Hyper Hyve™

To help grow the fan base and connect with other niche beekeepers and potential future customers we launched our YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsplMNFEZJCXBUmEAK6YQRg channel as well as the podcast Hyve Time™ - https://www.hyperhyve.com/hyve-time-beekeeping-podcast. The podcast primarily has been a great way to have long conversations with people in the industry and connect and grow the company's professional network. The great part of a podcast now is it offers a soft-touch approach to businesses and professionals that normally wouldn't take an hour or more out of their day to chat with you.

So I started the process of developing a first gen app that is stripped down from what it will be. It is a beekeeping app and there is a handful of them out in the market now, and one is clearly winning in UX and reach. The final app of Hyper Hyve will incorporate sensor data and machine learning, however in an effort to continue to grow the community (aka future buyers), our first app will simply be a record-keeping app for beekeepers like all the other ones.

I've decided to take what the best app offers in UX and give it our own twist. I'm hoping this is not a bad approach as, this way no need to do as much market research and we hope to make it even better than the leading app. Thoughts?

We will be crowd equity funding in our first step/ seed round. We decided to do this for two reasons: 1. traditional VC funds kept asking what our exit strategy was and to be honest, I thought making a bunch of money each year from a great product simply sounded nicer than selling, plus I am not entirely sure the product can be big enough to go public. 2. We think that the early backers, just like early employees should benefit from company success and Crowd Equity Funding sure can make this possible. Plus if we even hit a fraction of what I think our fair market share could be, we will all be smiling looking at our account balances in the future.

I know the word "community" gets tossed around a bit, but we are building a following/ community (fb groups, email list, podcast, etc) of engaged beekeepers and those wanting to learn more about Hyper Hyve. Today we are 3,000+ and growing every day.

After being involved in the smart home and sustainable building, there simply wasn't a better hive on the market with integrated monitoring, so I set out to build it by scratching my own itch if you will. So the product will start out as a blended SaaS and hardware model utilizing machine learning through multiple embedded sensors, helping beekeepers know when to take action in their hive, vs the conventional way of checking every hive every 2 weeks just to see if you need to do anything.