Hi friend,

We've been busy on a lot of fronts - here's another mammoth email. But before we get to that, here's a quick ask:

Have you (or anyone you know) built onboarding systems at companies that absolutely delight customers? We're looking for ideas on how we can make our host onboarding experience absolutely top class. Any suggestions are welcome.

Now, on with the show:

• Raise:
  • We will shortly be raising £300k - £1k min ticket. We will use this money to get our software into 1,000 venues and apply AI to our unique data sets, to radically improve both the search and booking experiences.
    • Want to learn more? Book a call with me.
  • We had some complications in setting up the round with the paperwork we were using before, so we've had to navigate that - but we're almost there & while we've been working on that we've been actively building relationships and growing the list of commits.
• Our SEO work of the past year is coming to fruition as we smashed 3 separate organic clickthrough targets in September alone: 10k, 11k, 12k clicks in 28 days. Our organic strength allows us to drive large amounts of traffic even while we keep our ad spend below £500/month.
• Team: We've welcomed two new team members:
  • Ross, who has years of experience in project management, and is deeply immersed in the creative industries. He's come on board to help improve our conversions, optimise our key product flows, most of which have been designed by me up to this point, and help set up some strong processes that will support us as the team grows.
  • Grace has joined our location listers to have flexible work between her main job as a researcher on major TV shows including Love Island & Deal or No Deal.
• Partnerships: We've formed a key partnership with the Heritage Alliance, who can introduce us to people who manage hundreds of incredible historic buildings: churches, cathedrals, castles, and more. They'll help us craft the right messages to reach these places, and provide warm intros.
  • This has already resulted in a new beautiful listing right in the heart of Covent Garden.
• Product:
  • We launched our new, highly specific, activity system that will enable people to find spaces perfect for exactly what they need. A good example is Podcasts: Some want audio only, some want video included. Now we have 2 activities: Video podcast & Audio podcast so people can find the space that works for them. Soon this will be a key search filter on the home page. This system will power a lot of Tutti in the future.
  • We redesigned a key page that shows ALL reviews ever given over Tutti.
  • We have a brand new home page on its way, inspired by Airbnb and Etsy! It'll be a stunning improvement & make an incredible impression on new users.
• External mentions:
  • I was interviewed on the Innovation Conversation by Harry McDonough & Ricardo Pascual

Crown Court Church of Scotland in the heart of Convent Garden, London. Introduced to us by our new partners

Raise

We've received the required investor consent to set up our raise and the documents should be ready in the next few days.

The system we'll be using is called an “Agile raise” - not many people seem to have heard of this so here's a bit of info.

For anyone investing, it will essentially look like a priced round. They put money in, they get shares in return immediately at a specific price, and then we can provide EIS info shortly after. BUT the big difference is that the price may be different depending on at what time investors put their money in. In short, the earlier you get in, the cheaper the price per share will be, so the more shares you'll purchase with the same amount of money.

We're doing it this way because we wanted to raise in tranches over an extended period of time. We explored doing an ASA but IF we did that, we would have been limited to 6 months in order to provide EIS because of rules from HMRC. And we need to be able to offer EIS for our UK investors.

So Sam Simpson of Founder Catalyst (flat fee fundraising tech platform) suggested we try an agile round & helped us set it up.

We have received investor consent to allot 450,000 new shares to the company. I will sell these new shares to incoming investors - our first new investors have agreed to a starting price of £3.76 per share (you bought your shares at £1.35 per share). I will continue selling these shares until any of the following occurs: 5 years passes, we raise £2m in total, OR there's another event that causes an allotment of shares (most likely a formal round with a new shareholder agreement).