Case Study – Gweek

Interim Commercial Leadership & Flexible Business Development

“Digital Works Group helped us position ourselves for our headquarters move to London, in terms of business development support and introductions to investors, making a smoother landing than we otherwise may have had.”

CEO, gweek

Gweek is an innovative analytics start-up, rapidly gathering commercial momentum. Powered by Speech Intelligence Analytics™ and using artificial intelligence, the Gweek mobile application is designed to improve communication and presentation skills.

  • Wanted to relocate their head office to London, but didn’t have the right contacts to ease the transition.
  • Ambitious to scale the business and expand into new verticals
  • Their proposition, GTM model and pricing needed refining in order to effectively support their growth
  • Needed to develop a better commercial understanding of target markets
  • Limited resource for business development
  • Wanted to secure funding for growth
  • Provided scale-up support to expand into a new territory, de-risk the investment, while increasing pace and return
  • Reviewed and tested their proposition, obtained vital market feedback to review pricing and GTM model for strategic and targeted outreach
  • Provided hands-on flexible business development, tapping into our well-established network of contacts and partners
  • Supported marketing activities online and at an event by representing gweek
  • Used our network to help raise funding and focus their proposition
  • Moved into plan and development phase; targets, objectives, road-maps and timelines to deliver
  • Refined proposition pricing and GTM model – differentiated based on need/audience and USP
  • Established new leads and industry contacts for GTM in new verticals including insurance, ecommerce, recruitment and education
  • Supported at key conference – allowing them to generate more leads and structured follow-up post-event
  • The team has now doubled and we were able to make an introduction for the new CFO role
  • A more focused approach enabled them to accelerate their growth

Their Story

Digital Works Group first met gweek during an HR analytics convention in London.

Their solution sits in an exciting intersection of micro-learning and analysis, and they already had a great USP and proven solution- the Speech Intelligence Analytics™ which can track and map the degree to which a speaker get their message across while remaining both efficient in speech and authentic in person in any situation.

The start-up was originally based in Hong Kong and had already won key customers in the region among the education and banking sectors – proving that they were commercially viable, with both a valid product and proposition.

In order to gain more traction and accelerate their growth, gweek were keen to move the business to the UK and establish a London office, evolve their proposition and expand into new verticals.

The problem was they didn’t have the right contacts and network to do this as easily or as quickly as they needed to – a common issue many start-ups and scale-ups face. They needed to do this in an efficient manner, maximising the use of capital and resources.

Gweek was initially designed for learning and talent development, through iOS/Android and SaaS environments.

They had already built and tested out their product in the market. Successfully applying the same algorithm for secondary school pupils, graduates or senior bankers was a testament to the strength and value of their solution.

For gweek, it proved helpful to have the independent expertise to act as a sounding board and test and qualify new ideas. Firstly, we sounded gweek value proposition within our network, to develop the right strategy and target, and then ensure the proposition and pricing was structured in the right way.

This helped further refine gweek pitch to raise funds, which we also supported.

Smaller businesses are frequently pulled in many directions, and often have teams that are multi-skilled and agile, but spread too thin.

By offering flexible business development, we provided gweek with vital GTM support – tapping into our networks and getting stuck in with outreach and qualification – but with sensible commercials structured to their exact needs.

DWG had the pleasure of supporting gweek at key AI conference – Cognition X Artificial Intelligence Awards – where, in recognition of their growing success they won the Cognition X Artificial Intelligence Awards, Best Innovation in Natural Language Processing, 2017.

This conference proved very useful in terms of both establishing and following up on new leads. We were able to provide an extra boost of support, so they could make the most of the investment during and after the event.

As part of their strategic move to London, gweek wanted to raise funds to scale and support business development. The proposition and stage of gweek as a company proved too early for VC’s, but we were able to create interest for the next stage of fundraising and have constructive feedback on the current market potential and development. Through our network, we introduced gweek to their future CFO, who also garnered interest from angel investors and led the fundraising round.

They are now on the next stage of their journey and are moving to talks with VC’s for series A investment. They have grown to a team of more than 10.

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