STARTUP STAGE: Cray is a social-selling video app for travel

Cray

Cray is an app to help users discover, book and share outdoor adventures and local travel experiences.

Founded in June 2021, Cray pays a commission to video creators when a booking is made through their content.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors? 

Cray is a video-centric online travel company for Gen Z, which enables creators to directly monetize their short format travel content. The product is a social-selling video app to discover, book and share travel experiences (think a cross of Tripadvisor and TikTok). 

The mobile app (main product) is in development, we are planning the launch in Miami this coming July. While building the app, we launched early-marketing efforts, acquired over 100 million views on video content on social channels, more than 180,000 subscribers and an available audience that is growing.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Cray is a video app where you can discover, book and share outdoor adventures and local travel experiences. In Cray one can watch short videos created by other users and activity operators. Users make videos using the Cray app about their experiences, for other users to book those experiences straight through the app. Cray users make commission on each booking made through the content they post.

Cray will be available both on mobile and web. We utilize advanced machine-learning algorithms to match our users with the most inspiring activities that match their personality and circumstances.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths:
  • We speak the language of Gen Z - video-first user experience which allows for an immersive and social journey to discover, learn about and book local tourist and outdoor activities.
  • Operator-first approach - we give operators a set of low-touch tools to highlight uniqueness of their brand and engage Cray users to promote their offerings, while requiring little time and effort.
  • Game-changing business model that encourages users to share content and build communities.
  • Strong technology-driven team
• Weaknesses
  • Early stage, limited funding
  • At this stage, offerings limited to certain U.S. hot spots
  • At this stage, limited organic traffic
• Opportunities:
  • High travel demand in domestic U.S. market
  • User shift towards video/audio content interactions 
  • User preference for community, values, diversity, more personal and more immersive discovery experience
• Threats:
  • COVID restrictions
  • Established well-funded incumbent players in the market who may enter in direct competition with us
  • Lack of product-market fit and slow user adoption

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective? 

After attending the Arival Travel conference in San Diego in February we identified two major pain points: 

• Operators want the chance to build their brands through online travel agencies and don’t have that ability because major OTAs are fearful of losing the booking. OTAs rarely share logos or branding other than their own. On Cray the operators have their own profiles, similar to social media profiles, where they have the ability to share their logo, branding and personal touch. 
• Operators are looking to generate content at scale. Cray is a content machine. Our users are already posting their experiences on social media but will be incentivized to post on Cray for the commission on bookings. This user-generated content will then be accessible for operators to use on their Cray profiles as well. We encourage both users and operators to cross share all content on all social media platforms. Our logo is automatically added to any video coming out of our platform.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We are building a community of adventure seekers who are already creating content for us. We send these creators on experiences and they generate content. This serves as our initial inventory.

All of our videos have our branding on it, which creates awareness and intrigue when creators cross share our videos on social media. We are building aggressive influencer campaigns for our launch this summer. We are exploring ways in which we can give back to the community and contribute in the realms of DEI, education and service. 

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

We conducted a nationwide soft launch last summer in the U.S. with our MVP. Utilizing the content of our community we post every day on social media. We found that travel creators are looking for a space to connect with like-minded individuals and consumers are looking for more immersive ways to make informed bookings. We have since gone viral on YouTube Shorts with over 100 million views and growing, and accumulated 180,000+ YouTube subscribers. We engage with tens of thousands of people daily and have already sent customers to our operators. Our efforts brought us to the understanding that people are excitedly engaging and booking through short form video content and from creators that they see consistently whom they trust.

How and when will you make money?

Cray's business model is similar to traditional OTAs where we take a commission on each booking. We anticipate bookings to occur immediately after launch. We also share that commission with our creators. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Raquella Raiz - co-founder & CMO. Founder and CEO of Qreative Edge, a video production and marketing agency. Founder at Battle of the Crews. Travel vlogger, filmmaker, speaker and hip-hop instructor. 

Denis Slipets - co-founder & CTO. Co-founder of Stairwaysoft, led 100+ fintech, marketplace, IoT projects. Has a M.S. in computer science, software architect, big data engineer, senior full-stack developer. Researcher, swimmer, traveler.

Levy Raiz - co-founder & СOO; Entrepreneur, venture partner at Digital Horizon VC, ex-partner at Flint Capital VC, ex-managing partner at JSCapital. Chef, traveler, gardener.

Dmitriy Bechutskiy  - co-founder & CEO; Co-founder at Stairwaysoft, CBDO at Alcor, CTO at LiveGlobal Money. PhD in Economics, computer science. Mountaineer, diver, skipper.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Our CMO, Raquella is very active in women-led initiatives especially in marketing, tech and Web3. Raquella is serious about Cray representing the diverse culture. She is especially passionate about instilling confidence and determination in girls and young women. We look forward to hiring more diversely across the board as we continue to grow.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Raising our pre-seed had its challenges. It forced us to be more frugal and we found ways to acquire more content for free while bootstrapping. We definitely value the dollar. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

There is a desire for “shop-tainment” - the ability to shop directly from a video you watch. We are the intersection of peer-to-peer reviews and online booking platforms. We leverage social selling techniques while delighting the end user with adventurous user-generated video content. We believe we are going to be lucky because of the care we have for the operators’ success, the lengths at which we are going to ensure the end user is entertained and delighted throughout their booking process and the tenacity and creativity embedded in our team. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in? 

In a year from now we plan to be valued members of the greater Miami travelers’ community with hundreds of thousands of bookings and users. Our community will include local travelers as well as international travelers who visit the area. We anticipate our team to grow as necessary to ensure we can serve our community. 

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc)

Cray has immense scalability potential. We initially start with experiences in one region, then grow into other regions organically and then include other services. In order to actualize these ambitions, we plan to go public.