Hi friend,
We had a brilliant March: Highest # of bookings, value of bookings paid for, traffic, new mentors, potential major software clients, and we've had some inbound investor interest.
Key updates:
- General updates:
- We facilitated £9,000 of bookings in March.
- £3,000 of those bookings were a single location agency partner, who we finished onboarding in February ‘23. We’re now figuring out ways to attract similar partners (2 in the pipeline).
- The CultTech accelerator kicked off in Vienna.
- The program gave me a chance to try some new ways of pitching Tutti (which ultimately were deemed too unfocused so I've now stopped using them, but it was a great testing ground)
- I've been assigned two mentors who will support me weekly from now till the end of May:
- I met some amazing fellow founders building technology companies in the culture sector.
- I hired Greg McCallum as a sales coach, as I've had no formal sales training/experience and wanted to level my skills up quickly. He's helping me set up good processes for selling software, and fine tuning the way I demo and pitch the product to customers.
- Authority Magazine published an interview with me. (Secured by Jenny)
- It was picked up and shared to thousands of people by my university across all their social & internal channels.
- There's a potential raise on the horizon due to a few things (more info below).
- Software sales
- We had strong first meetings with larger clients this month:
- A massive American university, that is keen to act as a case study to help us sell into other universities.
- A large UK based location agency
- A church organisation with venues in more than 30 countries.
- One thing Greg is helping me with is switching the pitch. Up until now, I've been selling the free pilot program, but he believes our tech is in a good enough place we can go straight for the paid sale. So we're switching gears and focusing on that from now on.
- Tech progress:
- Penetration testing & security audit
- We've received the report & have already implemented fixes for the high priority vulnerabilities.
- They said that many issues they often expect to find in systems like ours, were not there. So that's great.
- Other improvements we made this month:
- Implemented the data stack to track software usage
- Added some new CMS components for key pages, to help people learn about Tutti (both marketplace and software) when browsing the site.
- Added a prompt for all users to enter their phone number for SMS notifications when they send their first messages (on both marketplace and software). To improve response rates.
- April:
- Booking widget will be the main focus (as mentioned last time)
- SEO + activity:
- Our strong growth continued, with a 30% jump in general traffic from Feb, 93% driven by SEO.
- Our organic traffic is up roughly 400% from last year.
- I expect we'll see a slight dip in April given the number of long weekends - our traffic follows a clear business schedule (always much lower on weekends).
- All our SEO pages are purely focused on London still… But that's changing shortly.
- Listings:
- A collection of castles across the UK asked to list with us (inbound enquiry).
- SEO has continued to lead to decent organic listings this month.
- But we've also created new internal processes that lead to strong listing growth through a mixture of direct sales and an ‘onboarding team.’
Asks
- We're actively expanding outside London, starting with Manchester. If you know any venues that would be interested.
- Please send our website or my contact details their way, and make an intro if relevant:
- www.tutti.space
- [email protected]
- Quick sell: We are “Airbnb for creative space” - we help venues market their space to creators for no upfront cost. We only charge when they get a booking.
https://getcabal.com/api/uploads/194e14df-ba0b-4a51-a380-b254940c119e?cached=1
Cluny Castle in Aberdeenshire - part of Storied Collection, who reached out to us, asking to list. They'll be listed soon.
Potential raise on the horizon.
- We've had a number of exciting things come up that have made us consider moving our next raise timeline up.
- We've had inbound investor interest from multiple people: a few angels who know the creative industries and a silicon valley based VC (acting like angels) whose partners are both exited founders.
- A brilliant CTO with founding experience, and expertise in AI wants to join the team.
- We have some strong early stage unit economics that could unlock enormous amounts of growth if we have fuel to pour onto the fire.
- No one is building software quite like us (just the software - I know there's a number of similar marketplaces), but that won't always be the case, so we need to be able to move faster than we currently are, before others catch on to the opportunity we've identified.
- And on top of all of that, we have a great problem on our hands: we have too many in-bound opportunities coming our way than our tiny team can effectively capture.
- What we're doing now:
- Preparing materials and making sure they effectively showcase what we've achieved and how much potential we have.
- Email me if you want to see the deck.
- Working on full financials this & next week
- And preparing a full seed stage data room.
- We have a hit list of 100 investors (only interested in angels and syndicates at the moment) that's growing every week. If there's anyone you think should be included on it, please let me know.
- After sharing this news with existing investors yesterday we already have 5 hard commits.
- The plan is to raise with an Advanced Subscription Agreement (ASA) at a 20% discount on our Seed round, which was always planned for early 2024.
- If you don't know what that means and want to learn more, I created a document to try and explain key investment terms in my own words here. Please seek professional advice if you have specific questions pertaining to your personal situation.
- The minimum investment we'll be able to accept at this time will be £1,000. If this sounds of interest and you want to learn more, let me know.
Follow ups to what we mentioned last time (lows or highs):