Nocto helps people find and enjoy nightlife experiences, and helps bars, clubs, restaurants and hotels attract more customers and improve customer relations.
Current Status
Nocto has 35+ paying clients, almost all of which are in The Hague, our launching city. We are preparing to enter Rotterdam and Eindhoven in the coming 3 months, where we already have 10 venues in each city as early adopters with which we will host the city launch, and attract the rest of the local clients. Until recently we have been exclusively focused on building our software products, but as our products are now commercially viable we are shifting our focus to operational growth and market share acquisition in the Netherlands. We expect to be ready for international expansion in Q2 2020.
Market
For the Nocto app, the profile user is between 18 and 30, living in urban areas with an interest in nightlife, music, events, social media and digital marketing. Our research suggests there are approximately 80 million people that fit this profile in Europe.
For the Nocto business platform, our clients are bars, clubs, restaurants and hotels in urban areas that understand the value of social media and digital marketing as a tool to create and strengthen client relations, and to attract more clients. Our research suggests there are approximately 40,000 potential clients in Europe (given only our current B2B value proposition). At full market share given only the current B2B value proposition, this represents and annual revenue of €75,000,000.
Problem or Opportunity
Problems for people (18+, and looking for nightlife experiences) :
- Inefficient event discovery
- Limited nightlife location-based real-time information
- No reward for promotion via traditional social media
- Costly in time, money and energy
Problems for venues (bars, clubs, restaurants and hotels):
- Impersonal customer relationships
- Decreasing effectiveness of organic posts on traditional channels
- Limited access to user-generated content
- No leading customer loyalty program
- Little understanding of customer demographics, behaviours & desires
Solution (product or service)
For people: Find and enjoy the best nightlife experiences!
- Efficient, structured & complete event discovery
- Real-time location-based info: see music, atmosphere and attendance
- Share your experiences to earn digital tokens (Nocs)
- Spend Nocs on nightlife experiences like drinks, entrances, queue skips ...
For venues: Attract more customers, and strengthen your customer relations!
- Promote events to your followers and to everyone within 10km
- Turn clients into your social media force and re-use content
- Offer deals to attract more clients, especially on slow days and times
- Build up relationships with new and loyal clients
- Easier & faster payment method for your staff
Some focus on "user reviews", some on "discounts" and some on "sharing experiences". We have all 3 of these elements in the niche of urban nightlife.
Advantages or differentiators
Nocto’s Competitive Advantages:
- All-in-one solution for event discovery, real-time reviews, and contribution based rewards.
- “Time & place” focus instead of “acquiantance” focus --> More relevant content.
- Our own utility token (the Noc) as an offensive (user acquisition) and defensive (barrier for competition) strategy.
- Strong team balanced with skills, expertise, experience and local and global networks.
Finance
For now, our business model is exclusively a B2B subscription SaaS platform. We charge €49 excl. VAT per month per venue for Nocto Basic, and €249 excl. VAT per month per venue for Nocto Premium.
We have already outlined at least 3 additional revenue streams that are plausible and compatible with our current model.
Business model
Refer to the answer above.
Money will be spent on
3 things:
- Operations (sales & marketing) budgets for new city entry
- Team: need to hire a head of marketing and a head of tech + salary for co-founders
- Tech: continued technical improvements of the Nocto app and the Nocto business platform
The market we are targeting is very traditional. Our challenges include convincing business owners that they need to adopt new technologies to stay ahead of the curve, and ultimately, to survive. The market we are targeting is also very big, and therefore, as the shift in the first point starts happening, we expect large players (facebook / instagram / snapchat / tripadvisor etc.) to move into this space also. This however makes us an interesting acquisition target for these (and other) companies.
Incubation/Acceleration programs accomplishment
Get Started Programme, hosted by the ECE in Rotterdam
December 2016 (pre company incorporation)
