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Symbiosis is a revolutionary cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Symbiosis’ “Tarantula” gamification system is unlike any other CRM currently available on the market. With 70% of failed CRMs dying primarily because of a lack of user adoption, Tarantula was designed to increase the level of adoption, interaction and engagement with the Company amongst all key stakeholders, including sales agents, management teams, referral partners and even existing and new customers.

Symbiosis acts as a traditional CRM in terms of providing contact databases, social media, email, calendar and phone integration, project management, accounting, marketing campaigns, sales funnels, analytics and reporting tools. Unlike traditional CRMs, Symbiosis’ gamification features make sure that the CRM is actually used. Additionally, Symbiosis acts a loyalty program with gamification features that encourage customers and referral partners to engage with the online Tarantula platform. Tarantula works by allocating points for certain actions performed by each stakeholder. Stakeholders are incentivized to perform these actions as rewards are accrued at various point levels.

CRMs are sold all over the internet, specifically by direct competitors of Symbiosis like Salesforce, Oracle, Dynamics CRM and Sugar CRM. All of these CRM’s offer similar tools as Symbiosis, yet none of them offer features such as Tarantula nor such great prices and package deals.

Symbiosis’ addressable market consists of small businesses – and the wage and salary sales workers of these businesses – that need a CRM system that organizes their customers’ information easily and effectively while increasing sales volume and revenue. There are 27.9M small businesses in the U.S. and over 13M wage and salary sales workers in the U.S. as of 2010. North America currently is the largest CRM market, reaching $10B in sales so far for 2012. The major target markets for Symbiosis consist of small businesses in the fields of education, manufacturing, retail & wholesale and utilities as these industries use CRMs the most.

Symbiosis will sell its CRM through 3 primary sales channels: online, sales representatives and partnering reseller individuals and businesses. Symbiosis will drive traffic to the website via an aggressive online marketing campaign and will build market awareness via print ads and PR while eventually offering seminars, sponsorships and TV commercials. Symbiosis’ offers a free trial package for customers to demo the CRM. Small business with up to 10 seats are charged $20 per month, businesses with 10 to 50 seats are charged $30 per month and businesses with 50+ seats are charged $40 per month.

In the first year, Symbiosis projects that it will sell 25,000+ 1-10 seat packages, 20,000+ 10-50 seat packages and 16,000+ 50+ seat packages. By year 3, Symbiosis projects that it will attract 400,000+ 1-10 seat businesses, 320,000+ 10-50 seat businesses and 254,000+ 50+ seat businesses. By year 5, Symbiosis projects that it will attract 1,800,000+ 1-10 seat businesses, 1,460,000+ 10-50 seat businesses and 1,152,000+ 50+ seat businesses. The following chart depicts the Company’s projected profit and loss over the first 5 years of operations.

 

Profit & Loss Chart

Symbiosis’ founders are Bill Johnson (CEO) and John Bryant (CTO). Bill was the VP of marketing for Sugar CRM for 5 years. He helped the company grow to become a dominant player in the market before leaving to start Symbiosis. Bill is striving to create a vision and direction for the company, and plans on doing so with the help of the rest of the executive team. John Bryant has a wide range of technological experience and skills that will greatly benefit the Symbiosis team. For three years John was the lead User Interface Engineer for the CRM division at BizAutomation. John also has significant experience heading teams of both front- end and back-end engineers. John’s main responsibility at Symbiosis is to oversee the product development by the engineering team, as well as managing ongoing system improvements and repairs.

 

Symbiosis is currently seeking seed funding of $600,000. These funds will be primarily spent on startup and organizational expenses such as development, rent and office equipment, consultants, etc. The remaining $377,000 will be spent on sales, marketing, personnel and operating expenses. The Company anticipates seeking Series A and B funding in the amounts of $3M in year 2 and $7M in year 3.

The most likely exit for Symbiosis will come from an acquisition by a major player or such as Salesforce, Oracle and Dynamics CRM once the Company reaches 500,000+ company clients. A few recent mergers of CRM companies include Oracle acquiring Virtue for $300M, Salesforce acquiring BuddyMedia for $689M, Salesforce acquiring Radian6 for $300M and Microsoft acquiring Yammer for $1.2B.