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The product

The product's main innovation is how it combines cutting-edge digital and IoT technologies for creating an all-in-one digital engagement platform that can provide any social organization or municipality to engage all segments of the population for a very competitive price. No other software provider is offering a similar solution as a SaaS with flexible packages that suits every organization’s budget and with a set of features as complete and technologically advanced.

Problem being solved

Many local governments, medium-large companies and social organizations struggle to engage their community members and co-create innovation.

Which solution

Managers of organizations and their members can publicly discuss issues, co-create projects, and co-solve challenges by collecting ideas on specific challenges, sharing feedback through surveys, and identifying and reporting issues. The solution uses IoT technology and ML to automate problem-solving and decision-making processes based on the feedback from citizens and data generated from IoT sensors.

Business model

The platform is sold as a SaaS solution and it is based mainly on a usage-based pricing plan.

The main revenue streams are: monthly or annual subscriptions for using the platform; sales from in-app reward system; monthly fees for extra services (e-public authentication login; SMS notification; content creation and moderation; data analysis and reporting, customer support).

Customers

The clients are mainly municipalities, social organizations and middle-large private companies and are mostly based in Denmark and Italy, but we are already testing the market also in other European countries.

The market

Competitors

Novoville, CitizenLab, Ideascale, Fluicity only partially cover some of our features. We have a key competitive advantage thanks to a unique SaaS pricing model and features like multi-organization network, in-app reward system, user verification through public authentications, and the integration of IoT.

Growth potential / goals / ambition

-Increase revenue sales to 200k € (increase of the number of customers through direct sales, digital marketing, organic growth, and public online events);

-Rollout of innovative key features (i.e. IoT integration and ML for improved core features oriented to strategic clients like municipalities);

-Fundraising (raising brand awareness and capital from funds in order to support investments both for acquisition of new customers and innovations in the solution).

Management and team

17 team members (1 CEO, 1 CTO, 2 software developers, 5 communication and 8 sales)

Finance / financing

The business has been mainly bootstrapped and co-financed by Innovation Fund Denmark (with a grant of 270K DKK).

Status

The product was launched in January 2021.

Questions for the panel

1.How can the company more effectively reach potential customers through marketing, direct sales and partnership channels (B2B and B2G)?

2.Currently the SaaS solution is sold based on a usage-based pricing that changes also on the customer’s organization type. Since no competitor is using a similar pricing model, what is the best approach to decide and evaluate which is the optimal product price?

3.The company managed to develop the product without the need of raising external capital. At this stage the company can decide to continue to grow (thanks to the future revenues, personal finances and potential soft money) and show more traction before raising external capital or to start looking for one or more investors to support marketing and sales costs and, potentially, grow faster. Considering the company’s situation, is it recommended to raise capital at this stage? If so, what type (and structure) of investment is recommended? Moreover, what should the company do to be ready for a successful external investment?