Kohort Is Group Management Done Simple, Yet Robust

Don't say a word and no facial expression. Alright.

Okay, so for the rest of judges, please, so please welcome to the stage first of all, stival from Kohort Mark Davis CEO and co-founder Limcan the director of business development for Kohort.

And just finishing the technology.

I'm Mark Davis is the CEO of Kohort. I'm an Colombian venture community and a New York venture community.

And I know that hundreds of people here in the audience today are the members of those group,I have seen a lot of people out at the exhibits. What you don't know is that managing those nother for member management. Even worse, thousands of people have had a signup with five different systems in order to engage our group.


Today the game changes. Kohort connects community, what I mean by that it is the single solution that an organizer needs to engage their membership, communication management, event management, member management, transaction management, under one umbrella.

We also connect groups to their chapters and we allow groups to interact online, we've made them social. Kohort is for any type of community. It is for mommy groups, alumni groups, hiking groups, you name it and obviously entrepreneurship groups. Let's dive in. I wanna show you what we built. So Kohort is the catchall for all things community, We give every group their own page.

Each organizer is given robust communication management tools. Each organizer can have as many email lists as their want on our platform and each email list is automatically integrated into a discussion board capturing all the conversation that takes place between your members. Your members You'll never have to ask the same question twice.

We also have a complete member management system. It's a full membership directory, and each member has a complete member profile, meaning you and your members can actually find each other when you search. In addition to that, we give organizers custom application forms. These forms are forms that members fill out when they join the group.

This enables organizers to target communication and events at specific subsets of their population. On the events side, we have a complete event listing, but we also have advance ticketing. When we launch in public beta, you'll be able to create numerous ticket types. Student, alumni, employee - charged different rates for every ticket, release them on different dates, and make them available to both members and people from the general public.

And of course we manage everything transaction. You'll never have to touch cash. Event fees, dues taken care of. You can also create numerous tiers of dues. Student alumni rate, not a problem. Now, groups are complicated in the real world, they're hierarchical, they have chapters. We allow you to manage that online.

Each group can have as many subgroups as they want, and as many tiers of subgroups as they need. Each subgroup has all of the tools I just described - communication management, member, event, transaction management in one place, enabling your local leadership to operate completely autonomously without you losing control.

You can send global communications and global events at any time. And groups are also social in the real world. They do events together. Right now that's accomplished by sending emails and making phone calls - on Kohort that's just a a couple of clicks. We've also created something new called channels.

Channels are a curated list of groups for a given interest topic: whether again it's a wine group, a mommy group, an alumni group, a venture capital group, or an entrepreneurship group. This makes it easy for users to find the great groups and events in their interest topic. Finally you can actively discover what you are looking for.

We also have a great focus on giving users control over how their information is shared on our website. You create a very simple lexicon, that's public, private and hidden, and we applied those toggles to groups, events and members. You'll be able to see more on how you can use these tools when we're on our public beta.

And what does all this cost? Well for the vast majority of groups it's entirely free. We generate revenue by selling subscriptions against our channels and free groups. We generate subscription revenue for our premium groups, and we generate service fees revenue any time we conduct a transaction.

Taking a step back... In April we launched a landing page. And knowing nothing more than the fact we raised $3 million dollars from a marquee list of investors. Well over ten thousand people signed up. Today we're very excited to unveil our company and enter into a private beta with a number of marquee organizations already joining the platform.

Tech Star, Start Up Weekend, Arizona State University, the largest university in the country and dozens of others. But today we're doing more than announcing our company. We're beginning a movement with the support of our Launch sponsors American Express Open Forum and the law firm Cooley, who are driving an initiative, to unify the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem, and export entrepreneurship globally by taking the model we developed at the Columbia Venture community, to every major university in the States and beyond.

If you want to be part of the movement and change the world of entrepreneurship, get involved on Kohort.

That's Kohort, with a K.

So, where should we start? Let's start at this end, Shanna.

Is this an enterprise sales model? And can you talk about how that's going to work?

It's a hybrid. So we have a free version which really targets the consumer. We have an intermediate pricing structure for prosumer, and then we have what we call premier pricing which speaks to larger organizations that are interested, who have already... some of which who have already engaged us.

And how do you make those sales.

It depends. So the consumer and prosumer are self served at enterprise who obviously have a team that works interface with those people. do you think that the step from free to the paid -without the ads - at $99 a month is a pretty big step. Aren't there a whole bunch of groups that might pay something less then $1200 a year that you're not addressing?

What I think is really helpful to understand is how we segment between those two pricing structures. If you have a group that has fewer than 15,000 members or fewer than ten subgroups it's free.

But your members have to see ads. So there's no opportunity for - no more features but no ads.

Right. If you want to remove those sponsorships and control that inventory then it's $99 a month, and that allows us to target organizations that are a prosumer that are generating revenue off their community.

How do you compare this to Ning which is a competitor presumably?

Look there are dozens of competitors in this space. There is not a single player out there that is aggregated all of the tools that an organizer needs and made it really easy to manage their community until this.

So Big Tent, there is something in the UK - Group Spaces.What are your thoughts on how that's different? You just said they don't have these features.

Again, the feature set is more robust on this, number of email lists, how it's available. We've also made groups social, which hasn't been done. And we accommodate really complex organizations. Again, you can have many subgroups as you want and as many tiers, so that applies to lot of types of different communities out there that have no way to manage really complex ecosystems.

Big mailing list.

So is the implication of all this?

It enables hyper-local engagement, because you can segment your membership by the If you plan an event with another group - the Columbia venture community and NYU venture community share events all the time. Now with a single click we can share an event with them, their member can buy tickets through our system very simply.

Whereas right now it's a phone call, "Hey, these are the details." You spend a couple hours trading emails and people make mistakes. And what's exciting about that is it can scale, now you do a hundred clicks and do a social event with a hundred groups.

You been a You know the trick. Sometimes, something has never been done before because of the market, and it seems to me that you're bringing together a bunch of interesting features made up even by the groups and so on and so forth. But as you aggregate everything for a very specific usage, you actually have a company here.

So we've talked to a number of customers over the past couple months, and we're obviously taking their feedback. They have been ecstatic and the consistent feedback is, "I can't wait to use your service, I will be moving on to it" from whatever they're using now.

OK, well, we can-

Yeah.

I have a startup in that space and that's what they said as well, but never actually- never got the transfers.

Right now I can tell you, we're getting traction already.

It sounds- Is it fair to say that even though you have a premium model, your heart is with that big group, the one that has lots of subgroups - the university with all the chapters. It feels like where you've optimized the product and the distinctiveness is against...

No we really think this serves everybody, all the way to groups that aren't being served now- maybe your family wants to have a private group, they can be completely hidden on our platform to large eight organizations. But given the fact that there is this huge threshold on what is free which is fifteen thousand users is a pretty big number in a group space.

We think there will be a tremendous number of free organizations on the platform, in addition to major brands that have already engaged us.

And you're going to be able to make money from ads on the, you know, is it? Do you make money on the free?

That's sponsorships though, not ads. Sponsorships.

My hunch is that you will find at the $99 price point, there is sort of a gap. Maybe at the $19 price point where you could just get a bunch of gaps.

We have a tremendous amount to learn, for sure. I mean, we're listening Any final thoughts. Okay, round of applause for Kohort. And well done, Rod.