Introduction
Joe Monastiero, the CEO and founder of nFlate, was in a mall about a year ago trying to find a nice shirt for a fashion event. He found exactly what he was looking for. The problem was the price - $375! So with that style in mind, Joe wandered around the mall for more than an hour trying to find something similar in his price range. No luck. So he pulled out his phone to try to find an app to submit a picture of the item and get back similar items to buy online. No luck again. So he assembled a team and built See It Buy It.
When we shop in a mall, we generally “settle” for what we end up buying. It might not be the ideal price, color, size, style or material. Occasionally we find exactly what we are looking for, but those moments are few and far between.
Shopping for apparel on mobile is also broken. It takes too long to find an item using text or point & click navigation. Fat fingers, endless text entry, jumping from site to site due to limited selections. Shopping is a visual experience in the real world, why not on mobile?
The problem is that delivering similar items that match a photo is H-A-R-D. It requires two primary components to succeed, each being out of the reach of most online retailers:
- Complex artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, and;
- Hundreds of thousands of products
See It Buy It delivers both in a single compelling mobile app experience. And in the process, we dramatically accelerate mobile fashion shopping by allowing people to shop the way they’re used to shopping – visually – by photo, favorite colors and web images. Text is (and should be) a last resort!
Opportunity
The ecommerce market produces $2T in sales annually and is expected to grow to $4T by 2020. It is the only trillion-dollar market with double digit annual growth. The apparel ecommerce sector produces about $600B in annual revenue.
75% of people use mobile devices to try to find products, yet only 34% use mobile to checkout. This phenomenon relates to the mobile search and discovery challenges described above.
Our target audience, Millennials, use their phones and cameras for everything—80% use their phones while shopping. They are highly social and insist on instant gratification—they tweet, snap, insta and pin all day, every day. Millennials accounted for $2.45T in annual spending power in 2015.
See It Buy It delivers both accelerated and visual discovery, a perfect match for this exploding demographic.
The world of search and discovery is changing rapidly, for many reasons. See It Buy It allows shoppers to do things today with artificial intelligence that were not possible just a few years ago. We can now index millions of images and compare a new image to those millions in seconds. The primary goal for search companies is, of course, to accelerate discovery. Get people where they want to go faster. See It Buy It could be the pathway to this “Holy Grail”.
Artificial intelligence is also a white hot M&A space right now, up 7x since 2011. The majority of AI startups are acquired within 4 years of their 1st financing. Forbes has proclaimed 2017 to be “The Year of Artificial Intelligence”.
Business model
See it Buy It is an artificial intelligence-enhanced, mobile apparel marketplace. We have native apps for both iPhones and Android devices. See It Buy It collects 15% of each gross sale. We are paid directly by Shopify, a $5B public company, effectively limiting our receivables exposure. We do not have any inventory costs and our merchants handle shipping and returns.
We have plans to support merchants outside of the Shopify ecosystem eventually, however we will likely focus on optimizing our relationship with Shopify and this huge, worldwide merchant-base for most of 2017.
Shopify is an amazing ecommerce platform success story. Their merchants produced $3.8B in gross merchandise volume in Q316, a whopping 100% increase over Q315.
Our Team
The Company’s Management has over 40 years of combined experience in both consumer and B2B product development for mobile and desktop applications.
Joe is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, with 5 start-ups to his credit. He brought See It Buy It to life in 2016. He is an engineer by training that has spent much of his tech career leading business development, sales and marketing teams. Joe co-founded Intervideo, makers of WinDVD and the creators of the DVD software industry (IPO in 2003) and appMobi, the HTML cross platform mobile app development system acquired by Intel. Joe was responsible for producing $36M in annual software revenue for Intervideo within 36 months of founding the company.
Petar is a Swiss army knife when it comes to web technologies. He has been tasked with building the frontend web applications and the backend services that run the complex engine that is See It Buy It. The platform handles millions of requests per day, from shoppers delivering visual and voice search queries to merchants updating, adding and deleting products. Petar is also responsible for building out the search engine infrastructure, a project that is usually reserved for companies with names like Google. Petar is the glue that holds all of the various technology pieces together.
Venu is responsible for creating the artificial intelligence building blocks that deliver back our similar items and color matches based on shopper requests. He has built the system that we use to analyze millions of images for features and colors. When a consumer submits a new image or color selection for matches, the platform has to analyze that request and instantly compare it to the entire inventory, delivering back matches in just a few seconds. This all happens thanks to advances in cloud and computing power and our integration of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies.
Our success so far
See It Buy It launched in Q416. In the last few months, we’ve validated market fit and product interest (our Android app has a 4.5 star rating). We have also tested various user acquisition strategies and costs. As a data science company at heart, we have been able to gain excellent insight into what target demographics are most interested in our market and what types of products and price points they favor.
Direct marketplace app competitors that have launched products have a few early entry challenges – they are generally small and marginally funded, they usually resource product partners one at a time and the biggest problem we see is that almost all of them refer shoppers to an external website to finalize purchases. With See It Buy It, shoppers complete their purchases in the app and are never passed off to a 3rd party web shop to finish the checkout process.
See It Buy It was selected as an early Shopify alternate sales channel partner. Shopify has 375,000 merchants, of which approximately 40% are apparel-focused. Shopify merchants can add their products to the See It Buy It market with just a few clicks.
We currently have about 500 merchants and 125,000 products in the market. We also have had about 10,000 shoppers install the Android app on their devices.
Learn more about nFlate at http://seeitbuy.it.
Use of Proceeds
If the offering's maximum amount of $99,999 is raised:
| Use | Value | % of Proceeds |
|---|---|---|
| Working Capital | $95,099 | 95.1% |
| Intermediary fees | $4,900 | 4.9% |
Terms
Investing in nFlate and See It Buy It is a chance for individuals to be involved with a company that is leading the change in the way search and discovery occurs on mobile devices. In 5-10 years, visual and voice search will be part of our everyday lives, just like text has been for the past 20 years. New companies will emerge to lead this industry change, just like Google and Amazon emerged and dominated in the text search era. Small, fast, nimble companies like nFlate will innovate monthly instead of yearly to create leadership position in the industry.
Your investments will help us get to the next stage – delivering our iPhone version, funding initial user growth, and generating the metrics that VCs require for our future rounds.
Want to help ensure our success? Become a brand ambassador. Tell 20 people to tell 20 people. Then we can win together!
This is an offering of Common, under registration exemption 4(a)(6), in nFlate, Inc.. This offering must raise at least $10,000 by May 15, 2017 at 4:00pm ET. If this offering doesn’t reach its target, then your money will be refunded. nFlate may issue additional securities to raise up to $99,999, the offering’s maximum.
If the offering is successful at raising the maximum amount, then the company’s implied valuation after the offering (sometimes called its post-money valuation) will be:
Pitch Deck
Financials
We have an impressive group of investors already including Joe Abrams of MySpace fame and Kathy Thomson, CMO of SiriusXM.
SEC Filings
The Offering Statement is a formal description of the company and this transaction. It’s filed with the SEC to comply with the requirements of exemption 4(a)(6) of the Securities Act of 1933.
We’re also required to share links to each of the SEC filings related to this offering with investors.
Understand the Risks
Be sure to understand the risks of this type of investment. No regulatory body (not the SEC, not any state regulator) has passed upon the merits of or given its approval to the securities, the terms of the offering, or the accuracy or completeness of any offering materials or information posted herein. That’s typical for Regulation CF offerings like this one.
Neither Netcapital nor any of its directors, officers, employees, representatives, affiliates, or agents shall have any liability whatsoever arising from any error or incompleteness of fact or opinion in, or lack of care in the preparation or publication of, the materials and communication herein or the terms or valuation of any securities offering.
The information contained herein includes forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or to future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which are, in some cases, beyond the company’s control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects the current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to operations, results of operations, growth strategy, and liquidity. No obligation exists to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
Highlights
See It Buy It has one goal – that every apparel shopper opens See It Buy It when they are thinking of buying a fashion item.
At home. At the mall. At school, a party or even a bus stop. Ubiquity. Just like Amazon is today for text-based shopping and Google is for search. To dramatically simplify and accelerate the way people shop for fashion. People use an average of 20 apps on a monthly basis. We intend to become one of those.
The new generation of consumers prefer platforms that provide instant gratification. They are visual by nature, growing up in the era of Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. See It Buy It delivers a cutting-edge product search experience tailored exactly to that demographic. We have built our core technology - though we are always improving it - and are raising capital to scale our business. Let’s do this together! Thanks for your consideration.
More Info
Updates
- May 15, 2017Primary offering finalized, selling shares
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