Pitch Me Up update - week of 18/4/22
📣 Pitch Me Up + Public Group = 🚀🧑🚀💫
We’re very excited to announce the new partnership between Pitch Me Up and Public Group. Each start-up in which the Pitch Me Up angels invest will receive special vouchers to get their tech gear from Public. And all Pitch Me Up listeners are eligible for free delivery from Public.gr using the coupon “public_pitchmeup”.
🐶 Woofresh, a fresh dog food delivery service
The global pet meal kit delivery services market is expected to reach $5.20 billion by 2028, fueled by rising concerns about pet health and nutritional deficiencies but also the significant advantages offered to pet owners / parents, such as customization or free delivery.
Woofresh is a newly launched fresh dog food delivery service, offering natural, personalized hand-cooked meals made with quality ingredients for dogs. In this week’s episode, we host (via Zoom) the Covid quarantined co-founder of Woofresh Dave Sousa.
🌷 An update about eBloom
A couple of weeks ago, we featured eBloom, the newly launched online marketplace for florists, or as I like to call it “the Wolt for flowers”. After that, we had a follow-up call with the eBloom founders and some of the interested Pitch Me Up angel investors. Here is their assessment.
Pros
Deep understanding of the flower market
Seasoned entrepreneurs (albeit offline)
Driven and ambitious
Cons
They seemed confused regarding marketing
They did not seem to own their numbers (e.g. when asked about orders in Dec 2022 and Dec 2023)
Although they are deep into this industry, and they can certainly find the supply, there does not seem to be a clear path to find the demand
No clear go-to-market strategy
They need a CTO on the cap table
They could certainly benefit from an acceleration program and some mentorship.
One of the investors added:
I would invest if the following could happen:
They find a CTO and give him at least 10%
They run a marketing campaign with someone that knows what they're doing and can show positive ROAS - even at 2 to 1 I'd be good (I know it doesn't mean much at low ad spends, but it's an initial indication)
They present a monthly business plan that shows path to 1M€ in total commissions in year 4 based on assumptions that make sense (I would normally expect this in year 3 but Y4 is acceptable too)
Next step for the eBloom team is their business plan review session with the Pitch Me Up angel Panagiotis Gezerlis.
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine
Last week, after recording a new conversation with Taras Pohrebniak, the Co-founder and CEO of the Ukrainian start-up Elomia (who we featured a couple of weeks ago), he suggested we speak with Andrew, another start-up founder who is still in Kharkiv. Located in northeast Ukraine, the city of Kharkiv has been under relentless Russian bombardment.
The day before our scheduled call, we got the following message from Andrew.
Hoping all will be ok, and we’ll try to speak with Andrew in the coming weeks.
😇 Meet the Pitch Me Up angels
Every week, we will feature 2 of the angel investors supporting Pitch Me Up.
Alexander Caravitis is a seasoned tech entrepreneur with successful exits and currently co-founder & CEO of Hosthub – a B2B SaaS for the vacation rental industry. Before Hosthub he was co-founder of Viva Wallet, the first Greek Unicorn, where he helped grow the team from 8 to 250 people during his 10 year stint. He is currently an advisor and angel investor for multiple startups, a very lucky husband and proud father of 3.
George Anagnostopoulos is the Founder and President of Socialab, the biggest digital-first creative ad agency in Greece. He has also taught digital marketing and advertising since 2009, with the latest being at ALBA Graduate Business School where he has taught more than 2,500 executives since 2012. He considers himself a Jack of All Trades, and he has a broad range of marketing experience from his clients into most consumer markets.