Startup of the day (November 2017)

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

Ycloset

Startupers around the world are trying to launch a service for the rental of clothes, I have seen such presentations dozens of times, the idea lies on the surface. Chinese YCloset implemented it and brought it to a significant scale.

Mechanic is a classic subscription: a girl pays 500 yuan ($ 75) and holds three things at the same time. You can sort through your wardrobe indefinitely, even if you call a courier every day while she pays a subscription, it's free. The choice of clothes - 60 thousand items, in Lamode, for comparison, a little more, but the scale is the same. Of the brands I know of, Zara works with YCloset, and journalists write that the average retail price of things in service is 1,500 yuan - to the amateurish opinion, the amount seems too high, but I will not argue.

For those who already spend a lot on clothes, the deal looks great. The subscriber pays for the year the price of four items, holds three houses and changes them at least for each publication - this is clearly more effective than a regular store. A start-up takes things from brands for free - for them this is a way of advertising, but, let's say, they will sometime buy with a threefold discount from retail. Suppose also that the dresses live for a year, and then the fashion changes. Under these conditions, and the ideal utilization of the assortment, YCloset will spend exactly a quarter of the proceeds on the clothing itself, in reality, probably half. The remaining 37.5 dollars a month with a reserve will pay back two or three or four courier trips and the same amount of washings, and they will change less often on large volumes, they will play and get tired, the economy looks like a working scale.

It is curious that the biggest operational difficulties arose precisely with washing and cleaning, there was not a word about them in the typical presentation of the start-up idealist. YCloset takes all these efforts on itself, and it is organizationally difficult for him, as a result, they even merged with one of the specialized companies.

A startup two years, investment has received 70 million dollars, 50 of them in the recent round. About plans to expand to a male audience is not talking.

Braavo

Business plans of mobile games are structured according to the same scheme: the cost of attraction, the conversion to the payer, the average check and the returnability are combined with each other according to a simple formula and confidently predict success or lack thereof. Braavo Capital automated this analysis to offer financing.

The gaming company gives BC access to analytics accounts and advertiser’s accounts, Braavo’s algorithms are trying to figure out that marketing is fighting off, and immediately approve of the credit line. As soon as CTR or retenshen crawl the red line - that's all, stop the machine, do not give more money. Loan payments are automatically deducted from the money transferred by the stora, the business of the client Braavo usually understands better than the owner himself - the risks are minimal. As a result of confidence, financing conditions are better offered than those of a bank that does not understand the mobile game economy and is afraid of everything. Moreover, BC is cheaper than a traditional venture capital fund - that, in the end, wants to return 3x, or even 10x, no matter how you make it. Another advantage of the new approach is the speed of decision-making; Braavo promises 24 hours in advertising from receiving data to approving a loan.

Automatic financing of startups on automatic financing has not yet been invented, BC itself traditionally raised investments. The last round was $ 70 million, but this number is not as large as it seems: most of the amount is a commercial loan in working capital, and not an investment in the development of the company.

Matroid

Hanging a camera now costs a penny, it is much more expensive to constantly watch it, so as not to miss the point of interest. For many years, a start-up was asking for observers from Bangladesh, conditional, overseeing order in the United States. A local, dear security officer would run out only if there were problems, that is, almost never, out of ten nine would have been quietly fired. I don’t know if it was launched in reality, and Matroid has already made a more progressive decision.

In his model, instead of a living person, AI looks at the video stream. There are no universal settings, each client is looking for their own interesting things, anybody is important to any people near the forbidden door, to someone’s specific person. In Matroid, a customer uploads his own samples to train his unique neural network and turns it on for his camera. Successful settings of the grids can be shared with the world, while it seems to be on pure altruism, but in the future, you can probably make money.

The start-up price looks modern, with open tariffs, a minimum of free trial and payment on the card. Bulk 1000 seconds recognition costs 40 cents, translated into an eight-hour working day out $ 250. Now it is comparable with the final price of a living person in Bangladesh, but it scales much better and will become cheaper over time and not expensive. With the cost of renting a server, these numbers can not even be compared, Matroid unit-margins are excellent.

Although customers come from the street with arbitrary tasks, Matroid itself purposefully searches for consumers in certain sectors. In addition to the obvious security, he is now actively offering monitoring of television for large companies in search of displaying their logos and top officials.

It is curious that a startup looks very cool and modern, but there are no breakthrough technologies inside, libraries are used by others, a billing web interface can be repeated. The product is already ready, and only $ 3.5 million has been spent on investments so far, 10 have been raised in the last round, but this is for future marketing, not for development.

Simple contacts

Telemedicine finds it difficult to find B2C niches with real treatment of patients, but it fights well against strange bureaucracy. American rules allow the purchase of contact lenses only by prescription, and with a limited period of validity. Myopic and far-sighted people, even with stable vision, regularly go to the doctor, spend their time and money on this only to get a completely identical piece of paper each time.

Simple Contacts brings the visit to the online: the patient puts a lot of checkboxes about the absence of complications and complaints, after which the English analogues of SB and OLS appear on the screen of a smartphone or computer. The results of the automatic test are signed by a licensed doctor. If everything is ok, the old recipe is confirmed, the user buys a favorite brand of lenses right in Simple Contacts.

For a vision check, a startup takes 30 dollars. If we assume that the oculist signs for 5 minutes, then 20 dollars of them is the margin. The online store works with market prices and commissions, but potentially earns more competitors - customer loyalty should be higher, they will save money and, most importantly, time to visit an offline doctor.

Investment Simple Contacts raised 10 million dollars; besides marketing, a lot of money is eaten up by an expansion of a license for a test - reducing the list of contraindications, etc.

Onyx

The trend of the last decade is the unification of everything and everything in a smartphone. Previously, taxis were called by hand, in the store they paid with a card, and they did not take any pictures at all - now all this is done by applications on the smartphone. Onyx goes against the flow and materializes one of the standard applications - communication in the radio mode, wok-talki.

The device looks like a round disk the size of a palm, users cling it to clothes, usually to the chest, but it is possible to shoulder it or somewhere else. We saw a similar form factor in dozens of science fiction and fantasy films, while Captain Power turned off the suit from a similar button, for example. The Onyx signal goes to the smartphone via Bluetooth, and further to the interlocutor via the Internet.

Winning compared to the application - the number of clicks. To say something, it is enough to touch the chest with your hand - and you can talk, compare it with “pull the phone out of your pocket, unlock, find the application you need, start, press the button inside it”. On the other hand, the trend of combining everything in a smartphone not from scratch appeared, Onyx cons are also obvious: a separate device and a separate charge, and the price is more than $ 100 per piece instead of an advertising model or a couple of bucks.

Such inconveniences pay off only with constant use; among private individuals, there’s perhaps some kind of superromantic couple or a very disturbing mother, for 99.9% of the population a fairly ordinary messenger is enough. The main startup market is B2B. Companies buy Onyx for hands-on line workers, a typical conversation is something like “Hey, anyone, there are still red tubes in stock?” Saving seconds can be justified even economically, the time taken by the loader is really money. In addition, if we are talking about, for example, cashiers, then their use of Onyx looks much better for the eyes of people from the queue.

The startup wants to develop in the direction of an automatic translation for communication of Spanish-speaking employees with English-speaking and bots with answers to standard questions. It looks like an attempt to cling to the AI-HYIP, but the company received a round of $ 18 million for these plans.