There may be no other entrepreneur with a more interesting story than Frederick Hutson, CEO of Pigeonly. Hutson is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of the company, Pigeonly. It is a technology company that helps people to search, locate, and contact with an incarcerated relative or loved one. A natural businessman, Hutson initiated and sold his first business when he was just 19, while he was on active duty as in the United States Air Force.
Frederick Hutson was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He lived with his mother and his three siblings. He later relocated to St. Petersburg in Florida where he studied at Brandon High School. He then began serving in the US Air Force, where he worked at the Nellis Air Force Base as an electrician on jet engines.
Hutson launched and ran multiple businesses while working in the Air Force including a window-tinting business that turned over about $50,000 when he was just 19 years old. He was discharged from the air force in 2005 after the base started to downsize. He turned his attention to selling marijuana and sending it through the parcel companies. The business made approximately $500,000 annually. Hutson was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). “They put me in handcuffs and arraigned me at the courthouse just down the street from where I sit now,” tells Hutson. “I don’t know that I’ve changed, because I still have a high tolerance for risk and a desire to solve problems creatively. But I have matured.” He served a 51-month sentence in 2007 when he was 23 years of age. He was charged for shipping 2 tons of marijuana, receiving marijuana from Mexico, and sending it to Florida. He was released from prison in 2012 to a half-way house.
While he was in prison Hutson identified the difficulty that American inmates have with attempting to communicate with their family and friends outside of the prison. Because of this problem, Hutson came up with an idea for sending communications for those people in prison. After he left prison he launched a company, Pigeonly, that was based on the idea of printing electronic communication for prisoners and mailing them through the postal service to the inmates in an attempt for them to be better received by the prison system. Hutson’s business initiative was accepted by the incubators Y Combinator and NewMe. The business was co-founded in 2013 with Alfonzo Brooks, who had employed Hutson in his last year in prison when he entered a work-release programme. “I know the population I’m building this business for, and that’s my advantage,” Hutson tells of those 2.3 million inmates and their loved ones. “You put all those people together, and that’s a large market. But more importantly, I saw first-hand that inmates who stayed in touch had a better chance of not going back to jail after they got out.”
Hutson now works as the company’s CEO. By 2015, Pigeonly had sent approximately one million pieces of communication and helped to facilitate up to eight million minutes of telephone calls by prisoners.
