Caribu

Caribu redefines the way multi-generational families communicate. Children and their families can read and draw together through an interactive video-call, and Caribu plans to first go after the untapped and underserved $86B grandparent market.

It’s 2019, and video-call relationships with kids suck.

Parents work late, travel for work, are divorced, and may serve in the military. 90% of grandparents live far away from their grandchildren, and most of these adults use smartphones and tablets to stay connected through boring video-calls. Kids hate video-calls, making long-distance relationship building extremely hard. Sadly, in today’s world, human connection is a luxury.

So we built, Caribu.

Caribu is an interactive video-calling platform that helps grandparents read and draw with their grandchildren when they're not in the same location. 

Read Together. Draw Together. Be Together.

Caribu is using tech to rapidly scale and innovate a solution for the hundreds of millions of families, across the globe, that are separated by distance and want to make memories together with their (grand)children through mobile and tablet devices. Our in-app library has hundreds of books from leading children’s publishers in seven languages, and interactive educational workbooks and activities that you can draw on in real-time. The result is an engaging experience in a carefully designed, curated, and secure platform. As our users say, “It’s FaceTime that kids don’t run away from.”

We bootstrapped through Pitch competitions.

Soon after co-founding Caribu, Max, our CEO decided to bootstrap the company through pitch competitions. Between 2017-2018, Caribu was the winner or finalist in 30+ pitch competitions winning $100K in non-dilutive cash and prizes. It kept us going as we built out our subscription model and tested our market. Max was named a Toyota Mother of Invention, which came with a $50K grant, and when we won the 1776 Global Pitch Competition, we officially became World Champs, and secured an investment from Revolution’s Rise Of The Rest Seed Fund and then AT&T.

The $1.3M that set our foundation.

We raised $1.3M in Q2 2018 to do three things: Grow our team (Alvaro and Max are rockstars but couldn’t fulfill their plan for global domination by themselves!), refresh the platform with React Native (so we’d have both an Android and iOS app, sharing the same code), and grow our content partnerships. The team is now a full-time team of 5 rockstars, we’re on iOS and Android, and we have brought on amazing content partners like Mattel, Highlights, and Sesame Street.

Enter Glamma.

A Glamma is a glamorous grandma. She’s 50-70 years old, active, professional, and a “silver” mine. She is tech-savvy, stays in touch with family on an iPad, and just like a significant portion of grandparents, controls the majority of disposable income spend in the US., makes 4x what a millennial mom makes (median net worth of ~$200K), and wants to spoil her grandchildren silly! She’s trying to build a relationship with them long-distance but FaceTime isn’t cross-platform and Skype and WhatsApp calls are, well… not a great experience with young kids. 

The 72M grandparents, just in the U.S., spend an average of $1,200 a year entertaining their grandkids, adding up to an $86B TAM and $39B serviceable addressable market.

For grandparents, Caribu is an antibiotic, not a vitamin.

We did a Product Market Fit survey in January, where the minimum goal is to have 40% of your users say they would be "very disappointed" if Caribu went away tomorrow. Not only did 33% of our power users say they would be very disappointed if Caribu went away, but when we adjusted for personas, 46% of our power users that identified as grandparents would be very disappointed if Caribu ceased to exist. It’s very clear that we are on to something! We’ve heard from multiple investors and partners in the #AgeTech space that we’re the first of our kind in this market. While other tech companies are focused on connecting seniors to other seniors, we’re connecting them to their own families. We have the First Mover Advantage and, as one investor said, “if you can nail your Go To Market strategy and reach Glammas, you will print cash.” #ChallengeAccepted

Explosive early traction + engagement.

We have 50,000 registered users reading together in 160+ countries and 4k+ global cities. As we’ve optimized our conversion funnels for Glamma, we’ve seen clear improvements across multiple metrics. Glamma’s loyalty is strong! We are now ready to scale the business by going after the Glamma market in earnest.

Most importantly, our customers love us!

We have a great rating in the Apple App Store and count A-Rod, Howie Mandel, and Nick Lachey as celebrity fans!

Our Business Model.

Caribu has a monthly and yearly in-app subscription and a gift subscription option. With only 575K subscribers and conservative retention of one year in the current platform, our financial projections put us at $41M in revenue in just 3 years. 

And we give back.

Because our company was inspired by a soldier who was just trying to be an awesome dad and read his daughter a bedtime story, we’ve partnered with the non-profit Blue Star Families to donate free subscriptions of Caribu to all currently serving US military. In 2018, Toyota sponsored 2,000 Caribu subscriptions for military families to read and draw together during the holiday season.

Our next steps are…

To keep growing the team in engineering and on the marketing side. Add more engaging and buzz-worthy content and build new revenue streams, features, and products. To go after traveling parents, divorced parents, extended family, and military after we crush the Glamma market.

We’ll increase Customer LTV by adding other features to Caribu Consumer (our current platform) and building out Caribu Platform (our future platform) where we license our technology to tutoring and language learning companies.

We’re doing well by doing good. We’re on a mission to change the way families around the world connect and create value for our investors.