ASAPP!

Funded

£110,000 target

£156,030 from 0 investors

Business overview

Location	Cheltenham, United Kingdom
Social media
Website	www.asapp.co.uk
Company number	08613042
Incorporation date	17 Jul 2013

Less

Investment summary

Type	Equity
Valuation (pre-money)	£890K
Equity offered	11.00%
Tax relief	SEIS

Idea

Introduction

ASAPP! is a free to download app for iOs and Android devices.

Once ASAPP! is downloaded to a smartphone it uses the phone's inbuilt GPS technology to determine the user's location.

We then use the GPS satellites to draw a virtual perimeter or Geo Fence around any point on a map.

A Geo Fence can have a diameter from 5 metres to 5 kilometres.

A Geo Fence can be drawn around a corner shop, a football stadium or a whole city centre.

When a smartphone with ASAPP! downloaded onto it crosses a Geo Fence it is sent a message from the advertiser who owns that Geo Fence.

Advertisers are able to update their message at any time.

Advertisers pay a registration fee and residual monthly payment for the life of their contract.

Advertisers are also given a listing in ASAPP!’s business directories.

ASAPP! is a service that we believe can be used by virtually any organisation that wishes to communicate with end users in a localised area whether they be a small business to a national brand.

Intended impact

We believe that ASAPP! is an incredibly compelling concept for advertisers, who are always looking for new ways to reach consumers in their area.

ASAPP! taps into the trend of consumers increasingly living their lives via their smartphones. 87% of smartphone users search for local information on their phone, 76% taking action as a result (Source Hibu 2014).

An advertiser's message could be offering a time sensitive special offer or be a more generic message.

Advertisers may want to put multiple Geo Fences in place, perhaps because they have more than one outlet.

They may want to Geo Fence a local sports stadium on a Saturday afternoon.

They may even wish to Geo Fence their competition!

Their message can be plain text or can be media rich including still images and video.

A message can also have a smart map and links to web sites, and there can also be buttons so that the ASAPP! user can call or email an advertiser directly.

Messages can be changed very easily and Geo Fences can be timed to switch on and off automatically so that an advertiser's message only reaches the ASAPP! users at key times.

For instance, a restaurant may only want their special offer to be publicised on their quieter days and not at prime business times.

To avoid ASAPP! users being bombarded with the same message over and over again we have included "Cool Down" technology into ASAPP! "Cool Down" works like this.

Once a smartphone has passed through a Geo Fence and it has been sent a message a timer starts.

This timer can be set from 1 minute to 999 hours, and another message will not be sent to that smartphone until the timer has run its course.

We recommend a minimum of one week "Cool Down” to avoid annoying consumers.

We believe that small businesses like ASAPP! so much because it allows them to use technology that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to develop themselves.

Substantial accomplishments to date

ASAPP! is up and running and available from The iOS and Android App Stores right now, just search for ASAPP UK.

We have spent the last year working with our developers to perfect ASAPP! and since May 2014 we have been test marketing and selling advertising packages to businesses in Cheltenham, Gloucester, Swindon, Richmond, Chiswick, Putney, Windsor, Chester and Chelsea.

To date we have sold over 120 advertising packages and we are receiving monthly revenues from them.

We have opened a telesales office in Cheltenham and are now starting to recruit sales agents to cover London and the South East.

We intend to have the whole of the UK covered by mid 2015.

We intend to roll out across the rest of Europe over the next 12 months.

Monetisation strategy

For their listing an ASAPP! advertiser pays a one off fee of between £150 and £1,000.

They then normally pay a monthly subscription of between £20 and £100 per month for the running of their Geo Fence around their business, with the cost dependant on the size and number of their Geo Fences.

The minimum contract term is 12 months but we are about to increase this to 24 months.

To date during this period of proving the concept we have signed up over 120 paying clients

We have opened a telesales office in Cheltenham that will service the sales team we intend to build across the UK.

The telesales office is used to make appointments to go and visit potential clients and sell them the ASAPP! service. We estimate that we need 1.5 telesales people per sales agent to arrange 6 qualified appointments per day.

We will not employ our sales people but use self-employed sales agents who only get paid on results.

A good sales agent should close 50% of qualified leads.

We also intend to build a team of sales people who will close business over the phone, taking away the reliance solely on the face to face sales team.

Incoming sales are also an area we wish to develop and we will be hiring a “Social Media Guru” to drive sales via our website.

Britain has 66 cities and over 2,000 towns.

We have identified the following types of business as those we think are most likely to find ASAPP! a compelling proposition.

We have already been successful in selling packages within ASAPP! to all of these sectors:

Hotels
Pubs, Bars & Clubs
Restaurants
Theatres & Cinemas
Hairdressers & Beauticians
Gyms & Leisure Centres
Sports Clubs
Wedding Venues & Related Businesses
Schools & Colleges
Children’s Activities
Home Improvements
High Street Retailers

We aim to have up to 25-30 advertisers from each town and up to 100 in a city location.

Use of proceeds

- Hiring more full time telesales agents

We will be advertising for and hiring a Telesales Manager who will recruit, train and manage a team of telesales people.

- Marketing App to end users

We will use a variety of marketing techniques including some advertising and use of promotional staff.

- Hiring a full time social media specialist

This role will be split between driving incoming sales to our website and achieving downloads of ASAPP!

- Recruiting sales agents across UK (advertising, agency fees, travel etc.)

- Acquiring larger offices for telesales team

At the moment we have a small 4 man office, we need to increase the size to accommodate 20

- Further development of ASAPP! to improve some features and add more

We intend to do some further development work on ASAPP!, specifically to introduce “Filtering” of messages.

This means that end users will be able to manage the kinds of messages they are happy to receive and those they wish to block.

Market

Target market

ASAPP’s target user market covers a large proportion of all smartphone users.

There is some research in the next section that quantifies the different demographics but as an overview there are in excess of 30,000,000 smartphone users in the UK and hundreds of millions world wide.

ASAPP! is available to iPhone and Android users who make up 96% of recent smartphone sales.

Our target market is any smartphone user who likes to be kept informed of special offers and deals in their area.

Given the popularity of sites like Groupon and Wowcher we believe this is a very large group of people.

We believe that ASAPP! can be introduced quickly and inexpensively into international markets as much of the development work has been done and therefore the app can be quite simply translated and launched rapidly.

With regard to the target market for advertisers, there are a large number of businesses that can be sold to, from small independent businesses to large national groups. We also intend to market the app to local authorities and schools.

Characteristics of target market

The number of smartphone owners has reached 72 per cent in the UK, growing by l14 per cent in 2013 alone, according to research from Deloitte.

Generation Y – those aged around 25 to 30 – are the most likely to own a smartphone, at 89 per cent, and are considered a key target for mobile marketers.

Generation Z – those aged 16 to 24 – follow closely with 85 per cent smartphone ownership, and these people are the happiest group to use apps for shopping rather than going in store, at 48 per cent.

More than half, 54 per cent, of 54 to 65-year olds now own a smartphone too.

Gen Z are also more likely to use their phone for search, 59 per cent compared to 34 per cent on average, and to prefer that their search is relevant to their location, at 52 per cent versus 40 per cent overall.

Marketing strategy

We have been achieving downloads of ASAPP! in a number of ways.

To date we have over 7,000 downloads of ASAPP! In the areas we have been operating in with very little marketing, the app appears to have spread virally.

When we start marketing in an area we will use social media to gain downloads of ASAPP!

We will also offer discounts and incentives to organisations including theatres, schools, sports clubs etc if they encourage their existing communities to download the app.

A main push once we are funded will be to offer national brands a 6 month cost free period, they would then be able to use ASAPP! nationally at no cost to geo fence their branches as long as they encourage their customers to download the app.

In return we will ask them to include a "Download ASAPP!" (complete with ASAPP! Logo) message in all their press, tv and poster advertising.

One of the reasons for seeking funding via Seedrs is so that we can hire a full time social media "Guru” to gain even more downloads.

This person's job would be to use all social media to target both potential end users of ASAPP! and advertisers with marketing messages.

Competition strategy

There are other apps around that contain local business directories but none that we know of use Geo Fencing to send messages to their users when they are in the vicinity of their advertisers in the same way that ASAPP! does.

One of the leading local business directory apps is "The Big Local App”.

The Big Local App have been in business for 3 years and have a presence in approximately 40 towns in the UK.

However, from our understanding their app is a pure directory meaning that their users have to open the app and search for local businesses.

ASAPP!’s USP is that the user does not have to search for businesses, although they can if they wish. We think that what our users love about ASAPP! Is that their local businesses send offers to them when they are nearby.

In the 6 months that ASAPP! has been available to download from the Apple app store we have had over 7,000 downloads of ASAPP!.

This has been achieved with no hard launch of ASAPP! but by working with the communities we are partnered with and Facebook and Twitter campaigns in the areas that we have tested.

In the 3 years The Big Local App has been available they have only succeeded in amassing 17,000 downloads via the Apple app store.

We see the next 12 months as a basic land grab, we need to get ASAPP! coverage of the whole of the UK and seek licensees for the rest of the world.

There will no doubt be competition as we penetrate the market but we believe that because we are one of the first in and we have a very cool brand we will build a large number of advertisers paying monthly residuals.

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