AI transcript
Yeah. So just to preface here, I’m Tommy, Tommy Potter, student at UMich. I’m really excited
to be bringing you these startups today to illustrate the community work power hour,
which is the CIA for college entrepreneurship. And what I mean by that is that you don’t know
like who we are. You don’t know where we meet. We are this underground society of hand-picked,
killed founders. Wow. Hold on. Hold on. If you’re building the impossible,
we got Tommy like Tommy Potter, like Harry Potter. And then there’s no,
there’s no meeting place. There’s no information. There’s no way in and there’s no way out of this
club. Do I have that correct? Correct. It’s a tap on the shoulder, just like the CIA. We let you
know individually where we’re going to be meeting. Dude, Sam, they’re speaking your language already.
This is some real skull and bones shit. I want to preface, this is live audience of
Sam and Sean, you don’t know. I’ll pan the room. We got like 65 people here ready for you.
The ecosystem is out here today. I know the same is going on down at UIUC.
They got a massive room. How many you got in that room there, Austin?
Yeah, I’ll pan the camera too real quick.
So, but yeah, we did it on all points that Tommy said. I basically hope
get all the amazing founders as well as entrepreneurs, content creators, everybody
that’s doing awesome stuff in the same room down here at UIUC. So, we’re super pumped on both sides.
UIUC, is that Illinois Carbondale?
University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, the big I. So, that’s who we are.
So, we got Tommy, we got Austin. The club is called Happy Hour. Is that what you said?
No, we’re Power Hour. Oh, Power Hour.
An hour full of power.
And it’s all student run. There’s no faculty, nobody who’s making this happen.
Is this like, this has been around for 10 years or did you just invent this on Thursday?
What’s going on?
Do you remember Bobby Firehousel, which was on this podcast about two years ago?
I may never forget Bobby.
So, Bobby started all of this?
Bobby started this. Bobby started this and it’s kind of been planting around and UIUC
as their community. We’re very like deep in our partnership there as well.
So, this is fantastic. So, to give the listener background, two years ago we had this guy named
on Bobby. Bobby, I think, was in Michigan. Bobby gathered this group of maybe 15 entrepreneurs
and four of them pitched us and they were awesome. And apparently Bobby has fight clubbed this thing
and gone out from university to university to convince you guys to join on. And this sounds
awesome. And so, today, I think six of you, so three each, are going to pitch us. Is that right?
Totally correct. Yeah, there’s a lot of school pride on the line in terms of which school is
going to come out on top in this competition. So, we’re laying it all on the line for you.
We have tons of creators in the audience. It was tough to get it down to three startups,
but we’re giving you our best. So, can’t wait. We’re ready to roll.
So, this is college shark tank style, two schools pitching from both. We’re going to have a winner.
We’re going to maybe have a few other awards that we come up with. I invested in one of these
last time, Sam, out of Michigan. How’s it going? Company already failed. So, we’re not going to
hold that against y’all. You win some, you lose some. And we lost that one pretty hard, pretty
quick. But that’s all right. All right. But let’s see if you guys can beat Michigan. So,
the first one that we’re going to hear from is, meet your class. And I think,
is university in Michigan, are you guys doing three in a row? And then it’s going to be
back and forth. All right, Sam, I think we just need to step aside and let this kid
emcee this. He’s got the natural of a host. See, I’m using college words.
Is it let it bake or let them cook? Which one is it? Whatever. We’re going to let them bake.
All right. The first one is the folks at Michigan. Okay. Hello. My name is Jonah,
and I’m the COO of Meeker class. Two years ago, my co-founders and I created a platform for
prospective college students to meet each other before coming to campus. And Meeker class quickly
grew in popularity, largely because the communities we built actually extended beyond our own
platform and integrated with the social media apps that nearly every high schooler uses on a
daily basis. Within two years, this system has scaled to over 400,000 account creations and even
generated over $600,000 in revenue through a freemium business model. Well, this was a great
success. An even larger opportunity emerged when we were approached by a university called the
Christ College, which was struggling with enrollment. Basically, they were having issues
filling seats. And they were not alone. This is a really big issue. Recent polls have found
that over two thirds of university CFOs are deeply concerned about declining enrollment.
A really big factor in this that the Christ College and really the majority of universities
across the country struggle with is a phenomenon known as summer melt. Summer melt refers to when
a prospect gets all the way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel, just to at the last second
renege on their deposit, renege on their commitment and decide they no longer want to go to college.
At the Christ College, believe it or not, this was happening with every one in three students,
which eventually was leading to a 33% vacancy rate at the school. The Christ College believe
the Meager class could help decrease the summer melt because our platform had gained a reputation
as being able to build up excitement for prospective students and also to give them
a support network. Furthermore, we also found through discovery that Meager class data was
very valuable for universities in helping them to allocate their limited time and resources
towards students who needed the extra attention and help. And we’re very excited to say that this
worked. At the Christ College, students who used Meager class last year experienced a 61%
reduction in summer melt, which is expected to add $1.7 million back to their top line.
And we’re so excited by these results because at a minimum, this summer melt issue is calculated to
cost the higher education system over $11 billion per year. And it’s of course going to take more
than one case study to really go after this market. But luckily, we now have scaled to eight
partners for the upcoming admission cycle. And amazingly, that same B2C business that I described
at the start is helping us and empowering us to create a product that’s industry leading,
loved by students and administrators. It also got us admitted to tech stars and has allowed us to
bootstrap our way into a much larger, much more qualified team ready to take the higher ed market
by storm. All right. That was great. Do you have an ending for us? So sharks, who’s ready to,
you know, blah, blah, blah. And are you raising, are you actually raising money or not, not,
not raising money right now? We’re planning to actually open a seed round when we graduate in
the spring. That is awesome. That is awesome. By the way, the $600,000 in revenue, how many
people are working there? What’s your profit? Do you have any profit? Yeah. So us as initial
co-founders have not paid ourselves a dime and we reinvest every single penny back into the team.
So I don’t know the exact profitability off the top of my head. You know, we try to
keep the bank account enough to stay alive, but we reinvest every penny back into growing the
team and getting to more university partnerships and we’re trying to get 50 by the end of this
upcoming admission cycle. Of the $600,000, how much is in your business account right now?
I think around $300,000. We got $120,000 from tech stars and then we’ve also won some pitch
competitions. Okay. Okay. Cool. And Blake, your name is Blake, right? My name is Jonah. Blake is my
amazing co-founder. Okay, great. So Jonah, great first great pitch. Really cool business. At first,
when you were talking about it, I thought, well, you know, you sort of created Facebook
20 years too late. You’re trying to help college kids connect. But then what the story got really
interesting when you started talking about how colleges are struggling to fill enrollment and
they have vacancies just like a hotel has vacancies, a college has vacancies and that maybe your tools
actually could help them decrease that. And then they would be your customer, right? You’d be
charging them. Did you charge that first college and what are you charging those other eight colleges
who you said are partners with you on this? Yeah. So our initial partners are heavily discounted
relative to like the market rate for a solution like this because we’re trying to get more logos,
more case studies. Currently, those partners are at under $10,000, but there’s a very clear
path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name. You said market rate,
who else is doing something like this and what are they doing? We do have a handful of competitors.
So this initial thing that we’re describing is called like mid funnel conversion. It’s basically
getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel and then trying to convert them. There’s
a few competitors listed in that second column where we really stand out from them is our integrations
with social media because we’re able to get a large organic user base at the earliest and
latest stages of the enrollment funnel. So a lot of our competitors are like third party apps where
the university basically emails all their students says, Hey, download this and kind of forces them
to use it. And the reason they do that is because these communities generate so much valuable data
and they have a lot more control over it. And social media standalone really doesn’t do this for
them because it’s not a tailor made hire tool, hire tool. So we’re basically retrofitting these
social media platforms and bringing all the data that they pay for these programs. So Jonah,
if you were charging them what you think you can charge them, have you had any conversations about
how much they would be willing to pay either as a percentage of sort of save students or as a
flat fee? What’s your sense of how much each college can pay? So initially just for this
mid funnel conversion tool, we believe that it should be pretty reasonable. Of course,
a college is very inside, but we’ve seen these at the lowest for the smallest schools around
$20,000. And then we’ve seen them scale past 200,000. This is of course just like one small
part of the enrollment funnel. There’s many more issues that we believe we’re prime to solve. That’s
just a generally like, I always want to say a commoditized rate that universities like comfortable
paying for this. Is this the biggest problem or is there a bigger problem? This is one of the
biggest problems. As I mentioned for the Christ college, 1 in 3 students were melting. So it’s
just like the lowest hanging fruit to initially go after because these are kids who arguably should
be going to college. They got way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel and then we then converted
more of them. But they obviously wanted to just get more box and seats throughout the entire process.
Jonah, I always ask how the story ends. Is there a vision for where you’re going to be in 10 years
with this? We’re still trying to figure that out. We are very motivated by genuinely improving the
student experience and making it so college is worthwhile. So in the long run, we want to put
power back in the students’ hands. A lot of students don’t know that they have negotiation power in
the tuition price and a lot of them also end up at places that are suboptimal. So we kind of want
to in the long run become the go-to place that students come to and they figure out where they’re
going to be the most successful to for 10 years down the line. Did you just say that you can
negotiate tuition price? Because I had no idea that’s possible. It is possible. I personally didn’t
do it. Some members of my team could speak to it a lot more. But students have a lot more power
than they realize. Universities need students in order to stay in business. The majority of schools,
not the University of Michigan, but the majority of schools are tuition-dependent for revenue.
Tuition in Michigan is like a very small percentage of revenue. So if you ask for decreased tuition
here, that likely would not pan out because they’re not really struggling with any financial
situations. But at the end of the day, colleges need to act like a business. Otherwise, they’re
going to go under. I was just googling some of these companies. Sean, have you heard of Unibuddy?
Were you going to do Google any of those community apps? I had no idea this stuff existed. Some of
them are actually quite large. How big? Unibuddy, I think, raised $30 million. They raised it during
COVID. So there’s TBD if it’s legit. But it seems like it’s a business that does
many tens of millions in revenue. Jonah, my quick take on this. I think you actually have a real
business here. One of the biggest investments I missed on was the very first guy who ever pitched
me as an angel investor. He had an idea for something called Apply Board. What he was doing
was helping international students get into… He was helping these small colleges get more
international students because international students just didn’t know their name. I had never
heard of Christ College till you just said it. He was charging about $2,000 to $3,000 per student
that actually got admitted and enrolled there. He was making tons of money. That company really
took off. I think you have a real business here. The only thing I would say, I guess, to wrap up,
is I don’t think you should ever raise money for this. I think you should bootstrap this thing.
And if you actually just stuck with this idea and you bootstrapped it,
in four or five years, you would be sitting on probably $20 million, which would be a phenomenal
place for you to be exiting this business. And I think the biggest risk for you is not a business
risk. We raise money because we pitch investors that this could take over the world because we
thought that’s what we’re supposed to do. We thought you have an idea, you pitch investors,
you raise round one, round two, round three. And suddenly, we’re looking at you saying,
how are you going to be a billion-dollar company? And the reality is,
this might be a phenomenal $50 million company, but no chance at a billion-dollar company.
So my advice to you would be, don’t raise, but great pitch overall. Sam, any last thoughts?
I completely agree. I completely agree. All right, Jonah, thank you. Big round of applause.
All right, so where are we going now? Illinois? Yeah, we’ve got our guy out in San Francisco right
now, Shrikhar. What’s going on, guys? Nice to meet you. All right, I love it. You drop out?
You’re not even in college? What’s going on? No, I’m actually on a gap semester. Hey, Sean,
I’m in Founders Inc. I know you know Safon. Oh, no way. I’m in the background. So just met him
yesterday. Me and my couple of my buddies are just visiting San Francisco here, seeing if this is
the right place for us. But yeah. All right, well, gap year. I like the sound of that already.
About a year ago, me and my co-founder were watching the Spanish TV show Money High Sun Netflix.
Unfortunately, neither of us know Spanish very well, so we had to watch the English dub.
Anyone who has ever watched a dub movie knows that there’s a bunch of issues. The lips are
not synchronized with the audio. The voice actors sound nothing like the actual actors.
There’s one scene where two voice actors have the same actor making everything extremely confusing.
We looked at this issue a bit further and found that it is extremely technically complex,
expensive at $100 to $1,500 per minute, time consuming and low quality to dub a video nowadays.
With all of this, dubbing is a $60 billion market in 2022, and there’s been no clear solution for
this. We started by translating content for creators like Mr. Beast and Mr. Nightmare and found
that the essential use case is within education. Imagine the millions of people trying to get an
education in their second language where the content is not meant for them.
So we created MetaFroza, an automated, authentic and affordable translation solution for educators.
All the user has to do is input a video into our solution, press the input and output language,
press submit, and within minutes, get a lip sync, voice clone and text on-screen translated video,
just like this one that we translated for our client, UIUC and Geese and Coursera.
Utilitarianism suggests that an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good
for the greatest number of people. It suggests that an ethical decision will
produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism suggests that
an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number.
So as you can see, Professor’s voice is perfectly cloned from English to Spanish to French,
his lips are synchronized, and our key differentiators, any text on-screen,
is translated with the same font, text, and color as well. For our enterprise clients,
we have a human-in-the-loop process where we translate videos with industry-specific terminology,
keywords, idioms, none of that Google translate issues. We also have the most languages and cheapest
product on the market. Right now, we’re at $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue translating videos
for University of Illinois and corporations like Velcro Corporation. We actually are in talks with
Coursera for a potential integration in quarter one of 2025 as well. Just to look at one of our
potential deals after a paid pilot with geese, just one degree looks like 30,000 minutes in five
languages generating $1.35 million in revenue for our company. This actually saves the University
91% in actual costs and curating the course as well. Our team combines business and technology
with my self-taking gap year to focus on this and our machine learning team of five machine
learning engineers having 37 years of experience in computer vision. Hi, my name is Karla Kala and
my purpose is to break language barriers. Thank you guys very much. All right. That’s awesome.
Great pitch. Great pitch.
And leave some of the slides up so we might need to go back to them. So first of all,
the demo was great. Can you just tell us a little bit about the magic there? So you said,
translates the voice, makes the lips match, which I’ve never seen anyone do that.
Did you see Dana White do that, Sean? You didn’t see Dana White do that for the
Mexican Independence Day UFC? It was great. No, I didn’t see that. So what are you doing to make
the lips? Is it superimposed on top of their lips? Yeah. So essentially we take
one of my buddies, YC model. We take any original video or any original audio and we are allowed
to synchronize the lips based on the input of video and audio in our backend system.
We then curate that. That’s what you’re going to say. You took one of your buddy’s lips
and he’s a model. So you’re saying there’s an off-the-shelf library, basically off-the-shelf
model that does this already. You guys are just integrating that. Yeah, correct. That’s true.
That’s true. Okay. And another question. You said something like, if they did this just one course
for one university, that’s like a million in revenue for you. Are they currently,
are you convincing them, “Hey, you should dub this,” or they’re already dubbing it just at 10
times the cost? Yeah. So right now they’re translating videos automatically and they’re
translating courses, like imagine quizzes, tests, and just like reading papers, but they’re not
translating the videos. So a Spanish user has to go on Coursera and take the course in Spanish,
but have to read the subtitles on an English video for these videos, these courses that they’re
creating right now. We’re basically providing the solution that standardizes the actual
viewing experience for the end user. So they are doing this right now just without paying.
You said that, I think in ’22 or ’23 or something like that, that dubbing was a $70 or $60 billion.
What is that number? Tell me about that number. That’s ridiculous. Just looking at traditional
dubbing, this means in film, education, marketing, just translation in general. Huge market, a bunch
of different positions that we could put ourselves in. I was trying to tell you guys that we also
translated for content creators like MrBeast and Nightmare, but found that the niche was
in education for us just because of the essential need. Think about the applications of translation
for people that have life-changing opportunities stripped for them because they can’t take a
course in their preferred language or they’re not able to understand the professor in a classroom.
So that’s where we got that number. The key distinction, you said they’re already doing
this, but actually the way you said it was they’re translating the tests and the quizzes.
They’re not doing the videos today. And so for them to agree to do this,
this would be a new cost of a million dollars to them that they’re not currently spending.
So in terms of translating a video in general, they’re trying to translate these videos, but
for them, for like a person to translate a video, just like for a 10 minute video, it takes four
hours. They have to curate new slides, have a new professor go in, speak in a new language
of the contract, these people. This would cost them three million dollars to edit these videos,
go over, edit the screen text. But there’s a big distinction. Let’s say I’m sitting at this
university and I look like I am with this vest on right now and I’m sitting there and I’ve got my
budget. But what I’m asking you is today, they don’t already spend in this. You’re not saving them
money from something they’re already spending. They’re currently not spending because it would
be too expensive to do it too slow, too expensive. And so you’re going to be a new cost to them,
right? So that’s going to be a big point of friction because they’re not going to make more
money necessarily off this. You might be able to convince them that if you do this, you might be
able to get more customers. But day one, it’s going to be just extra cost with no extra revenue. Is
that correct? That is true. However, they are going in the direction of putting these courses
online. Digital translation is a thing that they’re already doing. This would just be an
added cost for them at the end of the day. But it would provide a better solution,
potentially being a marketing plight for international students to come to the university
to go, but to answer your question, yeah. What do you do for Velcro? First of all, I didn’t know
Velcro was a brand. I thought Velcro was like clean extra tissue. I thought it was a thing. That’s
pretty wild. But what are you doing for them? And how did you close those guys? Because they
look like a big old sluggish company. Yeah, we had a personal connection to one of the higher
ups of the company. We do internal communications for them. So every month, there’s a 90 minute
internal town hall where the CEO basically speaks in English. She’s Italian woman.
She had a bunch of issues with when she’s speaking English, she lacks emotion. She kind of
doesn’t feel like herself. And we were able to provide them a solution where she was able
to provide the company with updates in her true persona in the new language by speaking in Italian
for 90 minutes into our camera. We put that into our solution. Within three hours, we were able to
curate a transitive video that she’s able to send all the plants at Velcro Corporation in 10
different languages. And we provide the solution to them today. But it sounds like you’re not
doubling down as much on enterprise. You want to go for this university education niche. Is that
right? So we want to go into the education niche. This is universities. This can mean educational
content creation. This can mean corporate trainings as well. We understand that these
educational sales cycles are extremely long, which is why going to these translation agencies
for educational content as well can help us kind of apply like a geometric approach to our
sales cycle as well. Just to speed everything up faster, having us get more traction to it.
And then the university brand itself creates a stance where people say, “Hey,
University of Illinois, use this. I’m an educational content creator. I trust them.
I’m going to trust this company as well.” Right. Well, I think you have a solid pitch,
and I think you have a really great product. But I think this is a product in search of a market.
I think you’re going to run into a lot of trouble because you’re going to go to these
universities and you’re going to say, “Hey, we’re great.” And they’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s
awesome.” But they won’t have the budget for it, or it’s just going to be seen as an extra cost
without a clear extra payoff or sort of ROI attached to it. And so I think that’s going to
hurt the sales cycle. What’s already a slow sales cycle is university sales.
I think it’s going to get harder because you’re costing the money rather than saving the money.
But one thing to consider is if there’s already a big market for dubbing out there,
and they’re doing it manually, this actually could look like a private equity play where you
go buy existing dubbing services that have existing books of business, and then you just
fire all the people and replace it with the AI that’s going to do it better and faster and cheaper
than they’re currently doing. You said it costs like $100 a minute or whatever to dub
with humans doing it. And so what you could do is you could go buy companies and then
rip out the cost structure by replacing it with AI. And that might be actually a better way to go
to this market. And again, this is something that you don’t really hear a lot. You’re in San
Francisco now. A lot of people don’t talk about this, but there is a whole other avenue of business,
you know, rollups and private equity where they’re looking for this. They buy something at a fair
price, and then they slash the cost in half by using technology to make things more efficient.
You could do that here. Understood. And we’re actually are trying to do that right now,
partnering with the Translation Agency to understand exactly how they derive their clients,
how they are going through these sales cycles with refugees, people that are going through
different educational content. The one thing about universities is that I do seeing this
being globalized in systems and learning management systems like Coursera. So we just had a meeting
yesterday with Coursera to essentially say at the University of Illinois pilot goes, well,
they’re willing to give us a shot at integration for translation for a couple of courses there.
That would, you know, allow us to dub from going like a thousand minutes per every two
weeks to maybe a thousand hours for every two weeks. Just to show you the kind of stands
that we’re taking in terms of universities. We’re going for the learning management systems,
not the individual university. Hey, Sean, I don’t pay attention to this world too much,
but how that video that we saw, how impressive was that?
I mean, it’s definitely impressive. And I think they’re doing a couple of other things that are
specific like changing the text on the screen. So I think, you know, that makes the whole solution
work because then the actual course works. So it’s definitely impressive. But I, you know,
there’s got to be 10 other companies that could do this today. There’s nothing like
scientific breakthrough with what they’re doing. So this is really going to be a question of,
who builds the best business around this new technology? The technology exists and anyone’s
going to be able to build a business around this. So it’s really going to be about who figures out
the right market, the right go to market strategy, the right pricing model to actually build the
business out of this. What do your parents think about you taking the gap here?
We got into tech stars in June, ended up declining that my parents are South Indian.
They kind of are driven by, you know, percentages like Prestige was able to show them that,
hey, maybe I’m like top 1% of pre-seed companies by getting this accelerator.
I’m sure them that they let me take this gap semester and then
can have to show them some KPIs that keep on taking time off of school. But I’m loving it right now.
I hope they listen to this. Hey, kids or parents, your kid’s amazing. This is,
he’s going to, it’s going to, it’s going to turn out all right. It’s going to turn out more than
all right. I think there’s a kid at FA Inc where you’re at right now, that officer at right now,
there’s a kid there. It’s not a kid anymore. His name is Johnny Dallas. And he was in eighth grade
when he started working with us and he started in the summer. And then he started working every
day after school. And then I think in 11th grade or so, it was pretty clear, this guy’s awesome,
and he should just work here full time. And we made him an offer and his mom was freaking out,
I can’t, my son’s going to be a high school dropout. This is crazy. No, no, no, he’s going
to test out. He’s going to graduate. He’s going to get his GED. And what I convinced her of was
he’s not dropping out. He’s going pro the same way LeBron James went pro because he had incredible
skills. And that reframe, I got to tell you, that was some of my best work with that mom on a bench
in a park, convincing her that he’s going pro. He’s not dropping out. And then we got him to,
got him to go full time with us. Got you. Got you. Dude, congratulations on your success. Good
job. And thank you for letting us listen. And you’re the man. All right, what do we have next?
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Hey, hold on, brother. Keep that up. I’m going to try it. Go for it. All right, there you go.
This is pretty cool. When I thought microbiome, Sean, what did you immediately think? I thought it
was gut. Yeah, I thought it was gut and poop. I was like, do I got to poop it a thing and
you’re going to give me a thing to help my skin? But I didn’t know that skin microbiome was a thing.
That’s pretty baller. How’s your skincare routine?
You know, body wash that goes on my armpits also goes on my face. It’s not very good,
but I’m bought into the idea that it is important and I do want to get better.
So this is interesting to me. Do you have any revenue at all?
No revenue. We’re currently in development. We’re doing beta testing.
Okay, gotcha. And a really smooth pitch, by the way. You are a talker that was really well done.
Okay, so let’s give some thoughts on this.
Dude, by the way, his deck, Sean, was great. Those cartoons, they told the story wonderfully.
Yeah, who made all that? You made that?
The deck and the story? No one made it. That’s just my story.
Well, it made it sound like the graphics are cool.
Oh, the deck, yeah. My co-founder Ron and I worked on it. And then we also workshopped it
with a bunch of other students in the community. Gotcha. Okay. You know, one thing I think that
would help you is this type of story, I think, would go viral on TikTok. Basically what you told
us, if you were like, I used to think skincare routine. I used to think, you know, whatever,
I didn’t care about my skin. And then I got a flush eating bacteria. This is me after my trip
to Costa Rica and you show a picture. You’re like, so here’s what I did to get rid of this.
And while I’ll never look at any of these skincare products, the same again, knock over a bunch of
bottles on a table, right? You do something like that. You’re going to get like two million views
on a TikTok. You can actually include that in this, which is going to be like, we know how
to tell our story and get out there. And that that story resonates with people, that people are
looking for something that’s more personalized. That’s actually science-based and not just,
you know, a fancy brand. And we’re going to use content to our advantage. And that’s how we’re
going to have much cheaper customer acquisition, right? The smart brands in the DTC space are
basically content first right now. They know how to tell their story on TikTok and Instagram and
YouTube. And that’s where they’re getting just like a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody
else who’s just doing very basic static ads on Facebook type of thing.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we observe that many of our competitors sunk a ton of their initial
revenue into advertising. And so we’re looking at sort of a different go-to-market strategy.
We want to please 50 people in our beta testing. We want to work like very closely with a smaller
group of people to make sure that our product and our algorithm is really working the way that
it’s supposed to before we go like mass market. But I like the idea of doing short form content,
because I know it definitely hits with the younger audience, which is target market.
Who’s your competitors? So are there other people doing this?
Well, there’s no one that’s doing exactly what we’re doing. There are skincare companies that
do microbiome testing. And they’re also personalized skincare companies. The biggest skin microbiome
company currently is Parallel Health. And they offer a 200 a month protocol where they do sequencing
on your skin microbiome, super high market high end product. There’s a company that’s successful.
They’ve been in business for seven years now called Proven Health. They were actually, sorry,
Parallel, no, it’s Proven Skincare. They’re on, they’re on Shart Tank. And they do personalized
skincare that’s based off of a quiz only. So we have a quiz and we have microbiome testing. So
we’re sort of the baby between those two ideas. A lot of times with health stuff, health stuff or
skin, anything involving your body, that’s very, it’s very controversial because there’s always,
there’s a bunch of people who love something typically, and then there’s an equal or more
amount of haters, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. It’s just health is very controversial.
What would the haters say about this? Like, would they say like, dude, microbiome stuff,
it’s not actually important. If you just use these three things, it’s going to do most of the job.
You don’t need to worry about this other stuff. Like, what are the haters going to say about you?
I’d say the biggest liability there is that the skin microbiome field is actually very nascent.
So the, basically, we’re testing a hypothesis. We believe that skincare that’s precisely
tailored to your microbiome is better than the traditional methods out there. I think people
would likely continue to hold on to this societal idea that all bacteria is bad or like,
we need to stay in this sort of sanitized mindset. Like, people really like to feel clean.
And so I think that that’s the biggest objection to this is like, we love germs. We want to
harness the power of the germs that are on your face. And we believe they hold a lot of potential.
So people might be like, Oh, it’s gross, but, you know, it’s just science. Science is gross.
Well, I, like, I think the criticism, I’m an idiot, but I pay attention to health stuff. I
think the criticism is like, you know, that’s like, that thing will just move the needle by 1%,
whereas if you do these other things, it’s mostly going to get you there and be perfect.
Do you know what I mean? You know what I’m saying, Sean?
Yeah, it’s like in health stuff. You can listen to Hubertman for 92 hours,
and suddenly you’re Brian Johnson or whatever, and you’re trying to take 42 supplements a day.
But 80 to 90% of the gains are going to come from like, you know, good sleep,
drink water, eat clean whole foods. And if you just do those things and you’re not,
you’re probably not already doing those things, that’ll get you the bulk of it.
The rest is really like, you know, on the edge optimizations. And I think you’re right, Sam,
that, you know, sort of a smart skeptic would probably have that thought. But I don’t think
that’s what’s going to drive success or failure in this case. So I think actually one thing you
were missing from your pitch is to convince me that people care about hyper-personalization,
and that that’s where the puck is going. And really what you want in a pitch is for this to feel
like an inevitable outcome of what’s happening here, of what’s happening in this space, whether
it’s you or somebody else that’s sort of secondary, but you really want to convince investors of two
things. One, inevitably this is where the puck is going, and that inevitably we are going to be the
ones who take advantage, score when that puck gets there, right? So you kind of need to make
two cases when you make a pitch. And so for example, I know that in hair care and kind
of beauty products, makeup products, there’s a lot of this already, the trend has gone in this
direction where isn’t it like you do quizzes and you figure out, oh, I have curly hair and my problem
is that it’s dry. And then for that, you’re going to get a certain product. And I think what you
would want to show is that the companies that came out in the last wave for beauty products
that went the personalization route have outperformed, have had all these really great exits,
but nobody’s done it for skin care yet, but they will. And here’s what’s going to happen
in skin care. The same thing that just happened in makeup and hair is going to happen for skin,
right? Same thing that just happened in vitamins is going to happen for skin. And that makes it
sort of feel inevitable. Oh my God, he’s right. The next wave of successful skin care companies
are going to use this kind of science-based, hyper-personalized thing that I think was missing
from your pitch. So that’s kind of my feedback for you. Thank you. That’s good. That’s very good
feedback. I thought you did a great job telling the story. I’m still trying to understand what…
I already asked that question, but like the other answers could have been like,
everyone agrees that this is right, but the question that we’re trying to figure out is,
can we or anyone even figure this out? Like, I wanted to figure out like, what’s going to be…
What is this all hinge on? Because if you’re talking to like, on a beta, like, what is this…
What are you having to convince the world that needs to happen, owner, for this to be a massive
breakthrough? Let me ask you a very simple question. Do you believe… Let’s assume it works. Do you
believe that it’s going to be a visually different result? Meaning, if I just showed you two pictures,
one person who’s using your thing and one person who’s just using off-the-shelf stuff,
honest question, do you think it’s going to be where I could just point and go, yeah, that’s
clearly better? Because if it is, then all your marketing is going to work that way. And if it’s
not, then the science kind of actually in the world of supplements and vitamins and creams,
let’s be honest. Nobody has a clue if any of this ship actually works. And so then it’s all just a
branding game. It’s all a marketing game. It’s all who can convince the consumer that if you buy
this product, you’ll be more beautiful and everyone will love you and things will go well for you in
life. And so I think we’re kind of… Unless it’s literally visual where you can see the difference
and it’s going to be inarguable, then it’s just a question of, are you going to be a great marketer?
L’Oreal, why is L’Oreal successful? It’s not because we know that their product
scientifically is better than anybody else’s product. It’s because they’re better marketers.
That’s the reality of the situation. Yeah, we certainly recognize that. We definitely want to
sort of latch into the trend towards clean and sustainable beauty, which is why we made a box
that you can plant in the ground and it grows flowers. We think it’s really like the beauty’s
in the details here. So I absolutely agree with you. Before and after pictures are like one of the
best things that we can get. And the results of our beta testing are currently looking very promising,
but before I start to make claims and put those pictures on the website, I want to do really
thorough analysis of how the products are working, how the algorithm is working to make sure that we
have something that is really solid. All right, brother, we appreciate you. Congratulations on
this and solid pitch. We got to go to the next one. Great job. Thank you.
Hey, let’s take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out.
It is called The Next Wave. It’s hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz as part of the HubSpot
podcast network, which of course is your audio destination for business professionals like you.
You can catch The Next Wave with Matt Wolfe and he’s talking about where the puck is going
with AI creators, AI technology and how you can apply it to your growing business.
So check it out. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get the podcast.
Is Brother Nuts? Is that who’s up next? It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name is Austin Majors. I’m the
co-founder of Brothers Nuts. Here at Brothers Nuts, our mission is to kick the fake food to the curb
and revolutionize healthy snacking with organic sprouted nut and seed snacks.
So first off, my family found that half of the snacks out there
weren’t actually healthy and the other half tasted like garbage.
But first off, why did we create this business? Well, our business started back in 2010 actually
when my father was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. He was given seven weeks to live
and through the changes in diet and lifestyle turned that seven weeks into seven years.
But one of the biggest issues him and my family had was finding a snack that was as healthy as it
was tasty. And so our current day CFO, aka chief flavor officer, aka mom, being the amazing mom
that she is, went into work and created what is now known as the crackled cheesy almonds.
Now my family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were
flavorful, but also very crunchy. And that’s what makes us very different. All of our nuts and
seeds are sprouted. But how’s it gone over the last seven years? So I started this company
when I was 13 years old when my father passed away with my older brother who was 15. And over
the last seven years, we’ve done over a million dollars in sales. We sold over a million dollars
worth of nuts. We’re currently available in 200 retail locations. And the future is very promising.
We have a clear path forward over the next four years to take this business to $10 million in
sales and be a national brand. How are we going to do that? We’re going to do that by doing the
hard work that no one else wants to do. And I know no one else wants to do it because I speak to
these stores and no one else is doing it. So what is that? First of all, it’s expanding and making
more money from our current clients. Clients like FreshTime, MomsGradicMarket, FreshMarket.
But it’s also expanding distribution and getting new grocery stores like Whole Foods,
Sprouts, HEB, key accounts. How are we going to grow within those stores? We’re going to continue
shaking hands, doing what I just did for you guys. Telling my story, having people try the product
and letting people know that there’s something out there like this. And last, we’re going to continue
innovating through our product. Right now, we’re developing a clean chocolate almond. And we also
have a, we’re developing a high protein variant of our most popular flavors, something that’s never
been done in this space. Now, kind of more grand scale. I mean, there’s 62,000 grocery stores.
The nut market is selling $10 million this year. I look at the biggest companies out there and we
can absolutely get there. But what’s really cool is we are on the up and up. Steady oil free, wear that.
Sprouted, good and free, gut friendly. We check all the boxes. Finally, something that my dad did
in 2010 is now mainstream. And we are on the cutting edge of it. In the last period over period,
products labeled sprouted grew 34% in their velocities and sales. We are on the up and up.
But let’s remember why we’re doing this. Look, the reason why we’re able to have the success,
why we’re able to land these retailers, get through these gatekeepers, is because we’re doing this
in every sale that we’re making in milestone. It’s contributing to continuing my father’s legacy.
Everything we’re doing is to grow his legacy and to create my own along with my brothers.
Because we know that by changing what people snack on every single day,
we’ll lead them to live longer, better, healthier lives with their families.
And so, if you’re ready to join us, to kick the fake food to the curb and evolve the way you snack,
I’d love to talk to you.
Dude, that was great. I got goosebumps. What an amazing story. Good for you, dude. I’m really
happy to hear about this. Austin, I just placed a $52 order. I’m going to try the cheesy ones,
the garlic ones, and the spicy basil pumpkin seeds. So, let’s see what you’re about.
We’ll throw some extra stuff in there for you.
This is great. So, you’re in some stores today. Can you just give us the basic rundown? So,
how many stores are you currently in? And is that one chain or multiple? What’s going on?
Yeah. So, it’s multiple chains. Our very first store that gave us our shot was Freshtime Market.
There were about 70 stores across the Midwest. I mean, the story with that is my brother called
the CEO, got a call back in the lunchroom of the senior year of high school. We sat down with the
team, got three stores, proved ourselves in three stores. They gave us 30. We proved ourselves again.
They gave us 70. Stores only give you that many and allow you to expand if you’re selling well.
So, after we had that success story, we went out and we targeted smaller chains,
like mom’s organic market on the East Coast, the Fresh Market, which we’re starting off small with.
And with that data, we were now going to new stores. We met with Whole Foods.
We got a yes from them. We got pushback. We’re fighting to get a bigger and better yes.
And we have a huge mean with sprouts tomorrow, actually. Wow. And so, what’s the revenue so far?
Yeah. So, since inception over the last seven years, we sold over a million dollars worth of nuts.
This year alone, we’ll do 400,000. Last year, 200,000. And next year, with some of the launches
that we’re planning, we’ll do probably closer to 2 million. And what do the retailers tell you?
So, that fresh time that you’re in, sorry, you’re in 70 stores with them or they have 70 stores?
Now, we’re in all 70 of their stores. We’re in a total of 200 retail stores across the country from
some of those bigger players and some just smaller one-off stores, health food stores, golf courses.
And like, you know, the way that retail works is they need to see the velocity of, you know,
how much you’re selling on the shelf at their stores for you to get into more stores.
And so, what data do you have? And is that currently a strength? Is it a weakness? What’s
going on with the current cycle rate or whatever they call it for, retail consumption?
Yeah. So, the velocities in the data is the biggest thing. So, our product is incredibly
unique in that we are one of the only ones who offer a product like ours. We have very few
competitors. I can name them. And so, what we have to deal with, of course, first demonstrate a gap
on the shelf. Hey, you are not, you don’t have any nut, flavored nut options that are organic,
sprouted and they contain no seed oils. So, first we have to do that and then we just show share the
data. I mean, our velocities, if they were bad and that was an issue, we, fresh time would not have
let us go from 3 to 30 to 70 stores. They came to us. We didn’t have to approach them on that. We
were just killing it so much. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. I feel like you answered a question that
should be answered in numbers with letters. That’s okay. All right. So, here’s the problem
that I have with this business. I like your name. I like your story. I really want to try
your nuts. All right. But here’s the problem. When I go to your TikTok, I see 50 followers.
And when you’re young, you have a lot of disadvantages. You’re not going to have the same
level of experience. You’re not going to have the same amount of funding and resources. You’re
not going to have the supply chain experience that your competitors all have. But you do have a
story and what you should be is amazing at social media. You should be telling your story on social
media. You should be getting people excited about this and taking that to the retailers and saying,
“Look, we’re this young, exciting brand that consumers really care about and consumers are
excited about.” And you don’t have an option like that. The nut shelf for you guys is stale. It’s
just Blue Diamond. And it’s the same old brands that do the same old thing. And they’re not on
trend. They’re not seed oil-free. They’re not whatever. You have that story, but you need the
social side to be kick-ass because social just takes creativity. It doesn’t take money. And
you’re part of the generation that should be better at this than whoever the CEO of Blue Diamond is.
Their social strategy is obviously going to be pretty boring. And so, I think that’s where
you’re dropping the ball. And that’s what you’re going to need to get into retail because I’ve
talked to retailers. And what they care about is they need to believe that you are going to help
drive traffic to the store or that customers care about your brand and that they’re adding
young hot brands to the shelf. That’s what you need as your story. So, I think that’s what’s
missing for me right now. Absolutely. Yeah. Who, with the family business like this, do you and
your brother, are you the two owners or is your mother involved? Who owns the company?
Yeah. So, my brother and I are 50/50 owners. We do have my mom, who’s our chief flavor officer.
She’s in charge of making sure the nuts taste as good as they do. I mean, she’s the original
person who created these recipes and we just took them and started selling them.
Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. I bought in with Sean as well on the story. The story was
very good. I saw your about page. I saw the personality. I was like, “All right, this is
definitely going to be something interesting. I’m now a customer. I’m very eager to try it,
but this is pretty badass.” Sam, do you remember the name of that nuts brand that he’s kind of like
on Twitter? Nutty Nerds? Is that it? It’s like a peanut butter brand, right? Yeah. They do
many eight figures that you’re in revenue. Many eight figures. So, tens of millions of dollars
in revenue. Yeah. Have you looked at these guys, Austin? Yeah, I’m familiar with them.
And I think they just got popular on social media and their shtick is different than yours.
There’s the opposite of… Indulge. Yeah, it’s like indulge versus what you’re trying to do.
But you do have… I’ve invested in a bunch of these seed oil or seed oil-free companies.
I think TBD, if it’s going to be mainstream yet, but it definitely seems like it might be.
But this is super fascinating. You have a lot of tailwinds to help you out here for sure.
I think you want to include that in your pitch, by the way. An investor doesn’t really know how
big a nuts brand can be. And your numbers, while I’m not saying that they’re bad, they are
on the small side for an e-commerce company, right? So, if you’re… We’ve done a million
dollars across seven years. Okay, that’s not huge. I think you got to paint a picture that this can
actually be really big. I looked up Blue Diamonds, by the way. Blue Diamonds says about 1.8 billion
a year in revenue. Correct. So, I would show the nut category is huge. And you have… Blue Diamond
does 1.8 billion in sales a year. The next one does this. The next one does this. And we use
this phrase on MFM that there’s a sea of sameness. You walk down that aisle and it’s all old brands.
There’s not one challenger brand. And all of them have the same problem that they’re lacking,
XYZ. We have fresh packaging. We’re a challenger brand. We have a better story. We’re hot on social
media. So, I think you need that part of the story. And I would include others like nerdy nuts.
And I would show examples of others who have come into this category and are doing very well
at how you’re the next in line. Again, it’s that sort of error of inevitability that you want to
paint. And so, when you don’t have the traction that shows that your own trajectory is inevitable,
you want to show the inevitability of a category, of a change. Some of the things you talked about
about sprouted products are growing 34% year-over-year in these stores. That’s kind of like you want
slides there because it feels like every category now has a sprouted product and the sprouted
products are overperforming. Guess what? Nuts doesn’t have a sprouted product. We are that
sprouted nut, right? And so, you want to paint that picture for the investor. But really good
overall. And honestly, I actually think of all the business we heard today, I think this is probably
the one that could be the biggest. Yeah. But I don’t think you’re using your strengths. And I think
if you keep going on the same path you’re going, it won’t be huge. But you’re still young and you
have time to change. If you actually take some of the feedback and do it, I think this could
actually be a lot bigger. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ed. Thank you, man. You’re the best. Awesome,
majors. Thank you very much. All right. We have the last one from University of Michigan, right?
All right. Hi, Sam, Sean, MFMFAM. We are a tour, the AI-powered salesperson for property managers.
Today, only 4% of apartment prospects that ever land on an apartment website
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money already or what? Yeah, we’ve raised about 350 to 4K so far, but largely been bushdrop.
We’ve had many interesting moments throughout the journey, but we’ve been really focused on
getting the product experience as good for our customers as possible.
Can I tell you, I used to work in this industry a long time ago, can I tell you like the three
reasons why I think this could fail and you could tell me how I’m wrong? The first, I think that
there is this thing called Matterport that existed for a long time. I know Airbnb tested
on their website and I used to be an Airbnb owner. And when they had these, Matterport made these
like realistic models of what your apartment looked like. Like a 3D virtual tour. Yeah,
similar to this. And they found that it decreased conversion. And the main thing being is that a
lot of apartments for rent are shit. And like, it’s like, dude, just like, I just need to get
someone in the door. And once they’re in the door, I can like, like do some salesmanship to sell them.
But like online, it looks pretty shitty in a 3D way. The other one being that there’s
like right now, I don’t know, do apartments need to be filled at the moment? Like it seems like
a lot of these folks are like, dude, I’m killing it right now. My vacancy is quite low. Why should
I spend money to do this work? And the last one being is a lot of apartments that you need,
I would imagine to do sales on the apartments are kind of shitty. And I don’t want someone to see
them online. I need them to see them in real life so I can sell you on it. And, you know, it’s,
you know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t want like a user video of like a 1994 Honda Civic.
But if I get you here and you’re like, dude, I got $1,000. I’m like, this shit box is for you.
And I don’t need a video for that. You know what I mean? So can you like refute some of those points?
Yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. Matterport is one of our comps. You know, they’re
doing 500, they’re still doing $540 million per year. They are a public comp. But the big thing
that they do that’s different or that we do that’s different is where you’re telling me that
Matterport does $500 million in revenue? Yes. Yes. Now, the big thing that is put in perspective,
the big thing that we do that’s different is two things. The first thing is we are fundamentally
an active experience that’s partnered with the apartment to funnel someone down the whole
sales funnel. From the first moment they meet them to following up on email, following up targeting,
and that allows us to hit a much larger market than Matterport even does today.
And then the other thing that I think you talked about, which is the nature of most of these
apartments fundamentally being not necessarily like maybe old, drab experiences. I think the first
thing is, look, things change. Apartments are becoming one of the largest purchases we make.
It is one of the largest we make. And these are becoming more commoditized. They’re becoming
more monetized. I mean, the whole future is going into the experience economy. And I think the
experience is going to be a very important part of our Gen Z or even millennial shop.
So I think that experience is a very important part. We see that because a lot of our tours,
we deliver it over more tours. Many of them are international, out of state. And these are important
decisions that people are on the edge on which different shops or different departments they
might want to work with. Now, for example, one apartment might want to have a virtual
leasing advantage compared to others. And that’s why we help fundamentally become
part of the adversely leasing advantage. And then the last element I know because you want to say
something, it’s just that we’re also augmenting the sales force, right? So there’s a frontline
sales in most of these businesses are fundamentally high churn. There’s people leaving the building
all the time. If we can help augment their sales team, we have a much larger staying power with
the actual property, not just a one off virtual tour. And one thing I like to add is that Matterport,
yet their like essential goal is to communicate the like physical establishment to the customer.
And obviously, we do that. But what we’re trying to do is to augment the website to
better communicate that as well as segment leads so that they know how to allocate the
resources best to the highest intent leads. So that’s another area where they save money
by better allocating resources. And the tour, the tour that you give, sorry, I might have missed
this during the thing, or like, I don’t know, maybe have a demo. Is it just a girl talking
and photos? Or is it like a walking tour that you generate? Or do you go film it first? Like,
what is the actual thing? Okay, here’s the video. Yeah, we go and film it. So we have
two elements. We either have a video pro network that can help film it or building more and more
scripts that you can easily start start filming it from your phone. iPhone 16 is like rivals,
like Sony cameras. And once we got just so this is not AI generated. This is like a video you
guys make. Yes, yes. And then we take the knowledge base as well as that media and supply that
throughout the whole sales process. Got it. Okay, cool. So you guys go film a video when an
apartment social work with you. And then you have the AI wrapper around it where it’s chat,
it’s Q&A, it’s scheduling appointment, it’s following up with a targeted ad, it’s things
like that. That’s what you guys do after that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. And the 450K of ARR
that you have right now, that’s from how many customers? That’s from 130 property managers,
usually around the price point of $300, somewhere to 50, some are paying more.
And how’d you get the 100, whatever property managers? So the cool thing is we have a land
and expand motion. So once we’re inside a property manager, usually they manage many properties,
large apartment buildings. What we do is we demonstrate our results and most of our other
property management companies start expanding within the property managers. So one property
manager inside a company refers to some of her additional properties in her portfolio or some
of the other regional property managers. So how will you go from 100 something properties today
to 1,000 or 10,000 in the next year? What are you going to do?
So one of the big things we’ve been trying recently is automatically generating tours
so that we can demonstrate value to apartments before we even have to go in person because
obviously that’s a large cost of videotaping the actual apartment. So we can immediately
just scrape the website, pull some images, use flux to turn the images into somewhat of a mock
video, pull some information from their website and generate a tour that can act to segment
leads on the website. And then they can see the value of it. Oh, a tour lead came in. This is a
high intent lead. Let’s follow up on it. And then from there, if they’re pleased by the value,
then we can actually go out and record that video, making the tour even better.
Okay. So you’re going to auto generate these videos as a prototype, as a sample,
and then you’re going to cold email them and say, “Hey, we could do this for you guys.”
Cold email referral. Yep.
Okay. And then what do you guys run an A/B test? So on any of your apartment websites,
do you show if you have us installed versus if you don’t have us installed, what’s the difference
in revenue? Yeah, absolutely. So what we notice is when it comes to the actual properties,
like the amount of value we generate for the properties, usually an additional $300,000 to
$500,000 in leases. Now specifically, we do three things really importantly that leads to these
fundamental items. The first thing is we deliver a four-times number of tours, prospects who are
on the website get three times engagement, and also the leads that we end up capturing, just
obviously are going to be more qualified, right? And so those leases convert at a higher rate.
Okay, gotcha. That’s pretty convincing. If you told me, hey, however many tours you’re
giving per week right now, I could forex that if you add this thing to your website.
That’s a pretty compelling proposition, don’t you think, Sam?
Yes. I still think that there’s a bunch of… I think there’s a bunch of other questions related
to the things that I said, but that is compelling. I think I’m scarred from this industry of selling
to these companies and how hard it is and how old school some of these… Have you guys noticed
that about how old school your customers are? And it’s like the two customers that we’ve had in
this presentation or in this section have been campuses or colleges and apartment buildings.
And I’m like, oh my god, those are both really, really, really hard. Have you guys noticed that
when you’re selling to these apartment companies that they’re a pain in the ass to work with?
It definitely is an old guard. And things change ever so often. But I think they’re realizing how
important it is, particularly when they’re looking at e-commerce and how things are evolving,
that it’s important for them to be extremely competitively advantaged. And so just the nature
of competition has really been trying to somewhat push the… They’re just slow. They’re really slow.
Yeah, I do think though, again, back to that idea of you want to make this feel inevitable,
I think it is… There’s a clear line you could draw where you say, look, if you were a apartment
building and back 15 years ago, you might have been able to get away without having a website.
But about 15 years ago, you now had to have a website. You had to have a website. You had
to be findable on Google. That became mandatory table stakes. And then after that, you had to
have photos. If you didn’t have photos, you were not even competitive. You’re non-viable.
And then you had to have videos. And you had to have videos. And then after that, you had to have
a booking thing where somebody could schedule a tour without having to call you. That became
table stakes. And now 98% of apartment sites all have a way to book a tour online. Well,
guess what the next one is? The next one is an AI agent that’s helping you book those appointments
by either answering questions, upselling you, or putting together a higher quality
in a pitch to get in front of you. And that’s the next wave of this. All websites had to go
through this. And when the tech made it where it was possible, it just became too competitive.
If you didn’t have it, you were left in the dust. And that’s what’s going to happen in this space.
All websites are now going to have an AI agent that helps them sell. Agreed. Yeah. I love that,
Sean. And you guys have done great with your matching zip-ups that are nicely merchandised.
Congratulations. That’s step one to being a startup. So you’ve nailed that one.
You’ve also nailed the revenue thing too. So congratulations to you guys. The million tours
is also pretty good. And $30 million of leases that came through your appointments. That’s also
that’s okay as well. But really, the jackets are fantastic. All right. Thank you guys. You guys are
badass. Well done. Thank you guys. We kind of grade them on a curve. It’s like, if you’re already in
YC and you already have like, you know, a million tours done, then yeah, I kind of feel like these
are unfair. To be honest, I feel like if you are in YC or taking a gap, you’re in San Francisco.
Well, I don’t know. The gap here is fine. That’s like, yeah.
Do you even go to college if you’re at YC? Well, that’s what I’m saying. Those guys put up a team
slide and it was like, I’ve experienced at Google, at Yelp, at like all these companies. Like, dude,
I thought you’re supposed to be like 19 years old. What’s going on? Are these even college kids?
What’s happening? All right. I think we have one more left. The final pitch coming in from Illinois.
Who do we got? Hello. My name is Odd Vaigota. I’m the CEO and founder of Pathlet. It’s really
nice to meet you guys today. What’s up, brother? Nice to meet you too. All right. Until a month ago,
we were working on a no-code engine that helped businesses automate their daily tasks with AI.
And it was going really well. We were working with extremely large enterprises like the Big Four
and had more than a million dollars in VC money to accelerate our growth. But the more we worked
with enterprises, the more we realized that our most valuable automations for them ended up being
email related. They wanted help managing their cluttered inboxes that looked something like this.
A fun story. Our lead investor once told us that she went for a week-long break
and had 8,000 unread emails. And a business owner that we were working with told us his
employees were spending more time on emails alone than the job they were actually hired to do.
And these stories are not one-offs. According to McKinsey, the average employee processes
more than 600 emails per week, wasting 13 hours and thousands of business dollars.
Despite it being an essential part of our lives, email has become a burden and we find it hard to
keep track of even the most important emails in our inbox, often losing them. But according to
industry select, 86% of business professionals still prefer using emails for some reason,
so clearly we can’t get rid of emails. So what can we do? Well, to solve this exact problem,
we are currently building a virtual executive assistant or secretary that handles your emails
for you. What if, just like a real secretary, it could learn from you and respond to emails on your
behalf? What if, just like a real secretary, it tells you what the most important emails in your
inbox are every single morning? And what if, just like a real secretary, it could automatically
respond to emails that you don’t care about? Well, you can have that secretary because our
mobile app does all of that, and we are launching on the App Store next week. And no, we’re not
joking. We have been actively working with a Big Four customer, netting us six figures in annual
revenue, and are starting a pilot with the largest children’s enrichment franchise in the world next
week. Not only that, but we have also been working with five global financial institutions and
completed an oversubscribed seven-figure raise. We were also fortunate enough to win first place
in one of Midwest’s largest startup pitch competitions. My name is Adva, and together
with my co-founder Mark, we collectively bring more than a decade of experience in AI and building
companies. My entire teenage years have been spent building and scaling numerous online security
businesses to millions of users, and Mark has tons of AI research and startup experience under his
belt. We’re now working together to change the way you interact with email today. So join us in
helping to reclaim the biggest part of your daily workday. Thank you. All right, a quick break.
I know that if you’re listening to my first million, that means you love numbers. Well,
I’ve got a new podcast called Moneywise, and the premise is simple. We talk to high-net-worth
people, so people who have somewhere between 50 to 500 million dollars, and we start with simple
premise, which is tell me exactly how much money you have, how much money you make every month,
what your portfolio looks like, how much money you spend every month, and every other bit of
information that involves your net worth and your spending. And the reason we do this is because I
want to demystify money. So we just had this woman named Ann, who has a $94 million portfolio after
selling her business, and she spends $360,000 a month, and she talks about where the money is
and what she spends it on and why she spends that much, and if it makes her happy or not.
And then we dive deep on different topics like children buying versus renting,
giving money away. We basically are having a conversation that I see a lot of rich people
having behind closed doors. We do it publicly. So check it out. It’s called Moneywise,
and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. So I’ll hold on. The first five set words of your
pitch was pretty funny. You said, “Until last month, we were doing this thing.” So let me answer
some questions. But then you have a six figure enterprise contract, and you’ve raised a million
dollars. I don’t understand. Can you briefly tell me the… They had a product. They’re pivoting.
They raised money. They had a customer, but it wasn’t a thing. So they’re pivoting. Is that right?
Is that… Yes, for sure. So I can answer that question. So essentially, it’s the same business.
So we worked on the generative AI engine that we started just this February. So all the contracts
that we have are now converting to the email client. Essentially, we were using our technology to
develop email automations for all these businesses, and we had raised money on that. But now we simply
changed the user interface from a workflow builder that looked kind of like Zapier, etc., to more of
an assistant email client interface that we found that it works better with enterprise customers.
Got it. All right. Because your website doesn’t tell that story, but then if you click… You have
this folder up top that says, “New exclamation point, our email client,” which is pretty cool.
That tells that story a little bit better. Understood. Can I give a PSA about the…
Our team has decades of experience. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t want to get on that, but yeah.
Yeah, I got to say because a couple of the pitches have had that. I don’t think you should do that.
It seems… What you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor that, “Wait a minute.
I think this is even bigger than what they’re saying.” So this is a subtle art where you’re
desperately trying to convince them that this is going to be big and awesome and it’s going to work,
but you cannot appear to be overselling it. You have to feel like you’re underselling it,
and then they feel like they’re finding some diamond in the rough. So how old are you?
I’m 20. You’re 20, right? So to be like we have a combined 12 years of experience,
I think that’s a bit of a tell. What you would be better off saying is,
I started coding when I was 8. By the time I was 12, I had already built blah, blah, blah.
And when I was 14, I hacked into my school’s thing and changed my grades. And now I’ve figured out,
for the last few years, I’ve really been obsessed and focused with the AI. And that’s a more believable
and exciting story for me is like, oh, this is one of those boy geniuses, right? Like, oh,
you’re one of those hacker types that started early. I can pattern match and say, yeah,
a lot of the best performing founders I know have that same story. And that story works better
versus when you tell me, you know, me and my co-founder who are 18 years old, we’ve got decades
of experience. It’s like, no, you don’t, right? Okay. Now what else can I believe out of this?
Even if it’s technically true, the whole cumulative years of experience of your team is not a real
metric that most people put in their pitch deck. So I would get rid of that.
Yes, you’re right. Having said that, all right, that’s public service announcement. I do have a
question. It seems like you’ve done a great job of selling into people that are really hard to
sell into. So how did you go get an enterprise contract from a big four consulting company worth,
you know, over $100,000? I’m curious to hear what you did there. What’s the short story?
Yeah, very good question. So short story was that I was working as a consultant
on campus as part of a university organization. And thanks to my opportunity there, I was able
to connect to a very high level business executive within a big four enterprise through my mentor,
who happened to also be the director of the consulting org. So long story short, it was very
network driven. They were looking for a solution to fit certain problems that they had within an
enterprise. And what I was building as a personal project happened to solve those exact problems.
So once I had that, we essentially made it a company. And what did they say when you’re
pivoting? I mean, did you pivot because of them? They are partly the reason we pivoted,
but it was also when we started engaging with more and more prospects. So our initial
generative AI workflow engine was essentially you could take AI and plug it into any legacy
systems to automate any complex day to day task. For example, if you’re a VC and you receive a
lot of pitch decks every day via email, we could create an automation for you where you would
automatically process those pitch decks, analyze them against your investment thesis, portfolio
companies, etc. And then also send out replies saying, hey, we love this, we would love to
have a meeting or no for the following reasons. And what you’re describing is that sorry, I want
you to finish, but is what you’re describing similar to Lindy.ai? Yes. So Lindy.ai was definitely
a competitor of ours in that space. But then as I was saying earlier, the more we engaged with
customers and prospects, we found that our product was explicitly being used for email
automations. And a big problem with products like our previous one and Lindy.ai is that
the barrier to entry for a lot of non-technical users is quite high. You have to almost be a
developer to actually use even these no code tools. And that is why we decided to change
the interface into a much easier to understand virtual assistant or secretary. Gotcha. I think
the challenge with this business, because you seem really smart and I think whatever you work on
will be interesting. I think the challenge here is you’re going into the most competitive space.
So I do feel undoubtedly that email inboxes are going to start to have AI in them. And the AI is
going to help you process, categorize, summarize your emails in a way and help you with the responses.
The problem is, do I really believe that you are going to be able to get people off of outlook,
off of Gmail and onto your service? Or in addition, you know, they’re also going to be
doing that, right? Google’s definitely going to be adding AI into this. And so is superhuman.
And so is Microsoft, right? They own OpenAI basically. And so I do think that this is going
to be just an absolute bloodbath category. And so I think from an investment point of view,
that would be my problem with this, which is even if I like you, and even if I agree with the idea,
it’s kind of that second inevitability I talked about. One is, where is the puck going this way?
There’s, yes, of course it’s going this way. The second is, are you going to be the team who
captures that opportunity? And it just seems highly unlikely that you would be the team that
captures that opportunity given people don’t want to switch email clients and that all of the email
clients are already aware of this capability and are highly incentivized to add AI to it.
Did you say how much you raised so far? You said a million?
Yes, we have raised a little more than a million.
Are you still in school or are you in living in San Francisco?
Currently, we’re on a gap semester. I’m on a gap semester. Mark’s also on a gap semester,
he has one class left, but everyone else is full-time. We have four people.
Dude, I think that first company, Meet Your Class, it’s that middle funnel things that’s the issue.
All these kids, all these smart kids are bailing on university. That’s amazing that you guys are
all just picking gaps. Well, I just told you that you’re probably going to fail. Tell me why I’m
wrong and I should kick rock. Yeah, for sure. So businesses switching to our email client is
definitely a very big hurdle that we were also trying to navigate. But what we found is by
verticalizing in a lot of businesses with our own kind of information management secretaries,
a lot of businesses prefer us over their standard email clients like Gmail and Outlook.
For example, currently, as I said, we’re starting a pilot with the largest children’s
enrichment franchise. They entirely run over Gmail, but they’re still willing to switch to us
simply because some of the features that we provide is something Gmail and Outlook just
can never do because they have to cater to large groups of audiences and they cannot fit specific
niches of certain requirements that a lot of customers have. Okay. All right, fair enough.
Sam, what else you got before we wrap up? I don’t think I have much. I think that it’s so early.
It’s hard to ask questions because I’m on your website and it looks like it’s very much beta,
so it’s hard for me to fully understand. I think, Sean, you were asking about replacing Gmail.
According to their website, it’s an integration. It’s not replacing Gmail.
It’s hard to fully understand because you’re so new. Do you just keep using Gmail and this is
overlaid or is this a new client you download and you’re supposed to go here instead of Gmail.com?
Yes. So essentially, you just log in with your Gmail. So one way we’re beating that
barrier to adoption is by not saying that you need a new TLD and a new domain ID.
You simply log in with your Gmail. We get all your emails and then you start using
our interface rather than Gmail’s. Yeah. It’s like superhuman, right? So you keep your email address,
but fundamentally, you’re not supposed to go to Gmail every day. You’re supposed to go to
Superhuman and open up your email and use that for all your emails. Yes, that is correct.
All right. Good pitch. Thank you. Best of luck. I think this is a huge idea. I think it’s going
to be super competitive and if you did it, that would be amazing. This is a multi-billion dollar
win if you can actually do it. That’s the good news. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Round of applause.
Thanks, brother. All right. To wrap it, can we just name, I think, do you guys want to do the
winning school that we thought brought the heat? Secondly, our favorite pitch, the best pitch,
meaning the one we would be most likely to put our money into. And then I think we should maybe
do an audience choice as well, which is let the crowd react and see which one they think is best.
What do you think, Sam? All right. So let’s start with school. I have a winner. Let’s recap real
quick. Michigan did Meet Your Class, which was helping universities with the summer melt. The
middle final. Yeah. Middle final for universities. Mill U, which is the personalized skincare,
microbiome stuff. And Tour, which was the AI department tours. And then UIUC was basically
Meet Metafrazo, which is the dubbing company. Brothers Nuts, which is the sprouted nuts company
and Pathlet, that one we just heard about the AI email client. So those are the schools. Sam,
what’s your pick? Illinois all the way. I think that Michigan is an incredibly impressive school,
but I think that I thought it was incredibly impressive that the Metafrazo guy was at
Founders, or what’s it called? The Inc. The way this young guy who just went, the way that he
had already raised a little bit of money and was taking the gap year. And then Brothers Nuts already
has a business that is doing like 400 a year in revenue. I just thought it was more impressive
that a Midwestern school, their people are like going to the coast. And I think that’s a really
good thing. Do you agree or no? I would disagree. I would have gone Michigan. I think that traction-wise,
I mean, tour, let’s break the case here. Tour had the most traction, right? Half a million dollars
in ARR, a million tours served. I think tour and they’re NYC. I think tour was doing the best.
I think Meet Your Class has a real business. I think he stumbled into kind of actually like
a cool business where half a million people have used this thing and now he found a business model
that might actually work. So I thought that Michigan had had the better businesses overall.
All right. Good. They each could vote, but we disagree.
And it’s a tie. All right. So let’s do our favorite business out of these. If you were going to
invest your money into one of these, Sam, which one would you have invested your money into?
The business that I don’t want to invest in, but I wish I owned, and I think the people who
own this one might get the richest, the fastest of all these businesses is Brother Nuts. I think
Austin Major or Brother Nuts, I don’t think they should raise money. I don’t want to invest in
them, but I would love to own that company. I think it could be a family business that makes
hundreds or hundreds of millions or even more throughout the next handful of decades.
Okay. I like it. I would say that’s my favorite business.
My head tells me it’s either Meet Your Class or tour, but my heart is with Brothers Nuts.
And I’m going to go with Brothers Nuts as well. I think that they are one, you know, one step away
from actually making this like a real legit business that you’re going to see on the shelves
in every grocery store. I think they’re not far away from doing that. And I actually think it’s a,
I would actually invest in this business because I think it could actually make it happen.
It’s not theoretical here. I think that most of the companies had an AI element,
and I applaud that. I think that’s where the puck’s going. But it’s hard to stick out, man.
There’s just so much going on.
We picked the one with an Allman element.
Yeah. An Allman element. I don’t know, man. Right? Doesn’t it seem kind of seems like it’s
TBD as to like, who’s going to be the winners? It seems really hard to pick a winner at the moment.
Yeah. It’s sort of a trade off of like more competition, but maybe more upside.
Well, you said it well. You said, you said, this is definitely what’s going to happen,
but it’s going to be a bloodbath. Yeah. And that’s how I feel.
All right. So now the crowd’s choice. So can you guys unmute? I’m going to say
the name of the business. Crowd reaction is going to dictate who wins the audience choice.
Let’s see if this works. This might be crazy with the audio situation here.
Our producer’s freaking out. Turn the laptops. I want to see the crowd, actually.
Okay. So we got the crowd.
Yeah. All right. We’re going to start off from Michigan. Meet your class.
Okay. From UIUC, Metaphrasem.
All right. They might just be closer to the microphone. We’ll give them credit for that.
All right. From Michigan, we have the skin microbiome company, Milu.
All right. They can see exactly putting his mouth next to the mic.
All right. We’re going to go from UIUC. We have Pathlet.
Lukewarm. Lukewarm. I’m going to call it what it was. From Michigan, we have Tour.
All right. So from Michigan, it looks like Milu was the loudest.
And now from UIUC, last one, we have Brothers Nuts.
So Sean, I think I know who won that one. I think it was the Metaphraso.
Metaphraso, I think had it. I think they had it.
We miss you, bro. We miss you.
All right. All right. Okay. Wonderful. Guys, great job, everybody.
This is really impressive. You guys are way ahead of where I was in college.
I think, Sam, probably the same for you. You guys are ahead of the curve.
I hope our feedback is helpful. Even the people we shit on, like if we ask
hard questions or give you a hard time, of all the six people who presented the six companies,
you’re going to be in the 1% of the 1%. You already are in the 1% of the 1%
and what you’re doing is bad-ass. Exactly. Just by being active, you’re bad-ass.
And it’s a sign of respect. If we are willing to keep it real with you,
that’s because we actually think that you can win. If we just wanted to be nice and say,
the participation, I’m so happy for you. That wouldn’t have been helpful to you,
but it also would be actually not a sign of respect. We respect all of you for doing this.
And I just want to say, I would not have become an entrepreneur had I not had a class like this
where a speaker came in and just got me hyped about the idea of doing a startup.
I did not know what to do. My first idea was terrible. My execution was absolutely horrendous,
but it got me on that path. It just seemed like more fun. And so if you’re listening to this or
you’re at one of these schools right now, if it seems like something that you would want to do,
and it seems like the lifestyle, go for it. Don’t let that hold you back.
This could be a tipping point moment for you just like it was for me.
And you are currently in the phase of life where it will never get easier to do these things
than where you are right now. For the next, you have a four-year window where it’s like,
you have nothing really big to worry about except for this. And also, I think it’s Austin and Tommy.
Give these guys a shout out. You guys are the man.
It’s really hard to organize this type of stuff. And I think that getting this type of energy in
one room like you guys have done, it’s contagious. Sam, you thinking what I’m thinking?
I don’t know what you’re thinking. I got two words for you. I got two words for you, nationwide.
We’re taking the power hour nationwide. And then the second two words for you,
pizza party sponsored by MFM. I think we should give these guys some money. Let them host some
events and have some fun. So we will connect with you, Tommy, after this. And we’ll give you guys
some cash so that we can encourage you to throw more events and get more people excited about this.
And I like that it’s underground. I like that it’s off the books. I like that this is not
the entrepreneurship club of the school. This is just the people who actually care about building
stuff and want to do cool things and want to get off the conventional career track. I’m for that.
Thank you all for doing this. We appreciate you. Have a wonderful Wednesday. And if you’re listening
on MFM, you got to go and give all these guys a little bit of love on their websites and check
out their products. All right. Thank you guys. That’s it. That’s the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
to be bringing you these startups today to illustrate the community work power hour,
which is the CIA for college entrepreneurship. And what I mean by that is that you don’t know
like who we are. You don’t know where we meet. We are this underground society of hand-picked,
killed founders. Wow. Hold on. Hold on. If you’re building the impossible,
we got Tommy like Tommy Potter, like Harry Potter. And then there’s no,
there’s no meeting place. There’s no information. There’s no way in and there’s no way out of this
club. Do I have that correct? Correct. It’s a tap on the shoulder, just like the CIA. We let you
know individually where we’re going to be meeting. Dude, Sam, they’re speaking your language already.
This is some real skull and bones shit. I want to preface, this is live audience of
Sam and Sean, you don’t know. I’ll pan the room. We got like 65 people here ready for you.
The ecosystem is out here today. I know the same is going on down at UIUC.
They got a massive room. How many you got in that room there, Austin?
Yeah, I’ll pan the camera too real quick.
So, but yeah, we did it on all points that Tommy said. I basically hope
get all the amazing founders as well as entrepreneurs, content creators, everybody
that’s doing awesome stuff in the same room down here at UIUC. So, we’re super pumped on both sides.
UIUC, is that Illinois Carbondale?
University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, the big I. So, that’s who we are.
So, we got Tommy, we got Austin. The club is called Happy Hour. Is that what you said?
No, we’re Power Hour. Oh, Power Hour.
An hour full of power.
And it’s all student run. There’s no faculty, nobody who’s making this happen.
Is this like, this has been around for 10 years or did you just invent this on Thursday?
What’s going on?
Do you remember Bobby Firehousel, which was on this podcast about two years ago?
I may never forget Bobby.
So, Bobby started all of this?
Bobby started this. Bobby started this and it’s kind of been planting around and UIUC
as their community. We’re very like deep in our partnership there as well.
So, this is fantastic. So, to give the listener background, two years ago we had this guy named
on Bobby. Bobby, I think, was in Michigan. Bobby gathered this group of maybe 15 entrepreneurs
and four of them pitched us and they were awesome. And apparently Bobby has fight clubbed this thing
and gone out from university to university to convince you guys to join on. And this sounds
awesome. And so, today, I think six of you, so three each, are going to pitch us. Is that right?
Totally correct. Yeah, there’s a lot of school pride on the line in terms of which school is
going to come out on top in this competition. So, we’re laying it all on the line for you.
We have tons of creators in the audience. It was tough to get it down to three startups,
but we’re giving you our best. So, can’t wait. We’re ready to roll.
So, this is college shark tank style, two schools pitching from both. We’re going to have a winner.
We’re going to maybe have a few other awards that we come up with. I invested in one of these
last time, Sam, out of Michigan. How’s it going? Company already failed. So, we’re not going to
hold that against y’all. You win some, you lose some. And we lost that one pretty hard, pretty
quick. But that’s all right. All right. But let’s see if you guys can beat Michigan. So,
the first one that we’re going to hear from is, meet your class. And I think,
is university in Michigan, are you guys doing three in a row? And then it’s going to be
back and forth. All right, Sam, I think we just need to step aside and let this kid
emcee this. He’s got the natural of a host. See, I’m using college words.
Is it let it bake or let them cook? Which one is it? Whatever. We’re going to let them bake.
All right. The first one is the folks at Michigan. Okay. Hello. My name is Jonah,
and I’m the COO of Meeker class. Two years ago, my co-founders and I created a platform for
prospective college students to meet each other before coming to campus. And Meeker class quickly
grew in popularity, largely because the communities we built actually extended beyond our own
platform and integrated with the social media apps that nearly every high schooler uses on a
daily basis. Within two years, this system has scaled to over 400,000 account creations and even
generated over $600,000 in revenue through a freemium business model. Well, this was a great
success. An even larger opportunity emerged when we were approached by a university called the
Christ College, which was struggling with enrollment. Basically, they were having issues
filling seats. And they were not alone. This is a really big issue. Recent polls have found
that over two thirds of university CFOs are deeply concerned about declining enrollment.
A really big factor in this that the Christ College and really the majority of universities
across the country struggle with is a phenomenon known as summer melt. Summer melt refers to when
a prospect gets all the way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel, just to at the last second
renege on their deposit, renege on their commitment and decide they no longer want to go to college.
At the Christ College, believe it or not, this was happening with every one in three students,
which eventually was leading to a 33% vacancy rate at the school. The Christ College believe
the Meager class could help decrease the summer melt because our platform had gained a reputation
as being able to build up excitement for prospective students and also to give them
a support network. Furthermore, we also found through discovery that Meager class data was
very valuable for universities in helping them to allocate their limited time and resources
towards students who needed the extra attention and help. And we’re very excited to say that this
worked. At the Christ College, students who used Meager class last year experienced a 61%
reduction in summer melt, which is expected to add $1.7 million back to their top line.
And we’re so excited by these results because at a minimum, this summer melt issue is calculated to
cost the higher education system over $11 billion per year. And it’s of course going to take more
than one case study to really go after this market. But luckily, we now have scaled to eight
partners for the upcoming admission cycle. And amazingly, that same B2C business that I described
at the start is helping us and empowering us to create a product that’s industry leading,
loved by students and administrators. It also got us admitted to tech stars and has allowed us to
bootstrap our way into a much larger, much more qualified team ready to take the higher ed market
by storm. All right. That was great. Do you have an ending for us? So sharks, who’s ready to,
you know, blah, blah, blah. And are you raising, are you actually raising money or not, not,
not raising money right now? We’re planning to actually open a seed round when we graduate in
the spring. That is awesome. That is awesome. By the way, the $600,000 in revenue, how many
people are working there? What’s your profit? Do you have any profit? Yeah. So us as initial
co-founders have not paid ourselves a dime and we reinvest every single penny back into the team.
So I don’t know the exact profitability off the top of my head. You know, we try to
keep the bank account enough to stay alive, but we reinvest every penny back into growing the
team and getting to more university partnerships and we’re trying to get 50 by the end of this
upcoming admission cycle. Of the $600,000, how much is in your business account right now?
I think around $300,000. We got $120,000 from tech stars and then we’ve also won some pitch
competitions. Okay. Okay. Cool. And Blake, your name is Blake, right? My name is Jonah. Blake is my
amazing co-founder. Okay, great. So Jonah, great first great pitch. Really cool business. At first,
when you were talking about it, I thought, well, you know, you sort of created Facebook
20 years too late. You’re trying to help college kids connect. But then what the story got really
interesting when you started talking about how colleges are struggling to fill enrollment and
they have vacancies just like a hotel has vacancies, a college has vacancies and that maybe your tools
actually could help them decrease that. And then they would be your customer, right? You’d be
charging them. Did you charge that first college and what are you charging those other eight colleges
who you said are partners with you on this? Yeah. So our initial partners are heavily discounted
relative to like the market rate for a solution like this because we’re trying to get more logos,
more case studies. Currently, those partners are at under $10,000, but there’s a very clear
path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name. You said market rate,
who else is doing something like this and what are they doing? We do have a handful of competitors.
So this initial thing that we’re describing is called like mid funnel conversion. It’s basically
getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel and then trying to convert them. There’s
a few competitors listed in that second column where we really stand out from them is our integrations
with social media because we’re able to get a large organic user base at the earliest and
latest stages of the enrollment funnel. So a lot of our competitors are like third party apps where
the university basically emails all their students says, Hey, download this and kind of forces them
to use it. And the reason they do that is because these communities generate so much valuable data
and they have a lot more control over it. And social media standalone really doesn’t do this for
them because it’s not a tailor made hire tool, hire tool. So we’re basically retrofitting these
social media platforms and bringing all the data that they pay for these programs. So Jonah,
if you were charging them what you think you can charge them, have you had any conversations about
how much they would be willing to pay either as a percentage of sort of save students or as a
flat fee? What’s your sense of how much each college can pay? So initially just for this
mid funnel conversion tool, we believe that it should be pretty reasonable. Of course,
a college is very inside, but we’ve seen these at the lowest for the smallest schools around
$20,000. And then we’ve seen them scale past 200,000. This is of course just like one small
part of the enrollment funnel. There’s many more issues that we believe we’re prime to solve. That’s
just a generally like, I always want to say a commoditized rate that universities like comfortable
paying for this. Is this the biggest problem or is there a bigger problem? This is one of the
biggest problems. As I mentioned for the Christ college, 1 in 3 students were melting. So it’s
just like the lowest hanging fruit to initially go after because these are kids who arguably should
be going to college. They got way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel and then we then converted
more of them. But they obviously wanted to just get more box and seats throughout the entire process.
Jonah, I always ask how the story ends. Is there a vision for where you’re going to be in 10 years
with this? We’re still trying to figure that out. We are very motivated by genuinely improving the
student experience and making it so college is worthwhile. So in the long run, we want to put
power back in the students’ hands. A lot of students don’t know that they have negotiation power in
the tuition price and a lot of them also end up at places that are suboptimal. So we kind of want
to in the long run become the go-to place that students come to and they figure out where they’re
going to be the most successful to for 10 years down the line. Did you just say that you can
negotiate tuition price? Because I had no idea that’s possible. It is possible. I personally didn’t
do it. Some members of my team could speak to it a lot more. But students have a lot more power
than they realize. Universities need students in order to stay in business. The majority of schools,
not the University of Michigan, but the majority of schools are tuition-dependent for revenue.
Tuition in Michigan is like a very small percentage of revenue. So if you ask for decreased tuition
here, that likely would not pan out because they’re not really struggling with any financial
situations. But at the end of the day, colleges need to act like a business. Otherwise, they’re
going to go under. I was just googling some of these companies. Sean, have you heard of Unibuddy?
Were you going to do Google any of those community apps? I had no idea this stuff existed. Some of
them are actually quite large. How big? Unibuddy, I think, raised $30 million. They raised it during
COVID. So there’s TBD if it’s legit. But it seems like it’s a business that does
many tens of millions in revenue. Jonah, my quick take on this. I think you actually have a real
business here. One of the biggest investments I missed on was the very first guy who ever pitched
me as an angel investor. He had an idea for something called Apply Board. What he was doing
was helping international students get into… He was helping these small colleges get more
international students because international students just didn’t know their name. I had never
heard of Christ College till you just said it. He was charging about $2,000 to $3,000 per student
that actually got admitted and enrolled there. He was making tons of money. That company really
took off. I think you have a real business here. The only thing I would say, I guess, to wrap up,
is I don’t think you should ever raise money for this. I think you should bootstrap this thing.
And if you actually just stuck with this idea and you bootstrapped it,
in four or five years, you would be sitting on probably $20 million, which would be a phenomenal
place for you to be exiting this business. And I think the biggest risk for you is not a business
risk. We raise money because we pitch investors that this could take over the world because we
thought that’s what we’re supposed to do. We thought you have an idea, you pitch investors,
you raise round one, round two, round three. And suddenly, we’re looking at you saying,
how are you going to be a billion-dollar company? And the reality is,
this might be a phenomenal $50 million company, but no chance at a billion-dollar company.
So my advice to you would be, don’t raise, but great pitch overall. Sam, any last thoughts?
I completely agree. I completely agree. All right, Jonah, thank you. Big round of applause.
All right, so where are we going now? Illinois? Yeah, we’ve got our guy out in San Francisco right
now, Shrikhar. What’s going on, guys? Nice to meet you. All right, I love it. You drop out?
You’re not even in college? What’s going on? No, I’m actually on a gap semester. Hey, Sean,
I’m in Founders Inc. I know you know Safon. Oh, no way. I’m in the background. So just met him
yesterday. Me and my couple of my buddies are just visiting San Francisco here, seeing if this is
the right place for us. But yeah. All right, well, gap year. I like the sound of that already.
About a year ago, me and my co-founder were watching the Spanish TV show Money High Sun Netflix.
Unfortunately, neither of us know Spanish very well, so we had to watch the English dub.
Anyone who has ever watched a dub movie knows that there’s a bunch of issues. The lips are
not synchronized with the audio. The voice actors sound nothing like the actual actors.
There’s one scene where two voice actors have the same actor making everything extremely confusing.
We looked at this issue a bit further and found that it is extremely technically complex,
expensive at $100 to $1,500 per minute, time consuming and low quality to dub a video nowadays.
With all of this, dubbing is a $60 billion market in 2022, and there’s been no clear solution for
this. We started by translating content for creators like Mr. Beast and Mr. Nightmare and found
that the essential use case is within education. Imagine the millions of people trying to get an
education in their second language where the content is not meant for them.
So we created MetaFroza, an automated, authentic and affordable translation solution for educators.
All the user has to do is input a video into our solution, press the input and output language,
press submit, and within minutes, get a lip sync, voice clone and text on-screen translated video,
just like this one that we translated for our client, UIUC and Geese and Coursera.
Utilitarianism suggests that an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good
for the greatest number of people. It suggests that an ethical decision will
produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism suggests that
an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number.
So as you can see, Professor’s voice is perfectly cloned from English to Spanish to French,
his lips are synchronized, and our key differentiators, any text on-screen,
is translated with the same font, text, and color as well. For our enterprise clients,
we have a human-in-the-loop process where we translate videos with industry-specific terminology,
keywords, idioms, none of that Google translate issues. We also have the most languages and cheapest
product on the market. Right now, we’re at $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue translating videos
for University of Illinois and corporations like Velcro Corporation. We actually are in talks with
Coursera for a potential integration in quarter one of 2025 as well. Just to look at one of our
potential deals after a paid pilot with geese, just one degree looks like 30,000 minutes in five
languages generating $1.35 million in revenue for our company. This actually saves the University
91% in actual costs and curating the course as well. Our team combines business and technology
with my self-taking gap year to focus on this and our machine learning team of five machine
learning engineers having 37 years of experience in computer vision. Hi, my name is Karla Kala and
my purpose is to break language barriers. Thank you guys very much. All right. That’s awesome.
Great pitch. Great pitch.
And leave some of the slides up so we might need to go back to them. So first of all,
the demo was great. Can you just tell us a little bit about the magic there? So you said,
translates the voice, makes the lips match, which I’ve never seen anyone do that.
Did you see Dana White do that, Sean? You didn’t see Dana White do that for the
Mexican Independence Day UFC? It was great. No, I didn’t see that. So what are you doing to make
the lips? Is it superimposed on top of their lips? Yeah. So essentially we take
one of my buddies, YC model. We take any original video or any original audio and we are allowed
to synchronize the lips based on the input of video and audio in our backend system.
We then curate that. That’s what you’re going to say. You took one of your buddy’s lips
and he’s a model. So you’re saying there’s an off-the-shelf library, basically off-the-shelf
model that does this already. You guys are just integrating that. Yeah, correct. That’s true.
That’s true. Okay. And another question. You said something like, if they did this just one course
for one university, that’s like a million in revenue for you. Are they currently,
are you convincing them, “Hey, you should dub this,” or they’re already dubbing it just at 10
times the cost? Yeah. So right now they’re translating videos automatically and they’re
translating courses, like imagine quizzes, tests, and just like reading papers, but they’re not
translating the videos. So a Spanish user has to go on Coursera and take the course in Spanish,
but have to read the subtitles on an English video for these videos, these courses that they’re
creating right now. We’re basically providing the solution that standardizes the actual
viewing experience for the end user. So they are doing this right now just without paying.
You said that, I think in ’22 or ’23 or something like that, that dubbing was a $70 or $60 billion.
What is that number? Tell me about that number. That’s ridiculous. Just looking at traditional
dubbing, this means in film, education, marketing, just translation in general. Huge market, a bunch
of different positions that we could put ourselves in. I was trying to tell you guys that we also
translated for content creators like MrBeast and Nightmare, but found that the niche was
in education for us just because of the essential need. Think about the applications of translation
for people that have life-changing opportunities stripped for them because they can’t take a
course in their preferred language or they’re not able to understand the professor in a classroom.
So that’s where we got that number. The key distinction, you said they’re already doing
this, but actually the way you said it was they’re translating the tests and the quizzes.
They’re not doing the videos today. And so for them to agree to do this,
this would be a new cost of a million dollars to them that they’re not currently spending.
So in terms of translating a video in general, they’re trying to translate these videos, but
for them, for like a person to translate a video, just like for a 10 minute video, it takes four
hours. They have to curate new slides, have a new professor go in, speak in a new language
of the contract, these people. This would cost them three million dollars to edit these videos,
go over, edit the screen text. But there’s a big distinction. Let’s say I’m sitting at this
university and I look like I am with this vest on right now and I’m sitting there and I’ve got my
budget. But what I’m asking you is today, they don’t already spend in this. You’re not saving them
money from something they’re already spending. They’re currently not spending because it would
be too expensive to do it too slow, too expensive. And so you’re going to be a new cost to them,
right? So that’s going to be a big point of friction because they’re not going to make more
money necessarily off this. You might be able to convince them that if you do this, you might be
able to get more customers. But day one, it’s going to be just extra cost with no extra revenue. Is
that correct? That is true. However, they are going in the direction of putting these courses
online. Digital translation is a thing that they’re already doing. This would just be an
added cost for them at the end of the day. But it would provide a better solution,
potentially being a marketing plight for international students to come to the university
to go, but to answer your question, yeah. What do you do for Velcro? First of all, I didn’t know
Velcro was a brand. I thought Velcro was like clean extra tissue. I thought it was a thing. That’s
pretty wild. But what are you doing for them? And how did you close those guys? Because they
look like a big old sluggish company. Yeah, we had a personal connection to one of the higher
ups of the company. We do internal communications for them. So every month, there’s a 90 minute
internal town hall where the CEO basically speaks in English. She’s Italian woman.
She had a bunch of issues with when she’s speaking English, she lacks emotion. She kind of
doesn’t feel like herself. And we were able to provide them a solution where she was able
to provide the company with updates in her true persona in the new language by speaking in Italian
for 90 minutes into our camera. We put that into our solution. Within three hours, we were able to
curate a transitive video that she’s able to send all the plants at Velcro Corporation in 10
different languages. And we provide the solution to them today. But it sounds like you’re not
doubling down as much on enterprise. You want to go for this university education niche. Is that
right? So we want to go into the education niche. This is universities. This can mean educational
content creation. This can mean corporate trainings as well. We understand that these
educational sales cycles are extremely long, which is why going to these translation agencies
for educational content as well can help us kind of apply like a geometric approach to our
sales cycle as well. Just to speed everything up faster, having us get more traction to it.
And then the university brand itself creates a stance where people say, “Hey,
University of Illinois, use this. I’m an educational content creator. I trust them.
I’m going to trust this company as well.” Right. Well, I think you have a solid pitch,
and I think you have a really great product. But I think this is a product in search of a market.
I think you’re going to run into a lot of trouble because you’re going to go to these
universities and you’re going to say, “Hey, we’re great.” And they’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s
awesome.” But they won’t have the budget for it, or it’s just going to be seen as an extra cost
without a clear extra payoff or sort of ROI attached to it. And so I think that’s going to
hurt the sales cycle. What’s already a slow sales cycle is university sales.
I think it’s going to get harder because you’re costing the money rather than saving the money.
But one thing to consider is if there’s already a big market for dubbing out there,
and they’re doing it manually, this actually could look like a private equity play where you
go buy existing dubbing services that have existing books of business, and then you just
fire all the people and replace it with the AI that’s going to do it better and faster and cheaper
than they’re currently doing. You said it costs like $100 a minute or whatever to dub
with humans doing it. And so what you could do is you could go buy companies and then
rip out the cost structure by replacing it with AI. And that might be actually a better way to go
to this market. And again, this is something that you don’t really hear a lot. You’re in San
Francisco now. A lot of people don’t talk about this, but there is a whole other avenue of business,
you know, rollups and private equity where they’re looking for this. They buy something at a fair
price, and then they slash the cost in half by using technology to make things more efficient.
You could do that here. Understood. And we’re actually are trying to do that right now,
partnering with the Translation Agency to understand exactly how they derive their clients,
how they are going through these sales cycles with refugees, people that are going through
different educational content. The one thing about universities is that I do seeing this
being globalized in systems and learning management systems like Coursera. So we just had a meeting
yesterday with Coursera to essentially say at the University of Illinois pilot goes, well,
they’re willing to give us a shot at integration for translation for a couple of courses there.
That would, you know, allow us to dub from going like a thousand minutes per every two
weeks to maybe a thousand hours for every two weeks. Just to show you the kind of stands
that we’re taking in terms of universities. We’re going for the learning management systems,
not the individual university. Hey, Sean, I don’t pay attention to this world too much,
but how that video that we saw, how impressive was that?
I mean, it’s definitely impressive. And I think they’re doing a couple of other things that are
specific like changing the text on the screen. So I think, you know, that makes the whole solution
work because then the actual course works. So it’s definitely impressive. But I, you know,
there’s got to be 10 other companies that could do this today. There’s nothing like
scientific breakthrough with what they’re doing. So this is really going to be a question of,
who builds the best business around this new technology? The technology exists and anyone’s
going to be able to build a business around this. So it’s really going to be about who figures out
the right market, the right go to market strategy, the right pricing model to actually build the
business out of this. What do your parents think about you taking the gap here?
We got into tech stars in June, ended up declining that my parents are South Indian.
They kind of are driven by, you know, percentages like Prestige was able to show them that,
hey, maybe I’m like top 1% of pre-seed companies by getting this accelerator.
I’m sure them that they let me take this gap semester and then
can have to show them some KPIs that keep on taking time off of school. But I’m loving it right now.
I hope they listen to this. Hey, kids or parents, your kid’s amazing. This is,
he’s going to, it’s going to, it’s going to turn out all right. It’s going to turn out more than
all right. I think there’s a kid at FA Inc where you’re at right now, that officer at right now,
there’s a kid there. It’s not a kid anymore. His name is Johnny Dallas. And he was in eighth grade
when he started working with us and he started in the summer. And then he started working every
day after school. And then I think in 11th grade or so, it was pretty clear, this guy’s awesome,
and he should just work here full time. And we made him an offer and his mom was freaking out,
I can’t, my son’s going to be a high school dropout. This is crazy. No, no, no, he’s going
to test out. He’s going to graduate. He’s going to get his GED. And what I convinced her of was
he’s not dropping out. He’s going pro the same way LeBron James went pro because he had incredible
skills. And that reframe, I got to tell you, that was some of my best work with that mom on a bench
in a park, convincing her that he’s going pro. He’s not dropping out. And then we got him to,
got him to go full time with us. Got you. Got you. Dude, congratulations on your success. Good
job. And thank you for letting us listen. And you’re the man. All right, what do we have next?
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Hey, hold on, brother. Keep that up. I’m going to try it. Go for it. All right, there you go.
This is pretty cool. When I thought microbiome, Sean, what did you immediately think? I thought it
was gut. Yeah, I thought it was gut and poop. I was like, do I got to poop it a thing and
you’re going to give me a thing to help my skin? But I didn’t know that skin microbiome was a thing.
That’s pretty baller. How’s your skincare routine?
You know, body wash that goes on my armpits also goes on my face. It’s not very good,
but I’m bought into the idea that it is important and I do want to get better.
So this is interesting to me. Do you have any revenue at all?
No revenue. We’re currently in development. We’re doing beta testing.
Okay, gotcha. And a really smooth pitch, by the way. You are a talker that was really well done.
Okay, so let’s give some thoughts on this.
Dude, by the way, his deck, Sean, was great. Those cartoons, they told the story wonderfully.
Yeah, who made all that? You made that?
The deck and the story? No one made it. That’s just my story.
Well, it made it sound like the graphics are cool.
Oh, the deck, yeah. My co-founder Ron and I worked on it. And then we also workshopped it
with a bunch of other students in the community. Gotcha. Okay. You know, one thing I think that
would help you is this type of story, I think, would go viral on TikTok. Basically what you told
us, if you were like, I used to think skincare routine. I used to think, you know, whatever,
I didn’t care about my skin. And then I got a flush eating bacteria. This is me after my trip
to Costa Rica and you show a picture. You’re like, so here’s what I did to get rid of this.
And while I’ll never look at any of these skincare products, the same again, knock over a bunch of
bottles on a table, right? You do something like that. You’re going to get like two million views
on a TikTok. You can actually include that in this, which is going to be like, we know how
to tell our story and get out there. And that that story resonates with people, that people are
looking for something that’s more personalized. That’s actually science-based and not just,
you know, a fancy brand. And we’re going to use content to our advantage. And that’s how we’re
going to have much cheaper customer acquisition, right? The smart brands in the DTC space are
basically content first right now. They know how to tell their story on TikTok and Instagram and
YouTube. And that’s where they’re getting just like a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody
else who’s just doing very basic static ads on Facebook type of thing.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we observe that many of our competitors sunk a ton of their initial
revenue into advertising. And so we’re looking at sort of a different go-to-market strategy.
We want to please 50 people in our beta testing. We want to work like very closely with a smaller
group of people to make sure that our product and our algorithm is really working the way that
it’s supposed to before we go like mass market. But I like the idea of doing short form content,
because I know it definitely hits with the younger audience, which is target market.
Who’s your competitors? So are there other people doing this?
Well, there’s no one that’s doing exactly what we’re doing. There are skincare companies that
do microbiome testing. And they’re also personalized skincare companies. The biggest skin microbiome
company currently is Parallel Health. And they offer a 200 a month protocol where they do sequencing
on your skin microbiome, super high market high end product. There’s a company that’s successful.
They’ve been in business for seven years now called Proven Health. They were actually, sorry,
Parallel, no, it’s Proven Skincare. They’re on, they’re on Shart Tank. And they do personalized
skincare that’s based off of a quiz only. So we have a quiz and we have microbiome testing. So
we’re sort of the baby between those two ideas. A lot of times with health stuff, health stuff or
skin, anything involving your body, that’s very, it’s very controversial because there’s always,
there’s a bunch of people who love something typically, and then there’s an equal or more
amount of haters, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. It’s just health is very controversial.
What would the haters say about this? Like, would they say like, dude, microbiome stuff,
it’s not actually important. If you just use these three things, it’s going to do most of the job.
You don’t need to worry about this other stuff. Like, what are the haters going to say about you?
I’d say the biggest liability there is that the skin microbiome field is actually very nascent.
So the, basically, we’re testing a hypothesis. We believe that skincare that’s precisely
tailored to your microbiome is better than the traditional methods out there. I think people
would likely continue to hold on to this societal idea that all bacteria is bad or like,
we need to stay in this sort of sanitized mindset. Like, people really like to feel clean.
And so I think that that’s the biggest objection to this is like, we love germs. We want to
harness the power of the germs that are on your face. And we believe they hold a lot of potential.
So people might be like, Oh, it’s gross, but, you know, it’s just science. Science is gross.
Well, I, like, I think the criticism, I’m an idiot, but I pay attention to health stuff. I
think the criticism is like, you know, that’s like, that thing will just move the needle by 1%,
whereas if you do these other things, it’s mostly going to get you there and be perfect.
Do you know what I mean? You know what I’m saying, Sean?
Yeah, it’s like in health stuff. You can listen to Hubertman for 92 hours,
and suddenly you’re Brian Johnson or whatever, and you’re trying to take 42 supplements a day.
But 80 to 90% of the gains are going to come from like, you know, good sleep,
drink water, eat clean whole foods. And if you just do those things and you’re not,
you’re probably not already doing those things, that’ll get you the bulk of it.
The rest is really like, you know, on the edge optimizations. And I think you’re right, Sam,
that, you know, sort of a smart skeptic would probably have that thought. But I don’t think
that’s what’s going to drive success or failure in this case. So I think actually one thing you
were missing from your pitch is to convince me that people care about hyper-personalization,
and that that’s where the puck is going. And really what you want in a pitch is for this to feel
like an inevitable outcome of what’s happening here, of what’s happening in this space, whether
it’s you or somebody else that’s sort of secondary, but you really want to convince investors of two
things. One, inevitably this is where the puck is going, and that inevitably we are going to be the
ones who take advantage, score when that puck gets there, right? So you kind of need to make
two cases when you make a pitch. And so for example, I know that in hair care and kind
of beauty products, makeup products, there’s a lot of this already, the trend has gone in this
direction where isn’t it like you do quizzes and you figure out, oh, I have curly hair and my problem
is that it’s dry. And then for that, you’re going to get a certain product. And I think what you
would want to show is that the companies that came out in the last wave for beauty products
that went the personalization route have outperformed, have had all these really great exits,
but nobody’s done it for skin care yet, but they will. And here’s what’s going to happen
in skin care. The same thing that just happened in makeup and hair is going to happen for skin,
right? Same thing that just happened in vitamins is going to happen for skin. And that makes it
sort of feel inevitable. Oh my God, he’s right. The next wave of successful skin care companies
are going to use this kind of science-based, hyper-personalized thing that I think was missing
from your pitch. So that’s kind of my feedback for you. Thank you. That’s good. That’s very good
feedback. I thought you did a great job telling the story. I’m still trying to understand what…
I already asked that question, but like the other answers could have been like,
everyone agrees that this is right, but the question that we’re trying to figure out is,
can we or anyone even figure this out? Like, I wanted to figure out like, what’s going to be…
What is this all hinge on? Because if you’re talking to like, on a beta, like, what is this…
What are you having to convince the world that needs to happen, owner, for this to be a massive
breakthrough? Let me ask you a very simple question. Do you believe… Let’s assume it works. Do you
believe that it’s going to be a visually different result? Meaning, if I just showed you two pictures,
one person who’s using your thing and one person who’s just using off-the-shelf stuff,
honest question, do you think it’s going to be where I could just point and go, yeah, that’s
clearly better? Because if it is, then all your marketing is going to work that way. And if it’s
not, then the science kind of actually in the world of supplements and vitamins and creams,
let’s be honest. Nobody has a clue if any of this ship actually works. And so then it’s all just a
branding game. It’s all a marketing game. It’s all who can convince the consumer that if you buy
this product, you’ll be more beautiful and everyone will love you and things will go well for you in
life. And so I think we’re kind of… Unless it’s literally visual where you can see the difference
and it’s going to be inarguable, then it’s just a question of, are you going to be a great marketer?
L’Oreal, why is L’Oreal successful? It’s not because we know that their product
scientifically is better than anybody else’s product. It’s because they’re better marketers.
That’s the reality of the situation. Yeah, we certainly recognize that. We definitely want to
sort of latch into the trend towards clean and sustainable beauty, which is why we made a box
that you can plant in the ground and it grows flowers. We think it’s really like the beauty’s
in the details here. So I absolutely agree with you. Before and after pictures are like one of the
best things that we can get. And the results of our beta testing are currently looking very promising,
but before I start to make claims and put those pictures on the website, I want to do really
thorough analysis of how the products are working, how the algorithm is working to make sure that we
have something that is really solid. All right, brother, we appreciate you. Congratulations on
this and solid pitch. We got to go to the next one. Great job. Thank you.
Hey, let’s take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out.
It is called The Next Wave. It’s hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz as part of the HubSpot
podcast network, which of course is your audio destination for business professionals like you.
You can catch The Next Wave with Matt Wolfe and he’s talking about where the puck is going
with AI creators, AI technology and how you can apply it to your growing business.
So check it out. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get the podcast.
Is Brother Nuts? Is that who’s up next? It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name is Austin Majors. I’m the
co-founder of Brothers Nuts. Here at Brothers Nuts, our mission is to kick the fake food to the curb
and revolutionize healthy snacking with organic sprouted nut and seed snacks.
So first off, my family found that half of the snacks out there
weren’t actually healthy and the other half tasted like garbage.
But first off, why did we create this business? Well, our business started back in 2010 actually
when my father was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. He was given seven weeks to live
and through the changes in diet and lifestyle turned that seven weeks into seven years.
But one of the biggest issues him and my family had was finding a snack that was as healthy as it
was tasty. And so our current day CFO, aka chief flavor officer, aka mom, being the amazing mom
that she is, went into work and created what is now known as the crackled cheesy almonds.
Now my family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were
flavorful, but also very crunchy. And that’s what makes us very different. All of our nuts and
seeds are sprouted. But how’s it gone over the last seven years? So I started this company
when I was 13 years old when my father passed away with my older brother who was 15. And over
the last seven years, we’ve done over a million dollars in sales. We sold over a million dollars
worth of nuts. We’re currently available in 200 retail locations. And the future is very promising.
We have a clear path forward over the next four years to take this business to $10 million in
sales and be a national brand. How are we going to do that? We’re going to do that by doing the
hard work that no one else wants to do. And I know no one else wants to do it because I speak to
these stores and no one else is doing it. So what is that? First of all, it’s expanding and making
more money from our current clients. Clients like FreshTime, MomsGradicMarket, FreshMarket.
But it’s also expanding distribution and getting new grocery stores like Whole Foods,
Sprouts, HEB, key accounts. How are we going to grow within those stores? We’re going to continue
shaking hands, doing what I just did for you guys. Telling my story, having people try the product
and letting people know that there’s something out there like this. And last, we’re going to continue
innovating through our product. Right now, we’re developing a clean chocolate almond. And we also
have a, we’re developing a high protein variant of our most popular flavors, something that’s never
been done in this space. Now, kind of more grand scale. I mean, there’s 62,000 grocery stores.
The nut market is selling $10 million this year. I look at the biggest companies out there and we
can absolutely get there. But what’s really cool is we are on the up and up. Steady oil free, wear that.
Sprouted, good and free, gut friendly. We check all the boxes. Finally, something that my dad did
in 2010 is now mainstream. And we are on the cutting edge of it. In the last period over period,
products labeled sprouted grew 34% in their velocities and sales. We are on the up and up.
But let’s remember why we’re doing this. Look, the reason why we’re able to have the success,
why we’re able to land these retailers, get through these gatekeepers, is because we’re doing this
in every sale that we’re making in milestone. It’s contributing to continuing my father’s legacy.
Everything we’re doing is to grow his legacy and to create my own along with my brothers.
Because we know that by changing what people snack on every single day,
we’ll lead them to live longer, better, healthier lives with their families.
And so, if you’re ready to join us, to kick the fake food to the curb and evolve the way you snack,
I’d love to talk to you.
Dude, that was great. I got goosebumps. What an amazing story. Good for you, dude. I’m really
happy to hear about this. Austin, I just placed a $52 order. I’m going to try the cheesy ones,
the garlic ones, and the spicy basil pumpkin seeds. So, let’s see what you’re about.
We’ll throw some extra stuff in there for you.
This is great. So, you’re in some stores today. Can you just give us the basic rundown? So,
how many stores are you currently in? And is that one chain or multiple? What’s going on?
Yeah. So, it’s multiple chains. Our very first store that gave us our shot was Freshtime Market.
There were about 70 stores across the Midwest. I mean, the story with that is my brother called
the CEO, got a call back in the lunchroom of the senior year of high school. We sat down with the
team, got three stores, proved ourselves in three stores. They gave us 30. We proved ourselves again.
They gave us 70. Stores only give you that many and allow you to expand if you’re selling well.
So, after we had that success story, we went out and we targeted smaller chains,
like mom’s organic market on the East Coast, the Fresh Market, which we’re starting off small with.
And with that data, we were now going to new stores. We met with Whole Foods.
We got a yes from them. We got pushback. We’re fighting to get a bigger and better yes.
And we have a huge mean with sprouts tomorrow, actually. Wow. And so, what’s the revenue so far?
Yeah. So, since inception over the last seven years, we sold over a million dollars worth of nuts.
This year alone, we’ll do 400,000. Last year, 200,000. And next year, with some of the launches
that we’re planning, we’ll do probably closer to 2 million. And what do the retailers tell you?
So, that fresh time that you’re in, sorry, you’re in 70 stores with them or they have 70 stores?
Now, we’re in all 70 of their stores. We’re in a total of 200 retail stores across the country from
some of those bigger players and some just smaller one-off stores, health food stores, golf courses.
And like, you know, the way that retail works is they need to see the velocity of, you know,
how much you’re selling on the shelf at their stores for you to get into more stores.
And so, what data do you have? And is that currently a strength? Is it a weakness? What’s
going on with the current cycle rate or whatever they call it for, retail consumption?
Yeah. So, the velocities in the data is the biggest thing. So, our product is incredibly
unique in that we are one of the only ones who offer a product like ours. We have very few
competitors. I can name them. And so, what we have to deal with, of course, first demonstrate a gap
on the shelf. Hey, you are not, you don’t have any nut, flavored nut options that are organic,
sprouted and they contain no seed oils. So, first we have to do that and then we just show share the
data. I mean, our velocities, if they were bad and that was an issue, we, fresh time would not have
let us go from 3 to 30 to 70 stores. They came to us. We didn’t have to approach them on that. We
were just killing it so much. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. I feel like you answered a question that
should be answered in numbers with letters. That’s okay. All right. So, here’s the problem
that I have with this business. I like your name. I like your story. I really want to try
your nuts. All right. But here’s the problem. When I go to your TikTok, I see 50 followers.
And when you’re young, you have a lot of disadvantages. You’re not going to have the same
level of experience. You’re not going to have the same amount of funding and resources. You’re
not going to have the supply chain experience that your competitors all have. But you do have a
story and what you should be is amazing at social media. You should be telling your story on social
media. You should be getting people excited about this and taking that to the retailers and saying,
“Look, we’re this young, exciting brand that consumers really care about and consumers are
excited about.” And you don’t have an option like that. The nut shelf for you guys is stale. It’s
just Blue Diamond. And it’s the same old brands that do the same old thing. And they’re not on
trend. They’re not seed oil-free. They’re not whatever. You have that story, but you need the
social side to be kick-ass because social just takes creativity. It doesn’t take money. And
you’re part of the generation that should be better at this than whoever the CEO of Blue Diamond is.
Their social strategy is obviously going to be pretty boring. And so, I think that’s where
you’re dropping the ball. And that’s what you’re going to need to get into retail because I’ve
talked to retailers. And what they care about is they need to believe that you are going to help
drive traffic to the store or that customers care about your brand and that they’re adding
young hot brands to the shelf. That’s what you need as your story. So, I think that’s what’s
missing for me right now. Absolutely. Yeah. Who, with the family business like this, do you and
your brother, are you the two owners or is your mother involved? Who owns the company?
Yeah. So, my brother and I are 50/50 owners. We do have my mom, who’s our chief flavor officer.
She’s in charge of making sure the nuts taste as good as they do. I mean, she’s the original
person who created these recipes and we just took them and started selling them.
Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. I bought in with Sean as well on the story. The story was
very good. I saw your about page. I saw the personality. I was like, “All right, this is
definitely going to be something interesting. I’m now a customer. I’m very eager to try it,
but this is pretty badass.” Sam, do you remember the name of that nuts brand that he’s kind of like
on Twitter? Nutty Nerds? Is that it? It’s like a peanut butter brand, right? Yeah. They do
many eight figures that you’re in revenue. Many eight figures. So, tens of millions of dollars
in revenue. Yeah. Have you looked at these guys, Austin? Yeah, I’m familiar with them.
And I think they just got popular on social media and their shtick is different than yours.
There’s the opposite of… Indulge. Yeah, it’s like indulge versus what you’re trying to do.
But you do have… I’ve invested in a bunch of these seed oil or seed oil-free companies.
I think TBD, if it’s going to be mainstream yet, but it definitely seems like it might be.
But this is super fascinating. You have a lot of tailwinds to help you out here for sure.
I think you want to include that in your pitch, by the way. An investor doesn’t really know how
big a nuts brand can be. And your numbers, while I’m not saying that they’re bad, they are
on the small side for an e-commerce company, right? So, if you’re… We’ve done a million
dollars across seven years. Okay, that’s not huge. I think you got to paint a picture that this can
actually be really big. I looked up Blue Diamonds, by the way. Blue Diamonds says about 1.8 billion
a year in revenue. Correct. So, I would show the nut category is huge. And you have… Blue Diamond
does 1.8 billion in sales a year. The next one does this. The next one does this. And we use
this phrase on MFM that there’s a sea of sameness. You walk down that aisle and it’s all old brands.
There’s not one challenger brand. And all of them have the same problem that they’re lacking,
XYZ. We have fresh packaging. We’re a challenger brand. We have a better story. We’re hot on social
media. So, I think you need that part of the story. And I would include others like nerdy nuts.
And I would show examples of others who have come into this category and are doing very well
at how you’re the next in line. Again, it’s that sort of error of inevitability that you want to
paint. And so, when you don’t have the traction that shows that your own trajectory is inevitable,
you want to show the inevitability of a category, of a change. Some of the things you talked about
about sprouted products are growing 34% year-over-year in these stores. That’s kind of like you want
slides there because it feels like every category now has a sprouted product and the sprouted
products are overperforming. Guess what? Nuts doesn’t have a sprouted product. We are that
sprouted nut, right? And so, you want to paint that picture for the investor. But really good
overall. And honestly, I actually think of all the business we heard today, I think this is probably
the one that could be the biggest. Yeah. But I don’t think you’re using your strengths. And I think
if you keep going on the same path you’re going, it won’t be huge. But you’re still young and you
have time to change. If you actually take some of the feedback and do it, I think this could
actually be a lot bigger. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ed. Thank you, man. You’re the best. Awesome,
majors. Thank you very much. All right. We have the last one from University of Michigan, right?
All right. Hi, Sam, Sean, MFMFAM. We are a tour, the AI-powered salesperson for property managers.
Today, only 4% of apartment prospects that ever land on an apartment website
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money already or what? Yeah, we’ve raised about 350 to 4K so far, but largely been bushdrop.
We’ve had many interesting moments throughout the journey, but we’ve been really focused on
getting the product experience as good for our customers as possible.
Can I tell you, I used to work in this industry a long time ago, can I tell you like the three
reasons why I think this could fail and you could tell me how I’m wrong? The first, I think that
there is this thing called Matterport that existed for a long time. I know Airbnb tested
on their website and I used to be an Airbnb owner. And when they had these, Matterport made these
like realistic models of what your apartment looked like. Like a 3D virtual tour. Yeah,
similar to this. And they found that it decreased conversion. And the main thing being is that a
lot of apartments for rent are shit. And like, it’s like, dude, just like, I just need to get
someone in the door. And once they’re in the door, I can like, like do some salesmanship to sell them.
But like online, it looks pretty shitty in a 3D way. The other one being that there’s
like right now, I don’t know, do apartments need to be filled at the moment? Like it seems like
a lot of these folks are like, dude, I’m killing it right now. My vacancy is quite low. Why should
I spend money to do this work? And the last one being is a lot of apartments that you need,
I would imagine to do sales on the apartments are kind of shitty. And I don’t want someone to see
them online. I need them to see them in real life so I can sell you on it. And, you know, it’s,
you know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t want like a user video of like a 1994 Honda Civic.
But if I get you here and you’re like, dude, I got $1,000. I’m like, this shit box is for you.
And I don’t need a video for that. You know what I mean? So can you like refute some of those points?
Yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. Matterport is one of our comps. You know, they’re
doing 500, they’re still doing $540 million per year. They are a public comp. But the big thing
that they do that’s different or that we do that’s different is where you’re telling me that
Matterport does $500 million in revenue? Yes. Yes. Now, the big thing that is put in perspective,
the big thing that we do that’s different is two things. The first thing is we are fundamentally
an active experience that’s partnered with the apartment to funnel someone down the whole
sales funnel. From the first moment they meet them to following up on email, following up targeting,
and that allows us to hit a much larger market than Matterport even does today.
And then the other thing that I think you talked about, which is the nature of most of these
apartments fundamentally being not necessarily like maybe old, drab experiences. I think the first
thing is, look, things change. Apartments are becoming one of the largest purchases we make.
It is one of the largest we make. And these are becoming more commoditized. They’re becoming
more monetized. I mean, the whole future is going into the experience economy. And I think the
experience is going to be a very important part of our Gen Z or even millennial shop.
So I think that experience is a very important part. We see that because a lot of our tours,
we deliver it over more tours. Many of them are international, out of state. And these are important
decisions that people are on the edge on which different shops or different departments they
might want to work with. Now, for example, one apartment might want to have a virtual
leasing advantage compared to others. And that’s why we help fundamentally become
part of the adversely leasing advantage. And then the last element I know because you want to say
something, it’s just that we’re also augmenting the sales force, right? So there’s a frontline
sales in most of these businesses are fundamentally high churn. There’s people leaving the building
all the time. If we can help augment their sales team, we have a much larger staying power with
the actual property, not just a one off virtual tour. And one thing I like to add is that Matterport,
yet their like essential goal is to communicate the like physical establishment to the customer.
And obviously, we do that. But what we’re trying to do is to augment the website to
better communicate that as well as segment leads so that they know how to allocate the
resources best to the highest intent leads. So that’s another area where they save money
by better allocating resources. And the tour, the tour that you give, sorry, I might have missed
this during the thing, or like, I don’t know, maybe have a demo. Is it just a girl talking
and photos? Or is it like a walking tour that you generate? Or do you go film it first? Like,
what is the actual thing? Okay, here’s the video. Yeah, we go and film it. So we have
two elements. We either have a video pro network that can help film it or building more and more
scripts that you can easily start start filming it from your phone. iPhone 16 is like rivals,
like Sony cameras. And once we got just so this is not AI generated. This is like a video you
guys make. Yes, yes. And then we take the knowledge base as well as that media and supply that
throughout the whole sales process. Got it. Okay, cool. So you guys go film a video when an
apartment social work with you. And then you have the AI wrapper around it where it’s chat,
it’s Q&A, it’s scheduling appointment, it’s following up with a targeted ad, it’s things
like that. That’s what you guys do after that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. And the 450K of ARR
that you have right now, that’s from how many customers? That’s from 130 property managers,
usually around the price point of $300, somewhere to 50, some are paying more.
And how’d you get the 100, whatever property managers? So the cool thing is we have a land
and expand motion. So once we’re inside a property manager, usually they manage many properties,
large apartment buildings. What we do is we demonstrate our results and most of our other
property management companies start expanding within the property managers. So one property
manager inside a company refers to some of her additional properties in her portfolio or some
of the other regional property managers. So how will you go from 100 something properties today
to 1,000 or 10,000 in the next year? What are you going to do?
So one of the big things we’ve been trying recently is automatically generating tours
so that we can demonstrate value to apartments before we even have to go in person because
obviously that’s a large cost of videotaping the actual apartment. So we can immediately
just scrape the website, pull some images, use flux to turn the images into somewhat of a mock
video, pull some information from their website and generate a tour that can act to segment
leads on the website. And then they can see the value of it. Oh, a tour lead came in. This is a
high intent lead. Let’s follow up on it. And then from there, if they’re pleased by the value,
then we can actually go out and record that video, making the tour even better.
Okay. So you’re going to auto generate these videos as a prototype, as a sample,
and then you’re going to cold email them and say, “Hey, we could do this for you guys.”
Cold email referral. Yep.
Okay. And then what do you guys run an A/B test? So on any of your apartment websites,
do you show if you have us installed versus if you don’t have us installed, what’s the difference
in revenue? Yeah, absolutely. So what we notice is when it comes to the actual properties,
like the amount of value we generate for the properties, usually an additional $300,000 to
$500,000 in leases. Now specifically, we do three things really importantly that leads to these
fundamental items. The first thing is we deliver a four-times number of tours, prospects who are
on the website get three times engagement, and also the leads that we end up capturing, just
obviously are going to be more qualified, right? And so those leases convert at a higher rate.
Okay, gotcha. That’s pretty convincing. If you told me, hey, however many tours you’re
giving per week right now, I could forex that if you add this thing to your website.
That’s a pretty compelling proposition, don’t you think, Sam?
Yes. I still think that there’s a bunch of… I think there’s a bunch of other questions related
to the things that I said, but that is compelling. I think I’m scarred from this industry of selling
to these companies and how hard it is and how old school some of these… Have you guys noticed
that about how old school your customers are? And it’s like the two customers that we’ve had in
this presentation or in this section have been campuses or colleges and apartment buildings.
And I’m like, oh my god, those are both really, really, really hard. Have you guys noticed that
when you’re selling to these apartment companies that they’re a pain in the ass to work with?
It definitely is an old guard. And things change ever so often. But I think they’re realizing how
important it is, particularly when they’re looking at e-commerce and how things are evolving,
that it’s important for them to be extremely competitively advantaged. And so just the nature
of competition has really been trying to somewhat push the… They’re just slow. They’re really slow.
Yeah, I do think though, again, back to that idea of you want to make this feel inevitable,
I think it is… There’s a clear line you could draw where you say, look, if you were a apartment
building and back 15 years ago, you might have been able to get away without having a website.
But about 15 years ago, you now had to have a website. You had to have a website. You had
to be findable on Google. That became mandatory table stakes. And then after that, you had to
have photos. If you didn’t have photos, you were not even competitive. You’re non-viable.
And then you had to have videos. And you had to have videos. And then after that, you had to have
a booking thing where somebody could schedule a tour without having to call you. That became
table stakes. And now 98% of apartment sites all have a way to book a tour online. Well,
guess what the next one is? The next one is an AI agent that’s helping you book those appointments
by either answering questions, upselling you, or putting together a higher quality
in a pitch to get in front of you. And that’s the next wave of this. All websites had to go
through this. And when the tech made it where it was possible, it just became too competitive.
If you didn’t have it, you were left in the dust. And that’s what’s going to happen in this space.
All websites are now going to have an AI agent that helps them sell. Agreed. Yeah. I love that,
Sean. And you guys have done great with your matching zip-ups that are nicely merchandised.
Congratulations. That’s step one to being a startup. So you’ve nailed that one.
You’ve also nailed the revenue thing too. So congratulations to you guys. The million tours
is also pretty good. And $30 million of leases that came through your appointments. That’s also
that’s okay as well. But really, the jackets are fantastic. All right. Thank you guys. You guys are
badass. Well done. Thank you guys. We kind of grade them on a curve. It’s like, if you’re already in
YC and you already have like, you know, a million tours done, then yeah, I kind of feel like these
are unfair. To be honest, I feel like if you are in YC or taking a gap, you’re in San Francisco.
Well, I don’t know. The gap here is fine. That’s like, yeah.
Do you even go to college if you’re at YC? Well, that’s what I’m saying. Those guys put up a team
slide and it was like, I’ve experienced at Google, at Yelp, at like all these companies. Like, dude,
I thought you’re supposed to be like 19 years old. What’s going on? Are these even college kids?
What’s happening? All right. I think we have one more left. The final pitch coming in from Illinois.
Who do we got? Hello. My name is Odd Vaigota. I’m the CEO and founder of Pathlet. It’s really
nice to meet you guys today. What’s up, brother? Nice to meet you too. All right. Until a month ago,
we were working on a no-code engine that helped businesses automate their daily tasks with AI.
And it was going really well. We were working with extremely large enterprises like the Big Four
and had more than a million dollars in VC money to accelerate our growth. But the more we worked
with enterprises, the more we realized that our most valuable automations for them ended up being
email related. They wanted help managing their cluttered inboxes that looked something like this.
A fun story. Our lead investor once told us that she went for a week-long break
and had 8,000 unread emails. And a business owner that we were working with told us his
employees were spending more time on emails alone than the job they were actually hired to do.
And these stories are not one-offs. According to McKinsey, the average employee processes
more than 600 emails per week, wasting 13 hours and thousands of business dollars.
Despite it being an essential part of our lives, email has become a burden and we find it hard to
keep track of even the most important emails in our inbox, often losing them. But according to
industry select, 86% of business professionals still prefer using emails for some reason,
so clearly we can’t get rid of emails. So what can we do? Well, to solve this exact problem,
we are currently building a virtual executive assistant or secretary that handles your emails
for you. What if, just like a real secretary, it could learn from you and respond to emails on your
behalf? What if, just like a real secretary, it tells you what the most important emails in your
inbox are every single morning? And what if, just like a real secretary, it could automatically
respond to emails that you don’t care about? Well, you can have that secretary because our
mobile app does all of that, and we are launching on the App Store next week. And no, we’re not
joking. We have been actively working with a Big Four customer, netting us six figures in annual
revenue, and are starting a pilot with the largest children’s enrichment franchise in the world next
week. Not only that, but we have also been working with five global financial institutions and
completed an oversubscribed seven-figure raise. We were also fortunate enough to win first place
in one of Midwest’s largest startup pitch competitions. My name is Adva, and together
with my co-founder Mark, we collectively bring more than a decade of experience in AI and building
companies. My entire teenage years have been spent building and scaling numerous online security
businesses to millions of users, and Mark has tons of AI research and startup experience under his
belt. We’re now working together to change the way you interact with email today. So join us in
helping to reclaim the biggest part of your daily workday. Thank you. All right, a quick break.
I know that if you’re listening to my first million, that means you love numbers. Well,
I’ve got a new podcast called Moneywise, and the premise is simple. We talk to high-net-worth
people, so people who have somewhere between 50 to 500 million dollars, and we start with simple
premise, which is tell me exactly how much money you have, how much money you make every month,
what your portfolio looks like, how much money you spend every month, and every other bit of
information that involves your net worth and your spending. And the reason we do this is because I
want to demystify money. So we just had this woman named Ann, who has a $94 million portfolio after
selling her business, and she spends $360,000 a month, and she talks about where the money is
and what she spends it on and why she spends that much, and if it makes her happy or not.
And then we dive deep on different topics like children buying versus renting,
giving money away. We basically are having a conversation that I see a lot of rich people
having behind closed doors. We do it publicly. So check it out. It’s called Moneywise,
and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. So I’ll hold on. The first five set words of your
pitch was pretty funny. You said, “Until last month, we were doing this thing.” So let me answer
some questions. But then you have a six figure enterprise contract, and you’ve raised a million
dollars. I don’t understand. Can you briefly tell me the… They had a product. They’re pivoting.
They raised money. They had a customer, but it wasn’t a thing. So they’re pivoting. Is that right?
Is that… Yes, for sure. So I can answer that question. So essentially, it’s the same business.
So we worked on the generative AI engine that we started just this February. So all the contracts
that we have are now converting to the email client. Essentially, we were using our technology to
develop email automations for all these businesses, and we had raised money on that. But now we simply
changed the user interface from a workflow builder that looked kind of like Zapier, etc., to more of
an assistant email client interface that we found that it works better with enterprise customers.
Got it. All right. Because your website doesn’t tell that story, but then if you click… You have
this folder up top that says, “New exclamation point, our email client,” which is pretty cool.
That tells that story a little bit better. Understood. Can I give a PSA about the…
Our team has decades of experience. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t want to get on that, but yeah.
Yeah, I got to say because a couple of the pitches have had that. I don’t think you should do that.
It seems… What you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor that, “Wait a minute.
I think this is even bigger than what they’re saying.” So this is a subtle art where you’re
desperately trying to convince them that this is going to be big and awesome and it’s going to work,
but you cannot appear to be overselling it. You have to feel like you’re underselling it,
and then they feel like they’re finding some diamond in the rough. So how old are you?
I’m 20. You’re 20, right? So to be like we have a combined 12 years of experience,
I think that’s a bit of a tell. What you would be better off saying is,
I started coding when I was 8. By the time I was 12, I had already built blah, blah, blah.
And when I was 14, I hacked into my school’s thing and changed my grades. And now I’ve figured out,
for the last few years, I’ve really been obsessed and focused with the AI. And that’s a more believable
and exciting story for me is like, oh, this is one of those boy geniuses, right? Like, oh,
you’re one of those hacker types that started early. I can pattern match and say, yeah,
a lot of the best performing founders I know have that same story. And that story works better
versus when you tell me, you know, me and my co-founder who are 18 years old, we’ve got decades
of experience. It’s like, no, you don’t, right? Okay. Now what else can I believe out of this?
Even if it’s technically true, the whole cumulative years of experience of your team is not a real
metric that most people put in their pitch deck. So I would get rid of that.
Yes, you’re right. Having said that, all right, that’s public service announcement. I do have a
question. It seems like you’ve done a great job of selling into people that are really hard to
sell into. So how did you go get an enterprise contract from a big four consulting company worth,
you know, over $100,000? I’m curious to hear what you did there. What’s the short story?
Yeah, very good question. So short story was that I was working as a consultant
on campus as part of a university organization. And thanks to my opportunity there, I was able
to connect to a very high level business executive within a big four enterprise through my mentor,
who happened to also be the director of the consulting org. So long story short, it was very
network driven. They were looking for a solution to fit certain problems that they had within an
enterprise. And what I was building as a personal project happened to solve those exact problems.
So once I had that, we essentially made it a company. And what did they say when you’re
pivoting? I mean, did you pivot because of them? They are partly the reason we pivoted,
but it was also when we started engaging with more and more prospects. So our initial
generative AI workflow engine was essentially you could take AI and plug it into any legacy
systems to automate any complex day to day task. For example, if you’re a VC and you receive a
lot of pitch decks every day via email, we could create an automation for you where you would
automatically process those pitch decks, analyze them against your investment thesis, portfolio
companies, etc. And then also send out replies saying, hey, we love this, we would love to
have a meeting or no for the following reasons. And what you’re describing is that sorry, I want
you to finish, but is what you’re describing similar to Lindy.ai? Yes. So Lindy.ai was definitely
a competitor of ours in that space. But then as I was saying earlier, the more we engaged with
customers and prospects, we found that our product was explicitly being used for email
automations. And a big problem with products like our previous one and Lindy.ai is that
the barrier to entry for a lot of non-technical users is quite high. You have to almost be a
developer to actually use even these no code tools. And that is why we decided to change
the interface into a much easier to understand virtual assistant or secretary. Gotcha. I think
the challenge with this business, because you seem really smart and I think whatever you work on
will be interesting. I think the challenge here is you’re going into the most competitive space.
So I do feel undoubtedly that email inboxes are going to start to have AI in them. And the AI is
going to help you process, categorize, summarize your emails in a way and help you with the responses.
The problem is, do I really believe that you are going to be able to get people off of outlook,
off of Gmail and onto your service? Or in addition, you know, they’re also going to be
doing that, right? Google’s definitely going to be adding AI into this. And so is superhuman.
And so is Microsoft, right? They own OpenAI basically. And so I do think that this is going
to be just an absolute bloodbath category. And so I think from an investment point of view,
that would be my problem with this, which is even if I like you, and even if I agree with the idea,
it’s kind of that second inevitability I talked about. One is, where is the puck going this way?
There’s, yes, of course it’s going this way. The second is, are you going to be the team who
captures that opportunity? And it just seems highly unlikely that you would be the team that
captures that opportunity given people don’t want to switch email clients and that all of the email
clients are already aware of this capability and are highly incentivized to add AI to it.
Did you say how much you raised so far? You said a million?
Yes, we have raised a little more than a million.
Are you still in school or are you in living in San Francisco?
Currently, we’re on a gap semester. I’m on a gap semester. Mark’s also on a gap semester,
he has one class left, but everyone else is full-time. We have four people.
Dude, I think that first company, Meet Your Class, it’s that middle funnel things that’s the issue.
All these kids, all these smart kids are bailing on university. That’s amazing that you guys are
all just picking gaps. Well, I just told you that you’re probably going to fail. Tell me why I’m
wrong and I should kick rock. Yeah, for sure. So businesses switching to our email client is
definitely a very big hurdle that we were also trying to navigate. But what we found is by
verticalizing in a lot of businesses with our own kind of information management secretaries,
a lot of businesses prefer us over their standard email clients like Gmail and Outlook.
For example, currently, as I said, we’re starting a pilot with the largest children’s
enrichment franchise. They entirely run over Gmail, but they’re still willing to switch to us
simply because some of the features that we provide is something Gmail and Outlook just
can never do because they have to cater to large groups of audiences and they cannot fit specific
niches of certain requirements that a lot of customers have. Okay. All right, fair enough.
Sam, what else you got before we wrap up? I don’t think I have much. I think that it’s so early.
It’s hard to ask questions because I’m on your website and it looks like it’s very much beta,
so it’s hard for me to fully understand. I think, Sean, you were asking about replacing Gmail.
According to their website, it’s an integration. It’s not replacing Gmail.
It’s hard to fully understand because you’re so new. Do you just keep using Gmail and this is
overlaid or is this a new client you download and you’re supposed to go here instead of Gmail.com?
Yes. So essentially, you just log in with your Gmail. So one way we’re beating that
barrier to adoption is by not saying that you need a new TLD and a new domain ID.
You simply log in with your Gmail. We get all your emails and then you start using
our interface rather than Gmail’s. Yeah. It’s like superhuman, right? So you keep your email address,
but fundamentally, you’re not supposed to go to Gmail every day. You’re supposed to go to
Superhuman and open up your email and use that for all your emails. Yes, that is correct.
All right. Good pitch. Thank you. Best of luck. I think this is a huge idea. I think it’s going
to be super competitive and if you did it, that would be amazing. This is a multi-billion dollar
win if you can actually do it. That’s the good news. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Round of applause.
Thanks, brother. All right. To wrap it, can we just name, I think, do you guys want to do the
winning school that we thought brought the heat? Secondly, our favorite pitch, the best pitch,
meaning the one we would be most likely to put our money into. And then I think we should maybe
do an audience choice as well, which is let the crowd react and see which one they think is best.
What do you think, Sam? All right. So let’s start with school. I have a winner. Let’s recap real
quick. Michigan did Meet Your Class, which was helping universities with the summer melt. The
middle final. Yeah. Middle final for universities. Mill U, which is the personalized skincare,
microbiome stuff. And Tour, which was the AI department tours. And then UIUC was basically
Meet Metafrazo, which is the dubbing company. Brothers Nuts, which is the sprouted nuts company
and Pathlet, that one we just heard about the AI email client. So those are the schools. Sam,
what’s your pick? Illinois all the way. I think that Michigan is an incredibly impressive school,
but I think that I thought it was incredibly impressive that the Metafrazo guy was at
Founders, or what’s it called? The Inc. The way this young guy who just went, the way that he
had already raised a little bit of money and was taking the gap year. And then Brothers Nuts already
has a business that is doing like 400 a year in revenue. I just thought it was more impressive
that a Midwestern school, their people are like going to the coast. And I think that’s a really
good thing. Do you agree or no? I would disagree. I would have gone Michigan. I think that traction-wise,
I mean, tour, let’s break the case here. Tour had the most traction, right? Half a million dollars
in ARR, a million tours served. I think tour and they’re NYC. I think tour was doing the best.
I think Meet Your Class has a real business. I think he stumbled into kind of actually like
a cool business where half a million people have used this thing and now he found a business model
that might actually work. So I thought that Michigan had had the better businesses overall.
All right. Good. They each could vote, but we disagree.
And it’s a tie. All right. So let’s do our favorite business out of these. If you were going to
invest your money into one of these, Sam, which one would you have invested your money into?
The business that I don’t want to invest in, but I wish I owned, and I think the people who
own this one might get the richest, the fastest of all these businesses is Brother Nuts. I think
Austin Major or Brother Nuts, I don’t think they should raise money. I don’t want to invest in
them, but I would love to own that company. I think it could be a family business that makes
hundreds or hundreds of millions or even more throughout the next handful of decades.
Okay. I like it. I would say that’s my favorite business.
My head tells me it’s either Meet Your Class or tour, but my heart is with Brothers Nuts.
And I’m going to go with Brothers Nuts as well. I think that they are one, you know, one step away
from actually making this like a real legit business that you’re going to see on the shelves
in every grocery store. I think they’re not far away from doing that. And I actually think it’s a,
I would actually invest in this business because I think it could actually make it happen.
It’s not theoretical here. I think that most of the companies had an AI element,
and I applaud that. I think that’s where the puck’s going. But it’s hard to stick out, man.
There’s just so much going on.
We picked the one with an Allman element.
Yeah. An Allman element. I don’t know, man. Right? Doesn’t it seem kind of seems like it’s
TBD as to like, who’s going to be the winners? It seems really hard to pick a winner at the moment.
Yeah. It’s sort of a trade off of like more competition, but maybe more upside.
Well, you said it well. You said, you said, this is definitely what’s going to happen,
but it’s going to be a bloodbath. Yeah. And that’s how I feel.
All right. So now the crowd’s choice. So can you guys unmute? I’m going to say
the name of the business. Crowd reaction is going to dictate who wins the audience choice.
Let’s see if this works. This might be crazy with the audio situation here.
Our producer’s freaking out. Turn the laptops. I want to see the crowd, actually.
Okay. So we got the crowd.
Yeah. All right. We’re going to start off from Michigan. Meet your class.
Okay. From UIUC, Metaphrasem.
All right. They might just be closer to the microphone. We’ll give them credit for that.
All right. From Michigan, we have the skin microbiome company, Milu.
All right. They can see exactly putting his mouth next to the mic.
All right. We’re going to go from UIUC. We have Pathlet.
Lukewarm. Lukewarm. I’m going to call it what it was. From Michigan, we have Tour.
All right. So from Michigan, it looks like Milu was the loudest.
And now from UIUC, last one, we have Brothers Nuts.
So Sean, I think I know who won that one. I think it was the Metaphraso.
Metaphraso, I think had it. I think they had it.
We miss you, bro. We miss you.
All right. All right. Okay. Wonderful. Guys, great job, everybody.
This is really impressive. You guys are way ahead of where I was in college.
I think, Sam, probably the same for you. You guys are ahead of the curve.
I hope our feedback is helpful. Even the people we shit on, like if we ask
hard questions or give you a hard time, of all the six people who presented the six companies,
you’re going to be in the 1% of the 1%. You already are in the 1% of the 1%
and what you’re doing is bad-ass. Exactly. Just by being active, you’re bad-ass.
And it’s a sign of respect. If we are willing to keep it real with you,
that’s because we actually think that you can win. If we just wanted to be nice and say,
the participation, I’m so happy for you. That wouldn’t have been helpful to you,
but it also would be actually not a sign of respect. We respect all of you for doing this.
And I just want to say, I would not have become an entrepreneur had I not had a class like this
where a speaker came in and just got me hyped about the idea of doing a startup.
I did not know what to do. My first idea was terrible. My execution was absolutely horrendous,
but it got me on that path. It just seemed like more fun. And so if you’re listening to this or
you’re at one of these schools right now, if it seems like something that you would want to do,
and it seems like the lifestyle, go for it. Don’t let that hold you back.
This could be a tipping point moment for you just like it was for me.
And you are currently in the phase of life where it will never get easier to do these things
than where you are right now. For the next, you have a four-year window where it’s like,
you have nothing really big to worry about except for this. And also, I think it’s Austin and Tommy.
Give these guys a shout out. You guys are the man.
It’s really hard to organize this type of stuff. And I think that getting this type of energy in
one room like you guys have done, it’s contagious. Sam, you thinking what I’m thinking?
I don’t know what you’re thinking. I got two words for you. I got two words for you, nationwide.
We’re taking the power hour nationwide. And then the second two words for you,
pizza party sponsored by MFM. I think we should give these guys some money. Let them host some
events and have some fun. So we will connect with you, Tommy, after this. And we’ll give you guys
some cash so that we can encourage you to throw more events and get more people excited about this.
And I like that it’s underground. I like that it’s off the books. I like that this is not
the entrepreneurship club of the school. This is just the people who actually care about building
stuff and want to do cool things and want to get off the conventional career track. I’m for that.
Thank you all for doing this. We appreciate you. Have a wonderful Wednesday. And if you’re listening
on MFM, you got to go and give all these guys a little bit of love on their websites and check
out their products. All right. Thank you guys. That’s it. That’s the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
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Episode 647: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) invite 6 college students to pitch their startup ideas.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(3:58) Meet Your Class
(16:32) Metafrazo
(30:21) Milieu
(42:47) Brother Nuts
(54:14) Tour
(1:08:38) Pathlit
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Links:
• Meet Your Class – http://meetyourclass.com
• Jonah Liss – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonahliss/
• Blake Mischley – https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-mischley/
• Metafrazo – http://metafrazo.ai
• Shrikar Lekkala – https://www.linkedin.com/in/shrikar-lekkala/
• Milieu – http://milieubio.com
• Nathan Shatz – https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-shatz/
• Brother Nuts – http://brothersnuts.com
• Austin Majors – https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-majors-6b3275195/
• Tour – http://usetour.com
• Amulya Parmar – https://www.linkedin.com/in/amulya-agape/
• Pathlit – http://pathlit.com
• Advay Gupta – https://www.linkedin.com/in/advaygupta/
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Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
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Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
