Calling Our Investors
We have been paused with our development for the last four months.
We have been doing all we can to appeal to outside investors during this time, even getting past initial evaluation steps with several firms.
However, we are up against a lot of what we’d call “zero risk appetite remaining” with firms.
There’s been increased pull back ever since the Silicon Valley Bank debacle in March. Combine that with the fact many of the firms who have backed companies in our space remain disappointed that they didn’t figure out how to build strong revenue. Many wrong moves have been made in our industry by focusing on pricey content deals instead of focusing on distribution system issues to solve the underlying monetization issues (what we’re focused on).
The Make Or Break
No matter how obvious and exciting Marbyl has seemed to the many investors we've talked to, they all come back with one or two of the same responses:
Show us market traction and revenue and then let’s have another conversation.
We don’t lead rounds, but come back to us once you start making progress with this one.
When our teams went on pause in May, we were just 4 short weeks away from having our producer portals ready!
This would have allowed our case study partners (including various Indie podcasters, networks like PodcastOne, and even Michigan State University) to finally have dashboards from which to interact with their Marbyls and manage their accounts. Shortly thereafter, we’d have had the site e-commerce enabled and ready to sign up paid subscribers - in other words, finally demonstrate revenue!
On the user traction side, just before the pause, we had established a terrific relationship with a lead generation and growth hacking company. They were ready to 'hit go’ on one month use case test sprints so that we could identify our strongest target market, and then market to them through organic, influencer, and paid strategies.
Without our teams in place to manage the app and scale its content, we couldn’t move forward with that user testing even if we’d had the funds for just that initiative.
Our 5-Month Plan For Traction & Revenue
We are appealing to you for support in getting us across the most crucial line we’ve ever encountered in our business history.
Unlike any other of our ‘final miles’, this one is quite literally to get us to traction in the market and to paying customers. The two things outside investors need to see. (We have not yet been able to market to either app users or publishers.)
We have put together a plan for an aggressive 5-month development, testing, and marketing period that will get us there.
The first $1M tranche of our current $5M raise will cover this 5-month period.
We request your help in hitting this $1M goal!
The ‘just in time funding’ that has governed our last four years of growth - while it’s helped us move forward - has prevented us from moving faster, scaling with key hires, and marketing our product well in advance of now. In short, it’s prevented us from getting to the revenue and market traction we need to demonstrate.
So for your knowledge and perhaps sense of security, we will not be hitting "The Go Button" with our 5-month development plan until the full $1M is funded.
Either we get to make this final, imperative push of our unique tech and product after all these years of building something great (and that the market is proving to be even more in need of than when we started) or sadly we can't.
Path To Valuation and/or Sale
The truth is that the only way to get Marbyl to a valuation that it's worthy of is to make this final push.
At least with traction and proof, we’d be positioned to sell off a part of our tech and yield a good return for all. Or we could continue building up that valuation. In any case, we haven’t either of those options currently.
We are focused on the $244B digital ad space. That’s where we’re set on taking podcast content through the new distribution system it badly needs and that we’re building.
We have some creative PR efforts in motion to build credibility and awareness in tandem with our pounding of the pavement for funds. Sometimes it takes some key features to get people to listen to your pitch, if not to actually make the first move. Stay tuned for more on this.
Once we’re able to gain user traction, complete the portal, and build phase 1 of our API with this $1M tranche, we will be heading right back to NPR and NYT to discuss the partnerships they’ve expressed interest in securing, in addition to countless other networks, Indies, and service providers in the space that we’re in talks and case study agreements with (including SiriusXM, iHeart, Kast Media, Ausha, Barometer, and more).
Remaining paused is giving our competitors an advantage and staying here too long diminishes our likelihood of success.
If you would please consider making a pledge toward this necessary $1M goal, it would allow us to hit these crucial short-term goals without interruption, and to open up possibilities for our growth and/or sale!
Materials For Your Download
Please find two files for your download and review below.
The first is our $1M tranche One Sheet.
The second is our “Short Term Burn Rate” spreadsheet, reflecting:
Accurate numbers for funds spent and received over the past 5 months
Projections for the allocation of the $1M tranche over the 5-month period it covers
Demonstration of the beginnings of revenue kicking in at the tail end of this tranche phase
Some things to note on the Burn doc:
Green indicates the spend of the $1M
That spend starts when we’ve completed our raise. This spreadsheet is making the assumption that we are fully funded by September 1st. (Of course, this will have to get pushed out if we are not and the 5 months of build and spend will commence at that time.)
Barrel Proof, Applado, and TechCXO are our tech development vendors. You’ll see that our spend in September is much higher than subsequent months. This is because we’ve factored in the past due amounts they’ve each agreed to as being sufficient to lift the pause and move forward (approx. $151k in total).
Thank You!
We could not have gotten this far without you!
We’ve built something truly special together… and soon the world will see, that’s it’s something quite valuable.
Why?
With all the noise and increasing competition now surrounding OpenAI advancements, remember that our Machine Learning models are all in-house developed, patented, and do something that OpenAI can't do. They are trained to locate “interest-intensive” zones of spoken word and conversational text, and then pair that text with its audio component to produce multi-media deliverables, automatically.
So, together, we have strengthened our moat relative to competing tools and platforms building their offerings from leveraged OpenAI, leaving themselves more vulnerable to future licensing changes and all the rest.
Now, we just need to be known, used, and wanted.
This $1M in funding and the 5 months it buys us will get us there.
Thank you for considering supporting us at this critical hour. We are here for any questions you may have!
All our best,
Mike & Sherry
mkako@treegoatmedia.com
(917) 975-7595
sherry@treegoatmedia.com
(646) 337-6533