Safe, creative and fun email for kids.
Business overview
| Location | Brussels, Belgium |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.maily.com |
| Sectors | Content & Information Digital B2C |
| Company number | 0839445621 |
| Incorporation date | 6 Oct 2014 |
Investment summary
Idea
Introduction
Maily is email for 3+ year olds, currently we have 200 new signups per day with 120k users to date. Maily will be monetised through family members purchasing in-app content as gifts for children.
In a world where children are almost born digital, it is more critical than ever to develop their social and creative skills. Everyone - and everything - is increasingly connected with each other. There's no reason why young children should not have access to a dedicated communication system. Maily is an application that enables young children to send quirky, personalised messages to Mum, Dad, their grandparents, and close friends easily, rapidly, and securely.
Children can create messages using simple tools like digital pencils, brushes, photos, backgrounds, stickers, and their most commonly used expressions. Maily also allows parents and loved ones to reply to the child's messages.
Maily comes with extensive built-in parental control features. Parents are in charge of who their children can communicate with, including the ability to approve or reject each message before they are sent or received.
Intended impact
For the first time young children now have access to their own communication system. Maily will become the standard way to learn safe messaging habits before they get to use Snapchat, Whatsapp, and Facebook. To understand how Maily is helping, please read through the following reviews:
by cohenariel - UK: "Brilliant app! - I can babble on how much I like this app, instead, I'll sum it up: With Maily, my 4 yr old boy and 6 yr-old girl now understand the concept of email and are completely self-sufficient in communicating with the entire family. Pure gold."
by bboo2 - USA: "Excellent way to teach the concept of mail to children! - We have enjoyed using Maily throughout our entire extended family. It has shown our little ones the concept of email & communication with loved ones all over the country... Love the concept! We use it for children as little as 2 & 3!"
by ZombieFighter123 - UK: "Great introduction to messaging - My 6 year-old and his friends love this app. They are having fun messaging each other over the school holidays. We got it to practice their writing but my son’s favourite feature is sending photos. Highly recommended to all as an introduction to messaging. Very safe, and security features good too. Even my 3 year-old was able to work out how to send drawings to her Nana which is great. Love it."
Substantial accomplishments to date
In 18 months since launch we have:
- 120 K accounts and growing!
- 1.5 million messages exchanged.
- Featured on Time Magazine’s 25 best iPad apps for Kids.
- Press reviews on blogs and newspapers (including: CNN, The Guardian, Techcrunch, Mashable, SwissMiss, HackerNews, etc).
- Maily is a registered trademark, and the maily.com URL is secured.
- Seedcamp company since January 2013.
Product:
- Beta version released on iPad and web in August 2012: 3 stars average rating.
- Version 2 released in September 2013 on iPad, iPhone & web: 4.5 stars average rating in the UK.
Monetisation strategy
We plan to continue offering our basic services for free, our revenue model being based on in-app purchases. In January 2012, just over half (53 percent) of iPhone App Store revenue in the U.S. was attributed to in-app purchases. As of mid 2013, that number has climbed to 76 percent.
We want to sell valuable content to the adult contacts of the children. Mum, Dad, grandma, grandpa, and auntie will be invited to buy a pack of stamps or backgrounds as a gift. To be as attractive as possible, the future content will be based on gender, age, time of the year (Xmas, Halloween, Mother’s day), and even culture.
Use of proceeds
This seed round will help us achieve important milestones that will add significant value to the company, from user growth to proving our revenue model assumptions. The funds will be mostly (70%) dedicated to funding the team (5 FTE).
Our main milestones:
- Gain more user growth
- Moving cross-platform, beginning with Android
- Closing and executing a partnership with a major player
- Product dev: new features (video, sound, frames)
- Going global: as the current version of the app is only in English, we want to target new markets
- Testing and validating the in-app purchase model.
20% of the funds will be spent on marketing.
10% on admin expenses & overheads.
Market
Target market
We're targeting every child that has access to a mobile device. This number is growing rapidly. There has been an explosion of mobile technology use among young children in the past two years. According to a report from Common Sense Media, which studies the safe use of media for kids, the percentage of children under eight with access to some type of new media device has jumped from half (52%) to three-quarters (75%), while the average daily time on the device has tripled from 5 to 15 minutes.
Unlike other companies that target children themselves with products such as games and educational apps, Maily is also addressed to all the child's contacts: Dad, Mum, Grandpa, Grandma, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, etc. This has a huge multiplying effect, making our target market much larger.
Our target age range is 3-9: we're getting children at their very first steps into the digital world and serving them until they switch to existing messaging platforms (Snapchat, we-chat, Facebook, Gmail, etc).
Characteristics of target market
We are at the crossroads of two exponentially growing markets:
- kids mobile applications, and
- messaging applications.
With close to 3,000 Mailys exchanged every day we have strong market validation that young kids engage in communication at a very early age.
We have also found that grandparents are as engaged - if not more so - than their grandchildren.
When asked about the impact of technology on their children, many parents express concerns about their child's social, emotional, and behavioral skills. Maily addresses these concerns by helping kids create messages using their creativity and sharing them with family and friends, improving their social skills.
Marketing strategy
With 200 new sign ups per day, we already have early organic growth. To gain more growth we plan the following steps:
- Improving the conversion of downloads to users
- Have current users invite more people to connect and get the app
- Moving cross platform to allow a better spread of the product, starting with Android
- Securing strategic partnerships with key players (current discussions include: Lego and Samsung).
Competition strategy
We've been able to maintain our first-mover advantage for the last 1.5 years. We feel we're leading the market in young kid's messaging. It's all about the product. We are big believers that UI and UX are our key differentiators. We also want to strengthen our position by securing key partnerships. Several companies offering children's tablets, and other platforms have approached us to be integrated in their system.
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