The Verifeed Opportunity
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Verifeed is a social intelligence platform that analyzes social conversations to help enterprises make better business decisions. Their mission is to make sense of global social media discussions so companies can create contextual content, identify and engage customers and influencers. Verifeed uses advanced algorithms to identify patterns, credibility of sources and put information in context similar to investigative journalists. Some key clients include brands monitoring product discussions, financial firms ensuring regulatory compliance of tweets, and sports organizations increasing engagement during events. Verifeed seeks funding to expand their sales, engineering and data science teams to grow their client base across additional industries and social networks.
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The Verifeed Opportunity
- 1. Trusted social intelligence for the enterprise
- 2. make better business decisions create contextual content identify, engage, and reward customers, sources, ambassadors Our mission at Verifeed To make sense of the world’s social conversations so enterprises can:
- 3. Why Verifeed is massively scalable Brands Publishers Financial $432 Bn US Consumer Goods $118 Bn Content marketing spend, 2013 $100 Bn US News Publishing & Broadcasting $1.3 Trillion US Financial Services $10 Bn Financial Ad spend 2012 $1Bn Social software spend Gartner, 2013
- 4. How Verifeed makes money B2B Platform Licensing Enterprises pay recurring monthly fees on annual contracts with 3 pricing tiers based on: ―Data usage ―Social sources ―Service level
- 5. Eliot BergsonTim Berglund Peter Harrison Renee Lewis Duncan WorkMatt ProhaskaDavid Lawrence Why we’re the right team to execute Paul Herzog Chief Architect Melinda Wittstock Founder & CEO ‘Hands on’ advisors
- 6. Early Use Cases & Metrics Sports: March Madness Challenge: Boost traffic, keep conversations on site Action: Publish relevant real-time Tweets from/about the players and coaches on NBC affiliate Result: Time spent up from 10 to 26 seconds, Twitter referrals up 129% Brands: Dog Food Challenge: Find customers Action: Filter real- time Tweets about a UK luxury brand & competitor products, consumer attitudes Result: Ongoing. Identify & engage ambassadors with contextual content & identify customers Financial: Compliance Challenge: Assure Tweets are compliant with FINRA Action: Source ad parse market-moving news for reliability & exclude Tweets with investment advice to eliminate liability. Result: Ongoing. Verifeed technology working as promised.
- 7. How Verifeed forces global growth Beach-heads first US verticals Up-sell with more social sources / data & features Increase market penetration Grow globally SportsBrands PR Add verticals Hiring Publishing Politics Financial
- 8. How Verifeed IP works Verifeed’s algorithms and automated processes uniquely replicate what investigative and analytical journalists do to: — Identify patterns — Put developments in context — Qualify source reputation and expertise
- 9. Uncovers credibility of influencers Eliminates redundant, off-topic, search results Allows instant custom publication Enables real-time engagement/recruitment of users 100% Twitter fire hose, complex filters Soon automates discovery/contextual search Competitive Differentiation Twitter API Limited to 5% fire-hose & single-term searches by hashtag or handle, no engagement tools, analytics Social media management Twitter search engines Influencer assessment Broad social data search/analytics Social aggregators Social management dashboards, mediocre Twitter search, no source reputation/accuracy filters Focused on Twitter brand monitoring only, not content Focused on user influence (not credibility or expertise); not intended for search Limited filters for relevance, geolocation; no fact-checking / source reputation component Complex search filters, analytics, dashboards; no veracity / reputation emphasis; price point too high
- 10. Primary risks Large company pivots into Verifeed’s differentiated space: Verification for accuracy and source credibility for real-time ‘actionability’ is Verifeed’s number 1 focus Twitter changes terms of service to undercut Verifeed or offers rival service: Verifeed is developing support for all social feeds; Partners will not want multiple service providers if Verifeed can aggregate all sources at a competitive or lower cost
- 11. Timeline to Stage Execution ― Debuted 2013 SXSW ― Grew pipeline to 260+ in 2 weeks ― 62% wanted next steps post SXSW Market Validation ― Prove metrics ― Test use cases ― Find early adopters ― Incorporate customer feedback ― Average of 9 demo requests per day Product Paying Partners ― Convert pilots to charter revenue ― New use cases ― Up-sell new features ― Automated contextual alerts/discovery ― Add social sources ― Mobile SDK ― Enhance algorithms ― Enhance UI/UX Platform Growth ― Expand sales, biz dev, product team ― Expand into next verticals ― Full price point ― Expand reach & revenue within each company ― Enhance ‘fact check’ algorithms ― Unsupervised ML ― Ongoing UX/UI improvements ― Reputation scoring MARCH 2013 PRESENT – 3Q-4Q 2013 1Q 2014 ―-Enhance UX/UI ― Reputation scoring ― Automated @mention recruitment ― Automated pre-filled search Pilot Programs Product Product
- 12. Hire ‘Growth Hacker’/BD Engineers/Product Manager Support Data Scientist(s) Support Q3/4 Tech Roadmap Data Costs Marketing/Sales Investment Sought $30K Monthly Revenue Jan 14 $5mm Run Rate Q1/15 $95mm Annual 2017 Q3/13 Q1/14 Enhance Reputation scoring Mobile X-Platform/SDK Social sources Expand / Scale BD, Sales, Engineers $500K+ Bridge $3.5mm+ Series A
- 13. Financials: Five-Year Projected 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 # Enterprise Partners Recurring Fees Ad Revenue Share TOTAL REVENUE Cogs Operating / Sales Gross Margin EBITDA Margin EBITDA $166k $163k ($329k) 9 $42.5K $42.5K $377k $389k ($711k) 47 $1.8mm $153K $1.9mm $2.3mm $2.6mm (21%) ($2.9mm) 175 $9.3mm $1.1mm $10.5mm $4.4mm $6.1mm 56% (1%) ($52k) 456 $28mm $6.2mm $34mm $10.3mm $12.5mm 70% 33% $11.8mm 776 $63mm $20mm $83mm $18.4mm $19.9mm 78% 54% $44.8mm Cash positive Q2/15
- 14. $30K monthly revenue Customer Trials Proving Use Cases & Metrics Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer: “Revolutionizing social media with a differentiated solution” Financial Milestones & Progress$100K Founder & Family Nov/13-Feb/14Mar/12 Sept-Oct/12 Mar/13 First Revenue Bridge Jul/13 Sept/13 $3.5mm+ Series A Platform Enhancement & Sales $500K Equity Round ($3mm pre) 2,0 iPhone Twitter ‘mine & @mention’ B2B platform debuts at SXSW Pipeline 260+ Verifeed rebranding $400K Angel Convertible
- 15. Thank you Melinda Wittstock | CEO & Founder 202 274 1479 Melinda @ Verifeed.com Twitter @Veriate Demo at Verifeed.com
Editor's Notes
- If information had a ‘gold standard’ what would it be?Think of what makes information valuable to you and your company. It’s got to beuseful. So it needs to be relevant. Accurate. From a trusted source. All in the moment.At Verifeed we mine for ‘information gold’ by filtering social streams in real time … to provide enterprises with actionable and trusted social intelligence. We’re truly unique in that we replicate – with algorithms and automated processes – what an investigative and analytical journalist does intuitively to be first and right:Looks for patterns, puts developments in context,Qualifies source reputation / expertise
- Let’s face it – a lot of businesses and brands feel like this. Overwhelmed by the noise, 300 billion gigabytes of social data, three times the grains of sand on earth doubling every two years. Most companies have no idea how to harness Social Data in a meaningful way. They know they need a clearer signal of what’s actionable but have many don’t know where to start.Verifeed makes sense of the world’s conversations – for enterprises that need to be::: First to know – and right – like hedge funds and day traders, journalists.:: Closer to their customers like consumer brands who need to source fresh insights, identify and reward ambassadors, engage people around contextual social content:: Focused on driving traffic, time on site and other metrics to monetize content such as broadcasters and publishers
- Verifeed has massive addressable markets in US…and globally. Our focus is on the $1bn now being spent on social software, a spend which has a growth trajectory at pace with exponential growth in social data itself.
- How do we make money? Recurring revenue from a yearly license paid monthly at price points starting at $1,500 a month and toppingout at $15K with the addition of social sources, features and mobile SDK.
- Our team has deep domain expertise across our target markets and core technology – and we how to innovate and drive revenue and results. Founder & CEO Melinda Wittstock’s grandmother was first to call her disruptive at age 5 when she earned my first $100 door-to-door demanding pre-payment. She’s a serial media-tech entrepreneur, proven executive and award-winning journalist - creating content and driving revenue/ratings/traffic (Times, FT, CNBC, ABC, NPR, CNC, BBC),and building businesses.Verifeed is her third company. Verifeed has a top notch tech team led by Chief Data Architect Paul Herzog (Nuance, JP Morgan Chase, MacSpeech, NBA, Cendant) and data scientist Ronald Zhangand access to top Ruby on Rails, iOS and other developers.Hands-on advisors Duncan Work (fmr Chief Scientist, LinkedIn), David Lawrence, (enterprise data architect Harvard, Gartner, ProFlowers, State St Bank and others), Peter Harrison (fmr CEO Global Logic),Matt Prohaska who has sold or managed teams selling $2.5bn in digital advertising and platform licensing deals from CNET in 1995 through AOL and the New York Times,Renee Lewis (software entrepreneur with multiple exits), Tim Berglund (data architect & chief trainer at Gitbub formerly of Mapquest and Intellidata who built Verifeed’s first algorithms),
- We’ve done pilots and tested use cases for sports, veterans, weather, broadcaster’s second screens, PR and brand content marketing:Increasing traffic for a local NBC station around basketballFinding reliable sources to inform Airguide Online reporting and engage users with contextual interactive contentWorking with a major mobile enterprise company to automate thousands of relevant social conversations on a second screen app.Helping a brand find potential customers (first Iams, now Lily’s Kitchen), a self-help group increase its mailing list, and a hiring platform identify the best and most relevant jobs on Twitter.And we’re about to start helping a PR firm change opinion about a client during a crisis.One platform, many use cases.
- Verifeed scales deal by deal, vertical by vertical, upsell by upsell, worldwide. We believe this is a $100mm+ revenue company in 5 years. Social software / data currently has a multiple of 6x-7x.
- We believe our approach to ‘cracking the code’ of veracity/accuracy with automated algorithmic processes is superior to sentiment (which cannot discern intent let alone accuracy) and other current approaches. Verifeed differentiates with a systems-oriented approach that draws upon the award-winning investigative and analytical journalism of Verifeed founder Melinda Wittstock.Melinda was often first to discover game-changing, market moving and transformational stories – and first to understand where the story was going next. Her formula was a mix of pattern recognition, source qualification and cumulative knowledge, separating commonalities from outliers, and cross-referencing or weighting outliers with source reputation, expertise, proximity (first hand or second hand account) and discerning agendas (who gains, who loses) by ‘gaming’ out a story. Verifeed’s algorithms and algorithmic roadmap leverage these processes. Here are just four ways in which we execute:Weighted expertise. Cross reference LinkedIn API with data mined from Twitter/Facebook and other social profiles to establish expertise relative to a user’s post – and assign a weight accordingly.Strength in numbers. Multiple sources in agreement strengthens the probability of accuracy. Our systems will detect ‘outliers’. For instance a one-off report like the hacked AP tweet would have been flagged as questionable, irrespective of the source: if a bomb had gone off in the White House there would have been a deafening number of tweets. First hand vs. second hand. Eyewitness reports are more likely to be true. We already dig into each tweet to see if it has a link or not, and dig into the meta data of the link to establish whether it is a first hand or second hand account. Geolocation will also be used to establish proximity to an event.Authenticity. Cross reference Tweet timeline and bio to see if person really is where they say they are, and how much expertise they have built in a topic area, including how much of a following they have.
- There are many sentiment and ‘social listening’ platforms out there like Radian6, Mass Relevance, and Crimson Hexagon for brands that want to know what people think about their products. There are alsotools like Hootsuiteto help companies ‘push out’ and manage their outbound messaging on social networks. Consumer-focused tools like Klout help identify ‘influencers’ to help companies amplify those messages and others like Storify to help editors curate social feeds manually for use in stories. Others like Datasift provide complex search filters and infographics for companies to search for contextual relevance.Here’s how Verifeed’s Twitter search tool is CURRENTLY differentiated:Reduces redundant, off-topic, search resultsEliminates spam, viruses, porn, unauthenticated users, irrelevancies and repetitionAllows instant custom publication via widgets (soon SDK) Enables real-time engagement/recruitment of usersVerifeed soon adds a mobile SDK, additional social sources (Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and others) and automates discovery around preferences and contextual content.And here’s what NONE of these other vendors selling into our target markets do that Verifeed is progressing quickly to achieve:Establish veracity (probabilities of accuracy) of posts in real timeEstablish credibility (reputation scoring) of sources cross-referenced/weighted with expertiseReal time discovery and customized publishing (web & mobile) of relevant, accurate conversations
- Verifeedsoft-launched the Twitter platform in March. Within two weeks we’d built a pipeline of more than 260+ top companies. We are busy with early demos and pilots (and qualification of early adopter leads) –enhancing user experience and analytics on our platform so we can shorten our sales cycle. We now convert pilots into paying customers with at least 15 paying customers by the year-end with monthly revenues targeted for $30K by December.
- Verifeed’s most urgent need is to support existing cash burn required as we close first revenue: Data/Hosting costs, Chief Architect, CEO, and sparing use of freelance developers/designer. Current burn is $35K per month (not including $10K in one-off current contracts and deferred compensation payable at A round). We can sustain at current pace for 4 months with $150K to drive first revenue – and can progress faster on technology and sales if we can hire a sales ‘growth hacker’ to augment CEO efforts, at least one more data engineer, and support design/presentation layer freelancers. That’s why an immediate $500K at this time: We believe that level of investment will result in monthly revenue of a minimum $30K by January 2014, upon which we can sustain if it takes us longer to close a Series A than January 2014 target date.
- Why Verifeed? It’s scalable, high margin, and game changing.One platform, multiple large addressable markets, a great team and global reach. It’s win-win-win for partners, Verifeed and the right investors at the right time. Thank you. Let me know if you want the demo!