A short excerpt from a short presentation I did looking at discovering 'under-the-radar' companies! Here I looked at Uqora, a company with a drink powder supplement targeting UTIs in the United States. This could be useful for VCs, investors, big brands and others looking to take stakes or acquire high growth consumer goods' firms.

1. EXAMPLE
Discovering Companies
Rob Sullivan
July 2019

2. Summary of Topics
Uqora
Jailatm.com
Nested Bean
Supergoop
Chime Bank
Main points covered

3. Stages of Assessment
Initial Scoping 1st Financials Meet
Addressable Market
Google/YT searches
Social data (FB & IG)
Press
Website Metrics
Founding Team
Virality Factors & Brand Moats
Competition
Annual Recurring Revenue
"Magic Number"
Capital Efficiency
Gross Margins
More Due Diligence
Google Analytics
On-site Behaviour
Facebook Pixel
Offline Distribution Data
Funnels (how fast or easy is to make a sale
and how cheap to serve a customer and can
these metrics be brought down over time)
More Financials
Rapport with team
Likeability
Sales Skills

4. Who they are
Uqora
Uqora sells a supplement powder drink mix.
As well as capsules, convincing people to
sign up for a subscription to prevent UTIs,
rather than visiting the doctor (reactive).
Consumers drink after common UTI-
inducing activities like sex or even
sometimes exercise.
Uqora’s drink mix sells for $25 per box of
10 servings.
2,616 reviews, 92% are 5 or 4 stars.

5. Headline points for Uqora
The
company
already
has some
impressive
numbers 360K SITE
VISITS (MAY
2019)
ONE ROUND OF
SEED FUNDING
AT $1.4M
9,900 SEARCHES
PER MONTH (US)
ALREADY
ATTAINED SOME
MAJOR PRESS
(E.G. FORBES)
Source: Similarweb, San Diego Venture Capital, Google Keyword Planner

6. They are playing in a big
market
The addressable
market
Source: CDC, Medscape, Google Keyword Planner
Second leading cause of doctor's
visits after the common cold in the
USA (6 million annual visits)
20% are Emergency visits 600,000 Google searches on a
global basis for 'UTI'

7. With huge US
search interest
Google shows the large number of
searches in the US for UTI treatments, the
different variations totalling into hundreds
of thousands of monthly searches.
Data from 2019
Source: Google Keyword Planner

8. Uqora are
interesting
for the sole
reason of
'flipping the
script' in this
space
Problem moves from reaction
(antibiotics from doctor) to
prevention (drink supplement).
Solves the pain point of visiting the
doctor about an intimate and
personal problem.
Recurring purchase vs. one-off
antibiotics and more consumer-
centric model.

9. Branding moats
62% of traffic is
search
98.77% of search
traffic is organic.
As alluded to
before, the brand
has nearly 10k
searches in the US.
Uqora has
some of the
strongest
branding in
the space
Strong
Facebook ads
Good slogans,
catch messaging,
call to actions and .
10% of traffic is
from social.
12.7k Instagram
followers
Naturally there is
not much UGC
given the sensitive
nature of the topic
but better than near
competitors.

10. WEBSITE PERFORMANCE COULD BE BETTER
High Bounce Rate
78.28%
Average Time Spent
50 seconds
Pages Per Visit
1.77
Source: Similarweb
This highlights the basic opportunities in improving the UX/UI here...

11. But more math highlights
opportunity
6 million
annual doctor
visits (US)
US and Global
Potential
2% buy serving
pack, moving
to prevention
model
$3,000,000 in
annual US
revenue,
assuming 1 pack
purchase per year
150 million
annual cases
(Global)
0.5% buy
serving pack,
moving to
prevention
model
$18,750,000 in
annual global
revenue, " "
Source: British Medical Journal
Estimates based on just one pack purchased per year, so leans very conservative, given the service is subscription-based.
So this is a worst-case scenario for each customer here. Quick glance on the website shows about 1 drink pack per month.

12. A clinical trial to test for Uqora's efficacy has been
posted with the US National Library of Medicine,
on July 18th 2019.
Important landmark given growing antibiotic
resistance and over-prescription.

13. Summary Consumer Centric Solution
Marks a major shift for addressing UTIs, with people
looking towards prevention in the face of excessive
antibiotic dependence.
Big Addressable Market
Solves clear pain points, at least 2 different major
ones for UTIs and chance to expand globally to
address a portion of the 150m doctor visits (annual).
Strong Branding
Branding is strongest out of US competitors, high
number of monthly searches, organic traffic for not
just information, 2x website traffic of liveutifree.com.

14. End of Teaser
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