Love Mobile Just Got Bigger. Your State Could Be Next.

The messages never came during business hours.

They arrived at 1 a.m., at 3 a.m., in the flat hours when a person is awake with their phone and thinking about what it costs them. They arrived under videos, in comment threads, in direct messages written without punctuation because the sender was in a hurry or did not care about punctuation or both.

They almost always said the same thing.

Are you in my state yet?

For a long stretch, the answer was no, and there was no satisfying way to say it. Today the answer changes for a great many of the people who kept asking.

Love Mobile has opened a new wave of states.

A question nobody in the industry asks

Love Mobile Incorporated did not start in an office. It started at a kitchen table in Georgia, which is a detail the founders repeat often enough that it has become something like a founding text.

What began there was not a plan to build a cheaper phone plan. Cheap plans already exist. The prepaid market has been running a race to the bottom for the better part of a decade, and the finish line is a commodity nobody feels anything about.

The question at that table was different. It was about where the money goes.

Americans spend well over a hundred billion dollars a year on wireless service. That money leaves a neighborhood, travels through a small number of very large corporations, and does not come back. Nobody thinks this is remarkable. It is simply how the category works, and it has worked that way long enough that the arrangement has stopped registering as a choice.

Wade Dunn Jr. and Koddi Dunn treated it as a choice.

The structure, not the slogan

Corporate giving usually arrives late. A company succeeds, and then a foundation gets stood up, and then a percentage gets announced at an event with a step-and-repeat banner behind it. The giving is a consequence of the business.

Love Mobile reversed the sequence. The giving came first, and the company was engineered on top of it.

The mechanism is not complicated. Every subscriber generates a Give Back contribution directed to nonprofit organizations serving that subscriber’s own community. At one thousand subscribers, the Give Back Model delivers up to $120,000 a year.

That figure is abstract. Here is the same figure in a unit a person can hold.

336,000 meals.

The registered trademark reads The Cell Phone Company That Gives Back. It functions as a description of how the company is built rather than as a line of advertising, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a trademark.