TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Italy-based Woomark, a travel social network focused on location services planning.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Woomark is the fruit of a collaboration between a small team of entrepreneurs, web experts and mobile development specialists who all share the same vision that location-based services and geosocial networks are still in their infancy and offer an ocean of opportunities to whom can spot them.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We didn’t get any specific external financial support yet, the business has been self-funded to-date by the founders and we plan to keep it that way in the short-term. Towards the end of the year we will start gearing up for funding rounds and investors.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Woomark aims at turning local places global, with users coming from all continents and easy access via the web or the mobile App.
Woomark tries to connect like-minded people by allowing them to create, explore and share places of interest, wherever they are.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Woomark is a free location-based social networking website and Android mobile application that makes it easy to publish, share and discover places of interest anywhere in the world.
Woomark users can join groups, create new ones, follow other users, send each other private messages, share places and groups on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Stumbleupon and other popular services.
Signing up to Woomark is free and made easy by using existing Facebook, Google or Yahoo accounts.
Woomark is a geosocial network focused on location, with the use of GPS on the mobile and fully integrated into Google maps and Street view. Users can even get directions to places and get a print-friendly summary of their directions.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our business is a direct B2C business so we do not have customers as such. Every user is a customer. However, we believe that in the future, owners of places and merchants will be interested in using the Woomark platform to engage with new customers, globally. Accordingly, we are building a revenue model around featured places and exclusivity positioning for business customers.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
When we are ready to go into funding rounds and do the VC road show, we will be putting forward the added-values of our business, including fully owned IPR, low running costs, fast growing userbase, high web and social media presence, skilled and experienced management team.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
The business is a free social networking, user review, and local search web site and mobile App.
Our business is supported by Advertising for the moment, although we believe that the revenue model for monetization lies elsewhere. But our business is powered by user generated content, so we are focusing initially on building our user base, which in turn is building content, which in turn opens monetization opportunities.
Since we have low running costs and all the development is done in-house to keep IPR and knowledge, we are in no rush to add unnecessary expenses to our balance sheet or give away equity until we can reach the levels of popularity we are targeting and have a stronger position in front of investors.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Our strength is the young, talented and experienced team behind Woomark and our fully integrated approach to location-based geosocial networking.
Weaknesses:
- Our weakness is that we are a small team and are self-funding our business. Also we are competing with already established brands in our market, so we are the David against many Goliath of Geosocial networking.
Opportunities:
- The opportunities for us are in the Android strategy we are implementing. There is a lot of rubbish on the App stores in general, and we try to distinguish ourselves by the quality of the product we are offering as well as removing any barriers to signup e.g. allowing sign up from Facebook, google and yahoo.
Threats:
- The treat is that the current growing trend of users and traffic slows down before we have managed to reach a tipping point and monetise our business in a self sufficient way. But to mitigate against this treat we are playing on our strength and strong technology knowledge to stay on top of the popularity wave.
Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?
Most people that didn’t like the idea were people saying that Foursquare, Yelp, and Qype already existed and therefore the market was saturated. We see it differently. We think that there are popular services like Foursquare, Yelp and so on because there is a market.
We have taken a slightly different approach than the other to differentiate ourselves and have put our money on the Android horse rather than the iPhone as we believed in the Android market potential from the very beginning. Recent smart phone sales reports worldwide seem to confirm our thoughts.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We believe that if you take care of the seconds the minutes will take care of themselves, so our focus for the first 12 months is on Users, downloads and traffic (the seconds) and the real monetization strategies (the minutes) will come later.
We have increased our traffic significantly since we launched earlier this year thanks to an optimised SEO strategy which is reflected for example in our current Alexa ranking. Our initial goal is to enter into the top 100000 sites world ranking by this summer.
Our user base is growing considerably and we have users on all continents, but our downloads come mostly from the Android market yet. Our goal is to attract more web users as well as driving as many downloads of our Android App as possible.
To achieve the latter we have partnered with most of the independent App stores (CNET Download, Slideme, Handango, Mobihand, Handster, Getjar) to extend our reach and boost download levels. We have also started a localisation exercise to make our app more relevant in some key target territories.
We have translated it into Italian, French and are now working on a few more languages including Spanish to reach Spanish speaking users in the US, South America and Spain, where we have seen from the early trends that users really liked Woomark.
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