MTP Portfolio: Mocono Progress Update
September 29, 2022
Mocono is a SaaS platform for content gating / subscription paywalls for media companies to help them monetise their online content. It comes with a full-service customer relationship management platform as well as a suite of tools for paywall optimisation and for managing the subscriber relationships.
Key milestones in the last 18 months
Lining up funding sources - Completed May 2021
After a short period of intensive pitching and networking, we raised ca. £100k from a pool of angel investors to fund the technical development of the first iteration of the platform, as well as a modest sum of working capital to sustain the business during early sales activity.
Legals - Completed July 2021
Our lawyers, Bird & Bird, drew up shareholders agreements and handled share allocations and articles of association to establish the cap table and secure the investment funds. Included drawing up of the appropriate documents for circulation amongst investors.
Phase 1 Development Period - Completed February 2022
MTP’s development team worked for a period of six months on the V1 iteration of the software according to a detailed brief. Concurrent feature testing and parallel UX improvements were a significant proportion of the workload during this time.
Phase 2 Development Period - UAT - Completed July 2022
After moving the platform from a development server environment to a live server location on Microsoft Azure, Mocono and MTP then underwent an extended ‘user acceptance testing’ (UAT) period to identify and fix as many bugs as possible before a public beta was to be made available.
Onboarding of first Publisher
Mulberry Media is Mocono’s first client and has moved several of its media titles over to Mocono for subscriptions management and paywall provision. Mulberry also provided ‘road tests’ for Mocono in a live environment, which was an invaluable process allowing us to quickly iron out several kinks in the platform and bring it up to near-perfect functionality.
Next Phase - Onboarding New Clients and Begin Seed Round preparations
Mocono has live sales conversations with almost 20 media brands interested in using the platform. These publishers are on varying timelines and range from beginning in subscriptions for the first time, to arriving with a pre-existing subscriber base which would mean imported revenue for Mocono should they migrate to our platform. On the strength of these client acquisitions, we intend to seek £1.5m in venture capital having shown proof of concept, to then recruit an in-house development team and sales function with which to drive forward the development roadmap and accelerate client acquisition and revenue growth.