A market for restaurants and bars to monetise unused capacity by getting discovered by locals.
Business overview
| Location | Bristol, United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.getawriggleon.com |
| Sectors | Travel, Leisure & Sport Mixed Digital/Non-Digital B2C |
| Company number | 08599213 |
| Incorporation date | 5 Jul 2013 |
Idea
Introduction
Wriggle is monetising a huge and largely untapped market within the restaurant, bar and cafe sector - with a revolutionary approach to efficiency and discounting - by repackaging empty tables and surplus stock from quality businesses as exciting, time-sensitive opportunities for thousands of potential local customers.
It’s simple - local businesses reduce the price of their products to reach Wriggle customers, who make cut-price last-moment purchases over Wriggle in a couple of taps. These customers are provided with location and time-relevant offers from businesses tailored to their preferences - through a variety of channels.
Having proved our market with 440 local businesses signed up across Bristol and London, and 35,000 downloads, Wriggle is now preparing its technology for scalable-launch across the UK. The opportunity is for Wriggle to be the comprehensive platform for local businesses to fill capacity, market themselves and get bums on seats.
Intended impact
FOR CUSTOMERS
The Eat-Out sector in the UK is booming. Casual dining is up 11.6% on 5 years ago, and the typical Londoner now eats out a huge 3.7 times a week (up from 2.2 last year). A young discerning audience is looking to eat out more and more regularly, at the same time as becoming increasingly price-conscious and time-sensitive.
Enter Wriggle… a marketplace that curates quality local establishments from which customers can purchase at the last-moment - allowing them to eat out for less, at the same time as discovering new local establishments.
FOR BUSINESSES
1. Turning Surplus Capacity into Revenue
Unfilled capacity for many local businesses is a huge problem. The UK’s restaurants, pubs cafes and hotels produced 600,000 tonnes of food waste last year. Unused capacity and efficiency is a universal problem for businesses - particularly in the food & drink sector where businesses see vast discrepancies in demand based on the season or time of day.
Wriggle helps businesses to tackle this problem - by reacting to empty seats or surplus stock to generate additional sales and get bums on seats.
2. Marketing & Payments
At the same time, these businesses, despite an increasingly digital audience, generally remain reliant on word-of-mouth and footfall to draw customers in - and typically have only Facebook and Twitter as digital channels to reach a new audience. Wriggle provides these businesses with clear and trackable marketing benefit and a new electronic sales channel, at the same time as providing a digital platform for businesses to reach a new audience, along with valuable customer data and discrete feedback.
In a competitive restaurant sector where 1,294 restaurants went out of business in 2014/15, Wriggle aims to provide partner businesses with the vital difference between a quiet shift and a profitable one.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Wriggle isn’t just a vision - our team have successfully grown our audience over the last 18 months, developing our product, building our userbase, winning awards and receiving publicity.
- Launched Wriggle in Bristol and London (with Brighton launching in early February);
- Signed-up 440 local independent restaurants, cafes and bars;
- Received 35,000 customer downloads;
- Generating 15,000 transactions;
- With an average App-store rating of 4.5 out of 5 and an NPS of 83 (essentially a metric on virality)
We’ve won some Awards on the way:
- Seedcamp Winner September 2014
- SETsquared Innovation Showcase Award 2015
- Pitch@Palace South Winner September 2015
- Sparkies Best App Award 2014
And we’ve had the following great press:
- A key example of Bristol's smart city revolution in the Sunday Times,
- A “local hero” by the Financial Times,
- “a brilliant app for foodies” in the Independent on Sunday, and
- “the #3 Must-Download App for Londoners” in Buzzfeed.
Monetisation strategy
Revenue Stream 1 - % of Transactions
Customers purchase directly over the Wriggle mobile-app or website - and Wriggle automatically pays the merchant, keeping a 13.6% commission (recently raised from previous 9.5%), from which Wriggle’s profit margin is generated.
In doing-so, Wriggle leverages the rapidly expanding mobile economy to use a more efficient system to match buyers to sellers at the very-last moment, giving local businesses a mobile-payment solution not previously available, and allowing these businesses to drive greater efficiency and reduce wastage.
Revenue Stream 2 - Business Subscription Fee & Add-On Services
With a large and growing network of businesses who are generating directly-trackable revenue and marketing support through Wriggle, we believe that we are in a strong position to introduce our second revenue stream - a business subscription fee to use Wriggle’s capacity-filling services of £30 per month.
Revenue Stream 3 - Data
Wriggle generates highly-valuable data on the purchasing behaviour of our users. As customers transact, we gain an insight into their preferences, which allows us to provide increasingly relevant suggestions (via email, push, SMS or social-media) to these customers based on their purchasing behaviour, and therefore increase transaction rates.
This data can also be anonymised and packaged up to provide valuable insights to other (Wriggle or non-Wriggle) restaurants, cafes and bars about pricing, demographics, location and products.
Use of proceeds
With demand proven, this investment is about preparing our technology for scalable growth, and turning our user-figures into revenue. To do so, we need to achieve the following product milestones:
- Business Dashboard - to allow businesses to self-upload offers and to track and optimise performance. A key feature for scalability and a necessity before introducing our Business Subscription Fee
- Full Ecommerce Website - to provide a web-experience and allow more customers to reach Wriggle, opening up the ability to sell offers over desktop and tablet
- Automated Marketing System - an automated marketing process to analyse customer data (preferences and location) and generate automated outbound marketing (a process we conduct manually at present), and a key ingredient for scalability
- New Sector Functionality - before targeting next sectors.
Other expenditure will be split between B2C customer acquisition, and operational expenditure.
Market
Target market
CONSUMERS
Our target market for consumers is largely young professionals and students, with our audience breaking down as follows:
- 18-24 yrs - 21.33%
- 25-34 yrs - 59.47%
- 35-44 yrs - 14.40%
- 45-54 yrs - 4%
This is a young, discerning audience that is looking to eat out more and more regularly. Wriggle allows them to eat out for less at the very last-moment (a large majority of our transactions happen in the hour or two before the customer claims the meal) - at the same time as discovering new local establishments.
In particular, Wriggle is targeting the lunchtime eat-out market, where there is a strong opportunity to drive repeat transactions from office-workers (who spend on average £667 a year on lunch, and £830 in London), who are looking for exciting, convenient and reasonably-priced lunch options.
BUSINESSES
Wriggle has a strong focus on maintaining quality on its platform and building long-term partnerships with businesses. As such, we target establishments that our customers love, which, based upon our targets in Bristol and London, represents roughly ⅓ of eat-out food & drink establishments in any given location we operate.
Given our youthful consumer audience, quality refers to businesses that our audience will appreciate, rather than fine-dining establishments. For instance, our best performing establishments operate around the £10 average transaction level and typically provide quality fast-food or “dude-food” experiences that are perfect for spontaneous last-moment purchases.
From 2017 we will explore the Health & Fitness, Ticketed Events and Retail sectors - sectors which will fit with our current user-base and that we have already trialled in Bristol successfully.
Characteristics of target market
The Eat-Out sector in the UK is booming. The total Eat-Out market in the UK was worth £80bn in 2014, and Casual dining is up 11.6% on 5 years ago, and the typical Londoner now eats out a huge 3.7 times a week (up from 2.2 last year). Whilst last-moment capacity is difficult to quantify, we believe our initial addressable market to be at least £5bn in the UK (based on that fact that Wriggle curates its businesses, we estimate that our target establishments represent ⅓ of the total market - of which c.20% is unutilized capacity).
However you calculate it, unfilled capacity is an huge untapped market and a problem felt by virtually all businesses in the UK.
Once we have developed our technology for the food & drink sector, we envision a huge opportunity to expand our platform to Health & Fitness, Ticketed Events and Retail sectors - sectors which would match our current user-base and that we have already trialled in Bristol with success.
Marketing strategy
END-USERS
1. Referral System
Primary engine of growth, reward customers for referring their friends to use Wriggle (Basic referral system within trial generated 4,000 referrals)
2. Direct Marketing
Create partnerships with local offices; provide credit to try Wriggle; send localised on-the-day lunchtime offers
3. Digital Marketing
Localised targeted digital ads through services such as Facebook and Twitter
4. PR
On-going promotion in both trade and consumer-facing/lifestyle publications and on-going PR appearances.
PARTNER BUSINESSES
We have 3 sales channels to reach new partners:
1. Sales
(a) Automated Process
Create list of key targets in new locations, and use automated email software. This will pick up low-hanging fruit
(b) Manual Process for Top Targets
Select top-target-types (based on types of business that have performed well in Bristol and London). Call and follow-up meeting. Generate early sales and speed up word of mouth process
2. C2B Signups
Harness power of our super-users (Wriggle Ambassadors). Reward of £30 credit for each new business sign-up
3. Partnership Growth:
Develop intros through existing partnerships with restaurants/café suppliers, in new locations.
Competition strategy
Wriggle’s innovation is to merge the approaches of discounting services with restaurant booking services. It introduces a comprehensive just-in-time approach to last-minute discounting, driven by the businesses themselves, which can adjust their offerings on a daily ‘needs’ basis. The curation element of Wriggle (picking only quality local businesses that our customers will love) ensures that the offers are seen as “opportunities” rather than distressed inventory - and partner businesses’ reputations are maintained.
Restaurant Booking Services
Opentable and Bookatable are examples of restaurant booking services. The platforms include some discounting; however these are fixed offers, and do not respond to immediate business needs. The platforms are based on a passive ‘search-and-book’ model - and are not positioned as a demand-stimulating discount service. Similarly, because they relate to table-reservations, these products are limited to working with restaurants that work with a booking system, whilst Wriggle’s transactional business-model allows it to work with businesses across the Food & Drink Sector - including cafes, bars, streetfood - in particular targeting the lunchtime market.
Discounting Services
Groupon, Living Social, and Vouchercloud are all examples of offer or voucher sites. They do not operate in the same time or space as Wriggle, i.e. they are not genuinely geared to last-moment availability, and they focus on high-volume advanced bookings. Similarly, these services have developed a poor reputation from both businesses and consumers by not focusing on quality.
Wriggle, by contrast, provides a focused service by being time and location specific, but also having a strong focus on maintaining quality and building long-term partnerships with businesses, who can create offers to target quiet periods week-on-week.
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