 Good evening. I'm Bob Baldacci and welcome to Baldacci on Business. I am so pleased to introduce a whole new concept to our viewers tonight. This is our inaugural show called Pitch Me. And each month we will be introducing a new entrepreneur who will present their business ideas and business plans to a very distinguished group of panelists. And our panel will have a chance to offer consulting services and even invest if they so desire. So we're really excited tonight to introduce, first on my right, my right is Kerry Galvan of Chimani. And Kerry will be introducing his new business, which is a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts. And before Kerry has a chance, I really am pleased and proud to introduce our panel tonight. And on the end here, my good friend Hugh Stevens. Hugh is the director of the Knowledge Transfer Alliance at the University of Maine. Thank you, Hugh, for agreeing to do this. Thank you. Elizabeth Baldacci, my partner in Baldacci Group. And Elizabeth has 18 years of sales and marketing experience in branding development and brings a terrific, terrific expertise to our panel. My very good friend, a new Maine resident. I've had him on the show before. He's known worldwide, Mr. F. Lee Bailey. Lee, thank you for being here tonight. And finally, Don Gooding. Don is the director of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development, his vice chair of the Maine Angels, and is an investor. In fact, all of these panelists have invested and could possibly invest in our company tonight. So thank you all for being here. Kerry, the floor is yours. Tell us about Chamani. Sure. I'm the co-founder of Chamani. Chamani makes mobile apps specific for the outdoors. And our focus area right now is national parks and people visiting national parks. Now, the problem that we're presented with today is everyone loves national parks. But increasingly, people are wanting to use technology as part of their park experience. This is where Chamani comes in. We have over 280 million visitors per year visiting national parks. They spend $12 billion each year visiting those parks. Now, one out of three users have indicated a national park surveying that they wish to use technology as part of that experience. So there exists a tremendous opportunity of approximately 96 million visitors to the parks each year are starting to use technology as part of their experience. And this was based on a survey done in 2010. So things have only changed since then. So Chamani really, its basis is a mobile app. It is a mobile app which is available on all the major platforms. It presents benefits for visitors of three major areas. It allows them to plan their trips efficiently. It allows them to navigate while they're in the parks and allows them to socialize and experience their park visit both amongst the users there as well as their family back home. Now, the app itself has some essential features which we've really distinguished ourselves. It provides essential park information. It has high graphic maps which are designed specifically for the mobile platform and work offline without any cell phone connection and have a GPS enabled functionality. It provides detailed information on all the activities that you'll find in a particular national park like hiking, biking or swimming. It provides key information on services that you find in national parks. Parking locations, dining facilities and the number one most requested feature, restroom locations. In fact, Chamani offers a clean restroom award for each of the national park apps because it's the number one most requested service. We also provide tools such as sunrise, sunset data, title information if you're in a park like Acadia. You also have access to all of the complete ranger event schedules, something which isn't available unless you're on the National Park Service website. This is one of the unsold features of national park visits and one of the great resources. You also have convenient access to any of the shuttle bus information and we do an estimate of when the next bus is arriving even though you don't have cell phone access. We can estimate when it arrives because overcrowding is still a tremendous issue in most of the national parks. We also provide a beautiful photo gallery as part of the experience and then increasingly we're starting to launch new tools such as an augmented reality viewer so that people can view through their camera and get added information as they're overlooking the Grand Canyon and get a wealth of information. It's not just what they're seeing in the signage in front of them. We also provide push notifications. These are breaking news alerts such as trail closures such as anniversary educational events such as yesterday's the alert was the 122nd anniversary of Yellowstone National Park which happened to be my birthday as well. So it's a wealth of opportunities there. Now Chamani was founded in 2010. We've had over 400,000 downloads since then. We have 20 products in the marketplace right now We focus on the top eight national parks right now. We have a flagship app which includes all of the national park units and it was what we call a virtual passport that allows people to record all their visits and develop a bucket list for which parks they want to go to next. We're available on all the major mobile device platforms that includes the iPhone, the iPad as well as any of the Android devices. Chamani is currently ranked number one for each of the individual parks for the iTunes app store as well as the Google app place. Each of these app stores have over 650,000 apps in them and if you search for Acadia, Chamani comes up. If you search for Yosemite, Chamani comes up. And in fact, last week when Apple released the latest version of their operating system they've redesigned the store. Not only Chamani comes up, but that's the only thing that comes up when you search for Yellowstone now. It's a beautiful opportunity and we've already seen an increase in our downloads since last week as a result of that. Now we've learned a lot since being in the marketplace since 2010. Seems like a long time with the app world. Well, one of the first things we learned is pay per download is not a viable business model. It really has been challenging to simply recover and generate revenue from simply getting a download from the user. Also, free is king. People are wanting content for free. This seems to be a carryover from the world of the web. Also, what we're finding is that the app place is a very immature marketplace. What works in retail does not necessarily translate into a virtual marketplace such as this. So what we've had to do is we've had to change our revenue model. We started with a pay per download. We started at a premium price point of $9.99 per download. We saw from 2010, we saw a 300 increase in sales in 2011. But simply not enough in terms of trying to demonstrate a viable business. So we changed and we looked for other ways to generate revenue. So what we've done now is we've created in-app subscriptions. So now it's not a single download purchase. It's a subscription model, reoccurring revenue. So for $1.99, you get a subscription to all the critical services that are most relevant when you're in the park. Otherwise, you can download the app for free and use it as much as you want. But if you're going to the park, you get offline maps. You get the ranger event schedules. And so to allow to capture the market, still get exposure. But just for those folks who are actually going to the parks. We also have opened up the apps to local businesses. From the get go, we've always focused on services provided by the National Park Service, not commercial vendors. And they've been asking to get on our platform. We've now allowed them. So the gateway communities of Bar Harbor, all the gateway communities around Yosemite and Yellowstone, we're now offering this as a platform to advertise for them. Then lastly, our model has changed to allow for major brands who already identify the National Park Demographic as an important demographic that they want to market to. In a sponsorship model, which runs weekly, allow them to get brand exposure within the app across the entire platform. So we think these changes are going to demonstrate in a more viable business model. And the strategy going forward for us from the get go, we've always distinguished ourselves from the other folks on the landscape by making an innovative product starting from mobile first. Always keeping that perspective, designing a product that's meant to be designed and used in the outdoors. And that's where we're going to continue to innovate and distinguish ourselves. We're in an excellent position with regards to market. And so right now, we need expertise to really develop ourselves and to really mature as a company. We're looking for talent. And this is my pitch to you. We're looking for talent and we're looking for really folks to help us develop equity partner relationships and to really help mature the company and take it to the next stage. That's excellent. Panel. It's all yours. Fire away. Elizabeth. What are your sales? Sales to date. So the 2010, it was simply $1,500. And then 2011, it jumped up to $16,000 in downloads as sales. And then for the last summer, we made a strategic move to simply make the app completely free so as to gain market position to secure that. And now we're rolling out the changes in the subscription model over the course of the winter time now that we've secured our position in the marketplace. And are you finding that people are downloading those specialty apps within the app? You're finding people are paying $199 for the ranger services? Is that working? We've just started to pivot that. We wanted to wait until the season was over to roll that out. We've gotten exposure with, without any advertising, we've already had brands sign up for the advertising for the local advertising. And we've aggressively gone after brands at the larger market level. In fact, next week, we're sponsoring an outdoor industry conference to really start getting exposure to larger outdoor brands. Okay. So do you have on the back end sort of systems to make it easy for these local gateway communities to sort of put in their own information or is it labor-intensive to bring them on as advertisers? Right now, we don't have a web-based form but that's certainly, as we ramp up, we would do that. But right now, it's essentially providing, we have a basic format that we reach out to them and we work with them to provide the media that we would then put onto the system. We have a back-end content management system which we manage all the apps with. So the updating of the apps is very seamless, whether it be the ranger events, the push notifications, or content updates such as that. panel, I'm going to ask a couple of boring questions but tell me a little about who is we. When you say we. Sure, myself and my co-founder, Sean Meredith. Sean Meredith has a graduate of MIT. He's been the primary technical programmer of the app. He's worked, actually in the state of Maine, he worked as Apple, rolling out the laptop initiative. And so he's been the partner with myself and really developing this platform from the very start. Thank you. Sure. I also know, Carrie, from what you've told me previously that you've invested a significant amount of money from family and friends up to this point to bring it to this level. Lee. If you're looking for equity and it smells like you are, how much do you want and what are you going to do with it? Well, I am right now looking for consulting services to help define that point right there. We've done projections based on really how much we estimate each of those revenue streams are going to generate and what are the resources capital the resources needed in order to bring us there and then projecting when is the crossover line into profitability. And so we're now framing that conversation but we would like expertise to help us shape that conversation moving forward with potential equity partners. By the way, I noticed as a footnote that your partner has flown as a pilot the supersonic airplane and operated the reactor in an atomic submarine. Correct. I can match them on the first but how did we get to do the submarine? Well, it's over here. He originally was in the Air Force Academy went on to MIT and then moved on to the Navy to coming out of MIT as a nuclear engineer and spent his time on a submarine working as a nuclear engineer. Sounds a little bit like George Plimpton. He's a former fighter pilot. Yes, sir. And go ahead. I have a question on technology side. So you're saying that you don't need your cell service in order to get this app but you're also saying you get live updates as to what's going on in the park. How do you receive those? So we've engineered a product so that whenever there's even the slightest signal it downloads as much information as it can. So a lot of the parks around the key locations like Old Faithful AT&T Verizon have a signal right there but it only covers that area and it's very saturated. So the product is designed to give you just the most important information. A push notification is almost like an email message. A very small amount of text which is sent over the wire. So we've really tried to design it so that to take advantage whenever there is access but to assume that there isn't. Donald. What does your cost of customer acquisition look like? I'm probably putting it in the app store. Doesn't cost you anything but are you also trying to do things like Google AdWords or any other things to try to drive people to the app? The largest cost right now is we've actually focused on traditional marketing through the enough rack cards. This has been probably one of the most effective mediums. We've distributed over 85,000. A rack card is essentially a small brochure about this size and you would see them in a large assortment of brochures. Someone picks it up. And so that we've distributed over 85,000. Every single one of them has been picked up in all central California all around Yosemite. That has been the single one most effective way to drive traffic because people are enroute. So that's been our main advertising cost with regards to that after doing the programming. The other cost associated that is simply the innovations with the product and taking user feedback and developing the product. Excellent. Where are you in your organizational process as far as the planning process? How detailed are you midstream? Are you at the end? Are you business planning process? Yes, please. Business planning is midstream. We've just done projections based on our recent revenue pivoting for revenue. In terms of a product roadmap, we have a clear product roadmap and where we need to evolve and also looking at other opportunities, whether it be the larger outdoor space as well as international parks and just the range of other parks that are still available within the U.S. Any need for protection, you know, legal, a bit of patenting or trademarked, any of that all? Good question. We've been doing, we've already established trademarking patenting and it's worth looking at to see if there are any patent opportunities. We've already received counsel along the ways of actually taking advantage of the main patent program and working with the folks over there to assist with that. Elizabeth. You mentioned that you're pivoting to a recurring revenue model where it's $1.99 to download these apps within the park. Is that a one-time $1.99 or is it $1.99 per month? It's $1.99 that gives you a 12-month subscription. A 12-month subscription. Okay, so then it is recurring but it ends after a year so are you really looking to sort of refresh those users as they maybe go on to a different park and download more things for a year but the market is big enough that enough new people are coming into the parks that you feel that this is a sustaining model? We feel with the combination of providing a core set of tools which we call the Chamani Travel Kit but then starting to augment other tools around that which are based on either a subscription model or a paper download. For example, this augmented reality feature that I talked about that would be a separate cost download. That would be $1.99 as well if you wanted to get this camera which would allow you to view that information. Okay. And then we have a range of other products that we've evolved which we can really build out a store if you will but the base reoccurring revenue in that context would still be that subscription travel kit. You've indicated that because reception is so poor in many parks you download maps to memory and bring them up that way but you also said you have GPS tracking. Yes. How do you match the two if you're not getting a map signal? Sure. So the maps are actually geo-referenced and so the GPS is talking to the satellite. So unless you're in some of the slot canyons like in Zion and you don't have good triangulation with the GPS then the actual indicator is overlaid on top of the maps and gives you an accurate location. So even though they're pre-downloaded all the mapping data has been geo-referenced to coordinate with the GPS. Good question. Supposing you begin to take off like a rocket and DeLorm up the road decides to get in the business with their distribution their name and so forth. How would you deal with that? Well I think we offer a competitive a better a more competitive product because I think we've already established ourselves within the National Park that we have already established a brand. I think our approach DeLorm's is very device-centric. We've really tried to keep a device agnostic and really try and develop what for the device which most consumers are really using and so not having to focus too much on building out a device. Focusing on the software and making sure that's available on the most strategic devices. I think that DeLorm's focus on the GPS market and their focus on more of a as I would say more of an elite outdoor athlete the athlete is slightly different than our marketplace. The National Geographic demographic is is what I like to call windshield tourists. These are folks that go less than a mile away from their vehicle when they're in most national parks and so they are an ideal casual type of visitor to the parks and that's why an iPad or an iPhone is the best platform to develop for us. Elizabeth? This is a the app world and the tech world is a really fast-moving space. I have two questions for you. One, who else is in this space? Who do you see is your primary competition and two, what is your exit strategy? Sure. So the primary competition right now amazingly enough is National Geographic and even they are I would say a not a direct competition. Their approach has been to create a single app and then to bundle all the parks. There are real technical limitations of that approach but they have the name and they've been able to get exposure through Apple. Now we've already outpaced ourselves with a lot of the smaller developers. No one has been able to actually establish their brand and create products across the range of top visited parks. There have been a handful of developers who are out there doing one or two parks but no one's been able to establish this across. And I think that was one of our key strategy moves this summer was to keep it free and really drive the competitors because they were trying to nickel and dime everyone but we were keeping it free and we had the best product out there. And so we've really gained a lot of ground with regards to that. Could you I'm sorry the second question. Exit strategy. Exit strategy. I think that this is a real A. I want to create a viable business here in Maine. That's most important. And B. I think the business can really has room to evolve. The larger outdoor market recent study that was done so over it's generating 64 well over 64 billion dollars in revenue each year. There is larger rooms beyond just national parks. So I think that is a marketplace that it can evolve to. And I think there's a whole range of portfolio of applications that can be rolled out. We've just been talking about national parks but we want to take a lot of what we've learned in that experience and then start to apply it to a larger market. So A. I think there's growth of the company but also I think there are a lot of opportunities where larger brands for example you see Google going out getting fromers. They said they were never going to get into the content business. They're in the content business right now. Well they enough BBC bought Lonely Planet. You know which was a strange move. But I think there are also as potential opportunities now. We want to focus a lot on maps. Developing high quality maps. I was really nervous when Apple was replacing Google maps but I think they've shot themselves in the foot and they realize that maps are really hard and I'm wondering if they even want to stay in that business. So. Great questions. Well let me ask the panel at this point what's your reaction to the opportunity that Kerry has presented in terms of obviously he's not looking for investors at this point in time but he's looking for some help consulting help but so far away. Any interest. My program is a very organizational centric program and that would be my one question to you is very appealing very attractive to you know me who's not very he was with the University of Maine. Thank you. But my one question would be. We only have five minutes left so I want. On the top side where what do you need internally. Not just money but human resource. What what in order for you to expand into new markets new places. What do you need internally. We need a small sales force. You know in terms of programming we have it mapped out so that we can bring on some some more junior programming but in terms of core programming we're all good between myself and the co-founder Sean Meredith. Excellent. Elizabeth your reaction. Well I'd like to work with you our consulting group offers business plans. We have about 10 affiliate consultants that can help you put together a decent business plan and help with those forecasts. I'm also on the board of main angels which is a group of about 45 individuals that invest in private companies once we get a business plan together for you and you kind of fine tune and figure out what your needs are and how you're going to what your sources and uses are. I'd like to bring you to that group to present and and start start with a capital raise so. Good. If the apple faces up to the fact that they're not cartographers and tries to buy your company which would be very difficult to patent I want to point out. I take it you would sell. Yes. So the MCED top gun program I think will make a lot of sense for you. That'll be starting in January as I think you know. And we're also offering on October 24th a program called equity prep to help entrepreneurs like you get ready for the main angels. We're also going to have a pitch night on November 14th and you've done a great job tonight. I thought you said something terrific. My one caveat is I'm still thinking you're going to have a do a couple more pivots on doing a real revenue model here. And I think until you get then to that point you're not going to be ready to go out for a larger angel investment round. Good point. I know Hugh I don't want to speak for the Knowledge Transfer Alliance program at the university but you do have available business students and faculty that might be able to help somebody like Kerry with some numbers and financial forecasts. So you have clearly some interest here and how would how would you like to proceed? I mean you've got an indication from Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Sales and Marketing and the University of Maine. And Lee has incredible contacts and resources at the appropriate time. So I don't want to speak for you, Lee, but Kerry, take them all. We should we should go with one deal, Lee, somebody that you can that you can develop a relationship with knowing that clearly you've got other resources here. I wasn't clear whether whether Lee was interested in in doing that or not though. He wasn't. I don't want to speak for you, Lee. I'm glad to see the young man echoes Nick Gecko. He's agreed as good. He wants them all. All right. Well, on that note, I think we only have a minute left. Okay, I'm aware of the Top Gun program and that was already on my radar screen and the workshops. Wonderful opportunity and the work that Don's doing. Maine Angels has been on my radar screen as a potential avenue. So I think I'm going to make the request to work with Elizabeth. Do I just get one choice? Yes, you do. All right. Then Elizabeth will pull everybody together. Kerry, thank you very much. This has been this is our first show. We're really excited to have you on. You did a terrific job. Thank you. Terrific job. And panelists, thank you for your time and effort. This was great. I hope to the viewers out there, I hope you've enjoyed it. This has been fun for me and I think educational for all of you who are thinking of starting a business or investing in a business. So each month we're going to introduce a new entrepreneur and next month it's going to be Brian Crowder who has a very interesting product involving hydration, if you will. But Brian will be coming in and again, thank you all for tuning in tonight. And thank you guys very much. Thank you. Excellent.