PeerIndex

Idea

Introduction

PeerIndex is a multi-award winning start-up which helps companies extract intelligence to make faster, more cost-effective decisions by understanding the behaviour of hundreds of millions of consumers on social networks.

Forget likes and followers, with PeerIndex you can understand who & what influences your audience.

With more than 2 billion people active on social media, marketers have unparalleled access to consumers. But what do those consumers care about? Who influences whom and on what topics? How do you build a two-way relationship with those individuals?

We believe that for the first time in history, companies can access and understand their customers directly & answer those questions in real-time.

By tracking and analysing the people and messages on social networks such as Twitter, our product, PiQ, gives marketers real insight into consumer and celebrity influence.

Marketers can improve understanding of their target audience and make faster, better, more cost-efficient decisions on marketing, pricing, product, partnership and customer service.

PiQ is a software-as-a-service (SAAS) platform for marketers which helps them turn data from social networks into real business insight to make better marketing decisions. Examples include:

• Creating and tracking the right audience for your business
• Intelligently segment your audience to get the right message to the right people
• Help you share inspiring content relevant to your audiences
• Identifying the right influencers who could impact your business

We aren't the only ones to recognise this. Leading strategy consultancy, McKinsey & Co says; “Social-intelligence literacy will become a critical asset for C-level executives and board members seeking the best possible basis for their decisions”.

Intended impact

To borrow a famous marketing expression, half of social media followers are unlikely to ever be customers. Unfortunately brands still don’t know which half.

The first generation of social media tools is broken. Countless marketers are dissatisfied with their purchases of listening tools - we know this because our customers and prospects have told us so.

PiQ from PeerIndex exists to help businesses identify what their target customers actually discuss on social media. Our proprietary technology allows our clients to identify and understand their actual & likely customers, turning social media chatter into social intelligence.

Focusing less on who’s following or mentioning your brand and focusing more on what the people who actually will buy your brand care about.

Our research and data has shown that a lot of brands are caught in a cycle of competitions and discounts rather than building valuable content and connections with their customers on social platforms.

We have built PiQ from PeerIndex to become the solution and the future of Social Media.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We won the Grand Prix at the Europa's technology awards three years ago; and launched a consumer service to give consumers insights into their social influence.

PeerIndex has now leveraged our technology platform and database of more than 200m people to help marketers do better marketing.

Since launching our new platform earlier in 2014 we've inked deals with the likes of Unilever, Coral and the Financial Times; & agencies in the US, UK and Canada.

Our unaudited management accounts show that our revenues grew 37% from Q1 to Q2 and our engagement with our enterprise customers is growing steadily.

We've also signed deals with well known platforms that service brands with CRM, creative and social media technology.

These deals should enable our data to be in the hands of potential customers and allow us to learn more about which customer segments use our proposition and need our services most.

Monetisation strategy

There are three strands of potential revenue:

1. Data integration

Some of the largest providers of enterprise marketing software are beginning the process of integrating our data through their platforms.

With these relationships we would have differing models for generating revenue, in some partnerships we could be embedded into the platform and make a small fee on every interaction.

At scale we expect to generate significant revenues through this model. We are currently finalising a deal with the market leader in enterprise CRM and are working closely with the largest provider of enterprise social tools.

The second form of data integration is through applications in app store like marketplaces. We’re in the process of building these applications and have received a positive reaction from our early stage partners.

2. Enterprise sales

Our first model of revenue generation has been enabling brands and agencies to review custom audiences. This form of software as a service (SAAS) generates a regular recurring revenue and this has grown significantly since we launched our SAAS product at the end of the last year.

We've signed annual contracts with several well known brands and have an extensive pipeline of prospects around the world to ensure this continues to grow.

3. Freemium

We generate more than 200 sales leads (sign-ups) per week through our 'free' product , which is a heavily cut-down version of PiQ designed to allow customers to test our offering.

Use of proceeds

There are three strands of uses for the proceeds of our fundraising:

Development (50%)

Our product roadmap includes extending our data coverage to include Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. It also includes enhancing our ability to license our capabilities to the major marketing software providers.

Sales and marketing (25%)

This will support our sales and account teams to handle demand for our products.

Operating expenditures (25%)

Covering our various working capital needs.