Toppa
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Investment
sought: - £150,006
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Equity
offered: - 8.00%
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Investment
amount: - £240,689
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Valuation
(pre-money): - £1,725,000
Idea
Introduction
Toppa is a learning app designed to connect ambitious business learners and employees with the knowledge and expertise of proven entrepreneurs from around the world.
For just £9.99 a month Toppa delivers high-quality courses that aims to improve performance, offering true experience over theory via hundreds of video tutorials and document templates. In addition to this Toppa offers subscribers perks and discounts with nationwide companies such as retailers, leisure centres and even a virtual doctor.
In today’s fast-paced and always connected world, finding the time to learn new skills or keep your skills topped up can be difficult. As passionate learners ourselves, we felt the world needed a solution to this problem. Toppa makes professional learning fun, concise, and efficient by providing unlimited access to bite-sized interactive business courses, mentoring, and training from experts in their field.
Intended impact
In our view, learners are currently challenged to find good quality, effective ‘Business’ learning content due to poor production of tutorials, and a lack of accountability around content.
We believe that high quality, reliable tutorials are hard to discover and lost in the quagmire of self-proclaimed entrepreneurs. We aim to have a substantial impact on the future success rate of start-up businesses and enable budding entrepreneurs to have a one-stop shop for all of their business, leadership & management knowledge needs.
Micro-learning enables learners to consume data in small bite-size chunks, modern-day entrepreneurs will be able to access knowledge at a time and place that suits their busy schedule.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Key accomplishments include:.
• Confirmed pre-order for 18,750 individuals over a minimum 18 month period. This will be at the corporate rate of £5.00 per user per month starting Feb 2019 (£93,750 PCM).
• In advanced talks with Warwick Business School as a partner to endorse the app.
• Secured an official partnership and become Ambassadors for the Education Awards.
• Partnered with employee perks platform Pirkx giving us access to 500,000 potential subscribers and the ability to offer discounts/perks to Toppa subscribers.
• Gained the backing of some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs that have built and sold multi-million-pound businesses.
• Secured an exclusive partnership with The Telegraph giving Toppa exclusive rates to promote Toppa to UCAS students.
• Currently in talks to partner with PWC for content and also to offer Toppa as a tool for their clients.
• Nominated for 4 awards, Great British Entrepreneur Awards, BMW I UK Tech Founder awards for 2 categories and the City of Birmingham Business Awards.
Monetisation strategy
Toppa's ambitious learners pay £9.99 per month for unlimited access to the Toppa course content library, they also have the option to pay per course. We envisage that additional revenue streams will include:
· Advertisement (but not too heavy as we don’t want to annoy our subscribers).
· Targeted email campaigns for content partners to promote a discount enabling partners/instructors to offer a discount to an added value service for our subscribers (GDPR Compliant).
We are now raising investment to help us with our plans to launch an aggressive marketing campaign, secure further content and implement a sales and customer service team to drive the continued growth of the business.
Use of proceeds
Toppa will use the investment raised to conduct the following:
Implement a strong full-time team to be managed by the exec board members, this team will primarily consist of Customer Experience Assistants and Business Development Managers to effectively manage the day to day running of Toppa.
The continued development of high quality instructor Content. This funding round is planned to enable Toppa to rapidly grow our instructor community to enable us to produce a series of Toppa-produced tutorials over the next 12 months. The investment will also pay for official accreditation with awarding bodies adding further credibility to the Toppa content.
Toppa will conduct an aggressive marketing campaign to rapidly grow our subscriber base this will include:
Paid advertisement through various digital media platforms and also an outdoor advertisement campaign. This will run alongside our free* SEO campaign.
*SEO offered by Rob Pollard (Lightbox Digital) in return for equity.
Market
Target market
The Global E-Learning Market is poised to grow at a CAGR of around 7.0% over the next decade to reach approximately $331 billion by 2025. Mobile and internet learning is on the rise and we want to capitalise on this growing market (Global E-Learning Market Analysis & Trends - Industry Forecast to 2025).
Toppa is an edu-app operating in the global learning and education sector. The market for Toppa spans both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) segments, but also the third dimension of our target market is the recruitment of instructors to keep our content varied and relevant.
Toppa's primary target market are employers looking to upskill their employees, ambitious business learners, and leaders and managers looking to learn skills anytime, anywhere.
Characteristics of target market
Forecast to be worth £3.5 billion to the UK economy by 2021 and with a growth of 22%, the education technology sector is one of the UK’s fastest growing industries. (BMW i UK Tech Founder Awards)
Businesses truly appreciate the value of experienced, knowledgeable and engaged staff and the impact this has on their bottom line. We believe that individuals are also increasingly looking to upskill, whether to make them personally more competitive in the employment market, change careers, or simply an interest in self-development, and the eLearning market is exploding.
As Steve Case, the former CEO of AOL, put it, “The exciting part about living today is that anyone can be an entrepreneur”. We’re living in a world where information is not just readily available but, in many cases, overwhelming and with a huge lack of accountability on the standard of content. Building a business is not easy; that’s why we’re here: to help people cut through some of the noise and provide a solution in one place.
Marketing strategy
Our marketing activity will focus on our three core markets (B2B, B2C and instructors), and we will deliver differentiated marketing strategies to reach and engage with each sub-segment of these markets:
B2B:
Leveraging the contacts and sector experience of Toppa’s founders and shareholders, we will deploy a business development-led approach to B2B awareness building and adoption. We intend to use case studies from early adopters to sell the benefits of Toppa for employees.
B2C:
Our B2C marketing will be delivered across three core phases:
• Build awareness.
• Encourage app download and trial.
• Incentivise and retain.
We will incentivise and influence customer behaviour through gamification to retain and continue to inspire with new content and special offers to ensure consistent engagement and usage. We will also utilise in-house expertise in digital marketing via Lightbox Digital who will enable a fully rounded marketing approach including SEO and paid for advertisement.
Competition strategy
In our opinion, most e-learning platforms do not offer a one-stop shop to enable learners to have access to trusted business, leadership & management content. We feel that other e-learning providers assume that the student already knows what businesses are, what they do, and how they work—as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It’s not. We think that business is one of the most complex and multidisciplinary areas of human experience, and trying to understand how businesses work can be remarkably intimidating.
Our main goal is for Toppa to be an EdTech platform that offers high-quality courses that not only improves performance but offers true experience over theory.
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