Muzeums

Funded

£45,014 target

£53,165 from 0 investors

Business overview

Location	London, United Kingdom
Social media
Website	muzeu.ms/
Sectors	SaaS/PaaS Digital Mixed B2B/B2C
Company number	09376988
Incorporation date	7 Jan 2015

Less

Investment summary

Type	Equity
Valuation (pre-money)	£753K
Equity offered	5.64%
Tax relief	SEIS

Idea

Introduction

Muzeums is an app and platform for museums that manages the visitor experience. The museum gets a full dashboard in which it controls content and gets analytics, and the visitors get a unique individual experience based on their personal interests and learning style.

In other words, when a visitor uses Muzeums, the app can create, on the spot, an experience that is tailored specifically for them, with the content that they're interested in, and even delivered in their preferred way, be it a media tour guide or a real-time interactive social game. The museum controls all the content and gets the analytics about the visitor's data and behaviour in the museum.

Intended impact

We aim to radically change the museum visiting experience.

Today the standard visitor experience involves handheld devices, providing an audio/visual guide. That is a solution that is only available for established and successful museums, since the cost of creating and maintaining this solution is high. Some wealthy institutions also create tailor-made apps to enhance the visitor experience. We feel that these are even more expensive and less reusable than handheld guides.

Our solution will be extremely economical, it will be based on BYOD technology (bring your own device) and it will change according to each user's characteristics. Therefore we will impact both the market and the consumers:
1. as a result of our pricing model, with a very cheap basic plan, we expect that all museums, even small ones, will be able to afford high-quality visitor experience based on advanced technology, with different experiences created from the same content.
2. Each visitor will get a personalised experience straight to his device, with content picked out for him according to his interests, and organised in a structure that will appeal to them (a guide, a game, questions etc).

Substantial accomplishments to date

Muzeums was accepted and successfully completed SOUL-FI round B, an EU acceleration program, funding 75,000 EUR for creating the first product using FIWARE technology.

We have gathered an award-winning team to work on Muzeums - our team of employees have created "Europeana Beacon", a location based cultural heritage app integrating beacon technology, which won the Apps4Europe award in the 2014 Pisa Hackathon, and was promoted by Europeana. Muzeums was also featured on Europeana Labs website.

We have created a fully functional backend dashboard for the museum to control all content and deliver analytics, and fully functional beautiful apps on iOS and Android for the visitor, available to download for free.

After officially launching the product, we have started marketing and have signed 3 clients, and we expect more clients soon. Our marketing plan outlines our plan of achieving 100 paying clients by the end of 2016.

Monetisation strategy

Our business plan is based on a B2B2C model - since we are providing a service for a museum that will be used by their users. We're targeting museums (and similar institutions such as botanical gardens, heritage sites etc.) as our main client, using a subscription model with a basic, premium and branded plan. The plans will have different revenue models according to the client's needs, including:
1. payment according to user volume.
2. A monthly subscription.
3. A license for using Muzeum's technology in a branded app.

The flexibility in revenue models will allow us to widen the market share we are targeting, without losing focus - since the product is essentially the same one, with further or fewer features and options.

We are also considering monetizing through advertising in our free app, since we profile users and know where they are and what they're interested in, but we have decided to wait with this model until we have a stable growth in clients and users.

Use of proceeds

We will use the proceeds from this round as following:.

60% towards marketing, advertising and sales.
40% towards further development.

Market

Target market

The market we are addressing is the entire cultural and heritage visiting sites market - museums, heritage sites, historical houses, botanical gardens etc. In the UK alone this market accounts for 2% of the GDP, contributing £26 billion per year. We address a very specific need for this market which is the essential core of the economic activity - the visitor experience.

Since we are a B2B2C solution, our target market is also defined by the consumer that will use our product. Since the essence of Muzeums is profiling users and delivering a personalised experience, the target market in terms of users is wide, and essentially includes any visitor to a museum that owns a smartphone. In the UK alone, although there is no up-to date figure, museums and galleries have an estimated 100 million visitors a year and the vast majority of these people can be assumed to own smartphones. In the US the figure is 850 million visitors.

Characteristics of target market

What sets Muzeums apart, is that we're targeting a huge market, not just the top museums with millions of visitors. There are over 2,500 museums in the UK and 35,000 in the US and we feel there are even more relevant institutions which have no product targeting their needs of digitising and visitor experience. While the top museums, botanical gardens and heritage sites, in our experience have heavy competition with no scalable solution.

We plan on targeting all of the market, supplying smaller clients with technology they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, and larger clients with a significantly cheaper solution, relevant to all their visitors.

Marketing strategy

Our marketing strategy is simultaneously working on the following:

* Client base - Our initial client base will be the most difficult, but we expect that it will get increasingly easy as it grows. Creating a significant client base is key to achieving our goals, and all efforts should eventually support that.
* Brand identity and presence - To be ready to scale, we need a strong brand and presence within the cultural sector. Utilising existing targeted channels is the best and most cost-effective approach for that.
* Market foothold - Gaining a foothold in our main markets - UK, EU and USA - will be key for any scaling plan, taking into account cultural, language and regulatory differences between those markets.

In order to successfully penetrate the market, we will need to use different methods, but our main method will be to map a large city (we already started with London), and add as many institutions (potential clients) as possible to the system, with only a visibility layer - which means only opening hours, map etc. are available. After an institution is added we will approach them to convert them into a paying customer. Our goal is to do this process with at least 3 large cities by the end of the year - London, Paris/Berlin/Amsterdam and NYC.

Our detailed marketing plan includes clear and measurable objectives including number of paying customers, reputation, conversion rate, churn rate etc.

Competition strategy

We have 3 types of competitors:

1. Handheld device providers (Antenna) - Popular but are expensive (especially compared to BYOD tech.), offer limited visitor experience, and require a lot of effort in creating content and maintenance.

2. Tailor-made solutions for a museum - The preferred solution today for well established institutions, usually creates a high quality visitor experiences. Besides being very expensive, they require a lot of effort creating content, and maintenance is essentially re-development.

3. Platforms, primarily focusing on multimedia content in audio guides or digital tours, (izi.travel, 7scenes or MuseumApp) - we feel have limited user experience, with no personalisation.

Cuseum raised $1.2M in seed, before having a public beta. They’re appealing to some of the same problems we are, but we feel that their solution is not much more than a social media twist. Since we include digitising museums and using existing intl. databases, we believe that we won't have the scaling problem Cuseum will face.

Competitive Advantage
Our solution includes dynamic personalisation of content and the use of digitising efforts in visitor experience. The combination of those features lowers the cost of digitising museums, and allows reusing the same content in different contexts. Content is created once, digitised, and is used again and again, creating countless possibilities out of the same content, and enabling a high level of personalisation.