CloudGuide

Idea

Introduction

Many of you have traveled over the holidays. And one of the main activities when traveling is visiting tourist attractions, right? How was your experience? Was it fun? Do you remember anything? Not sure… Next time, travel with CloudGuide!

CloudGuide is a global tourist app for smart sightseeing, uniting all cultural institutions and tourist attractions into one app with official content (guides and tours), replacing traditional audioguides and museum branded apps and promoting comfortable smart travelling. CloudGuide accompanies tourists pre-visit (plan the trip, buy tickets, check info), during the visit (multimedia guides and games, notes, sharing), and post-visit (story of your trips, send postcards, check agenda).

iOS and Android apps as well as the CMS for institutions are fully launched. CloudGuide has over 300 institutions in 12 countries. We are funded by angels from 6 different countries, Silicon Valley and Swiss VCs, got public support and the Seal of Excellence of the EU.

Intended impact

We estimate that every year there are almost 3bn visits to museums and tourist attractions worldwide. And they all want to know something about the place they visit, but all they get are paper booklets, audioguides or museum branded apps.
We believe that this results in a huge gap between the site and the visitor:
• Poor communication, no feedback, boring.
• No convenience for the visitor.
• Low level of engagement, no pre- and post-visit communication.
• No statistical data.
• No e-commerce opportunities.

CloudGuide saves the situation:
Visitors: pre-visit (plan, buy tickets, check info), during the visit (multimedia guides and games, notes, sharing) and post-visit (story of your trips, postcards, agenda, memberships). The trip is therefore easier to plan, more enjoyable and memorable.
Institutions: increased visibility, easy way to digitize and share content at reduced cost. This helps to engage and attract more audiences, and create new money-making opportunities.

CloudGuide aims to connect the site and the visitor.

Substantial accomplishments to date

PRODUCT:
We have the iOS and Android apps for visitors as well as the CMS for sites fully launched.

TRACTION:
We already have over 300 institutions in 12 countries starting to use our CMS to populate CloudGuide, 3800 more in the pipeline. Some biggest names include Atomium (Belgium), Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam), Moulin Rouge (Paris), Pergamon Museum (Berlin), the Smithsonian (Washington), the Jewish Museum (Berlin) and Miro Foundation and Sagrada Familia (Barcelona).
We have closed partnership agreements with cities (Liege in Belgium, State Museums of Berlin) and governments (Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport - we are an official digital partner of 16 state museums).

FINANCING:
We did all of this on € 0.5 million - Consisting of support from international investors, including an ex Google executive, a Silicon Valley and a Swiss fund, government support, and a grant from the EU.

RECOGNITION:
• EU - Seal of Excellence of the European Union for the CloudGuide Education project.
• Airbnb - One of 10 top candidates for the Travel Tech Award by Airbnb.
• MECD - Official digital partner of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.
• Top Seeds Lab - 1 of 5 top travel startups of Spain.
• ICEX - Grant for internationalization from Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade’s agency.
• Herita - Invited to present as a successful museum digitalization case.
• Booking.com Booster - Grant for impact in tourism.

Monetisation strategy

CloudGuide has two pricing models: charging a subscription fee to the institution, which is applied to small and medium institutions, or charge the visitor per guide download, which is more beneficial in institutions with high visitors turnover.

In case of subscription, there is a free Basic Model with limited functionality and paid Premium Modules (unlimited content, iBeacon support, advanced analytics, device lock, gaming, promotion). The price level of the yearly subscription is € 3,000-6,000 depending on the modules selected.

In the case of institutions with over 150,000 visitors, CG offers the possibility of charging their visitors €0.99-1.99 for guide downloads and do revenue sharing (Visitors Model). In this case the institution gets all the CG technology for free and receives 50% of the revenue.

Additionally, there are extra potential revenue sources such as sale of value-added services (translations, recordings) and commissions on in-app merchandising, postcards, tickets, memberships.

Use of proceeds

KEY NEEDS:
Sales team: local client managers focused on 10% of clients for sales covering 20 regions.
Content management and communication team: basic model clients (to speed up the conversion cycle and take the effort off the sales team).
Technical development team: app, CMS and web.
Marketing team: mainly user side communication.
Other: legal, accounting, office, banking.

MILESTONES FOR THE NEXT YEAR:
1. Product development:
• Advanced Analytics development and integration in the sales process (automatic notifications).
• CloudGuide Play (gaming feature) market launch.
• Advanced E-commerce implementation.
2. Conversion to paying: targeting 10% conversion of clients to paying.
3. User acquisition: targeting over 10,000 active daily users to track the user behaviour and make constructive conclusions and forecasts.
4. US market establishment: US market accounts for a huge market share. We are aiming to attract 400 accounts.
5. Visitors model: Highly interesting in terms of numbers, thus we aim to find first partners to launch it.