cerviso

craft beer discovery, reimagined

cerviso is a beer discovery platform, subscription service, and direct-to-consumer delivery company. Our goal is to bridge the gap between craft breweries and craft beer adventurists. We pride ourselves on tailoring the experience of buying beer to each customer’s personal taste and preference, pairing our users with unique beers from a variety of craft brewers in order to make discovering and drinking craft beer convenient and fun.

Our product begins with our mobile and web-applications. The cerviso online interface allows customers to create an account and begin molding their beer preferences through a short series of questions about their prior experiences with beer, such as which brands and brews they’re accustomed to drinking. This experience is quick, simple, and fun for the user. With this information, our in-house beer experts are able to effectively recommend a bevy of beers sourced from hand-picked micro-breweries that we believe match their flavor profile. Once a user has decided upon ordering a six-pack ($19.99) of a mixed selection of craft beers that is tailored to their profile, they will subscribe to a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly subscription and receive their first order, shipped directly to their door. They will then review the beers they received, further updating their flavor profile for our beer experts to make the following shipment even more tailored to their tastes. If the user likes a particular craft beer, he or she will be able to purchase an a-la-carte 24-pack of that beer for $49.99.

All beers carried by cerviso will be brewed by contracted microbreweries. Through these partnerships, cerviso will be able to reliably supply its customers with products from a growing set of breweries, giving customers more variety and consistency than the revolving seasonal selections of typical beer-of-the-month clubs. In return, cerviso will be offering contracted breweries a new market outside of their current retail and greater brand exposure. This is especially attractive for smaller breweries that do not have the capacity to scale production for contracting with national distributors.

cerviso lies within the alcohol subscription and delivery service industry. The craft beer industry has grown significantly in the last few years; in the U.S. alone, the beer market was worth $114.2 billion in 2018, and the craft beer market was worth $27.6 billion, where the craft beer industry saw an increase of 3.9% barrels sold. The growth of alcohol delivery services has been even more significant; in 2017 alone, online sales of beer, wine and liquor grew by 32.7%. This is reflective of the growing popularity of direct delivery services, a market whose current offerings lack a customizable experience for the consumer, giving cerviso an untapped point of entry.

Our Total Addressable Market includes adults within the 43 states we intend to operate in who consume alcohol regularly and have the ability to make online orders. Out of the 183 million adults that constitute the states we operate in, 72 million regularly consume alcohol and purchase it online. These potential customers consume an average of 22 million gallons of craft beer annually, allowing for a total yearly revenue of $1.13 Billion to be generated by this market.

cerviso’s brand appeals to those comfortable with online purchasing and enticed by the opportunity to receive expert guidance on beer selections to expand their craft beer portfolio. We’ve factored this brand identity into our marketing approach, which will be executed primarily through outsourced search engine and social media advertising on Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat ad programs. This digital marketing approach allows our team to reach a larger portion of our target consumers at a cheaper cost than a traditional marketing team. Additionally, digital adverts allow us to develop interactive advertising, such as direct links to our sign-up page. Our marketing campaigns will be focused on the customizable and guided experience of ordering with cerviso and the convenience of hassle-free ordering and direct delivery.

cerviso’s operational structure relies heavily on our application technology. We will outsource the development of our app and web page to Gin Lane and work alongside them for future updates and features. We will manage the delivery of the products from breweries to our warehouse through LTL (Less Than Truckload) freight, allowing us to move pallets of beer at a low cost without the need to purchase our own fleet. We will also outsource distribution to the customer through UPS ground delivery, who will be responsible for outgoing inventory management, tracking shipments, and delivery quality assurance. This process is reflected below. This system allows us to focus company resources on our recommendation process, wide craft beer selection, quick delivery, and brewery relations - namely, areas where we can add the most value.

cerviso will be headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and plans to establish initial distribution channels in the American Northeast, specifically Massachusetts, New York, eastern Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Jersey. This geographical region encompasses a number of major metropolitan areas, many with a high concentration of potential customers and brewery partners. As cerviso begins operations, working in this region will help keep distribution and delivery costs low while we fine-tune our operations, and allow time to build local brand recognition among both customers and breweries. As sales grow by volume, we will purchase our own trucks to perform “milk runs” across all our brewery partners at once, allowing us to lower time in possession of inventory. We will subsequently use this system to expand operations to new states, contracting new breweries and reaching new customers.

Our revenues quickly outpace our initial overhead costs, and we expect to be profitable by 2025. cerviso will raise an initial seed round $600,000 through equity and bootstrap financing to fund our initial warehouse, brewery contracts, beer storage equipment, and distribution expenses. This investment will allow cerviso to begin operations in 2021 and remain cash-flow positive through the subsequent two years. By the end of 2023, cerviso will be looking to raise $1 million at a $5 million valuation. We see this as a strategic partnership in which the venture capital fund will provide access to additional resources in the beer industry, strategic guidance, and working capital to help cerviso achieve its sales, marketing, and scaling goals. Using comparable P/E ratios and revenue assumptions, our financial team came to a $5 million valuation by applying a 20x revenue multiple to our projected 2023 revenue, giving the investors the opportunity to own 20% of cerviso. With the help of working capital and strategic guidance from our Series A investors, we estimate a significant growth in revenue by year 5. Applying the same revenue multiple of 20x to our projected year 5 revenue, we expect cerviso to be valued at around $50 million by the time of acquisition., allowing for the opportunity of a significant ROI for investors.

We have appointed a CEO, CTO, CMO, COO, and CFO to handle the different components of cerviso. Our CEO, Mia Mansour, chairs the board and oversees the other chief officers. She holds a board position along with our CTO, Vera Lee, who is responsible for coordinating app development with Gin Lane and her team, and overseeing quality assurance. Liam Hosey, our CMO, manages our digital advertising campaign and develops our brand identity and marketing materials. Our COO, Katie Oppenheim, is responsible for product management and logistics of daily operations. Lastly, Sam Hefter, our CFO, manages FP&A, buying, and pricing.

cerviso is structured to offer a beer drinking experience that you won’t find anywhere else. We are making top-quality beer more accessible and more enticing to our customers through a simple and fun user interface, a personalized and guided beer buying, and the convenience of direct delivery. We’re financially sound, uniquely marketable, and have the right team behind us. So, it’s time to ditch the liquor store when buying beer. Few industry players have taken the need to personalize beer to heart, but with a commitment to customization and convenience, the cerviso brand will have a unique appeal to prospective beer buyers. Drinking craft beer is meant to be an experience. We’re here to make sure it’s a good one, and we hope you join us here at cerviso.

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