Featured Startup Pitch: Braineet enables brands to elicit proactive feedback and new ideas from customers

By Jonathan Livescault, Braineet co-founder and CEO

ELEVATOR PITCH

Braineet is a web and app platform to share your smart ideas—in 140 characters starting with ‘What if’—with every brand to improve the products and services you use every day.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Today, millions of customers are lost…while brands are desperately looking to hear them. It’s time to put an end to this. With Braineet, people and brands co-create a smarter world and everyone benefits. People are valued for what they think, rewarded by brands, and they contribute to improve the lives of millions. And brands get closer to their customers, catch trends and know where to innovate.

FOUNDER’S STORY

After graduating, I started my career in strategy consultancy. I was working in a large firm for the past three years and everything was going well, when one day, I was lucky enough to…tear my knee ligament playing soccer. It changed everything: ‘Break a leg,’ as they say.

Indeed, during my recovery period, I remembered my father back in ‘06 saying: “What if there were green and red lights above every space to find quickly where to park?” He had nothing to do with this industry (he’s a dentist), and yet, his idea could give time back to millions of people. I couldn’t sleep after that. I couldn’t not launch Braineet.

A few weeks later, Alban, my wife’s best friend (he was even there nine years ago to ‘protect’ her from me!) joined me on this great adventure.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

Our marketing strategy to spread the word relies on three pillars: Our users, brands, and schools.

First, our users invite their friends and contacts to discover, discuss, and support their ideas—called ‘brainees’—to help make them happen. And the other way around. They also spread the word by sharing their brainees with the outside world through existing social networks.

Second, brands sign up every day. And they invite their customers, fans, followers and employees to join them on Braineet to brainstorm together to make their products and services better. Brands also use our widgets and API on their own website to make it easy for their customers to share their ideas through Braineet.

Finally, schools love Braineet—they use it to invite their students to watch and improve the world they live in, notably the school itself. Some of them also use Braineet in their entrepreneurship classes to help future entrepreneurs get inspired by the thousands of ideas already shared on Braineet, and test theirs in return in real-time.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

The idea segment is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. A few telling numbers: More than 30 brands are spending $10-$100 million per year on Facebook; Yammer is used by 200,000 companies around the world; and just one brand, Starbucks, received more than 150,000 ideas in three years on mystarbucksidea.com.

We’ve identified a dozen competitors globally in the idea segment at large, most of them being startups.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

We put brands at the center of our concept, which competitors do not. We’re not another social network with no impact. That’s just not our ambition.

To do so, we meet and convince brands every week to join the adventure. It takes a bit of network, a lot of boldness, and some sales, conciseness, and relations skills.

Brands start realizing that having their own idea platform is not good enough: The vast majority of their customers will never visit it. Twitter is useful but it dilutes the ideation dialogue. What they need is a Twitter for ideas. Braineet.

BUSINESS MODEL

We make money through company monthly subscription in a freemium model.

Brands create their free account in 30 seconds. They can listen to, discuss, study and realize ideas. They can also post ideas to get real-time feedback from the Brainers community.

Then, they can upgrade their account at any time with several premium functionalities, one of them being organizing idea competitions to get answers from a targeted population to specific questions they’re facing.

CURRENT NEEDS

We’ll be looking to extend our current team of ten quickly and raise a new round of funding in spring, 2015, to support our international growth.

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HEADQUARTERS: Paris