Ravenry

Ravenry answers any business questions in 24 hours.

Ravenry in an on-demand desk research platform that leverages both human and technology to find any business insights in 24 hours.

1. Problem

Organisations spend about 20% of their time doing research to support various business decisions. Most organisations are not equipped with research team that can readily answer their business questions. As a result, most internal research work is scattered across teams who are not well-suited to do the work.

Marketing teams need to research their target customers; HR professionals need to find the best training materials; and strategy teams need to know various market information. These are work on top of their business-as-usual activities, and take away their attention from truly value-adding activities within their roles. 

2. Solution

Ravenry combines technology and people to generate the most relevant business insights for our clients. Think of Ravenry as Google for Enterprise, powered by actual human beings.

With a vast network of analysts (we call them ravens), we are able to leverage the right people for the right research questions. All our analysts are augmented with data tools and have access to proprietary data providers to ensure that the insights generated are truly useful for our clients.

Ravenry is able to scale because we have built a proprietary framework to quickly understand client requests and map them to the right people. We are currently building automation tools to help expedite the research process as well.

3. How Ravenry can change the world

Ravenry believes that access to data is key to helping organisations grow much more quickly. However, amalgamation of data sources is only the first step towards making data truly useful. Ravenry would like to make sense of this data for our clients, effectively saving them time and money. This democratises data from various proprietary sources, helping organisations that share their data generate additional revenue for their business.

As a platform, Ravenry also helps people who are disenfranchised from the workforce to gain sustainable employment. Ravenry helps knowledge workers who are not able to be part of conventional work to earn money any time, anywhere. Unlike gig platforms like ride-hailing or food delivery that turn people into mechanical drones, Ravenry offers our analysts the flexibility of gig economy combined with knowledge work from the comfort of one's home. Anyone who has access to a computer will be able to do work for Ravenry, including people with disability, stay-at-home parents, and even the elderly.

Ravenry combines existing big data and machine learning technologies to expedite the process of creating insights. While technology is key for us to grow, Ravenry believes that human intervention is key in generating truly useful insights. This is why we have opted on building the technology on a gig platform that is powered by a network of people.

Big data and machine learning are key in helping Ravenry scale our business. Ravenry works with multiple proprietary research partners and our analysts have to sort through oceans of data for the right insights. Big data tools help us make sense of these data much more quickly. 

Given research is a labour intensive activity, Ravenry automates as much of our processes as possible to standardise our output and maintain the quality of our insights.

Ravenry aims to serve 100+ clients in the next 12 months. We are scaling our platform to be able to handle such capacity. A big part of it is to recruit and train as many analysts as possible. We are aiming to onboard 200 new analysts by the end of 2018.

Ravenry is also planning to launch our alpha version by the end of the year to help clients submit their requests to us seamlessly.

Ravenry is trying to build a platform that is inclusive to make sure it is easy for analysts to sign up. We are also building a library of toolkits and frameworks to upskill our people quickly.

In the next three to five years, we hope to have more than 20,000 analysts globally. We also want at least 50% of the Fortune 500 corporations to be using our solutions during the same period.

Ravenry wants to include as many disenfranchised group as possible. We are starting with out-of-work professionals, but are working our way towards retirees, home-bound parents, and people with disabilities.

Our clients have mainly been converted through word-of-mouth marketing. We have also been attending industry events to find new customers for Ravenry. We retain our clients by creating high quality insights and by providing exceptional customer service.

Our beneficiaries are currently our analysts. We reach out to them via online job portals and recruit them from direct channels such as universities and career events. We hope to reach out to and onboard them via our website in the future.

Currently we are serving 2 companies in the consumer goods and media industries. We are also working with a government agency in Singapore to help them find key insights about the economy.

Clients have saved significant amount of time from leveraging our service. At the same time, they believe that the quality of their decisions has improved as well.

Our analysts have also benefited by having the chance to learn about new industries and also generate additional income during their free time.

In 12 months, we are hoping to have 100 clients in Singapore and the region. We are scaling our service through a web platform that is live 24/7. We would like to help organisations find the right insights to support their business decisions, making them more data-driven.

In three years' time, we hope to have a network of 20,000 analysts around the world serving global clients. We hope to be able to work with 50% of the Fortune 500 clients at the end of the three years.

Our co-founders have had more than 18 years experience in entrepreneurship, management consulting, product development, and research. Between the two of us, we have started four businesses in the past.

We are also an ardent believer in putting people first, which is key in helping us attract and retain talents. We have also worked with Fortune 500 companies to build new solutions, manage change, and grow their businesses.

We are an as-a-service business with subscription fees attached to our platform. Ravenry also charges per-use fee for every new insights generated.

We are able to scale because Ravenry is able to pre-generate key insights that we can resell to multiple clients. Our subscription service also helps generate relatively stable cashflow for the business for the long term.

We are applying to Solve because we truly believe that Ravenry can positively impact the way work is done in the future. Solve is a great platform for us to get the word out and to help us broaden our reach. We also believe that collaboration with other experts and organisations through Solve will help us advance our goals much more quickly.

Several key barriers to our success are:

• Finding Machine Learning and Big Data experts to help us implement these technologies onto a new business model
• Partnership with more proprietary data partners
• Reaching out to new global clients

Through Solve's extensive network of experts and supporting organisations, we believe that those barriers can easily be overcome.