Bridgr - Solving the World's Manufacturing Problems

Hello everyone, my name is Amira, and at Bridger, we help small and medium manufacturing companies find and collaborate with validated and qualified experts to solve their operation problems. I actually spent more than 100 hours listening and analyzing the sales of big names of the manufacturing world in Canada and in Algeria. And what I can tell you is that in today's world, external expertise is more than necessary. It's actually mandatory, especially the one in operation, as it represents 80% of their issues. But today's solutions require an average of 60 days to close a deal and a minimum of €120K per project. Another option is for them to find independent consultants that are willing and able to help them. But they are hidden and considered risky by manufacturers. That's why we created Bridgit, an online platform where small and medium manufacturing companies can find the right curated experts in days rather than months, and for a price that actually matches the reality. In our platform, a manufacturer can tell us exactly his needs, and it's okay if he doesn't know, because we're building an automated tool for operation diagnosis Then we can provide him with choices, and the company can decide with whom they want to work. We then provide both of them a collaborative platform where they can manage their project with a bunch of tools that can help increase their productivity. Today, we went from no platforms 3 months ago to a live product with actually 5 projects currently running. There is 5 others in the process to start this month. They are in 3 different countries. To help them, we have over 60 experts with an average of 10 years of experience in the manufacturing world. And as our business model is that we take a transaction fee on all the payments, the manufacturers actually pay us, and we pay the expert. And as you can see, the commission is evolutive to match the needs of our market, a market that is actually today evaluated at $6 billion. We're talking here about the operation expertise market. And for the manufacturers, they are over 300,000 in North America. With each one a potential of 3 to 5 projects and a projected lifetime value between $7,500 and $100K. As for the competition, today companies can either go to specialized firms, but they are still a lot super expensive and not really collaborative because you have just access to their expertise, or to the online platform where you actually have a lot of consultants but no one is today specialized in the manufacturing work. And to acquire our clients, our strategy is simple: be where they are and come— partnership strategy. We are reaching over 1,000 qualified leads in the beginning of next year, and we're building a content marketing strategy that will help us increase our visibility and legitimacy. And it's important to know that we're also using the experts themselves to build the content as they are writing for us. To do that, we're a team of 4 persons with backgrounds in computer science, management, digital marketing, consulting, and I've spent a lot of time in manufacturers. We're helped by an amazing team of advisors in entrepreneurship, consulting, as well as in— as well as manufacturing. Today, we would like to team up with investors to be better at what we do, as well as to raise $300K for a 1-year runway and to reach our target of having 115 projects on our platform. So we're a bridger, we're bridging bridges between two worlds actually, to solve a real problem. And you guys have the opportunity to help us and help this market that is in great need of it. Awesome, awesome, yeah.

Well done, and no audio problems. Feedback or questions?

Yeah, that was a really, really clear and crisp presentation. I really love that, like you explained things very clearly. I had no questions on the pitch itself. So tell me more about the demand acquisition. How are you getting the manufacturers?

How we get them? Okay, for now, we didn't spend a penny like on marketing. We went a lot with our network and we actually had a lot of references. And for all our first clients, all the ones that are today on our platform, we provided them with 10 free hours in the beginning and they have to give us at least one reference at the end. So we're working a lot with references, and in manufacturing, you know, they all talk between themselves. So if they like you, they're gonna talk about you to everyone. So this is how we're acquiring. And then in the future, we're really doing strategic partnership. Like we actually have a partnership with an organism here in Montreal, and we're targeting 100,000 leads in Montreal, in Quebec, Canada, and, and in the US. We're gonna call them, be there, talk to them, and from there we'll see. But it's mainly to be where they are, to the event they are, and so on.

Jill, do you want to ask a question as well? I have one too, but I'll let you go first.

Okay. Yeah, no, sure. Fantastic presentation. As I was jotting down notes about to ask a question, you then, you answered it for me. So I love pitches like that. So that was fantastic. And I also had some questions around that, around the acquisition, and you just answered that. Although I would just be curious about a little bit more around those strategic partnerships. What do those models look like as you grow?

Okay, so for now we have two kinds of partnerships. The first one is that we're teaming up with the technology provider for manufacturers, because today with Industry 4.0 there is a lot of technology that is being provided to manufacturers, and one of the things is that manufacturers don't understand them, so they still need a human being to do it. So we're teaming up with them. Today we have 10 partners like, like those ones, and we want to to have more so we can, they can share with us their client and we can share with them ours. And we are teaming up with universities, but also with the manufacturing association because it's still the best channel for them to talk. They got association by industry, they got association by cities and so on. So we work with them to get to the clients.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

I have a quick question. You know, maybe for the, by the way, everyone in the chat thought you did fantastic, which is great.

Thank you.

One of the things that— maybe if you could give us a very specific example, because we have a lot of people on the line. So you mentioned these partnerships with— that for lead gen, if you could give us a very specific example, and maybe even let me add one more thing, which is because I would imagine that they're not hiring the same person over and over again per se. They're hiring like one expert here, a different expert here. And if we had an example, that could be helpful.

So, okay. So, okay. So you just, for me to make sure, you want an example of a company that will use—

expert they would hire and what that could do.

Okay. So actually, we actually have one in Montreal that they are manufacturing some of the parts here and they got their assembly line in Montreal. And this company is growing. They went from B2C to B2B and they are expecting I think in the next months to get a much higher level of like, of selling. So they need their whole production line to go with that. So we started working with them by first, like we provided them with 10 free hours of help to help them identify how they should evolve. And now we have an expert that is working with them to actually help them build and plan for their assembly line, how it should evolve and how to actually meet the numbers they need to reach. And later, we can, from here, we can already identify the other problems. There is change management problems that are related to that. There is HR problems that are related to that. There is the, like, health and security problems that are related to that. So from this, we can identify what are the future pain points of our clients. And even if the mandate is over, tell them, okay, If you want to keep on, here are the other experts that can help them. And it's the same platform. We just add it to your accounts. They'll have what you want them to know, and they can work together after.

That was great. Judges, I'll read some feedback. Feedback's been great, but anything else, Chandini or Jill?

Go ahead, Chandini.

I was going to ask, what are your biggest bottlenecks right now?

Right now, it's, I would say, the internal resources, because we have a number of clients on the platform, and we figured that today we're not able to have more right now. We need to scale that, we need more resources, and to be able to build like the automated product and be able to get more clients. I think this is the main pain point right now.

Sorry, when you say resources, you meant more of—

yeah. Like, I think because we have like internally the developing team that is working on the next features, and we're still doing some parts not like manually, so we need to automate this part to be able to scale. And in the same time, we're helping companies identify their problem. We're doing the analysis for them, and we can't do more than a certain level. So we need to figure out how we're gonna be able to scale up this with the resources we have. I think this is the biggest pain point. That's why we're raising actually.

One of the questions that came from Chelsea is, do you only generate revenue when you book the consultant or have a transaction, or is there something else that allows you to generate revenue?

Yeah, for the diagnosis, the plan is to make companies pay for it. It's going to be a fixed price, but for depending on how they want it, but they're going to pay for that and pay. And we have our commission on the experts. Right. Great.

I just have a quick comment. I think most of the early-stage startups should know this, that it's— there's nothing wrong in doing things manually in a very unscalable fashion. It's okay. It's better that you have more leads and divide your jobs into the $10 an hour job, the $100 an hour job, and the $500, $5,000 an hour job. So those things you should be doing. But if there's something that's just manual and repetitive, you should just write down a process and hire the $10, $15 an hour person. That way, you know, never let your processes be the bottleneck. Let your number of leads be your bottleneck. Yeah, you can just get as many of these as you can, and even if you have to just manually pedal, you know, things in the backend, your customers don't need to know that.

Yeah.

Don't waste your resources automating things yet. Just get a lot of customers first, and you can automate.

There were some great comments and questions in the chat, but we do have more pitches to get through. So what I would recommend, Amira, is if you want to— and this will hold true for all of the pitchers— Why don't you respond to some of the questions in the chat because they really are quite good, and let's move on now. Well done, the feedback was fantastic.

Awesome, good job.