Pitch-deck / Feedback
Hey Everyone, I've been working on a pitch deck to use with angel investors over the coming weeks and I'd love your feedback.
Our product is a co-working platform that keeps teams connected through the day and also acts as a cloud PC they can copilot software inside of. I've bootstrapped thus far but now I'm seeking angel funding to iterate on the beta and increase marketing spend.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
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From a venture investibility perspective:
What's the killer use-case you've discovered for this type of collaboration?
I'd also like to know about the go-to-market strategy and channels. I generally believe that there's a market for what you're building, it's just there's so many tools how will you truly stand out - instead of just fit in? How many tools offer this feature? Pricing? This kind of venture needs to be marketing-first, and marketing needs to be inbuilt into the product in every way.
Thanks for the feedback @mark_b1234 I really appreciate it. And these are great points/questions.
It's hard to identify one smoking gun use-case because remote work is a wholesale redo of how we connect and manage effort vs in-person. JumpRoom flips that switch back all together by simply putting a team together synchronously with all the flexibility and visibility they had at the office.
## That said, here are some areas where JR shines:
Employee Onboarding - New employees can get right to work in a space where mentors are accessible and able to lend a hand with any of the teams tools. Saves a ton of planning time and meetings.
Shared Tech Support - Support staff can work tickets side-by-side and then jump in to help each other, all without any coordination or planning. Here you see faster time to resolution and greater knowledge sharing.
Synchronous Peer Reviews - JR is pretty perfect for this because everything is visible and co-controllable. Makes quick work of copy, design, or code reviews.
## How does JR stand out in the pack?
First important point around positioning. We are not trying to compete with meeting platforms - in fact we could very well integrate with them. Your JumpRoom could be a tab in MS Teams for instance.
Our focus is on solving for collaboration that happens between planned meetings.
What sets us apart is the ability to install and co-control any application. Web, Linux, Windows - all of it without any vendor or customer integration work required. Other toolsets come with either a pre-defined set of tools to collaborate in (like a shared whiteboard) or sometimes a cobrowser that's limited to web sharing. We do it all.
That's pretty important for the above use-cases. What happens when new employees need to learn how to use the PowerBI editor, that's not web based? How do IT techs troubleshoot a remote server together? What happens when you want a spot check on a video you're working on in ShotCut?
When teams are physically together its easy to walk to their desk and work together on whatever they're using without any extra effort. That's what we're replicating, and it requires the flexibility to co-control pretty much anything.
## Pricing and GTM
I just opened up the beta for public consumption a couple weeks ago and that's free for everyone right now while I crunch the bugs and iterate on features. I want to always provide a free plan, not totally sure what all that will support yet though. The paid subscription plan will be based on how powerful the JumpRoom is but I'd expect it to start at around $100 a month.
I'm still actively brainstorming and testing around the best GTM. I've had great response with targeted LI outreach and PPC ads are getting better. But I think there's a huge opportunity to garner attention by working with other software vendors to show-off their tools in a collaborative setting like JumpRoom. Particularly if they don't have co-control baked in.
Anyways, plenty here for me to keep working on. Again, I really appreciate the feedback. And sorry for the novel - I need to get better at being concise about this stuff. :-)
Awesome! I'm curious about the "whole ecosystem of shared applications to choose from". They seem to be open source but you mentioned Mac, Window and Linux apps can be installed. So are these run in a virtualized environment on your cloud based infrastructure? Also, yes demo's could be another great use-case. Here's another for ya - say I'm a remote developer working on no-code web-apps and want to collaborate with my client(s) in real-time.
Feel free to showcase your deck at VCvsME.com we have investors and I think you're close! Fingers crossed!
Thanks! During the beta we're keeping the app selection somewhat limited mostly to make testing easier. But down the road at launch we should have full support.
Every room has a dedicated VM and encrypted drive. They turn off if nobody is in the room to save on cost. But apps are actually run as containers on your rooms server rather than a dynamic back-end infrastructure.
Love the no-code collaboration idea! And yeah - I'll for sure check out VCvsMe, thanks for mentioning it!
Awesome :) Definitely submit your latest/greatest deck if you do, we're new but I can still email it out to 50+ entrepreneurs and at-least a few VC's. Plus more over time. So you could hopefully get more CX and the investor(s).
I don't 100% understand exactly where these apps are running and their level of data-persistency (in spite of my IT background, so others are probably more adrift). For example if I'm hacking on MySQL workbench, where are my private keys (and preferences) stored? For how long? Obviously, if I'm connecting to a remote server with it, that data persistency doesn't matter. Also the data-security is possibly super important. Just rhetorical questions to consider answering simply for not IT people!
I have some ideas about monetization too - for your app. Kind of a freemium hybrid model. If you wanted to chat more sometime. Good luck!
Good question! Each room comes with a dedicated cloud drive. That drive is what holds any persistent data required to run applications, very much like you would see on normal PC local hard drive. And it sticks around until you decide to delete the room.
App containers (docker) already have much of the persistent data required for the application though, so for the most part you'd only be saving app artifacts and temp files onto the drive.
So for your example of the MySQL private keys, you'd simply drag and drop that into the filebrowser in side panel of the room. Then when you start MySQL you can pick those private keys from the drive where applicable. This approach also allows applications to share the same drive together - so you can create a tsql query in notepad++, save it, then open it up in MySQL Workbench or SQL data tools.
Also, All the data is encrypted in transit and at rest too.
Sounds good. Probably most suited for cloud tool co-colaboration and sales demo's just due to having to deal with the data I/O for each room manually. I'm not sure what your product vision with this is of course, but I think that's a plenty big enough market to start growing to get to the next level - then expand into other tangential services as the market demands and you discover/experiment.
Not sure I follow on the data I/O bit. That part is mostly fast and cheap because it's all happening locally on your room server.
But yeah, side-by-side tool collaboration is where it shines with multiple cursors and all that. MySQL Workbench is an install option for the beta too so you can see linux tools run great. I wanted to put that in there because it would have been perfect when I was working with others writing integration queries and stuff back in the day. :-)
I/O meaning you have to setup each room with files for every meeting. Of course, it would be neat to control our actual desktops remotely via browser, but there's no API inbuilt in the browser to make that possible.
Yeah I enjoy using MySQL Workbench too! FileZilla might be cool too. Best of luck with the startup. :)
Oh - now I get what you mean about the files! They don't go away between sessions or anything but you're right that files you want to open need to either be cloud accessible or copied to the JR drive.
+1 on FileZilla. Good call there.