Citizfied is a citizen engagement app for municipalities to interact with citizens anywhere and anytime. It aims to increase citizen participation and knowledge of municipal operations. The team of 5 includes experts in government, technology, and business development. Citizfied is in discussions with New Jersey counties and Miami-Dade to fund development costs and plans to sell to municipalities through existing channels. However, the app currently has no prototype or user base, and relies on municipalities to drive citizen adoption, which may be difficult. Wasabi Ventures declines to invest as Citizfied prioritizes social impact over profits with no clear exit strategy.

1. Friday, September 4, 2015
Due Diligence & Investment Analysis
Prepared by:
Michael Hwan
Chris Eldridge
Alexander Hinds
Section 1: Idea Brief
Citizfied is a “frictionless” citizen engagement app for municipalities and their citizens. It
enhances your existing citizen engagement strategies many-fold using modern technology to
create interaction “anyplace, anytime”. It creates positive opportunities for municipalities to
increase knowledge of citizen needs impacting municipal operations, projects requiring public
input, and policy, as well as a “place” that provides focus for citizen initiatives, community
forums, and capital campaigns.
Staff Profile, Experience, and Contribution to Team
Meredith Aronson (CEO) - 22 years in public office, regional strategy, corporate, and higher
education. She is responsible for market positioning and organizational strategy. Non-
technical.
Dan Nasello (COO) - 6 years in technology. He is responsible for operations, sales, and
technical innovation. Technical but running sales.
Michael Nasello (CCO) - 8 years in technology, media, cultural analysis, and creative work. He
is responsible for marketing.
Rafi Chehirian (CTO) - 13 years in project management (finance and technology), and
technology startup consultancy experience. Technical.
Chris Mateiro (CFO) - 6 years in sales and marketing. He is responsible for company financials
and administrative duties. Legal.
Successes
Dan is in pre-sell discussions with New Jersey working with some counties of New Jersey
Hudson county (7 municipalities). Dan is also working with Florida Miami Dade county IT
department and is in talks to get $175K (April 2016) in funding from the municipality.
Key Players
Meredith Aronson (CEO) – She knows how government municipalities work and how to sell
their service to them.
Dan Nasello (COO) – Has a technical background but not taking a technical role. Running sales
strategy. Dan runs combustion group that employs 4 designer and 6 developers (domestic
employees are not 100% committed). 15 employees in total if everyone on board.
Rafi Chehirian (CTO) - Technical background.

2. Future Hires
An Inside Sales Manager to build out their sales team.
Advisors
None.
Existing Partners
None
Section 2: Company Overview
Currently there are 5 team members. Two technical and three in business development. Dan
is taking on a business role and is not working on the technology side.
Highlights
The team completed the 10 week social impact incubator, Thryve, in Tucson Arizona.
Concerns
The Citizfied team will not be focusing all their time on making one feature of their app.
No funding, product, or user groups as of August 9th, 2015. They plan on having beta users in
Florida, Arizona, and New Jersey.
Assessment
The application is only good if the citizens are using it. You can sell the product to a
municipality, but it does not come with users. You are relying on the municipalities to get the
users which may be difficult.
Section 3: Barriers
Citizfied is entering a difficult market to push sales. Government budgets are getting tighter
and tighter due to decreases in funding and the long sales cycle of getting new purchases
approved. Many local governments would love a new way for them to communicate back and
forth with their citizens, but it might be a drawback due to the large hurdles of getting a
large expenditure approved.
Citizfied is hoping that municipalities are going to cancel other existing services to move to
the Citizfied platform. Municipalities are currently spending equal amounts of money on
individual services such as event calendars, polling, notification systems and fundraising
campaigns, which are all currently planned to be implemented in the Citizfied application.
Section 4: Investors
At this time, Citizfied does not have any formal investors. However, Citizfied is currently in
talks to receive $175,000 of funding from Miami Dade County to put towards their
development costs of approximately $250,000. A portion of this money was already set aside
from a previous RFP that Miami Dade had for online polling services.
In return, Miami Dade is hoping to receive good publicity from the investment, a launch party,
and a thank you on the website. Miami Dade will still be paying to utilize the Citizfied
application.

3. At the time of our meeting there was no cap table for Citizfied, nor was the company legally
incorporated.
Section 5: Business Model
Value Proposition - Citizfied is looking to capitalize on the disconnect between local and
municipal governments, and the citizens they represent. The company believes that their
application will provide the connection and voice that citizens want in their government, and
that governments need in order to hear the voices of their citizens, thus providing the
mutually beneficial solution.
Citizfied estimates there are 90 million people between the ages of 18 and 39 who are
distanced from their local governments. This age range makes up the largest percentage of
smartphone users, giving Citizfied a large potential user base out of the roughly 390 million
people who are able to vote in the US.
Revenue Model
Citizfied’s revenue model is based off of a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. This allows
Citizfied to provide extended features for a premium beyond the base offering for the
product to bring in additional revenue. Their estimate for projected revenue through 2018
can be seen in Revenue Table 1.
As an added revenue model, Citizfied is planning on collecting 10% from capital fundraising
campaigns. This model is popular with crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter and
Indiegogo. At the time, Citizfied did not have an estimated revenue projection based off of
this portion of the service.
Citizfied is planning on going through traditional municipal groups and associations for sales,
as well as through consultants and auditing services that many municipalities already utilize.
Citizfied is also currently talking with a county in New Jersey who has a total of 34
municipalities.
Their Revenue Cost structure is based off of the size of the population the municipality serves
as well as the level of service they sign up for (Bronze, Silver, and Gold). Different levels of
services are based on how much data they are looking to receive from the application.
Customers have access to all features of the application, however the data that the customer
receives is based on the level of service they sign up for. Their current pricing structure can
be seen below in Revenue Table 2.
Gamification - To urge citizens to utilize the application Citizfied is planning to utilize
gamification with a leaderboard based on how often citizens use the application. Top citizens
will receive gift certificates from local companies as a reward for their active participation
inside the application. Citizfied plans on partnering with a company who has previous
relationships with local businesses for reward programs such as these.

4. Revenue Table 1
Revenue Table 2
Section 6: Financing
Citizfied is not seeking funding from Wasabi Ventures. The application development costs are
estimated to be $250,000. They are in discussions with Miami Dade municipality to finance
the initial $175,000, with a decision expected to be made in April 2016. Citizfied hopes to
pre-sell other municipalities to fund the remaining $75,000.
Section 7: Market Overview
The United States and local IT spending is expected the reach $25.5 billion in 2015, with $6.4
billion of that going towards civic tech market. Citizied estimates that 90% of $6.4 billion
spent on civic tech will be spent in municipalities with populations over 15,000, and 10% of
that is estimated to be spent on civic engagement tech, totaling $575 million.
Citizfied is targeting the 5,054 municipalities in the United States with a populations of more
than 15,000. They have segmented their customers by their size, as seen below:
Citizfied offers bronze, silver, and gold pricing plans which varies depending on the size of the
municipality. Given their pricing plans and estimated product mix, the total revenue that
could be achieved from 100% market share would be $114,035,592.
MarketSegments 2016 2017 2018 Total
Muncipality <50k 334,396$ 1,253,984$ 2,507,969$ 4,096,349$
Muncipality <250k 347,250$ 1,302,188$ 2,604,376$ 4,253,814$
Muncipality <1M 71,782$ 269,184$ 538,368$ 879,334$
Muncipality >1M 11,732$ 43,994$ 87,988$ 143,714$
Total 765,160$ 2,869,350$ 5,738,701$ 9,373,211$
Population <50k 50-250k 250k-1M >1M <50k 50-250k 250k-1M >1M <50k 50-250k 250k-1M >1M
Monthly Review 1,200$ 1,800$ 2,700$ 4,050$ 1,600$ 2,400$ 3,600$ 5,400$ 1,800$ 2,700$ 4,050$ 6,075$
Annual Revenue 14,400$ 21,600$ 32,400$ 48,600$ 19,200$ 28,800$ 43,200$ 64,800$ 21,600$ 32,400$ 48,600$ 72,900$
Bronze Silver Gold

5. TAM, SAM, SOM
!
Section 8: Sales
Citizfied plans to leverage their relationships with municipalities and sell directly to them. In
the future, they plan to hire additional salespersons.
Section 9: Competition
Community Networks - Nextdoor, Brigade
Civic Funding - neighbor.ly, Citizinvestor
Civic Engagement - Code for America, change.org (citizen action), iCitizen (polling),
Civocracy, City Sourced, iCity, mindmixer
Meredith did not point to any specific competitors among the three verticals she listed.
Citizfied wants to build in funding, petitioning, polling, and forum features in their app. She
specifically wants to tackle multiple features in their app instead of focusing on one app
feature.
Differentiation Strategy
Taking bits and pieces from three verticals (community network, civic funding, civic
engagement) and building it into the Citizfied app. The existing apps on the market do not
have all three features covered.

6. Section 10: Exit Strategy
Citizfied does not have an exit strategy at this time. Meredith states that “I do not see an
exit that is simply for financial gain”. However, if the right partners were to appear in the
future, it is something they would consider. Their goals appear to be more aligned with social
entrepreneurship and municipal transformation.
Section 11: Recommendations
WV Investment Recommendations
The Citizfied team plans to sell their product to municipalities. Once a sale is made,
municipalities will have to spend additional time and resources to grow their user base.
Meredith mentioned in the call that she sees this project as a social venture and not a for-
profit venture.
The team has no app prototype to demo at the time of the call. It’s very hard to visualize
what the app is capable of without a live demo.
Based on Citizfied’s projected revenue and market size, we do believe this project to be large
enough for Wasabi Ventures to be interested in investing. WV invests in “for profit”
businesses only and it does not seem that this is the priority of Citizfied. There is also no
clear exit strategy, which is important for investment.
Citizfied Recommendations
Alternatively, we recommend Citizfied consider a different business model, acquiring users
first instead of selling the app to directly to municipalities with no users. The application
could be a free download. Once the Citizfied team has existing users, it is easier to approach
municipalities and allow them to purchase the Citizfied product, users, and analytics. The
benefit is municipalities do not have to spend additional time and resources to acquire users.
It would also put the emphasis on developing a product that is ideal for citizens.