A Dash of Nutmeg
At PIE’s (Portland Incubator Experiments) Demo Day
81 days ago I walked into PIE and today I’ll be onstage sharing our story. The plan is to press publish after I’ve walked off stage, but realistically I’ll take a shot first. Since my slides are fairly minimal, I wrote out the script as well.
Hope you enjoy it and welcome to Nutmeg!
Hi! I’m Julie Logan from Nutmeg.
I’d guess most of us in this room have one of these, a smart phone, in our pockets. Perhaps a bag nearby. This is a really amazing device; with this, we can talk to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. And so we’re talking all the time! Texting all the time. These days, I text some of my friends more than I talk to them in real life.
But I want to text better.
Imagine you are texting your best friend and wanted to quickly tell them something simple. That you were smiling; you are happy. You might send them one of these.
What if you wanted to actually make them smile? Make them happy? I would send them this…
It doesn’t matter if you call it a gif, a jiff, or a MP4; it’s emotion. That’s what you do with Nutmeg, you share emotion…
…you make your friends actually smile.
It’s design is so simple that you can find the right gif to share in your conversation before the window of opportunity has passed. Because conversations move fast. And we’re constantly giving you new content to keep your conversations fresh.
Quickly glance at our collections and pick one, find a gif you like, then send it to your friends right in iMessage.
Imagine, making your best friend actually laugh-out-loud with a quick text.
Only soft released to the iOS App Store a few months ago, people already love Nutmeg.
These are teenagers. Two teenage girls, on Twitter, chatting. @Tardiswift, aka Samantha, interrupts their conversation to recommend @SwiftJLaw, aka Mary, download Nutmeg because O-M-G you can text gifs!!?!
Mary then live-tweets her first experience in our app.
Today, people don’t just consume content: they share it.
And it’s not just Millennials…
We’re just soft released and already known as the gif app to help you up your text game.
We’re out there. We’re in people’s hands. A lot of people.
We soft released a few months ago. No money spent on marketing, just word-of-mouth and those articles…and we’ve already hit one-hundred thousand users who have watched almost 10M gifs.
Everyone who downloads the app uses it. And not just in the U.S.
We’ve already been #1 in the French App Store.
The app is English, the content is from American pop culture, but it’s wildly popular in France. And Europe. Because gifs are a visual language full of emotion, and emotion is universal, requires no translation. With Nutmeg, you can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time…and easily make them smile.
To recap for a second…teenagers love Nutmeg. The media loves us, and the French! Ils adore les gifs!
You know who else likes it? Hollywood.
This summer Disney found Nutmeg and hunted us down. They were releasing a big blockbuster with Marvel called Guardians of the Galaxy.
Guardians is a cult classic comic and a great movie full of characters and is incredibly shareable. Disney had all these moments, but they needed a platform to put them on. A place where users could engage with the content and share it with their friends. They found Nutmeg and saw the opportunity we were creating.
So Disney and Marvel became our first content partners.
We had a collection of gifs in the app before the film even came out, building anticipation. And it was there for weeks after the premier, so people could keep engaging after they’d seen the film.
This is authentic engagement because it’s not a studio talking at a movie fan, it’s their friend borrowing the characters voice as a part of their normal conversation.
And in Hollywood…
Hollywood has a lot of great content it wants to share with fans. And they’ll pay to get the right eyeballs on it.
And you know what else is a currency? Money.
Hollywood spent $3.2B in 2013 advertising movies. They paid 3.2B dollars to hunt down those eyeballs, that engagement.
And that’s just Hollywood. Sports, TV, Music…these industries all have great content and fans who want to do more than just consume it. They want to share it with their friends.
Nutmeg is the future of entertainment marketing because…
…this is the future of digital communication.
And people are already doing it. I sent this Skadoosh gif from Kung Fu Panda to a friend of mine so many times that he went out and watched the movie.
I made a grown man, who has no children, go watch an animated movie because I texted him this gif so many times in our normal conversations.
That’s powerful. That’s emotion.
Our MVP shares just to iMessage, but we’re building a product that will integrate with other platforms so, no matter where you’re having a conversation, Nutmeg is there to make it better.
That’s our goal. So who are we?
I come from Hollywood and AKQA. Kevin worked at Google Ad Sense. We know this space. And we know each other! I met Kevin in Kindergarten.
Nutmeg is in over 130 countries. We have more partnerships in the pipeline. And we have some features releasing this holiday season that we can’t wait to share with you!
Our team is already building this future. And I’d love to tell you more about it.
Here is my information. If you’re curious, please get in touch. I’d love to hear your ideas and share more of our plans and vision.
Before I go, remember these? Take out your iPhones. Come on! Out! Don’t just take my word for it.
Text this number. Experience the power of this medium. Then download Nutmeg and share it with your friends. Make them smile. ☺
Thanks!
