CLOSEM Inc.
$21,800
amount committed
$10k - $1070k
funding goal
Regulation CF
exemption used
$8,000,000
pre money valuation
$500.00
min investment
15
investors
Security Type
$1.00 per share
Pitch
Experienced entrepreneurs who know a thing or two about sales
Small and medium business owners need more sales, but they never have enough time to manage their day-to-day tasks and do the time-consuming work of sales followup. Our company, CLOSEM, has developed an easy-to-use, affordable software system that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses increase sales by automating the tedious ⎼ and often avoided ⎼ work of following up with leads, prospects and customers.
CLOSEM is a cloud-based software-as-a-service, and users pay a monthly or annual subscription for the product. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a particularly attractive business model for investors due to its low overhead costs and predictable, recurring revenue. We're Laura Betterly and Richard Miles, two innovative and visionary marketing and sales gurus, and we've and poured all our years of experience into developing this breakthrough sales tool.
40+Million Small Businesses lose sales for lack of follow-up.
Following up with leads, prospects, and customers is time-consuming. Studies show it takes anywhere from 6 to 16 "touches" to turn a prospect into a sale. Even the best businesses close only 30% of their leads. Most entrepreneurs and small business owners are too busy managing their day-to-day tasks, and sales follow-up often takes a back seat. Even full-time salespeople give up after one or two attempts. That’s why 70% of small businesses don’t reach their sales goals. Businesses that could be succeeding struggle to survive. But now there's CLOSEM.
CLOSEM is the automated follow-up system that gets results.
CLOSEM is a breakthrough platform that combines a simple contact management system with a powerful messaging platform. Business people can follow up with contacts via email, text, voice, and first-class postal mail, all with the click of a mouse.
CLOSEM lets users send a follow-up campaign of text, email, and voice messages. And does it all automatically, with true “set-it-and-forget-it” simplicity. Rather than sending a single message and hoping for the best, CLOSEM automates the tedious process of following up -- and these message campaigns are proven to generate 4 - 10 times the response.
- Consumers prefer text messages to voice mail or email.
- 95% of text messages are delivered within 3 minutes!
- Combining text with email doubles email open rates and boosts engagement.
- Combining direct mail with digital messaging results in a 40% conversion rate!
- Message campaigns result in 50% more sales than a single message
While business people may be very good at their specialty, they aren’t necessarily skilled at writing marketing messages, and are normally much too busy running their business to spend time following up. What really sets CLOSEM apart is that it comes with dozens of professionally-written personalized messages that users can customize to perfectly suit their needs.
The company launched CLOSEM in mid-2020 for use in the US and Canada, and has over 500 active users, including coaches, real estate agents, e-commerce companies, digital agencies, insurance agents, web designers, teachers, schools, candidates for public office, consultants, merchant card processing companies, photographers, video production companies, home services including roofing, solar, painting, plumbing, cleaning; assisted living services, food franchisors – even one customer who makes giant statues of wooly mammoths out of recycled flip-flops for museums and a lady that sells healing crystals and chameleons online! The company has users in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and demand is coming from all over the world.
Customers have enjoyed rapid success with CLOSEM:
Distribution Partnerships
The company has developed relationships with a variety of partners, including AppSumo and StackSocial, two online marketplaces with millions of customers. This has exposed the product to a diverse worldwide consumer base. The company has entered into a partnership with Groove Digital, where CLOSEM is being integrated within their complimentary sales tool having over 650,000 users. The company has a robust affiliate program where other marketers earn commission income promoting CLOSEM to their audiences. The founders plan to continue to expand partnerships like these with others in 2022 and beyond.
Next Generation Technology
The company continues to improve the service and has recently added the ability for users to send first-class postal mail worldwide. The company is in the final stages of development of CLOSEM V2, a next-generation version of the platform, completely rebuilt using state-of-the-art technologies, with added features users have asked for as well as greater flexibility in expanding in the future.
In addition, the company continues to roll out global capabilities, allowing for SMS and voice telephone services in other countries beyond North America. The company now has users in the UK, Belgium, Greece, Australia, and New Zealand.
Shortly after the release of V2, the company intends to release a CLOSEM Agency Plan, which allows marketing agencies to manage multiple clients within a single CLOSEM account. The company has current demand from existing users for such a plan, and there is a clear market for this product.
Software as a Service (SaaS) continues hot growth fueled by SMB
The SaaS marketplace is expected to continue its rapid growth and forecasts show it reaching $436 Billion by 2025. Data from SaaS management company Blissfully show a sharp upward trajectory of small business spending on SaaS. The segment attracts high valuations due to predictable recurring revenues and low overhead. Recent SaaS valuations reflect the strong interest from companies and investors. Transactions such as Intuit’s $12B acquisition of MailChimp, Sequoia Capital’s investment in Slack at a $4B value, or Salesforce’s $27.7B acquisition of Zapier highlight valuations ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 per user and 30 to 40 times top-line revenue.
$436 billion market by 2025
30,000,000 small businesses and growing
According to the US Small Business Administration, there are over 30 million small businesses, and Gallup says there are 41 million self-employed entrepreneurs in their 2020 "State of the Self-Employed report -- and that's just in the US alone!
42,000,0000 self-employed
This Small-to-Medium (SMB) market continues to grow year over year. The recent pandemic and work-from-home business style have forced many employees to start offering products and services -- either as a second income (or "side-hustle") or as a path to freedom as a solo entrepreneur and self-employed professional.
"Technology has made it easier to run a freelance business and has allowed workers to add new revenue streams."
-- Gallup, 2020 State of the Self-Employed
CLOSEM's target market are these small to medium sized businesses, solo entrepreneurs, and work-from-home folks trying to turn their side-hustle into fulltime employment.
6,000 digital marketing agencies
In addition, there are 6,000 digital marketing agencies, again in the US alone, according to marketing firm ibisworld. These agencies build websites and provide other marketing services including lead generation, social media marketing, search engine optimization and other services to their local business clients. These agencies represent a booming market for CLOSEM's Agency Plan, where they can add lead followup to their menu of services and manage multiple clients with one plan.
Software as a Service continues hot growth fueled by SMB
Gartner Group forecasts the SaaS marketplace to continue its growth of 6.3% in 2021, and forecasts $140B by 2022. Data from SaaS management company Blissfully shows a sharp upward trajectory of small business spending on SaaS. The average small business five-year SaaS spend, which was less than $55,000 in 2016, climbed to nearly $220,000 in 2019.
Simplicity and ease of use make CLOSEM more attractive
CLOSEM combines a number of features into one easy-to-use suite. These include contact management, often called Customer Relation Management or CRM systems. The main competitors in the CRM space include Salesforce, which far and away is the dominant player in the enterprise space, and which generated over $17 billion in sales last year. It is a very capable system, expensive, with a steep learning curve that requires a heavy investment in IT support and customization. There are many other SaaS-based CRM companies, ranging from simple to complex, across a variety of price points. Many of these are focused heavily on managing sales processes, as opposed to lead follow-up. CRM competitors going after the SMB market include Zendesk, which claims 170,000 users; Pipedrive, which boasts 90,000 users, and others including Monday, Freshworks, Creatio, Bitrix, Agile and many other small players.
There are a variety of messaging platforms ranging from newsletter focused platforms such as MailChimp and Constant Contact, to text-only bulk messaging platforms such as SimpleTexting, Textedly, Trumpia and others. There are a variety of simple auto-responders (products that automate the response to subscription forms, lead forms, and the like) including Aweber, with over 1,000,000 users, and others including MailerLite, SendinBlue, GetResponse, and others.
In what we consider the Integrated marketing and sales automation space, where CRM features are combined with messaging and followup include ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, Infusionsoft / Keap, and others.
And pre-written message templates are a huge value added
There's nothing worse than staring at a blank screen trying to come up with the right thing to say. A CLOSEM subscripton includes professionally-written message templates in a variety of sales and followup categories to help users get started quickly send powerful messages that get results. This is part of the secret sauce that Laura and Richard's years of experience in sales and marketing communication create a unique and highly value added feature that sets CLOSEM apart from the competition.
The sweet spot in the market for CLOSEM is the ease of use and zero learning curve. Busy entrepreneurs don't have time or interest in learning new tools or fiddling with technical settings, and CLOSEM makes it easy to get started. None of these have the combination of simplicity, ease of use, and pre-written messages and campaigns that CLOSEM offers.
Software-as-a-service means recurring revenue
Customers pay a monthly or annual subscription fee to use CLOSEM. The company offers a variety of plans that include a certain amount of text, email and voice message credits every month, similar to minutes in a cell phone plan. These monthly message credits do not roll over from month to month, and are available on a "use it or lose it" basis. There are also plans for higher volume users which do not come with any pre-set number of messages every month. In these plans, users purchase however many message credits they want and can use them on an as-needed basis. These message credits do not expire every month. The company also offers additional message templates for purchase.
The cost of adding a new user to the platform is minimal, literaly only a few cents per month in added storage, server use, and bandwidth charges. The company provides training sessions free of charge, and a set of fast-paced, short comprehensive tutorial and instruction videos give users an easy way to learn advanced features. This ease of use keeps customer service and technical support costs to a minimum.
We have offered special packages for niche markets in insurance and retail, and have also offered a custom "done-for-you" service at a much higher one-time fee to customers who want a complete set of templates and campaigns specifically written for their business.
The company incurs associated costs for the text, voice and email messages provided, and these are budgeted for as if they are 100% used every month. However, experience shows that most users do not use the maximum amount of message credits budgeted and this increases the company's margins. We also generate additional revenues by charging customers for additional messages.
A powerhouse team with proven results
Laura and Richard first began working together in the late 1990's on PCDJ, Laura's breakthrough internet music product, where their combined skills resulted in over 8,000,000 downloads in a matter of months. With a unique set of complementary skills in sales, marketing, PR, and advertising, they teamed up in 2020 to bring CLOSEM to market.
Laura Betterly, co-founder
Laura is a visionary entrepreneur who has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Newsday, as well as on CNN, CNNfN, and NPR, and has been a speaker at CES (The Consumer Electronics Show), Winter Music Conference, and the Federal Trade Commission.
She accurately predicted the fall of the traditional music business with the rise of MP3s, and co-founded Visiosonic (PCDJ.COM) in 1999, building relationships with companies such as MP3.com and Live365.com, and celebrities such as Ice T, Nile Rodgers, Jam Master Jay, and Chaka Khan. In 2010, Laura saw the rise of local and mobile technology becoming the primary way consumers search for local businesses and created Mobile Local Fusion, a marketing course designed to teach others the basics of local and mobile marketing.
Richard Miles, co-founder
Richard began his career as a salesman and developed many of the skills he brings to bear in developing CLOSEM. In 1980 Richard was a co-founder of Adaptive Controls, Inc. (ACI). Richard led the sales success of the company before negotiating a sale to worldwide Ingersoll-Rand.
He joined Polaroid to take over their worldwide distribution and sales of floppy disks and other magnetic media products, successfully competing in a global market. in 1990 Richard founded Re:Launch, a sales and marketing consulting firm. He wrote The Software Channel Sales Guidebook, the go-to resource for software publishers looking to gain market share, and became a sought-after speaker at Comdex, CES, and many others. He was responsible for a single direct mail letter that made over $1,000,000 in net profit for one client (Connectix), brought the first line of budget software to market under the Memorex brand, created an entire product line for a division of Hitachi, consulted with IBM, Computer Associates, as well as scores of startups. He founded FreeSoftwareClub, Inc. and took it public in 1999. He sold Re:Launch to an investor group in 2003.
Richard served as CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the San Francisco Bay Area, was the Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tanzania, was Entrepreneur in Residence at the Dar es Salaam business incubator sponsored by the Tanzanian government and the World Bank, and created a program (Daraja) to teach employment and entrepreneurial skills to over 4,000 Tanzanian young people. He served on the Board of the American Business Council in Botswana and is a noted wildlife photographer. Upon returning the US after 8 years overseas, Richard teamed up with Laura to bring CLOSEM to market.
Time to rapidly scale
We've bootstrapped our success thus far, and now it's time to rapidly accelerate our growth. We are raising funds now to scale up our marketing outreach and proven promotion to drive sales. At the same time, we want to add to our tech team to quickly bring additional features and integrations to market.
Updates
A lot of tremendous good things are happening for CLOSEM.
1. Sales are up more than 500% year over year.
2. Our long-awaited integration with Groove is off to a fantastic start. CLOSEM now appears as a built-in integration for the over 550,000 Groove users worldwide and we are picking up new users from the pool of "Groovesters" daily. Be on the lookout for an upcoming Press Release on this.
3. The addition of personalized postal mail as an option to email, SMS and voice has gotten tremendous acceptance. Our development team has hit new strides and we are rolling out new features every month. Last month we introduced phone and email validation services that help our users save money. This month we are introducing integration with Google, Outlook and iOS calendars, making our appointments feature much more robust and compelling.
4. We are in the process of finalizing an acquisition of a technology to create trackable shortlinks, QR-codes, and bio pages -- something we had our own roadmap to develop ourselves. Now we have it as a ready-to-go option for users and something else we can offer on a standalone basis for new customers. Another press release will be going out once the final handover is completed.
5. Our affiliate program is in full operations after a long startup mode, and we expect to start seeing results from that effort in the second half of the year.
6. Of course, all of this is great news, but the proof in the pudding is our continued sales growth.
7. Our 2-for-1 stock purchase offer is still on the table, and we hope to close out this fundraising round with momentum. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
WebApp Market calls CLOSEM "The Perfect Sales Tool For Your Business" and names it one of the Top Trending Products for 2022. Read more here: https://closem.ai/top-product-2022/
Recent new accounts:
We brought on the largest Real Estate agency in New Zealand (with a potential total of 1700 users) which rolls out starting with the first 30 agents being onboarded later this month (January). We added the fastest-growing US mortgage broker (with 700 loan officers) as an account. We start training the first 100 users mid-January.
Potential partnerships:
The addition of our direct mail component, as promised, has proven to be a game-changer. We've been approached for partnerships by a number of companies that need the complete solution that CLOSEM has become and we're talking thousands of letters and postcards every month.
We are looking forward to surpassing our goals in 2022 and feel we're on track to do so.
We have two new members of our Advisory Board: Perry Belcher and Mike Filsaime. These two powerhouses are already helping us leverage new opportunities.
Perry Belcher is known as one of the greatest Internet Marketers in the world. Responsible for over $1B in sales online; co-founder of DigitalMarketer. Mike Filsaime is known as the "Michael Jordan" of Digital Marketing, co-founder and CEO of Groove Digital, with over 50,000 users.
We are so excited to have these truly amazing partners on our Advisory team!
Care to learn more in a live meeting online? Register for our webinar series here: https://closem.ai/pages/closem-biz
Kevin Harrington, one of the original Sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and well-known investor and entrepreneur (founder of "As Seen On TV" and many other incredible successes) has joined our Advisory Board as a member.
Q&A
Unfortunately, this securities offering is closed. For questions, please email support@trucrowd.com. Thanks!
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Other Disclosures
Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment, and new risks emerge from time to time. It is not possible to predict all risks, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements we may make. In light of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, the forward-looking events and circumstances discussed in this offering may not occur, and actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to revise or publically release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Given these risks and uncertainties, prospective investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements.