Charles Jillings, CEO of Utilico, energized by strong economic momentum across Latin America. Watch the video here.
Hi chamelon1, I know I should know this but I am not sure how the warrants work in this circumstance and I am not sure where to look for them in the company documents. Are you able to help me understand this please? thanks
As a previous buyer of this product I have just received a buy one get one free offer to my email. What happened to spending our marketing resources on B2B distribution deals and not spending the same on B2C ? I thought B2C was considered not to be something the business has expertise in. Smacks of more desperation and a complete lack of appropriate sales and marketing strategy. I am open to being wrong if my summary of the distribution plan is inaccurate but I just do not trust that this team know how to sell.
Many people build great things but can't sell them. Stuart's marketing plans are naive and I suspect that they will not deliver the results he has been banking on. This has a long way to do down before the sales and marketing plan starts to work.
If you buy the product you will see that the order numbers are sequential. The numbers of orders has always been massively below the predictions and expectations raised and a much earlier indication of the clear lack of ability to meet those targets could and should have been brought to the market much earlier.
I can also not find a single truly unprompted independant review from anyone saying its great. People increasingly can see through social influencers and the marketing plan's reliance on this group to make a huge difference is a signficant risk.
Stuart has not been open and frank about the issue of poor sales and poor sign ups at any point. Why believe him now ?
The twitter comments from the hackers suggests that this is quite serious and would scare me away as a customer. Management here have really failed in their duty to keep the data safe. They should have been more risk aware than this.
Lawyers are spoilt for choice when adopting this type of technology and are doing so in droves. Businesses like InCase, Minerva and Thirdfort are romping ahead. There are loads more on their way. People think the tech is the hard bit, it isnt. The hard bit is adoption and I dont see anyone in this market selling or pushing this product, and only a limited number of users. This is a massive risk for this business and a huge gamble. The CEO needs to do something quickly or they will have missed the boat in this market.
I am really confused by the advocates here.
The business has just waived the white flag or at least said its really struggling in non professional services and that its service is really optimised for professional services.
They have therefore specialised into a reasonably small market. Yes professional services is big but it a small fraction of professional services plus non professional services. They have hugely risked the up side.
I know quite a bit about the professional services sector in the UK but not across the world. I suspect it isn't that different than anywhere else.
If we take lawyers as an example of a professional services sector firm:-
- the types of firms that need this are probably less than 100 potential large firms in the country. Yes there are about 10,500 solicitors practices in England and Wales but this product only really has features and a price point that interest the largest firms. The product just isnt of interest to lots of the smaller professional services firms that make up the back bone and a large proportion of professional service sector. I dont know a firm under £3M turnover using Loopup and they are the bulk of this sector.
- One of the largest legal exhibitions happened over two days this week in London virtually, its called LegalEx. I attended and couldnt see LOOPUP there.
- In any event many of these law firms are struggling to work out how to use Teams in the context of client files and the structures of their work, because it limits the number of channels you can have. Yes firms are using Teams but it isnt easy for their historic work patterns to use it in a way that integrates to other applications they commonly use. I accept there are examples of heavy microsoft teams users in this sector but I have also seen many struggle.
- I dont understand why this company thinks that the professional service sector has specific needs that make its products specifically attractive to that sector. I have had over 100 video calls with lawyers in the last 30 days. All on VOIP using Teams or Zoom video chat. I have not had to dial a telephone number for any of them or use telephony.
- In my experience VOIP video calls are becoming increasingly used and any need for tradtitional telephony is declining. Why is it relevant to professional services sector that they have the best voice over traditional telephone lines any more ? That is a dying technology.
I still think that this is a tradtional telephony business trying to pull the wool over everyones eyes that its a tech company.
I understand that at a certain price the company become cheap but isnt this like investing in steam trains that have nice whistles and bells when everyone is moving to electric ?
I am very open to being wrong but this feels like trying to catch a falling knife to me unless the company fundamentally adopts a different strategy.
All
I have been looking at LOOP and Cloudcall for sometime and I have read all these posts with interest and I don't understand the enthusiasm here completely. I partly get it but I see risks that don't seem to be represented on this board.
1) The company I work for is UK based B2B business and use Teams a lot. Since the start of Covid our telephone calls have dropped dramatically with external organisations and clients and we are using Team video calls and meetings without any need to use our telephony provider. In particular staff in our clients are keen meet using the native facilities in team rather than in a more traditional video conference. I get B2C will continue to be phone for some time but even B2C communication is increasingly twitter, whatsapp and messaging. Whilst voice calls are still massive for many businesses we have seen a substantial shift away from calls towards video which you dont need LOOP for because its built into Microsoft Teams.
2) I can already buy the ability to dial voice calls externally directly from Microsofte Teams. Why would I add LOOP to that when its native in the Microsoft Teams platform?
3) Any functionality that LOOP builds integrated to Microsoft Teams will be on the development plan for Microsoft Teams and Dynamics, surely its only a matter of time where the little additional functionality offered by LOOP will be native within Teams?
4) As an example of point 3 above Zoom used to lead on the way it presented attendees in calls on screen. Virtually all of the Zoom functionality has been rolled out by Teams recently e.g. spotlight, backgrounds, theatre style, a larger number of video tiles on screen at once. My point is that if LOOP continue to make ground the functionality will be copied by Microsoft because they are nearly there already.
5) Given the development of the Microsoft Power Automate flows and the Power Platform with a low or no code environment it is likely that any telecoms provider will within a short period of time be able to integrate to Microsoft Teams for in and out bond external calls and what LOOP are building and launched wont be hard or a barrier to entry.
Don't get me wrong this is a good company doing good things but the hype in here seems over done given the pace of change in technology, what is actually happening with working from home and covid and Microsofts own platform capability and its likely direction of travel.
In essence the numbers might be good now but will they be sustainable ?
Please tell me if I am missing the point here but I am respectfully trying to understand the potential risks in the business and I might just be completely wrong. Its just that many comments here appear to be out of sync with my experience of what is actually happening out there now. Are any of you customers of LOOP?
Cheers.
The company webinar on the 22nd September talked about a large contract renewal that was close and a potential deal with the Royal Navy. Nearly two months later there is no news, or have I missed something? I hope some positive news comes soon on either these contracts, or an acquistion. It all seems rather slow progress at the moment or am I just impatient ?
https://www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/farewill-raises-20m-to-fuel-exponential-growth
Farewill are doing well.
I have just listened to the 1st June update. Given that I hear of firms switching to VOIP and Microsoft Teams during the pandemic I am not sure why sales have slowed. I would have thought a switch to VOIP at this time would be accelerating. Or has the pandemic meant that video via Zoom or Teams will in the future superseded voice calls as more people work from home?
I am interested to hear what will come next with Microsoft Teams integration and what they will do differently to what Microsoft can do in its own native environment. It seems that give the development of Microsoft Flow it shouldnt be too hard for a firm to do its own integration of Teams to their own native CRM.
Where do people think this is going ?