CloudGuide
Global tourist app for smart cultural sightseeing: official guides of all tourist attractions in one app.
- Location
- Barcelona, Spain
Categories: Travel, Leisure & Sport Digital Mixed B2B/B2C
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Investment
sought: - €400,001
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Equity
offered: - 9.59%
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Investment
amount: - €403,767
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Valuation
(pre-money): - €3,772,848
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.
Market
Target market
B2C:
CloudGuide is designed for tourists, art lovers and families: tourists can plan their trip, pre-download the city packages having all the attractions in one app, send postcards back home and keep the story of their trip; art lovers can keep their lists of Favourites and follow the agenda of their favourite institutions; families can turn their visit in an educative adventurous treasure hunt game.
B2B:
CloudGuide targets tourist sites and cultural institutions willing to improve their visitors' experience, boost engagement and get to know them better thanks to statistics, attract new audiences thanks to sharing the app with other institutions. CloudGuide can also help them comply with some legal regulations (for example, language requirements), earn money through e-commerce or raise funds through charity.
B2G:
CloudGuide gives the city councils and governments an opportunity to promote national culture, boost tourism, distribute budgets and examine relative statistics of the cultural sector (Big Data).
Characteristics of target market
There are more than 55,000 museums around the world and our own research indicates that there could be as many as 10 times more tourist attractions (monuments, galleries, parks, art fairs). There are over 2.9 billion visits done yearly around the globe. In the US alone there are almost approximately 850 million yearly visits and $21B revenue gets generated by the museum industry (not counting all other tourist attractions).One breath-taking example of the use of audioguides and tours comes with the Statue of Liberty, where more than 345,000 visitors took audio tours in 2012, which is almost 1,000 audioguide sales per day.
CloudGuide is already working with 326 institutions in 12 countries, with 3,800 in the pipeline. The main hubs are Spain, Belgium, Germany, and we recently launched in the US. The company is already present in the three biggest EU markets (UK, Germany, Spain) and the US accounting for 1/3 of the TAM. Just 30 institutions in the pipeline have 56M annual visitors (based on our research), all of which are potential CloudGuide users.
Marketing strategy
B2B:
The company is building an international network of local representatives responsible for clients relations assisted by the Content Management Department. CloudGuide is aiming to do the major part of the process online, which is crucial for scaling. Apart from this, the company is implementing an automatized system of notifications for the clients with incentives to enter the platform (promotions and special offers) to keep them attached.
Also, CloudGuide is aiming to acquire clients through technological sponsorship of art/culture/tourist events and cooperate with governments.
B2C:
Our key acquisition channel of users are the institutions themselves. They promote our app onsite with posters and signs, which gives us access to the hot users that need a solution immediately. Apart from this it can be the cheapest acquisition channel (CPU< € 0.01 vs CPU>€ 0.90 of the online campaigns).
NETWORK EFFECT: the more institutions we get, the more institutions and users jump in.
Competition strategy
Most of our competitors create one app per site (Oncell, Cuseum, GuideKick or general app producers) or work through scraping non-official content (izi.TRAVEL).
CloudGuide is a SINGLE app for ALL cultural institutions and tourist sites with OFFICIAL content only. This way CloudGuide allows everyone benefit from the network effect:
• Users: all content in one place at user's disposal; keep the story of your trips; get suggestions of places to visit based on your profile.
• Institutions: promotion functionality - get advantage of sharing the app with other institutions and attract their visitors; fast and easy to implement, no need for tech expertise or updates; get to know your users through analytics.
• B2G: Big Data analysis for the industry and government bodies.
CloudGuide is aiming at turning the experience of visiting museums into a trendy social experience thanks to sharing, gaming and postcards functionality. Traveling becomes smart, easy, accessible and favours people's curiosity.
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