Draagu - Democratizing Stock Imagery

Hi everyone, thank you for joining. My name is Yoann, I'm the CEO of Dragoo. I've been a professional photographer for 10 years now. I won a World Press Photo, and what we do with Dragoo, we allow anyone to put their smartphone images on sale effortlessly. So nowadays, I mean, shooting good images using smartphone is super easy. And our vision is that image selling should be just as easy as image making. So that's what we do. With digital communication, there has been created a huge need for images now, and people shoot billions of images every day. But just a small part of those images are on sale. That's because the image submission process is very long and painful, and only professionals go go through it. Well, we want to change that, and we don't want to create an additional image stock. We want to bring image buyers directly into image sellers, image makers' smartphones. So we have created a mobile app that automatically detects whenever an image you have shot matches a need and can sell. So people, Only have to sign in our app and they don't have to upload images, that's automatical. When they receive an alert, they can choose among matching images the one they want to submit. And when one of these images, the image they've submitted, is used, then they cash in. Using our platform, companies, they can create their own image stock on demand. They can retrieve smartphone images even if those images have not been published yet. And they can even use Dragoo to retrieve images shot by their internal staff at no cost. So we're growing fast. We have launched the app in June, and after only 15 weeks, we already have access to over 300,000 images from 42 countries. We grow by 60,000 images per week, and our user acquisition costs is now below 40 cents. We now have as client 4 big European corporates. Our market, our serviceable market, is worth $19 billion, which is the spending in images from the large company in US and Europe only. And we are a B2B company with a subscription model, which means that Companies pay between €800 to up to €2,000 or more per month to use our technology and retrieve exclusive images. The cost depends on the storage we offer them for the submitted images and also on the number of internal staff that use the Dragoo mobile app. Our key difference with competitors is that we are not a stock. We are a channel allowing clients to retrieve unpublished images but also allowing clients to engage with image makers. And all this can be done through a fake-proof and professional process. Our go-to-market to get users is mainly based on publicity and referral by past winners on social network. We also leverage on the staff of our clients that use our mobile application. To get clients, we do direct sell, but we also seal partnership with big communication agency throughout Europe. Our team is perfect for that business because we have 3 top-level engineers. 2 of them, myself and Maxime, are now professional photographers for 10 years, and Alain is a top computer vision specialist. The team is completed by a CTO and a CMO that have over 5 years of experience in startups. We are currently fundraising €300,000, and that will give us a 14-month runway. And with this, we want to achieve a €1 million annual revenue, and we want to have access to over 100 million images, which would make us among the top image providers worldwide. So that's about it, and I would be happy to answer your questions and tell you more about Drago. Thanks for listening.

Awesome, man. All right, so thank you. There was a little bit of background noise there as well. A lot of chatter in the chat room about it.

Oh, sorry. Yeah?

No, no, it's not your fault, man. This is the startup life, right? It seems like you're in a coworking space or something like that. Yeah.

So it was very loud. I'm sorry for that.

Yeah, yeah, no worries. I'm just addressing some of the people in the crowd. They were all like, mute the other people, mute the other people. He's in a coworking space. So sorry, everybody. Hopefully you were able to hear the contents of the pitch. So we need some audience questions. So get your questions into there about the pitch. I'm sure that you will all have pictures on your phone. I am also— I mean, I love to travel and just just take stupid pictures and put filters on them and this kind of stuff. But honestly, I think that some of them are pretty damn good. So I think there is definitely an opportunity here. And I think that, you know, you're making it a very passive thing as well. Right. So just to— I'll start off with a couple of questions that I had. You know, there's a lot of images on the platform. You'd mentioned a less than $0.40 user acquisition cost. Was that user acquisition cost on the people submitting the images?

That's the user acquisition of people using the app. When people have downloaded the app, basically any of their images is accessible. So once they have downloaded the app, we scan all the images they've done, and that feeds our library of images. The advantage is we don't have to store all those images. Those images are stored in the smartphone of the user.

Ah, that's great. Very efficient. Do you—

what was the main channel that you used to get all of those images on the platform? Well, I mean, we reach out for users. So we reach out for users by doing publicity on social network, other big social network like Facebook, Instagram, or local one like Taringa in South America. Once a user has downloaded the app, basically we retrieve the data describing the image it has in his smartphone, and this is stored in our cloud. When there's a match, you receive an alert on your smartphone, and at that moment only, you submit images that we get in high resolution on our server.

Okay. So yeah, I mean, your customer acquisition costs less than 40 cents is pretty attractive. Um, is there— do you have any, um, sense of what that lifetime value could be, or are you just too early into the process? Just curious.

I, I— on the user side, you mean? Not on customer side?

On the user side.

Yeah, well, it's, uh, for now we have— I mean, the, the average, uh, data that any app will have means that after 3 months we lose about 70% of our users. But that's also because for now, uh, we don't have the funding necessary to feed our community with, like, say, fake image search. That could be done very easily because we see that spending just €5 to do some image search, we already have over 300 image submissions. So the aim is to use part of the funding also to have at least one or two people winning some money, like, every day, which would allow people to stay more because they see that people are actually winning some money. Spending €1 or €2 doesn't cost much, right?

Yeah, no, and we, you know, we've used a bunch of the different stock photography services here, you know, as kind of probably a typical, like, small business user, and it is not a fun process, right? Um, the stuff that you get— I mean, I'll, like, somebody on my team will use something on our social channel, and then I'll get an email like 5 minutes later with the same exact image. So that's kind of annoying. But also just, you know, it's super expensive. I mean, it is, it's very prohibitive for, you know, the people that aren't like the Associated Press, you know, these massive media companies. They built their models for these media companies, right? So I have an audience question from Daniel. So how do you protect your work? Do you have a provisional patent?

Okay, what we do is that, how do we protect our client? Whenever somebody submits an image, he releases copyright for the intended use that the client has indicated, which means that any image that a client receives, he has full copyright release to use that and to send the image. The person must confirm that she's the author and has the authorization of people in the image to submit these images. So legally, there's no problem. For our users, how do we guarantee them that when they submit an image for internal use, for example, that the client will be able to buy at a very low cost, that this image is only used internally? Well, we have a technology that is like an invisible watermarking that allows us to— and we have a scroller scrolling in the internet which allow us to detect whenever an image that is registered in our database is used, and we can compare how it's been used with the copyright release that the user has made. Which means that for the users, there's two advantages: be sure that when you sell the image for usage, this user will be able to follow that the image is used as planned, and if the image is used, he will receive, let's say, a publication of how his image will has been used, and you can feel proud about it.

That's cool. Just a follow-up question. We have some more questions coming in, but I just had one question. So this invisible watermarking, can you just dive into that a little bit? It sounds interesting.

Yeah. What we did is we've teamed with a company in France, and we're using that technology to do that. Let's say we've been creating an algorithm with the pixel that creates the image, and this combination of pixel is unique, which means that even though the image has been cropped or maybe the color has been changed, we are able to know that this image was created or submitted by this person. That's how we do it.

Very cool. Okay, so Luciana asks, what about the private images on the phone? Can I have photos on my phone that I do not share with the app? I think I know the answer to this question, but I'll send it to you.

Okay, we solved the privacy issue, was the biggest one, because we both wanted to be something super simple to democratize image selling and also keep privacy. So how we did that is that everything is done on device. So that's a big barrier for entry for competitors because our artificial intelligence runs on device. We scan all images, so you cannot say, "Okay, this one I don't want it to be scanned and this one I want." But we never publish images, nor we copy images, which means that the app scans your image, generates metadata to describe them, but your image remains invisible in your smartphone. The only thing that leaves the smartphone are the metadata. Once you receive an alert, then you can look into your smartphone among matching images, the one you want to sell, and only the one you want to sell, those one you submit, become visible and can be used. So which means that basically you can potentially sell any image, but you're the one that decide which one you sell and which one become visible.

Right, and that makes sense, right? Because you're basically, um, you have to— it's a total opt-in to to put an image out there, right? But you're making it as easy as possible to analyze the images on your phone to make it as passive as possible to somebody that maybe doesn't sell images for a living, right?

You feel that this image scanning is like, I mean, GPS like 5 years ago, like 5, 6 years ago, people were afraid of GPS, oh, I'm gonna be tracked. Now that people see all the, applications that use GPS and can help ease their life. And now it's much more widespread. We think that it's going to be the same for images.

Yeah, we track our lives through images more and more. So, um, okay, so there's two last questions here, and then, and then we're gonna move on. But, um, we have, uh, okay, so Mohammed asks, you mentioned your customer acquisition cost is below 40 cents, and That was one of the things that I pointed out too, because it was impressive. How are you able to drop that? And what was your first acquisition strategy? Or is there something you'd be willing to share there and how you've been able to get that so low for honestly a product that to a consumer might seem kind of novel?

Okay. I think one of the key reasons that we are able to have a user acquisition cost that is low is that we offer great value with this app. I mean, it's not an additional app helping you to maybe manage your photo better or maybe find the best one. No, it's something that allows you to earn money basically just doing an app sign-in. And we think that very few apps allow you to earn money. And Airbnb allows you to rent your apartment and make money, but we think that app that allows you to get some more earning you will have a decreased user acquisition. After that, we've been following data on each of our campaigns like crazy to get the best visual, the best message, the best channel, and all that. And we've been dedicating a lot of time for 4 months now. So it started at €4, and now we're steady at €0.40 for about a month and a half now.

Right. And I know that you don't submit your bank account information or anything like that until somebody actually wants to buy your phone.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

I think that's great. All right, so I have, so I'm gonna skip to one last question because I think it's important. So Steph asked, who sets the price for the photos?

It's the client. We're not a stock, like, we're not a stock. Usually stocks say, okay, I'm selling this picture, it costs that amount. In our case, it's the other way around. It's a client that go reach for matching images, say, hey, seems like you have some matches. And I'm willing to afford that for that image. So the user, that's his call. I mean, he decides which image he wants to submit and decide if the price offered for the intended use is good enough for him.

Okay. All right. Thank you, John. So—

Thank you very much.