Startup of the day (March 2017)

Continuing the “Startup of the Day” series of digests, today I present the most interesting projects for March. If you want to get acquainted with the others, then please in my blog. Entries are available on Facebook , ICQ and Telegram .

1. TerrAvion

The American TerrAvion regularly photographs the fields so that their owners, farmers, quickly find out where and what has broken, where the pests have got, and where there is not enough water. The service is not new, but TerrAvion has come up with a new way to implement it - airplanes.



Other projects usually sell photos either from the very top - from satellites, or from the bottom - from drones. Both methods have their advantages, but there are also disadvantages. Drones turn out to be too expensive, one device manages to photograph too little, and satellites, on the contrary, can give a very good price on scale, but with impractical poor resolution and the problem of clouds.
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Once a week, TerrAvion launches maize planes over the fields of its subscribers, which fly below the clouds and take pictures with a resolution of 9 cm - “enough to see every vine in the vineyard”. In addition to the usual pictures for “just to see,” they take photos in the infrared range, and also determine the amount of water, the temperature of the earth, and the density of vegetation.

The service is sold by annual subscription, the price ranges from a few dollars to several tens of dollars per season per acre (approximately 40 acres). Curiously, the startup is not trying to sell services and consulting services, but is ready to integrate its data into any third-party service by API. That is, the farmer pays TerrAvion $ 4 per acre for the photos, and if he wants to receive automatic recommendations based on them (“it’s time to clean the fields here, don’t do anything”), then he buys some other service.

Despite the modest initial investment, the project is already popular, and in the 2015 season, they said that they take off 2.5 million acres weekly - this is revenue of about $ 15–20 million a year and about 30 times more shots than the same DroneDeploy in 2016

However, there is still a lot to grow, almost a billion acres are processed in the USA, while even 1% of the market is not covered. Recently, money appeared for scaling, in 2017 TerrAvion received the first big round of investments - $ 10 million.

2. Goat

It's not hard for a non-American to realize, but Goat is a special ad service for selling expensive, designer and collectible ... sneakers. Not a category in Avito and Yuly subsections, not a section in the VestiAire Collective, but a separate application with separate venture financing and an estimate of about $ 100 million. Well, of course, that is not a unicorn, but $ 100 million for the app for the resale of sneakers! The score of 100 million for the venture round, I recall, means that, in the opinion of the funds, the project will cost three hundred or more: it is necessary for him to go out with a profit, and not just enter. Although, on the other hand, the secondary market for sneakers in the United States — $ 1.2 billion per year — fully justifies the startup price (investors take risks, but they are not idiots), but this is also a shock and insanity.

In addition to the disproportionate positioning and investment, Goat is pretty boring. The main model works exactly the same as the same VestiAire Collective - this is probably the best option for expensive products. The seller uploads his treasures to the site, the buyer chooses something that suits him, clicks and makes 100% prepayment. Goat sends a notification to the seller, he only at this moment goes to the post office and sends his sneakers - but not to the buyer, but to Goat. They check the originality and condition of the shoes, if everything is OK, they send the goods and money minus their commission (9.5%), if not, they return both to the original owners.

Also, due to the narrow niche of the niche, Goat implemented two ideas that are almost beyond the power of general purpose projects. First, this is how to create ads. Goat clearly described what to say in the ad, at what angles, under what kind of lighting and how many times to take pictures of the sneakers, and takes only those sellers who are able to follow the instructions. As a result, buyers see much more enjoyable content than on ordinary boards. Secondly, the gluing of ads on the model. If 30 sellers sell the unpacked gray Nike from the September 1994 collection, then the buyer needs to know only the minimum price of each size, and not what Jack puts it or John: the guarantee of originality is still from the service. As a result, the ad looks like one, and if there is no right size, then you can leave a request: I pay $ 700 for the 11th. Maybe someone from the sellers and interest, give what they had not planned.

But all these innovations against the background of the main business idea, in my opinion, fade away. Fight for the secondary market of sneakers!

3. Outfit7

Apart from Google and Apple with their presets, only two companies in the world - Outfit7 and Facebook - have achieved 5 billion installations of their applications. And if Facebook is a part of modern culture, then Outfit7, despite mega-popularity, is sitting in some underground, talking about it a little, you need to fix it.

Outfit7 is a Slovenian gaming company, it releases dozens of similar games in the Tamagotchi style about the kitten Tom and his friends: you can stroke the character, feed, walk and drive to the toilet, while the young one grows, enjoys life and repeats everything that he hears into the microphone with a funny voice. And he knows how to fart!

Earn games on built-in purchases (beautiful clothes for pets, for example) and a wild amount of advertising, applications are crammed with it to some fantastic level, the paid video is hidden just behind every careless click.

The popularity of Tom and his friends is relatively stable - tens of millions of downloads a month for five years in a row: this is much longer than the era of Angry Birds, for example. (And it’s a shame to remember about Pokemon Go on this background.) During this time, Outfit7 has already launched a bunch of non-game products - from the animated series in collaboration with Disney to a children's paper magazine in Russia.

What will happen next - no one, of course, knows, but judging by the fact that the founders decided to jump off and recently sold their offspring (for a billion dollars, by the way), there are some signs of decline on the horizon, Tom should not become the second Mickey Mouse . But five and a half billion downloads! I strongly advise you to see and see what humanity likes with at least one of the games.

4. AirHelp

According to European rules, airlines must pay substantial compensation to passengers for being late for more than three hours or refusing to land during overbooking, while in the US it is possible to be late, but an unsuccessful overbooking must also be paid. And no, a sandwich and a bottle of water is not a payment, payment is a few hundred dollars, depending on the details of what happened.

And of course, no one knows about it, no one is offered money to anyone. And if you demand them, then paperwork begins, which will not bring any pleasure, and time and nerves will eat completely disproportionately possible victory.

But now there is AirHelp and several of its competitors. They take all the problems on themselves. All you need to do is to file an application on the site, and a startup will turn it into a legal complaint and in a couple of months will shake out everything that the airline actually owes. The mediator takes 25% of the compensation, if the case went without a court, and 50%, if not done. Payment, of course, is taken only for the result, the user is absolutely no risk. Law on the consumer side, the system works.

The service is already four years old, the biggest round - 12 million dollars - he raised last August. He spends money on marketing in European countries, in the USA he is not actively coming out yet, and in the rest of the world he has not even studied the laws yet. AirHelp tells investors about the market at $ 16 billion, i.e. 4 billion potential revenue per year, but, of course, they will never get anything close: the service is no longer unique, and the market they change is not in their favor, airlines learn courtesy .

In any case, no matter how the development of a startup is over - you can safely use its services. The statute of limitations on such matters is three years, if you had any problems with aviation since April 2014, it is not too late to receive your money. This also applies to Aeroflot flights from New York or Paris to Moscow.

5. Book a Tiger

The German Book a Tiger is an approximate analogue of our Qlean: a service that offers home cleaners for the middle class. But, unlike all uber-like services, he takes the performers to work officially, without any tricks with information services and other tricks, he hires them in the hundreds, pays for vacations and everything that is necessary. As a result, in theory, the price should increase, but in reality this is not - adjusted for average wages in the country at the cost of Book a Tiger is almost indistinguishable from the American Handy or our Qlean Lite, but the usual Qlean is much more expensive.

But if the wines are taken to the state, then suddenly there is one big plus - the ability to work normally with B2B. It is unknown to businesses that it is psychologically difficult to pay for information services for hire, and here you can use the same contract with the old cleaning company, only changing the name of the contractor. Business is usually less greedy than private individuals. You don’t need to train to get out of it for money, he has been using such services for a hundred years already - the B2B market turns out to be much better than B2C, and for Book a Tiger it is he who really became mainstream.

After that, what remains is the difference between an innovative startup and any big cleaning from the sixties of the last century, it’s not so easy to understand. Those and others manage a large staff of cleaners, those and others sell their services to businesses, those and others use the same detergents and vacuum cleaners. Book a Tiger themselves answer the question about the difference like this: "... modern alternative ... online platform ... affordable and available ... reliable cleaners". In reality, they have a mobile application, if a hipster millenial is in charge of choosing a contractor in the company, this is quite a serious plus, and, moreover, the price: compared to traditional cleaning, it is relatively low. In a bad version, the price will change when investors run out of money, in a good way - it will remain as it is due to economies of scale and more efficient use of IT for personnel management, old companies usually manage in the old way.

So far everything is going just fine, not a lot of money has been spent, and besides Germany, they are already working in Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, they raised another round in February to 20 million euros, promising to get a plus in a year.