Trigger

Idea

Introduction

Trigger Buzz is a new creative technology business designed and built to disrupt the way marketing content and advertising is created and produced. Founded on the principles of creativity, speed, agility and effectiveness. We’re passionate about making new content, to new rules, across all new channels of communication, including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.

Our project platform, Trigger Hub, connects marketeers with a global, 600-strong, individually selected, creative community. Containing those at the cutting edge of digital creativity and production, we believe our ‘always-on’ community is more flexible and agile than traditional suppliers.

With a mobile app, planned for development in Q3 this year, Trigger Buzz aims to provide brands’ content needs anywhere in the world, on-demand. Making it faster, easier and more cost-effective than ever before for them to create the most shareable video and vines, tweets and visuals.

Intended impact

The marketing world is witnessing the biggest revolution in how it supplies and sources content in the last 50 years. At Trigger Buzz we’re there to take advantage of that by transforming the way marketing content is bought, created, produced and managed.

Whilst the traditional model worked well for TV, print-centric ad campaigns and paid digital display advertising, we found it is neither fast enough, nimble enough or cost-effective enough to produce highly effective social engagement for brands in a social media world that is constantly evolving. As testament to the speed of change, in 2014 and 2015 alone there has been the launch of Meerkat, Periscope, Riff, PicLab, VidLab as well as the relaunch of Snapchat.

Instead of looking at traditional creative and production agencies for inspiration, we have based our model on the way real people engage with and use social media. Therefore our business architecture is based on building a large, global, external community of creative talent rather than a fixed internal creative resource.

Trigger Hub has the potential to change the way marketeers brief and manage their digital marketing, giving them greater value and ROI from their communication budgets. It is designed to provide a simple process that streamlines project management in a way that is more centralised, productive and efficient than ever before.

At the same time, we aim to offer new ways for brands to extend and integrate their existing campaigns and advertising assets across a variety of social channels. To this end, Trigger Buzz often works as part of a team of suppliers, helping both brands and their agencies alike. For creative talent, we are democratising the way they work by introducing them to brands across the world and empowering them to create highly creative content. We also enable them to work flexibly and with fewer barriers, whilst giving them the opportunity to exercise themselves entrepreneurially. We aim to create the virtual home for the best independent creative talents in the world.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Generating real revenue from a range of top brands:
We’ve already attracted over £165,000* of revenue. This has come from repeat business with direct clients including; PUMA, Heart FM, Captial FM, Movember, Tabasco, MacMillan. At the same time, we have worked with brands through their existing agencies, including Florette, Petplan and the New York Bagel Company. With limited marketing activity, we have secured £85k* of revenues since 1st March 2015.

Recruitment of creative community:
We now have a database of around 1,500 registered users and over 600 approved community members.

Built and launched Trigger Hub:
We recently launched a Beta version of Trigger Hub to a select group of clients. A proprietary platform and tool, it’s been specifically built to enable clients and creatives to produce content simply and quickly.

To see more, please check out our website at trigger.buzz

*Source: unaudited management accounts

Monetisation strategy

One of the most attractive elements of our business model is the ability to create revenues from both our clients and our community. This will be achieved from three main activities;

When clients use the Trigger Hub platform
Clients will be charged a monthly subscription based on the number of users. These subscription costs are anticipated to be between £500 - £5,000 per month, per client.

We’re also planning to develop a ‘light’ app version of Trigger Hub in Q3 this year that will be specifically targeted at professional creative freelancers (such as those in our community). They will be able to use this for all of their content creation projects by paying a small monthly subscription.

When brands commission projects:
We will charge a commission, based on project value, to both the client and the talent when a project is completed. Clients will be charged 5% of the project cost, while the talent will be charged a 20% introduction fee. The average project value is currently almost £8k*.

When brands need our help to manage a project:
Clients who require support setting up and managing their projects can work with our specialist in-house teams. We will charge the team out at an hourly rate on a per project basis, based on the requirements of each project.

The revenue generating activities listed above will be packaged into three different products, each meeting the needs of different client profiles.

*Source: unaudited management accounts

Use of proceeds

The priority is to complete a full launch of the business to the UK market in 2015. Subsequently we believe Trigger Buzz has the potential to be a global game changer in the marketing industry. Therefore with these monies we also want to build the business assets so they can be scaled into new markets at speed.

Specifically we plan to fund:

1) Trigger Studio: the expansion of our creative community through marketing and partnerships. We will also create a test community in an international market.

2) Trigger Hub: Improve performance, appeal and usability based on initial client feedback. Improve accessibility through the development of apps for both the community and clients.

3) Sales & marketing: Increase awareness and lead generation with our core audience groups including PR, event marketing and by increasing the size and use of our CRM database.

4) Working capital: Create cash flow flexibility as we accelerate growth.

As a cash-flow back-up, we have in place a small loan arrangement. This facility has been offered by our existing board of directors and is capped at £25K. Should this facility be used (either partially or fully) during the campaign period, the monies may be paid back with interest (in line with market rates) from existing or future client project revenues and/or from the proceeds of this raise.