 Good evening. I'm Bob Baldacci and welcome to Baldacci on Business. And this is our third installment of our new show format called Pitch Me. And before I introduce our special guest entrepreneur tonight, I'd first like to introduce our panel of experts. And first on my immediate left is Elizabeth Baldacci, who is a principal of Baldacci Group. Elizabeth is an investor, an officer at the Maine Angels, and has a long career in sales and marketing. And tonight, I'm very pleased to introduce Debbie Elliott. Debbie is a longtime business owner and operator, formerly with the state of Maine, working with the Department of Economic and Community Development. She's earned numerous national and state awards for her business expertise. And Debbie is also a partner of our other panelists who couldn't be here tonight, F. Lee Bailey. I'm the quiet partner. You're the quiet partner. Debbie, thanks for being here. Thank you. And Hugh Stevens from the University of Maine. Hugh is the director of the Knowledge Transfer Alliance, which is the link between the university and the business community here in Maine. Hugh, thank you for being here. Thank you. And Don Gooding. Don is the executive director of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development and is the vice chair of the Maine Angels, an investor, and just a fabulous resource for businesses here in the state. So thank you guys. Thank you. We're going to have some fun tonight. Thank you. And it's all about weddings in the air. So, and Debbie, with your background in the wedding industry, it's great that you're going to be sitting on this panel tonight. I'd like to introduce Jay Sandofer. Jay is employee number one of the firm Tide Creative. And he's going to talk about a fabulous new product that he's working on with his group of founders and entrepreneurs actually located right across the street. So, Jay, without further ado, welcome to the Bobby. Thanks. I appreciate your time and the esteemed panel for being here. Like Bob said, my name is Jay Sandofer. I'm with Tide Creative. We put together a little video that we're going to play now and kind of encapsulates where we're at with Tide Creative. In the past 12 years, working as a professional wedding photographer and internet entrepreneur, I've shot or participated in hundreds of weddings and helped build three online startup companies related to the wedding industry. My passion with technology and the wedding industry has led me to where I am today, building mobile apps that change the way people experience weddings. My journey took a sharp turn in August during a meeting here at CREMA. I was meeting with a mentor, someone whom I talked to about startup ideas on a regular basis. He challenged me on a big idea. I challenged him to invest. And right here on the spot, he wrote me a check and became my first investor. Seven weeks later, a team of three partners and I launched our first product, Venue App. Venue App is a mobile application for wedding venues. We empower any wedding venue to have a clean and beautiful mobile app and to self-manage their app's design and content on an ongoing basis. The Venue App platform enables wedding venues to showcase the new characteristics of their property, map guests to points of interest in the area and connect clients with recommended vendors and leverage the venue-branded mobile photos sharing across social media platforms. The most important opportunity wedding venues have in the 21st century is to own the interaction the guests have with their mobile devices. Our next three projects leverage crowd sourcing in fun and useful ways. Prepare to Wed is an invite-only online wedding vendor directory that will be driven completely by vendor-to-vendor recommendations. The Prepare to Wed app will allow brides and grooms to budget, plan their wedding and get expert vendor recommendations directly on their iPhone. Wedding DJ App allows friends to suggest, purchase and vote on songs to be played at the wedding party. It's an intuitive way to make sure that everyone loves the music, everyone dances and everyone has a great time. I Spy Love is an app that allows brides and grooms to crowdsource their wedding photography from the guest's mobile devices. Wedding photo albums will no longer be limited to a single perspective of the professional photographer. Everyone takes photos and now everyone can contribute. I'm excited about what lies ahead. Our team is passionate about weddings, design and technology. We love making a difference in the most important day in people's lives. We're Tide Creative and we're changing the way people experience weddings. Thanks, I appreciate that, Bob. Today I'm pitching to get some expert advice in the hospitality industry. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that and a little bit about Tide Creative. We're a young, passionate startup based right here in Portland, Maine. Actually right across the street at Think Tank. We're leveraging our wedding expertise, design and passion for technology like the video said to change the way people experience weddings. The problem we're addressing is that current offerings are not meeting the expectation of savvy millennials and they're not doing it in an intuitive and beautiful way. We're approaching this from four places. The venue experience, planning tools, music and photography. The market for, the size of the market is huge. So there's 80 million millennials just in the US alone. 2.2 million weddings in the US each year. Three million people planning a wedding at any given moment with an average of 144 guests per wedding. We just found some statistics that just came out that on average the millennials are spending 231 minutes per month in photo and video sharing applications. This is a three time increase over just last year. So you can see the huge opportunity that's in the market. In the suite of apps, each mobile platform addresses a specific pain point that a couple encounters in the wedding experience. We're leveraging mobile technology to make the wedding experience fun, easier and more engaging for everyone involved. Our first product is venue app. The problem we're solving here is that wedding venues need to engage couples on mobile devices but they don't know how. In many cases they don't even know what to do with it. The solution is that we've developed a platform that with a few core feature sets that's easy to scale and price sensitive because it's built on a SaaS model. The market is around 35,000 hospitality properties across North America and the Caribbean. The second product is prepared to wed. The problem we're approaching here is that wedding vendors are constantly struggling with a way to market themselves through brides and the couples are struggling with ways to find intuitive planning resources and trusted vendors. What we're creating here is an invite only vendor referral engine. An opportunity here is also very large. There's 560,000 wedding vendors and venues just in North America. The way we're going to monetize this is allow all these venues and vendors to recommend each other on our platform and once we've built up a specific number of them, we'll go forward with charging a nominal fee on a monthly basis. Our next product is one we're really excited about. We're a first mover in this space and it's called Wedding DJ App. The problem we found here is a couple who choose not to have a band or a DJ at their wedding don't really have a great way to play the music at their wedding. Our solution is we've built a mobile application that will not only be easy to use but also allow the guests to get to the music list and really pull everyone in and make it a great experience for everyone at the wedding. The market size here is about 450,000 DIY couples, which is do-it-yourself couples. These folks are really excuse me, price sensitive so they're looking for options that are cheaper and things that they can do themselves. So what we've done is we're pricing this at $4.99 we're putting it in the App Store and we hope to get some great traction on it. The product is iSpyLove and the problem we're addressing with iSpyLove is that couples who can't afford photography at their wedding or when they do, they wait months to see the images from a single perspective. The solution to this is what we've created is an application that will crowdsource the photography and notes from the wedding from guests on their mobile devices and in real time. The App gives the wedding images multiple perspectives and captures private moments between friends and family that may not be captured by a photographer who may be hired for the event. The market here is also the 450,000 DIY couples but we also believe that the 2.2 million weddings are also taken into play because it adds something to the perspective of the wedding and not just the single photographer shooting it. The way we're going to monetize this is all the images are pulled into a very nice presentation at the bride and groom or couples I guess are able to manipulate and move around and choose favorites and then we're working with some partners on leveraging that platform to sell those images and sell different products from it. So we're tide creative, we're passionate about startups we're passionate about Portland we're passionate about weddings and we're changing the way people are experiencing weddings. Jay, well done, well done great presentation. Panel, questions. I have a question. How do you reach who's your customer and how do you reach them? How do you reach the do-it-yourself person? Sure, well we're creating a relationship with wedding blogs which is really the way that things are being done these days in the wedding world. So what we've done is built a series of infographics that we put out and give into wedding bloggers so our most recent one was how to find the perfect wedding venue so that's one of the way we're creating relationships with the people who have access to DIY brides. What's the early traction you're getting? So we have one product that's in the market already which is a venue app and so we started a company about three months ago. We have a couple of gratis people using the app and then we've sold a couple so we're just beginning to get traction on that. Can you tell me a little bit about you as a company not just the product you're selling but how you set yourself up as a company? Sure, we're a corporation. We're very democratic in the way we do things. That's why I'm employee number one. So we really see ourselves as being technologists and passionate about weddings and we're creating these products because of the pain points that we've seen over the years. So I've been involved in hundreds of weddings I've been involved in two startups. One was called Pictage which is based in Los Angeles and what we did was actually take negatives that photographers would send us if you can believe this or not they would actually send us their negatives in the mail we would scan them in and then put them up on the site for sale to their guests. So now that everything's digital we don't have to take quite as many risks. So that's one of the avenues that we're approaching this from is technology has allowed us to do things that we weren't able to do even when I was with that company and we started that in 2002. Did I answer your question? Yes. Just go ahead Elizabeth. I'm trying to understand it. I'm a little bit confused because you have three different products or four different products going on? Four different products, that's correct. They're all focused around weddings and specifically around pain points that couples experience when planning their wedding. Right. I'm branding and marketing so you've got the company Tide Creative and then you have four different brands underneath that. So I'm just a little bit confused about why you haven't chosen to go with one market first create your brand there and then create products that you can then use that brand to sell. It seems like you've got four companies. So what is your marketing strategy? There are four products. The strategy is we chose to go with venue at first because when a couple is planning a wedding the very first thing that they go to are the venues. So we want to have a presence in that market and that will also allow us with the SAS model to be able to have income coming in to be able to float and do the other products without having to take any more money on. So how do you make money on the venue app? Sure it's a SAS model software as a service. We tried an upfront design fee and a monthly fee to keep the platform moving and making improvements on the platform. And your client is not the do-it-yourselfer in that instance? It's the resort? It's the actual hospitality property that's correct. So the people who are running weddings on their property whether it's in a state, a hotel or even someone who may just have a barn these days, right? So that property would hire us to create an application for them that would help them with their guest experience and it's kind of a sales tool not necessarily bringing people to them but once they're in their lap they're able to say hey we have this product that you can allow your guests to download and have a great experience rather here. And what are you trying? Go ahead. So Jay you had said that you were looking for help in this industry so can you elaborate on what kind of help you're looking for because it's kind of implied in that is you're having a little trouble trying to penetrate that market right now. Sure, I think all entrepreneurs we have a great idea and we test it and we go out and we keep validating what we're learning and retesting. So what we've learned in this space is that yes we have some good experience in the wedding industry but hospitality industry is a little different and we're looking for someone who has really good connections within the hospitality space. To open up some doors to get in and things have started to take off. It has been a little slow but we're only three months old and we already have the product out moving so we're building this foundation and someone who has the connections to help us open a few more doors can really start to get it moving and create the momentum we need to springboard ahead. I have one question about the mechanics of where I could foresee a problem having worked with a lot of brides and do they control what's on the pictures and what's in the music or is it anyone can post anything I mean because what I've experienced with brides and I'm not sure what your experience was as a photographer is that they may not like somebody else's choice of what they want to hear because they don't want the chicken dance at their wedding. Amen to that. So do they control that when they allow this? That is correct. So there is an admin side of these products which allows them to control what's happening within them but also crowd sources them which the brides millennials these days aren't like our old brides where everything was about them at the wedding everyone was catering to their needs the millennials these days are looking at this as a different experience like they want everyone at the wedding to have a terrific experience which is where the idea for some of these products came from so for instance in wedding DJ app there will be an admin screen that allows them to say well we're not going to have the chicken dance however it will be crowd sourced and people will be able to vote on those songs so they can vote them up and so before the wedding people will be able to see what it is that everyone wanted to be played so they can see that hey maybe you know Mustang Sally got 89 votes right but Beaded only got 49 so the couple might be more interested in playing a Michael Jackson song so they could push that ahead but they will have admin over it that's correct Can I follow up with what Beth was talking about is the idea of does each product in the future start to interact with each other I don't know if I'm asking that the right way but is that what we're they don't necessarily want to interact with each other but they take on the pain points that someone would experience along the way in the planning process so for instance Prepare to Wed is at the beginning it's a planning tool and they have a mobile app that we have ability to market these other products within that specific app so that someone's planning their wedding and doing a checklist or a budget right on the app within Prepare to Wed we'll be able to serve up ads for Iced by Love and Wedding DJ or ads for specific people in their area that they may not have booked yet so we'll know if they booked a photography and won't necessarily need to serve up a photographer's ad in there but we can serve up a hair and makeup stylist in there as well as our products very interrelated that's correct So that's how you're making money on that app or are you actually charging for that app as well the Prepare to Wed? That would be a free app and the way we're monetizing Prepare to Wed is we want to gain this momentum and then be able to charge vendors in the long run a nominal monthly fee so it's a vendor directory that's based upon vendor to vendor relationship if you think of something like LinkedIn we're all connected on LinkedIn there aren't a terribly many people paying yet but they've created some amazing resources that are pulling people in to have them pay so we don't see it being a major fee but a nominal fee which spread across quite a few vendors can really create some nice revenue I'm going to come back to this brand because I'm still not satisfied so a couple months ago we had Chimani in they've got multiple apps for multiple national parks Chimani is the brand that ties them all together right is there a brand because Tide Creative doesn't say wedding to me it just says you know we're creative so is there a brand that ties all of these apps together as a family not necessarily that is a good question and maybe something we should look into if that's a concern from from the panel you guys must be seeing that's something that you were trying to that's what I was trying to say but Don you said it better but that's exactly my problem is that it seems like you have four different companies and there's got to be a way to brand this so that you can do a lot of you know cross-selling and and build that brand with these products together it's more powerful your sales will grow more quickly so I think you should look at that I have one more question about the the music app and the the I spy what's how are you charging for those how you gonna make money doing this so the way we're monetizing the wedding DJ app it's a first mover many of these things aren't necessarily original to the space but wedding DJ app is there's no one else doing it in the marketplace so we believe that we can create enough of a buzz around it to charge for it in the app store and we plan on charging around four ninety nine five dollars for that app I spy love is a platform that's taking images that everyone's created at the wedding and putting them into a beautiful website for the bride and groom to be sorry couples these days we have couples we're in Maine your market is suddenly doubling that's correct there's only one way to increase the number of weddings each year from two point two above and one of those things just happened in Maine which we're grateful for but the idea is all these images were pulled into a website which we're able to monetize by them buying products off of the platform. Okay can I come back to that the DJ app sure is that four ninety nine just for the couple to buy that or does everybody voting on it also needed to couple would need to buy that one time and then everyone else can contribute to it so you know with four hundred fifty thousand DIYs and then opportunity to reach beyond that even I think it has a large penetration yeah but that's I mean you need a really big penetration in order to to generate any serious money there that may be correct but we're also that's why we're kind of leveraging the suite of apps and beginning with venue app which is a SAS model and something that we can get recurring revenue from to be able to drive the rest of it have you done projections and numbers as to how many customers you need to make this thing viable? Sure we have but as a start up everything keeps changing so you know the idea of a five year business plan and putting something into a spreadsheet is great until you actually get into the practicality of it all and you really start to move through things one thing that we are doing right now is crowd testing some things so the idea of crowd funding is out there and it's kind of becoming this buzz term but crowd testing by using some of these crowd funding platforms so we're putting DJ into some of these crowd funding platforms putting it out there for a very nominal donation amount for people to help get it moving just to see what type of pool we do get from it I have a question as far as your launch I know in the beginning when I started my businesses I did a lot of wedding shows do you have a message that you could bring to that wedding show venue that would reach the people planning their weddings? Great question. Something quick that they could understand while they're on the fly going through a show? Sure, well the idea is really with Prepared-A-Wed is we're creating this referral network so as we bring on people within venue apps so these venues have a recommendation list so we're bringing those and combining the two within Prepared-A-Wed so they're referring each other back and forth what we really want to do is hope to take advantage of that relationship so when someone books a venue they can say well you can see all my vendors here or in this app which then also kicks them into a Prepared-A-Wed type of situation and they can get in and use the planning tools from there so while I agree that wedding shows are sometimes a good way to get in the door on things I'm not sold on that's the way forward for us. Okay, panel we've got five minutes remaining in the program so this is at the point where you know what he's looking for you pretty much heard his pitch before I ask you if there's any interest from any of you to work with Jay do you have any other questions that you want to ask him are all your questions answered at this point in time? Alright interest questions Debbie? I think it's brilliant my concern is that if you launch it through your vendors that they're selling their place first and you take second space to that and you think your marketing plan needs to be bolder and to the point of doing some national shows you know bring in today's show bring in Good Morning America some of those contacts because I think once it goes it's going to go like crazy it's a great idea The DJ and the iSpy? Yeah DJ iSpy I think those are See I see with the venue app being a completely different market than the other three apps that you have going the venue app is to hospitality to big resorts those aren't doing it yourself first those people are going to pay for the photographer they're going to pay for the hair and then your other three apps are an online push and you're trying to go viral on that and get the so I'm interested I like the venue app I think is a great channel and I wish you would focus on something before I feel like you're going you got one employee and you've got four products and so that concerns me is the focus you just got five employees four employees and you're correct and what we've done is chosen to focus on venue app because that is the wedge that gets people on the door okay all right Don you've been in our top gun prep class I'm looking forward to you being in top gun main and I think on the hospitality side we're part of Blackstone accelerates growth Blackstone owns Hilton so I think we can make some connections there so I look forward to helping you in that regard and I look forward to your help that sounds great and Chip I have to I can't add a whole lot here because I agree with Liz and the difficulty or the non-clarity of the way your products are set up but how it channels into revenue generation however we can't be an idiot not to want to assess and as he said he's not looking for money at this point in time he's looking for help and resources and connection in the hospitality industry so with respect to the university Chip and Chip was also a manufacturer of men's clothing apparel for many years and yes I can and Chip is there any of the resources from the university to play here that you might be able to more personal I mean certainly business development is something that I mean all four of us do I mean if that's a focus of yours especially from the venue app I can't see any one of us but before we approach a hospitality group you think a lot more work needs to be done in terms of refining that venue app so we need to know and look at the competition if there really isn't out there then I do think it's a resource that many hospitality industry is not out there yet so I do believe we're ahead of the curve and I appreciate everything that you guys have said and we'll take all of that to heart who would you this four here is there anybody in particular you'd like to work with I hear that all four want to participate with you and work with you and your team Jay is there a lead that you'd like to work with at any time well since we're doing some work within with Don's organizations Hugh I appreciate anything that you can bring to the table but I think if Elizabeth would be willing she challenged me the most I saw Debbie also challenge me and she has experience in the industry I wasn't I'm not as aware of her background so if Elizabeth would want to challenge me a little bit more and let me come to you and define what we're doing I would appreciate any help we only have a few more seconds left but we're going to wrap Jay great job thank you very much listeners viewers thank you very much we appreciate that and stay tuned for our next show thank you good job