Encarta | University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups

00:00

By the way, you like how he was, like, so sharks. You wanna come take a swim in the maritime industry?

00:06

These kids are the best. This is the greatest thing I've ever I thought this was gonna be stupid. These are these guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.

00:17

Also, if this is, like, the bar if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then, like,

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you know, like, I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had, like, short shorts and nobody could use a left hand and, like, you know, it's a huge basket for a hoop. It's like, oh, wow. These these guys can jump. Yeah. It's like we just, like, Lebron just learned how to lift weight Like, that's what this feels like.

00:44

Alright. What up? We got a special episode. This is like a Shark Tank style episode. So this is the my first million

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pitch competition. We got the University of Michigan.

00:54

So wolverines

00:56

are here. We got five companies, I believe. Each company is gonna have two minutes to pitch,

01:01

a five minute q and a, and the winner. Will get five thousand dollars at the end as decided by me and Sam, whoever is the best at pitching. And little do people know this?

01:11

This is how I became an entrepreneur. I was gonna be a doctor, and then I entered a pitch competition at my university,

01:17

and I won that baby for twenty five grand

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And,

01:22

that was what got me on the path of entrepreneurship altogether. I would have never ever ever done startups, if it wasn't for that. Competition that we randomly entered. So this could be kind of for somebody out there. This could be their break too. So here we go. University of Michigan pitch competition.

01:37

First up,

01:39

who is it? Jake? So Jake from Area. Is that right?

01:42

Yes. Hey, guys.

01:44

What's up? Alright. Two minutes is all yours. Go.

01:47

Cool. So, hey, guys. My name is Jake. I'm the founder of Area. We're bringing e commerce abilities to in person shopping.

01:53

And so as an e commerce business owner myself, we we know quite a bit about our customers, such as who they are, what they're interested, and how they engage with our business.

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And so

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this this type of information informs all aspects of our operations from developing new products and then driving more sales.

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And so

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the question that comes to mind is why are these same necessities available to retail business owner why is this limited to just e commerce? And this happens because the source of the transaction, which is the bar code.

02:27

At area, we're making a new type of product code, that brings,

02:31

e commerce abilities to retail. So this is called one tag. It uses radio frequency identification.

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This is the same type of technology in contactless credit cards and garage door openers, and it recently became affordable at a mass scale.

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And, once I get super versatile, there's a lot of uses for it. It costs pennies to manufacture,

02:51

and it's printed on a sticker to attach to merchandise.

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So by replacing the bar code with one tag, retailers unlock new capabilities

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in a variety of things. I'm gonna go into one example now.

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So this is a traditional retail setup. You have your products, then you have bar codes, and each one is individually scanned.

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Instead of that, let's just replace all of these bar codes with one tag.

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So now,

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shopper can just bag all items as they shop.

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And then they can pretty much just

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walk through an antenna,

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which instantly scans all of their items at once. And then payment can be done through a kiosk for quick self checkout

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or through an app.

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That uses,

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something called Ultra wide band, which is a new type of technology,

03:43

that's brought to iPhone and as recent as twenty nineteen.

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And so,

03:47

this pretty much tracks location

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of the customer

03:51

and,

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shows what products they purchased and how they purchased it.

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And so you could pretty much walk out and then,

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payments instantly process as you walk out just like Amazon gum. So what this does in addition to autonomous checkout is it brings a bunch of e commerce capabilities to retail. So now we have an e commerce profile for a bunch of offline purchases.

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This allows us to do abandoned car recovery,

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personalized product upsells,

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in-depth shopping data, and subscription reorders. There's also loss prevention built right in.

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And then

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the location accuracy of RFID

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is super high. So inventory management is, like, pretty easy.

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All you really have to do is

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is put an item in its proper location. And

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then

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If an item is ever misplaced, area pretty much will map the entire location of all these items. And so instead of, like, arduous stock checks,

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you can pretty much just instantly know where things are misplaced and address those directly.

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And so, yeah, that's my product. This is one tag. It's checkout security and inventory all in one product. And most importantly, it brings e commerce abilities

05:04

to retail. Jake, what type of e commerce storm do you own?

05:09

I own a sex chocolate brand.

05:12

What is it called?

05:13

It's called TAV's chocolate. Yeah. We we've talked about you, a fair bit, on the pod, I think. Right? You've got, like, a crazy,

05:21

Instagram or TikTok or something like that. Yeah. We go viral and TikTok pretty frequently. Yeah. That's cool. Wait. You're in college?

05:28

I am. I'm a software now. My god. Okay.

05:31

Cool. Alright. It's Sam. What do you think?

05:34

Yeah. So I've talked to a few companies in this space.

05:39

I know there's a few people trying to attack it. And some of them I think are actually quite big. I the one of the most interesting so basically,

05:47

Jake explained it in a more sophisticated way. I'm gonna explain it in a more dumb way, which is like this little tag goes into clothing and you know the clothing's history and you could track it and things like that.

05:58

And I saw a company that was doing this with high end luxury goods. So, like, I don't know if this was their customer, but basically, like, This would get sewn inside of a Louis Vuitton purse and whether, you know, how people buy and sell used purses You could see, like, where originally came from, who originally bought it, and as a collector of, like, old stuff. I thought that was awesome. I thought that was great. So I it's it's interesting technology to me. I don't really know this market that well, but I do think there's a few people doing this. Right, Sean? Well, I I think you are looking only at a little niche use case. It seems like to me what they're doing is they're trying to take the Amazon Go store

06:36

Like, Amazon's like, hey, what if there was a grocery store where you could walk in and just walk out? There's no checkout process. Right? That's more efficient. It's more convenient.

06:45

And it's lower cost because you don't have to, you know, employ all these checkout folks at the at the store. And,

06:51

trying to just provide that as a, like, anybody at e store should be able to have that if they want kind of the, the next level of self checkout. As I think what they're trying to do And so I think that's a cool idea. I think it it ticks a lot of boxes. So,

07:06

technology that really wasn't possible wasn't cheap enough. Until a few years ago. I like that. Like, these little, I don't know if they're called. I don't know if these are NFC chips or whatever, but, like, they're very cheap, like, pennies, of these, like,

07:19

the penny is like pennies now to to manufacture or or add these little chips to,

07:24

to any kind of goods. So I think that's really great that that's now possible. It wasn't possible before. I think it's clearly

07:30

cheaper, faster for the person who's doing it. But I do have some problems with your pitch. So I'm gonna give you, like, three bits of pitch feedback for you. Alright, Jake. So

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keep in mind, though, he's doing this with, like, in the most, like, hood rat way ever right now. We've got, like, one person talking, another person hitting slides, and there's a delay. So go a little easier.

07:50

And, of course, of course. And also, he's, like, sideways on my screen, so that doesn't help.

07:54

But basically the the

07:57

the main things I would have said in the pitch is basically, like,

08:01

you know, you have three three major ways that you could have presented this. Number one, you could have shown a bar code and just been, like,

08:08

Can you believe this hasn't been upgraded in, like, a hundred years? Like, this is the same thing we've been using for seventy five years. We got iPhones. We got all this crazy stuff. All this amazing technology, but the bar code is still the same. And, like, you could have presented it from that angle. Like, the bar code is is outdated. We're revolutionizing the bar code, and the bar code's on everything. So, like, that's how big this idea is gonna be. The second thing was basically, like, we're taking the Amazon Go checkout, and we're making it available to any store. Right? That that's a very simple way for me to understand what you're talking about.

08:38

Then this the third thing is that you have a really cool backstory with with the chocolate stuff. So you could be like, I'm Jake. I'm a sophomore in college.

08:45

This year, I sold four million dollars worth of sex chocolate.

08:49

I'm a entrepreneur. I'm a hustler. I don't think my crew is gonna, you know, I don't think Checktox is the big idea for me, but it led me to what I think is the big idea. And already, I'd be hooked because I'm like, who is this college sophomore that sold four million dollars of sex chocolate? Like, tell me more. Right? So that's my pitch feedback for you.

09:05

On that side, on the on and the actual idea itself, the part I felt was lacking was the go to market. So this was this was all about technology technology technology.

09:15

But how are you gonna get customers? And are, you know, are these stores gonna be willing to revamp?

09:21

Are pro our customer is gonna understand what the hell is going on? And I think that's where this technology that's where this a company like this was struggle, but you didn't really talk about that at all. So can you talk about how are you gonna go get your first ten or hundred customers. Have you done that already or how are you gonna do it? Absolutely. Yeah. I'm talking to customers right now. It would pretty much be there would really be no retrofitting for a store.

09:42

The first MVP would be pretty much an iPad kiosk, that self checkout.

09:46

So But they have to tag every product. Right? They do. Yeah. But a lot of retailers, especially small retailers don't even use, like, universal product code. They have to tag barcode. So it's not really an increase in labor.

09:59

And,

09:59

the way the way I'm envisioning for the MVP is

10:03

customers already have to check out somehow. They go to the front desk. There's an iPad there that says instant checkout. They put their bag there and pay with credit card. And then soon, you could add in things like, antennas with active inventory, and then ultimately it's hard to just check out with the map. So who are you going for? Like, Small stores, big stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, huge brands. What who are you going for? I'm thinking clothing stores and convenience stores. At least initially. So convenience stores give a lot of the benefits of, like, the just walk out stuff, the convenience stuff, and then clothing stores,

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prioritize

10:35

the

10:36

e commerce abilities a lot more to be able to retarget customers and be a little bit more pointed with the way they're they're selling things. Jake, how old are you? I'm twenty. How big's tabs?

10:46

It's actually less than four million. It's about two million dollars this year.

10:50

Got eight hundred k profit, and we started a year ago today. So for how young and how impressive you are, I have got incredibly high standards because you're, like, You're amazing. I mean, the you're you're you're you're you're a certified bad ass with your background and how young you are. Thanks.

11:07

I am shocked at how much you are you are screwing this up though, like, with with this pitch because

11:13

First, you build them up. That you told him. Well, my standards with him are so high because, like,

11:19

I'll I would invest in a lot of things that this guy does just because he's him.

11:23

I think if you're that young and you're this successful already, like you clearly have some type of it factor,

11:28

Jonathan, by the way, can you mute them? You you clearly have some type of mute factor or, you have some type of it factor. Sorry. And, you're you're amazing. I think though that when Sean nailed it, where he said

11:39

I don't he didn't say it this way, but basically this isn't really a tech problem.

11:43

Like the tech exists and you're gonna be working on that. This is a distribution and marketing problem. Can you just get this in the hands of people.

11:50

I don't have a lot of experience selling to like, convenience stores and things like that. I think that would be a pain in the ass unless you got like a seven eleven or something like that. But, like, I think going, like, from store to store to store is gonna be the worst. But, anyway,

12:04

I think this is, like, a distribution customer acquisition problem. It's a sales problem. Yeah. And you're And, like, if you're gonna sell to a convenience store, like, the dude who owns the convenience store is working there, that will tell you much he thinks about efficiency. Right? Like, he just sits there all day. And, like, if you're like, hey, you have four thousand skews on your shelves. Could you just add this tab to it? And then

12:26

When a customer comes in, you could tell them just to walk out. He'd be like, actually, it's fine. They just I actually want them to come to the front counter so they buy a five hour energy also and a lotto ticket. And, like, I don't want them to just walk out. That's, like, half the revenue. And so, you know, I think that pro that if I was you, what I would say is who needs this the mo well, guess if I was you, I'd probably

12:45

actually lean on your strengths. You're, like, good at TikTok and shit like that. That's my point. It's, like, I'm shocked that he doesn't get

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You're doing a product that old people would be good at, which is basically enterprise sales, going to a Kroger and showing them that with this increase in efficiency or retargeting or whatever, they're gonna get, you know, it's a four percent impact to the, you know, to to their to their operations, and that's a huge number for them. But that takes that's like a year long rollout or whatever. I I think the SMB sale problem is gonna be pretty tough here. So that's what I would say is the weakness is, but really cool idea.

13:18

And,

13:20

The good the good thing is I do think this is inevitable. Like, I do think this is where all retail is going. It's the how is it gonna get there? That's sort of the challenge. And,

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So, you know, that's, you you know, that's that's the opportunity also. I think it's definitely gonna be challenging to acquire the first initial customers. The way this works though is it gets easier over time. So you could build leverage with brands and have them install the tag itself. This is obviously a long term goal.

13:45

But once it's you know, similar to a UPC, where it's applied at checkout, the barrier to entry for a retailer to carry area or carry one tag in their store is

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virtually the same. And, a lot of these benefits are actually pretty relevant to, to retailers. It's not really like

14:03

this kind of archaic, like, old thing.

14:06

So I think, I think it's definitely gonna be challenging to, like, go door to door and pitch And I think there definitely would need to be some sort of investor person that could intro me to a bigger chain there where we could, like, do an ex doable out of this that's much more efficient. But, yeah, I mean, you're definitely right. It's gonna take some some leg work to to get someone on board. If if I was you, there's there's a thing called Walmart Labs that you should check out. So Walmart has basically a giant innovation department, or at least they did. I don't know if this is still around. But, like, they acquired a bunch of startups. They put, like, millions and millions of dollars into Walmart labs where they were gonna, like, experiment with technology, because Walmart's the biggest retailer for them. One percent matters a lot. And,

14:49

I would go talk to them and be like, Hey, here's what we're thinking about. And I think that conversation will be pretty illuminating,

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to figure out, like, you know, what's the what is the appetite? What are the concerns? What's How would they realistically, you know, how how would you realistically get this into stores? So that'd be my suggestion as a next step. And I actually think that a lot I know I'm currently filming this in Austin right now. HEP has a, like, an innovation lab. I would imagine

15:12

what Sam's Club, which is also Walmart does. But I think that as a nineteen twenty, twenty one year old person with a really successful background, I think you actually have this massive

15:23

advantage to go to some of these, like, executives at some of these big companies, these gray haired executives, and they would meet someone like you and they're like,

15:31

you're you're special. Like, it's my job to, like, collect interesting talent and, like, be on the latest and greatest and and know what's happening. I,

15:39

don't know if you're gonna pull this off, but, like, I wanna I wanna be in business with you. And I think, like, three out of twenty people who you talk would give you a chance just because of your success and your age. And I think that you should use every advantage you have. Do you think I go to big retailers initially versus small. I have one hundred percent weight. I would I would go big right away. I think big retailers think about this stuff in a more

16:01

Like, they they need to be innovating, and these efficiencies

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mean a lot more to them.

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And they can sort of mandate these rollout So so we so I think that's the that's the play. And Sam's totally right. There's gonna be the executive who's like, love this. You're gonna be like, wow. He loves the technologies. They'll be like, he's gonna tell you he's gonna meet my son. He needs to be more like you. And it really, like, the draw is gonna be. He wants his eighteen year old son to hang out with you so that he could be more like you. And, like, you know, that actually could get you a long way. That actually happened to me several times in my, like, basically between eighteen and twenty four. I got so many either investors or intros or things like that just because people just thought it was endearing that I was this young kid who believed in this stupid thing and was going for it and was clearly smart and gonna do things later. And, they just wanted that energy around them. They wanted to, like, support it. Go, I just want a piece of the action. I don't know what it's gonna be, but it, like, when you see, like, anyone who's, like, at the top, oftentimes,

16:58

they'll be, like, I appreciate young hustlers who are, like, they're gonna be the real deal. I see myself in you, whatever it is, and they build a relationship, and I would one hundred percent use that because there's, like, this, like, five or six year window when you're still considered a prodigy, and you should just, like, pounce on that. Right. Thanks, Jake.

17:14

Thank you guys. Thanks, Jake.

17:16

Alright. Who's next? We got Anant from internet activism.

17:21

By the way, that guy's pitch was like,

17:24

freaking Pixar movie or something. It was like animated and Figma.

17:28

Like, kids these days, they got the tools, man. I don't I don't even know how how do you do that? Did you have you ever even seen that before? That was that was all designed to fit, but yeah. That was impressive. This this one looks good too. I like internet activism. I I'm clicking on your deck now. I like your I like your hacker design. It's Cool. Alright. Two minutes. It's all yours. Go. Alright. My name's Anaut Senja. I'm the CTO of an organization called internet activism.

17:54

So currently, the world is online. Over sixty four percent of the world has access to the internet and the world's poorest communities, people are more likely to have access to a cell phone than a toilet.

18:07

But still, the internet's potential when it comes to distributing

18:11

humanitarian software is heavily underutilized.

18:15

In response to this, internet activism is the first nonprofit that's solely dedicated to developing software in response to humanitarian disaster

18:23

So now I'm gonna walk you through a couple examples of what this actually looks like. In March twenty twenty two, we launched a website called Ukraine Take shelter

18:31

This is essentially like Airbnb for refugees. We connected refugees with potential hosts. And over the last year, we were We've been able to house over a hundred thousand refugees, which has ten thousand dollars in spend.

18:44

How did you track that? Like, you you know for a fact you put them in the home?

18:48

Yeah.

18:49

Another example of a project we worked on is the world's most popular coronavirus tracking dashboard. This is launching launch in January twenty twenty. Before COVID nineteen was officially a pandemic.

19:01

It was used by over six hundred million people. It was recognized by doctor Fauci as an invaluable resource in distributing COVID nineteen information.

19:09

We are also recognized

19:10

19:11

being able to compile coronavirus

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data faster in the DC and sharing it with

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general public.

19:20

And now moving on to what we're doing right now, we're building out an app called hyperlocal.

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This essentially allows people to message each other just using Bluetooth. So if you don't have access to data or WiFi, or cellular service, you can still message others using Bluetooth.

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Even if they aren't right near you, we can carry store and forward messages. So messages can hop between people across large distances.

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This app is completely decentralized.

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It's censorship resistant and it's secure. And we envision this to soon be a vital part modern day emergency toolkit.

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So the central thesis for our organization

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is being low cost, having a quick response time, and having building with small teams.

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We're going to build out a entire suite of products that we can tweak in the matter of days or hours to respond to crises around the world. And our main goal is to bridge the gap between the tech sector and humanitarian organizations.

20:18

Our leadership consists of the world's leading internet activists, exited founders, and highly talented designers and developers.

20:25

We're all young ambitious, and we build really, really fast.

20:29

Yeah.

20:31

And when crisis occurs next, we'll be ready to respond.

20:35

Move on to questions.

20:37

Wow.

20:38

Wow. That was incredible. Did you yeah. Who who are you? These people are fucking amazing, by the way. How old are how old are you? Twenty one. And you're in college?

20:48

Yeah.

20:49

Why?

20:51

I'm asking myself that question too. Probably gonna take, like, gap semester or a permanent gap semester starting next month. This is amazing.

21:00

Well done.

21:03

From the start, the pitch was amazing. The, you know, the world's poorest communities are more likely to have a cell phone than access to a toilet.

21:10

That is,

21:11

you know, a great attention grabbing, you know, like, you know, grab them by the throat type of type of,

21:16

hook. And then then you backed it up, and you were like, you know, we're gonna do this thing. We're gonna basically develop soft, a nonprofit developing software for the humanitarian disaster. Okay. Sounds interesting. But you've actually done it. So super impressive

21:29

that you guys did this Airbnb thing and you housed a hundred thousand refugees.

21:34

I remember using this coronavirus

21:36

tracker,

21:37

that you guys made.

21:39

So that's kind of amazing as well. And it sounds like How much traffic did you say that one got? It had over six hundred million users and a peak daily active, thirty six million use, thirty four million daily active users. And how did it get so popular? What did you do? Did you just release it to the world? Did it just went? Or was there any growth in marketing around it? I believe it was because of how early it was released this week before John Hopkins started, like, publicly aggregating all the data and releasing it. We just had an advantage of being, like, one of the first people to compile all this data and share it with everyone. Again, this was in January twenty twenty. So this was three months before, like,

22:14

the pandemic officially began. This was just in the early stages of the pandemic. And so you said this you show this leadership team, which is three people. How many people are there totally in your group or your org? That, like, actively do stuff. Currently, there are five people. Wow. So you're a five person team. All of you guys are, like, you know, college age. Is that it? Yeah. Everyone's in between the ages of nineteen and twenty one. Have you made any money from any of us? Government grants,

22:40

donations. We're five zero one c three. So we're gonna be raising over the next few months to okay. So our grand vision right now is

22:48

We're just going full force with a nonprofit right now. So these are, like, a couple of cool projects, but

22:54

this is small in comparison to what we're gonna do over the next few years. We wanna build out entire suite of tools so that whenever a crisis occurs, we can just tweak it and then quickly deploy in a matter of hours or days. Feel like current non profits, the amount of time it takes to respond to a situation, it can be months, it can be years. We wanna be able to do that in hours.

23:14

How

23:14

many nonprofits are, like, run by hackers.

23:17

Right? Like, no one does this. That's why

23:20

so we worked on these projects in the past and we're, like, Why is no one else doing this? We see how powerful the internet is in terms of distributing these solutions. We see that can literally save lives. So if no other organization's gonna do it, we're gonna do it. But why is there an incentive for a for profit investor?

23:37

This isn't for profit. This is more we're gonna be taking donations for a nonprofit organization.

23:43

But is there a way? Okay.

23:45

Maybe there's a philosophical

23:47

reason why you're doing that, which is totally cool, which is cool that I won't or I won't debate you on that. But if No. No. We we can talk about that. If If we do make this a for profit company and we're going into countries where we're establishing a presence, we're becoming their, like, central means of communication. If we come across a for profit company, people are gonna question what our main incentives

24:09

are. Again, we're not trying to dis distribute this in, like, one or two countries.

24:13

With the app that I was discussing before Hyper Local,

24:17

that okay. I'm just gonna walk you through that app real quick. Basically, it allows people to just message each other using Bluetooth. So if a government shuts down Wi Fi access, like we're seeing in Iran right now, you can still message people close to you or across an entire city, you can bounce message across everyone in between you and that person who has their app downloaded, even if their phone is off, So if we this has this has happened before, right, these mesh network, like, messaging apps, and they kinda took off. I remember when at festivals where there was no service, And then in some, like, disaster zones, they were using these. The thing is that most of these mesh networking apps, their UI, UX, socks,

24:54

We're gonna improve that, and they don't have store and carry. So say you're standing near me, I can message you pretty easily. But if I wanna message someone who's a mile away, my message cannot get to them. What we're doing is essentially

25:07

and, first of all, our messages are completely encrypted, but say I want a message someone who's on the other side of the city, If I wanna message them, every person I come across, I will they will store my message and be, like, Anant is trying to message this other person.

25:22

So once they walk across other people, they're also gonna be carrying my message until it eventually reaches that person to able to create, like, a virus effect and spread messages and create entire decentralized networks and cities. What are you and your team motivated by? Why are you doing this? We wanna, like, have a positive impact in the world. Basically,

25:41

We know that there are existing solutions that can help out people around the world. We know that we can potentially save lives or just make the world a better place in general

25:51

But just to just to reiterate,

25:53

this is not a profit making thing and that is not your intention ever. You were just doing this because I imagine it's incredibly fun and because you just wanna make the world better. Is that right?

26:04

Yeah. Basically, look, if you'd if you see that there's a problem in the world and you know that you have the means to create solution for it. If you walk away from that solution, our entire team would basically be bystanders,

26:15

and our team isn't

26:16

man. This is this is great.

26:18

You're

26:19

you're a visionary. I I mean, I I think this guy's fucking bad ass. Yeah. I think what you guys have done is amazing. I think that, it's really cool to see a nonprofit that's just driven by a, you know, a handful of builders, like, in engineers

26:32

hackers for better, for lack of a better word. And,

26:36

not gonna lie. Gonna be a hard pitch to beat. So, you know,

26:41

if you could put that out there, the ball is starting off. So our team is five people, but we're planning on scaling this as fast as possible. Half of our team right now is full time students I'm a computer science student here at University of Michigan. I have a lot of workload, but as soon as this semester ends, this is all we're gonna be working. Why hasn't University of Michigan been like, dude, Bail. Here's money. You're good. That would be a good question for the university. Yeah. Both both of the first two pitches got the my first million,

27:08

bachelor's

27:09

degree of, you know, you got a BA badass,

27:12

from our from us. You don't need to finish school. The one thing you should do though is you should shout out. If there's because people listen to this podcast. If there's somebody at a school right now or a young young person who's like, dude, that's awesome. I wanna help them out. Yeah. Okay. There's a website internet activism dot org. If you go to that, you can find your contact information and reach out to us directly. Alright. Internet act Beyond just people are interested in programming for us, if you're interested in working with us as a nonprofit organization,

27:38

or you're just philanthropic in general,

27:41

feel free to reach out to us. We're looking for as many partners in both attack and humanitarian space as possible. Wanna reach as many people as possible within the next few years. Alright.

27:50

We get it. You're saving the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Good. You're you're perfect. You're we we love you. You're amazing.

27:56

But by the way, He hit him with the, if you don't wanna sell sugar water. Exactly. Wow.

28:02

Amazing.

28:05

I I I these guys are so much smarter than us.

28:09

These guys are amazing. Dude, I was picking my boogers at that age and eat Chick fil A. And now I still eat Chick fil A. I just top pick boogers. Right? Like, these guys are so far ahead of where where I was in college. That's the same. I was It's noon on a Friday. I was gearing up for the nighttime bar run for my hot dog stand.

28:26

Like, I was, like, getting I was chopping onions in my kitchen, get ready for the two AM hot dog rush. These guys are so to build a website that has six hundred million people visited. That is outstanding.

28:37

This is just these these these guys are crazy. Yeah.

28:41

I I don't get, like, the whole knot. I would I would urge him. I I mean, I could go either way. I would urge him to have a profit way of doing this because I think that He's doing perfectly. What are you gonna live on grants your whole life? I mean, how does

28:53

like, first of all, like, Jonathan mute this guy.

28:57

There's a lot of money in government grants out there. It's not like we're gonna be starving or anything. We can still afford to, like, sustain ourselves. We also have people like Jake in our community. So if you wanna work on side businesses, we have that opportunity unlocked too. But It's not that we're This is like, you know, when people go do teach for America for two years, like, go work for internet activism dot org, and, you'll come out the other side, you know, in a good spot. Don't worry about that. So let's do the next one. Next one is,

29:25

Jordan is gonna pitch us your feet.

29:28

By the way, I'm inspired. I wanna quit this. Enjoy that. If I could hop in for two seconds,

29:34

I'm Bobby. And also, like, anyone who's watching this, we are a group of entrepreneurs. This is built for students by in my community. These people are my best friends. And if you wanna, like, get involved with these people in any sort of way, like, feel free to reach out to me at b h o u s e l at umich umich dot e u. We're building communities like this across the country, and we want your help if you're a college student or young person that's excited about making things. What else, I'll let the next guy go. Alright. Let's do it. What's up? Jason from what is it? Seaffair?

30:02

Seaffair. And from Minnesota.

30:05

Alright. Hit it. You got two minutes.

30:08

Awesome. Ojoey sharks. This is seafare,

30:10

payroll and onboarding software for ships.

30:13

It's just jump right into the problem here.

30:16

Paying the two million global seafarers is really hard. Average ship is made up of peoples for more than three different nationalities.

30:23

Meaning you deal with disparate local bank accounts, currencies, and regulations.

30:28

That's why the current solution is literally paying these people in US dollars cash and or sending slow and often delayed swift transfers.

30:37

On top of this, the documents that seafarers need to provide and that ships need to process are arduous and painstaking to go through.

30:47

Take a look at this, Sam. I can see your face right now. You're having flashbacks to the DMV when you try to renew your license. It's an absolute disaster to go through these documents. We're talking vaccinations,

30:59

professional certificates,

31:01

sailing history. You name it. They have to provide it. Once seafarer I talked to, once had to print out seven hundred pages of documents, just to get hired on a ship. By the way, what's a seafarer? Are we talking like,

31:14

like, workshops

31:15

or what?

31:16

Yeah. We're talking merchant mariners. So any ship that's out in the ocean, primarily those, like, transporting goods and services, but outside, like, leisure as well as military ships.

31:26

Yeah.

31:27

Awesome. So what are my brother and I working on to address this problem? We're taking a two pronged approach to this solution.

31:34

First is with the payroll solution.

31:36

We're talking multi currency,

31:38

low FX fees, direct deposit to local accounts, and a mobile first approach that will bring this industry to the modern era. This will improve record keeping fine and financial management for these ships and will eliminate the risk of having cash on board. I'm sure many of you have seen the movie Captain Phillips and know this problem at hand. Second is we're working on an onboarding solution.

31:59

For ships, this will be a single place where they can have a document upload, where our software will scrape those documents to determine eligibility

32:06

expirations,

32:07

and everything else a ship needs to know, saving them money. Seafarers will love it too as it'll be a one stop shop for them to store their documents track their certifications

32:17

and have an employment record at hand.

32:20

So, sharks, why now? There's

32:23

two compelling reasons why this can happen right now. First is that fintech infrastructure over the past few years has exploded.

32:30

Never has it been easier,

32:32

faster,

32:33

more efficient and more reliable

32:35

to build a cross border payments company.

32:38

Second, internet adoption on chips is finally growing. If you didn't know, lots of these chips didn't have access to internet until recently. But the dropping costs of satellite internet and starlink for Maritime launching in just this July, we see it really exploding.

32:53

On top of this, there's a labor shortage of seafarers right now, which is putting pressure on shipping companies to provide internet in order to attract labor to work for them.

33:04

So sharks, I'll leave you with a quote from Captain Jacks Ferrow. And in the meantime, I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.

33:12

Bravo, man. You guys are all great. This is the this is way

33:16

like, we had stocks. We did this with stocks, and it was, like, like, you know, people have been working in the workforce for years, and some of them already successful entrepreneurs,

33:23

this is way better. This is way better. Yeah. This is really good.

33:28

Your name again, Jordan? You, Jordan? My name is Jason. Okay. Jason.

33:33

Jason, I'd like to invest in your company. So I don't know if you're gonna win this pitch competition or I'd like to invest in your company. So Alright. Let's set up a call next week. No call. I'm in. The call is done. This is this was the call.

33:45

And I'm in. I don't know if you have an entity or a corporation, but you need to get one and send me some wiring details.

33:52

Because I'm in on this idea. This is, you know, one of my best investments was a company called Deal that's basically like a payments solution for contractors around the world.

34:01

This is, like, a niche that no no payment company is gonna really, like, kind of focus on the unique

34:07

aspects of this.

34:09

No, no, no, the modern companies are gonna do this. You know, I I think because there's probably a bunch of nuances that are specific here.

34:15

It seems like

34:17

you could go in and, you know, you found a that most people aren't even really aware of. Like, I didn't even know what a seafarer was for the first two minutes of the presentation.

34:26

You know, so I doubt most entrepreneurs are even looking at this. The question, of course, is how big can this be? So let's just do some math here. Two million.

34:34

Two million. What do we call I'm not calling these guys see first. Too many. I can walk you through there. Calculations if you want quick. Yeah. So what is the how much money can you make if you get, like, you know, whatever? Let's say, you know, some reasonable amount of, like, if you had a tenth of that. So if you had two hundred thousand of these people using your platform, what would you be generating?

34:53

Okay. Yeah. So two hundred thousand for charging ten dollars a month.

34:56

Okay? So that's two million dollars every single month times twelve.

35:01

That's twenty four million in in ARR. If we capture ten percent of the market, But you also have to realize that we're gonna be charging and sort of monetizing not just based off ten dollars per person per month. We're also gonna be taking twenty five to fifty bips on FX. As well as getting floating interest on payroll deposits before they're sent out. So I would say that How'd you know, we'd like to, like, one percent of the market. That's Oh, you know, I do know we like bips.

35:25

Yeah.

35:26

That's that's Sam's safe word.

35:31

Okay. So I think I'm clear I'm in on this. I will invest in this company. Sam, what are your thoughts?

35:38

This I'm I'm I'm taken away. Or my breath is taken away. These guys are awesome, man.

35:43

Like,

35:44

the reason this is great is this guy's pitching a C Fair B2B

35:49

software

35:50

But at the bottom of a slide, he says, Alexa play. I'm on a boat by lonely island.

35:55

Like, this this this this the dichotomy here of going on of just a bunch of dumbass shit head young kids who are a fucking geniuses

36:03

and incredibly successful

36:05

I'm all about it. You know, I said earlier in the first pitch, you do a good job pitching to some older executive who just wants to be around you guys. That's exactly how I feel right now. So your your brother says five years to AWS. Is this your brother who's older and out of college?

36:21

Yeah.

36:23

In a computer engineering degree, he's been working at AWS for five years. And you have his currently just an idea. Right? You don't have a product. You don't have any customers or anything like Yep. Idea phase. Did you work with, Bessima Bessima?

36:37

Yep. I worked at Bessima Venture Partners last summer. Did you pitch them this?

36:41

No. I did not pitch them next. Why not?

36:44

They primarily do series a, but I'm happy to talk to some of my partner friends there after this. Why didn't, how'd you come across this idea? Yeah. Yeah. So my brother was actually born in Indonesia. He spent a lot of time there. And you might know them as, like, a global shipping hub. So he actually became friends with this guy named Dennis. Long story short is Dennis handled a lot of the payroll paperwork that has to be processed by these shipping companies.

37:08

And, he would talk to my brother basically every day about the pain points he faced. So, we decided we should tackle this to help alleviate some of Dennis's paying here. Is that how you know them, Sean, Indonesia as a shipping hub? Yeah. I lived in Indonesia. I didn't pay this any of this shit.

37:23

I met a guy named Poppy who was who was importing

37:27

cotton.

37:27

I was like, whoa.

37:29

Shout out to Poppy if he's listening somewhere.

37:32

Yeah, I still remember you. So do you how will you sell this? So who do you who are you gonna go to? And, like, is the guy gonna have, like, you know, gangrene on his knuckles to be like, what are you talking about apps? You know, like, who are you gonna be selling this to? And what makes you think you could sell it? Yeah. For sure. For sure. So I know I look pretty young here, but I do have a past life on doing sales at several early stage successful software companies.

37:55

Most notably patch dot I o, join them pre seed. They're now at series b. So I've put in my thousand cold calls, put in my hundred thousand cold emails. So I'm pretty confident that I can get on the phone with someone and sell something.

38:08

I will say that people were targeting. Right? This is a fairly concentrated industry. A lot of the shipping companies control lots of, like, market share. So it's pretty long sales cycles enterprise b to b sales cycles, but I'd directly reach out to sort of those working in the offices of these shipping companies get them on the phone and sort of kick off that cycle. I'm projecting six to ten months for the average sales cycle for these bigger companies But, obviously, we're gonna work our way down to SMBs later on. Jason

38:35

you're Jason. Right?

38:38

Yeah. I'm so hot and bothered when you talk to me like this.

38:42

Does somebody script this for you? Why are you saying all the right things? Alright. So This is great. Jason, email me sean at seanpury dot com. I'm investigating this company. I can't wait.

38:51

This is this is really, really interesting.

38:55

Well, well done. Good pick.

38:57

Alright. Next one up. We got are we going back to Facebook? Are we going

39:03

back By the way, you like how he was like,

39:06

so sharks. You wanna come take a swim and the maritime industry?

39:11

Are the best. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I thought this was gonna be stupid. These are these guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.

39:21

Also, if this is, like, the bar if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then, like,

39:27

you know, like, I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had, like, short that nobody could use a left hand and, like, it was a beach basket for a hoop. It's like, oh, wow. These these guys could jump. Yeah. It's like we just, like, Lebron just learned how to lift weights Like, that's what this feels like. I don't know what's happening. I

39:43

for my by my sake, he's I'm hoping this next one sucks. I really hope he sucks just so I feel better. This guy, Jason, was supposed to go last, but he just interrupted

39:52

and grabbed the mic, like, congregated with Taylor Swift because he goes, Hey, bro. Can I take this I gotta run to class? Like, can can we just reiterate that? The if I was University,

40:03

what is this University of Michigan,

40:05

they seem like a fairly progressive school. If I, like, was these guys and I heard what was happening, I would say, bro. It was like, don't go to class anymore. Here's here. We we got you covered. Do this stuff. By the way, I wanna do this with, like, every university now. This is amazing. I need to know just a university of Michigan thing, or if this is the, like, the caliber of, of, Jonathan,

40:24

what should we

40:26

if if you're another university or if you're somebody at a university listening to do they get in touch with us to do this at their school? It is it is definitely partially a Michigan thing. And I will say, like, the biggest problem is the universities don't facilitate this. It took me, like, two years to meet every single one of these killers. And, like, we come together biweekly

40:44

to bring together these kinds of conversations patience and to build together. And who's, like, who's this? That didn't exactly bother you organized this thing? I'm biased too. This is I'm a student as well. Yeah. This is a community of entrepreneurs.

40:55

Like, two hundred strong at this school. We meet biweekly and just enjoy each other. No context of, like, paying dues, like, monthly membership, like, screw that. This is not club. This is just a group of killers that enjoy spending time together. Oh, this time.

41:08

This does not exist

41:12

at other schools. And the schools that, like, pretend like they have these crazy entrepreneurship programs, like, no hate on mission entrepreneurship. Like, there are some upside. Like, they can't build this. Right? Like, this has only existed because I spent every, like, waking moment at this school. Like, anytime anyone tells me they're building something,

41:29

on, man. What do you have to do? How are you? You need to come up with my first billion.

41:34

Like, I would love to help put this on other schools. Like, our mission is to bring this sort community to schools across the country. Right? Like, built, ground up, four students, five students, screw the preconception of having to do anything. Like, yeah, come and be together and, like, make cool Alright, Bob. Put, put George. That was incredible.

41:51

It's also just the biweekly killers. That's that's that's a great band.

41:55

Yeah. It's like a Du Wap beta from the sixties.

41:59

This data is wrong every freaking time.

42:02

Have you heard of HubSpot?

42:04

HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Well, I can see the clients hold history, calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a test from three days ago I totally missed.

42:16

Hubspot. Brobed at him.

42:19

Put it Yofai on. I wanna hear from Jordan Shamir.

42:22

Yeah. No. Thanks for having me. I guess I'm the senior citizen here. I'm a master student, so a little bit older. But if we go to the next slide, One of the things we were working on in a previous life is we were all working on digital identities. How can these brands create, you know, meaningful, consistent relationships with their customers?

42:38

Customers are always changing, but one of the things that we saw is that our understanding of who customers are digitally is really complicated. Can't interact with them. We can't see them. We can't see what they like. And so one of the things that we did is we actually worked with some of the world's largest brands, right, working in the bot mitigation teams. I don't know if y'all like sneakers

42:57

or anything along those lines. One of the things that we saw is that through all of our experience in e commerce, but just larger brands in general is that everything you consume digitally is being skewed because everyone has multiple personas or multiple identities online. So whether it's intentional, being bots, frauds, resellers, etcetera, or unintentional.

43:14

Right? We've all used multiple different email addresses to get ten, fifteen percent off discounts. And this creates as a huge issue for both brands and consumers. Right, from brands. I don't know how many customers that I have are unique. I don't know which products to build because it's being skewed by these multiple personas. I over forecast inventory leads to a bunch of dead stock, but also as consumers, right, we all know what's going on with Taylor Swift or we've all lost sneaker drop. We've all paid way too much for a concert ticket that we wanted to go to. Reason that happens is not because other people are beating you. It's because people are programmatically beating you bots. And the second thing that I also, you know, that we see that's just fascinating is that the notion of omnichannel has changed drastically. You're not just competing Nike versus Adidas. You're also competing Nike versus, you know, D2C, Nike Dick's Sporting Goods, Nike unauthorized resellers. And these unauthorized resellers are actually costing brands millions of dollars a year, even dum dums lollipops, like the ones that you get from, you know, the hospital or the doctor, is actually being arbitrage and it's costing them millions of dollars a year. And then we kinda know about these fake profiles on Twitter and, you know, these social media sites that we've seen. Or even if you live in New York, Austin, LA, you know, if you try to go to your favorite restaurants,

44:21

big reason why they're booked is that the moment they come online, they're taken and resold somewhere else. So what we've done is we've actually created a platform, like, in a digital identity platform. We're in real time without, like, interacting with the user, we rank every order between zero and one hundred. So we kinda use this real time graph,

44:38

graph networking clustering to be able to find all these patterns of randomness and associations between individuals. And we create these really nice graphs to be able to say, okay. Well, these are bots. These are bad actors. These are duplicate accounts. And so we actually work with some of the largest neighborhood sneak stores in the world, help them prioritize, hey, I got a whole bunch of raffle entries, right? I got four hundred thousand raffle entries for fifty pairs of shoots. How do I use this to acquire new clients or prioritize existing ones? How do I choose? Because today, what they're doing is they're just randomly giving it out and people aren't actually buying them aren't even checking the email addresses that are going in. So we've been actually working with a lot of this from bad actors perspective, but one of the new things that we've been able to see with this, which has been really cool, helping brands actually find their best customers. So kind of through using the same clustering technology, we've been able to say who are your most influential customers. Right? How are they not just the individual lifetime value, but what we Three pause. It's close circle. Yeah. Three pause. I think that might be over the two minutes. So,

45:36

Sam, can you tell me can you tell me what this guy does? What what is the business? Yeah. You you're missing your one liner, my friend, but basically,

45:44

it's a software that has a hundred and sixty features that analyze in real times the patterns of random randomness

45:50

and similarities at the customer trends product company.

45:54

It's it's confusing, dude. Can you explain that, Jordan? Can you explain it to me like this? We help

46:00

blank customer. So who who's your customer? What type of person or business? Oh, we help brands and retailers. More more specific. Like, give me one example. Like, we help shoot shoe brands or something? Yeah. We help brands like Nike to prioritize their best consumers for limited release products and also clean their data by pulling

46:17

out kind of all the crap that goes in. I don't.

46:20

So prioritize their top customers, you basically

46:23

you tell Nike who their top customers are? We would say, like, for sneaker drops and limited release products, like, hey, these are the new clients that you can acquire cheaply or here are the clients that you can actually prioritize that. This is actually something meaningful. Compared to one person putting like ten thousand or a hundred thousand entries via bots to get those products. So you just prevent bots from buying shit online.

46:43

We prevent and then what we also do is we actually kinda clean the data downstream. So we flag all of those accounts that can get pulled out of the CRM system that are kinda bloating the CRM So, like, one of the things that we see from a lot of our clients is that they way overspend on,

46:58

you know, the products that they use like Clabio or, you know, kind of CRM products because A lot of the entries in there aren't actually legitimate. So when I'm actually making decisions around how many products should I buy or how many products should I make, what are people buying, is actually being skewed based off the amount of what's in there. It's actually just a bunch of duplicate versus actually unique consumers. Okay.

47:18

You are not the best at explaining your own company, but that but you're not horrible. I kind of get it after you explain it a bunch. And but that's all good. You can I think you can improve that? But do you have any,

47:28

even on your website, man, I'm gonna be honest. It's it's a little challenging to understand, but I saw that you have a book demo thing. Do you are you booking demos? Are you do you have a product? What are people buying it? Yeah. We have about twenty five customers right now. That's impressive. What's the revenue? The revenue right now when we convert to revenue is gonna be around fifteen k MRR. But it's free now. Is what you're saying? It's free right now. Yep. Who do you need notable customers that, you know, like, are

47:54

anybody we would know of?

47:56

I guess, like, based off the area you're in, we work with a lot of, like, local sneaker stores. So, like, in San Francisco, we work on it with a couple of same in Seattle, same in Canada. So mostly local sneakers. Do they love it? And be honest, do they love it? Do they like it? Or do they think it's just okay? They love it. I mean, right now, we're providing from our cost to value. We're providing for, like, if we're charging them a thousand dollars, one of their stores, we're providing ten thousand dollars in net new revenue that we're acquiring in for them a month.

48:23

Okay.

48:25

Know, honestly, it's tough to give you feedback because the pitch was so confusing.

48:30

So it's really difficult to try to assess that out. Right? Like, just from the beginning, you know, Like Sam said, you need your one liner or your one sentence description so that people need to have a clear picture in their head at the beginning of the presentation.

48:43

What the business does. Alright? So you here's your first slide. Your first slide said, Yofy.

48:47

Keep business human.

48:49

Alright. Cool. No idea what you do. Then I go to your second slide.

48:53

It's a team slide. Experts at transforming data into recommendations.

48:57

A passion is keeping customer interactions authentic and meaningful. Still have no idea what you guys do.

49:02

Then slide three,

49:04

Everything is digital, and you've been impacted. And it says something about ticket, sellouts, and fake social media, and brand loyalty is harder. Okay? Still don't know what you do.

49:13

And then the last one, which is prioritize and reward your best customers. We help you understand your customers and streamline every interaction.

49:19

I feel like there's fifty different ways that that could be, like, that could mean fifty different solutions. And so and then the last slide is just your title again. Right? So that that was the whole pitch. And so that's the that's I think the challenge here is for me, at least. I'm not able to really give you any useful feedback except for except for to say.

49:38

I think you gotta, like, flip this on its head and say,

49:42

We're Yofi.

49:44

And we help, you know, we help businesses figure out who their most valuable customers are. For example,

49:49

this is a shoe store. The shoe store does drops every Friday, but it's having this problem, which is blah blah blah. And that's a common problem.

49:55

So we give them this app that shows them a screen like this. These are all the top customers. They push this button, and our app costs a thousand dollars a month. And look at this, our we have twenty five customers. And on average, we make them ten grand a month in additional revenue. And we also save them an additional thousand dollars a month because of the bloated CRM and, like, they don't actually need those contacts in there. And then all these other reasons. Yeah. And then you got, you know, then you could go on. And here's why, you know, we even found this problem because we've spent our career doing this blah blah blah. Right? So I think that's why we try to reorient this pitch if that was you. But the good news is is as you got into it and we were able to, like, work hard to kind of find the gold and all the dirt,

50:33

you

50:33

had some good shit in there. It does actually seem like an interesting product. It's that it's pretty impressive that you're

50:39

have all these people using it. You're saying they love it. I have no idea if that's true, but you're saying they love it. That's really interesting. That's hard to do with the software product when you're just working on it part time. So it seems actually fairly interesting. I think your branding's kinda cool.

50:53

But your messaging,

50:55

needs a lot of work. Yeah. That's helpful. Yeah. And that's been our hardest thing as, like, we kinda matured. It's, like, getting the messaging spot on because, like, we do a little bit more. Right? We started with sneaker bots. Now we've kind of expanded more to digital identity. So having, like, a streamlined messaging of, like, what we do that's like a one liner is. But you're I think you're making a common mistake, which is We do a bunch of things. We don't have just one customer. We have, like, five, five different types of customers, and we do we have a hundred features in our app. So we do a bunch of things. So what you do is you try to create this giant umbrella that's catch all. Like, we help customer we help brands

51:27

understand their customers or streamline their customer interactions. And the the problem is nobody knows what the hell that means. So instead,

51:34

you should go way narrower and be like,

51:37

you know, whoever you're most of the twenty five clients, is there one type that's, like, you know, the majority or half, half of the customers? Is it shoe stores? Secret stores? Yeah. Right now it's, yeah, sneaker store and beauty. Then just to do that. So I would start by saying, we help stores

51:54

do x. For example, we have twenty five customers right now and half of them are sneaker stores. Sneaker stores have problem, blah, blah, blah, blah, you talk about that. You say, but it's not just sneaker stores because, yes, sneakers do drops, but so does Taylor Swift. She does drops too. And so does this brand, they do drops too, and they all have that same problem. Right? And so that's kinda how you should explain it instead of trying to do this, like, umbrella thing.

52:16

Okay. Cool.

52:18

Thanks so much. We got the we got one more, I I believe. Yep. We

52:25

got

52:27

We got Dolan from Deal Dog. That's gonna take us home. Dolan from Deal Don. Alright. Wonderful. Awesome. So my name is Dolan, and, I create a deal though.

52:38

So DealDOG is an exclusive campus marketplace.

52:41

We launched this semester at the University of Michigan,

52:44

beginning with student football tickets. And since then, our traction has been good. We have over two thousand verified Michigan students on the app, and those two thousand students processed over ninety three thousand dollars in student tickets.

52:57

Additionally, with some traction numbers, two thirds of those tickets that have been listed on DealDOG have been sold to other users, and we're growing in the next few months.

53:07

So what's the core problem?

53:09

Essentially the way students buy and sell things on campus now, is they go to group me or Facebook marketplace.

53:15

Those are filled with bots and scammers.

53:18

And, basically, it's just

53:20

a mess. Next, they need to go to a platform like link LinkedIn or Instagram to message the other person or verify their legitimacy.

53:27

Finally, they need to transact payment and there's friction between, do you sell, do you use cash app? There's a chicken in the egg problem versus who sends the item first and who pays first. And overall, it's just a complete mess.

53:42

So what makes DealDOG different? First of all, we verify your UNish email so you can't get into the unless you have a verified student email, it's a centralized place to find relevant items to students,

53:52

along with tools like filtering, sorting, and searching,

53:55

so here's an example. On the left of what our app looks like if you were to log in versus on the right, this is the the current state of the market.

54:03

Full of skillless scammers and etcetera.

54:07

So what makes deal doc actually different?

54:09

So our app has gamified tools that turn student pain points into fun experiences.

54:15

One of which that I demonstrated here is our tool called final offer.

54:18

Basically, if you're dealing with somebody, they're wishy washy. You can't reach,

54:23

agreement on price. You can use our final offer tool to send them your best offer. If they reject it, the conversation's over. And if they accept it, you know, you agree to solving that item. This is highly scalable because when we expanded to new markets, we can add tools into this toolbar exactly like you do with iMessage

54:40

to help solve those needs.

54:44

So how does the scale? There's two ways. One of which is we're gonna expand to different categories on campus. We just launched the clothing. And have great success.

54:53

Our approach is to build things from the ground up instead of cloning other markets.

54:57

And, again, without chat tools,

55:00

integrations we're thinking about are to integrate on top of the APIs of existing clothing platforms

55:05

so that for instance, if you wanna find Michigan gear, You can't find exactly what you're looking for on our app. It'll redirect you to an existing platform.

55:13

And although we may lose that particular sale, We wanna make that buying experience as easy, as fast and safe as possible for students.

55:22

So our future plans are to expand to new campuses.

55:25

We're gonna build on top of the dominant ticketing APIs that exist in the market today. And additionally, we're gonna have an ambassador program so we can scale even faster both at Michigan and at other schools. Does this exist now or is this just an idea?

55:39

So this exists now. It's been live for about two months. Just at Michigan.

55:44

We wanted to really validate our hypothesis,

55:46

and see what works with students and what doesn't work. Did you did you think he was making up the traction numbers or what?

55:52

I didn't see it. Wait. I first slide. He's like, we have two thousand students, ninety eight thousand of

55:57

of JV,

55:59

and that's in two months. That's pretty impressive.

56:03

Okay.

56:05

And what was your take on that? You take ten percent? Yes, Joe. One of the things that we wanted to hold off on is actually implementing the payments. We've already built it, but we didn't wanna implement it yet because we're so new. We thought it'd be

56:18

a little

56:19

it'd be a point of friction for students to be like, hey, you know, we're launching this new app. By the way, what's your credit card number? Put in your banking details.

56:26

Stuff like that. We wanted to really get the product down first before we started actually, you know, taking money between the two parties. When we do, it's gonna be between five and ten percent. Of whatever the transaction is. Okay.

56:38

Alright. Cool. Thanks, Sean. What do you think?

56:41

Yeah. I think it's cool.

56:43

I like

56:44

some of the product details. Like, I love the final offer thing. I think that's great. And I get it that, like,

56:50

you know, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, these things are, like, lower trust.

56:55

So having verified student IDs, I think it's just great because it creates this, like, trust bubble. So I really like that. I don't know how big this gets. So that'd be my kind of question. I don't really like these kinda like small take rate businesses where you take five or ten percent.

57:09

Then you need the number to be massive on the transaction side in order for you to, like, make a lot of money.

57:15

So I think that's the only question. It's just, like, I think this is really

57:19

It's a useful product. I think it's a cool project to work on.

57:23

I wouldn't personally invest in this because I don't think it can be that big. You would basically take a Facebook path where you would say we're gonna go get every college or we're gonna dominate that college. It's gonna be, like, the way that you transact in a in a trusted environment. Then you say, okay. But it's not just colleges. Now we're gonna do neighborhoods

57:41

because we can send postcards out and verify that you live at the address, like next door and we're gonna you know, you'd have to really believe

57:48

that, like, two or three more miracles are gonna happen for this to be big.

57:52

So I think that's my only that's my only knock on it, which is not really, like, you know,

57:57

not every business has to be absolutely massive. It's just When I invest, I try to obviously slant towards things. But it's a net it's a network's effects.

58:05

It's a net in the this business involves network. So in order for it to be successful, everyone needs to be using it. So my problem is not with Dolan, the entrepreneur.

58:13

My problem is with this market.

58:16

I think that even if you are a ten out of ten entrepreneur,

58:20

this is just like social apps. Even if you're a ten out of ten entrepreneur and you have ten out of a ten execution,

58:26

It's just like it's so challenging to make this work. You're you're going for, like, a four out of ten opportunity.

58:32

Yeah. It's just it's just so hard because you got your competing with Craigslist You're competing with, Facebook marketplace. Now you're gonna be competing with the other incumbents that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that are think mostly failing. Like, what was that thing called let you offer up offer up in Lego or let something like that? They bought billboards. They did everything they possibly could. I don't think it's caught on.

58:54

And it's like, well, they prob the entrepreneurs, I bet were really great. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So capital wasn't an issue. And yet they still can't be Craigslist, which is just thirty dudes in an apartment working at which is I know this because I rented their apartment. It was like a crappy apartment. It's just thirty guys who are hippies And they're just like, we're it's like, well,

59:13

you you're just not gonna be this because everyone already uses this. So it's like it doesn't matter how great you are.

59:18

And so it's really, really hard to have so many things going against you. And I wanna invest in things that have tailwinds, and I just don't think that no matter how great you are, you're gonna catch tied a wave. I think you're always gonna be paddling, you know, upstream on this one. Yeah. Really good points. We certainly have a lot to prove.

59:34

One of the things that we wanted to do is, hey, begin with college campuses.

59:38

The reason being is because, you know, at at these big, large state schools, you got a student body of fifty, sixty thousand people competing for ten thousand tickets.

59:46

And in that exact niche, you know, the math really makes sense. But I do agree in a lot of other cases, it might not. One of the things that we're expanding to working on, if I may, is a lot of these items that we're working on, whether it be tickets,

59:59

second hand goods, services, subletting,

01:00:02

the core mechanics of those can be distilled down and then scaled to other things. So for instance, if a campus group has a concert, they bring a DJ, whatever the case may be, they can use our app in underlying

01:00:14

ticket technology to distribute that on campus.

01:00:17

And so, again, it doesn't solve your core

01:00:19

issue of, you know, it's a credibly difficult market. Dude, I think that makes it worse, actually. I think that one of the few ways that these one of the few ways these businesses can work is by, like, being very niche. So you have poshmark for women's clothing. You've got,

01:00:34

grailed for men's streetwear.

01:00:36

You know, there's, like, dozens of these are like pretty big companies. I think poshmark is a multi billion dollar company. Thread up. I don't know what their niche is, but some type of like clothing for a certain genre person. I think that when you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. And I think that in really to make this work, you'd have to select, like, I'm sure that there's what's the one call for for sneakers stock x or something like that. Code. Yeah.

01:00:57

Yeah. Like, these are huge businesses because they just focused on one thing, and it's far easier to have a wedge where you start with a small group of people who are passionate and care about them and get them to use it versus, well, we're gonna do tickets, and then we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do this. It's like, no, man. I think you can just build a big thing. You just focus one thing, and so appealing to every once of sublets,

01:01:16

so apartments,

01:01:17

and then tickets, and then when you had clothing on your deck, I think that's actually, in my opinion, turns me off even more. Not again, not entirely on you. I just think that, like, there's just so many things outside of your control. You know, like, seafare was gonna compete against, like, paper.

01:01:32

You are gonna compete against Zuck,

01:01:35

Craigslistless, and, like, hundreds and billions of dollars of invested capital into this.

01:01:41

I just don't think it's it's it's not a safe bet. It's not a good bet.

01:01:45

Yeah. Really good points there. Tell me to work on for sure. And by the way, I would say, like, when I was in college, our first idea was, it's always this. This would roommates.

01:01:55

Well, no. I I this would have been better than my first idea. My the one we did Estrate out of college was like a sushi restaurant chain. Trying to create a a restaurant chain. And, like,

01:02:05

it was the same thing. We could be ten out of ten,

01:02:08

execution,

01:02:09

ten out of ten creativity.

01:02:11

Like, fundamentally, like, restaurants are, like, you know, sort of like a two out of ten opportunity. It's like one of the worst types of businesses you can try to start. And

01:02:18

you know, so we had a point where a year in, we were like, cool. We won this businessman competition. We we can do this. Not that we can't do it. We're we're having success with our first location, but, like,

01:02:30

we we gotta remember. This is just our first idea. Maybe we're more entrepreneurs than we are restaurateurs.

01:02:35

And maybe this first idea is the one that got our wheels turning, but let's not commit more years to something if we rec once we recognize

01:02:42

that this is a two out of ten opportunity, we should just say, oh, okay. Cool. Let me just

01:02:47

be a college kid. Let me have my opportunity, my time back, let me put it on another better opportunity. And so that's what I would do if, if I was you. But if just FYI,

01:02:57

getting ninety three thousand dollars of transactional

01:02:59

value a transactional volume is super, super,

01:03:03

super impressive. That is amazing.

01:03:06

So maybe you can prove us wrong and be like, we're and you said two out of three of tickets, you just be like, look, we're just gonna build a different stub hub and it's gonna be better because we're marketing wizards and who knows why it's gonna be better. Maybe you're gonna prove us wrong, but ninety three thousand dollars and twenty three hundred users in the three months incredibly impressive.

01:03:23

That is wildly impressive. So you're you're also a superstar. I'm just gonna I I don't know if you're gonna pull it off in this

01:03:30

genre, but we'll see. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you guys so much.

01:03:33

As a closing note, like, if you have any advice on this, it seems like the of the people that do use our app,

01:03:40

you know, they almost exclusively use it to sell their tickets and other things.

01:03:44

If if you decide not to bail, I would stick with tickets and stick on that for at least one year and talk to users constantly and see what happens. But stick with tickets. And I wouldn't even worry about expansion. I would just figure out what makes them come back over and over and over again because I imagine if I had to look into StubHub and SeGeek, CAC is the biggest issue. I and I'm just guessing I've not researched this. Yep. Alright, Dolan. Thank you so much. And Alright.

01:04:08

We pick a winner. We pick a winner now. So that is the, my first million presents, University of Michigan pitch competition,

01:04:15

super impressive caliber of entrepreneurs. Like I said,

01:04:18

love this community, you know, Bobby. Bobby, my biweekly killer, good job putting this group together.

01:04:23

We gotta pick a winner. So Sam, how do you wanna do this? I think

01:04:27

let's let's talk about, like, who's in the top three, and then you and I slack with me. I've I just slack to you my top two. You and I slack, and and just tell me what you wanna do, and I'll tell you if I approve and I agree with your vote. But basically,

01:04:40

let's go let's go in order. So So third runner-up,

01:04:43

or, like, you know, but maybe maybe my top three, I guess. I just give you give you three random order.

01:04:49

So,

01:04:50

I liked seafarer. Like I said, I I wanna actually invest in that. I think that that's a a really cool idea going into a boring, boring industry that's

01:04:59

painful, complicated,

01:05:01

and

01:05:01

I think, you know, not gonna be easy to sell into. But if they do, very easy get locked in, and I think they can make money doing basically

01:05:09

payroll for the shipping, you know, shipping industry for people who work on ships. So I I really like that idea.

01:05:17

Internet activism was super impressive.

01:05:20

They, you know, have built a website that got six hundred million users. They,

01:05:25

built a Airbnb thing for Ukrainian refugees that had a hundred thousand people stay, you know, in homes. That's kind of it's just crazy ludicrous.

01:05:33

And then that's a career maker just that. I mean, that number. And and just the idea of a nonprofit that's not,

01:05:40

driven by, you know, nonprofit is driven by today, which is sort of like fundraising and sales and marketing. It's like we're hackers. We just build stuff that's gonna help help people. And that's what we do. And I I've really kind of resonate with that.

01:05:52

I've seen the power of that one time,

01:05:55

the guy who was investing in our our ideal lab. He was like, hey, wanna do this thing for this charity I support called Charity Water.

01:06:02

You know, but instead of just giving money, what if we gave our talent? What if we built something? And we built a charity

01:06:07

website that was designed to go viral. It was like, could you make charity go viral? That was the mission. We spent three months on it. And I remember we got, I don't know, five million people to, like, come visit the thing, and we raised, I think, eight hundred thousand for the cause.

01:06:21

And so, like, I've seen how

01:06:23

builders can help charity in a way that's kinda unique.

01:06:26

And then,

01:06:28

And then also, Jake, from Tabs Chocolate, who's doing the NFC tagging thing. I thought that was

01:06:34

another good one. I think I think a cut below the other two, but

01:06:39

a honorable mention. What what do you think? Say I agree entirely I think Jordan just did a really big, good, bad job of pitching, and but I actually think that that business is actually really intriguing and could be great. I think it's just a boring software company that I like. I think it could be a really great business.

01:06:56

But he was so bad at pitching that it ruined the fact that it's a cool company I think. And I actually think that he's got a lot he doesn't have as much traction as internet activism,

01:07:05

but if he does actually have thirty or however how said twenty customers using a software.

01:07:11

I think that's a fairly pretty big deal because it seems kinda hard to sell into them. So,

01:07:16

I sent to you

01:07:18

what I think should be the winner. It's the last thing I said. Do you agree or not agree?

01:07:24

I don't agree. I think it should be this other one. What do you think?

01:07:29

Okay. So let's just say who the top two are. Yep. Top two, we got our seafarer

01:07:36

and internet activism.

01:07:38

And let me let me explain my let me explain my perspective here. So internet activism

01:07:44

fucking amazing.

01:07:45

This guy made me wanna quit and join him. My issue with him, not him. My issue with giving them the money is

01:07:52

They already have a great thing going, and they're kind of crushing it. It feels weird giving this money to a nonprofit.

01:07:59

I'd rather just give them my own personal money, but

01:08:02

He is so impressive that I was I I this guy's gonna be, on the cover of fortune or fords, I think, in the next five years. So I'm I would be fine giving them money. But seafare, it's an idea, man. We could just be the first money in to actually make them like build something. So that's why that's interesting.

01:08:18

Yeah. I I I feel the same way, but I think for Seifer, I would put my personal money in as an investment. But I think for the prize money of this, I think that if we put it into interactiveism, it's gonna save lives. And,

01:08:30

and, honestly,

01:08:31

like, he was of the bunch.

01:08:34

He was the most

01:08:35

missionary.

01:08:37

And, like, you could just tell, like, for example, the guy's the visionary. All all these other people, I feel like if I talk to him six months from now, they could be working on something completely different.

01:08:45

And that's totally normal and okay, especially if you're in college. I actually encourage that. But when you know, you know, this guy was, like, kind of agro where where he was, like, you know,

01:08:54

yeah, I could go work on a CRM tool or just like whatever, but, like, you know, f that, I'm doing this.

01:09:01

And that is something I really, really respect. I don't

01:09:04

he was looking for validation.

01:09:06

I think he was trying to get the word out. And so that I respect that. Dude, I looked up one of the co founders of internet activism on Twitter.

01:09:13

And,

01:09:14

he,

01:09:15

his background picture was, Zach, was Mark Zuck, given the middle finger.

01:09:20

And

01:09:21

I used to have that same background. And so I'm on board, man. I agree with you. We'll give it to internet activism.

01:09:28

I think that they are awesome. I think all the folks here are are we're we're incredibly impressive. Dude, the one that we should on the most, I think, was Deal Dog, The guy got ninety three thousand dollars of transactional value in three months. Like, no one does that. Very impressive, all around Kudos to everybody. And I gotta say we're not picking internet activism for the do good. Like, the guy's pitch was dope. His first line where he's like, you know, people in poor communities have that have have more access to cell phones than they do to toilets. Right? He his pitch was good. His traction was good. We built things that have gotten hundreds of millions of visits. Right?

01:10:03

His idea was a big idea, encrypted messaging app that can't be shut down, basically an unstoppable messaging app. That's gonna help people in certain places. Right? And I think he was the most committed founder. That's why, not because, it's a charity. Just give him the money. I also think

01:10:19

He's a shithead. I think these guys are shitheads. I think that these guys are, like,

01:10:24

the good type of shitheads. I think that they're the people who I'm gravitated towards. I like people who just, like, and and frankly a lot of these guys had that vibe. I mean, Tab's chocolate from Jake definitely has that vibe.

01:10:35

They have this, like, attitude of, like, screw it. I'm just gonna do this and we're just gonna see what we're we're gonna build these fights out. Yeah. Yes. And I love that mentality. This guy just displayed it the best for this in this particular case, but these guys all had this, like, punk rock vibe that I love. So

01:10:52

And that's, guys, that that's everybody in this room right now. Even the pig's man had it. Yeah. Even

01:10:57

even the everything I wanted just before is is building insane stuff. We we got twenty entrants.

01:11:03

And Jonathan and and Mike, when I, like, we were struggling to take five.

01:11:07

There we we could've had twenty pitches. He was, like, shitting on the traditional clubs and, like, other, like, official organizations. And he's like, no. We're the underground.

01:11:16

We're the underground real ones.

01:11:18

And I respect that. Dude this reminds me. I mean, they were further along than us and smarter than us, but when you and I were, like, twenty three, twenty four, twenty five hanging out at your office of monkey inferno,

01:11:28

We surrounded ourselves with these types of freaks, and a lot of them have gone on to build

01:11:33

literally twenty or thirty billion dollars worth of companies, you know, Jack Smith, your boy,

01:11:39

furcon. Like, these guys have built, like, huge, Ryan Hoover. All these guys have built some really huge companies, and these guys remind us of this. And I think that it's actually I hope send this to University of Michigan. They're blowing it, man, by not empowering you guys. So I think that's crazy. Yeah. Send you a hoodie. I'm a Michigan hoodie on the next pod. I'm I'm a I'm a fan now. You know who else came from, University of Michigan was our boy, Michael, from from Future. Who's a total that has this exact same vibe of just pretty One of the one of the first members of this organization. Whatever you wanna call it. And,

01:12:12

this is, this is credits these guys and gals. This is not Credit University of Michigan. This is

01:12:19

what makes this special. We love University of Michigan. We do, and we're gonna take every single last resource until we leave this place. But until then,

01:12:28

Oh, man. Alright. Well, whatever you wanna describe yourself, I admire you folks. I think you're awesome. I think the list Hopefully, this gets hundreds of thousands of listens. We'll see. I I think this is gonna be a hit.

01:12:40

But, yeah, you're awesome. So if people wanna find out more do you have your website? What's your website? Did did you even say that? Yeah. Just again, it's internet activism dot org. We're looking for donors. We're looking for engineers. We're looking for non profit organizations to partner with, anything. If you think you can help out or your interest in working with us, just feel free to reach out again, internet activism dot org. Alright. And, the name of the club is what? Entrepreneal Power. My name is Bobby Haisel.

01:13:06

You can feel free to reach out to me. And help me build this across the country. Thank you. Sean, you got anything to say? We're out of here. No. That's it. That's the pod. Good job guys. Very impressive.

00:00 01:13:34