Off Track Planet Raises $500,000 To Build Living Travel Guide

Off Track Planet started as a Brooklyn-based travel blog in 2009. Their first book Off Track Planet’s Travel Guide for the Young, Sexy, and Broke was released in 2012 and saw impressive distribution, including at Urban Outfitters stores. That year they also moved half of their startup to Cincinnati to participate in the Brandery.

Now, the hits just keep coming. Last week Off Track Planet announced a $500,000 seed round. CincyTech, the Brandery, and unnamed international angels all participated in the round. Off Track Planet will use their new capital infusion to build the world’s first “living travel guide.” The new app (which is currently in private beta) will aggregate users’ content from across all their social networks, organizing it by date, location, tags, and keywords into a single timeline. From that stream of images and updates, OTP will curate and add some editorial to create a cohesive, branded guide for a given place. Users will be incentivized to add more and better detail to create the richest guides possible. The “living” part comes in because each guide will change and grow as users contribute more and more content. Off Track Planet co-founder and CEO Freddy Pikovsky said in a statement:

“In order to build the most beautiful and intelligent travel guide, we needed to make it insanely easy and richer for people to share their experiences. Your travel stuff is scattered all over the place. We have pictures and bits of content fragmented on different social sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc), and there’s no easy way of putting it all together to tell your story.”

The app is currently in private beta while the company recruits “super-users,” meaning travel experts, local experts, photographers, and bloggers. The company plans to launch a public beta early next year, along with 3 city guides: Buenos Aires, Brooklyn, and Berlin. Off Track Planet is demo-ing the new app at two separate events tonight. Go here to sign up for the Cincinnati event and here for the Brooklyn event. You can also keep up with beta release on the Off Track Planet website.

3 Ways To Improve Your Startup’s Pitch Deck

As an early-stage entrepreneur, you must constantly keep your pitch materials up to date, even if you don’t seek venture capital funding until the future. Whether investors reach out to you or vice versa, there are certain questions that are almost always asked. In my observations of the startup market — and my experience of the million-dollar seed raise my company completed last year — investors usually end up focusing on three very specific items.

To maximize your company’s chances of pitching your startup successfully and securing venture capital, here are the three questions that every pitch deck should answer:

1. Does it look like your customer base is growing?

If it does not look like your customer base is growing, you are dead in the water. That may be an obvious point, but I cannot tell you how hard it is to communicate customer traction to prospective investors. Investors, like you, have limited time. You need to graphically depict that you are growing in as few words as possible, using a solid visual representation.

We have taken a lot of different cuts at this slide, but the version below seemed to resonate best:

2. Do your customers like your product?

I’m speaking for both B2C and B2B businesses here – you need to be able to demonstrate that your product is getting “stickier” somehow, and the usage patterns of your customers are getting more favorable. In our case, we choose to depict traction in terms of number of pieces of written content our customers purchase from us each month – fortunately, that is trending upward for us:

The reason you need to demonstrate that your product is sticky is simple: acquiring new customers is MUCH more expensive than getting existing customers to pay for your product again. Not only that, but happy customers are also your best salespeople — if you are able to successfully demonstrate that your existing customer base is happy, that in and of itself is a low-cost sales channel. I cannot tell you how often we get asked for the above slide, and we try to update the data on this as frequently as possible.

3. Does it look like your business/product can actually scale?

Remember that venture investors are not interested in ordinary returns — that is why they are in venture capital and not in the S&P 500. If you are not able to demonstrate a clear path to $100M within five years, your company is not a good candidate for venture capital. We constantly get asked about scalability, and truthfully, there is no great answer for any company – all you can do is take your best shot. For us, it is a product slide that looks like this:

We figured out that the bottleneck for our customers creating content was coming up with topics fast enough. We introduced a product (“topic pitching”) that allows our writers to pitch businesses on the fly. It had a nearly 52 percent conversion rate to paid business. Our writers are essentially doing demand generation for us. That is what we want to communicate to potential venture investors, should they come knocking at the right time.

Similarly, your business likely has a “magic” lever that will allow you to reach that 100M in revenue point (a big maybe, I realize) if you keep investing in a certain product, or channel. Once you figure out what the lever is, you need to figure out a way to communicate that.

It never hurts to keep your materials up to date, and it cannot hurt to have the above slides ready at a moment’s notice — should the right investor come along.

Sunil Rajaraman is the founder and CEO of Scripted.com, a marketplace for businesses to hire freelance writers. Scripted.com has a pool of 80,000 freelance writers, and ranks as one of the top five largest writer communities on the Internet. Scripted.com currently provides hundreds of businesses with thousands of blog posts, tweets, press releases and articles each month.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

NY Emotional Commerce Startup Fab Raises $150 Million At A $1 Billion Valuation

We’ve seen some crazy venture funding, and even crazier valuations, lately. We’ve even some some crazy acquisitions like the $1 billion dollar Tumblr deal.

Unlike some of these other deals though, Fab, a startup that CEO Jason Goldberg calls “emotional commerce,” has customers, revenue, and a big plan for all of the money they just raised. How much was that? Well according to multiple sources the New York based startup raised $150 million dollars at a $1 billion dollar valuation. What’s more is that TechCrunch is reporting Fab has another $100 million dollars on the way.

Investors in Fab’s recent deal included Andreessen Horowitz and Atomico. New investor, Chinese firm, TenCent is also reported in the deal. This latest round brings their total venture funding up to $310 million.

Why on earth does an e-commerce site need so much money? Well the folks at GigaOm got a hold of this excerpt from a blog post Goldberg plans to post next week.

“Fab is focused on the long term. We are focused on creating “Wow!” shopping experiences that will result in customers making 20+ purchases from Fab within a couple of years. We are focused on being the global brand that represents emotional commerce for decades to come. Fab is not about a single transaction. Fab is about creating Wow! experiences in everything we do, from the unique merchandise we offer, to the user experience on our website and mobile apps, to fast delivery and a delightful out-of-box experience, to the follow-on customer service. We truly believe that it takes investing in Wow! in order to build the next $10B+ E-commerce company, and that’s what we’re doing.”

You can check out Fab here

Nashville: Jumpstart Foundry Startup, Jamplify, Raises $600K

One of the highlights at the 2012 Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day in Nashville Tennessee last August, was how many startup teams actually had a product ready to go. Jamplify was one of those teams.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands, brands and products that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

What’s even cooler is you wouldn’t know it if you saw them pitch, but Jamplify was founded by two friends that met while they were coworkers in New York at Goldman Sachs. Andy Pickens and Moses Soyoola, left one of the most prestigious addresses on Wall Street and spent last summer iterating, developing, pivoting and reworking Jamplify to the product that it is today.

They’ve already started seeing great results. Business Insider reports that Jamplify was able to drive 190,000 views to a 15 year old pop stars YouTube video. What’s even more impressive is those 190,000 views were referred by 670 fans, meaning each fan drove about 280 views.

Their $600,000 round came from a number of unnamed Nashville and New York based investors and will allow the team to continue working on a product that’s been tried,proven and is developing traction.

Here’s their pitch video from the Jumpstart Foundry demo day:

We cover high growth technology in the South and Everywhere Else.

Quick Tip A Fundraising Dealbreaker: Crazy Cap Table

So your product is out and your starting to get some traction (if you need more traction click here). It’s time to take that idea and go to the next level, but for that you need money.

Fundraising is the hardest part of a startups life. Many startup founders are inexperienced at fundraising, and perhaps the thought in itself is scary. Compound that with the fact that it’s traditionally it’s harder to raise money “everywhere else” and you’ve got the cards stacked against you.

So going forward with fundraising you need to make sure all your ducks are in a row. You want to make sure your deck looks great and your executive summary is clear and concise. You want to have your milestones and victories prominently showed off. You don’t want to waste an investor’s time.

Forbes recently posted some tips on deal breakers for inexperienced entrepreneurs. One of those is having a crazy cap table.

If you’re not familiar with a cap table, no worries, it’s the part of your corporate structure that defines who holds what in terms of equity.

A crazy cap table is a hodgepodge of small investors who may cause potential headaches for management and institutional investors.

How can you fix it?

While you may have given equity to anyone who liked your idea enough to give you a little bit of money, it’s time to start evaluating who gave you what, how much equity you gave them in exchange and what they will bring to your company down the road.

You can approach this and clean up your cap table by buying back your existing stock whenever you can afford it. You can also dilute those equity holders as you raise money. Be very leery of any investor that refuses to get diluted, and/or asks for preferred stock early on.

If you have an investor in your cap table that many not be a recognizable name to your future investors but bring something of real value to your company make sure that’s highlighted in your executive summary.

India Startup: Milaap, CrowdFunded Loaning For India’s People

Milaap is a new startup in India that allows anyone in the world to loan money to people of India for anything from solar power,clean water, building toilets, training and more. What sets this apart from traditional crowdfunding or even donations, is the fact that the money collected is a loan and is actually paid back.

With Milaap’s business plan not only can anyone help make things better for people in India that can’t get traditional loans, but they can recoup their money as well, and then reloan if they wish to.

We got a chance to talk to Shubhashree Sangameswaran about this innovative new international startup, check out that interview below.

What is Milaap?

Milaap (www.milaap.org) is the first online platform that enables anyone from across the world to lend to India’s working poor for causes such as solar energy, clean water, building toilets, vocational and artisanal training. Since it’s a loan, not a donation, you get your money back once the borrower repays.

We believe that while a handout is good, a hand-up is even better. Donations create a huge impact, but their lifespan is short-lived. When you give a loan, on the other hand, you encourage the borrowers to be enterprising and responsible with the money, and if you re-lend the money, it can successively help more borrowers!

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The founders are Anoj Viswanathan, Mayukh Choudhury and Sourabh Sharma. Sourabh and Anoj have their roots in the same university, National University of Singapore (NUS), and have known each other for 6 years. They are all entrepreneurs; Anoj has worked with SKS Microfinance and D.light Design. Sourabh worked on and sold his first start up, MicroAppli, to OnMobile, while Mayukh has worked with Ernst& Young and D.light design.

Where are you based?

We are based in Bangalore, India, and we are incorporated in Singapore. We fund borrowers from all over India though.

How did you come up with the idea?

The idea for Milaap was born when Anoj, one of our co-founders, saw what a difference solar lighting made to underprivileged households in Orissa while working at SKS Microfinance. He realised that one of the reasons such products failed to make a bigger impact was because loans for these were unavailable at low interest rates. He teamed up with Sourabh (who having sold the product of his first startup was looking to build a consumer-facing internet startup for social impact) and Mayukh (who was trying to build loan programs for small scale retailers and kirana shop owners selling lighting products in rural Uttar Pradesh) and started Milaap in June 2010.

So is the idea behind Milaap to do business loans, general loans or is it more like American cash til payday loans?

Milaap focuses on the huge opportunity to weave microfinance around livelihood services. Our loans focus on bringing financial inclusion to over 700 million Indians who live on less than $2 a day: the people at the base of the pyramid. We hope to create sustainable and increased incomes that provide for their unmet needs through our loans.

What is the problem you are solving?

The people we target, those who earn less than $2 a day, find it difficult to access capital for their needs. The cost of capital from mainstream financial institutions is too high for them to afford, especially on loans for amounts between Rs 5,000 – Rs 50,000.

We provide access to affordable credit at almost 50% less than existing credit sources available to such small value borrowers, ensuring that they see value in the service and maintain their credit worthiness. We eliminate the usual wait associated with grants traditionally, and we enable our lenders and borrowers manage their own requirements as and when needed through a transparent and structured system.

Most importantly, we aim to create economic impact. Each Rs. 1 lent on Milaap creates at least Rs. 9 in economic impact, and helps lift families out of poverty.

What is your secret sauce?

Our secret sauce is that we focus on positive stories and creating opportunites rather than focusing on the problems. Our stories are grounded and we believe in steering clear of romanticism.

Share one or two of your great stories about how Milaap is helping the people of India?

We have seen many stories of change on Milaap, and all of them are dear to us. However, if we just have to pick two, one would have to be Sridevi’s story.

Sridevi is a female entrepreneur from Bangalore. She took a Rs. 50,000 loan to expand her artisan business. She started her business 10 years ago, and has since provided employment to the destitute women of Bangalore’s slums. With her loan, she bought new equipment and is now able to employ 60 people in her unit. You can watch the video here: http://youtu.be/QZDA7p0YgxI

We also have Parameswaran, who had no access to a toilet at his home a year ago. He would carry his disabled daughter everyday so that she could relieve herself. Milaap changed his life. He got a loan of Rs. 10,000 to build a toilet, and now, he does not have to carry his daughter to the fields anymore. You can watch the video here: http://youtu.be/2vAYmtmmlQY

What is your plan to scale up?

We ultimately aim to make microlending a part of people’s everyday life. We plan to tap into social media tools to our advantage. In future, you will be able to browse through borrower profiles right from your Facebook account and make a loan.

We hope to make our presence felt in the retail sectors online and offline as well. While you shop online, recharge you cellphone online, or even eat out at a restaurant, you will be able to lend a few dollars to Milaap.

We have also launched payroll lending with a few corporates wherein employees can simply opt to have a small amount from their monthly pay given out as a loan to Milaap. This is simple and hassle-free. Since this is a loan, 100% of the money comes back to them.

Are credit scores and factors as hard in India as they are in the US? What do you need to do to qualify to get a loan through Milaap?

In India the poor do not have collateral to access loans from banks. The rural poor tend to be excluded from financial banking systems and most of their financial transactions happen informally. Usually for large sums of money, they rely on local moneylenders and lending clubs.

Milaap uses social collateral as an approach to overcome this. Group-based loans where individuals serve as guarantee for each other is an approach we employ. Other mechanisms to ensure repayments are making loans in the name of training institute for an education loan and or the artisan training institute for artisanal loans.

What are the safety features to protect the lender?

Milaap follows strict policy measures to cover all risks to our lenders. Our standards and processes have been laid out with the advice of our highly qualified advisors, who have significant experience in microcredit and financial services.

Our field partners are selected after rigorous due diligence to ensure that they have a grounded understanding of the borrowers needs and capabilities. Our field partners have a strong market presence and over three years of experience interacting with borrowers. As a result, we have been lucky to have a repayment rate of 100% to date.

In the off-chance that a borrower defaults on a loan, we offer a 20% first-loss guarantee through our field partner.

What’s next for Milaap?

Our goal is to redefine the way people think about charitable giving, not a one-time write-off but make it ubiquitous and part of our everyday activities, making it more engaging beyond financial transactions.

On the ground, we hope to expand to offer loans in all parts of India and ultimately make essential services accessible to all. Once the basic needs are taken care of, that’s the beginning of real, positive change.

Where can our Indian readers find out more?

They can visit our site, www.milaap.org, and read our blog: blog.milaap.org for all our updates. We are also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Milaap.org and Twitter as @milaapdotorg. Be sure to follow these channels and make a loan!

Linkage:

Find out more about Milaap here at milaap.org

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