Europe Online Demo Day - Founder Institute

Hey everyone, welcome. Uh, this is the Europe Founder Institute online demo day. Uh, we have almost 900 people registered to this event, so this is something that we're super excited about, and, and a lot of our companies are doing some really great stuff in Europe, so I'm really glad that you all are here. Uh, so just as an introduction, my name is Jonathan Gritchen. I am a co-founder of the Founder Institute. We are an idea stage accelerator based in Silicon Valley and we operate all over the world. We have over 30 chapters across Europe. The way that our program works is that we take companies at a very early stage, typically pre-funding, pre-team, and even some cases, you know, still people that are working full-time on their jobs, and we bring them through a a very challenging process to launch their company so that they're ready to raise a seed round or go into an accelerator or whatever it is. So we've created several hundred companies across Europe and those companies have gone on now to raise over €60 million in funding. And the companies that we're going to be showing you today are companies that we think are really on the cusp and are gonna be the next ones that are gonna really create some impact in the world. So just another quick thing about the Founder Institute, you know, if you'd like to learn more about it, I really wanna make this Demo Day more about the companies obviously, 'cause it's a Demo Day than the Founder Institute, but you can learn more at fi.co or next week at this exact time, we will be running a virtual info session and we have my community manager and social marketing lead who's in the chat right now, if she can put the link into that, that would be great. We have an online info session if you want to learn more and all that kind of stuff. But let's make this about the companies. Okay, so, um, what I'm gonna do here is just to give you the format. We're gonna have 3 companies online today. Typically we have a little bit, uh, more companies on these online demo days. If you've ever been to them, and you can watch the old ones on our YouTube channel. Um, but today we want to focus on 3, and that's going to provide a lot more opportunity for there to be interaction between you, the crowd, um, and these companies. You know, I may have a question or two for these companies, but really I want to hear the questions from the crowd. We have a lot of investors watching, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that want to learn how to build their businesses watching, and we have a lot of advisors and mentors that may want to get contact and become part of these awesome projects watching. So if you have questions, what you do is put them into the chat right here. Okay, I'm not going to be watching the chat personally because it's super distracting, but I have somebody on my team, Kat, who is literally just watching the chat the other time, and she's going to be feeding me in these questions and things like that. So, you know, one of the powers of these online Demo Days is how, you know, interactive they can be, even as an online event. So please don't be shy. You know, these companies want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. So put all your questions in the chat, and we can make this more of a dialogue than just a, you know, a broadcast. Okay, so the first company that we're going to bring online is coming from the Barcelona Founder Institute. So I am going to make you big right here. I'm actually having a problem doing that. Kat on my team, can you— Oh, there we go. Okay. So Joan is a graduate of the Barcelona Founder Institute, and he's doing some really interesting stuff in terms of mobile and stock photography. So Joan, if you want to share your screen and get going. Yeah, welcome.

Sure, I'm sharing the screen now.

Yeah? All right, yeah, we could see it perfectly. Let's get going.

Perfect. Hi everyone, thank you for joining. My name is Yoan, I'm the CEO of Drago. I've been a professional photographer for 10 years now. I won a WordPress Photo Award, 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 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 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 automatico. 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 cost is now below 40 cents. We now have as clients 4 big European corporates. Our market, our serviceable market, is worth $19 billion, which is the spending in images from the large companies 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 to 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 €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'll 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. Sorry, 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 to hear the content of the pitch. So, um, 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, 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, uh, I think there is definitely an opportunity here, and I think that you're making it a very passive thing as well. So I'll start off with a couple questions that I had. There's a lot of images on the platform. You'd mentioned a less than 40-cent user acquisition cost. Was that user acquisition cost on 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? You use 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. And once a user has downloaded the app, basically we retrieve the data describing the image it has in its smartphone. And this is stored in our cloud. And 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. Ah, okay.

And so, yeah, I mean, your customer acquisition costs less than $0.40 is pretty attractive. Um, is there— do you have any sense of what that lifetime value could be, or are you just too early into the process? Just curious.

On the user side, you mean? Not on the customer side?

On the user side.

Yeah, well, it's— for now, we have— I mean, the average 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, 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've used a bunch of the different stock photography services here, you know, as kind of probably a typical small business user, and it is not a fun process, right? 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: he's sure that when he sells 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 has been used, and he can feel proud about it.

Okay. 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? Sounds interesting.

Yeah.

What we did is we've teamed with a company in France and— using that technology to do that. And it's, 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, you have to, it's a total opt-in 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, the application 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 was 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 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. Airbnb allows you to rent your apartment and make money, but we think that apps that allow you to get some more earnings 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, Joan.

So thank you very much.

Yeah, no, I'm going to take Joan off now, but Joan is going to hang out. You're going to hang out in the chat for a minute, right, to answer any other questions. And then just so everybody knows, we're going to be sending videos and the contact information shortly to all this stuff. So if you're interested in speaking to Joan, if you're interested in monetizing the billions and billions of dollars or billions and billions of images that are taken every day by, I don't know, quote unquote Instagram photographers like me and all these other people, definitely get in contact with them. And you can continue to ask questions to Joan in the chat. She's going to be in there. But let's move on to the next one. So we're going from a, you know, a marketplace B2C, you know, B2B kind of play. So now we're going to a straight B2B play, but it's going to be something that even if you are just a consumer and not on the B2B side, you will definitely understand because it has to do with hotels, which most of us have probably stayed in. So let's bring on Mario onto the screen. Hey Mario, how's it going, man?

All good. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, no, thanks for joining. So Mario is from the Lisbon Founder Institute, and I think That's enough of introduction. You're doing stuff to help hospitals and let's get started. I'm going to mute myself and let's get going.

To help hotels. Yeah, thanks. I'll just ask the other founders to turn their webcam off so I can share better my screen. My name is Mario. I'm the founder and CEO of Klimber. Klimber is a revenue management system for hotels. Hotels, we are hoteliers' best friend. So according to Booking.com, there's slightly over 200,000 hotels in the world. About 80% of those are independent hotels. No matter what type of hotel you have, you have to come up with what is the optimal price you should be selling the rooms in order to maximize your revenues. Large hotel chains like Accor, Sofitel, they use complex, expensive revenue management tools. Which independent hotels could never afford because they don't have the money to pay for it. Also, they do not understand that complexity because they do not understand complexity. So they ended up using spreadsheets, Excel, to come up with the optimal price they should be selling the rooms and to run their daily analysis. So in Klimber, we made their life easier. We do everything for them. They don't have to do anything manually. We come up with the best price they should be selling the rooms, So we use a machine learning algorithm that takes into consideration both historical data from the hotel and also market data like events in the city, the competitor's price, etc., to tell what is the optimal price. We automate most of the decisions that the hotelier needs to make on a daily basis regarding the channels they need to sell, and even we automate it. So we make the decisions for them. Not only we suggest, but we make it for them. So in the end of the day, we save them a lot of time. We bring up to 6 to 8 hours per week that they don't have to do manual analysis. But the most important is that we increase hotels' revenue by 8 to 10%, and they don't have to do anything. We do everything for them. So we are speaking of a market that has 200,000 hotels, but only 4% of them use revenue management systems. We are speaking of an untapped market of 96% of the hotels who currently are not having access to revenue management systems. And Klimber is targeting specifically the 3, 4, 5-star hotels with more than 45 rooms. So we are not going for hostels or Airbnb. How we make money? We charge an annual subscription that is based on the number of rooms. So we charge €3.5 to €4 per room per month, which means that a hotel with an average 100 rooms is paying us €3,500 €4,000 a year. We have competition. We are comparing with Duetto and IDeaS, much faster and easier to integrate. So while to these players it takes 2 to 3 months for the hotelier to try the solution, in case of Climbrr, we take 1 week from the moment the hotelier wants to test it until he is able to have Climbrr in their hands. Comparing with the others, we are much easier to use. We bring even less complexity to the system. We launched last year in July with 4 beta tests, but currently we have 20 paying customers. We are growing a lot, so we experience a lot of growth, not just in Portugal, but in Europe in general. We have 88% conversion from demo to trial, which means that every time we sit with a client and we present them Climbrr, the guys are really interested to test it. We have a team of 9 people, 2 PhDs, 2 founders, I come from the hospitality background, so I worked in the hotels. I founded 3 startups. João brings expertise in terms of product development. We have sales, we have data analysts, we have everything that we need to scale in this phase. And our vision is really to democratize the revenue management globally. So we will stop and we'll be happy when every single hotel in the world will be using a revenue management system, which we believe it will happen. So right now our roadmap is to really to consolidate the expansion that we initiated to France and the United Kingdom since we are already in Germany and Poland, get to 100 paying clients until the end of the first quarter of 2018, hire more people to join our team here in Lisbon, and make more product developments. Right now, September 2017, we closed a €350,000 seed round which we'll use it to scale to Europe. And in approximately 14-16 months, we'll be fundraising a Series A to scale to US. So that's where you investors out there can come in handy because we will need you in that time. Right now, the money we'll be using will be to build the sales team, product team, and also to keep developing some integrations with hotel systems. Why is this the best time to invest? And I'm concluding here. It's because the revenue management expenditure is expected to more than double in 5 years, exactly as it happened with another technology that hoteliers are using currently, which is called channel manager. So about 10 years ago, nobody was using a channel manager. Today, every single hotel in the world is using a channel manager, and we are facing the same type of trend. There's also the end of rate parity in the world, which means that hotels that before were obliged to have the same pricing in different online channels like Booking.com. Right now they can sell at any price they want in different channels. So basically that's it. We are Climbrr, a faster, easier, and more affordable revenue management system.

All right, good job, Climbrr and Mario. So I'm going to make myself bigger here. A couple of points just really quick. So you guys might've noticed that there were a lot of other messages coming up during Climbrr's pitch. He was very diligently, uh, turning those off. This is the life of the CEO of a startup, right? Be ready to be managing 15 different things at one time. So I, I can definitely appreciate that. Um, and also, um, something else that I thought was just a little point out on your pitch was the fact that, you know, you, you just closed the seed round, but you're already looking towards the next one, right? So if you are a startup, and about typically on these demo days something like 60-70% are entrepreneurs, and then the other smaller minority are investors and mentors and advisors and this sort of stuff. If you are one of the entrepreneurs on this presentation, just know that, I don't know, I kind of like to call it the TechCrunch effect, right? Where a company raises money and and they have like parties and stuff like that. But very clearly, Mario raised some money and he's still getting a million messages and now he's getting ready for the next one. Okay, so anyway, that's my bit. Mario, I'm gonna put you back on screen now and we got a lot of questions, so I'm gonna get started. So, Asan, and I hope I got that correct, I'm sorry, this is a very international event German, and I'm an American, so we only know one language here. How would you get data from local independent hotels?

So we get the data by integrating with their hotel reservation system, which is in the industry called PMS, Property Management System. There's about 100 reservation systems around the world. We are integrated with 33.

Okay, so that seems like pretty easy. Who are your competitors? Do you consider— so they're asking, I know you have that matrix, right? They're asking, is Airbnb a competitor at all?

No, no, not at all. So we compete with the other automated tools that recommend prices and make calculations automatically for hotels. Not with other platforms that generate bookings for hotels, like it is the case of Airbnb. So definitely Airbnb, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So Airbnb has their own revenue management system.

Yeah, okay. So does the hotel need— so this is from Steph— does the hotel need a sales manager to use this, or is this software easy to understand for a non-tech-savvy employee?

Very good question. So we work with two different types of hotels. So we work with independent hotels that usually the person that manages our solution is the general manager, so the hotel director. And the other case, we work with microchains and small chains up to 5, 10, 15 hotels. And in that case, it's the revenue manager or the sales director or the marketing manager who uses our solution. So it can vary, but we made it so simple to use that it requires little training from our side. So 1-hour training and the client is good to go. And that's the major benefit of our solution, that there's no heavy trainings, no face-to-face trainings, and they can set it up and then in 1 week have it running by them, by their side.

Sure. So there's a couple more questions coming in, but I just have 1 question. Um, you know, a lot of these markets are— I don't know, maybe they're described as like a blue ocean opportunity or something like this, but you have a lot, you know, it's kind of an, an older, more established business, right? Where honestly you might even call your competitor like just doing nothing, right? It's like substitute, right? When you're working with this kind of long tail, like what has been— has it just been the increase in revenue? What has been the value prop where you've been able to get these people that maybe have been you know, not receptive to using any of these technological tools and this kind of stuff to start getting onto the platform?

So your question is what's the benefit we bring to the hotels?

What's the value prop that has been most attractive to the hotels? You know, because you're working with a lot of hotels that might be smaller and a little bit more old school, right? And you're bringing them on to the internet, right? So there's a very distinct, you know, customer problem there? Like, what kind of gets them over that edge?

No matter the client that we are working with, all want to maximize their revenue, and that's core. That's the major benefit that we bring to the hotel. Then, for the case of the microchains and small chains, so they already have 5 hotels working, what they want to do is not just to centralize revenue management but to increase efficiency on the communication between the revenue management department and sales department, reservations department, group department, and we also help on that. So that's highly appreciated by the microchains. But in general, increase in revenue and time saved for the hotels are the most appreciated benefits that we bring.

Okay, so a couple more of the questions here. So, the Janna, and again, I'm sorry if I got the name wrong, how did you calculate the 8-10% revenue growth?

Good question. So we have the historical data from the hotel from the last 3 years. So last year we know how much he did in terms of sales, number of rooms sold, average price, etc. So having that as a base, we know how much we helped them in a certain period. So what we did is for the first semester, the first 2 quarters of 2017, we compared it with last year results, and we were able to get those results that you saw. For some clients, we were able to get 21%, to others we were able to get 10%, but in general everyone benefited.

Right, okay. And then the last two questions here, it seems like these are both from hotel owners, so maybe this is useful. So Eliza asked, do you work with hotels with less than 45 rooms? And then Tony asked, "Can I use Klima Hotel from Croatia?" So I guess, you know, it's a market question in two pieces, so if you want to answer those together.

Absolutely, so we can work with the hotels anywhere, provided that we are integrated, as for now, with their PMS. So if you are working with Opera, Protel, or one of the main ones, we can definitely talk today and you'll be up and running next week. Feel free to contact me later.

Yeah, please do contact him later, and we're going to send you all that information. Mario, thank you very much. All right, so now we are going to the last pitch. So now we kind of did a loop, I guess, a little bit. Now we're going back up to London, right on the other side of the pond here. And we have a founder by the name of Stefan. He's doing a company called Bonigo or Bonego. I might not have the pronunciation right, but I know what they do. And it is a very big problem. For example, here in San Francisco, where a lot of, you know, very desirable urban communities are becoming extremely expensive. I think this is a trend that's going on all around the world, especially in San Francisco, and I'm sure in London as well. And it's a platform to help people make the matches between different tenants as roommates. So let's bring Stefan onto the screen. Hey, Stefan.

Hi, John.

How are you? I'm good, man. Good to see you. So I am going to hide and mute myself and Mario, that was a great recommendation before as well, so why don't you hide yourself and Mario, it's— or, uh, Stefan, it's all on you, man. Good luck.

Thank you very much.

Alright, we're cool, we see it.

Excellent. So hello everybody, and again, thank you so much for having me here today. I'm Stefan Gastiger, I'm a co-founder of VonEgo based in London. In London, many people, as John was saying, live in a shared home. But there are two major issues people face with their housemates, with their roommates. First of all, a lack of compatibility in many cases, and secondly, a lack of trust, with over 300,000 cases of rental fraud in the UK every year. So how does VonEgo help? VonEgo helps professionals in London find roommates who are compatible and who are trustworthy, and that's facilitated by 4 key features: credibility scoring, compatibility scoring, matchmaking, and processing the rent payment. So if you go to vonEgo.com and sign up, you can create a profile in less than 5 minutes. We'll ask you to answer a few questions about personality and lifestyle. Our matching algorithm will then present you to your top matches ranked with a compatibility and a lifestyle score You can click on the ones you like most, view their profile, start connecting and messaging with them. And we launched this platform in May 2017 and now have around 2,000 active roommates on the platform already and growing. Our business model is focused on capturing the rental transaction in the first months, meaning we take a 7% cut of the first month's rent. This adds a layer of trust to the process as we handle the transaction as opposed to you having to handle it offline. The market we initially target is a market for London professionals typically aged in their mid to late 20s or early 30s, and we target the market in London initially. It is worth around €50 million $1 million in house share rental commissions. Once we get to a 10%+ market share in London, we'll be targeting other large cities and expand. Our competition includes on one side the large listing websites and at the same time on the other hand some smaller websites which are more focused on house sharing and have some matchmaking features. However, our combination of the key features I mentioned earlier is what makes us unique. We have grown in the London market via direct messaging, via social media campaigns, and we are now looking to increasingly grow the user base through partnerships with graduate programs and with corporates. Stuart, who is my co-founder, and myself are both landlords, so we have spent many years facing problems and frustrations of the property property market. About 2 years ago, we left our careers in banking to launch VonEgo and to fully focus and dedicate ourselves to solve some of these problems which we are passionate about addressing. We now look at raising a funding round of £500,000, around $650,000, which would give us an 18-month runway to achieve a late 2019 goal of 1,500 monthly paying users. Again, thanks very much for your attention, and I really look forward to your questions.

All right, thank you, Stefan. So, um, I was also a landlord, and I had a very awful experience with the tenant, so I definitely understand. You know, there's a lot of products out there for landlords that create a lot of value. And something like this is something that I definitely would have liked to use. So I, you know, knowing the business models of a lot of, you know, brokers and stuff like that, your business model of a 7% first month's rent, uh, makes sense to me because it kind of plugs in. Is there any other kind of background you can give on why you chose that business model? Because, you know, you have two sides of the marketplace and a lot of different ways you can make money. You know, what was kind of the customer development that led to that decision to make that the business model?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's really about adding a layer of trust because right now on existing websites, you meet somebody, you arrange a viewing, you move in, but after you met the person, you have moved offline. And that's where a lot of problems can start happening. In over 50% of cases in London, in the UK in general, over 50% of house shares are without any contract. In many cases, in most cases, payment is arranged, you know, between two parties. In some cases, it's cash, in some cases via bank wire. And the biggest worry of landlords is, as you know, John, is not getting paid on time. So handling in the beginning the first month of rent and in the future potentially handling the rent for the longer term is solving another problem. It is clearly challenging, but it is solving an additional problem which no major firm has solved in the industry so far.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Um, you, you talked a little bit about credibility scoring, and there's some questions coming in here too, and, and I encourage other people to put some questions in there, um, and I'll get to those in a second. But the last thing on the credibility scoring, that also was something that, that I thought was super interesting. Can you, can you dive into that a little bit more?

Sure. So credibility scoring is about being able to show that the person you are seeing as a match and you interact with is a real person. So we do a lot of work currently on identifying how to best show and score credibility. There is a very easy way which can be done by searching a person online, doing a background check based on the email address and phone number and building that into our platform. which is something we're currently doing. And the more complex solution to that, which we'll be bringing in the longer term, is to show somebody's credibility based on their activity on the web in general, such as over social media, such as over Netflix, over Amazon. How many hours does a person spend online? Which then results in showing that person X is genuine because they have more social media activities than person Y. For example. But this is where we'd be working with partners.

Right, right. So you take the whole responsibility off of the landlords to figure this kind of stuff out. All right, let's get some audience questions. So, Aysan, again, you asked the question to the last one, and I appreciate it. I'm just, I'm probably butchering your name, but how did you design the questions for matching users together? And how do you correct for false answers? So I guess that's kind of diving a little bit deeper into the methodology for, you know, the logic that you're creating and this credibility.

Yeah, absolutely. So that's a very good question. We have two questionnaires. So the first one is personality-based, and that's inspired by, um, by several types of personality tests. So what kind of person are you? The second questionnaire is about lifestyle. So how do you actually live? And that's like, when do you go to bed? When do you get up? Do you work full-time in an office or do you work full-time from home? Because so that second questionnaire, the lifestyle questionnaire, was basically designed with users because we realized that It's very simple, but we realize that the biggest frictions happen between house sharers when two of them get up at the same time and need the bathroom at the same time, and one of them gets to work late just because of the other. Or that— the obvious one is somebody gets up at 5 AM every morning, but somebody else goes to bed at 3 AM every night and has a shower in the bathroom next door. So the lifestyle questions really have been designed with users. The personality questions are inspired by multiple tests of personalities that we have come across talking to experts. Now, to the second part of your question, how do you deal with false answers? You know, it's at this stage— it's a tough one, it's a tough one, it's a very tough one because at this stage everyone fills in as a questionnaire only once, so you cannot change your answers to the personality questionnaire. You cannot change them once you have filled it in, you cannot go back and edit it. Regarding the lifestyle, those things change, and honestly, it's not in your interest to lie, to say you work in an office all day long and then you end up working from home. So one way of addressing this currently is that we are very, very focused on curation. So we go literally through every listing, we look at our newly registered users and we quality control them and we make sure that those profiles have been filled in properly, that the name matches the email address. Because a big problem we currently see in especially the house sharing market is, as I was saying, is it's a quality problem. And by curating more, we can start addressing this and we reduce people who come up with false answers to a minimum. And you can quite quickly see when a profile is suspicious.

Yeah, yeah. It's certainly not a quantity problem, right? Definitely quality. So let's see. Could you mute your microphone? I think it's you, Joan. Okay, there was a little echo there. That's better. So, um, let's see. Lydia asks, liability and insurance, are you providing to the user? Do you provide any guarantee that rooming pairings will work?

Um, we currently don't provide liability and insurance, but we will if you book a room and you cannot move into the room. Of course, you'll get you'd get refunded because we handle the rent. And so you will only— the landlord will only get paid after you have moved in and you have— you can give us some feedback in the first 48 hours. If something is wrong with the room or with the home, we'll not pay out the rent.

Okay. And Jens, I think Jens has been asking repeatedly how the Founder Institute assisted you with your company. Company, but I'm going to skip that question. Jens will provide contact information after this webinar. I don't want to make this about us. Sure, I'm happy to. Yeah, but Susie asked, what does Wonego mean?

That's a very good question.

And how did you come up with the name?

That's a very good question. Well, I have German origins, as you can hear probably, and Wonego, so wohnen in German means to live, as to live in a house. And EGO is of course the ego from Latin, is the person, the identity. So we are very focused on the person. We bring the person into the property transaction. We think that the person's importance is underestimated in the property transaction. At the same time, WG, which you find in VonEgo, stands for— it's the abbreviation for flat share in German.

So we played with that.

With those words.

With us, there's a lot of meaning. Exactly. All right, so those are all the companies, and all of you are on now. You can put your microphones on. Um, the— there, I think I've seen a lot of questions about patents as well, and I just want to bring this up. If all you guys want to put your microphones on, have any of you guys gotten patents Not yet.

We didn't as well. In Europe, it's tricky to patent software, so we didn't do it.

No, we didn't for now, basically for cost reasons.

Yeah, no, and I asked that question because I totally agree. I think that my guess is that the person who keeps asking the And, um, that's, uh, there's a lot of activity there, so now I can't see it. Look, man, don't, don't worry about your idea being stolen, all right? Don't, don't worry about that. Don't worry about the patents. Um, you know, build, build some customer demand, build a product before you worry about that kind of stuff. So if you guys all had, um, you know, maybe one last ask Right. For the people on this webinar, as I said, we have— we had about 900 people register. I'd say about 60 to 70% were aspiring entrepreneurs all across Europe. We promoted this pretty, pretty targeted just in Europe and some Northern Africa and the Middle East. If you have any recommendations for them, and then also if you have an ask for the next stages of your business? Does somebody want to go first and volunteer, and then I'll make you on the big screen? All right, Mario.

So again, our ask for this pitch is we'll be fundraising a new round. We just closed one now, but we'll be fundraising a Series A of about $4 to $5 million in 14, 16 months' time. So if there's any investor up there that is on SaaS, B2B travel space, and is interested, come and speak with us. And regarding my advice for the founders in here, this is my third company. I failed two before. And so what I was really looking for when I joined Founder Institute is someone to tell me what to do in a process that I know I will not fail. And Founder Institute gave me exactly that, a proven methodology. That's what I was in need for. So I'm really grateful I joined. I think it was one of the best decisions, publicity-free.

Great. Okay. I'm going to bring the other ones on, but honestly, I don't want to hear what you like about the Founder Institute. I want to hear about your company. And thank you, Mario. I'll take free promotion, but I want to hear, You know, just try not to make this about F5. So Joan, it looks like you're ready to speak. So I put you on. All right.

All right. Thanks. Yeah, I completely join Mario on the Fondant Institute. I won't say more, but I'm in the same case as him. I'll ask, one is an offer for people looking for images in Europe to prove that our technology is working and is efficient. We can manage some image search and image acquisition for for you. So we won't make thousands, but we can make a few ones for you. So if you're looking for images, reach out to us and we'll search images and buy them for you. That's the first thing. That's for startup and company looking for images. And we are in the middle of a $300K round, seed round. So if you're a business angel or VC, I'd be happy to talk. We want to close it by the end of the year.

Yeah. And let me, let me just say really quick too, that images for content creation, all this kind of stuff is a huge problem for us. We used to have a deal with one of the bigger companies and then they cut it off because it's very concentrated kind of at the top, right? Between 1 to 3, maybe probably 2, Getty and Shutterstock, right? And that leaves out the whole long tail, right? Which is what the internet kind of produces. And then we've gotten random, like, letters in the mail saying that we owe thousands of dollars for some picture of me or Deo, right? And I'm like, that's a picture of me. Like, how could I— anyway, it's a big problem. So, um, I I implore people to, you know, if you're starting a small business and if you're interested in that space, it's becoming more and more of a copyright problem just because the amount of images that are being shared on the internet and all of the restrictions and the copyrights that go as part of them. All right. So, Stephan, I'm going to put you on right now. What do you think?

So, first of all, in terms of ask, we are always interested in user feedback. Of course, anybody who is looking for a room in London or has a room to offer is welcome to visit our site, and we also very actively always help our users, and we love feedback, good or bad. We work with our users all the time, always interested in partnerships as well, and of course we're looking at raising a round, as I said earlier, so very, very interested in discussing opportunities with potential investors. Now, when it comes to advice Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is, yes, do follow your heart, to follow your passion, build what you believe in. Of course, the Founder Institute helped me give me that structure and work towards that vision, and I also found my co-founder on the way. But yes, if you have a dream you want to pursue, don't give it up and go for it and just work very hard on it and make sure you reach that goal.

All right, thanks, Stephane. So I'm going to wrap things up here. So just as another— just kind of reminder, everybody that's on this webinar right now, I think the requirement to be watching this was that you gave us your email. So we're going to be sending you the video of all these pitches. We're going to be sending you the contact information for all of these founders if you want to get in touch with them. And also, uh, if you are in the bunch of, of people that are, are starting to launch new companies, um, in Europe, I believe we're enrolling in a lot of different cities. So you can go to fi.co/enrolling to get there. Um, just, just one thing I'll say, and all the founders on this, um, webinar can attest to it, the Founder Institute is very, very, very hard, right? Um, the people on this webinar not only, um, were in kind of the probably 20 to 30% that were able to make it through the program, they were the ones that went out and executed and kicked ass afterwards. Um, so, you know, we're a program that is for people that are serious and passionate about building businesses, and hopefully, um, we can make those great businesses forward. So thanks, guys. Have a great evening there in, in Europe, and we'll talk soon. If anyone has questions, again, all their emails, contact, and all these videos will be sent to you shortly. Thanks everybody for joining.

Thanks so much.

All right, take care.