Meet Our Founder, Marci Corry.
If you would have met Marci Corry five years ago, she may have been at her cubicle-enclosed desk analyzing data or perhaps wrangling one of her two toddlers in H-E-B while trying to grocery shop for the week.
Her title over the years has spanned from Mom, to Missionary, to Marketing Manager, to everything in between, and even Corry, buoyant in spirit, admits she never could have imagined she would be where she is now, doing what she is doing. “I just saw an issue and thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this?’ only to quickly check myself. I thought again, but this time differently: ‘I am a someone. I can do something.’”
After hearing about the texting and driving-related death of a college student who was jogging on A&M campus, Marci was compelled to research the issue further.
“It really only took a single Google search to grasp the urgency of the issue of distracted driving. I then read article after article about effective methods of behavior change and how positive reinforcement is a powerful tool to affect change. During this research phase, I had lunch with a college student, Ally Fraustro, and noticed everyone was on their devices not engaged with one another. Ally shared that Chick-fil-A was rewarding families that summer with free ice cream if they all kept their phones in a box on their table until the end of the meal. This led me to come up with the idea for an app that could track the time a user drives without using their phone. To incentivize the new, safe behavior, I came up with a reward system which converts minutes driven safely to points that can be used for free food and special offers at restaurants and businesses.”
Following this, Corry recruited and converged the minds of her friends and family, including her tech-savvy husband, to perfect the business model and create SAFE 2 SAVE.
Now, two years later, SAFE 2 SAVE has nearly 230,000 users across Texas. Marci’s goals for the future are numerous and fairly predictable: expand nationally, add more businesses and continue to refine the app’s features. Marci is laser-focused on her ultimate goal of ending what she calls the “epidemic” of distracted driving.
“The truth is that I hope there is no need for my app one day,” she laughs as she finishes this sentence, remarking that it’s probably an unpopular and unwise stance of a CEO. “But really, the app exists to end distracted driving and that’s what I hope it does. I do hope we grow and get better, but that’s only because I want to present a tool that’s fun and engaging so we can eradicate the issue altogether to create safer communities. That is always my ultimate goal.”