The Pitch
Yobrio is a mobile app that revolutionizes the way we interact with magazines by bridging the online with the offline to enable a rich, immersive experience.
Meet the Team
(l-r): Andy Sternberg, Vincent Kranenburg, Dru Erridge, Daniel M. Song, Johnny Jewell, Yaxi Yang
After a day of seesawing from unbridled enthusiasm for extreme couponing to mere ambivalence, these six LA-based StartupBus-preneurs collectively “killed their darling” at four in the morning. But for every death, there is rebirth. At 4:30 a.m., lightning struck in room 235 at a Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of Phoenix: team yobrio was officially good to go.
Our highly-specialized team consisting of mutants, rogues, and other assorted misanthropes include:
* ‘Dru‘: Android fanboy, hacker extraordinaire (yet to be demonstrated)
* Andy: The silverback gorilla and the best PR man in the business.
* Johnny ‘Rarefied-Rock’ Jewell: The jack-of-all-trades, and a master of none
* Vincent: With a black-belt in skepticism, he is extremely dangerous when backed into a corner
* Yaxi (yaaaah-shee): ‘The Prez of Prezi’ and chief ideator
* Daniel: The biz man with the biz plan
Our Vision
Yobrio aims to bridge the gap between offline and online commerce. With yobrio, products are literally pulled off the page and placed into the world’s largest one-stop shopping cart. When users place orders, yobrio’s unique mobile platform relays those purchase orders to retailers. The retailers in turn ship these products out to the customer. This streamlines, but more importantly unifies the buying process across different media platforms.
We plan to generate revenue by partnering with online retailers and creating (millions) of affiliations. Down the line, we envision functioning as a look book for not only print magazines, but newspapers, billboards, television, and the like.
Target Market
Yobrio is geared toward smartphone users who want further engagement with advertisements and displays they encounter, including one-click purchasing or bookmarking. These consumers:
* want quick, seamless, secure transactions
* want an elegant mobile interface to purchase items discovered offline
* want to bookmark products for future purchase
* value efficiency above all else
These consumers have attributed for the massive growth in ecommerce. Online B2C product sales totaled $142.5 billion last year, which accounted for 8 percent of total retail product sales in the US. Not only that, Forrester Research estimates that the US online retail industry will be worth $279 billion in 2015.
Who Cares?
Consumers and readers care. There is currently nothing on the market comparable to Yobrio’s model: by corralling different products from various merchants into a single point-of-sale, online shopping becomes easier and more appealing.
Publishers and advertisers care. Yobrio adds depth to stale ads by adding an interactive element with the target customer in mind. By reducing the time between piquing a customer’s interest in a product and triggering a purchasing point, yobrio directly increases the advertiser’s conversion ratio and backs it up with detailed analytics. Publishers care because readers can take comfort in the experience of reading with the ability to instantly engage in an online transaction, or store items for later viewing. Magazines remain a sexy option for quick, easy shopping and browsing — it’s like Shazam for print publications.
