a super fragmented process.”
Described as a “social pinboard,” Sovi works by enabling businesses and promoters to market and sell tickets to their events and promotions. Users can search for and filter events based on type, location and time. The app currently lists events in Greenville, Charleston, Charlotte, Atlanta and Nashville.
“Sovi is unique in the way it covers large, well-known events and smaller events that may not have the same media exposure,” says Tate, who majored in communication. “It’s the perfect way for users to discover new things to do in their own town, as well as in the cities they are visiting.”
Pringle and Evans spent a year developing the app, writing code when they could find time outside their full-time jobs.
Pringle, who was a history major in the Honors College, taught himself how to code by learning programming languages through websites and open forums. “The ability to self-educate is super important as an entrepreneur,” Pringle says. “CofC taught me how to learn and think critically.”
Scales, who majored in arts management, says working at a startup would have been much more difficult if he hadn’t learned the building blocks of business at the College. “In the arts management program we had to create organizations from the ground up, including the balancing of a yearly budget, fundraising, marketing and eventually creating an event as a fundraiser.”
Hannah Tate ’10
While there is plenty of competition in the world of mobile and online event-listings, Sovi’s initial focus is on smaller markets in the Southeast, Tate says. This approach gives Sovi employees the ability to get to know and understand the businesses whose events are featured on the app.
Businesses in the Charleston area currently using Sovi include Music Farm, Boone’s Bar, Awendaw Green, and Sweet CeCe’s frozen yogurt in the Charleston City Market.
‘Graduate School for Start-ups’
A beta version of Sovi was launched in spring 2013 at the inaugural Dig South, a technology and music festival held that April in the College’s TD Arena.
RELATED: Learn more about Dig South.
The launch attracted some early investors, but the app needed a bigger financial boost if it was going to succeed. That infusion came in late 2013 when Sovi was awarded $20,000 in seed funding from a San Francisco-based technology incubation program called Tumml.
McLain Scales ’11
As part of the program, Pringle and Evans have temporarily moved to San Francisco. They work in Tumml’s offices and receive mentorship from seasoned software developers and entrepreneurs. The incubator program is “like graduate school for start-ups,” Pringle says.
The investment, which requires Sovi to give a five percent equity stake to Tumml, has helped the young company seek new investors, upgrade its mobile app and develop a web version, www.sovi.fm.
All three of the alumni say the problem-solving skills and adaptability they bring to their work is a credit to the liberal arts education they received at the College.
As Sovi makes plans to expand into new cities, Scales and his fellow alumni see only opportunity ahead. “We have no limitations and boundaries for our future.”
