Wonderush
Subscription commerce platform for local classes & experiences, backed by the Founder of MyVoucherCodes.
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
Categories: Travel, Leisure & Sport Digital Mixed B2B/B2C
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Investment
sought: - £200,003
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Equity
offered: - 6.25%
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Investment
amount: - £225,592
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Valuation
(pre-money): - £2,999,955
Idea
Introduction
Wonderush is a discovery commerce platform to find and book a variety of local classes and experiences. We’re redefining the online discovery and ticketing experience by pairing a monthly subscription to taster sessions with a marketplace to create a seamless path to regular follow on bookings.
Wonderush helps local activity hosts fill their last-minute unsold spaces with new customers at a fraction of the acquisition cost by offering the spaces to our captive audience of monthly subscribers. On the other hand, our monthly subscribers can book as many classes and experiences as they want for a monthly flat fee and buy follow on tickets if they would like to do an activity more than once in a monthly cycle.
Intended impact
Wonderush is a new concept and a business model innovation disrupting the £200 billion UK Leisure industry and set to disrupt the $2.8 trillion global leisure market.
FOR CUSTOMERS
As a work-life balance becomes increasingly difficult to achieve, hard-earned leisure time takes on a new significance. Consumers are actively seeking a disruption from their routine through unique experiences, personalised interactions and unforgettable moments.
Over 78% of Millennials would choose to spend money on an experience over buying something material. However, finding amazing local things to do is time consuming and doing a variety of activities on a regular basis can be expensive.
Wonderush lets customers choose from thousands of handpicked things to do and book a variety of classes and experiences for a flat fee - providing a flexible and economical means to try new things and even-more extreme, surprising and unusual activities on a regular basis.
FOR ACTIVITY HOSTS
New customer acquisition can be an expensive process for local activity hosts. Many do not have the resources to compete with digital advertising and resort to non-targeted marketing channels such as flyering.
A large segment of Activity Hosts use multiple ticketing platforms in order to fill their spaces which results in labour-intensive admin and opportunities for out of date information to be available to public. Another segment do not use any existing platforms and instead still take bookings over the phone/email which restricts their growth.
Wonderush provides Activity Hosts with a comprehensive booking management tool to sell their tickets anywhere online for a small booking fee, whilst giving them access to Wonderush subscribers to fill last minute spaces with new customers for a significantly low acquisition cost. This means they can potentially save money on advertising and run more activities at full capacity.
Wonderush will be the only platform a local activity host will need.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Within just 4 months of launching our beta we raised early seed investment from Fuel Ventures founded by Mark Pearson (Founder of MyVoucherCodes).
In the last 18 months we have had over 3000 members sign up for our subscription service.
We have nearly 5000 activities across London available, ranging from fitness, to arts, crafts, music, dance, food and drink.
To our knowledge we have developed the first booking management tool that converts unsold spaces into an acquisition channel that generates new customers.
Wonderush is offered as an employee benefit at JustPark, WPP and we've recently signed a deal with KPMG.
We have developed an iOS and Android app. The iOS app was ‘Best New App’ on the App store.
We won ‘New Business of the Year’ at the Dot London Awards and we were voted in the top 100 startups in the UK by startups.co.uk.
We’ve been featured in The Mirror, Daily Mail, Metro and featured as 'Best New App' on the Evening Standard.
Monetisation strategy
SUBSCRIPTION
Users pay a monthly flat fee to Wonderush and in turn Wonderush pays a referral fee to the Activity Host for each booking. This referral fee is a significant discount off the activity's normal price and is positioned to the Host as the acquisition cost to get a new customer.
MARKETPLACE
We charge activity hosts a 5% booking fee for any direct and follow on bookings. This includes bookings via Wonderush.com and also anywhere our booking widget is used online i.e. host's website, blogs, affiliates.
Use of proceeds
We have demonstrated product-market fit and traction from both activity hosts and customers. Our last round of investment was predominantly spent on building the team and refining our product. This includes redesign of site, integrating CRM, developing the marketplace and booking management tool and launching iOS and Android app. We have only invested a fraction of our total costs towards marketing yet still managed to grow the user to over 3,000 people.
This round of investment will be spent on:
1. Paid User Acquisition
2. Driving Supplier Liquidity
3. Launching in two UK cities
4. Position for Series A
Market
Target market
Wonderush is a two-sided marketplace.
On one side the target market is millennials who are working professionals actively seeking things to do in their free time. In the UK alone there are 13.8 million millennials ranging from 20 to 35 years of age. Early adopters in this market already regularly book events, classes and experiences, and are proactively taking steps to learn/try something new. The target market is active on social media, frequent in sharing their experiences and for them experience is the new status symbol.
On the other side, the target market is the long tail of local class and experience providers. These are independent providers working from local community centres, libraries, sports halls, bars and clubs. These providers are mainly sole traders and small companies who do not have big budgets for advertising. These providers on average host weekly sessions and mainly charge £30 and under per session. On Gumtree alone there are over 1000 independent classes, demonstrating the need for a platform that markets local activities to a targeted audience.
Characteristics of target market
The global leisure market generated almost $2.8 trillion in 2015. The UK Leisure industry generates over £200 billion of revenue a year and is growing at over 7% a year.
More than three in four millennials (78%) would choose to spend money on an experience over buying something desirable. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they believe attending live experiences helps them connect better with their friends, their community and people around the world. Eighty-three percent of respondents said they participated in a “live event” in the past year and 72% said they’d like to improve their expenditures on experiences in the coming year.
Marketing strategy
PAID ACQUISITION
Over the last 12 months we have ran numerous marketing experiments on various channels and paid acquisition has brought us our most profitable users - in particular, Facebook and Google Adwords. We currently acquire new customers at less that £10 through some paid acquisition channels. As well as being a profitable acquisition channel with further opportunity to extend the lifetime value of the customer, this will also be scalable channel for targeted growth.
CORPORATE
Build partnerships with businesses that can distribute the Wonderush to their employees and customers. We already work with KPMG, WPP, ASOS and JustPark and offer Wonderush as an employee benefit. We've found this to be a very cost-effective acquisition channel with great network effects which contribute to better retention.
PR & CONTENT
With limited resources we have managed to build a significant blogger affiliate network and get featured in major publications including the Guardian, Daily Mail, Metro, Evening Standard and The Mirror. This has contributed to brand awareness and helped reach our target market.
REFERRALS
Many new customers come from an existing customers using the viral loop that we have integrated into the product. We will further optimise this loop to reach our target market.
Competition strategy
The key competitors include ticketing platforms and discovery websites/apps that operate a similar business model and user experience to each other. Wonderush is redefining this discovery and ticketing experience with a business model innovation and a technological advancement in booking management platform. We are the only platform in this space to our knowledge that is offering a subscription service as a discovery product which helps activity hosts fill last-minute unsold inventory with new customers at a fraction of their usual acquisition cost.
Other competitors include monthly subscription services such as ClassPass (specific to group fitness classes), Jukley (specific to concerts) and Moviepass (specific to cinema). However, Wonderush focuses on your social life as a whole with an emphasis on variety and learning/trying something new.
We understand the importance of building a sticky platform for activity hosts and growing the liquidity of supply quickly in order to succeed in the long-term. We have built a self-service platform with extensive support systems to streamline the on boarding process for new hosts and we have built a comprehensive booking management tool that eliminates the need for any other booking platform. Our churn amongst activity hosts is less than 5% so we believe we have built a great product that activity hosts want.
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