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Problem
The events industry is in desperate need of modernization
We provide a green solution for an events industry that is evolving into the modern era by offering an online alternative to face-to-face communication for large groups of people.
Save the environment
Inconvenient to attend
Lack an alternative online solution
Facebook was forced to cancel their 5,000 person conference because of Coronavirus. IBM withdraws from attending RSA Conference citing the “health of IBMers” as their concern. Hundreds of corporations have no back-up plan when in-person events are not an option.
Alternatives fail to deliver a social experience
Organizers of events are losing millions of dollars on their canceled conferences and have no back up plan. Webinars (Zoom, On24, Hopin) are restricted by a poor social experience due to outdated text-chat interfaces.
Solution
Life-like online events
Built for groups of people who otherwise don't have the opportunity to socialize in-person.
Preserve the environment
Online events are less taxing on the environment because they do not require a physical presence. Therefore, there's no need for attendees to travel, or generate physical waste.
Attend conveniently
Our mobile app allows anyone to join an event instantly from anywhere in the world. As easy as taping a few buttons. You can join an event from your smartphone in the back of a taxi, from your home, at work, or even while commuting.
Socialize remotely
Virtual attendees can walk around and shake other virtual attendees' hand, just like in real life.
Be yourself
Product
Real life experience inside a virtual venue
How it works
Organizers use our tool set to create and host their event. Attendees use out tools to create an avatar to represent themselves. Both parties join our events by using their mobile phone, and can then move around and control their character just as they would act at a real event; moving from the main stage, to breakout rooms, to the networking room, and even having group sessions to discuss important topics.
Event formats
Virtual Panels
Virtual Mastermind Groups, Roundtable Discussion
Virtual Fireside Chats
Virtual Audience Q&A, Polling
Virtual Workshops, Virtual Breakout Rooms
Traction
20+ pilots and more in the pipeline
Customers love the product
Teooh organizers and attendees love the product and engage for hours. We've seen people stay inside of our app for as long as 4 straight hours while at an event. The realistic nature of the product helps facilitate healthy human connections and conversations.
Hours of engagement
'Apple's Market Cap Potential' hosted by Loup Ventures
156 RSVP’s
67 Attendees (42%)
Attendees from 8 countries
70% of attendees stayed for the entire hour long event
Examples of successful pilots
We've successfully hosted pilot events with a diverse range of brands in our industry.
- Yena and Rebel meetups gathered chapter leaders for their monthly meeting
- Sanctus hosted a 'mental health in the workplace' discussion
- StartupGrind hosted multiple roundtable discussions for CEO's
- The Family hosted a fireside chat with their director
- Kryptowalutowa hosted a bitcoin meetup for people who speak Polish
- Liquidity Podcast hosted a live podcast event
- Atlas co-hosted an event around mental health
- Clocktower Advisers hosted a roundtable discussion to discuss the future of community
- Bromley Mindfulness hosted virtual meditation classes for their students.
Strong pipeline and waiting list
With 100's of organizations in our pipeline, on our waiting list, or already in conversation, we expect to deliver strong growth in 2020 for the total number of brands using our platform. Pipeline examples include a top tech newsletter with 1M readers, a top 10 newsletter author on Substack with 10K's of paying subscribers, event organizations who host traditional conferences which generate millions of dollars in ticket sales and sponsorship for their events, motivational speakers who work with famous musicians, authors who are releasing their second or third book, CEO coaches for Series A companies, TikTok agency representing some of the platforms top influencers, and even a film festival organizer in Canary Islands who's looking to extend their presence into VR.
Customers
Brands, brands, brands
Influencer brands
Influencers have amassed a following online and are searching for new ways to monetize. Teooh gives them an ability to sell tickets to their backers for virtual meet-and-greets, or virtual AMA's. Their followers live all over the world so they choose Teooh because we provide them an affordable venue so all their followers can attend.
Influencers Include:
Newsletter authors
Podcast hosts
Social media influencers
Motivational speakers
Influencers using Teooh
BILLIONAIRE VC INVESTOR
Tim Draper, legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist founded Draper University in 2012 with a vision and belief that in order to change the world we have to change education. Draper University aims to teach entrepreneurship globally in an entirely new way. Through hands on training, an innovative curriculum and thought leadership Tim Draper brings together young entrepreneurs, startup founders, executives and investors all under one roof. Tim Draper has deep roots in entrepreneurship and venture capital with a rich background that started by founding Draper Associates in 1985.
Tim hosted a "virtual alumni reunion" for his Draper University graduates. He had attendees from more than 15 countries, and over half of attendees stayed inside of the app for the entire event.
142 RSVP’s
81 Attendees (57%)
Over half of the attendees stayed inside our app for 60 minutes
Attendees joined from 10+ countries
United States
United Kingdom
Spain
France
Italy
Poland
Armenia
Canada
Columbia
Turkey
Estonia
Saudi Arabia
PROFESSIONAL NFL PLAYER
Kelvin Beachum is a professional football player by occupation, but making a positive impact is his passion and purpose. He hosted a virtual meet-and-greet on Teooh so his fans could meet him, ask him questions, and hear his story.
CRYPTO PIONEER SINCE 2013
Szczepan bought his first Bitcoin in 2013, right before the Mt.Gox crash, and remained in the crypto space ever since. In 2016 he started a Youtube channel explaining what Bitcoin is, how it works and how to use it.
53 RSVP’s
34 Attendee’s (64%)
Average attendee stayed 134 minutes
Event organizers
Event organizations are looking to scale their total events without scaling their overhead costs, Teooh is the perfect solution.
Event organizations
Non-profits
Co-working spaces
Event organizers using Teooh
Startup Grind is a global startup community with 2 million members and hosts thousands of events across 600+ cities.
Business model
Low pricing barriers for high growth
Pay-as-you-go
We are democratizing event hosting by giving everyone the possibility to make a living organizing virtual events as well as organizations to host their events cheaply.
Teooh has a pay-as-you-go model charging $1.99 per attendee plus 20% of ticket sales with no upfront cost, which lowers the barrier to entry for new customers to experiment with this innovative form of social gatherings.
Recession-proof
We position ourselves as an alternative to expensive and cumbersome in-person events. Our company is recession proof as our price point is significantly less costly than the typical rental fee for an event venue that also comes with a minimum number of hours. When the next recession hits, physical event venues will go quickly on the decline and virtual venues will generate more and more revenue.
Customer acquisition strategy
1. Direct sales
- We have 35+ investors, advisers, and key employees with a strong network of potential customers. We're leveraging this pipeline in order to acquire our first 50 customers who are hosting monthly events.
2. SEO
- We are launching 'Teooh Talks' in April. This is a monthly event series similar to Ted. We are lining up high profile speakers who will appear on stage, and we'll hand invite 100 attendees. Press contacts, potential customers, and investors will receive invites to this event.
- In parallel to hosting monthly events, we are creating a content strategy around each event that occurs on our platform. We'll have a staff of contractors who will attend and publish 'recap articles' for each event. This will help us boost our SEO ranking by identifying the top keywords for conversion.
3. Pay-per-clicks
- Understanding our customer personas and search intent is key to drive traffic from PPC ads.
- Each event is worth $199 MRR. We are measuring our CAC in order to identify unit economics. For example, if it takes us $17 to acquire a new customer to host their first event, then we'll have recovered our acquisition costs within the first month.
Market
Virtualization of an $800B+ market
A market shifting online
An $860B Total Addressable Market (T.A.M) for offline events and $547M T.A.M for online events with combined growth of 7% YoY.
A growing need
Crisis and technology advancements are making the need for events to go virtual a priority. Recently Facebook cancelled a 5000 people in-person event because of Coronavirus.
After hiring staff, renting venues, organizing chairs, stages and renting teams of videographers, Facebook had spent millions of dollars to host this event. If they had hosted this conference on Teeoh it would have cost them $9,950, saving them $M's, and also enabling a wider range of people who can buy tickets.
Competition
Virtually the best
The experience is real
Our competition is focusing on presentations and meetings, we are focused on creating real healthy and meaningful connections in a social environment. Gatherings with real voice and virtual body language conversations are what makes our product magical.
`Be there` with your friends
The advantage of avatars is the feeling of presence. Our users report feeling as though they are really hanging out with their friends. In the image below, you see 5 friends catching up inside of Teooh at a private table after a panel event.
Effective and affordable
We have less barriers for mass adoption than our competitors as there are no upfront costs, and therefore customers can self-serve. Plus, some of our direct competitors are still desktop based because they started years ago and are built on older tech stacks that won't work on a smartphone.
Our competitors are built on WebRTC and therefore have a higher costs-per-attendee. We can deliver a more effective social solution for a fraction of the costs.
Realistic virtual reality
We have the infrastructure to make our app accessible inside of VR, meaning your Avatar can become an accurate representation of who you are in real-life. As more VR hardware devices are purchased by consumers our product becomes increasingly valuable and more realistic.
Our competitors are confined by their video based solution, and won't be able to easily make the transition of their product into VR. We are both VR and non-VR, giving us a competitive advantage.
Prior to Teooh, our team built a VR game which sold millions of dollars worth of product, so we understand this technology very well.
Vision and strategy
The future of social is virtual
A place where anyone can gather
Our vision is to become a venue without geographical limits, enabling all types of people to gather together for a plethora of reasons; events, meetings, hanging out, concerts, book clubs, and even family gatherings.
Investor Vision
Teooh was started in August 2018 by Don Stein. The plan we've executed upon is similar to other companies who are building deep-tech.
Phase I: Product and Tech R&D
R&D - We set off on our mission to validate if this technology is viable in today's world so that we can specialize our audio and avatar positioning in the cloud. We began this process on December 17th 2018, and confirmed that our event technology is capable of supporting 100's of avatars that are controlled in real-time running a virtual world simulation.
Customer Validation - We partnered with 10 brands to co-host test events at the end of 2019. The purpose of these events was to validate that customers enjoy the social experience of being an avatar, and that their attendees feel the product is intuitive. We ran these events over the course of 3 months and hosted them successfully. This informed us that we have a technology stack that is stable, an engaged user base once their in the app, and a high-potential idea.
Phase II: Customer Persona and Business Model Discovery
Customer Persona - The next phase was to come up with a thesis for 15 customer personas. An example of a customer persona was a 'newsletter author who has 5K+ weekly readers, and is motivated to monetize their readers and followers by offering them opportunities to engage with them in real-time.' We spoke to multiple customer personas, and uncovered what is the ideal business model.
Business Model Discovery - We tested three business models. (1) A standard monthly SaaS fee. (2) A ticket-sales model where customers pay us a % of their total sales. (3) A pay-as-you-go model where the customers pay a fee per attendee. After many discussion with various customer personas, the model that seems to resonate best is a combination of #2 and #3.
Phase III: Customer Partnerships andInitial Sales
Customer Partnerships - We're currently in conversation with a two event companies who have each hosted 1000's of events in the lifetime of their company. The one is looking to keep up with the times, and stay ahead of the curve. The other is hoping to continue it's offerings to attendees as one of the most forward-thinking event brands in the world. Because we are a new category within the events industry, we'll need a strong partner(s) who can package our offering alongside their sales team, and also drive volume to our platform over the upcoming 18 months by hosting events themselves.
Initial Sales - We have set it our company goal to on-board 100 brands to our platform in 2020, with each brand hosting 1 event every 2 months, and filling up those events with 50 attendees. If this occurs, then our platform would generate $150,000 if the average ticket price was $5, or $750,000 if the average ticket price was $25. So we expect to end 2020 with total ticket sales of $150,000 - $750,000 of which we would receive 20% ($30,000 - $150,000).
2021 and beyond
Successfully executing upon Phase I, II, and III will provide us the required validation to raise our Series A. We will have taken a product from inception of the idea, completed a very complicated development cycle, identified our target customer, proven our business model, and have repeat customers hosting events and generating revenue for us. At this point, we would go back to one of the large funds who supports us (i.e. General Catalyst, who is currently an investor who led our Seed round, and we would hopefully partner with Niko and GC as they lead our Series A).
Funding
$2.4M raised from unicorn investors
- Managing Director of General Catalyst
- $5 Billion raised to date
- General Catalyst has invested in unicorn companies like Airbnb, Snapchat, ClassPass, and Livongo.
- Founder of Flycast (Exited for $2.5 Billion)
- Founder of Adify
- Mr. Braitman has invested in unicorn companies like Udemy, and Dynamic Signal
- Respected public figure for analyzing technology stocks on CNBC
Join other major VC's by investing in Teooh today!
General Catalyst is a VC firm based in Boston and San Francisco. They create the ideal conditions for startup growth, surround their investments with the right advisers, and offer mentorship based on deep experience.
Michael Acheson is Teooh's largest angel investor, and he works closely with Don to facilitate customer development, product testing, and investor introductions. Mike is based in Michigan and is focused on investing in early stage companies across a variety of markets. His goal is long term capital growth and he does this by working with management in a number of capacities to assist in all aspects of corporate development.
Betaworks Ventures is a product-focused, seed-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco and New York.
Courtside Ventures is based in New York and partners with early-stage founders challenging the traditional definition of sports, digital media, fitness, and gaming.
Akatsuki Ventures is based in Japan and Los Angeles and actively invests in new forms of entertainment such as streaming services, voice assist, and the gamification of existing industries.
Loup Ventures is a research-driven venture capital firm based in Minneapolis and New York investing in frontier technology.
Kima Ventures is based in Paris and funds ambitious, cohesive teams with stellar learning and execution curves
Lightspeed Scout Fund (LSS) is the fund which helps scout companies for Lightspeed Ventures. This program was created as a way to identify high-potential startups at an early stage, and is used as their mechanism for tracking these companies so Lightspeed Ventures has the opportunity to invest in the future at a Series A level and beyond. They have a presence in Silicon Valley, Israel, China, India, Europe, and Singapore.
Uphonest Capital is based in China and San Francisco they invest in the most promising entrepreneurs and fastest-growing early-stage startups and then use their resources to boost value creation.
Founders
Founders with a history of success
Don Stein, CEO
I moved to Silicon Valley in 2015 with ambitions to enable the Virtual Reality industry. I spent time attending networking events, meeting venture capitalist, angel investors, and entrepreneurs. Networking events made a large impact on my early career as it is where I met nearly everyone who I still work with today. Recognizing the power of events, I started hosting my own networking events in 2015. This further expanded my network until I was eventually able to meet Larry Braitman (https://braitman.co/) and co-found Candela Partners where we built a startup portfolio of 30+ investments.
After hosting monthly networking events, I became exhausted with the consistent headaches of renting a venue, setting up chairs, hiring videographers, and managing attendee check in. I made it my mission to solve my own problems by creating a platform for event organizers to easily host online events which deliver on the same value proposition as traditional networking events. So in early 2019 I received my Entrepreneurship Visa from the United Kingdom and officially moved to London to pursue this mission of building Teooh Inc and Teooh Limited alongside Jon Hibbins, an entrepreneur from London, and together we've assembled a world-class team and investor base.
If you'd like to help our mission to create better connections and a better world, please invest into our campaign.
Jon Hibbins, CTO
I am responsible for the Quality, Consistency and On-Time delivery of Teooh. For the previous 20+ years I held CTO, Software Development Managing, Group IT Managing and Non-Executive Director roles for a number of global companies including, where I learned to create high quality enterprise webs solutions. I also worked and managed development teams that provided the NHS Health Spine connectivity, High Volume Voucher Transactions, Business Continuity Systems and Manufacturing Systems. I have an In depth knowledge of full stack cloud development and I am responsible for its reliable 24/7 operation, technical strategy and implementation.
Don and Jon on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2019
Thank you for reading and investing
