Encarta | We Hosted A SharkTank For SaaS Businesses

00:06

So here's the here's the here's the situation. So this is recorded So this is gonna go live on our podcast feed. So the people listening on the podcast,

00:14

there's you, and then there's people who are live right now. I think over a thousand people live. So we're on this thing called stonks dot com. I guess I gotta I kinda gotta do a disclosure. I'm an investor, Sean, are you an investor? No. But fan. Fan. So stocks dot com, it's they, we were friends with them. They asked us to do this, and it was actually we say no to everything, but this was a cool idea. So, basically, five startups are gonna pitch us, and we're gonna maybe invest, but very likely tear them apart and also compliment them. We're gonna make, like, some good content out of this. Right?

00:47

Yeah.

00:48

Yeah. Okay. Great. I'm down. And we don't know

00:52

much about these startups ahead of time, so it's all gonna be kind of fresh.

00:55

And there's a comment section. Do you see the comment section, Sean? Like, where people are chatting? Yeah. So if, like, if there's any good questions, and also on the stock They can invest. Right? Like, they can just put in money.

01:06

Yeah. So, like, if they see something, I I don't think they can, they're not literally gonna fund the company right there, but they're gonna say, like, I'm interested. Let's talk.

01:13

And, honestly, that's probably what I'm gonna do. I'd never, like, on these things, I I cannot I've seen these things that someone's, like, I'm in for a hundred thousand dollars, and they say they're, like, right on the spot. I'm not that impulsive. Are you?

01:24

Yeah. I'm that impulsive. And it's also more dramatic. So I'm, sucker for the drum. I'll do it. Oh, alright. Well, at least one of us will.

01:32

And then do you if you go to the chat of this video thing, you'll see the order of of people that they're gonna go. And, we're gonna talk to one person. I think they get two minutes, and then we get eight minutes to talk to them, and then it's gonna say, like, time's up, move to the next one. Does that make sense? This is pretty sick. Let's do this. Alright. We have John Hancock

01:52

from Stonks is like our assistant here. He's gonna be feeding this startup. So, John, do you wanna bring the first one up? John, is that a real name?

02:01

I don't think so. Hey, guys.

02:03

What's up, Tarush?

02:05

How's it going? Thank you so much for the time.

02:08

Okay. Take it away.

02:10

Awesome. My name is Tyresh. I'm the founder and CEO of five x. Been fortunate enough to spend my career in the data space from being the first data engineer at sales most recently running data for WeWork supporting thousands of employees. Over the last four years being super interested in the modern data stack. It's estimated that over seventy seven percent of companies in the next ten years in some way, shape, or form, we're gonna use the modern data stack. The problem is that there's a big disconnect in what vendors are selling today. And what customers need. Over ninety percent of customers are investing in data to get a business ROI

02:41

yet the vendors are really focused on selling individual categories

02:45

What this means is that customers have to have expertise. They need to sign multiple contracts. They need to stitch this together. All of this is taking away from actually getting business output.

02:54

5x to the first end to end data platform, which is focused on business output. So we license and integrate with the different vendors in the space. As an end result, we can provide customers with an end to end platform depending on their use cases, industry size budget.

03:08

On top of this, we also have a services model where we can give companies access to high quality engineers who are pre trained on the stack. Today, we interview hundreds of engineers fully automated, and we get to hire the top zero point one percent. End result customers can implement end to end data strategies in weeks instead of spending time signing all these contracts. For less than a year old million dollar run rate, on a POC with zero marketing.

03:31

And we're super excited that we are gonna be profitable by the end of this month.

03:39

Alright.

03:41

Good stuff.

03:43

Sam, so, what does this business do?

03:46

That's what I'm

03:48

I'm trying to I I I was trying to interrupt you earlier, but I think as I was muted,

03:52

I need can you kinda dumb this down for me for a little bit? I'm looking at you. So so let me for the listeners. Alright. So the website is five x

04:00

dot co. Right now, you are raising three hundred thousand dollars at a twenty five million dollar evaluation.

04:07

You got to a million dollars in ARR in less than a year I don't know what POC means. When I see POC at people of color, that's what I thought about. It was a bit point point of concept.

04:18

Okay. So,

04:19

like,

04:20

some companies are telling you that they're gonna pay you up to a million dollars, right, or collectively, or they actually have?

04:27

They actually are paying us monthly.

04:29

And Dude, you got a million dollars at a proof of concept. That sounds pretty sick to me. Okay. Yep. But I'm gonna be honest. I don't know what the hell you do.

04:37

Can you explain to me? I've never worked at a big company before. So I'm kind of like a big dumb idiot. It's not just for big companies. Think of, you know, If you wanna get value from data, fundamentally,

04:47

you need two things. You need infrastructure.

04:49

You need tools, infrastructure. You might have heard of Tableau or Snowflake.

04:53

And the second thing you need is people. Now the way the infrastructure is working today is every vendor is really focused on one small part of the stack. If you wanna do something like analytics, you need to go sign four or five different vendors, sign these upfront contracts,

05:07

and stitch this together yourself.

05:09

Now, if an industry is gonna become mainstream,

05:11

then you can't really expect ninety percent of customers who don't care about. When you say words like vendors, it's it's still hard for me to understand. Give me a very specific example. You use use this format.

05:23

Yeah. You use a format that's like,

05:25

x, x company had y problem.

05:28

Yeah. They they tried z, but the problem with z is this. So then we came in and we do it differently instead.

05:35

Sure. So ex company, you know, wants to figure out

05:41

Sorry. That was confusing. Use one of our customer's bank. Noble wants to figure out where the customers are coming from, how do they personalize the app, how do they save cost, and, you know, optimize this sort of cash flow,

05:52

they

05:53

now

05:54

don't know where to go. They can go buy a single reporting tool like Tableau

06:00

but

06:01

the end to end data strategy is a lot more comprehensive. There's a lot more than just having a dashboarding tool

06:06

instead of having to hire multiple engineers instead of having to go sign all of these different tools and vendors, they come to five x. 5X instantly gives them an end to end platform, which has got all of these vendors. We license these vendors and can give customers an end to end platform.

06:23

On top of this, if bank if bank nova doesn't have their resources to figure out how to go use it, they can add

06:30

engineers on our side who are pre trained on the platform. End result, they're getting business output in weeks, whereas if they try to go do this themselves, it would be twelve times slower and six times more expensive.

06:43

Yeah. Alright. That's way better. And one question. How on earth did you get people to spend a million dollars with you on a proof of concept because this sounds like a very hard thing to sell, and a million dollars is a lot of money on it. And is it actually, like, They're gonna pay you a certain amount of money every single year.

07:00

Yeah. So, you know, at the moment, we, you know, we so in the next two months, our self-service platform will be live. Right? So anyone will be able to go to five x, enter their credit card for a few hundred bucks a month. You'll have

07:12

the you'll have the, you'll have the platform.

07:16

So early stage companies can do this by spending very little money. What we do today because the self-service platform isn't ready,

07:23

we combine

07:25

the a semi automated platform plus a services model. So you get engineers plus you get,

07:32

plus you get the platform. So our average order value at this point, it's about ten k a month.

07:38

Multiplied that by about ten, fifteen customers, we're at a million dollar plus run rate. Which basically means you're doing it by hand from now and then you're, raising money so you can automate it all. Correct. It's semi automated already. It would take a consultant

07:52

about three or four months just to give you that platform.

07:55

They would go build it and they would start from scratch. We do it in less than one day today. That's pretty. Semi automated. And where are these customers coming from? So let's dig into this one million of ARR. So you said you gotta ten k per customer, roughly ten fifteen k.

08:09

And roughly ten customers that are paying you monthly right now.

08:14

You got a hundred k a month, you know, roughly roughly in in revenue. Where did these customers come from? Is this inbound, outbound? Do you have growth strategy. Like, do you have a strategy that would just lead you to the next three million also? Sure. At the moment, we've done zero marketing. We've been really been focused on on the platform. We have been producing content on my LinkedIn,

08:34

on YouTube,

08:36

mainly getting customers by word-of-mouth and by that. So, really, the last eight months were early on

08:43

using this as a proof of contract, using this as a proof of concept. This is not just the technology problem You have to convince all of the vendors in the space to give you API access to provision them, integrate with them, bill for them.

08:56

So, you know, you need it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem, but you need customers. And at the same time, you need to show these vendors that you that you they they actually

09:04

and we become an added sales channel for them.

09:09

Okay.

09:10

I, what else, Sean?

09:13

I guess I'll just give you a little bit of feedback on the pitch itself. So,

09:17

a couple things. Your house, wherever you're at? Super nice.

09:21

Almost distractingly nice. I kinda like my founders to be a little more scrappy than that. Just gonna put that out there. Where are you?

09:28

I'm in bali.

09:30

He's a bollywood man. It's it's probably it's probably not not the most, expensive place. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Second thing,

09:37

you know, I think you wanna I think you tried to get the most information into the pitch, whereas I think you want kinda wanna slow down, and you need to just, like, work on that first thirty seconds.

09:47

To be figure out the thing that I was confused about. Sam was confused about. Most of the chat, if you look on Stonks, was confused about, which was I don't really know what this does. Right? When you say end to end, that makes sense to you because you're knee deep in it. But for us, we've never heard of five x before. So we're, like, end to end what? And you know, all of the all of the words were quite,

10:08

you know, generic. So, like, you know, vendors, blah, blah, blah, And, and and so you what you wanna do is basically just be able to

10:16

to paint a picture. So, you know,

10:19

Did you ever work at a company that had this problem or if you've ever been the marketing manager at a company, you know that you spend almost, you know, six months getting your analytics platform and then integrating it. And then you have to get your CRM and then integrate it. Then you have to do this and then integrate it. And so it takes months just to get set up with the things you need to be able to see your business, and every business has the same problem. So what we do is we go to that person, and we say, hey, use us, and you get x y z, right, benefits out of this. And people are choosing it because of this, we got a million dollars in, an ARR already as a, you know, during our pilot just, you know, in a couple weeks or whatever it is. Now I'm kinda more engaged.

10:56

What else here. And look, look, this is actually quite easy. What year did you join WeWork? Someone in the chat said, this guy made a bunch of money off the WeWork IPO. And then I just went to your website, and it said you worked at WeWork. So I I don't know what the truth is. I don't

11:10

I think

11:12

or twenty seventeen.

11:14

I did not make money off the IPO. That that's okay. That's irrelevant. I it I mean, that would have been if you were. It looks like you did it because you're in that nice house. But,

11:22

I guess what I was trying to get at is

11:25

I would do exactly what Sean said, but I would use the WeWork story. So we were at when I when I worked at WeWork because you were the head of data, it looked like at WeWork or something, like, like, some, like, pretty

11:35

you led data for WeWork, your bios. That's sounds impressive. It doesn't matter if it is, but it sounds like it. And so I would use the story of, like, I led beta at WeWork

11:45

when we were this size, and I grew the company to this size, and a problem that we consistently

11:51

had was blank blank blank.

11:53

And we solved it by hiring tons of people, and it was still, like, riddled with airs.

11:58

And in talking to other people in this data world, I noticed they all had the same problem And so to bootstrap this company and get it off the ground, I hired a couple friends,

12:08

and we actually have been doing this by hand. And we convinced x, y, and z to give us some money and slowly

12:14

or quickly, we've actually automated a lot of it. And we've automated by doing x, y, and z. So now all these companies who wanna get this thing done, they can actually use us. And instead of hiring thirty people, they just use have one person use this bit of software, and it saves them x amount of money and x amount of time. You know what I mean? Like, I have by the way, I'm just Riffen. I don't know any of this is true. No. That was great. But you know what I mean? Yeah. Totally.

12:40

But now if if we should just get to the product, I think it sounds neat. And it looks like my good friend Anker invested, and he's actually quite,

12:50

actually quite impressive as he knows his shit. I I think it's a cool company.

12:54

Yeah. I would I would definitely just based off your traction alone, I would wanna learn more because I'm, like, okay.

13:00

You know, a good pitch is not necessarily

13:02

a good business, but good traction is usually a good business. And so you actually have good traction at a bad pitch. That's okay. So I would wanna learn more and, and dig in to understand

13:12

how much of this is a service and consulting business versus

13:16

is this gonna be software and this is gonna be automated? Because it sounds like you've actually found a problem that people care about.

13:22

We'll see how how kind of durable that is, and then we can go from there. So

13:26

Thanks for coming on, man. I think, you know, for both of us, it seems like the answer is, like, we'd actually wanna learn a little bit more,

13:32

and and look at the deck before we, we go too far.

13:35

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for,

13:39

digging brave and doing this. So,

13:42

Sean, he

13:44

So on this stocks platform, it says he's got seventy five thousand dollars of interest. I do agree this potentially is more of a services play.

13:52

But we actually just talked about that company worldwide technology, and this sounds just like it, doesn't it? Yeah. There's there's several companies that are like this. There's a lot of lot of, SaaS companies have, like, a, like, a either a consulting thing that's how they get embedded,

14:06

or it's, like, just an ongoing revenue stream, and it actually can get quite substantial. So I don't think that's a complete,

14:12

No. I didn't I didn't mean that. I didn't mean that as a diss. Oh, I kinda said it as, like, is this just just consulting because if it was just a consulting company, I I would not do it. But,

14:23

but, yeah, I I was just so confused for half the time that I didn't really get to think about didn't really get to think about the business, to be honest. I was trying to figure out what that does.

14:30

Yeah. That was a a little bit of an error. Hopefully, he'll fix that. But, this type of business, think it'd be sick to own. I don't know if you if I don't know why you'd wanna raise money if you got a million dollars and and just selling By the way, the simple test here is,

14:45

like, just say the first, like, thirty to sixty seconds of your pitch to somebody.

14:50

And then be, like, to a friend and just be like,

14:54

hey, can you play that back to me? Like, so based on what I said, what does my company do? Like, and what you wanna know is, do they get it? First of all, like, you have to get it. And then are you interested in it? Does it sound compelling?

15:04

And if it's not if you don't get it, it's not compelling, like, don't move forward. Don't go to the rest of the pitch, you need a friend or you need, like, random people who are gonna do that. And the format you used was good because you you sort of, like, added the team and credibility. Well, when I was leaving data for WeWork -- Right. You know, all the shenanigans were going on, but in my little corner of the world, we actually had this much, you know, this big problem that we had to deal with And, that's where I kind of realized that every company has this issue that blank and blank blank. And it's like, oh, yeah. That's a good format generically for a pitch. Yeah. I agree.

15:36

Alright.

15:37

John Hancock, you wanna send us the next one?

15:41

Alright. Alright, Kenny. You got it.

15:44

Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on the show. So I am Kenny. I'm one of the co founders of Backerae, and we've built the world's first online marketplace for group airfare. And the problem that we set out to solve is that group airfare, flights of ten or more people traveling to together, it's sold offline.

16:01

So what does this mean? Say that you are a, you're organizing

16:05

an eighth grade school trip and you're flying fifty people from San Francisco to Orlando.

16:10

If you wanna shop for, for quotes, you actually have to call the air call the airlines group desk over the phone. And once you get something that you like, well, the offline nature of group doesn't end there. It's really important to note that group airfare is unlike booking a normal ticket. So it actually takes place in five unique stages and that's from shopping, to deposit, to final payments, and make names list. And before Baccarai, all of that happened over the phone. So we thought in twenty twenty two, this is insane

16:40

that,

16:41

world with so much money in it,

16:43

operates totally offline.

16:45

So we created what's like a b to b Expedia like marketplace for shopping for flights of ten or more people.

16:53

In terms of traction,

16:55

we we did launch Bakarai

16:58

in,

16:59

October of twenty twenty one. We have really strong growth, great unit economics, and we're actually profitable.

17:06

As a business model, we make between ten and fifteen percent margin on flights and from January to April, we've done four point two million dollars worth of total sales.

17:17

We take about seventeen hundred dollars in revenue per per group and have forty corporate customers that are using the platform today.

17:26

And one of the most exciting things that happen as a result of the pandemic is we got a ton of inbound from corporate meeting,

17:33

and team off sites that are looking to book group airfare. It's our fastest growing customer segment, and it's caused us to build out a bunch of tools to meet the needs of meeting planners.

17:44

And you're probably asking

17:46

Why is, why is this the team to bring group airfare from analog to digital? Well, we have really deep,

17:52

domain expertise in group travel. Our CEO, Eric,

17:57

previously sold a tour operator

17:59

business where he kinda learned the ropes of the business, And then our team internally from the service side to the tech side, we have a lot of deep expertise in travel tech. And we think that we have a shot to be both the storefront and the underlying operating system for group airfare. So we'd love to answer any questions that you have about our business.

18:19

Are we live? Or can you hear us? Dude, the top comment is actually pretty funny, which it says fly together

18:26

and group flights dot com is available.

18:31

Go by the domain. Yeah. Go by the domain. Yeah. Get on that one. Yeah. No. You got you got the, the the stocks chat, Adam's value here. They're they're the real value add investor. I love this.

18:42

Also, I like how you just, like, looked out straight. He's like, Go buy the domain.

18:48

My meatloaf.

18:50

Yeah. Goodbye. I thought you were, like, a Chinese gambling website. When you, when you first came on, I thought this was Bakarot. Well, based on your last podcast, that wouldn't be a bad idea too.

19:00

I thought Australian business is crazy.

19:02

Fair enough. What,

19:04

can you imagine? Let me ask a clarifying question on the pitch. You said that you get ten to fifteen percent,

19:10

and I think your chart said Did your charts say a hundred thousand a month in bookings, or did it well, you're I forget what you're but you you said four million

19:19

Between the subtraction slide again? Yeah. It was like four million between January and April. Does that mean that between January

19:26

January and April, you did four million,

19:30

but the yeah. Yeah. So we did That's GMV. Correct? We did. Yeah. Exactly. So we've sold four point two million dollars worth of group airfare, and we're averaging about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue. And that's the revenue that, like, it's real revenue. That's what you have. And how old's the business?

19:49

So we started in twenty eighteen.

19:51

Survive the pandemic just barely,

19:54

and then probably, like, half of our clients kind of, didn't make the pandemic. So it's kind of like a fresh restart for us.

20:01

Prior

20:02

to us launching flight shopping, we were just a trip management platform for tour operators. So, like, if someone did, like, a lot of student travel sending to, like, DC and Orlando,

20:12

they would use our trip management platform just a way to stay organized and make sure that they don't miss deposits and final balances.

20:18

And then we had a lot of time to ourselves during the pandemic. So we made flight shopping because it was our number one request. People don't wanna call the airlines for for quotes. And then how many people work there? We have eleven now. Cool. Got it. Okay.

20:33

So maybe in each of these, Sam, we we do, like,

20:36

first, I kinda like clarifying questions slash, like, reaction to the business, and then maybe some pitch feedback at the end of, like, how to get that better. But, like, okay. So reactions to the business and clarifying questions.

20:45

So,

20:47

you are trying to do group travel,

20:50

for corporate

20:51

and,

20:53

And you said something at the beginning, which was, like, it's in saying that there isn't really a good solution for something with this much money in it. I didn't catch. Did you say how much is spent booking group travel every year? Yeah. So I didn't. It's about a hundred and thirty billion dollars worth of just total group spend.

21:09

And that equates to about five percent of an airline's revenue.

21:14

So floating around about two hundred and twenty five million passengers fly part of a group,

21:19

pre pandemic.

21:21

Okay. Cool. So five percent of airline rev airline revenue is done via via these groups, and that's all kind of the over the phone or some, like, some other old school method at the at the current currently. Exactly. Yep. Okay. Cool. And then what's the why now? Because people have been doing, like, travel startups forever.

21:39

Like, you know, booking dot com pricing. These were, I think, booking dot com pricing came out, like, in nineteen ninety five or crazy like that. Yeah. And so why hasn't nobody tackled this part of it? Because I've seen

21:50

travel startups in every angle

21:53

But what is there anything that's unlocked now, or you're just you you finally have the great idea. What's going on here? No. So not finally have the great idea. We do have some people that are editors that sell a SaaS solution to airlines that allow airlines to make like a white label version of what, of What what we do, the why now is before the pandemic,

22:14

Lufthansa, American Airlines, United is rumored to be working on it. They wanna go digital for their groups, and they've actually instituted a private white label.

22:24

And so we see it happening in the same way that, like, single tickets came online, we think groups will come online. So the airlines are already starting to do the underlying tech, and we think that's amazing.

22:37

And we wanna be basically that that second shelf that they sell their their their group airfare in.

22:45

How are you getting the customers now? Because isn't travel, like, the hardest, like, when I think of, like, hardcore customer acquisition people. I think of, like, online gambling. I think of gaining

22:57

and then, like, travel.

23:00

Like, that seems, like, the most cut one of the most cutthroat industries to get customers, because I think,

23:06

the guys who started Reddit started HitMunk, and

23:09

it didn't work out because they just, like, couldn't get, like, or, you know, it wasn't as big nearly as big as Reddit.

23:15

How how are you getting those customers?

23:17

Yeah. So currently right now, about ninety nine percent of our business is b to b. So we at customers really in two core ways.

23:25

One, we have a referral pro referral program. So we are a

23:30

we're a preferred partner for, like, meeting planners and tour operators in the student travel space. And if you refer us business, we give you, like, five dollars per, per per ticket book. That has been enough to send us so much business that we have to, like, higher and raise money,

23:47

then the second way is kinda old school, like industry events are still really popular. Just meeting with meeting planners and tour operators,

23:55

And then something that we'll try to get better with, in time is, like, SEO.

24:00

There is not a lot of com of competition for, like, the keywords group airfare. Before the pandemic, we got it down to, like, seventy two cents a click. But admittedly, since we just survived, I mean, to have the capital to run a bunch of marketing experiments, we're not doing any paid at the moment.

24:15

And then Until now, you got a bunch of savages in the chat that are all gonna start beating you up.

24:21

They already bought the domain flight together before you could get it. So

24:24

explain what are the terms of the raise? You're raising how much at what valuation?

24:28

Yeah. So we would like to raise one point five million dollars at,

24:33

fifteen million dollar cap.

24:35

Great. So for somebody listening to the podcast, there's people who listen to the podcast that don't, they're not part of, like, the angel investing scene.

24:42

How does a cup are you just fifteen million dollars. Wait. But you said you're doing a hundred fifty thousand a month in revenue. So is it some revenue multiple? Just explain. Where does this fifteen million magic number come from for you? Yeah. So,

24:53

we have our customers book pretty far out. So, like, our average customer books nine nine months out. So through the end of the year, we should make about one point five, one point six million dollars in revenue. And so we just took that top line number and times it by ten to kind of be safe. No. There's been crazy stuff happening, but we wanna be set up first success

25:12

and fair.

25:13

So we just times it by ten. And then what is the, like, what's actually happening under the hood? You didn't show, like, a demo or search engine or how somebody actually does this. Is there are there APIs? Are you just, like, calling the airline yourself under the hood? Like, what's what's actually happening? Yeah. So under the hood, we are connected to with two. Are you familiar with, like, travel technology?

25:33

No. Okay. So really high level. I know that where time is running So we're connected to two GDSs called Sabor and Amadeus. That's how we get the flight content. And then we had to build some stuff on top to make sure that groups work because there's limitations of the legacy system, but I think our time is up, and that could be a whole podcast. Let me ask one let me ask one more question.

25:54

This is something that I love asking everyone that I invest in, which is, like, five, ten, fifteen years down the line. How does this how big? How much revenue are you gonna be making? And how get my money back?

26:05

Yeah. I think that we can be both the store the the storefront and the underlying pipes for groups

26:11

So,

26:12

if you were thinking about getting, like, a ride, you would open the the Uber app. If you were thinking about booking flights of ten or more. I think that you come to back right dot com. But how do I and how so how big do you think the business will get and what's gonna happen? Someone's gonna buy you for dollars. Someone's gonna buy you for a hundred million dollars. You're gonna go public. What do you think will happen? Yeah. I think there's a there's a really,

26:32

a really clear path for us that we get to, like, fifty million dollars in revenue in the next, like, five to six years.

26:39

And beyond that, I'm not totally sure, but I the path to fifty is pretty clear. That's a good answer. Okay. Yeah. That's a great answer. In in general, fantastic pitch, actually.

26:48

The thing I was saying before gotta be clear gotta be compelling in the first minute, You were extremely clear, extremely compelling. I think it's pretty clear. You know your stuff,

26:57

as you were asked questions about it, you had good honest answers. You didn't oversell

27:01

but you,

27:02

you've got to the point on on on each one of those questions. So I think a really strong, really strong pitch, as far as our picture.

27:09

Yeah. I would I I I would I'd love to learn more.

27:12

Cool.

27:14

Awesome.

27:15

Yeah. It was a good one. It was very, very, very, very, very clear. One thing that wasn't clear, which is, like,

27:21

how big is this I mean, I don't know anything about group flights. And it turns out So he said it's, like, it it's a hundred billion dollars worth of tickets booked a year as group flight. Is that what he said? Hundred thirty billion of group spend, which is five percent of all airline is what he said. Yeah. He buried the lead on that one a little bit. Yeah. Exactly. So, like, you know, that question we asked, that's gotta go to the front of his presentation, which is, like,

27:45

you know, Booking Group Travel sucks. And by the way, this sounds like it might just be this fringe thing, but there's over a hundred thirty billion a year. Going through,

27:53

group group travel. And today, that's all done still on the phone, which is crazy because most of all other ticketing, ninety eight other eighty percent of the other ticketing is just done online. Now. That's gonna happen for group travel, and we're gonna make it happen. Right? It would have been like,

28:06

alright. So group travel is defined as ten or more guess how much revenue is booked per year during that? Yeah. Guess how much revenue is is a nice one. A, confidence,

28:15

B makes the other person insecure. See, they're almost always gonna guess wrong when you have a really high number, because they just don't have the right the right frame or the right price. Say a hundred and twenty eight billion that's five percent of all tickets are booked that way. And guess how they book it. They have to call the airline and book it all, like, manually. It's a pain in the butt. Like, that's how I would have done But he did he did really good. And I would put a screenshot of the website to, like, this is a, you know, if I go to, like, whatever delta

28:40

or I go to Expedia, like,

28:42

Look, all the there's a million buttons on the screen. There's not one. If you wanna find the group button, go to help, go to phone this is where you go for that. This is where a hundred thirty billion flows through. Right? Like, I really emphasize that problem, and then I'd show my screen, which is, like, a Google search engine that's, like, here's how it works on fly together.

29:00

You just go here. You just say how many people where you're going, and then we take care of the rest. We do a bunch of crazy stuff under the hood to make that automated.

29:08

And it's working. We have, you know, we've done four million in bookings so far. That translated into a hundred fifty thousand dollars a month of revenue for us. So we're on a x mill in a two million dollar run rate. And, by the end of the year, blah blah blah. Dude, I agree. Everything's the one thing that what it bother there's two things that when startups when I'm talking to them, it bothers me. One is when they use ARR and it's not actually annually recurring revenue. And they're like, well, it means,

29:35

at annual run rate. I'm like, dawg, come on. You know, like, we none of us, like, use that word that way. And the second thing is when they say revenue, but it's GMV, which stands for, I think, but gross -- Merchandise volume. -- so it's, like, if your eBay you sell,

29:48

technically, like, let's say, a hundred billion worth of stuff, but eBay only captures five percent of that, you know, I'm making that up. But, like, I I need it's so confusing me when they see that. I I wrote this note during the thing. Right? Like, I have this little whiteboard here I'm writing on. I wrote revenue presented weirdly because he wrote four point two million in sales, but it was like, that's an aggregate over five months. Then he wrote, like,

30:09

we take one point seven per customer. It's like, Dude, just say how much revenue you have. Like, make that the first one. We do this much per month or per year. That's our current run rate. That's that's not GMV. That's what we take home. In terms of GMV, we've done this much. Right? Like, that would be a big improvement over,

30:25

over the traction side. But Very, very cool company, though. You wanna do another one, mister Hancock? Where you at?

30:33

Hello? What's up?

30:35

All good. And the fax we're doing that. It's actually a pretty fast fascinating

30:42

So my name is Oren. I'm the co founder and CEO of Munch, and I'm accompanied by, Peter and my co founder and CTO.

30:50

We both have some,

30:52

I have too many years of experience in business and tech leadership growers. And we've been in building much for the past few months.

31:00

Getting out of the validation phase and into our MVP and initial traction.

31:06

So what is month? Think about your favorite youtuber.

31:09

Apart from results. Let's say this person has one million subscribers on YouTube.

31:15

Now what if I tell you that chances are that this person

31:20

has almost all

31:22

of of other content professionals

31:24

has only one to two successful distribution platforms.

31:28

I mean, this is mostly the case in, you know, in almost all cases.

31:32

This is because it takes a lot of time, money, professional,

31:36

to succeed on each and every social platform.

31:38

Actually pretty different to be successful on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube,

31:43

totally different platforms and different audiences.

31:47

Due to that, most of them don't even try to, to put it in that effort

31:53

and kind of give up even though it can grow their revenue streams and the monetization potential

31:59

quite

32:00

quite, you know, and quite reasonable as

32:04

numbers.

32:05

32:06

we are a team of builders, dreamers, and content creators on a mission to build the first platform that we serve as a home for coding pre content professionals. There are no other platforms currently serving as a home, as a place that the content profession can do everything

32:21

from,

32:22

creating their,

32:23

their new content based on data driven processes.

32:27

We're purposing the content for different types of forms doing research on what's the next plat next content that they want to create and actually distribute it on all platforms and monetize.

32:37

The current creation market is currently estimated at around sixty five billion dollars with an annual growth rate of fifteen percent. This means that it will get to one hundred forty billion dollars by twenty twenty six. And combine that with the creative economy, we're talking about two two hundred billion dollars market. It's a by the big market.

32:56

And we are currently raising five hundred thousand dollars on top of the nine hundred thousand dollars that we already raised. We have two fifty thousand already committed, and we're looking for two fifty more. The idea is to take this money and use it to boost our dev team and create the the first version of the product by this November,

33:14

increase our traction

33:15

and start,

33:17

and and start testing different pricing levels. With their initial paying customers.

33:24

So we're looking so far some new partners that can actually

33:28

features a bit more about the media business.

33:32

Okay. For first of all, let me say the people who are not English speaking and pitch

33:38

fucking awesome.

33:39

That would I cannot imagine

33:41

how hard that It's not easy. It's not easy. I could tell it wasn't easy. It you you did pretty good, but,

33:48

that seems like a rough thing to have to learn how to do. Congratulations.

33:52

I think that's cool. We we can barely speak when it's our our native language. So, you know, respect for that.

33:59

Okay.

34:00

Now I could be mean.

34:02

That was a horrible pitch, though.

34:04

I respect the attempt, but the actual structure of the pitch,

34:10

was just not great. And, like, you know, in the chat here on Stong on a scale of one to ten, ten being that was super clear and compelling. One being,

34:19

as cloudy and not compelling, give it a score. One to ten. I'm curious what it was for for you guys. One being low, not clear compelling, ten being very, very clear compelling. Type type it in the chat. And they're on, like, a -- Way. -- they're on, like, a fifteen second delay, by the way.

34:33

So let's see what comes through. It's gonna start coming in.

34:36

So I'm seeing an eight and then two two three two one three one two one two one one one Okay. So your job, Oren, is

34:44

to get that two

34:46

into an eight. Right? Because, like, right now, I can barely even give you kind of feedback on the business self. Like, I I went to your website. I went to get munch dot com, and it looks like, basically, what you're doing is a creator spends a ton time, let's say, making a video or a long form post, they're kind of drained by the end of that. And, and so they posted on one platform. They posted on YouTube, You take that content. You turn it into clips. You put it on TikTok. You take that content. You turn it into tweets. You you basically repurpose the content. You chop it up and repurpose it so they can get more juice out of the content they Is that right?

35:18

This is the penetration product. This is what we currently do. We currently have online.

35:22

We can actually, if you want to see an example,

35:26

I allowed myself to take one of your episodes.

35:29

Do you like to see that?

35:31

Can you see that? Yes.

35:34

Okay. So, let's take, for example, this.

35:37

Okay. It was from April six. I kind of played around with it. And what you have here is our system in choosing

35:45

between three to five, the most engaging parts of the original

35:49

video. What do you mean by engaging? We do analysis

35:53

both on scenes

35:55

and visuals

35:57

and,

35:58

any different types of audio effects as well as analyze with using AI. The action spoken words in the in the video in order to understand

36:07

what would be the best clips that can fit into, let's say, a one minute tick tock or a three minutes tick tock or a one minute instagram real. So the idea is that you, as a creator, you can get your original video chopped up into, like you said, into a few clips

36:21

and then turn from landscape to portrait we can publish it, directly to the other,

36:26

to the other platform.

36:28

So this is

36:30

go ahead. Yeah.

36:31

I'm I am human optimization.

36:34

Thank you so

36:35

much. I I Sean, have you ever heard of jelly snack I'm shocked, Oren. You didn't talk about them. You've heard of Jelly Smack. Right? She was waiting for her to raise their name.

36:44

Yeah. We heard about it, Jellie Smack name. Actually, we love make, we love what they're doing, and, we'll have the fact that they are doing all the market education for us, that's talking to content creators about content repurposing at the and the fact that you can be successful equally on all platforms.

37:00

But Jenny's back, and again, we really admire what you're doing. Oh, come on, Oren.

37:05

We really admire what they're doing, but they've been around for six and a half years, and they have five hundred customers and two thousand employees.

37:12

Manual labor is not really

37:15

high-tech,

37:16

new, kind of,

37:18

what we're looking for.

37:19

Using the NLP and Computer Vision, we can do what Jetice Mcdoes.

37:23

Fully automatic

37:24

on a self-service

37:25

basis and fully scalable. This is a whole new

37:29

level of a of a content management.

37:32

And just to be clear, we're starting with cognitive repurposing. My idea is that we distribute the content for the content creator on their behalf on all platforms

37:40

So we can take back the,

37:43

and the analytics that we get from the platforms and then create a kind of a cockpit in which the calling credential sees everything that is going on. And can understand what exactly they need to focus on, where is their niche, what is the topic they need to talk more about, and, and kind of, you know, progress along the lines that every content piece can become thirty to fifty different types of content pieces let's create more data that you can then analyze and then create the whole fibula group. So,

38:12

yeah, this is the idea. We'll have a question real quick. But What's stopping this?

38:18

To me, maybe there's a world where this kind of becomes

38:23

like the,

38:26

you know, buffer buffer dot com started just by, like, you would schedule, like, tweets to go out. And then, like, everyone

38:33

kinda offered that same thing, and that feature became somewhat of a commodity.

38:39

Is there a world where this this thing that you've built becomes a commodity, and you actually have to offer more stuff. Like, for example, I don't actually know if this is true because I don't entirely know how they work. But it seemed like jelly Smack, one of the ways they make money is they actually don't charge the creator, but they put ads on the creator's videos and they take a cut And so it's like the technology that they're offering is just like a feature. And the real value is that they are giving the creators more revenue

39:06

by giving them an ad split. And Or does it be the money maker? Yeah. Yeah. So is there a world where this technology you have really just becomes a commodity and you gotta offer other stuff in order to keep people on?

39:17

Yeah. So the idea is is is actually, you know, like drop shippers have have Shopify and marketers have apps app spot. Content creators will have,

39:26

much. And the idea behind that is that currently there's no platform like that. There's a lot of vacuum in this space. And currently, this vacuum is being filled by

39:36

hundreds of thousands of freelancers on fiber, rock, and a little to to medium agencies. So this is something that people already consume,

39:44

but either they're paying, premium money for their services or they're giving up, like, between and is on ring numbers, thirty to fifty percent of the re revenue that has been generated by the agencies.

39:55

So, yeah, the idea is that it's gonna be

39:58

the central platform for common creators, the central copy they can use

40:03

And in terms of the business model, if this is what you're asking, so we have, like, two options. And we're currently we're still pre seed. We still, you know, plan your own experimenting with the business models. We can do both

40:14

things. We can charge a premium fee for the premium features, and there's a there's a lot of things that we can charge for. Like, you know, creating, taking your podcast and creating Twitter threads for the next month, that we can distribute in the right time,

40:27

or we can just use this inventory that been created

40:31

via Munch and integrate brands

40:34

into it and do brandies and get money from brands and pay the creators.

40:38

So we're still not sure which business model would win. Right. We experiment with both in the next few months, but yeah, it's it's like

40:47

looks like a huge potential.

40:50

So so I would not be interested in investing in this business,

40:54

for a couple reasons, but I I would say, like, you know,

40:57

The main the main too is, like, I feel like it's going to be

41:01

based on how difficult it was to get us interested in the business. I think you're gonna creators are super busy,

41:11

thousand opportunities coming at them at all times. And it seems like you're gonna have to really punch through the noise in order to be able to get there. And I don't really have confidence. You're gonna be able to do that. That's kind of the first piece.

41:21

Second is, like, anytime somebody's using AI I'm like, oh, okay. You know, I gotta see it to believe it. Now I what I will say is

41:29

your pitch with the slides was putting me to sleep, but the pitch where you showed my face. I'm like, oh, wait. That's me. Great.

41:37

You know, so so I would I would definitely lead with the demo.

41:40

And that's not just for us because we create content. A lot of people create content and a lot of investors do, but even if it wasn't us, hey, this is a popular podcast blah blah blah. So here it is. It's the one hour thing. Not everybody's gonna watch it. Today, they pay

41:52

you know, editors and social media people, thousands of dollars a month to go find good clips, cut them out, post them on TikTok, post them on whatever. Because they know they're leaving so much growth on the table if they don't do it. But with months, they'd either be able to do it themselves, or they can hand this tool to the person. They can make ten times more clips

42:10

you know, and and not have to hire as many people. And so then you're explaining, you know, the the like, your demo was the most impressive part of your thing where you're like, look, long video push a button. I get a properly formatted clip option, and I have, you know, ten of these that I could choose from, and we're trying to do this all automatically. Right? So so I think that you can You can make your thing more compelling.

42:31

If you kind of, like, work on how you explain it versus, like, it was all intellectual. It was all theory based. Whereas you want it to be story based. Right? So instead of saying, you know, content creators,

42:41

you know, have complexity when it comes to managing multiple platforms, that's intellectual.

42:47

You wanna make it a story, which is, like,

42:49

here's these guys. They do this stuff. They record this three r thing. The last thing they wanna do is this. Or Hey, for your podcast, right now, we have a five thousand dollar clip contest running. It's like you're paying five thousand dollars just for somebody to cut clips of your of your video into into TikTok, what if I told you I had a tool that would do that automatically for you. And you a producer could just go do this, you know, in ten minutes after the thing. They don't have to rewatch the video. They don't have to do blank, blank blank. They don't have to resize it. Don't have to export it. We've done all of that for you.

43:16

And the best part is, you know,

43:19

blank. And so I think you can make this a lot more compelling But as it is right now, I would not be interested

43:24

in the business.

43:26

Well, thanks for the feedback.

43:29

For that reason,

43:30

out. Do we do the shark tank thing? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

43:34

Yeah. Thanks for the feedback. And regarding customer acquisition,

43:38

actually, this is exactly what we're doing. We we we are creating

43:41

preemptively

43:42

the videos for them, and then we send them

43:45

via an email marketing machine that currently has, like, four to five

43:49

percent conversion rate. And at the the base of eight hundred hundred thousand chronic creators on YouTube, and we're using influencer marketing because it turns out after talking with more than one hundred content creators,

43:59

the way that they learn about new tools and new platforms

44:02

is by

44:03

watching bigger influencers.

44:05

So we're using influencers in order to get to more,

44:09

more customers. It's kind of

44:12

needs because we just

44:14

got to two thousand users in less than two months. So, yeah, it's it's it's kind of starting to grow.

44:21

Cool, Sam. Anything else on your side? The same question,

44:25

that I that I asked the other folks.

44:27

And I don't know why you guys aren't doing it, but paint the picture of, like,

44:31

how's this gonna make me wealthier? You know, like, like, I I, like, get down to, like, my my primal ins my, like, my primal desire here of, like, I'm giving you money. So how big is this going to get and how do you sell or go public and I get paid more than what I gave you? You know, like paint that picture for me.

44:49

Yeah. So

44:50

why once we have five thousand users, paying users, we're gonna hit the one minute out ARR. It's an actual ARR because it's recurring revenue once you charge them on a on a monthly basis.

45:02

And there is

45:04

serious, virality,

45:06

and symptom

45:07

in the area of content creation. It's kind of a PLG

45:10

because once you create content with management, we have our logo and some mentioned too much on the on the content.

45:17

The idea is that other creators are watching and getting into the game. So it's gonna

45:22

be,

45:23

a very, very quick growth. In terms of sizes, current market is sixty five billion dollars. It's gonna grow aggressively in the next few years. So, you know, Skye is the limit. It's gonna be a unicorn. It's gonna be a big company, and this is what we're aiming for. Good. I appreciate you. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Thank you. See you, Lauren. Bye. I, Sean, man. Like, what I was saying to him about the the English

45:46

thing,

45:47

dude, it is

45:49

If you don't speak if you have a an accent, you are at such a logis like, just in terms of logistics and understanding everything, you are such a disadvantage for these things. It's a really, really hard thing to to overcome. And it it's I mean, it's cool that people are,

46:05

overcome it, but holy moly, I would not wanna be in that position. It is tough. Right?

46:10

It is really hard. And,

46:12

And, you know, I feel like,

46:15

that's why I think the the deck and the story, I think, need to be kind of, like, crafted well. So that that can be the kind of, like, universal language that you're working with as you as you go through this. I, like, as an investor, and even just, like, when I'm ever trying to assess out anything, I have to work extra hard to be like, okay. This person

46:33

well, like, a lot of times we're investing sometimes we're investing just on charm, like, Alright. This person is

46:39

charming enough that I feel as though they're con they can convince other customers

46:43

to buy or or they can convince employees to join their company

46:47

you know, that's, like, kinda, like, that Adam WeWork guy thing. And then there's other times where I'm, like, okay, but, like, what's the idea here? Is the idea good? And I have to

46:57

kind of challenged myself to be, like,

47:00

to, like, look beyond where they currently are because of maybe, like, a lack of

47:05

It's just hard to understand, man. That that it makes a difference. And that and and I have to, like, overcome that a little bit.

47:12

Yeah.

47:13

And I would say some of my best investments have come from very charismatic CEOs and some of my absolute worst investments have come from charismatic CEOs. It cuts both ways

47:22

on that

47:23

Absolutely. By the way, I can't get into stocks. It's, like, dead for me. So I don't know if I had to refresh it as well, and everyone in the chat is saying they had to refresh it too. Yeah. When I refresh them, I mean, but alright.

47:34

Either way, that's okay. I don't I don't need that open.

47:36

Do we wanna do another one? I think one more or two more. One more?

47:43

There's Allison, Nicholas. Alright.

47:46

47:47

Zaza. Sorry. I don't know who's presenting.

47:49

Alright. That's me. Hey, guys. How are you? You guys

47:54

can

47:58

see my name?

48:04

I think they can. Alright.

48:07

What's going on? Name is Zada, CEO, and co founder of Nicholas. Before this, I was the head of international expansion at Huffington Post.

48:15

After that, I was groomed to be the CRO where I discovered we were not profitable. We were the largest new site in the world outside of China. And I didn't know before I took the job that we actually hadn't found a way to monetize the two hundred million people coming to our website globally.

48:32

I'm Allison Pazio, O and co founder.

48:35

Part of this, I was actually a banker for about ten years.

48:39

And our way of sharing news and information on the team was to have my EA print out an article, leave it on the center conference table and say, please read. And that's certainly not a way of sharing news and information that scale is when you're working on remote teams, distributed teams, asynchronous teams. So Nicole Pass really saw for all of that.

48:57

And

48:58

awesome. I'll just jump in. One of the things that we've come up with is the what we call cocktail party pitch. When we're at a party, people are like, what does nickel pass do? And what we say is, you know how you get,

49:09

an article from a friend shared with you, and you get that pop up that says pay for full site.

49:14

Well, we invented a product where you never see that again. And the way our business works is we sell it to enterprises, which allows them to get up seventy percent off of retail, and we customize the pass based on what each department and team and user needs to be successful.

49:29

So here's the nickel pass.

49:32

I'm in front of a business insider paywall.

49:35

I click a button. Oops. I don't think

49:37

there we go.

49:39

Okay. There we go.

49:41

Through the payroll.

49:46

So I hit a payroll.

49:49

I go to my nickel pass, which is a Chrome extension,

49:53

click on business insider, and that's it. I never see a paywall again.

49:58

So it looks like we're having a little bit of who's sharing what, but you guys saw the product.

50:03

A couple things about the business So because of our background, the chairman of the company is the former head of strategy at CNN,

50:10

we've been able to collect a network of two hundred publications, including the the LA Times,

50:16

Crunchbase Pro, Time Magazine, and we always like to point out that Beer Business Daily is on here for a reason. If I'm an enterprise, we work with anheuser bus, they don't need just the New York Times. They also need, beer business daily, which tells them about how the craft beer market is doing in the Pacific Northwest.

50:31

In terms of the business, we've booked over a million in revenue. So that's a million of hard revenue, one point two. Bookings,

50:38

Some above the companies we work with include Anheuser Bush has mentioned, visa, and also Publicis and Habas, which are respectively

50:46

the number one and number two marketing and PR agencies

50:49

in the world. In terms of why people come to us, if you wanted to get these subscriptions yourself,

50:55

BR guests, it costs you over a thousand dollars a year just for five different sites. Obviously, that's not gonna scale. If you're an enterprise, and some of the other problems in the space and the reason we've been able to get some attraction in eighteen months.

51:07

Number two, there is no tech enabled way to buy group subscriptions. So if you want a ten license the New York Times today. You're essentially filling out a form, and then number three,

51:18

now three out of every four new sites require a subscription or have a paywall. When we started the business,

51:24

now a little over three years ago, that number was at, thirty percent. So about one in three sites.

51:31

So we'll stop there. This is awesome.

51:34

This is awesome.

51:35

So we we could just recap,

51:37

because I think some people are having trouble in the stocks first, they might have missed the beginning of the pitch. But basically, what you did is

51:43

I work at a company. I go try to click some article to read some important news story that some of my coworkers sent me. I hit hit with a payroll. I'll shut. Hey, man. What did it say? I don't have a business insider subscription.

51:54

Uh-huh. And

51:56

our company, which is, let's pretend we work at Google, Oh, Google uses Nicole Pass. So I can just use the Chrome extension and bypass the payroll because Google has paid for a multi seat,

52:05

license to business insider. So business insider is getting this huge bulk subscription buy at they'll give it at a discount. Yep. Google wants its employees to be able to read news and employees don't have to pay for it out of pocket. That's what happens. That's that's That's exactly all. I'll add some other things. Publishers right now convert less than one percent of the people that come to their website to pay for the full subscription. It's a win win for everyone where they they're basically getting all of these people that they would be monetizing at cents on the dollar per year from advertising.

52:33

But do you if if Google buys twenty seats,

52:37

do they only get business insider or do they also get the other publications you had listed there. And if they if the second one, how do you figure out who which publisher gets paid? What money?

52:46

Right. Yes. So we have over two hundred publishers in our network. We add more every day.

52:52

We create bespoke packages. So how we have an initial package that you pick six out of ten publications. It includes business insider and many others, and that's twenty three ninety five a user a month. For that package.

53:05

After that, we'll upsell from there, and we work with customers to design custom packages based on the industry you're in and the role you're in in your industry.

53:14

So if you work at a big bank and you're in marketing and PR, you're gonna need a very different

53:19

set of publications

53:20

than someone who's at the comms team at Google, but you're we'll be able to work with you to customize that. And a lot of that, you're now able to do on your own on administrative panel. But then how does,

53:31

if let's just use round numbers. Let's say it's thirty dollars a month. Does this and you have two publications, does business and federal get ten dollars, New York Times get ten dollars, and you guys get ten dollars? So what we do is we work with the publishers to either take rate cards they have or create ones from scratch. And so that way in the custom package, the publisher has always made holes. So in your example, it all depends on the number of seats that Google signs up with. So if they sign up with,

53:58

ten people or a thousand people, the price may go from ten dollars a month, which is a twenty percent discount off of retail to two dollars a month, which is, you know, much more off of retail. And then we bundle that and then charge an administrative fee on top of that, and that's the bespoke package what's the fees percent?

54:17

So right now gross margin is anywhere from forty four to fifty five percent.

54:22

And that's a combination of not only the seat fee, but we integrate with, Octa, Microsoft Active Directory. So it's really single sign on for news, public defense, and we basically handle all of the admin,

54:33

for both the enterprise and the publisher.

54:36

That's amazing. So, let's talk let's talk about the track Okay. So you showed a bunch of publications that you guys have gotten to agree with this. How many companies are paying for this? I don't know if I I missed that part or, it wasn't in there.

54:49

Yes. Yep. So

54:51

we have over a hundred and twenty five companies who we currently work with and we're we're adding more every day, both, smaller companies as well as large enterprises.

55:00

And what does that mean for revenue for you guys?

55:04

Yep. So we're at one point two million,

55:07

ARR and we're on track to be three million by the end of the year.

55:12

And raising at a fifteen million dollar evaluation.

55:16

And -- That's correct. -- that's three million as in net revenue.

55:21

And you get or is that three million as in you there's three million there's three million for the bundle and you take forty five to fifty percent of it. Correct. Yeah. The set the second one.

55:32

Correct.

55:33

So more like one point five million. Is that in real in net revenue. Is that right?

55:39

In net revenue. Yes. One point five. And,

55:43

okay. Great. And so and how are you how do you go on board customers? So what what do you do to go get the next

55:49

twenty five, fifty customers. What what happens?

55:53

Well, I think one of the things that we're really excited about is the hundred and twenty companies we have. They have over four hundred thousand employees.

56:00

So what we found is that it's much easier to upsell within an organization once you land them. So what we're seeing is that our growth trajectory. If we go from the one percent to the three percent, that's how you get to the three. And that's why only focusing on two segments right now, marketing and PR and the consumer finance, that doesn't count telco, doesn't count, some of the tech companies you mentioned, it doesn't count international, which is actually my background for the post.

56:24

Gotcha. So you're just gonna expand within the companies you're already in to get to to get to three million gross. Okay. But how do you get more customers

56:31

here, what is the strategy? Is it outbound? Is it inbound? Is it a referral program? What what do you do? Yep.

56:37

Yeah. It's we primarily have cold outbound marketing strategy.

56:41

So we do a lot of lead gen,

56:44

and then we do some organic search, organic social. And now this is a cost to companies at a time when a lot of companies are cutting costs. Right? So today,

56:52

they're just not paying for this, and employees are just not getting the benefit or they're paying, you know, employees pay out of pocket. Yep. If I do this and I have, you know, one percent of my employees doing this, all of a sudden, I've added

57:04

I don't know what your what your average volume is, but let's say ten grand ten ten grand,

57:09

a year. What what is the average cost to a company?

57:12

So that that's grown. When we first started, it was a roughly the seven to ten brand a year. Now what we're seeing is, fifty k.

57:20

And that, having opportunity to grow. And here's the thing, you know, people see it from two lenses. So there is the cost savings, and they look at our customer, like, well, better than everyone buying it at retail than expensing it back to the company. So that's one thing. The second thing is, in a time like this,

57:34

if you miss a critical piece of news in your industry, The opportunity cost for that is much higher. And so you're gonna feel some type of way for not paying the fifty bucks per person per seat because you're like, oh, I was trying to, like,

57:47

basically refine the cost. We like to say what we're going after is the budget people used to use on soda machines because this is one of those

57:58

Uh-oh. Oh, I think we've lost as a

58:02

there.

58:03

But, yes, this is an expense that people actually already have. They just don't realize that frequently it's being put on personal cards and then expense back to the company. So the other thing that we're doing is actually giving finance and procurement a single line item. So they really understand how much they're spending on news and information and data, which for the forty professional,

58:23

the forty million thousand the forty million professional services workers in the US is extremely important to know.

58:30

Okay. Great.

58:31

I also feel like there's probably some strategy where you go to anheuser Bush and anheuser, you know, once they have their one percent of people and you go to every other

58:39

beer company out there and you say, hey, Anheuser Bush does this so that their employees can read Beere Journal Daily and this and that, you know, would you guys be interested? There's I think within industries, you could sort of play, play off each other a little bit.

58:52

Exactly. And we we've seen that, social proof model work extremely well with marketing and PR firms and with financial services firms. Allison, how big is this gonna get? You know, what do you what you're gonna get to a hundred million in recurring revenue? What's gonna happen?

59:06

Yeah. Without a doubt. So we are we see ourselves as really the next version of cable,

59:12

and how we access news content and information,

59:16

digitally is gonna change drastically from how it it works today.

59:20

And Nicole Pass is gonna be the single stop solution for that What, how many employees?

59:25

Let me ask that. Same question a little bit differently. Because Sam likes to hear the kind of how big is the dream. I I like to hear a little bit differently, which is What would I need to believe

59:34

for this to be at a hundred million in revenue? Meaning, how many companies, how many people would it how do you work your way to a hundred million in revenue?

59:42

Yeah. So our goal has always been to get everyone access to quality and news and information. And by everyone, we don't just mean professional services workers

59:50

we also mean individuals.

59:52

And there's a certain price point that individuals can pay for access to quality news and information.

59:58

So we're exploring what that is, but I think it's extremely important to note that over the past five years, we've understood. And I think the general problem So, actually, it should be the math. So, like, this many companies paying this much a month is a hundred million of revenue. And then

01:00:12

I need to know is that a believable number of companies. That's, like, you know, out of the total universe, how many companies would you need to be paying you to for you to be at that point?

01:00:20

Yeah. So we'd need to be at about,

01:00:23

ten thousand companies based on on our now. So ten thousand companies, and,

01:00:29

you think that those will, you know, right now, you're at whatever twenty five. You think by the end of the year, you can get to

01:00:35

maybe forty or fifty, something like that. How Oh, no. No. So we're at a hundred and fifty. Right? I'm

01:00:39

sorry. You're at a hundred and fifty. Great. Yeah. We're we're you know, well beyond the that initial group. And what are you guys gonna have to do to go from a hundred fifty to ten thousand companies? What will actually need to happen?

01:00:50

Yeah. So it's it's two pronged. It's that we have to increase our penetration rate on the existing companies from one percent to three percent.

01:00:57

On that number is even achievable up to the five or ten percent range. And then we have to increase our penetration in the in the specific sectors.

01:01:06

From currently point o one percent

01:01:08

to, closer to one percent in each sector. So financial services, marketing, and PR

01:01:14

and then universities and associations as well.

01:01:18

Gotcha. Okay. Alright. Thanks. I think, we might have to apply. I had one more. Did you have you raised any money so far? And from who? Yeah.

01:01:24

Yeah. So we've raised about five million so far.

01:01:27

That's our last round was led by river park ventures so that

01:01:32

seamless,

01:01:34

food ordering company co founders because they took the same b to b model to get to a b to c model.

01:01:40

And we have a number of, other institutions as well, sixty eight capital,

01:01:45

rain ventures. Damn, you raised five million at a fifteen million dollar valuation?

01:01:50

No. Smaller valuation in the past. So this new this new round is, fifteen million pre money.

01:01:56

So you gave up a lot of the companies for stuff. How are you gonna stay motivated? You gotta

01:02:02

Yeah. So I understood. So we are, reworking the table as we speak because basically we pivoted the company

01:02:09

from a blockchain micro payments.

01:02:12

And so that's total

01:02:14

over the pivot.

01:02:17

That's,

01:02:18

By the way, re respect for pivoting away from blockchain. That sort of shows me that you're a clear and independent thinker that didn't just, like, oh, here's the trend.

01:02:28

We are a web three company for micro payments. You can get the lightning, and it's like, what do what do our customers actually want? And in this case, you found out what they actually wanted, which was not not that -- Not that. -- or something else. Yeah. Cut customers hated it. Public shers loved it, but it wasn't selling to, to anyone as as recurring revenue. Right? And we could have raised it a much higher valuation,

01:02:47

but we chose to pivot. I think I think your product is awesome. It sounds like your cap table is shitty to be blunt. I would love I would love to hear a little bit more about how I don't wanna hear about it now, but, like, how you're gonna get out of that situation. I think it's it's hopefully, it's

01:03:02

fixable because this product sounds pretty sick.

01:03:05

And we gotta ask. People are asking, why what does nickel pass? What is his name? Why are you named after nickelback?

01:03:11

News used to cost a nickel. So that's why.

01:03:15

Okay. Alright. Great.

01:03:17

And now it's got twenty twenty three dollars per person per month. Twenty three dollars a month. Yep. Congratulations.

01:03:22

This is sick. This is sick. I think your pitch was awesome. I said what I thought about the cap table, the product's bad ass.

01:03:29

It's One little thing between you. Your act together though. Between you and your co founder, you guys should figure out who's gonna answer questions and which types of questions so you automatically know when to defer because it's a little bit of a signal when you're doing a pitch and, like, both are kind of, like, me and Sam do this. We talk over each other a little bit. It's okay to podcast our realm, but as a company, you kinda need to know, okay, technical questions this person's gonna answer, growth questions this person's gonna answer,

01:03:53

or this one person's gonna answer everything, and then they're gonna say, you know, Allison, why don't you talk about that? You're you're, you know, knows it's better than anybody. And so you'll be able to kinda defer, a little bit better,

01:04:03

in that sense. But good really good job overall with the pitch. That's my only kinda, like, pitch feedback for you.

01:04:08

Great. Thank you, guys.

01:04:12

This data is wrong. April freaking time.

01:04:15

Have you heard of HubSpot?

01:04:17

HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Well, I can see the clients hold history, calls, support tickets, emails,

01:04:24

and used a task from three days ago, I totally missed.

01:04:29

Hubspot, grow better.

01:04:32

Sick sick company. God damn, man. That cap table really fucks things up for her.

01:04:38

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's okay, though. I think it's recoverable

01:04:42

or,

01:04:43

you know, like, some people, like, you know, how are you gonna stay motivated? Some people are motivated

01:04:48

Yeah. The numb whether the number whether they own fifty percent or thirty five percent, they they sort of feel the same about it. It's their baby. And also can be motivated by the request. That's cool. Getting away so much of the company in the first That's crazy to me. I I,

01:05:01

I, am friends with this guy who sold his company for a billion dollars

01:05:05

and he nine hundred ninety million, and he walked away with three million dollars because he had it was five of them, either or four of them. So it was four or five of them, and then they raised all this money. And he walked away with three million dollars on a billion dollar value

01:05:20

sale. Annette, Tracy. I I can't.

01:05:23

I don't understand how you get motivated

01:05:25

when you're not gonna get paid.

01:05:27

Yeah. Well, some people,

01:05:29

some people motivated by the mission. Some people don't do the math. Some people are like, well, fuck. I'm stuck now. I made that mistake. And now,

01:05:37

I guess I gotta live with that. I gotta I guess I gotta eat that one.

01:05:41

By the way, shout out to her, we don't do public math, but we sure as hell make founders do public math when they pitch us, because, you know, you gotta be able to answer that question. In fact, I don't even care what the like, some people think that when I ask that question, how do you get to a hundred million or how do you get to ten ARR.

01:05:56

I'm, like, judging whether,

01:05:58

I'm judging whether

01:06:00

that thing sounds feasible or not, and that's part of it. The bigger part of it is, does this seem like the first time they've done this math, or have they done this before? Because if they haven't done it before, I'm like, oh, this person is not actually thinking of plotting how to, like, take over and, like, how to build this into something big. They're just kind of, like, buried their head in product. And, like, they may not have if they haven't thought of it up till now, they're probably not gonna be thinking about that in the future. In this case, I thought that she

01:06:24

she had an answer. I haven't done the math that she could go check if that answer was, like, you know, bullshit or real, but she had at least thought about. We need ten thousand companies at our current, you know, pricing and scale to be at that, you know, that revenue mark. Well, and I and and I think people, like, think it's a trick question towards, like, how does this get big or,

01:06:43

how are you gonna exit? And they'll say, like, this bullshit of, like, well, we're not thinking about an exit. It's like, dude, come on. Just, like, this, like, talk real. I'd like, like, a a good answer is, like, well, the worst case scenario is I think we'll get to five million in this many years. And someone's gonna buy us for fifty million dollars, and you'll get a two or three return. I think that's, like, a likely worst case scenario, best case scenario. I actually think we have a clear path to seventy five million, and we're gonna figure out as we go. And I think these possible doors might open up, and then we could either go public, which I would love to go public, or we could sell for this much money, or we just own the company forever and we've grown to this.

01:07:19

See, I think that answer works on you because you invest your own money. For most venture capitalists, they're investing in other people's money. They don't care about the two to three x.

01:07:27

I know, but I've mentioned the downside protection. It's, like, to them, it's either a zero or it's huge. And so you're better off focusing most of the energy on the

01:07:35

how this ends up huge. And you might just say, you might say things like,

01:07:39

so you don't have to say, oh, man, I can't wait to go sell this for a billion dollars. But I think you could say, like, Like, we had a buddy Ramon who who was telling us about this. He's like, look, right now I have, you know, I don't know what what it was. Like, a hundred thousand

01:07:52

you know, like pet owners,

01:07:55

who have bought for me. And I know their name, their address, their dog's name, their dogs breed, their dogs age. I know everything about them. He goes, and he named, like, the big, you know, chewy doesn't know any of that because they sell

01:08:07

on store shelves. But I have the largest databases. I think that asset's gonna be worth a lot of money to one of these companies. And I think that, you know, that's beyond just sales that we're already doing. And so you can kind of say your downside protection that we're building a valuable asset. That's kinda what I mean. I'm just saying that, like, at just it it's okay to show weakness, and it's okay to show uncertainty.

01:08:26

But at the same time, you also wanna have, like, yeah, but I think this could happen, and here's how. What the flight booking guy said is also perfect, which is you don't have to say there's gonna be a billion dollar company. You're just gonna autopilot like a, you know, venture capital robot. Like, you know, what he could say is basically

01:08:43

You know, he's like he's like, you know, I don't know what the I don't know where the ceiling of this is because nobody's ever done this before. But there's a clear path to seventy five million, and we're gonna get there, then we're gonna look up and figure out what's next. And I I think that's a totally honest, but also exciting version of that answer. Which is to say, like, look, we don't know how high this thing can fly, but I know there's a clear path to this. I'm just laser focused. Fifty million a hour. Before I go to bed, kissed my daughter good night, and I say fifty million in ARR. And when I wake up and I'm brushing my teeth, I say fifty million ARR, and because I know that that's what's in front of us. And, like, I can't sleep because it's so obvious that there's a step by step path to go get there. So you can say some bullshit like that and people get, like, people start to believe

01:09:23

that you believe that that's your certainty that there's a clear path to that makes them certain there's a clear path to it. That asked. Let's do the last one.

01:09:34

What's up, Colton? Take it away.

01:09:37

Hi.

01:09:38

I'm Colton Woodard, founder of Little Ducky's pool company.

01:09:41

I'm a pull industry expert with a knack for sourcing companies that may not know they wanna sell and creating acquisition plan.

01:09:48

Started out with my own pool maintenance business from zero clients.

01:09:52

Now I make about eighteen thousand monthly recurring revenue.

01:09:56

All in under three years. My father-in-law owns a large pool resurfacing company in Orlando, Florida, and found our first private acquisition deal from a friend who was feeling like he was ready to retire.

01:10:07

Instead of just letting his business dissolve, we negotiated a purchase at about a multiple,

01:10:12

a, you know, four months of the monthly gross revenue.

01:10:16

Currently, we've secured two upcoming purchase contracts in the South Florida pool construction sector,

01:10:21

With another in negotiation for quarter four, we are projecting ten point three million in gross for our twenty twenty three sales. With a yearly increase of thirteen percent as we streamline the processes and add in modern tech.

01:10:34

Our working builder portfolio of pool construction companies in South Florida,

01:10:38

and gain a majority of the market share and then add in pool cleaning and maintenance on these accounts for additional monthly reoccurring revenue.

01:10:46

Ideally, we'd like to secure locations in all of South Florida within the next five years

01:10:51

with four owner operators in place who know the industry, know the business, how to utilize specific contractors,

01:10:58

we're looking to take over the industry and build an empire.

01:11:01

Like real estate, now is the hottest time to invest in South Florida pool construction.

01:11:10

Sick. So

01:11:13

let me bay is this basically like a PE play where you're buying,

01:11:18

baby boomers

01:11:20

businesses who put pools in a people's backyards?

01:11:25

In a simple, in a simple explanation, kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's it's a little harder than that because, you know, South forty, you dig fifty four inches. You hit water. So if you don't know what you're doing, you could really muck it up.

01:11:37

But, yeah, so we know the industry. We know the pool. We know pool construction.

01:11:42

So we can find people that already retire.

01:11:44

And instead of letting their business just go to the wind and the other guys pick it all up,

01:11:51

we can utilize different contractors that specialize in, you know, form and steel excavation.

01:11:57

Take his company and he sub contracts out to the plumbing guys. And the tile guys, the screen enclosure guys, and he's spending so much money on paying subcontractors, whatever they need to charge, because he's gotta hire because he can't do it himself.

01:12:12

So we buy these individual companies that can complement each other, bring everything in house, and we can get our permits done faster

01:12:19

reduce our wait times and increase profits and turn over more projects year over year. So that's why we're looking at thirteen percent increase

01:12:27

on our on our productivity problem. So just expect

01:12:30

multiple choice answer. Your company does what? Do you, a, sell software

01:12:35

b, buy existing pool companies,

01:12:39

01:12:40

invested in FICO's, or d, other? Which one of those four things do you do? B, we we buy pool companies mergers and acquisitions. Yeah. So you you're rolling up pool companies, and you're rolling them up, and you are, a good you are not buying them for less or anything like that. You buy them at some fair value, but you are better operating because you do what?

01:13:00

You, have different expertise in house. B, you have better software.

01:13:05

C, you, have economies of scale. What is the the advantage you have, which by the way? A and b. So we we know the business. We do it well, and we implement modern technology.

01:13:16

So three d modeling designs for the pools so we can email it to customer. We don't gotta go to their house with a pen and paper and show them how it's done. So we can just email it over. And then also since COVID hit, permitting has been horrible, slowed down a lot. Now we can do digital permitting where we can be on video chat with the, with the county that we're working with. And when they give you right on the phone, we could show them step by step and get the phases approved without having to wait time on their schedule for them to come to the site. So the result is you guys build pools for faster and cheaper. How much faster and how much cheaper?

01:13:51

We build them faster. We don't build them cheaper. Like, how never a fast point.

01:13:57

It it depends on the county. You know, each county is gonna be a little bit different. But if you don't have to wait on the subcontractors

01:14:03

to get you on their schedule or not show up and and reschedule on you, it's it's gonna be at least twenty percent faster.

01:14:10

A percent faster. Okay. Great. And you up till now, you've bought how many pool companies?

01:14:15

So right now, we've signed we have our own. We own two. But we bought, we have two purchase contracts signed in agreement, and we have one in negotiation,

01:14:24

that we're looking to get another round of funding for. And then explain when you buy a business like this, you know, it has this much in EBITDA. Typically, it's been in business for ten years or whatever. And you're buying it at at some multiple

01:14:37

and you're financing it how?

01:14:40

Well, the first two, we sold our houses.

01:14:43

Okay. What are you gonna do for the next two?

01:14:46

We're looking to raise capital, and then we're also gonna make a plan using the,

01:14:51

signed contracts. Usually, you're two years out you know, two years booked out with these with these contracts for the pool companies that we're buying. So not only were we buying the company, we're buying the crew, We're having the owner stay on for two years as a consultant while we put a project manager in place for him to train. And then we're getting all of those contracts

01:15:11

and they get paid in phases. So we use some of the working capital to put aside into another fund to use to purchase more businesses

01:15:18

as we as we roll out

01:15:20

all the locations we need between, like I said, form and steel, excavation,

01:15:24

shotcrete,

01:15:25

tile Marcyte, plaster, guys, we're we're gonna buy all the specialty contractors and roll them on to one company. So

01:15:32

Sean and I is one of our best investments ever. We think we both invested at the same time into a biz Shawnee. Still there? Yeah. We both invest we invested into this business

01:15:42

the started by our friend, Cieva called endure Ventures, and his whole premise was to buy businesses

01:15:49

that baby boomers who wanna retire and their kids don't wanna take it over, basically. And That's exactly what's going on. And Sam Zell, Sam Zell is the guy who basically created the REIT. He, owned Schwin Bikes. He owned the Tribune. He owned a bunch of stuff.

01:16:05

Rich guy. He owned waste management, I think.

01:16:08

Anyway, he said recently in a podcast that he is making more money off of buying businesses from baby boomers who don't wanna pass their companies onto the kids, than he has ever made in real estate. Yeah. And so that's just for the proof that this is actually quite interesting. And I think Siva actually bought a pool business, didn't he?

01:16:26

Sean? Yeah. Yeah. Dolphin pools. It's in Arizona.

01:16:29

Yeah. And they're killing it. I would argue that that's probably the path you should go And for these pitches, you should entirely

01:16:36

pitch it that way.

01:16:39

Another way that you could maybe pitch is The guy who started I was gonna bring this up on the podcast, Sean, but the guy who started we were,

01:16:47

we, Upwork. Have you heard of Upwork? It's like the outsourcing tech company. He, started this new company called I actually don't know how he's Eregion,

01:16:56

e r g e o n. And it's a fence contractor and installation and repair business. And he just raised, like, forty million dollars for it, and he bootstrapped it to, like, four hundred employees. Do you see this Sean? No. I've never seen that. That's crazy. Dude, it just got relaunched, like, or it just got released, like, two days ago on TechCrunch. He was like, I they're like, we we wanted to keep this in the DL, but basically we bootstrap this this into a monster business and we just raised financing for it and at a huge valuation because getting someone to build a fence. It's a pain in the ass. Well, we just went and just, like, you so what they did is they used a little bit of technology and they made the process easier and better. What CAave is doing is he's just saying no one wants these businesses. We're gonna buy them for cheap, and we're just gonna install a manager and let it run. So, anyway, I think if I was to you, I would go one of those two routes and I would go all in on one of those two routes. I imagine

01:17:47

seeing that your website I went to it. It looks like it's built on Wix. Technology is not gonna be where you're gonna play. It's gonna be the PE route. But the problem is is you don't actually seem entirely bought in on that route.

01:17:58

So that's, like, my fairly critical feedback. Did you think I hit the nail on the head there, Sean?

01:18:03

Yeah. Well, I can go ahead and call. If I can interject,

01:18:06

I I think that yeah. That's that's pretty accurate. It's a little it's a little bit more difficult.

01:18:12

You know, these guys, they are retiring But they also it's very difficult to get into this industry. You have to have four years of experience and then go in front of a board, the DPBR,

01:18:22

to even get approved to have the license to do it. So it's not like

01:18:26

Millennials or Gen Z can just, hey, I'm gonna start a pool construction company today.

01:18:32

You're gonna have to go work for somebody for four years to get that experience to even do it. So it's it's really not super turnkey, so there's not a lot of competition

01:18:41

for the PE,

01:18:43

to go out and scoop them up. You know, we're we're poised and ready to strike.

01:18:49

Okay.

01:18:50

Yeah. I would say I'm just gonna give you some pitch feedback because I think your pitch was, confusing

01:18:57

and therefore

01:18:58

hard to

01:18:59

phrase money, which is what we're here to do. Right? So,

01:19:03

number one, like use a you you had a slide up there that had a bunch of text, but then you talked a bunch, and you weren't talking exactly a you weren't just saying the points on the slide. You were telling a story, which is good. It's good to tell a story. But if you're gonna tell a story, put like a picture on the screen.

01:19:16

So it's like, you know, this is, you know, this is my pool company. We've been doing this. This business spits off this much cash. And we're, you know, we're not alone. There's

01:19:26

four hundred of these just in the Florida area where I, you know, where I'm from. And I bought two more of these, and these are great businesses to buy. In fact, I sold my house to buy these because they're such a better investment than my home. And, you know, this first one we bought, we bought it for this It's already paid itself off in two years and blah blah blah. The second one, blah blah blah. Same thing. And for each one of these, we have a playbook of how to buy it grow it and, like, improve it from where it was. We improve each of these businesses by over twenty five percent within the first year. Okay. Great. We're gonna keep doing this. We have a plan that is working.

01:19:58

You know, but I don't have any more houses to sell. So it's time for me to go raise some money.

01:20:03

And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna raise five million dollars. I'm gonna go buy twenty million dollars worth of,

01:20:09

of pool pool companies, and we're gonna start rolling these up You've probably seen these roll ups get pretty big. This roll up in the dental space got this big. This pull roll up in the pool space got this big in a different state. You know, Sam Zell, the guy who invented the REIT is doing doing these roll up. The guy who started out work is now doing this with fencing companies.

01:20:27

This is a strategy that works. Now the problem is most people don't have what I have don't have fifteen years of pool construction experience. So even if they wanted to do this, they wouldn't really know where to start. They wouldn't know the nuances of permitting. And I could say a bunch of words you're not gonna understand. But the the those are kinda fifteen years of hard worn lessons.

01:20:42

And so today, I'm coming here to I'm gonna raise this. I'm gonna build a billion dollar pool roll up company. And, like, you gotta say the category of your company, the size of the product, all of that, I think would be, like,

01:20:53

I don't know, if you heard that in the chat, I know it's not problems right now. But if you heard that in the chat, go one to ten.

01:21:00

Where was my pitch on a scale of one to ten if clear and compelling?

01:21:05

Because that's where you need to get this to. Because I think you actually have a really good idea.

01:21:10

I don't I don't think you're We

01:21:12

we need a smart investor like you, Sean.

01:21:16

Because, man, you you said it perfectly. You Yeah. But he didn't wanna do the work. He wants you to do the work. Yeah. I want you to be the one who says, like, you know, wanna invest in people who figure these things out. If I'm if you need me for help, honestly, it's, usually a bad sign for my investment.

01:21:31

Like, I wanna be helping a a rocket that's already going and not, like, pushing something that's at a standstill.

01:21:38

And so Well, you know you know the investment industry. You know the roll ups and you know the comparables.

01:21:43

I'm I'm out here doing the doing the hard work managing the cruise. Fair enough. Fair enough.

01:21:49

And so I think take that and basically say, okay. The problem was I wasn't clear on what type of investment vehicle this is. This is a roll up. Second,

01:21:58

I gotta weave my story, just a bit of my story, which is that I'm I got tons of experience doing this. I've already started my roll up. This is not just idea that's pie in the sky. I already got the first two under my belt. I did those myself bootstrapped and they're working. And now I just gotta sell you how we're gonna go from two to twenty. Doing this. And that when we have twenty, it's gonna be worth this much because I can just do some math, say, twenty times each one is worth ten million dollars. Now I got a two hundred million dollar roll up. If we if we could pull this off. Right?

01:22:27

Beautiful side. The other thing is you didn't say anything about debt. Are you taking on debt for doing this, you said you're kind of raising money to buy the next ones. Why aren't you using debt? We haven't taken any loans. We thought about it. We thought about doing SBA, but,

01:22:41

I mean, it it just made more sense to seller finance. So what we we actually did was we negotiated, like, a ten percent down with seller financing or five years of the balloon payment, and the it's so cheap. We can just Dude, why didn't you say that? That's a that's a great point. I'm buying these for ten percent down.

01:23:00

I'm giving away my secrets over the internet to thousands of people and now millions of your podcast listeners. So here you go. They're gonna

01:23:07

You you It's not a secret. It seems like I didn't say it's not a secret.

01:23:12

It's in fact, you kinda made it look sound like you don't know what debt is because you didn't say anything. But now we've revealed the truth. Okay. Great. Honestly, again, I think you actually have a very good business idea.

01:23:24

Presented slightly differently. That'd be, you know, I think it could be very investment worthy, especially right now. You know, you see stocks going down. Crypto going down. These private companies are raising a huge valuations with, like, you know, software and a dream, whereas you're, like, actually, I buy successful profitable companies.

01:23:41

And I'm just a better operator than the mom and pop, and I'm gonna aggregate these because, like, I just have a playbook that I could just keep rolling out. And by the way, I buy these for ten percent down. So that means, you know,

01:23:53

you know, on my cash on cash return after, you know, fifteen months, looks like this. And so you you have a very, very strong pitch,

01:24:02

and you just gotta, like, you know, put it all together.

01:24:05

Yeah. After thirty years of doing something, they're gonna be real tired. Yeah. They don't wanna they don't wanna push the needle. They don't wanna make it bigger. They have a paycheck coming in salary. They're taken care of. So Right.

01:24:16

There was a guy so right now for the listeners, Colton, he's sitting in front of a book shelf that's empty. And someone just says,

01:24:23

Peter Teals zero to one is not on his bookshelf. And for that reason, I'm out.

01:24:29

This is where all of my trophies are gonna go. For, for all the wins we're about to have.

01:24:35

Oh, lean startups, not on his bookshelf. For that reason, I'm out.

01:24:40

Yeah, dude. You you seem to be spending too much time actually building your business. I need somebody who's way more into reading about business.

01:24:47

Yeah. You don't seem like you do yoga. I'm out. You're on a gamer chair. You're not, like, on a on a treadmill desk. I'm out. You eat carbs? I'm out.

01:24:58

That's hilarious.

01:24:59

Thanks, dude. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much.

01:25:04

Alright. I asked I'll I don't know if Ali's gonna pop up. Think I start stocks. But that was that was fun.

01:25:10

Some I think some people need some work on their pitch, not as much work on their business, but work on just like, saying what the fuck they do. So let's go most interested to least interested.

01:25:22

Let's rank the companies based on on that. I'll kinda remind you what they were. So there was five x. That was the first business that pitched, which was doing something that we could barely understand, but had a million dollars of of ARR commitments

01:25:35

you know, for his, kinda, like, marketing stack that he was or, you know, there's, like, vendor stack that he was putting in a box. Then we had, I think, fly together which wasn't their name. It was like Bakari or something like that group booking on travel.

01:25:47

Third one we had was,

01:25:49

Orim, who was doing munch, I think,

01:25:52

which was taking creator's content and letting you chop it up into bits and letting them re making it easy for them to repost using, AI and some software.

01:26:00

Then we had, the last guy was duckies. And before that, we had Nicole pass, did I miss anyone?

01:26:07

Yeah.

01:26:09

Alright. I did miss someone or no? No. I don't think you missed someone. I think my ranking from most to least from the ones I would wanna invest in to the least, I would actually put nickel and fly together.

01:26:21

Maybe nickel first, but the fly together, Bakari, I would put the they would trade for one or two. In the middle would be five x, and then,

01:26:29

tie for the bottom ones would be,

01:26:31

the jelly snack competitor and duckies.

01:26:35

Okay. Alright. I like it. Mine would be fly together number one. I thought that, he seemed great and the business seemed, you know, pretty straightforward and had momenta

01:26:45

And, you know, I need to go look at the competition. Like, is it really as backwards? And he's kind of the only real one doing this as as it made it sound, but I I I like the sound of that one.

01:26:54

I I actually think that Duckis is probably the second or first best investment,

01:26:58

but I'm not sure I'd wanna invest in Colton just because, you know, he seemed like a I think I'd wanna hang out with him But I'm not sure I'd wanna invest in him because I feel like I'd just be frustrated because he speaks a different language than me. He speaks, like, digging holes in the ground and building pools and, like,

01:27:14

I speak, like, frameworks and, you know Hey, Colton. I like you. Just change the way you look for me, please. Yeah. Just like This talk entirely different for me, will you? If I invested in it, I'd be like, look, we're allowed to hang out, but we'll never be allowed to talk about the business. And, like, in twenty years, just mail me a giant check. And just in between, I need to pretend it's gone. So so that that'd be my second question. And by the way, I'm Colton. I'm messing with you.

01:27:39

Also, I love the name of that. Little Duckies. That's a great full name.

01:27:44

I do Nicole Pass three. And then the other two, I probably wouldn't invest in. So those are kinda like four and five.

01:27:51

Alright. Ali, you're here. The crowd is beating you up because Stocks was crashing. I'll just is it because we're too popular? Are we just too popular? Is that what happened or or is this some something else? And this is Ali Moi is the founder of stocks. Yes. Thanks for having me guys. Great. Great show loved the real talk. Honestly, I think it's it's the best real talk we've had in stocks.

01:28:12

And and, you know, in the comment short,

01:28:15

yeah, so you guys crashed on. You you

01:28:18

this this is one of our biggest events.

01:28:21

And we were also in the middle of, like, a code migration. So there were more issues at this event than the last, like, fifty events put together.

01:28:29

So the stream crashed a few times, but a page refresh, it fixed it, but it it will be a lot more stable going forward. So thank you for hanging in there. And I could attest that. So people don't know this. Me and you, we used to compete at our previous startups. So you built Stream Labs. We we were building Beba. We're both trying to build tools for live streamers on Twitch. And so I've seen you execute from, you know, first of all, that we became friends kind of towards the end.

01:28:55

But, like, you're good. And, when you decide to do something, you guys pull you know, you guys are scrappy and you pull it off, And, actually, when we were competing against each other, I had asked, I had told, Michael Birch, who is the founder of of the original Bebo, and he was our investor said, yeah. There's this company streamlabs out there. He was like, who's behind it? And I told him your name. He goes, I know these guys. You used to have some company called peanut something.

01:29:19

And he's like, oh, these guys these guys are, like, you know, they always just find, like, the thing that people want. And he was basically described just very scrappy entrepreneurs who will just, like, kind of, like, you'll never die.

01:29:30

And you'll, like, kind of just keep iterating until you find this, like, hook that people want, and then you'll, like, go for it. We would go for it with, like, full force. Is that accurate. Thank you. Thank you. You are you're too kind, Sean. I have a lot of respect for what you did as well. Amazing products.

01:29:45

And you guys take your for what it's worth. I feel like the, in the end, we were competing with you guys, but it really, you guys kicked our ass.

01:29:51

Oh, no. It's, it it's great. I mean,

01:29:54

I have a lot of respect for, for for you and, you know, what you what you've done in, Birch as well.

01:30:01

But, amazing amazing event today guys. It's just our our our team has been loving it. The chat's been loving it. I think Sam asked,

01:30:09

everyone should we do it again? Seems like

01:30:12

See, seems like the chat is, really into it. Yes.

01:30:15

Dude, so on the podcast yesterday, we talked about this company called Steak and they're like an online crypto gambling website,

01:30:23

and they basically give Drake a certain amount of money, like ten million dollars a month in order to gamble. Twenty million dollars a month in order to gamble on the website, and he tweets about it, and people come and watch him gamble. And they give him free house money to play with in order to attract more users.

01:30:40

So We'll take this is a gambling this is a gambling website.

01:30:44

It's called state dot com. Yeah. It's awesome. So it's really effective for that company. You've seen it.

01:30:51

We is is this a hatred? Do we need to set like, house money for you guys? Like, a house Exactly. Okay. Yes. I think that you give us each, like, ten or twenty grand to invest in different startups. And by the way, we will invest random ass influencers in Ulta. So we'll go get, you know, we'll get Jake Paul in here. We'll just go get a bunch of, like, other famous people to be our friend of the house, and just give us a house budget to go invest in start ups. You know, this is this is actually not,

01:31:17

a half joke half idea, but this is actually not a terrible idea. This is Oh, so we have a Look.

01:31:25

Don't don't don't assume smiling needs a joke. I am not joking. I'm being dead serious. We should do this.

01:31:31

So,

01:31:33

So the way we could do it is we we we have a small fund. It's called the best of stocks fund, and we do write checks into interesting start up

01:31:41

particularly high traction or or great co investors.

01:31:45

Similar to what you guys look for. So what we could do is for your next event, we could each give

01:31:50

you

01:31:51

one

01:31:52

one check. So you pick your one favorite startup out of the five or so that pitch at your next event, and and we'll write that.

01:32:01

Yeah. But I want, we we want steaks in it, bro.

01:32:05

Oh, okay. So that's that's a little more work. I mean, I have to figure it out. That's alright. Let me let me get back to you. Maybe maybe we can give you some carry on that. Or Yeah. That'd be fine. Something. Okay. That'd be cool.

01:32:18

Alright. So,

01:32:20

also people will need to know that Ali Moiz is not the same as Moiz Ali, the the other guest on our podcast all the time.

01:32:27

And I call Moiz Ali. My No. No. No. You you said it right. But people in the chat are like, wait. Is this the deodorant guy? It's like, no. There's there's Moizali. That's the deodorant guy. There's Ali Moiz. That's the Stocks guy. So Yeah. I'm not I'm the investing guy, not the dear turn guy. You gotta be sick of that. I I have to assume.

01:32:43

You know, it's fine. It's a it's more followers for both of us people, we we confuse all our followers.

01:32:48

That's great. That's amazing. Okay. And also, we've been doing this bookshelf, meme this whole time. Get us a book off the shelf there, something that has helped you've sold a company for over a hundred million dollars, I believe.

01:33:00

And, so so you read books, and you've had Cesco, give us a book off that shelf there that you will recommend to the crowd. Something that you think has helped you?

01:33:10

I think

01:33:11

Bring it over. Bring, go go grab the book. Okay. Okay.

01:33:16

Dude, he's got a nice house. Does he live in San Francisco? That was actually my test to just see if he's wearing only underwear.

01:33:21

On a lot on Zoom's. And, no, he he passes. We're in we're in shorts. If you ask him to get up right now, you might be, you know, this this stream might might be rated know, Fiji thirteen at least. Are you wearing on only underwear right now? I'm wearing my jammies, which are

01:33:36

which are, are more than underwear.

01:33:39

Okay. So this this is what I'm reading right now. It's -- I have the same one. -- dense read,

01:33:44

but,

01:33:45

huge fan.

01:33:47

So it looks like, I've actually bought this as well. So it's a, compilation

01:33:52

of, nine from nineteen sixty four, I think, up until two thousand ten, or I forget the year. Of every single one of Warren Buffett's annual letters.

01:34:01

And what you'll notice, I actually analyze this. His words per sentence actually get shorter and shorter

01:34:07

each year. And I would argue that's because he's becoming a better writer. And what's really interesting about that book is he explains, like, really complicated topics like GEICO car insurance and incredibly

01:34:18

easy to understand ways. So I I think that's a good book to read.

01:34:24

That's cool. Connor, the chat goes, who picked the heaviest book he has power move. I agree. Absolute alpha move of you just now. To go pull a a a, you know, thirty six pound book off the shelf. I I appreciate that.

01:34:37

Alright. Well,

01:34:39

Thanks for help. Tell your boy, John Hancock, and the rest of the team. Thanks for making this happen. This was awesome.

01:34:44

Sean,

01:34:46

I I guess we'll do this again. This was this was pretty good. Think we had the little kinks to work out, but it's pretty good. Yeah. Let us know. Tweet at us.

01:34:53

If you're if you're here live or if you listen pod. We do this if you if you want us to do more of these or or, you know, if this should be a one time thing.

00:00 01:35:17