“Who here doesn’t have peanut butter in their kitchen?” asks Jeremiah Utecht from the stage at 1 Million Cups Fargo, on June 17. “And is it because you have a nut allergy?”
The crowd chuckles, but not many raise a hand. Peanut butter, Utchet points out, is a staple item in the kitchen. It’s good and simple. That’s why when he and his wife Rachel were brainstorming what to call their recently released project, a relationship focused contact manager, the name Peanut Buttr came to mind. 
Peanut Buttr is an application that lets you document personal details about the people you know. Kind of like a combination of a virtual Roladex and Facebook. Each name in your Peanut Buttr app leads to contact information like phone numbers, address, birthdays, even nickname. But it also lets you go deeper to include notes about family, employment history, religion, and personal goals, for example.
Choosing Fargo
Peanut Buttr started, as the website states, “with a bored husband pestering his busy wife.” Rachel is a photographer (and ultra marathon runner), and Jeremiah, a project manager at Myriad Mobile, wanted to know how she kept track of her customers. How, on a personal level, did she know who her best customers were and what they wanted?
“We identified that there is this gap between official big sales systems and the dumping ground that is the contact board,” Utecht said. “This [Peanut Buttr] is the app you use to really curate, to collect the info on the people that you’re going to relate with on a regular basis.”
Before developing Peanut Buttr, Utecht said he’d never written a line of code in his life. His wife Rachel had never done marketing copy. In the past 18 months, Utecht wrote the code to build Peanut Buttr and Rachel is head of marketing.
“We were inspired by Fargo, and the work people are doing starting things here,” Utecht said.
Not too long ago, Utecht was planning to leave Fargo. He needed something new. But then he attended 1 Million Cups, and Startup Drinks, and “Fargo was ripped wide open for me,” he said. Seeing the startup activity was a sure sign that if they were to pursue dreams of entrepreneurship, this was the place to be.
“This [Peanut Buttr] is the reason we’re still in Fargo,” he said.
The Utechts launched Peanut Buttr on June 1, offering a 30 day free trial and pricing ranging from the Creamy option of $10 a month, to the Chunky option of $100 a year. It’s the first product of Improbable Software LLC, a company the Utechts founded in 2013.
To celebrate, they hosted a launch party at 20 Below Coffee where they served a variety of peanut butter themed snacks and let guests demo the software. Utecht said he is hoping to continue to host Peanut Buttr parties to build a user base.
“If it works for Tupperware and Mary Kay, why can’t it work for software?” he said.
Utecht also uses these brands as a standard they want to reach in the long run, he said. They want Peanut Buttr to have brand recognition on par with Tupperware or Mary Kay, and to become the go-to way to manage personal business relationships he said.
Today, they’re starting here.
“To launch Peanut Buttr is a dream come true for my wife and I,” he said. “We believe Fargo is the right place to do this.”
Learn more about Peanut Buttr at their website, here!
