Amplifying under-represented stories with tech innovation

We know audiences want a discovery portal for a diverse range of books, TV and movies where their matches are truly personalized. We also know that the publishing and screen industry needs insight into what audiences want to read and watch.

Narrative Muse brings these two demands together in a platform that serves both – we’re an Aotearoa-made, deep tech start-up that’s bringing the entertainment revolution.

Invest from NZD $50 here

Read more in our full investment document.

Tech meets book, movie and TV recs – What we do

Narrative Muse is an Aotearoa New Zealand startup using deep tech for good.

Our platform offers tailored recommendations that match user preferences with books, movies and TV shows that are aligned to their identity, interests and values.

We’re building a technology that uses forward looking data to learn what diverse audiences would like to read and watch – even when these stories don’t exist yet.

This technology helps prevent content echo chambers by recommending books, movies and TV shows based on users’ preferences, rather than what they’ve read or watched in the past.

Then, using this hard-to-obtain data, we can sell valuable insights to screen producers and publishers to express and highlight under-served market gaps.

The Narrative Muse platform offers recommendations from real people. We plan to maintain our current community-led content curation model while enhancing it with AI to gather deep, global knowledge about entertainment by and about diverse groups.

Watch here to learn more.

Our mission

We’re working to build and strengthen connections between under-served audiences and content producers for better representation and equity across the entertainment landscape.

Be part of our company

Invest from just under $50 NZD and join us to change the entertainment landscape.

Invest from NZD $50 here

Find more detail in our full investment document.

Why are we crowdfunding?

We’re excited to invite the community to invest in our company to help create a more inclusive and equitable, worldwide media landscape – where everyone’s voices can be heard.

Narrative Muse is using media tech as a path to social change.

Through our platform, supporting both diverse audiences and storytellers by providing insights to content producers on what people want to read and watch, and helping to create more of the stories audiences are searching for.

The money raised will help expand the capability of our platform to keep up with user demands, drive the sales of our audience insights and expand our technology for AI-driven content data.

We invite investments from $48.96 - 749,998.08 NZD. This allows both non-professional and professional investors from around the globe to back Narrative Muse.

Being co-owned by the community is important to us as it’s an opportunity for groups and identities that don’t often get to participate in the ownership of companies to take part in the representation and equity space.

We look forward to the depth and breadth of expertise we can bring together with angel investment, venture capital, and audiences.

We will also invest in marketing and communication with the goal of amplifying our visibility so that more users can find us. And because we have aspirations to scale incredibly quickly, we will invest in the financial, legal and technical architecture to ensure we are doing so from a strong, regulatory and commercial foundation.

If we raise the maximum amount, we will resource ourselves even more powerfully to support sales generation, provide proof that we are meeting a market need, scale our technology and keep Narrative Muse humming towards our vision of representation and belonging in entertainment.

Read full investment document

Invest from NZD $50 here and join us on our mission to change entertainment.

Our share offer

This offer is for shares in Narrative Muse Limited.

Our nominee, Narrative Muse PledgeMe Shareholding Limited, will hold legal title to the non-voting Investor Class Shares on trust for investors who invest up to $49,999 under this offer. Those investing $50,000 or more will receive Ordinary Shares directly in Narrative Muse Limited.

Find more detail about the classes of shares in our full investment document.

We're ready to grow

• We've launched an improved version of the Narrative Muse platform, which provides tailored recommendations using an algorithm that matches user preferences with aligned books, movies and TV shows.
• We’ve collected over a million user reactions to books, movies, and TV shows; with engagement consistently growing.
• We’ve grown to over 55,000 verified users from around the world with an exponential growth rate of 7% in 2023.
• We've produced difficult-to-obtain deep data. For individual books, movies and TV shows, we've extracted the relevant audience and analyzed the content to determine the qualities of it that best resonate with its audience.
• We began providing demos of our insights in October 2022.
• We have begun to receive customer queries from around the world, including in the US, UK, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
• We collaborate with organizations such as Book Discussion Scheme, The Ākina Foundation, Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Pasifika Festival.
• We are also in discussion with The Publishers Association of New Zealand/Te Rau o Tākupu (PANZ) and The Māori Literature Trust.

Invest from NZD $50 here

Read more about our achievements in our full investment document.

The opportunity

The demand for audience insights comes from a variety of industries, including marketing and advertising, media, and consumer research, among others. And the global audience analytics market is projected to grow*:

Market size in 2021: USD $4.25B
Forecast period 2022 to 2029 CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate): 11.34%
Market size in 2029: USD $ 10.04B

*MMR Audience Analytics Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast (2022-2029)

In progress in Aotearoa New Zealand

• Launched in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Our local work is about engaging with partners in the government and arts sector to help with audience insights which can benchmark Aotearoa against global trends.

Opportunities in Australia

• Business analytics revenue grew from $244M in 2015 to $585M in 2019 (Statista)
• Total TV and movie expenditure in Australia was $2.29B AUD in 2021/2022, up from $1.2B in 2018/2019. (Screen Australia Drama Report 2021/22)
• The Australian book industry produces roughly $2B AUD for the Australian economy annually. (Australian Publishers Association)

Opportunities in the UK

• The economic benefit of analytics for professional services in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2020 was £34B. (Statista)
• The combined spend by film and high-end television production during 2022 reached £6.27B, the highest ever reported and £1.83B higher than for the pre-pandemic year 2019. (BFI)
• The UK publishing industry has a turnover of £6B, with export income accounting for almost 60% of revenues. The UK is the largest exporter of books in the world. (UK Publishers Association)

Opportunities in the US

• Marketing spend on audience data activation solutions in the U.S. was $8.7B USD in 2021. (Statista)
• The top eight US media groups, including Walt Disney, Comcast, WarnerMedia and Amazon) planned to spend at least $115B USD on new movies and television shows in 2022 (Financial Times)
• Book publishing revenues up 12.3% for 2021, reaching all-time high of USD $29.33B (Association of American Publishers)

Our team

Read more about our team from page 22 in our full investment document.

How we'll make use of the funds

• Resourcing to generate sales – 1-2 people to validate product/market fit, travel to key markets and sell. ($125,000 - $200,000)
• Resourcing to build technology – focused on delivering scalable content insights using AI and audience insights. ($125,000 - $350,000)
• Resourcing for marketing and community building – community champions and marketing to connect communities through social advocacy. ($75,000 - $150,000)
• Resourcing for accounting and legal to support sales growth – create processes and structures to allow us to deliver insights at scale ($25,000 - $50,000)

Read more financial information from page 32 in our full investment document.

Risks and mitigation

• Slower than expected market entry and sales – Applying Lean Startup and Customer Development principles, we believe we can test, iterate and measure our initial assumptions on market entry and sales projections and pivot quickly where necessary. We will also seek to employ experts in sales and pricing development to ensure we adhere to our plans, in a systematic and efficient manner.
• Technical failure - Our tech is being developed in an iterative and considered way to ensure learnings are identified and absorbed. Key team member loss - We have shared the CEO position to de-risk having a single point of leadership. Narrative Muse is built on a collaborative and open style in which all relevant information is shared across teams.
• Failure to raise Series A - We will work towards proving product-market fit to ensure the product or service is solving a real problem and content creators will pay for it. This could be demonstrated through sales, signed agreements, returning clients and feedback. These are the key attributes venture investors tend to look for when investing.
• Competitors - Examples: Parrot Analytics, Nielson • Different audience focus - we focus on understanding and collecting data and insights on audiences that are not “mainstream.” It’s clear to us these “non-mainstream” audiences are actually the bigger proportion of the population. • The way we collect data - our “proprietary” data (which means we collect, control and own it) is forward-looking and reveals insights about what audiences are actively and actually looking for so we can tell publishers and screen content producers what markets are out there but which are not currently being tapped.
• The company becomes insolvent during fundraising - We have raised a bridge round from previous angel investors to help our cashflow through this capital raise.
• The changing book, TV and movie content landscape - In the last 10 years, the book, TV and movie content landscape has changed a lot. Right now, the growing availability of content online has helped put NM in the right place at the right time. By constantly keeping an eye on industry trends and engaging with key industry thought leaders, we believe we will be ahead of the curve and react accordingly to any major industry changes to content and its regulation.
• Unable to hire world-class, diverse talent aligned with NM’s ways of working in an inclusive setting - We will aim to offer a competitive salary, stock options, the opportunity to join our impact- driven mission, and a supportive work environment which includes flexible work hours, the ability to work from home, wellbeing support, learning and development opportunities. We also want to ensure that our management and leadership positions reflect the diversity of our audience and our world. It’s crucial that we have a strong, inclusive leadership team that can speak to the needs and world view of our diverse audiences.

Read full investment document

Be part of the change by making a pledge.

Our shareholding pre and post raise

Narrative Muse PledgeMe Shareholding Limited will hold the legal title to Investor Class Shares in Narrative Muse Limited on trust for the crowdfunding investors who invest up to $49,999 under this offer, those investing $50,000 or more will receive Ordinary Shares directly in Narrative Muse Limited.

You can see the full share table in our full investment document, here is a summary of what the crowd will own:

Pre-raise			Post-raise If fully subscribed $750,000k
Shareholder	No. of shares	Ownership %	No. of shares	Ownership %
Brough Johnson	670,000	38.58%	670,000	33.55%
Teresa Bass	330,000	19%	330,000	16.52%
Other investors	562,888	32.42%	121,226	28.19%
ESOP	173,750	10.00%	173,750	8.70%
SAFE Note*	To be determined at Series A
Investors through PledgeMe			260,416	13.04%
Total	1,736,638	100%	1,997,054	100%

*There is a $173,000 SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) Note outstanding which will minimally dilute existing shareholders when it converts at a Series A. The terms of this SAFE note are a 30% discount and a valuation cap of $7.5M. The dilutive impact of the SAFE has not been factored into the table above. When this converts we believe the impact on investors will be insignificant.

Our financials

Three year forecast

You can read our revenue assumptions in our full investment document here.

Historic financials

Balance sheet

Note from PledgeMe

We have completed Equifax checks on Narrative Muse and their Directors, as well as Google and Insolvency checks. There were no adverse findings.

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