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Needle.Com Valuation

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Submitted By jarenr21
Words 3524
Pages 15
University Venture Fund
Needle.com
Jaren Rogers

Basic Company Description
Needle.com was founded by Morgan Lynch on November 1st, 2009. It is an online company that licenses its chat software to ecommerce companies. The company then hires experts of a certain product that work as independent contractors with the flexibly of working from anywhere with flexible work hours. These experts chat to customers online when the customer has visited a website that uses Needle’s chat software. Gamification is used as a tool to give the experts who chat to customer’s incentive to do well and be compensated.

Business Model Needle licenses its proprietary chat software to online retail companies. This licensing agreement drives the revenue for the company. The company hires independent contractors to assist in giving knowledge about the products that Needle licenses to. The large expenses that Needle demands are for research and development, salaries for independent contractors, overhead and sales force.

Product
A customer visits a company that is partnered with Needle and starts browsing for a product. On the site there is button that says something along the lines of “Talk to an Expert Now”. Once the customer clicks the button, a screen pop comes up, the customer is asked to type in their name, and a friendly “Hello, How are you today?” comes up from a Needle product aficionado 1099 employee. The company is constantly innovating and is currently experimenting with a new service known as Traffic Builder. It takes a client’s live chat and removes any personally identifiable information so that it could post the information on its website, creating a Q&A forum. With costs, Lynch claims that interaction costs between $2.50 and $5 per chat, less than the $4-6 it would be with a call center staff and $6-10 per phone query.

SWOT Analysis
Strengths

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