*Beaconsoft Limited is raising £125,000 on Crowd for Angels, with the amount expected to be matched by the government under the Future Fund, which is the minimum that can be raised under the Future Fund. All investors should read and refer to the Convertible Loan Note Terms and Future Fund, Convertible Loan Agreement found in the documents section to ensure they understand the terms in full before making an investment. In addition, the company has separately another pitch to raise a minimum of £70,000 under EIS.

The Product - Beacon SaaS

In digital, up to $85,000 of every $100,000 of a digital budget is wasted. The current technology and tools won’t tell you this.

Economist Prof Roberto Cavazo, University of Baltimore, world expert in fraud comments: “I have studied the economic costs of fraud in many sectors for decades, and I was left stunned by the scale of fraud in online advertising”.

In addition, Anthony Hitchings; Digital Advertising Operations Director at Financial Times, said: “The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping. The industry continues to waste marketing budgets on what is essentially organised crime.”

Beacon tells you exactly how much is wasted, Where, When and Why, to optimise spend and transform digital ROI.

Beacon allows you to attribute actual spend, revenue and individuals to specific digital campaigns, channels, posts, ads, emails and texts, identifying the fraud and real results, to give continual and accurate ROI improvement. It delivers the “holy grail” of accurate, validated ROI attribution to activities including sales, bookings, downloads and revenue. 

Beacon:

• Gives unique analytics accuracy based on independent non-channel campaign data
• Optimises full ad spend and campaign budget, saving time and costs
• Improves engagement and improves the whole online customer journey.
• Saves budget by revealing and mitigating against bots and ad fraud.

 “Due to real time knowledge; were able to make changes very quickly during the campaign. As a result we have lessened the drop-off by roughly 60% which is huge. That would not have happened if we hadn’t used Beacon” (Beacon customer).

“This is a must have product for us: without it our work would be harder...” (Beacon customer)

We have patent-pending IP to cover our key innovations around AI and Blockchain, which are being delivered as part of the next few product releases.

The Market

The target markets for Beacon are:

• marketing/digital agencies that manage digital marketing campaigns for their clients,
• organisations that have in-house marketing teams, and
• volume distributor channels / white label.

According to Stratistics MRC, the Web Analytics Tools Market is expected to reach $12.2 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 21%. This is the market Beacon plays into.

We sell Beacon by Monthly or Annual SaaS Licences (target £100 - £4,000+ / month) and are currently selling directly in UK with a recently opened sales operation in the USA.

We are now successfully targeting mid-sized agencies and end B2C/D2C/B2B organisations.

There is a large partnership, reseller, ‘self serve’ and white label potential. Plus large Professional Insights Services opportunity for us and partners.

Traction & Achievements

2017 - Developed MVP, confirmed product market opportunity, confirmed competitive positioning.

2018-19 - Developed commercial product, confirmed product/market fit, engaged early adopter customers, secured InnovateUK grant, delivered IP and Patent application, started USA outreach. Achieved customer testimonials of significantly improved ROI.

2019-20 - Go To Market plan launched. Repeatable scalable sales process achieved. Growing quarterly revenues. First US customer. Positioned at the heart the sector of “Post COVID Technologies with greatest game-changing potential”.  Looking for funds to accelerate the sales engine.

Competition

Within the world of digital analytics there are two current generations:

1. Generation 1 – the “free analytics tools”. These are often provided by the ad-channels themselves, such as Google (Google Analytics), Facebook, Twitter etc.  Organisations often use these and pull data from these channels into spreadsheets for further analysis. The problem: they are ‘self-referencing’ solutions, the channels using their own data to give the user insights for improvement.
2. Generation 2 – due to the perceived lack of ‘user friendliness’ of Generation 1, there are many tools available that take data from the ad channels (via API’s), combine them, add value, and present the data in more user friendly form. These include tools such as Nudge, Tiger Pistol, Netbase, Crazyegg, Sprout social, Oribi, Appsflyer and many others.  Howeve,r the same problem remains – the data based on the self-attributing channels.

There is now a 3rd Generation of insights tools emerging of which BEACON is one of very few. 3rd Generation tools DO NOT base their key analytics and insights on the data from the ad-channels via API’s. This gives them far greater independence and accuracy. The key competitor would be Adobe, although their target market and price point is at the Corporate/Enterprise level, leaving a vast market open for Beacon. 

Beacon’s IP differentiates us from the competitors and allows us to focus on CMO empowerment and the CFO agenda of accurate results and better ROI across all campaigns and channels at the ad/link/post level, driving direct business results (more sales, downloads, bookings, etc) for lower cost in a transparent manner.

The barrier to entry between generation 2 and 3 is high, as the Generation 2 tools will need a re-architecture to move away from channel-API based data.  Generation 3 technology is technically difficult.

Growth & Future Prospects

Our intention is to grow the Monthly and Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR / ARR) to a point of sustainability and then undertake a Series A event for a significant value change. 

Our exit will (probably) be to another tools vendor (potentially a CRM vendor or another analytics company) beyond that point. We have a target list of companies to approach, but will not do so until we have sufficient traction and revenue to command a good conversation.