mycoop: a Communication and Collaboration Hub for Buildings

Great. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Alex Norman. I'm the founder of MyCoop. We're the communication and cooperation hub for small multifamily buildings. We provide simple and effective communication and data management for buildings, owners, managers, and residents. We launched in 2018 with a small experienced team. I myself have spent the last 18 years in marketing tech. My co-founder Christy has spent over 20 years experience in property management. As a team, we all came together on a simple mission to make building life simpler, more connected, and more pleasant for everyone. It all started when I was living in New York, as it was mentioned, during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when rising tides flooded half the city and left 800,000 people in the dark, during which time all of us were wondering about our status of our homes and how we were going to rebuild. It was at that time that I realized the harsh truth that critical communications in residential buildings was broken, and not just in times of crisis or pandemics, but for everything. In the US alone, there are 4 million multifamily buildings, the majority of which are still in the dark with less than 0.1% having modern communication systems of any kind. And if you live in the 3.9 million buildings that are considered small, well, good luck, because communication sort of feels like this. And there's a very good reason, because managing communication in buildings is difficult. It's difficult because buildings have many stakeholders—owners, managers, boards, residents—who still need to collaborate. It's difficult because buildings need—have different types of information that needs to be shared—documents, requests, notifications—and they need better content management. And lastly, it's difficult because there are so many types of buildings around the US and the world, and there aren't enough good solutions. And we're seeing that now during the pandemic. So we decided to create a solution, and that is to centralize all communication for multifamily buildings into a simple platform that's collaborative, integrated, and scalable that starts with better messaging at its core. We currently are live in buildings and have seen over a 70% increase in messaging effectiveness compared to basic communication like email. We've grown consistently during the current pandemic and recently surpassed 1,000 buildings with over 1,000 181,000 total units under management. Our business model is pretty simple. You know, we, we offer a freemium of up to $480 per building per year, all you can eat. We hope to generate additional revenue from advertising, commerce, and third-party integrations to $3 million AAR. Our core target are homeowners associations, building managers, and owners. Currently, our growth has been organic, but we're starting to engage large portfolio owners, universities, and governments to get ourselves to scale. Our market potential is huge. In the US alone, we have an addressable market of $3 billion. We have an attainable market of roughly $273 million, which includes primarily homeowners associations, which is our core target in the US alone. We have competitors, but there are no dominant players in the market, and we continue to differentiate ourselves on our ability to scale and provide collaborative solutions, particularly focused on the small building market. We are in fundraising round. We're looking to raise $500,000 to help us to get to the $3 million ARR by the end of 2021. And we are MyCoop, making building life simpler, more connected, and more pleasant for everyone. And please find us at mycoop.com.

Awesome. Thank you, Alex. All right. So a couple of questions here in the chat as well. One of these was a question that I sort of had too. Like, do you guys have a sweet spot in terms of building size, you know, number of dwellings, number of residents, or? Yeah.

So our target is, our sweet spot is small buildings and small buildings are classified as under 50 units. And our sweet spot are anywhere between 25 and 50.

Okay. And you said that a lot of your growth, and it's impressive growth, is coming organically, right? So, does this mean that like the HOAs, like they're— is it management companies? Are they sort of talking to each other?

Or like, how have you guys seen that dynamic work? Yeah, primarily resident activists, and some of them include board members. So, homeowners associations, members of the board, we like to refer to them, if for those that are Seinfeld fans, there are Jerry's and Kramer's Kramers. We love the Kramers, the guys and gals who are particularly interested in the well-being and community of their buildings and are looking for a better way to connect, and they go and find us on Google and search for us. So we've been very fortunate to have a fairly decent SEO, and so for people that are looking for better communication, more simple communication, ultimately find us through that.

And for the HOAs or these resident activists, what is sort of like the— what would you say is sort of the hook or the biggest problem that, you know, that it's solving for them?

Yeah, so it's collaboration. Usually, pre-pandemic, we were seeing it around— we usually say either things happen are really good in your building or really bad in your building. Really good things are when you first move in, They're looking for resources, looking for services, laundromats, daycare. And the bad things that happen are things like leaks, floods, fires. And so pre-pandemic, those were the reasons why people engage and we're looking for a way to say, look, we want— we have a problem, or we have an opportunity and we need to solve it with everyone engaged. And email simply doesn't do that. Writing paper or notes Putting it in building walls and foyers and common areas doesn't do that. And having an online collaboration tool that engages everyone around topics and content is a way to do that. Of course, we do that in our day-to-day businesses and in our jobs. And it makes sense to have that, to have those tools available for people in their buildings. At the same time, you know, we're also seeing during the pandemic, the crisis and the bad stuff are happening real time all the time. And so when people are looking to know whether or not their common areas are going to be open to everyone in the building, whether or not their building staff has access or going to be available to clean and sanitize the building, all these questions that people have, they need to have answers. The people who have those answers need to find an efficient way of distributing them. And having a central hub for all that content and communication is the right way to do it.

Got it. A couple people asking here, you know, sort of on the competitive advantage side, right? I mean, I think Nextdoor is out there, but Nextdoor is for neighborhoods, right? So, um, you know, pretty, pretty clearly. And honestly, it's, it's not a great product either for anybody that's used it. But, um, you know, how would you guys— there are other options out there, right? Maybe even somebody, and I don't see a landlord or somebody doing this, but there could be like a Facebook group or something like that. Like, how do you guys see yourself, you know, really differentiating from some of the other— I wouldn't say competitors, maybe you might refer to them as like substitutes or something like that. Sure.

And I'll break it up. I'll be quick with this answer. And I'll break it up into a few different categories. On the very low end, so small buildings or midsize, small to midsize buildings, we compete with paper and pencil. Right. And email.

Sort of that, it was, I love the picture, right? It reminded me of Seinfeld again, but it was the bulletin board in the lobby, right? Right, right.

Yeah. And so that's what exists currently in most small buildings. So we compete with paper and pencil and it's not really, it's not, there's no argument there on how a digital solution is better. Part 2 with the Nextdoor, we are now being referred to as the net, next door for buildings, because what happens down the street is not as relevant that what happens in your basement or down your hall, particularly for multifamily buildings. And then the third category is the property management software business, which are large, clunky, complicated software systems that primarily work on operations and back-of-house solutions, rent control, maintenance management, and all these types of things that are very, very important. They're very important for large buildings. So, buildings that are 100, 200, 500, 1,000 units, but not necessarily just too much for buildings that are under 100 units. And so, which just so happened to be 99.9% of the multifamily building market in the United States and the world. And just think about it in Europe, you know, the majority of the market is 4-story walk-ups. So for us, we see there being an enormous opportunity in white space in which requires a lightweight, fast-moving, simple solution that handles communication elegantly and available at a low cost.

Awesome. All right. And then the last question here, and then we'll move on to the final speaker here today. The last question, similar to some of the previous questions before, is You know, is this US-specific? Are you currently just in New York, or where are you geographically at the moment?

Yeah, geographically we're kind of spread out all over the place. We're in 171 countries and 39 cities. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, yeah, and sorry, 171 cities in 39 countries. But the challenge for us is language. We're only in English language, so our second largest market outside the United States happens to be Australia, and that really exploded during the fires last year. So Melbourne, Sydney, and all that are on our platform. We have been asked for— and so our penetration outside of the US has been typically geographically and demographically higher educated, higher income users in buildings who speak English. But we have been asked to add new languages like Spanish as a second language. Being in Miami, it helps. Also, Latin America is enormous in areas particularly like Bogotá, where there's a large amount of multifamily and not a lot of management oversight. So, we are available. You can sign up to us anywhere. And we are, and if you do, and looking for additional language, let us know and we'll do what we can to prioritize that.

Awesome. All right, thank you, Alex.