Warmintro

Warmintro makes it easy for you to create, manage, and monetize your very own online community.

Warmintro is our solution built directly fr om our CEO Irene Ryabaya's frustrations running the community for the Monarq Incubator. We give communities a unique space where they can organize and onboard their members. It's like a private mini social network that is fully customizable and built to encourage connections.

We are post-revenue and have 2000+ users and 15 communities using the platform. We charge our communities a monthly SaaS fee as well as 2%-3% on any event or membership fees our communities charge to their members.

We charged for the service from day 1 in order to prove out the idea and validate the market. Now that we have done that we are raising our first round so that we can scale rapidly to meet the demand we are seeing.

If your group, association, accelerator, or community has a mission to connect the people in the group, we are the platform for you. We are best for those groups who have a dedicated leader running the community and creating connections for members.

We estimate the market to be $30+ Billion. Facebook alone has 200 million active groups and have just spent $11mm on a Superbowl add to promote Groups because they see in their own data that most of the engagement is now not in the feed, but inside groups run by communities. Accelerators and incubators have proliferated and the number of networking communities and the events they run have exploded. 1.5 Billion people have sought out a community for networking in the past year. This is a huge and rapidly growing space, with no market leader, that we are very well positioned to win.

Communities live everywhere.

Some communities use Facebook groups, some have Slack groups, some have (shudder) Linkedin groups. Most hack together makeshift communities using a combination of many tools, emails, and spreadsheets. This does not scale and often you will see companies trying to build their own solutions. Sometimes there are entire teams dedicated to organizing members of a community. From billing to event schedules and discussions, everything lives in separate systems and was a huge pain to operate and track. There needed to be a better, more streamlined way.

Warmintro is the solution for running connected communities. It has been built directly out of our own experience running communities for thousands of people.

Billing, events, discussions, information, and introductions. We handle all of this for you and collect and organize the data in the process so that you can know exactly what your members want.

We streamline organizing and running incubators, accelerators, professional networks. We help keep event attendees engaged and active between events. We connect members of an organization with each other and let them create warm introductions with a click.

As we grow we create a new market. Anyone with a network or a mailing list can easily create a powerful, turnkey community. What Twitch.tv did for streamers, and Shopify did for small boutiques, Warmintro will do for communities.

Aside from FB Groups, LinkedIn Groups and Slack which most people who contact us want to leave, our direct competitors:

Higher Logic: does an estimated $60M in annual revenue. We had a customer A/B test them in comparison with us and 100% preferred Warmintro. It is a very old and dated product.

Mighty Networks: $5M in estimated revenue. Communities that use them tell us they have struggled with adoption and engagement. They seem optimal for IG style communities and are not well set up for creating deep connections. It looks good but ends up not being used.

Hivebrite: $10M in estimated revenue. Their product costs $30K minimum per year, and that is just the starting price. It is focused on university alumni networks. The high price point and alumni focus leaves a lot of the market on the table.

Our main advantage is our team: Irene built and ran deeply connected communities for women founders and investors and Nolan built and scaled tech products for millions of active users. We uniquely understand the community manager and their needs and we have the tech knowledge to solve their problems and connect their members.

All of our competitor platforms end up being a soup of "community" features. They lack a focus and they struggle to engage their members. We know that the main value of most communities is connection. As we build our platform, we are laser-focused on ways for people to meaningfully connect with each other, and it shows in the engagement and response to our product.

We have also focused on data from day 1. We track what discussions a member has participated in, what events they attend, what items they click, their membership payment record, and more all in one place. This data gives us a long term economic advantage and paves the way for powerful AI-generated recommendations and personalization.

We have two revenue streams.

1) Monthly or Yearly SaaS fees for each community. We have Basic ($150/month), Professional($500/month), and Enterprise tiers ($1000+/month). No free tier means no ads, and each community owns its own data. You can see the full details on our pricing page: https://warmintro.ai/pricing.

2) We take 2%-3% on membership and event payments handled through the platform. We empower communities to run their own events and charge membership fees for their own members.

Over the next five years, we plan to grow rapidly. The number and breadth of communities reaching out to us about our platform have already exceeded our expectations. Our estimates over the next 18 months after funding has us surpassing $1MM in annual revenue, from there we estimate expanding to $40MM as our next target.

The great thing about the platform is it spreads exponentially by word of mouth. When we onboard a new community we get a flood of requests from their members about other groups they are a part of that want to use the platform.

We have two revenue streams.

1) Monthly or Yearly SaaS fees for each community. We have Basic ($150/month), Professional($500/month), and Enterprise tiers ($1000+/month). No free tier means no ads, and each community owns its own data. You can see the full details on our pricing page: https://warmintro.ai/pricing.

2) We take 2%-3% on membership and event payments handled through the platform. We empower communities to run their own events and charge membership fees for their own members.

Team and shared office space.

The roles are laid out below. More specifically, we have several people in mind for the roles but we also know that hiring can take time. We have connections with a consultancy group that we will immediately start working with while we hire our local team. This allows us to start scaling up our operations immediately.

Roles:
1)Mobile Engineer
2)VP of Sales
3)Fullstack Engineer
4)Fullstack/Data Engineer
5)VP of Operations.

Convertible note at a 5% interest rate and 48-month maturity date. Depending on the investor, a board seat is on the table.

By the very nature of the problem, we need to support a wide level of features. The diverse feature set poses a risk in that we can not follow the normal startup route of building a single thing that does one thing well. We acknowledge this and have set out the guiding principles for every feature we prioritize. We focus on encouraging real connections between members and ease of use. A large number of features can get messy, which is why we focus on making that mess simple and streamlined.

A more immediate risk is if we fail to get funding to scale now. We have always gotten consistent interest and demo requests, but with COVID-19 our demand has boomed. People have resorted to emailing us directly asking for demos because there is no space left on our calendar. This is an opportunity for us and we want to scale rapidly to support the demand we see.

We are currently participating in Project Entrepreneur 2020 N.Y.C. Cohort II. (https://www.femalefoundercollective.com/project-entrepreneur)