Bundle

Kelvin Lockwood was working in account management at a UK advertising agency, earning £35,000 per year (approximately $55,000 USD). After years of mulling over ideas, one opportunity finally pushed him to take the leap. At 33 years old, he made the decision to leave the corporate world and build his own company.

Kelvin identified a clear problem: local news discovery was fragmented across multiple websites and social platforms. While people used Facebook and Twitter to access news, these platforms weren't optimized for location-based information. "My Facebook feed is stuck in the UK whilst I'm here in Austin. It's not that useful to me," he explained. Bundle was built as a location-driven mobile app that leverages the mobile phone's inherent knowledge of a user's location to deliver contextual, hyper-local news from traditional publishers, smaller independent outlets, and community reporters.

At the time of this interview, Bundle was still in testing phase. The app had attracted 50 testers in the UK and 20 in the US. Kelvin was selective about distribution, sending invites to interested users rather than pursuing broad launch strategies.

Kelvin's revenue model centered on mobile advertising. He projected that with 6 million UK users visiting the app three times daily and seeing three ads per session, at a CPM of £5-7 ($7 USD), the business could generate approximately £25 million ($30M+ USD) in annual revenue. He positioned this conservatively compared to giants like Google ($50 CPM per user annually) and Facebook ($12-18 CPM), arguing his lower rate was justified by highly contextual, location-based ad placement.

When pressed on validation metrics, Kelvin acknowledged the challenge of building consumer mobile apps in a landscape dominated by Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. He set an ambitious goal: one million unique monthly users by January 2017, positioning this as a hard deadline to determine whether the product had true market fit.

Bundle was operating out of Capital Factory in Austin as part of an accelerator program. The team was actively testing in both the UK and US markets, building what they hoped would become a world-class mobile experience capable of competing for users' attention in an increasingly crowded mobile ecosystem.