How to Survive’s apps

Wildlife & Nature Identifier

Identify animals, plants, mushrooms, tracks, and other things encountered outdoors.

Point a camera at a plant, animal, track or fungus and get an identification with the confidence stated. It is built to be honest about uncertainty, and it refuses outright to tell anybody whether a mushroom can be eaten.

What a v1 does5 features
  • Identification from a photo, with a confidence figure and the alternatives
  • Tracks, scat and calls as well as whole organisms
  • Local range checks - is this even found here
  • Offline identification for the common species, since signal fails outdoors
  • A hard refusal on fungus edibility, with the reason stated

The market

Adjacent marketNature and species ID
Free and non-profitMerlin Bird ID and Seek, the two best known products in the category

PictureThis charges for plant identification but publishes nothing. Demand is visible in download volume across the category; the paid model is not yet demonstrated. At $5 a month this has to earn its place against free alternatives.

Where these numbers come from
CompanyEarnsReachSource
PictureThisNothing published10,000+ species coveredNo disclosed revenue
Merlin Bird IDFree, grant-fundedNot publishedNon-commercial
Seek / iNaturalistFree, non-profitNot publishedNon-commercial

Why this audience

This audience is outdoors and curious, and identification is the recurring question the content answers. They already ask what something is and want a real answer rather than a guess. The refusal on mushroom edibility will read as credibility to people who take the outdoors seriously.

Before it can launch

  • No certification exists for identification apps, which is the problem rather than the relief. Mushroom edibility carries real liability, so v1 identifies fungi and refuses to say whether they can be eaten

What it earns

Drag me Every figure recalculates as you go.

Paying users1,000

0.021% of 4.7M followers · capped at 50,000

Price per month$5

Opens on the price this idea was costed at, $5.

1,000 paying — 0.021% of 4.7M followers — × $5 a month = $5,000 a month

Paying users0123456789,012345678901234567890123456789
Revenue a month$0123456789,012345678901234567890123456789
Over twelve months$01234567890123456789,012345678901234567890123456789

Fifty thousand paying users is the ceiling every one of these pages is drawn against, not a forecast. It opens at a thousand, the bottom of the range, so the first figures you see are the modest ones. What the cap buys is comparability: the same range on every app, and the percentage of the audience it takes as the number that moves.

Is this the one for your audience?

We fund it, build it, and run it. You bring the audience and take a share of the revenue. Nothing to pay and nothing to build.

Also for How to Survive