Hooptap

Follow-on - Pre-emption

A white label gamification platform built to activate any audience and boost revenue.

Location: Xirivella, Spain

www.hooptap.com

Categories: Advertising & Marketing Digital B2B

Investment sought:: €2,154

Equity offered:: 0.29%

Funded 23 Jan 2016

Investment amount:: €2,693

Valuation (pre-money):: €750,084

Idea

Introduction

Hooptap helps brands to effectively engage their audiences and create “calls-to-action”.

We provide gamification technology specifically designed to allow brands to increase and monetize their engagement with customers.

Hooptap is a technology platform that helps companies to create branded web and mobile apps focused on achieving a stronger and more profitable relationship with their audience.

We feel that gamification is one of the key tools that make an audience want to listen to branded content and to actively participate in marketing initiatives.

Our customers can use over 100 different modules and around 50 different game mechanics. We also offer second screen & audio recognition technology for the TV industry that allows for perfect synchronization of content.

Hooptap's content management system allows managing of content inside the app remotely & in real time.

All of our technology has been developed in-house, is cloud based, and we consider it to be fully scalable.

Intended impact

What is gamification?
- It’s not a game, but it uses game mechanics to stimulate game-like behavior in a non-game setting.
- It addresses many of an individual's inherent needs: achievement, recognition, competition and socializing.

Research has shown that users become much more active and engaged when brands appear in a gamified content than when they find the same brands through advertising or on social networks.

With our technology our customers are creating a playful and rewarding environment, with a view to make users keener to interact with their brands. Gamification allows us to offer a different, effective and entertaining way of integrating the promotion and the "call-to-action" in the communication between a brand and its users.

Our loyalty and TV customers would be able to sell this engagement channel to their advertisers, adding a new revenue source to their business. Brands could benefit by significantly increasing the ROI of their marketing expenses and other key metrics of their campaigns.

We offer a fully developed, highly flexible solution with a vast (and growing) amount of game mechanics. Our platform has been designed to be configured quickly to meet our clients’ requirements and to be fully integrated with the backend database and processes of our clients.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We have had over 1.2 million USERS engaging in around 60 million GAME INTERACTIONS through our platform.

Founded in 2011, launched B2C Beta in 2012.

May 2013: Switch to B2B model. Launch with Spanish Television RTVE as first client, offering gamification for brand loyalty soon after.

Jan 2014: Second screen technology with Canal 13 from Chile, adding audio recognition technology in June.

2014: Technology provider for MASTER CHEF TV show in Spain. We calculate that we beat Twitter in second-screen engagement for the show, with a larger audience participating live through our App than tweeting via twitter. Due to the success we are now working with MasterChef in other countries.

International sales network with distribution partners in 12 countries.

2nd half 2014: Finalists in three major start-up competitions: Tech Tour, South Summit & BBVA Open Talent.

We are backed by Business Booster, Sinensis Seed Capital, Caixa Risk, public Spanish co-investment and Angel investors.

Monetisation strategy

We operate using a Platform as a Service business model. Our clients pay a monthly, recurring subscription fee for using our technology, in addition to an initial set-up fee.

The size of the fee depends on the complexity of the customer’s requirements, in particular with respect to API calls and backend integration as well as the number of modules and game mechanics used.

Additionally, we may offer to perform consulting and content management services for some of our customers to help them to maximise the impact of our technology.

Due to our lean operational-cost structure, we believe that our business model is highly scalable.

Use of proceeds

In order to help accelerate growth, we need to invest in sales and marketing as well as international expansion. Additionally, we need to keep investing into R&D, in order to maintain a “best available in class” status.

The proceeds of this round will go towards covering our operational cash burn over the coming months to allow us to ramp up sales and prepare a larger follow-on financing round for future investmentIn particular it will be used for:

- Expenses related to development.
- Investment in international sales and marketing.
- Business Development of new partner distribution channels.
- Working capital and operational expenses.

The development of distribution channels through B2B partners, such as loyalty program providers, digital marketing agencies and others is a crucial element in our sales strategy that we feel will enable us to grow even faster as a business.

Market

Target market

It is possible to apply gamification strategies to almost any industry. Second screen technology, especially combined with audio and content recognition, creates additional opportunities for the broadcasting industry.
Our current verticals include brands, loyalty and TV. We provide the most value to clients who already have a large, existing audience, but who struggle to engage their audience in a meaningful and entertaining way when it comes to branded content.

Examples:
- A brand wanting to communicate particular features or new uses of its product to its existing customers.
- A loyalty program wanting to reward its customers, increase interaction and visits to its points of sale, website or m-commerce solution.
- A marketing manager wants additional data on how customers perceive its brand or on the performance of his campaigns.
- A TV channel wants to increase audience participation.
- An advertiser wants to push new content or increase social media engagement.

Characteristics of target market

Gamification marketing is a new and very fast growing sector. Global market size of:

(1) M2 Research predicts the gamification market to reach $2.6 Billion by 2016 and.
(2) The Second Screenmarket research firm “The Intersection” predicts the second screen market to reach $5.9 Billion by 2017.

Marketing strategy

On one hand we are targeting large brands, loyalty programs, TV channels & content producers and corporations for our gamification suite. We distribute our service through three differentiated channels:

• Directly (with our sales and marketing team, using both offline and online marketing tools).
• Through international partners and agents.
• Through marketing and digital marketing agencies, which recommend the use of our technology and services to their final clients.

For the lower end of the market we are developing a modular SDK solution, which allows smaller customers to only use specific modules or mechanisms of our platform with their existing apps. We will aim to market to this segment using online advertising, SEO and SEM.

Competition strategy

We consider Hooptap to have a unique approach to the business. Its robust and well-tested technology platform allows for simple and cost effective solutions, which we understand to differ from our competitors in the following ways:

- Customize to client’s needs (some of the more established competitors in the market do not offer customised solutions, e.g. Shazaam, Zeebox, Viggle).

- Solutions for different businesses/channels (many of our competitors’ technology serves one particular vertical, e.g. Sohalo and Bigdoor for loyalty programs, or Visiware, Exmachina or Aplicaster, for Second Screen).

- Expanded range of functionalities (Hooptap allows for many and customized ways to interact with the audience, both web and app based. Other competitors’ technology is limited to one or a few very basic functionalities, e.g. Brainsins, Sohalo or Visiware).

- Focus on “Call-to-Action” mechanics (many of our competitors provide ways to gamify content, but lack mechanics aimed at making an audience “do something”, like visit a point of sale).

We believe that Hooptap offers its clients the best value proposition available in the “gamification” market. Our platform is a powerful and versatile tool, which contains more than 50 (and growing) different game mechanics, ready to be customised to embed the client’s brand personality and adapt it to its specific objectives:

- Launching new products.
- Building loyalty.
- Attracting new consumers.
- Tracking information about users.
- Increasing brand awareness.
- Communicating new relevant information.
- Increasing visits to points of sale or e/m-commerce sites.
- Sampling.
- Hyper-segmenting an audience.

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