Poq

Market

Target market

The SaaS platform currently enables over 30 retailers, including House of Fraser, Missguided, Steven Alan, Radley and Blue Inc, to deliver best in class mobile apps across Android and iOS. We sell our solutions domestically and internationally through both direct and indirect channels.

We offer large retailers a reliable and scalable way to deploy and maintain native apps. We have partnerships with Magento and Demandware focusing our sales efforts on their enterprise retail clients with more than £1m online revenue. This can be either pure play online retailers or multi-channel retailers with own stores.

At the moment we believe that the best prospects are retailers amongst the top 500 retail sites in the UK, whose websites are on commonly used e-commerce platforms, like Magento or Demandware. Some examples of the type of retailers we are hoping to work with in the future are the likes of Kurt Geiger or Fred Perry.

We generally approach the E-commerce Director, as mobile traditionally falls under their responsibility. However, an app can offer a lot of value when used as the glue between online and in-store shopping, in this case we need to engage the wider team in the client’s organisation, such as the Retail Director.

In the next 8 months our main focus will be largely on retailers in the UK, but still going to key events organised by our partners in Europe and the US. We already have two key beachhead clients: Steven Alan in the US and Scarosso in Germany.

Characteristics of target market

We see our total addressable market at the centre of 3 large and growing markets.

Firstly, digital commerce in the form of e-commerce, consumers buying products remotely from a digital device. E-commerce is about $1.5-trillion worldwide. Right now m-commerce can be seen as a subset of e-commerce. Global mobile transactions have averaged 42% annual growth in volume between 2011 - 2014. Mobile payments are predicted to reach $1 trillion by 2017.

Secondly, the market for SaaS, cloud based solutions for large retailers. Gartner predicts the global spend by enterprise clients on SaaS products to reach $22bn by 2015.

Thirdly, mobile in an omni-channel world. Google states that already 82% of smartphone users are using their mobile when buying products in a store. We believe that soon mobile will be not just e-commerce, but will touch 100% of retail. Apple and Samsung are opening fingerprint recognition for payments, which will finally open retail to mobile payments.

Marketing strategy

Our strategy to grow our revenue base is based on three pillars.

Firstly, we are aiming to retain and grow our current customer base, by innovating on our product offering. We expect that developing features that help to connect online and in-store shopping for our clients will allow us to touch a larger part of their business. Thus, adding more value, making our solution more important for their long term success and reaping larger benefit ourselves, as well.

Secondly, growing our customer base in the UK. Currently, most of our prospects come from outbound direct sales and about 15% from inbound sales through channel partnerships. To grow the percentage of inbound marketing leads, we are using a mix of content marketing and joint PR with our portfolio of enterprise clients. Part of the investment is planned to go into investing in our direct sales channels and marketing capacity. In addition, we're building an ecosystem of app and e-commerce technology providers. These partners are providing leads through exclusive partnerships, as well as increasing the value of our solution through technology collaboration. Our strongest channel are e-commerce platforms where we have pre-set integrations, like Magento and Demandware.

Thirdly, we plan to grow our presence in new markets, specifically the US and Europe. We already have key customers in both territories and we expect that existing and new partnerships will allow us to grow further in those places.

Competition strategy

We believe that we are the leading commerce platform for native retail apps in the UK.

One of our key competitive advantages stems from running all clients on the same technology platform, on one version of the code. In this way we are able to scale good performance and apply best practices from our clients across the platform based on our knowledge database. Every company on the platform could potentially gain from innovations driven forward by other clients. We believe that this results in a strong network effect over time, as more clients add ever more insight into consumer shopping behaviour.

Generally competition can be split up in the following sources:

- In-house development efforts. This is rather rare and we feel only works well for a handful of multinational retailers like Amazon and Ebay. Especially looking at a cross platform offering of iPhone, iPad and Android, we believe that this becomes too resource intensive for the vast majority of retailers.
- Traditional web agencies, who aim to build mobile apps bespoke. Only a few agencies can warrant to hire a large team of app developers, as it’s not their core business. Cross platform development can be very expensive for the client to launch and maintain. Thus we believe that we will always be able to beat agencies on price and long term innovation.
- App developers: we compete mainly with reliability and scalability of our solutions, our speed of deployment and cross-channel development. This means we can launch a new clients in weeks rather than months. In addition, we believe that our model is cheaper on scale, because we only deploy one code-base for all our clients.

Finally, we are regularly approached by app technology providers for exclusive partnerships, for example for offering augmented reality or ibeacon to retailers on the Poq platform.

We strongly believe that we are already seen as the market leader in the industry. We feel that the Poq platform is unique in being the only fully cloud based platform for native retail apps, built for large retailers.