Lime&Tonic

Lime&Tonic is one of the world's first digital concierge platforms for your social life.

Location: Prague, Czech Republic

www.limeandtonic.com

Categories: Travel, Leisure & Sport Mixed Digital/Non-Digital B2C

Investment sought:: £80,000

Equity offered:: 2.40%

Funded 17 Mar 2014

Investment amount:: £106,880

Valuation (pre-money):: £3,253,333

Idea

Introduction

Lime&Tonic provides access to unique social activities and dining experiences in the world’s most dynamic cities. We enrich people’s lives through unforgettable experiences, creating memories from your limited free time. Lime&Tonic is the digital equivalent of a trusted friend, the most connected contact in town who always knows the latest places opening and where you should go. We want to ensure our users that if they are spending their limited free time with us, that it will be a unique and memorable experience.

We are currently raising funds for our Series A round, and are very excited to open up a portion of this round to investors on Seedrs. The following chart shows how the Seedrs investment will be structured. Please note that the final amount of equity offered to investors (and the subsequent pre-money valuation set out above) may vary slightly as a result of fluctuations in the exchange rate between GBP and Euros. There is also an option pool that will be issued after the conclusion of this round, equal to 15% of the total shares in issue at that time.

Intended impact

Consumers have more choice than ever, while at the same time, having less time than before. By utilising our online “social concierge” system members can cut through the noise, obtaining vetted recommendations on events and curated dining experiences for their social agendas.

No more sifting through restaurant reviews on multiple review sites just to end up having an average meal in a restaurant that didn’t appeal to your unique preferences. No more combing through blogs looking for the latest trendy pop-up, and then attempting to get a table. No more hearing about a unique event, like a progressive dinner, wondering why you only find out about the event afterwards.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Since launching in 2011, Lime&Tonic has effectively doubled all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) year-on-year. As of January 31st 2014, we have delivered our 100,000th paying customer with a cumulative total of €2. 7m in sales . Our oldest buyer cohorts (which are still active) are showing a current Life Time Value (LTV) exceeding €270, with ~30-34% margins being seen in our established cities. This is exciting when looking at some of our channels showing a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) at less than ~€5.

2013 was been an exciting year for us, having set new records on all fronts. Our Sydney portal set the record for annual sales at $1. 2m AUS this year (€745k), as well as the record for Best Month Sales at €95,865.

Monetisation strategy

Lime&Tonic generates revenue by charging merchants a success-fee (commission or listing) in return for delivering highly targeted, relevant consumers.

Our system is free to use for the end consumer, with the purchase of an experience being made on the Lime&Tonic website in advance. We focus on listing recurring inventory, such as dinners which can be sold thousands of times over 6-12 months, rather than limited-time inventory like event tickets. Additionally, the bespoke curation of Lime&Tonic’s turn-key experiences means that there are few comparative data points, providing an opportunity for high value creation.

We act as a third-party intermediary between the merchant and the consumer, with payment only being made to the merchant following the redemption made by the consumer- incentivising the merchant to ensure a high quality experience. This upfront cash collection results in large floats being accumulated.

Membership growth is largely fuelled by word-of-mouth, with 30% of sign-ups being referrals. Additional channels include affiliate partnerships, merchants marketing to their databases, and more common channels such as social media and search engine optimisation.

With regards to our global roll-out strategy, we have pioneered a unique agency model, which allows for elastic expansion with little capital outlay. Local agents are purely commissions-based and all tech work, creation of the site’s content and design, approval and write-ups of experiences, member support and all tech, administration and merchant payments are executed by the global team based in Europe.

Use of proceeds

* Entry in the US market- establishment of office and launch of first portal (Las Vegas)

* Investment in to marketing campaigns

* General operational costs

* Fund-raising activities

Market

Target market

Typical consumer (globally)
• 37 years old
• Local residents (94%)
• Dual household income
• Affluent professional (top 20%)
• Travels >7x per annum
• Even gender split (51% female)
• Average transaction of €54

Characteristics of target market

With a €1.5 trillion leisure travel market and only a few direct concept competitors out there, the potential for Lime&Tonic to enrich lives across the globe is immense.

We plan to expand our portfolio to over 10,000 experiences with operations across 50 cities within the next 3-4 years. The market potential is huge, and Lime&Tonic is well positioned to take advantage of this.

Competition strategy

Pulling from our differentiators, our defensible position comes from a combination of the following-

(a) User data. The more that people use our system, the more data we are collecting, the more relevant the whole experience becomes, and the less likely they are to use other systems.

(b) User loyalty. We operate a loyalty program similar to an airline frequent flier program. The data and loyalty program combined provide a very powerful lock-in for our consumers- very similar to an air-miles program.

(c) Merchant relationships. We have established relationships now with 200+ premium merchants / 5-star hotels, something which has taken over 2 years to do so. This provides strong barriers to entry for any platform which doesn’t already have established relationships.

(d) Experience portfolio. We have just over 1,200 experiences already curated and loaded in the system, many of them exclusive to us, which provides a similar barrier to merchant relationships to new entrants.

(e) Technology platform. All tech has been built in-house with full IP ownership maintained, including the proprietary recommendation algorithms- something which relies heavily on historical purchasing data and profile data to function, and is not easily replicated.

(f) Business model. Unlike most tech companies, we’ve spent a lot of time on creating a structure which allows us to roll out very quickly with little resources via our agency model.

(g) Connected team. Finally, we view our team as one of our core assets. We have managed to attract very strong local talent - and this is not easily replicated.

In summary, we don’t believe it’s a single element which makes us successful, but rather the combination of elements. No one else is approaching this segment in the way which we are, and we don’t believe it’s easy for new-comers to replicate these, nor for existing companies to easily change so many elements of their model to successfully compete with us in the short-term.