Startup of the day (July 2017)

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

Twiggle

Eight years ago there were many such projects, but it seemed that the quality of the product was not enough for everyone, everyone died. Maybe now the time has come and now it will work out. Twiggle sells e-commerce services to the technology of intelligent search for products with an understanding of the natural language.

As a demo, they use the query “Open blue button for under 200 not blue” - try to drive its counterpart into any Lamoda, at best, the blue dresses in the issue will turn out to be. Or, for example, “under 200” - the most stupid consultant in the store will perfectly understand that this is about the price, but some online store is not. Even Amazon does not understand! The request “tv under 200 dollars” easily falls in the offers, it is popular, real people want to look for it, but look what the “shop of everything” finds in response.

In Twiggle demonstrations, of course, everything works. Both “not blue”, and “under 200”, and “dress shirt” with “without” in other cunning examples - the startup understands all this correctly, and the results of the issue correspond to human expectations. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to look at the project in real life, and not in the presentations - no one has yet fully implemented it, although “some clients already have A / B tests”.

Technically, Twiggle works like SaaS, providing partners with essentially two API methods: “load base” and “get search results”. Integration, respectively, is simple, no need to change the design, it is easy to use. Unfortunately, the Russian language is not supported, it will not be possible to introduce a miracle weapon in local projects, but you can try the domestic equivalent - Detectum

Cardlytics

Cardlytics elegantly trades bank secrets. Indeed, in fact, any bank knows about its customers so much that no search engine has ever dreamed of, and I want them to sell advertisements targeted. Cardlytics implements one of the possible scenarios.

Part of the startup software is installed inside the perimeter of the bank, it has access to all transactions, and based on this data it somehow segments the users. At the beginning of an advertising campaign aimed, for example, at rich lovers of beer restaurants, selected customers are transferred to the system of the bank itself, and the latter sends SMS or other alerts about the super discount and increased cash back. An unsuspecting person rejoices at a successful gift (“as you have guessed”) and goes to get acquainted with a new establishment. Cardlytics and the bank receive their commission, and the bank also has the additional loyalty of a happy customer.

Personal data is protected on two levels. True user names can and not be transferred to Cardlytics, it is enough for it to exchange completely conditional identifiers with the bank. In addition, the part of the software, located in the perimeter, is in the perimeter, and it should keep everything that has accumulated, it needs to send only general statistics to the outside.

Theoretically, everything that Cardlytics does can also be done by the bank itself: Smart Algorithms on BigData are quite conditional there, having access to card spending can use straight-line filters. In practice, small banks have neither the resources to develop, nor the ability to reach large advertisers, and a startup gives them a single point of entry.

Now 1,500 American banks are working with Cardlytics, together they see about 10% of all American spending on cards and checks. For comparison, in Russia such a share would correspond to the position number two after Sberbank. The volume of investments corresponds to the scale: for almost 10 years of life, the company has “mastered” $ 180 million - try cheaper to connect 1,500 small banks to its platform. Serious revenue went only very recently: 80 million for the year 2016 with rapid growth.

Tile

A new gadget for forgetful hipsters offers startup Tile. He sells small electronic cards with a Bluetooth chip, which users put in their wallet, hang up on a key ring with keys, attach to a dog's collar, or otherwise connect with what they are afraid of losing. Now, if the fears come true, just press the button in the mobile application, Tile will ring and the thing will be there. A small wow-effect from product designers: if the phone is suddenly lost, then everything works perfectly symmetrical - press the button on the Tile and the smartphone will ring.

This approach works great if the keys are filled somewhere within the apartment. But when they flew out of pocket somewhere on the road, Bluetooth, most likely, will not finish off. In this case, Tile offers two mechanisms. The application can show the point on the map, in which he last managed to connect with the card. If this is, say, a job or a favorite cafe, then the problem is most likely solved. If the purse fell out on the bus and the geographic coordinate of this place is completely meaningless, then the community enters the battle. When a card loses its master phone from its “mind”, it starts sending an SOS signal to everyone. Any smartphone with the Tile application next to the loss will receive a signal and send it to the cloud, from where information about the movement of the thing will be sent to its owner. Of course, nobody gives a 100% guarantee, but there are chances for a happy ending to the story.

It costs one card twenty-five bucks, with the purchase of several at the same time, you can get a substantial discount. The battery serves for a year, after this period the company offers to exchange cards for a surcharge - in fact, a hidden subscription model with an annual contract, I don’t really understand why it is not executed explicitly. Now the startup has reached a turnover of $ 100 million a year, and has sold 10 million devices in the entire history, more than half of them in the last 12 months. Investments are growing in the same way: from the received 59 million 25 came this May.

Levelup

American LevelUp offers users pre-order kiosks - as in McDonalds, only through the application, and not in the iron box. An office employee descends for lunch, enters an order at a nearby eatery in an elevator, and by the time he arrives, take-away food will be waiting for him. The user does not have to waste time, the restaurant does not have to pay the cashier, the startup collects its $ 69 a month for a subscription, even the other less advanced ones are satisfied, the guests have become a bit shorter.

This one feature and subscription to it is already a big business, LevelUp speaks about 300 thousand connected points. It is impossible to estimate revenue by multiplying them by $ 69 and 12, of course, the networks have huge discounts, but there is still a lot of money. And a subscription is not everything, another source of income is advertising and promotion. A person launches an application when he goes somewhere for food, and his location is known - the perfect moment to advertise some new burger from a cafe nearby.

The most ambiguous way to monetize - CRM-opportunities. Orders and payments pass exclusively through LevelUp, and they come to a public catering facility already impersonal. Knowledge of the habits of users, start-ups and trades. Cafes can segment their guests, make special offers to them and even send pushy.

It is interesting that the product is young, and the startup is very old, but earlier it was engaged in a completely different one - did some kind of Appe Pay through QR codes. LevelUp changed its business model about a year ago, but in all articles in the press, and even in its own Help section, the old version is described. If you count from the time of the pivot, the investment received $ 42 million, 37 of them very recently.

Meet for charity

Sometimes a startup can be just a page on a social network. The Russian startup Meet For Charity has no IT platform, but this does not prevent it from achieving success.

The idea of ​​the project is very simple - it is a regular charity auction for the right to meet with an interesting person. Every day a new guest is announced (“lot”), and the subscribers of the page make their bets right in the comments - who will be willing to pay what amount for the opportunity to communicate with this person. After the end of the bidding, the winner transfers his bid to a charitable foundation, and he shares with the 15% commission with Meet For Charity. As a result, absolutely everything is won: the world gets more good, a start-up earns money, and someone gets an important meeting.

Guests "in the lots" are very different: businessmen, show stars, athletes. At the time of writing the original post, Kortnev “played out” from Accident, and a record amount of 1.2 million rubles was rescued two months ago for lunch with Dmitry Grishin. For comparison, the rate of 20-25 thousand dollars ended similar auctions for a meeting with Warren Buffett at the beginning of the two thousandth.

The current average final price of the lot is 90,000 rubles (20,000 a year ago), 15% of the commission gave more than one and a half million revenue over the past six months, with almost zero costs and organic growth. The growth of the inorganic founders are looking for investment - they want to leave the page on Facebook for a mobile application and go with their model to other countries. I think we should at least wish them good luck!