Wiser

Deck: Here

Fundraise: £1.2m on a £5m Post-Money SAFE (£250k committed).

Founders: Nilsu & Emre

Existing Investors

Alexey Kosachev, CIO at VC Venture

“We invested in Wiser Media because we saw that the founders share our values on promoting culture and knowledge, as well as their ability to achieve success with their idea. The remarkable results in Turkey have given us reason to expect success in other markets, and the team's work during the CultTech acceleration program has validated our intentions.”

My Notes

Team

• Nilsu, Co-Founder & COO

  • Early employee at ‘Behavox’ – an AI-powered compliance platform purely designed for the world’s Financial Services community.

  • First-time founder.

• Emre, Co-Founder & CEO

  • Previously founded an e-mobility company which he scaled to 200 employees and $20m ARR.

• Nilsu and Emre met at university and became close friends. Upon graduation, Emre approached Nilsu with the idea for Wiser over three years ago.

  • Wiser was initially an expert recommendation platform but they uncovered their users wanted to archive content and discover other people’s digital libraries.

• 15 FTEs (all based in Turkey)

Problem

• An overwhelming amount of content is available which makes it hard to consume content efficiently and find content that is interesting and relevant

Solution

• A shareable digital archive of your saved content with AI that recommends content based on your preferences.

Product

1. Content Curation

   • Users can save articles, specific sections of articles, and videos through their phone or browser

   • Wiser tags and categorises saved content into “curations”.

   • Users can share their curations with others

2. Content Discovery

   • Recommends you content that you have already saved based on what you have been reading – e.g. if you have frequently been reading about AI and have unread articles on AI Wiser will remind you of this

   • Recommendations also come from ‘Wisers’, real life experts in their field – e.g. if Wiser knows that a user is interested in cooking it will recommend content chosen by real chefs.

Nilsu on the Roadmap:

Vision

• Become the “Spotify of new media.”

• Winner takes all mindset → Replace all other content curation and recommendation platforms.

Business Model

• B2C → freemium model

  • Free with ads.

  • Wiser premium costs €4 per month.

  • Revenue share with creators who bring paying users

• B2B

  • Companies offer Wiser Premium as a perk of being a customer e.g., a Large Fintech company with 2 million users = £15k MRR.

  • Leveraging brand sponsorships = €50k projected ARR from 2 customers.

Traction

• Launched product in the Summer of 2022:

  • 70k Registered users

    • 30k MAUs; 1k paid users (beta)

    • 1k new users per month

    • GTM → leveraging network effects (i.e., reaching out to tech-focused content creators who bring users to Wiser thereby creating a flywheel).

  • 300 Creators

    • >5 curations in a month

    • Consist of journalists, young professionals, famous people, etc.

    • Flywheel from creators adding their Wiser link to LinkTree.

Fundraise

• £1.2m on an £5m Post-Money SAFE; £250k committed