How Pintler Group Grew from UM Roots

Kyle Pucko didn’t arrive at entrepreneurship by accident. He arrived by following a series of practical questions – how to solve a problem, how to build a useful tool and how to turn a good idea into something durable.

That helped shape Pintler Group, the Missoula-based software and marketing firm he founded after years of work at the University of Montana, where he first created a digital marketing role for himself and began testing ideas that would eventually become the company’s foundation.

What began as support for a software concept has since grown into a business with a wider reach and a clearer identity. Pintler Group is now, in Pucko’s words, “systems and software that turn online prospects into leads.”

Pucko’s origin story at UM is revealing. In 2013, he said, he wrote the job description of “digital marketing manager” for himself at the University – a title so unusual he couldn’t find another one like it on LinkedIn. That perch gave him room to experiment, and one of those experiments led directly to GeoFli, the personalization software he co-founded with then co-worker Nick Shontz.

A moment happened when they noticed out-of-state website visitors immediately bouncing from the financial aid page. Students from California would see in-state tuition compared directly next to out-of-state tuition and think, “That’s expensive.” In reality,  California students could save money attending UM, but the side-by-side comparison was a terrible user experience, Pucko said. Pucko and Shontz looked for an existing tool that could change website content by location, could not find one, and decided to build it themselves.

That instinct – identify a friction point, then create the solution – remains central to the company’s identity. Pintler Group began in 2015 to fund and bootstrap GeoFli, quickly onboarding clients such as the University of Oregon, Colorado State University and Western Washington University. Over time revenue from services grew faster than the software, and the company gradually evolved into what Pucko now describes as a marketing systems and software company.

Today, the company’s work is organized around outcomes. Pucko said Pintler Group is especially effective when using the internet to find potential clients for higher education, health care and large nonprofits – fields in which the journey from interest to action can be decisive.

The firm’s emphasis is not on impressions or clicks, but on the more consequential task of converting a visitor into an inquiry, a patient consult, a call or a completed form, which is what the software component of Pintler Group is exclusively focused on improving. In his view, too many organizations spend heavily to attract traffic and stop there. Pintler Group’s value lies in what happens next.

This philosophy extends to the company’s software. GeoFli personalizes content by location and audience interest. RevelForms, another software product that lives in the “activation” stage of a customer journey, turns video into a way to attract customers, allowing viewers to ask questions, submit information or upload documents within the video itself. Lander, their newest software, produces a custom-designed, fully on-brand, one-page site in 48 hours that is proven to convert.

“Something we always try to stress internally and to our software customers and our marketing clients is that we really try to make your life easier,” Pucko said. “Take things off your to-do list so that you can focus on what you do best, and we can focus on what we do best.”

Pucko speaks about this with the confidence of someone who has watched his industry become more crowded, opaque and self-important. Marketing, he said, lacks the formal barriers that define professions such as law or accounting, which means anyone can claim expertise.

Transparency is a defining principle at Pintler Group.

“If somebody spends a dollar on Google with us,” Pucko said “there is no middleman. The average person, even the average marketing professional, couldn’t tell you how much 1,000 impressions on the internet should cost, so it’s a market that’s ripe for abuse.”

“We’re not going to make this complicated,” he added because “the simplest option is often the best option. It’s why we focus on outcomes and building tools that focus on lower-funnel results.”

In a field often dominated by jargon, that restraint is itself an outlier.

Missoula isn’t just a home base but a source of talent and continuity. Pucko said the company’s team is entirely made up of UM graduates, drawn from fields as varied as forestry, education, journalism and marketing. The University’s accessibility and the relationships Pintler Group has built with faculty and staff have made it possible to find people who are capable and aligned with the company’s ethos.

Those hires tend to be self-starters, people with side projects, entrepreneurial instincts and enough initiative to thrive in a place that values movement over hierarchy.

“I’ve really evolved as a leader and put a lot more emphasis on professional development,” Pucko said.

Jasmine Oyler’s experience gives that claim credence. She came to Pintler Group after hearing a company speaker in one of her UM classes, applied for an internship and was recently asked to stay on full time. She said she had already heard of the company because, in her words, “all University of Montana students in the marketing world know what Pintler Group is.”

Oyler’s background fits the company’s preferences neatly. From Stevensville and the daughter of UM alumni, she began as an entrepreneurship student before moving into marketing and adding a certificate in digital media. She also built a side business making permanent jewelry and creates content for Buckle at the Southgate Mall, which gives Pucko’s preference for self-starters an almost textbook illustration. She described herself as someone who likes aesthetic social media, who is always on Pinterest and who enjoys making a brand and a feeling.

For her, marketing is the place where creativity and strategy meet.

“How much there is to just like one advertisement that you see and how much goes on behind the scenes of that,” Oyler said. “I feel like people, when they hear marketing, they don’t realize all the lanes that marketing has.”

Inside the office, that sensibility appears to be valued not as decoration but as a working principle. Oyler said the days are varied, the collaboration is constant and the pace is broad enough to keep her engaged.

“My everyday kind of looks different,” she said, a sharp contrast to previous internships where she spent long stretches repeating the same task. The office structure, with morning check-ins and Monday meetings, gives everyone a view into one another’s work and a reminder that the team is building in tandem.

Her description of the work also helps clarify what the company expects from young employees. 

The challenge is not only technical but interpretive: to understand a client’s brand deeply enough to set aside one’s own preferences and serve the client’s identity.

Pucko seems to favor people who can adapt, question assumptions and enter a process with a fresh set of eyes. Employee accounts suggest that the company doesn’t just hire for that trait; it cultivates it.

Ana Crites offers a strong example of that approach. A two-time UM alum, she came to Pintler Group after completing an undergraduate degree in elementary education and later returning to earn an MBA in 2025.

“I thought the idea of marketing sounded really interesting, but I had never worked in marketing,” she said, describing a career pivot that began, appropriately enough, with a conversation over coffee and a trial basis at the firm.

Crites said she was drawn to the company in part because the work would allow her to be client-facing, community-oriented and involved in a range of projects – things like writing articles, conducting interviews and doing a video shoot for a commercial. Every day is different. “It’s such a complete circle,” she said.

Crites also helps sharpen the company’s critique of conventional marketing.

“I don’t think I’d feel good about it, just running ads,” she said.

Her instinct is toward the fuller civic and organizational context of the work. For her, the appeal of Pintler Group lies partly in projects such as Downtown Missoula Partnership and Scouting America, where the objective is not merely conversion but community benefit.

Crites moved from Ohio to Montana for college, knew no one when she arrived for her undergraduate years and found at UM a place of immediate immersion and long-term connection.

“I loved my time at the University,” she said. The relationships she built there, she added, made the MBA program especially valuable because it felt like a community.

Pucko speaks warmly of UM’s professional development culture and  the flexibility it offered him while he completed his MBA from 2013 to 2015. Oyler, for her part, found in UM a place where her interests   in entrepreneurship, design and digital media could become something practical. In both cases, the University served less as a credential than as a setting for formation.

That may be why Pintler Group feels especially rooted in Missoula even as its ambitions extend beyond it. The company isn’t trying to imitate larger firms or import a formula from elsewhere.

Pucko’s achievement isn’t just that he built a company, but that he built one whose culture remains tied to the virtues that shaped him: curiosity, precision and a willingness to let good ideas prove themselves in practice.