KC Underweight Deal: An App For Inventory Management?

Key Stats:

Summary

Today we are taking a close look at the world of home inventory management. A new entrant into the space, InventoryMeApp, is currently going through a fundraising round on TruCrowd.

Essentially, the application will help people take “Home Inventory” of their possessions for events like home sales as well as keep things like homeowners insurance, warranties, and other vital documents all in one place. The app can be used by individuals as well as businesses.

InventoryMeApp offers intuitive, cloud-based, end-to-end solutions to automate as much of these tasks as possible. The company hopes that its application will help industry professionals, inspection-based service providers, businesses, government organizations, and individual consumers.

The vision of InventoryMeApp is to be unique and different from the other available applications that offer similar products.

The applications specs are, at first glance, impressive. They include:

• The ability to take panoramic images of room and properties and creating an inventory simply by choosing individual items in the photo.
• Bulk Editing which allows entire team members of small businesses that use InventoryMeApp to changes to categories, item descriptions, location of items, etc…
• The ability to scan and capture barcodes and QR codes.

That’s just the beginning. For further functionality we urge anyone interested to check out the company’s fundraising page.

It’s easy to see how such software might be useful for not just businesses but individuals as well. The company notes that uses include Estate & Trust planning, Landlord/Tenant Documentation, Pre & Post Moving Inspections, Self-Storage Inventories, etc…

The InventoryMeApp is, indeed, comprehensive and can be integrated into Quickbooks Online in order to provide a seamless solution to the needs of the individuals and businesses in the field of asset documentation.

Stiff Competition

However, trouble arises upon realizing just how many competing Inventory Management applications are already on the market. This includes Sortly, Memento, Nest Egg, Encircle, Homezada, Smart Inventory, Magic Inventory, and others are not far behind the company’s laudable technology.

Moreover, the unique offerings of InventoryMeApp seem to have made the application quite complex. It seems to be offering solutions to problems that do not need to be addressed (the opposite of “giving the people what they want”) and, even if they need to be, not before so many more tasks are completed.

Here are the basic points that are of concern:

InventoryMeApp: Raising on TruCrowd

1. Complex Solution to a Simple Problem

The application is still undergoing constant development yet even now it looks complex for the needs of the average user.

Some of the potential clients of InventoryMeApp are asset documentation service providers, appraisal companies, property management firms, insurance claim adjusters, pack-out companies, and moving companies, and homeowners. These parties have been working to assist individuals and businesses in the legal aspects of property and asset claims for years. They have been doing quite well and are able to provide a satisfactory output with the technology presently available to them.

The addition of complexities like dynamic sharing, bulk editing, dynamic import & export, field scheduling, and others are “nice to haves” not “must haves” in our estimation.

2. Lack Of Operating History

Though the Founder has been working on InventoryMeApp for four years according to LinkedIn, the income statement reflects no sales over that time.

Source: Reviewed Financial in Form C of company

The company does not foresee generating any revenue in the near future.

The absence of revenue in the present and the near future makes InventoryMeApp completely dependent on external financing. Even if the minimum financing from the crowdfunding round is obtained, most of the funds will be used to develop and market the app.

3. Saturated Market

The competitors of InventoryMeApp include established players like Sortly, Memento and Smart Inventory. These companies are established and have a loyal client base.

This in itself might not be a problem were it not for the fact that the majority of the InventoryMeApp’s competitors are financially and technologically ahead.

Granted, the founder of InventoryMeApp, Kevin Cope, has years of first-hand experience as the operating owner of a 3rd party asset documentation service provider. But this doesn’t change the fact that the market is saturated from our own analysis.

4. Non-Competitive Pricing

If InventoryMe App was offering a truly differentiated product we could justify a higher price point for its solution. However, utilizing our analysis, we do not see enough value-add from this app to justify a higher price point to competition.

For instance, the Basic-Plus package of InventoryMeApp is priced at $6.00 per month, while the same package is priced at $3.99 per month by the competitor Sortly and $3.00 per month by Memento Database.

For business customers the app subscription cost ranges from $25 per month for small businesses to $285 per month for large businesses.Sortly subscriptions come for $25 per month with almost all the basic features available on InventoryMeApp. We think if and when the team does start to roll out the product, this will hamper business customer adoption.

Rating

Due to a highly saturated market, relatively high prices, lack of revenues and financial strength, and complexities of the application, we are assigning InventoryMeApp an underweight deal rating.

There are multiple other applications that are serving the same purpose of asset documentation and inventory management. The application claims to save both time and money for the consumers, however, for us this remains to be seen.

If you have any questions regarding the Underweight Rating of InventoryMeApp, please reach out to us at hello@kingscrowd.com.