The Best of Founder/Investor/Expert Q&A #2

The Best of Founder/Investor/Expert Q&A #2

Hi team,

Here's a snippet from the Community VC ecosystem of who said what between experts/investors and startup founders and why it’s worth reading.

If you want to see more of the conversations that happen within our ecosystem - you can take part, learn and join hundreds of others in our community forums here: https://community-vc.com/join/ ?

?? Before we jump into it, welcome to the 15 new forum supporters and 21 new founders who joined our community!

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Why read the Q&A from this week?

UAM TEC are an incredibly innovative startup leading the globe in subsea and underground asset inspections.

Their business model is vertically integrated from the hardware-firmware-software-as-a-service.

UAM is looking for insights into business model changes from the community.

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????The Ask??

  • Founder:

Justin O'Donnell | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/justin-o-donnell-gaicd-0b3b9861/

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  • Company:

UAMTEC | https://www.uamtec.com/

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  • Tagline:

Revolutionizing Utility Asset Mapping Technologies

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  • Sector:

Robotics | Data Analytics | AI

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  • Stage:

$500k to $1M SAFE | Series A ($5M raise)

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  • Ask:?

Data charges, best practices and feedback.

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  • Question:?

We are currently reviewing our data charges for data storage on our customer portal. Some background, our robotics systems collect data from underground/underwater tunnels and manholes. We charge a data charge per linear foot ( industry uses imperial ) of data collected, this charge includes the first year of data storage on our portal. We are reviewing what to charge per year for storage past this date as it is likely many customers will want to store this data. We have had some challenging discussions on the best way to do this. One challenge is that some organisations may have only one or two users, whereas others may have many. Should we charge a fee per user with x amount of data credit per registered user? We are looking for something that is easy to communicate, however covers us for additional costs of maintaining multiple users and the support required. Another question is what to markup our AWS costs per GB for data storage, we have some ideas on this also , however are interested to hear if there are any accepted industry standards around this, best practices etc.... we are open to feedback here to check our thinking.

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  • Additional Info:

Pitch Deck: (only for forum members)

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????The Q&A?

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@Andreas Huemer | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/andreas-huemer-phd/ ?

I'm not a big fan of charges per user. However, you could have size/user pools with fixed charge per month for the USE of the system (not the storage) and an additional charge for the storage (of that's the main driver of costs). Is density an issue, i.e. amount of data per square foot? It's generally not a bad idea to slightly decouple the fees you charge from the fees you pay (GiB). That gives the customers a better idea of fees that are meaningful to them and you more flexibility, but the scaling factor must be the same (or scale better for you, i.e. higher profit margin for bigger amounts of data). On your end you can drive costs down utilising multiple storage layers, lifecycle policies and custom data reduction features (compression, redundancy removal, etc).

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@Peter Tippet | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/petertippett/

The key to this is your GP. If data storage is the business, then your GP will be low as just reselling storage. My take without seeing the deck is your business is in data analysis and charging on this activity is where the money is.

Charge storage based on how much they would have paid to store themselves less 10% so they stay.? You make money as storing many peoples data which gives you a better margin.? When they access the data, then the analysis fee covers the cost of that data coming out of cold storage so when they compare this years images with the last few years, then they are paying, then no user linked.

You want them to keep using you to store the data as your money is made from quick access to the information. Also making the storage independent means it will always be there for them and is an asset for your businesses.?

This means you can move this off your base revenue line and not impact your core GP.? Could even be a seperate business. Saw this at LEAP Legal when FileMan was created and became its own business, but LEAP has part ownership in it.

Also be worth seeing how Propellor do this as they have visual data as well, just that theirs is above ground.

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@Andrew Scott | https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/andrewescott/

Hi Justin. Do you do consumer-style charges to a credit card or settle via an invoice? If the latter, there is usually scope for more complex pricing structures. Also, what do consider the churn risk to be for customers keeping data stored with you past a year? If it's low, you can probably afford to experiment, and see what feedback the customers give you when they come to pay.

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@Justin O’Donnell?

Hi @Andrew Scott , not consumer based, we are b2b by invoice. We have a detailed pricing structure and are refining as we go. There is a lot of value in the data we capture especially for customers to measure change over time for their assets, so not a high risk of churn. Probably the biggest risk is the volume of data we would be storing and if we get our pricing wrong the risk of cost blowouts for us if not managed properly.

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??? Finally, a welcome to our ecosystem

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Community VC & Iceberg are community and software businesses in the early stage startup investing and advising space.

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is Australia's biggest forum for founders at pre-seed and seed stage asking questions and getting feedback from people who love startups.

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is a CRM specifically built for founders, geared for network building and driven by thoughtful automation to maximise impact.

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TL:DR

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We do that by providing a place where founders can ask questions in front of strategically aligned investors and experts, capturing the insights/engagement and then synthesising feedback for the whole ecosystem to thrive.

RE community. It’s pretty straight forward, there’s a set of explanatory WhatsApp groups, a Q&A form, a community guide doc and a whole lot of people collabing on learnings and investor insights to help founder gather acute insights and signal from early investors.

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Think of it like an ASX forum for Venture where we capture the insights and feed it back for the whole ecosystem to benefit.

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Jock & the team

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