TheONE partner and investor update
Jan '20
Read the Jan '19 version here >
Another year has passed and it was a very special year for us in many ways. Rarely have we learned so much in our careers, both individually and as a team. We have to, because the market is changing rapidly and we want to remain flexible in order to be able to respond to these changes.
We now have users on our platform from 103 countries and with tens of thousands of different areas of expertise that can be shared in more than 40 languages. We are still a long way from achieving our ambitions, but success takes time. Time we carefully spend being of value to people who want to add knowledge and share their value to the world.
One of our goals is to establish a genuine mix of high-quality professionals and truly experienced practitioners at TheONE.
The quality level continues to amaze us in a positive way. The same goes for the variation in offerings. The past few months have shown that there is currently a suitable offer for every request or need on our platform.
Last year our promise was that we would soon become the largest living encyclopedia in the world. A better alternative than Google or Wikipedia to really find the answers to your questions. Today we dare to say that we are living up to our promise.
Our ideology will continue to guide us.
We believe that everyone can be of value to someone else. Borderless and independent of faith, race or convictions. In order to apply this globally, some scale of our platform is needed. That takes time and a lot of effort and adjustments.
Many of the ideas we rolled out in the past year to rapidly expand our community didn't turn out the way we all hoped for. It is a good thing that we have always been able to come up with new ideas. Our belief is great and we do see our community using our platform. However, it is regrettable that we have not yet been able to prove on a large scale that the world is longing for our ideology and service.
Fail fast, learn rapidly
As always with a startup, almost nothing turns out the way you hope. However, as founders of TheONE, we not only take full responsibility for this, we also continue to take the right steps to turn our failures into actions that do contribute to the continuity and growth of our community.
The lesson we have already learned in the past is that start-ups usually have difficulty achieving their short-term goals, but in the long run they achieve more than they themselves had in mind.
Our optimism is therefore not about what we have not achieved, but about what we will achieve and contribute with our platform. Nevertheless, we find it important to express what we have not yet succeeded in doing.
Gaining multiple b2b partnerships
Companies we speak to are more than enthusiastic about the future that we have to offer for their services within TheONE. Unfortunately, we only managed to implement one partner. Despite the good hopes of success with this partner, this is far below our objectives.
Involving bloggers, influencers and the media
Bloggers, influencers and the media do not see us as relevant yet. One of the ideas was to acquire several blogs and another was to make influencers and the press enthusiastic. None of these three objectives have been achieved by any means.
Create a successful ambassador program
We believed that if we rewarded professionals for activating their own community with a revenue share that they would actively start engaging their own crowd of people to TheONE. Unfortunately, this didn't turn out to be the case.
Strategic partnerships
Hooking up new strategic partners also turned out to be more difficult than expected. Two partners have ended their active contribution and are only active from the sidelines. This was mainly due to the lack of rapid growth.
With a small team of devoted professionals and a humble budget we managed to keep growing our platform. Enabling many from all over the world to share their knowledge and wisdom.
We found a few private investors who made it possible to keep focusing on TheONE and stick to our strategy. We therefore could, among others, write over 500 articles in 5 languages. These articles are causing Google to rank us higher and higher and already gave us one of the highest domain authority a platform can reach within a year. Together with the technical improvements of our website and app, we keep gaining more fame and organic traffic every day, and thus users.
in making a difference in 2020?
Setbacks and failures will not stop us. As one of the greatest inventors in the world, Mr. Edison, once said,
"I didn't fail, I just found 10,000 ways that didn't work."
Step 1 - continue with our seo strategy
Google ranking has turned out to be a real battle. Every month we thought we'd solved something in the back-end so Google would finally rank us high. Not a month went by that there was something new of a technical or textual nature that made this impossible. Adaptation after adaptation we made while continuing to add content and posts.
The result is that every month we did increase our search results on topics we wanted to score on. In the coming months, our efforts will finally be rewarded which will result in a strong growth of registrations and online video calls. And we know that Google will keep us focused for 2020 to keep on tweaking.
Step 2 - continue with our blog integrations
We were hoping for a whole series of blogs that would be acquired and integrated by the end of 2019. We didn’t reach our target, but early January the next 3 blogs will be online and in the coming months more will follow on topics such as food, health, sports, cities and more. This will not only contribute to our ranking in Google but will also lead to repeat visits and the popularity of our platform.
> But there's more on the agenda that is going to make a difference...
A (major) change in our strategy
One of the things we've learned is that platforms like ours quickly grow in size when you use so-called affiliate networks. These are companies with a large network of bloggers and influencers who are urging to give publicity to a startup. Because we are free for everyone to sign up, affiliates and their network can't earn anything from us. That's why they don't give us any attention and they do give it to other inferior “paid” apps or platforms.
The solution is not to make TheONE platform a “paid” platform for all users. That goes against our philosophy. What we will introduce in early 2020 is a new service that uses our technology and platform. Fully integrated and of high added value for our community to share their knowledge.
Step 3 - TheONE Webinar
A webinar is the ultimate way to share knowledge with a large audience. But where do you find an audience and the certainty that someone will show up for your webinar? TheONE is the only one that has a large community where people are pro-actively looking for information and thus can be reached by people who want to host a webinar.
In fact, a live video call is a great feature if you have any questions before or after a webinar. 1-on-1 answers to your questions you couldn't ask during the webinar session.
The easiest and safest way to give a webinar
That's why TheONE decided to launch the easiest and safest way of hosting a webinar. It is easy to announce a webinar on your subject and in addition to informing your own contacts, we take care of the promotion within our community.
What we offer is not only our community but also that people can attend a webinar ad hoc and pay per minute for as long as they are interested. We also give the webinar host the possibility to specify the minimum number of participants to register before the webinar takes place. This way you never make an effort for nothing.
The simplicity of what we offer is that there are no moderators or co-hosts needed and that everyone can and may share something. Finally, they can record the webinar and (optionally) sell it later via TheONE.
The synergy between webinars and direct contact.
We are live video on request.
We believe that webinars are a welcome addition to our existing offer of knowledge sharing. 1-on-1 contact remains as it is now. The ability to host your own webinar within TheONE as an addition to our free 1-on-1 contact will cost approximately $ 399,- per year. An amount that can already be earned back by the host within one webinar.
Thanks to the combination of direct contact and webinars, we are opening up a market that until recently was only accessible to a few.
TheONE
webinars
Share with many
TheONE
community
Share 1-on-1
Faster user growth by webinars and affiliates.
Because the webinar functionality is paid for, affiliates will actively help us promote our platform. By handing over part of the profits to the affiliate partners, TheONE will gain fame, users, and popularity faster than we have dared to do so far. In addition, the intensity of use will increase.
Step 4 - b2b partnerships and coaching
We have developed the best coaching solution for companies. A company prefers to have its own coaches in order to maintain synergy. In practice, it turns out that the administration of who has been allowed to follow which coaching can be extensive.
TheONE has developed an application with which companies can easily select the desired number of coaches and TheONE makes the entire administration transparent and well-organized. Of course, the employees are also able to follow webinars, paid or not by the company.
In Q1 2020 we will launch this concept as a pilot on the Dutch market with our new partner. This partner is currently the largest provider of corporate sports subscriptions. Their tens of thousands of customers consist of both the largest and most progressive companies in the Netherlands.
They see it is an enormous added value to offer online business coaching, private coaching, dieticians and personal trainers via a live video connection to their large customer base.
Investments in TheONE will continue to exceed revenues in the first half of 2020. Therefore, in addition to TheONE, we will do more than our usual strategic advice and advertising services for third parties to keep the engine running. We will continue to actively look for (private) investors and we will launch a crowdfunding campaign in the US in early 2020.
Wefunder crowdfunding and webinar pre-sales
From January 2020 we will start pre-selling our webinar solution in order to get a more accurate picture of the potential of this market. We will use this data in combination with the webinar proposition to start up a Wefunder crowdfunding campaign in the U.S. early Q1.
The revenues from this pre-sale will in all likelihood not contribute significantly to our revenue. However, the results will be able to present clear proof of concept to future private investors.
The target amount of the crowdfunding campaign associated with our U.S. company will at least cover the development costs of TheONE Webinar.
Continue with finding (private) investors
This year we issued our first convertible note in which a number of private investors have invested which gave us the opportunity to fully focus on TheONE. We are grateful for this. Soon there will be a second round where other small and large investors can participate.
Thank you for your support and confidence
Through the above actions, we will overcome the learnings of 2019 and show that 2020 will be a year of positive change for you, for our community and for us as a team. For some, the end of the year has been a moment of reflection on whether you are still doing the right things. For us, it is certain that we are on the right track. We start 2020 with a lot of confidence and we will continue to learn from the old and enjoy the new.
We probably have a long way to go with many ups and downs, but with our passion for TheONE's contribution to society, we are proud and devoted to continue. Thank you for sharing your time, effort, resources and mental support in helping us in our journey.
Together we are TheONEs who will create a better world for everyONE.
Ben Steentra
Co-founder of TheONE
Jan '21