BIYU (Bob's Your Uncle)

Idea

Introduction

BIYU is the smoothest way to rent everything.

BIYU is a marketplace that provides customers with a serious alternative to buying, and suppliers with a 'circular-supply-chain-platform'.

Customers USP's:

1. Trusted one stop shop
2. Smooth rental experience
3. Flexible rental periods & fast delivery
4. Huge selection of 220 products
5. Top products
6. Fair price

The suppliers to our marketplace are called 'Vendors' and when using our platform they can easily add hubs to the BIYU platform and register available products to these hubs.

Each product gets a 'product passport', so vendors can easily keep track of their products and know when to clean, refurbish, repair, add a missing part or recycle. We call it 'circular-supply-chain-ERP'.

Our added value:

1. Customer acquisition;
2. Embedded insurance of each order;
3. 1st line customer support;
4. Payment processing;
5. The BIYU software eco-system;
6. Vendor support.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We founded BIYU in the summer of 2020 with the intention of creating a product membership platform. So to speak: 'The Spotify or Netflix of products'.

We quickly grew to 500 members that paid €10 per month. Members could borrow one product at the time for 24 hours. Extensions and extra products came at an extra cost.

After three months we felt that the growth was stalling and began to research why. We quickly found that product membership and sustainability weren't appealing to the masses, and so we did our first pivot: We added the functionality of pay-per-use to our platform, so that our customers could rent for any desired period.

Initially our idea was to scale through our own hubs. Soon after the launch of pay-per-use, the economic climate changed dramatically and scaling through our own hubs became less viable. High interest rates and risk averse investors made us rethink our business on the supply side. Thus the second pivot was born: We engineered the functionality of multi-tenancy into our platform, making it a market place.

1. To date we have raised a total of €3.5M in funding;

2. Moved from a proof of concept set up to a professional hub on at an A location in Amsterdam;

3. We are operational in Amsterdam and the surranding municipalities, and are aiming to launch all of the Netherlands together with an LSP (Logistic Service Provider) partner in December;

4. Signed vendors for our market place;

5. Became retail start up of the month with RetailTrends;

6. We now have over 8,000 users and have delivered over 3,500 products across Amsterdam

7. Our 'Pay Per Use' revenue stream has increased by over 550% (Jan 23 vs Sept 23)*

* Based on unaudited management accounts

Monetisation strategy

Our business model consists of three pillars:

1. VOVO (Vendor Owned & Vendor Operated) hubs and products;

2. VOBO (Vendor Owned & BIYU Operated) hubs and products;

3. BOBO (BIYU Owned & BIYU Operated) hubs and products.

1. VOVO: BIYU gets a % of the order value. The customers place the order through the BIYU proprietary system and the fulfilment is done through the vendor hub with a vendor owned product;

2. VOBO: BIYU gets a higher % of the order value. The customers place the order through the BIYU system, the product is owned by the vendor and the fulfilment is done through a BIYU hub;

3. BOBO: This is how we got our business started. 100% of order value is for BIYU. The customers place the order with BIYU and the fulfilment is done through the BIYU hub with a BIYU owned product;

The BOBO and VOBO model require a far highest CAPEX investment as you scale. Our focus is therefore to scale BIYU entirely through the VOVO model.

Use of proceeds

BIYU is ready to scale. CAC (Customer Aqcuisition Cost) is at an acceptable level when you take the AOV into consideration and the margins that BIYU makes.

The first deals with vendors are in place, the team is in place, the marketing funnels are in place and the platform is ready to onboard vendors and customers.

Our focus in spending the investment will therefore be on marketing, supporting our vendors to set up successful hub operations and ongoing engineering and business development.

In short the investment will be used to:

1. Roll BIYU out in the Netherlands;
2. Get to break even;
3. Prepare for international roll out.