“We had to convince risk-averse investors to fund a robust launch.”
“We are a communications company dedicated to helping the deaf and hard-of-hearing see what they can’t hear.”
– Stephen Foster, CEO, iMAT
Company: i-Mobile Access Technologies, Inc.
Industry: Media distribution
Situation: Define and show a growth story that will appeal to investors, and show the underlying value to consumers.
Success measure: Investors consider funding full-scale roll-out of the project.
iMAT will use wearable technology to bring captioned radio to deaf "listeners."
On one level, the benefits were clear.
Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) people represent an untapped media audience of 78 million people in the US. “iMAT is conceptualized as a means to help the D/HH audience see AM and FM radio content in text-caption format,” said Hari Samrat, iMAT CTO. The business concept is that opening the world of audio media to a segment hungry for media will increase advertising base for broadcasters from two to five percent. Radio stations and their advertisers would get an instant, loyal audience in exchange for allowing their content to be captioned.
Born deaf, CEO Stephen Foster tells a compelling story of why “seeing radio” is a benefit to D/HH consumers like him. However, investors were not grasping the business opportunity.
“Investors were pigeonholing iMAT as a ‘socially responsible’ device company that would never be profitable, and should focus on winning not-for-profit or foundation funding," Foster said.
Foster envisions iMAT as a media company, and the challenge is to help investors perceive of the opportunity on a media-industry scale. “Potential investors do sense a connection to my personal story. But some investors do not see the business opportunity," said Foster. "I need investors to see content distribution in our new medium as a media opportunity and see us as a media company.”
How will you get investors to see your opportunity on a scale that that will enable your venture to succeed?
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