11. We look for
• Smart money
– Distribution
– Marketing
Notes de l'éditeur
My name is AndreiBlaj and I will talk to you about how we encourage people to be creative. Anytime. Anywhere. 15 s
Andrei BlajI used to be a regular at the National Informatics OlympicsI graduated Politehnic University of Bucharest, I worked on my final year paper in Singapore, in the Image Processing Lab there. I worked in several companies like Bitdefender and Brainient as a Research Engineer. I am in charge of developing the core technology behind our products.CatalinMorosanHe also graduated Politehnica University of Bucharest, he did his final year paper in Lisabon, working on drivers for an automated car for planet Mars.He did some hard core programming for Thales, developing software for the Austrian Railways. Then he decided to go indie and started to do freelance development on Android.Last year we won “Best Mashup” Prize at Yahoo Open Hack.He is in charge of implementing the UI for mobile devicesMihaiIovaHe is the renegate of our team, a true "creative“. He has been doing design for the last 10 years. His experience involves freelancing and working with cool companies in Bucharest like Internet Corp or Brainient as well as working on his own side projects like T-Vice.com.He is in charge of the good looks and easiness of our productsWe started working together last year, when we did our own little Startup Weekend at a challet in the Bucegi mountains. We brainstormed some mobile app ideas, including a hand reading app, an app for breast measurement (yeah, 3 guys in the mountains, what can you expect) and this app that automatically generates color palettes from photos. The latter one won and we worked for 2 days on it. We wanted to launch it after that weekend, which of course, did not happen. The good part was that we discovered the very good vibe that we have when working together. 1:30 m
We target 40 MM creatives, both professional and amateur, that are using a smartphone. We plan to make $25/customer/year, making it a….Ourinitial market is the same as Adobe’s market for it’s professional creative products, 40 MM, according to their Investor Handout in 2011. Apart from this, we realized that we also reach everyday people that are interested in picking the right color palette for their wedding (by the way, there are 500.000 searches on Google for wedding color palette), or people interested in interior design or fashion. We can easily add up another 40 MM to our initial market. Then, we took into account th fact that the Smartphone penetration is at about 35% now and will reach 50% in the next 2 years, so we concluded that our addressable market is of about 40 MM creatives (professionals and regular people interested into color) that use smartphones and want to get inspiration anytime, anywhere. 30s
1 B dollar market.
We chose to focus on one of their problems, specifically getting color inspiration. They are looking for harmonious color combinations (also called color palettes) which they use in their products: websites, clothes, furniture and others. The current way of finding the color palettes is mostly manual and requires a lot of time.
We are providing a solution for this problem, a mobile app that automatically generates the color palettes anytime, anywhere from photos. We have already developed an Android app until now that looks like this. Let’s see how two of our customers use our app30 s
Adam is a freelance designer from Louisville, Kentucky. He is among the first 10 customers that downloaded our app. He told me he is now snapping photos anytime, anywhere and then uses the color palettes to create beautiful looking websites for his customers, like this one. 30 s
Elsa is an amateur painter from Mexico. She’s finding inspiration in the most common objects in her house. This is a picture she took to of her radiator. Then she generated the color palette using Real Colors, and then she painted this.30s
We are now using a Free/Paid business model. We have limited functionality on the free version of the app and we charge for the paid version 5$ for each download. We launched the free app last year in November, and until now we managed to get 10.000 downloads, with excellent reviewsThe Paid app was launched last month and we had close to 200 downloads until now, in 1 and a half months. In the last month and a half we got very good reviews from Google’s Android Developers on their weekly video show The Friday App Review30s
Our BM now is Free/Paid, we charge 5$ for every Real Colors Pro version. Because we realized that different groups of people from our target market want the same functionality packed differently, we decided that we will create products for groups like Web Designers (the current app is targeted to them), Fashion Designers, Interior Designers and Architects, Video Editors, Photographers. We will also experiment with in-app or subscription based models, which will generate 25$/customer/year. Statistics show that a well implemented in-app model can generate on average 34$/customer/year. 30s
Our main problems right now are distribution and promotion of our product. We have found a market for it, we have customers using our app and buying it, we need to reach out to all the 40 MM creatives that want to use download and use the app. We are interested in creating relations in the US, especially in the Silicon Valley in the mobile space, so our partner must have access to that market and the players in it (publishers, advertisers). Right now we are looking for 100k to help us validate the distribution and marketing hypothesis in the US and in the beginning of 2012 we will be looking for Venture Capital of around 1 MM euros to help us rapidly grow our business (product, distribution, networking, marketing).30s
We believe that the products that we build can change the way creatives get inspired and we need a partner that can help us reach them. Thank you10s