6 College Students Pitch Us Their Startups | MFM Shark Tank

0:00:06 Yeah. So just to preface here, I’m Tommy, Tommy Potter, student at UMich. I’m really excited
0:00:10 to be bringing you these startups today to illustrate the community work power hour,
0:00:13 which is the CIA for college entrepreneurship. And what I mean by that is that you don’t know
0:00:18 like who we are. You don’t know where we meet. We are this underground society of hand-picked,
0:00:24 killed founders. Wow. Hold on. Hold on. If you’re building the impossible,
0:00:29 we got Tommy like Tommy Potter, like Harry Potter. And then there’s no,
0:00:32 there’s no meeting place. There’s no information. There’s no way in and there’s no way out of this
0:00:36 club. Do I have that correct? Correct. It’s a tap on the shoulder, just like the CIA. We let you
0:00:41 know individually where we’re going to be meeting. Dude, Sam, they’re speaking your language already.
0:00:54 This is some real skull and bones shit. I want to preface, this is live audience of
0:00:59 Sam and Sean, you don’t know. I’ll pan the room. We got like 65 people here ready for you.
0:01:07 The ecosystem is out here today. I know the same is going on down at UIUC.
0:01:09 They got a massive room. How many you got in that room there, Austin?
0:01:11 Yeah, I’ll pan the camera too real quick.
0:01:22 So, but yeah, we did it on all points that Tommy said. I basically hope
0:01:26 get all the amazing founders as well as entrepreneurs, content creators, everybody
0:01:32 that’s doing awesome stuff in the same room down here at UIUC. So, we’re super pumped on both sides.
0:01:34 UIUC, is that Illinois Carbondale?
0:01:43 University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, the big I. So, that’s who we are.
0:01:47 So, we got Tommy, we got Austin. The club is called Happy Hour. Is that what you said?
0:01:51 No, we’re Power Hour. Oh, Power Hour.
0:01:54 An hour full of power.
0:01:59 And it’s all student run. There’s no faculty, nobody who’s making this happen.
0:02:03 Is this like, this has been around for 10 years or did you just invent this on Thursday?
0:02:03 What’s going on?
0:02:08 Do you remember Bobby Firehousel, which was on this podcast about two years ago?
0:02:10 I may never forget Bobby.
0:02:12 So, Bobby started all of this?
0:02:16 Bobby started this. Bobby started this and it’s kind of been planting around and UIUC
0:02:20 as their community. We’re very like deep in our partnership there as well.
0:02:24 So, this is fantastic. So, to give the listener background, two years ago we had this guy named
0:02:33 on Bobby. Bobby, I think, was in Michigan. Bobby gathered this group of maybe 15 entrepreneurs
0:02:38 and four of them pitched us and they were awesome. And apparently Bobby has fight clubbed this thing
0:02:43 and gone out from university to university to convince you guys to join on. And this sounds
0:02:48 awesome. And so, today, I think six of you, so three each, are going to pitch us. Is that right?
0:02:52 Totally correct. Yeah, there’s a lot of school pride on the line in terms of which school is
0:02:56 going to come out on top in this competition. So, we’re laying it all on the line for you.
0:03:01 We have tons of creators in the audience. It was tough to get it down to three startups,
0:03:05 but we’re giving you our best. So, can’t wait. We’re ready to roll.
0:03:11 So, this is college shark tank style, two schools pitching from both. We’re going to have a winner.
0:03:17 We’re going to maybe have a few other awards that we come up with. I invested in one of these
0:03:23 last time, Sam, out of Michigan. How’s it going? Company already failed. So, we’re not going to
0:03:28 hold that against y’all. You win some, you lose some. And we lost that one pretty hard, pretty
0:03:32 quick. But that’s all right. All right. But let’s see if you guys can beat Michigan. So,
0:03:36 the first one that we’re going to hear from is, meet your class. And I think,
0:03:40 is university in Michigan, are you guys doing three in a row? And then it’s going to be
0:03:45 back and forth. All right, Sam, I think we just need to step aside and let this kid
0:03:50 emcee this. He’s got the natural of a host. See, I’m using college words.
0:03:54 Is it let it bake or let them cook? Which one is it? Whatever. We’re going to let them bake.
0:04:10 All right. The first one is the folks at Michigan. Okay. Hello. My name is Jonah,
0:04:16 and I’m the COO of Meeker class. Two years ago, my co-founders and I created a platform for
0:04:22 prospective college students to meet each other before coming to campus. And Meeker class quickly
0:04:29 grew in popularity, largely because the communities we built actually extended beyond our own
0:04:34 platform and integrated with the social media apps that nearly every high schooler uses on a
0:04:42 daily basis. Within two years, this system has scaled to over 400,000 account creations and even
0:04:49 generated over $600,000 in revenue through a freemium business model. Well, this was a great
0:04:56 success. An even larger opportunity emerged when we were approached by a university called the
0:05:00 Christ College, which was struggling with enrollment. Basically, they were having issues
0:05:07 filling seats. And they were not alone. This is a really big issue. Recent polls have found
0:05:12 that over two thirds of university CFOs are deeply concerned about declining enrollment.
0:05:18 A really big factor in this that the Christ College and really the majority of universities
0:05:25 across the country struggle with is a phenomenon known as summer melt. Summer melt refers to when
0:05:31 a prospect gets all the way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel, just to at the last second
0:05:36 renege on their deposit, renege on their commitment and decide they no longer want to go to college.
0:05:42 At the Christ College, believe it or not, this was happening with every one in three students,
0:05:49 which eventually was leading to a 33% vacancy rate at the school. The Christ College believe
0:05:56 the Meager class could help decrease the summer melt because our platform had gained a reputation
0:06:01 as being able to build up excitement for prospective students and also to give them
0:06:07 a support network. Furthermore, we also found through discovery that Meager class data was
0:06:13 very valuable for universities in helping them to allocate their limited time and resources
0:06:19 towards students who needed the extra attention and help. And we’re very excited to say that this
0:06:25 worked. At the Christ College, students who used Meager class last year experienced a 61%
0:06:31 reduction in summer melt, which is expected to add $1.7 million back to their top line.
0:06:38 And we’re so excited by these results because at a minimum, this summer melt issue is calculated to
0:06:45 cost the higher education system over $11 billion per year. And it’s of course going to take more
0:06:50 than one case study to really go after this market. But luckily, we now have scaled to eight
0:06:57 partners for the upcoming admission cycle. And amazingly, that same B2C business that I described
0:07:03 at the start is helping us and empowering us to create a product that’s industry leading,
0:07:09 loved by students and administrators. It also got us admitted to tech stars and has allowed us to
0:07:14 bootstrap our way into a much larger, much more qualified team ready to take the higher ed market
0:07:30 by storm. All right. That was great. Do you have an ending for us? So sharks, who’s ready to,
0:07:34 you know, blah, blah, blah. And are you raising, are you actually raising money or not, not,
0:07:39 not raising money right now? We’re planning to actually open a seed round when we graduate in
0:07:47 the spring. That is awesome. That is awesome. By the way, the $600,000 in revenue, how many
0:07:52 people are working there? What’s your profit? Do you have any profit? Yeah. So us as initial
0:07:59 co-founders have not paid ourselves a dime and we reinvest every single penny back into the team.
0:08:04 So I don’t know the exact profitability off the top of my head. You know, we try to
0:08:10 keep the bank account enough to stay alive, but we reinvest every penny back into growing the
0:08:15 team and getting to more university partnerships and we’re trying to get 50 by the end of this
0:08:19 upcoming admission cycle. Of the $600,000, how much is in your business account right now?
0:08:26 I think around $300,000. We got $120,000 from tech stars and then we’ve also won some pitch
0:08:32 competitions. Okay. Okay. Cool. And Blake, your name is Blake, right? My name is Jonah. Blake is my
0:08:38 amazing co-founder. Okay, great. So Jonah, great first great pitch. Really cool business. At first,
0:08:43 when you were talking about it, I thought, well, you know, you sort of created Facebook
0:08:48 20 years too late. You’re trying to help college kids connect. But then what the story got really
0:08:54 interesting when you started talking about how colleges are struggling to fill enrollment and
0:09:00 they have vacancies just like a hotel has vacancies, a college has vacancies and that maybe your tools
0:09:04 actually could help them decrease that. And then they would be your customer, right? You’d be
0:09:10 charging them. Did you charge that first college and what are you charging those other eight colleges
0:09:16 who you said are partners with you on this? Yeah. So our initial partners are heavily discounted
0:09:21 relative to like the market rate for a solution like this because we’re trying to get more logos,
0:09:28 more case studies. Currently, those partners are at under $10,000, but there’s a very clear
0:09:33 path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name. You said market rate,
0:09:39 who else is doing something like this and what are they doing? We do have a handful of competitors.
0:09:46 So this initial thing that we’re describing is called like mid funnel conversion. It’s basically
0:09:53 getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel and then trying to convert them. There’s
0:10:00 a few competitors listed in that second column where we really stand out from them is our integrations
0:10:07 with social media because we’re able to get a large organic user base at the earliest and
0:10:13 latest stages of the enrollment funnel. So a lot of our competitors are like third party apps where
0:10:20 the university basically emails all their students says, Hey, download this and kind of forces them
0:10:26 to use it. And the reason they do that is because these communities generate so much valuable data
0:10:33 and they have a lot more control over it. And social media standalone really doesn’t do this for
0:10:38 them because it’s not a tailor made hire tool, hire tool. So we’re basically retrofitting these
0:10:44 social media platforms and bringing all the data that they pay for these programs. So Jonah,
0:10:48 if you were charging them what you think you can charge them, have you had any conversations about
0:10:53 how much they would be willing to pay either as a percentage of sort of save students or as a
0:10:59 flat fee? What’s your sense of how much each college can pay? So initially just for this
0:11:05 mid funnel conversion tool, we believe that it should be pretty reasonable. Of course,
0:11:10 a college is very inside, but we’ve seen these at the lowest for the smallest schools around
0:11:19 $20,000. And then we’ve seen them scale past 200,000. This is of course just like one small
0:11:24 part of the enrollment funnel. There’s many more issues that we believe we’re prime to solve. That’s
0:11:30 just a generally like, I always want to say a commoditized rate that universities like comfortable
0:11:35 paying for this. Is this the biggest problem or is there a bigger problem? This is one of the
0:11:43 biggest problems. As I mentioned for the Christ college, 1 in 3 students were melting. So it’s
0:11:49 just like the lowest hanging fruit to initially go after because these are kids who arguably should
0:11:56 be going to college. They got way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel and then we then converted
0:12:02 more of them. But they obviously wanted to just get more box and seats throughout the entire process.
0:12:10 Jonah, I always ask how the story ends. Is there a vision for where you’re going to be in 10 years
0:12:19 with this? We’re still trying to figure that out. We are very motivated by genuinely improving the
0:12:26 student experience and making it so college is worthwhile. So in the long run, we want to put
0:12:32 power back in the students’ hands. A lot of students don’t know that they have negotiation power in
0:12:39 the tuition price and a lot of them also end up at places that are suboptimal. So we kind of want
0:12:45 to in the long run become the go-to place that students come to and they figure out where they’re
0:12:50 going to be the most successful to for 10 years down the line. Did you just say that you can
0:12:58 negotiate tuition price? Because I had no idea that’s possible. It is possible. I personally didn’t
0:13:04 do it. Some members of my team could speak to it a lot more. But students have a lot more power
0:13:11 than they realize. Universities need students in order to stay in business. The majority of schools,
0:13:17 not the University of Michigan, but the majority of schools are tuition-dependent for revenue.
0:13:24 Tuition in Michigan is like a very small percentage of revenue. So if you ask for decreased tuition
0:13:30 here, that likely would not pan out because they’re not really struggling with any financial
0:13:36 situations. But at the end of the day, colleges need to act like a business. Otherwise, they’re
0:13:39 going to go under. I was just googling some of these companies. Sean, have you heard of Unibuddy?
0:13:44 Were you going to do Google any of those community apps? I had no idea this stuff existed. Some of
0:13:50 them are actually quite large. How big? Unibuddy, I think, raised $30 million. They raised it during
0:13:55 COVID. So there’s TBD if it’s legit. But it seems like it’s a business that does
0:14:00 many tens of millions in revenue. Jonah, my quick take on this. I think you actually have a real
0:14:06 business here. One of the biggest investments I missed on was the very first guy who ever pitched
0:14:10 me as an angel investor. He had an idea for something called Apply Board. What he was doing
0:14:17 was helping international students get into… He was helping these small colleges get more
0:14:21 international students because international students just didn’t know their name. I had never
0:14:29 heard of Christ College till you just said it. He was charging about $2,000 to $3,000 per student
0:14:35 that actually got admitted and enrolled there. He was making tons of money. That company really
0:14:40 took off. I think you have a real business here. The only thing I would say, I guess, to wrap up,
0:14:45 is I don’t think you should ever raise money for this. I think you should bootstrap this thing.
0:14:48 And if you actually just stuck with this idea and you bootstrapped it,
0:14:55 in four or five years, you would be sitting on probably $20 million, which would be a phenomenal
0:15:01 place for you to be exiting this business. And I think the biggest risk for you is not a business
0:15:05 risk. We raise money because we pitch investors that this could take over the world because we
0:15:10 thought that’s what we’re supposed to do. We thought you have an idea, you pitch investors,
0:15:14 you raise round one, round two, round three. And suddenly, we’re looking at you saying,
0:15:16 how are you going to be a billion-dollar company? And the reality is,
0:15:21 this might be a phenomenal $50 million company, but no chance at a billion-dollar company.
0:15:26 So my advice to you would be, don’t raise, but great pitch overall. Sam, any last thoughts?
0:15:31 I completely agree. I completely agree. All right, Jonah, thank you. Big round of applause.
0:15:45 All right, so where are we going now? Illinois? Yeah, we’ve got our guy out in San Francisco right
0:15:50 now, Shrikhar. What’s going on, guys? Nice to meet you. All right, I love it. You drop out?
0:15:56 You’re not even in college? What’s going on? No, I’m actually on a gap semester. Hey, Sean,
0:16:00 I’m in Founders Inc. I know you know Safon. Oh, no way. I’m in the background. So just met him
0:16:05 yesterday. Me and my couple of my buddies are just visiting San Francisco here, seeing if this is
0:16:10 the right place for us. But yeah. All right, well, gap year. I like the sound of that already.
0:16:16 About a year ago, me and my co-founder were watching the Spanish TV show Money High Sun Netflix.
0:16:20 Unfortunately, neither of us know Spanish very well, so we had to watch the English dub.
0:16:24 Anyone who has ever watched a dub movie knows that there’s a bunch of issues. The lips are
0:16:28 not synchronized with the audio. The voice actors sound nothing like the actual actors.
0:16:32 There’s one scene where two voice actors have the same actor making everything extremely confusing.
0:16:39 We looked at this issue a bit further and found that it is extremely technically complex,
0:16:45 expensive at $100 to $1,500 per minute, time consuming and low quality to dub a video nowadays.
0:16:51 With all of this, dubbing is a $60 billion market in 2022, and there’s been no clear solution for
0:16:56 this. We started by translating content for creators like Mr. Beast and Mr. Nightmare and found
0:17:01 that the essential use case is within education. Imagine the millions of people trying to get an
0:17:04 education in their second language where the content is not meant for them.
0:17:11 So we created MetaFroza, an automated, authentic and affordable translation solution for educators.
0:17:16 All the user has to do is input a video into our solution, press the input and output language,
0:17:22 press submit, and within minutes, get a lip sync, voice clone and text on-screen translated video,
0:17:26 just like this one that we translated for our client, UIUC and Geese and Coursera.
0:17:31 Utilitarianism suggests that an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good
0:17:34 for the greatest number of people. It suggests that an ethical decision will
0:17:41 produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism suggests that
0:17:45 an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number.
0:17:49 So as you can see, Professor’s voice is perfectly cloned from English to Spanish to French,
0:17:53 his lips are synchronized, and our key differentiators, any text on-screen,
0:17:58 is translated with the same font, text, and color as well. For our enterprise clients,
0:18:04 we have a human-in-the-loop process where we translate videos with industry-specific terminology,
0:18:10 keywords, idioms, none of that Google translate issues. We also have the most languages and cheapest
0:18:15 product on the market. Right now, we’re at $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue translating videos
0:18:20 for University of Illinois and corporations like Velcro Corporation. We actually are in talks with
0:18:25 Coursera for a potential integration in quarter one of 2025 as well. Just to look at one of our
0:18:30 potential deals after a paid pilot with geese, just one degree looks like 30,000 minutes in five
0:18:36 languages generating $1.35 million in revenue for our company. This actually saves the University
0:18:43 91% in actual costs and curating the course as well. Our team combines business and technology
0:18:47 with my self-taking gap year to focus on this and our machine learning team of five machine
0:18:54 learning engineers having 37 years of experience in computer vision. Hi, my name is Karla Kala and
0:18:59 my purpose is to break language barriers. Thank you guys very much. All right. That’s awesome.
0:19:00 Great pitch. Great pitch.
0:19:08 And leave some of the slides up so we might need to go back to them. So first of all,
0:19:12 the demo was great. Can you just tell us a little bit about the magic there? So you said,
0:19:18 translates the voice, makes the lips match, which I’ve never seen anyone do that.
0:19:21 Did you see Dana White do that, Sean? You didn’t see Dana White do that for the
0:19:27 Mexican Independence Day UFC? It was great. No, I didn’t see that. So what are you doing to make
0:19:33 the lips? Is it superimposed on top of their lips? Yeah. So essentially we take
0:19:41 one of my buddies, YC model. We take any original video or any original audio and we are allowed
0:19:46 to synchronize the lips based on the input of video and audio in our backend system.
0:19:50 We then curate that. That’s what you’re going to say. You took one of your buddy’s lips
0:19:55 and he’s a model. So you’re saying there’s an off-the-shelf library, basically off-the-shelf
0:19:59 model that does this already. You guys are just integrating that. Yeah, correct. That’s true.
0:20:05 That’s true. Okay. And another question. You said something like, if they did this just one course
0:20:09 for one university, that’s like a million in revenue for you. Are they currently,
0:20:13 are you convincing them, “Hey, you should dub this,” or they’re already dubbing it just at 10
0:20:19 times the cost? Yeah. So right now they’re translating videos automatically and they’re
0:20:24 translating courses, like imagine quizzes, tests, and just like reading papers, but they’re not
0:20:30 translating the videos. So a Spanish user has to go on Coursera and take the course in Spanish,
0:20:35 but have to read the subtitles on an English video for these videos, these courses that they’re
0:20:40 creating right now. We’re basically providing the solution that standardizes the actual
0:20:44 viewing experience for the end user. So they are doing this right now just without paying.
0:20:52 You said that, I think in ’22 or ’23 or something like that, that dubbing was a $70 or $60 billion.
0:20:57 What is that number? Tell me about that number. That’s ridiculous. Just looking at traditional
0:21:04 dubbing, this means in film, education, marketing, just translation in general. Huge market, a bunch
0:21:09 of different positions that we could put ourselves in. I was trying to tell you guys that we also
0:21:14 translated for content creators like MrBeast and Nightmare, but found that the niche was
0:21:20 in education for us just because of the essential need. Think about the applications of translation
0:21:24 for people that have life-changing opportunities stripped for them because they can’t take a
0:21:31 course in their preferred language or they’re not able to understand the professor in a classroom.
0:21:36 So that’s where we got that number. The key distinction, you said they’re already doing
0:21:40 this, but actually the way you said it was they’re translating the tests and the quizzes.
0:21:45 They’re not doing the videos today. And so for them to agree to do this,
0:21:49 this would be a new cost of a million dollars to them that they’re not currently spending.
0:21:56 So in terms of translating a video in general, they’re trying to translate these videos, but
0:22:00 for them, for like a person to translate a video, just like for a 10 minute video, it takes four
0:22:07 hours. They have to curate new slides, have a new professor go in, speak in a new language
0:22:12 of the contract, these people. This would cost them three million dollars to edit these videos,
0:22:19 go over, edit the screen text. But there’s a big distinction. Let’s say I’m sitting at this
0:22:23 university and I look like I am with this vest on right now and I’m sitting there and I’ve got my
0:22:29 budget. But what I’m asking you is today, they don’t already spend in this. You’re not saving them
0:22:33 money from something they’re already spending. They’re currently not spending because it would
0:22:39 be too expensive to do it too slow, too expensive. And so you’re going to be a new cost to them,
0:22:43 right? So that’s going to be a big point of friction because they’re not going to make more
0:22:46 money necessarily off this. You might be able to convince them that if you do this, you might be
0:22:51 able to get more customers. But day one, it’s going to be just extra cost with no extra revenue. Is
0:22:56 that correct? That is true. However, they are going in the direction of putting these courses
0:23:01 online. Digital translation is a thing that they’re already doing. This would just be an
0:23:05 added cost for them at the end of the day. But it would provide a better solution,
0:23:08 potentially being a marketing plight for international students to come to the university
0:23:13 to go, but to answer your question, yeah. What do you do for Velcro? First of all, I didn’t know
0:23:16 Velcro was a brand. I thought Velcro was like clean extra tissue. I thought it was a thing. That’s
0:23:20 pretty wild. But what are you doing for them? And how did you close those guys? Because they
0:23:26 look like a big old sluggish company. Yeah, we had a personal connection to one of the higher
0:23:32 ups of the company. We do internal communications for them. So every month, there’s a 90 minute
0:23:36 internal town hall where the CEO basically speaks in English. She’s Italian woman.
0:23:42 She had a bunch of issues with when she’s speaking English, she lacks emotion. She kind of
0:23:49 doesn’t feel like herself. And we were able to provide them a solution where she was able
0:23:54 to provide the company with updates in her true persona in the new language by speaking in Italian
0:23:59 for 90 minutes into our camera. We put that into our solution. Within three hours, we were able to
0:24:04 curate a transitive video that she’s able to send all the plants at Velcro Corporation in 10
0:24:10 different languages. And we provide the solution to them today. But it sounds like you’re not
0:24:15 doubling down as much on enterprise. You want to go for this university education niche. Is that
0:24:21 right? So we want to go into the education niche. This is universities. This can mean educational
0:24:26 content creation. This can mean corporate trainings as well. We understand that these
0:24:31 educational sales cycles are extremely long, which is why going to these translation agencies
0:24:37 for educational content as well can help us kind of apply like a geometric approach to our
0:24:42 sales cycle as well. Just to speed everything up faster, having us get more traction to it.
0:24:47 And then the university brand itself creates a stance where people say, “Hey,
0:24:51 University of Illinois, use this. I’m an educational content creator. I trust them.
0:24:55 I’m going to trust this company as well.” Right. Well, I think you have a solid pitch,
0:25:01 and I think you have a really great product. But I think this is a product in search of a market.
0:25:05 I think you’re going to run into a lot of trouble because you’re going to go to these
0:25:08 universities and you’re going to say, “Hey, we’re great.” And they’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s
0:25:15 awesome.” But they won’t have the budget for it, or it’s just going to be seen as an extra cost
0:25:20 without a clear extra payoff or sort of ROI attached to it. And so I think that’s going to
0:25:24 hurt the sales cycle. What’s already a slow sales cycle is university sales.
0:25:28 I think it’s going to get harder because you’re costing the money rather than saving the money.
0:25:35 But one thing to consider is if there’s already a big market for dubbing out there,
0:25:40 and they’re doing it manually, this actually could look like a private equity play where you
0:25:45 go buy existing dubbing services that have existing books of business, and then you just
0:25:50 fire all the people and replace it with the AI that’s going to do it better and faster and cheaper
0:25:54 than they’re currently doing. You said it costs like $100 a minute or whatever to dub
0:25:59 with humans doing it. And so what you could do is you could go buy companies and then
0:26:03 rip out the cost structure by replacing it with AI. And that might be actually a better way to go
0:26:06 to this market. And again, this is something that you don’t really hear a lot. You’re in San
0:26:11 Francisco now. A lot of people don’t talk about this, but there is a whole other avenue of business,
0:26:16 you know, rollups and private equity where they’re looking for this. They buy something at a fair
0:26:21 price, and then they slash the cost in half by using technology to make things more efficient.
0:26:26 You could do that here. Understood. And we’re actually are trying to do that right now,
0:26:31 partnering with the Translation Agency to understand exactly how they derive their clients,
0:26:37 how they are going through these sales cycles with refugees, people that are going through
0:26:42 different educational content. The one thing about universities is that I do seeing this
0:26:48 being globalized in systems and learning management systems like Coursera. So we just had a meeting
0:26:53 yesterday with Coursera to essentially say at the University of Illinois pilot goes, well,
0:26:57 they’re willing to give us a shot at integration for translation for a couple of courses there.
0:27:03 That would, you know, allow us to dub from going like a thousand minutes per every two
0:27:08 weeks to maybe a thousand hours for every two weeks. Just to show you the kind of stands
0:27:12 that we’re taking in terms of universities. We’re going for the learning management systems,
0:27:17 not the individual university. Hey, Sean, I don’t pay attention to this world too much,
0:27:21 but how that video that we saw, how impressive was that?
0:27:26 I mean, it’s definitely impressive. And I think they’re doing a couple of other things that are
0:27:31 specific like changing the text on the screen. So I think, you know, that makes the whole solution
0:27:36 work because then the actual course works. So it’s definitely impressive. But I, you know,
0:27:40 there’s got to be 10 other companies that could do this today. There’s nothing like
0:27:45 scientific breakthrough with what they’re doing. So this is really going to be a question of,
0:27:49 who builds the best business around this new technology? The technology exists and anyone’s
0:27:52 going to be able to build a business around this. So it’s really going to be about who figures out
0:27:57 the right market, the right go to market strategy, the right pricing model to actually build the
0:27:59 business out of this. What do your parents think about you taking the gap here?
0:28:06 We got into tech stars in June, ended up declining that my parents are South Indian.
0:28:12 They kind of are driven by, you know, percentages like Prestige was able to show them that,
0:28:17 hey, maybe I’m like top 1% of pre-seed companies by getting this accelerator.
0:28:19 I’m sure them that they let me take this gap semester and then
0:28:26 can have to show them some KPIs that keep on taking time off of school. But I’m loving it right now.
0:28:33 I hope they listen to this. Hey, kids or parents, your kid’s amazing. This is,
0:28:36 he’s going to, it’s going to, it’s going to turn out all right. It’s going to turn out more than
0:28:40 all right. I think there’s a kid at FA Inc where you’re at right now, that officer at right now,
0:28:47 there’s a kid there. It’s not a kid anymore. His name is Johnny Dallas. And he was in eighth grade
0:28:51 when he started working with us and he started in the summer. And then he started working every
0:28:56 day after school. And then I think in 11th grade or so, it was pretty clear, this guy’s awesome,
0:28:59 and he should just work here full time. And we made him an offer and his mom was freaking out,
0:29:03 I can’t, my son’s going to be a high school dropout. This is crazy. No, no, no, he’s going
0:29:08 to test out. He’s going to graduate. He’s going to get his GED. And what I convinced her of was
0:29:13 he’s not dropping out. He’s going pro the same way LeBron James went pro because he had incredible
0:29:18 skills. And that reframe, I got to tell you, that was some of my best work with that mom on a bench
0:29:22 in a park, convincing her that he’s going pro. He’s not dropping out. And then we got him to,
0:29:26 got him to go full time with us. Got you. Got you. Dude, congratulations on your success. Good
0:29:35 job. And thank you for letting us listen. And you’re the man. All right, what do we have next?
0:29:41 I’m Nathan Schatz, co-founder of Milu, and we are creating personalized skincare that’s built
0:29:46 for your microbiome. My journey with microbiology began when I was eight after I had a life-threatening
0:29:51 encounter with a flesh eating bacteria. This experience sparked a fascination with the world
0:29:56 of microbes like bacteria and fungi. Since then, I’ve been driven to understand how the skin
0:30:01 microbiome, which is the trillions of microbes living on our bodies, affects human health.
0:30:06 Let me paint you a picture. Think of the skin microbiome as a city, a complex community of
0:30:12 microbes, each with a unique job, just like these little guys on the screen. In our city,
0:30:18 some help manage inflammation, others retain moisture, and some even fight off viruses.
0:30:23 This microbiome is unique to each person, like a fingerprint, and its well-being is essential
0:30:28 for healthy and beautiful skin. But here’s the problem. Many common skincare products contain
0:30:34 preservatives and harsh chemicals that are detrimental to your skin microbiome. Using these
0:30:40 is like dropping a nuke on your microbiome city, leading to chaos and any number of skin problems.
0:30:46 Acne, dryness, anti-aging, and other common skin concerns drive a $150 billion industry,
0:30:53 yet most products rely on an outdated one-size-fits-all approach that overlooks our unique biology.
0:30:58 This leads to a frustrating cycle of trial and error where consumers waste their time and their
0:31:03 money looking to the right product for their skin, often to no avail. People need skincare that is
0:31:08 hyper-personalized, and that is why milieu is different. We create skincare that works with
0:31:14 your unique microbiome, so here’s how we’re changing the game. Meet the milieu biomesense system.
0:31:19 This is a comprehensive solution that combines microbiome science, AI, and personalization
0:31:25 to meet your skin’s unique needs. It starts with our at-home microbiome collection kit.
0:31:31 Simply swab your skin, mail it back to us, and complete a short survey about your skin concerns,
0:31:37 lifestyle, and habits. In our lab three miles west of here, we analyze your microbiome sample.
0:31:41 Our AI-powered algorithm then integrates this data with your survey responses
0:31:46 to create a personalized skin insights report along with custom formulations,
0:31:52 a serum and a cleanser designed just for you. As you use our products, milieu adapts.
0:31:57 Through retests and reformulations, we ensure that your skincare evolves with your skin’s
0:32:02 changing needs, restoring microbiome balance for lasting skin health. Plus,
0:32:07 our plantable boxes and recyclable packaging reflect our commitment to sustainability.
0:32:13 Milu offers high-quality personalized skincare for $59.95, which includes the test kit,
0:32:20 analysis, and custom products. With a $16.95 monthly subscription, you get refills and retests as
0:32:25 needed. We are pioneering a science-driven, personalized approach to skincare, and we’re
0:32:29 currently inviting new members to join our beta program. Please visit our website to learn more
0:32:33 and join us in making personal care truly about you. Thank you for that.
0:32:37 Hey, hold on, brother. Keep that up. I’m going to try it. Go for it. All right, there you go.
0:32:44 This is pretty cool. When I thought microbiome, Sean, what did you immediately think? I thought it
0:32:48 was gut. Yeah, I thought it was gut and poop. I was like, do I got to poop it a thing and
0:32:52 you’re going to give me a thing to help my skin? But I didn’t know that skin microbiome was a thing.
0:32:54 That’s pretty baller. How’s your skincare routine?
0:33:00 You know, body wash that goes on my armpits also goes on my face. It’s not very good,
0:33:06 but I’m bought into the idea that it is important and I do want to get better.
0:33:08 So this is interesting to me. Do you have any revenue at all?
0:33:11 No revenue. We’re currently in development. We’re doing beta testing.
0:33:18 Okay, gotcha. And a really smooth pitch, by the way. You are a talker that was really well done.
0:33:22 Okay, so let’s give some thoughts on this.
0:33:26 Dude, by the way, his deck, Sean, was great. Those cartoons, they told the story wonderfully.
0:33:28 Yeah, who made all that? You made that?
0:33:32 The deck and the story? No one made it. That’s just my story.
0:33:37 Well, it made it sound like the graphics are cool.
0:33:42 Oh, the deck, yeah. My co-founder Ron and I worked on it. And then we also workshopped it
0:33:49 with a bunch of other students in the community. Gotcha. Okay. You know, one thing I think that
0:33:55 would help you is this type of story, I think, would go viral on TikTok. Basically what you told
0:34:01 us, if you were like, I used to think skincare routine. I used to think, you know, whatever,
0:34:06 I didn’t care about my skin. And then I got a flush eating bacteria. This is me after my trip
0:34:10 to Costa Rica and you show a picture. You’re like, so here’s what I did to get rid of this.
0:34:15 And while I’ll never look at any of these skincare products, the same again, knock over a bunch of
0:34:18 bottles on a table, right? You do something like that. You’re going to get like two million views
0:34:23 on a TikTok. You can actually include that in this, which is going to be like, we know how
0:34:27 to tell our story and get out there. And that that story resonates with people, that people are
0:34:32 looking for something that’s more personalized. That’s actually science-based and not just,
0:34:38 you know, a fancy brand. And we’re going to use content to our advantage. And that’s how we’re
0:34:43 going to have much cheaper customer acquisition, right? The smart brands in the DTC space are
0:34:48 basically content first right now. They know how to tell their story on TikTok and Instagram and
0:34:52 YouTube. And that’s where they’re getting just like a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody
0:34:56 else who’s just doing very basic static ads on Facebook type of thing.
0:35:01 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we observe that many of our competitors sunk a ton of their initial
0:35:06 revenue into advertising. And so we’re looking at sort of a different go-to-market strategy.
0:35:12 We want to please 50 people in our beta testing. We want to work like very closely with a smaller
0:35:16 group of people to make sure that our product and our algorithm is really working the way that
0:35:21 it’s supposed to before we go like mass market. But I like the idea of doing short form content,
0:35:25 because I know it definitely hits with the younger audience, which is target market.
0:35:28 Who’s your competitors? So are there other people doing this?
0:35:32 Well, there’s no one that’s doing exactly what we’re doing. There are skincare companies that
0:35:38 do microbiome testing. And they’re also personalized skincare companies. The biggest skin microbiome
0:35:45 company currently is Parallel Health. And they offer a 200 a month protocol where they do sequencing
0:35:51 on your skin microbiome, super high market high end product. There’s a company that’s successful.
0:35:55 They’ve been in business for seven years now called Proven Health. They were actually, sorry,
0:36:00 Parallel, no, it’s Proven Skincare. They’re on, they’re on Shart Tank. And they do personalized
0:36:05 skincare that’s based off of a quiz only. So we have a quiz and we have microbiome testing. So
0:36:10 we’re sort of the baby between those two ideas. A lot of times with health stuff, health stuff or
0:36:14 skin, anything involving your body, that’s very, it’s very controversial because there’s always,
0:36:18 there’s a bunch of people who love something typically, and then there’s an equal or more
0:36:22 amount of haters, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. It’s just health is very controversial.
0:36:28 What would the haters say about this? Like, would they say like, dude, microbiome stuff,
0:36:32 it’s not actually important. If you just use these three things, it’s going to do most of the job.
0:36:35 You don’t need to worry about this other stuff. Like, what are the haters going to say about you?
0:36:41 I’d say the biggest liability there is that the skin microbiome field is actually very nascent.
0:36:47 So the, basically, we’re testing a hypothesis. We believe that skincare that’s precisely
0:36:52 tailored to your microbiome is better than the traditional methods out there. I think people
0:36:57 would likely continue to hold on to this societal idea that all bacteria is bad or like,
0:37:02 we need to stay in this sort of sanitized mindset. Like, people really like to feel clean.
0:37:07 And so I think that that’s the biggest objection to this is like, we love germs. We want to
0:37:11 harness the power of the germs that are on your face. And we believe they hold a lot of potential.
0:37:15 So people might be like, Oh, it’s gross, but, you know, it’s just science. Science is gross.
0:37:20 Well, I, like, I think the criticism, I’m an idiot, but I pay attention to health stuff. I
0:37:27 think the criticism is like, you know, that’s like, that thing will just move the needle by 1%,
0:37:31 whereas if you do these other things, it’s mostly going to get you there and be perfect.
0:37:32 Do you know what I mean? You know what I’m saying, Sean?
0:37:36 Yeah, it’s like in health stuff. You can listen to Hubertman for 92 hours,
0:37:41 and suddenly you’re Brian Johnson or whatever, and you’re trying to take 42 supplements a day.
0:37:45 But 80 to 90% of the gains are going to come from like, you know, good sleep,
0:37:48 drink water, eat clean whole foods. And if you just do those things and you’re not,
0:37:51 you’re probably not already doing those things, that’ll get you the bulk of it.
0:37:56 The rest is really like, you know, on the edge optimizations. And I think you’re right, Sam,
0:38:01 that, you know, sort of a smart skeptic would probably have that thought. But I don’t think
0:38:06 that’s what’s going to drive success or failure in this case. So I think actually one thing you
0:38:12 were missing from your pitch is to convince me that people care about hyper-personalization,
0:38:16 and that that’s where the puck is going. And really what you want in a pitch is for this to feel
0:38:21 like an inevitable outcome of what’s happening here, of what’s happening in this space, whether
0:38:25 it’s you or somebody else that’s sort of secondary, but you really want to convince investors of two
0:38:31 things. One, inevitably this is where the puck is going, and that inevitably we are going to be the
0:38:35 ones who take advantage, score when that puck gets there, right? So you kind of need to make
0:38:40 two cases when you make a pitch. And so for example, I know that in hair care and kind
0:38:44 of beauty products, makeup products, there’s a lot of this already, the trend has gone in this
0:38:50 direction where isn’t it like you do quizzes and you figure out, oh, I have curly hair and my problem
0:38:55 is that it’s dry. And then for that, you’re going to get a certain product. And I think what you
0:38:59 would want to show is that the companies that came out in the last wave for beauty products
0:39:04 that went the personalization route have outperformed, have had all these really great exits,
0:39:09 but nobody’s done it for skin care yet, but they will. And here’s what’s going to happen
0:39:14 in skin care. The same thing that just happened in makeup and hair is going to happen for skin,
0:39:17 right? Same thing that just happened in vitamins is going to happen for skin. And that makes it
0:39:22 sort of feel inevitable. Oh my God, he’s right. The next wave of successful skin care companies
0:39:28 are going to use this kind of science-based, hyper-personalized thing that I think was missing
0:39:32 from your pitch. So that’s kind of my feedback for you. Thank you. That’s good. That’s very good
0:39:38 feedback. I thought you did a great job telling the story. I’m still trying to understand what…
0:39:42 I already asked that question, but like the other answers could have been like,
0:39:46 everyone agrees that this is right, but the question that we’re trying to figure out is,
0:39:50 can we or anyone even figure this out? Like, I wanted to figure out like, what’s going to be…
0:39:55 What is this all hinge on? Because if you’re talking to like, on a beta, like, what is this…
0:40:01 What are you having to convince the world that needs to happen, owner, for this to be a massive
0:40:06 breakthrough? Let me ask you a very simple question. Do you believe… Let’s assume it works. Do you
0:40:12 believe that it’s going to be a visually different result? Meaning, if I just showed you two pictures,
0:40:15 one person who’s using your thing and one person who’s just using off-the-shelf stuff,
0:40:19 honest question, do you think it’s going to be where I could just point and go, yeah, that’s
0:40:24 clearly better? Because if it is, then all your marketing is going to work that way. And if it’s
0:40:31 not, then the science kind of actually in the world of supplements and vitamins and creams,
0:40:36 let’s be honest. Nobody has a clue if any of this ship actually works. And so then it’s all just a
0:40:40 branding game. It’s all a marketing game. It’s all who can convince the consumer that if you buy
0:40:45 this product, you’ll be more beautiful and everyone will love you and things will go well for you in
0:40:51 life. And so I think we’re kind of… Unless it’s literally visual where you can see the difference
0:40:56 and it’s going to be inarguable, then it’s just a question of, are you going to be a great marketer?
0:41:02 L’Oreal, why is L’Oreal successful? It’s not because we know that their product
0:41:05 scientifically is better than anybody else’s product. It’s because they’re better marketers.
0:41:11 That’s the reality of the situation. Yeah, we certainly recognize that. We definitely want to
0:41:17 sort of latch into the trend towards clean and sustainable beauty, which is why we made a box
0:41:21 that you can plant in the ground and it grows flowers. We think it’s really like the beauty’s
0:41:25 in the details here. So I absolutely agree with you. Before and after pictures are like one of the
0:41:31 best things that we can get. And the results of our beta testing are currently looking very promising,
0:41:36 but before I start to make claims and put those pictures on the website, I want to do really
0:41:41 thorough analysis of how the products are working, how the algorithm is working to make sure that we
0:41:47 have something that is really solid. All right, brother, we appreciate you. Congratulations on
0:41:54 this and solid pitch. We got to go to the next one. Great job. Thank you.
0:42:02 Hey, let’s take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out.
0:42:06 It is called The Next Wave. It’s hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz as part of the HubSpot
0:42:11 podcast network, which of course is your audio destination for business professionals like you.
0:42:14 You can catch The Next Wave with Matt Wolfe and he’s talking about where the puck is going
0:42:18 with AI creators, AI technology and how you can apply it to your growing business.
0:42:22 So check it out. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get the podcast.
0:42:32 Is Brother Nuts? Is that who’s up next? It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name is Austin Majors. I’m the
0:42:37 co-founder of Brothers Nuts. Here at Brothers Nuts, our mission is to kick the fake food to the curb
0:42:41 and revolutionize healthy snacking with organic sprouted nut and seed snacks.
0:42:45 So first off, my family found that half of the snacks out there
0:42:49 weren’t actually healthy and the other half tasted like garbage.
0:42:54 But first off, why did we create this business? Well, our business started back in 2010 actually
0:42:59 when my father was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. He was given seven weeks to live
0:43:04 and through the changes in diet and lifestyle turned that seven weeks into seven years.
0:43:09 But one of the biggest issues him and my family had was finding a snack that was as healthy as it
0:43:15 was tasty. And so our current day CFO, aka chief flavor officer, aka mom, being the amazing mom
0:43:20 that she is, went into work and created what is now known as the crackled cheesy almonds.
0:43:24 Now my family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were
0:43:29 flavorful, but also very crunchy. And that’s what makes us very different. All of our nuts and
0:43:34 seeds are sprouted. But how’s it gone over the last seven years? So I started this company
0:43:38 when I was 13 years old when my father passed away with my older brother who was 15. And over
0:43:41 the last seven years, we’ve done over a million dollars in sales. We sold over a million dollars
0:43:47 worth of nuts. We’re currently available in 200 retail locations. And the future is very promising.
0:43:51 We have a clear path forward over the next four years to take this business to $10 million in
0:43:56 sales and be a national brand. How are we going to do that? We’re going to do that by doing the
0:44:01 hard work that no one else wants to do. And I know no one else wants to do it because I speak to
0:44:05 these stores and no one else is doing it. So what is that? First of all, it’s expanding and making
0:44:10 more money from our current clients. Clients like FreshTime, MomsGradicMarket, FreshMarket.
0:44:15 But it’s also expanding distribution and getting new grocery stores like Whole Foods,
0:44:20 Sprouts, HEB, key accounts. How are we going to grow within those stores? We’re going to continue
0:44:25 shaking hands, doing what I just did for you guys. Telling my story, having people try the product
0:44:29 and letting people know that there’s something out there like this. And last, we’re going to continue
0:44:34 innovating through our product. Right now, we’re developing a clean chocolate almond. And we also
0:44:40 have a, we’re developing a high protein variant of our most popular flavors, something that’s never
0:44:46 been done in this space. Now, kind of more grand scale. I mean, there’s 62,000 grocery stores.
0:44:50 The nut market is selling $10 million this year. I look at the biggest companies out there and we
0:44:55 can absolutely get there. But what’s really cool is we are on the up and up. Steady oil free, wear that.
0:45:01 Sprouted, good and free, gut friendly. We check all the boxes. Finally, something that my dad did
0:45:06 in 2010 is now mainstream. And we are on the cutting edge of it. In the last period over period,
0:45:13 products labeled sprouted grew 34% in their velocities and sales. We are on the up and up.
0:45:17 But let’s remember why we’re doing this. Look, the reason why we’re able to have the success,
0:45:22 why we’re able to land these retailers, get through these gatekeepers, is because we’re doing this
0:45:27 in every sale that we’re making in milestone. It’s contributing to continuing my father’s legacy.
0:45:32 Everything we’re doing is to grow his legacy and to create my own along with my brothers.
0:45:35 Because we know that by changing what people snack on every single day,
0:45:39 we’ll lead them to live longer, better, healthier lives with their families.
0:45:44 And so, if you’re ready to join us, to kick the fake food to the curb and evolve the way you snack,
0:45:45 I’d love to talk to you.
0:45:59 Dude, that was great. I got goosebumps. What an amazing story. Good for you, dude. I’m really
0:46:05 happy to hear about this. Austin, I just placed a $52 order. I’m going to try the cheesy ones,
0:46:08 the garlic ones, and the spicy basil pumpkin seeds. So, let’s see what you’re about.
0:46:10 We’ll throw some extra stuff in there for you.
0:46:16 This is great. So, you’re in some stores today. Can you just give us the basic rundown? So,
0:46:20 how many stores are you currently in? And is that one chain or multiple? What’s going on?
0:46:24 Yeah. So, it’s multiple chains. Our very first store that gave us our shot was Freshtime Market.
0:46:29 There were about 70 stores across the Midwest. I mean, the story with that is my brother called
0:46:34 the CEO, got a call back in the lunchroom of the senior year of high school. We sat down with the
0:46:39 team, got three stores, proved ourselves in three stores. They gave us 30. We proved ourselves again.
0:46:45 They gave us 70. Stores only give you that many and allow you to expand if you’re selling well.
0:46:49 So, after we had that success story, we went out and we targeted smaller chains,
0:46:53 like mom’s organic market on the East Coast, the Fresh Market, which we’re starting off small with.
0:46:57 And with that data, we were now going to new stores. We met with Whole Foods.
0:47:01 We got a yes from them. We got pushback. We’re fighting to get a bigger and better yes.
0:47:08 And we have a huge mean with sprouts tomorrow, actually. Wow. And so, what’s the revenue so far?
0:47:13 Yeah. So, since inception over the last seven years, we sold over a million dollars worth of nuts.
0:47:18 This year alone, we’ll do 400,000. Last year, 200,000. And next year, with some of the launches
0:47:24 that we’re planning, we’ll do probably closer to 2 million. And what do the retailers tell you?
0:47:29 So, that fresh time that you’re in, sorry, you’re in 70 stores with them or they have 70 stores?
0:47:34 Now, we’re in all 70 of their stores. We’re in a total of 200 retail stores across the country from
0:47:39 some of those bigger players and some just smaller one-off stores, health food stores, golf courses.
0:47:46 And like, you know, the way that retail works is they need to see the velocity of, you know,
0:47:50 how much you’re selling on the shelf at their stores for you to get into more stores.
0:47:54 And so, what data do you have? And is that currently a strength? Is it a weakness? What’s
0:48:00 going on with the current cycle rate or whatever they call it for, retail consumption?
0:48:04 Yeah. So, the velocities in the data is the biggest thing. So, our product is incredibly
0:48:09 unique in that we are one of the only ones who offer a product like ours. We have very few
0:48:14 competitors. I can name them. And so, what we have to deal with, of course, first demonstrate a gap
0:48:19 on the shelf. Hey, you are not, you don’t have any nut, flavored nut options that are organic,
0:48:23 sprouted and they contain no seed oils. So, first we have to do that and then we just show share the
0:48:29 data. I mean, our velocities, if they were bad and that was an issue, we, fresh time would not have
0:48:34 let us go from 3 to 30 to 70 stores. They came to us. We didn’t have to approach them on that. We
0:48:40 were just killing it so much. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. I feel like you answered a question that
0:48:47 should be answered in numbers with letters. That’s okay. All right. So, here’s the problem
0:48:52 that I have with this business. I like your name. I like your story. I really want to try
0:48:59 your nuts. All right. But here’s the problem. When I go to your TikTok, I see 50 followers.
0:49:05 And when you’re young, you have a lot of disadvantages. You’re not going to have the same
0:49:08 level of experience. You’re not going to have the same amount of funding and resources. You’re
0:49:15 not going to have the supply chain experience that your competitors all have. But you do have a
0:49:23 story and what you should be is amazing at social media. You should be telling your story on social
0:49:27 media. You should be getting people excited about this and taking that to the retailers and saying,
0:49:32 “Look, we’re this young, exciting brand that consumers really care about and consumers are
0:49:38 excited about.” And you don’t have an option like that. The nut shelf for you guys is stale. It’s
0:49:43 just Blue Diamond. And it’s the same old brands that do the same old thing. And they’re not on
0:49:47 trend. They’re not seed oil-free. They’re not whatever. You have that story, but you need the
0:49:52 social side to be kick-ass because social just takes creativity. It doesn’t take money. And
0:49:58 you’re part of the generation that should be better at this than whoever the CEO of Blue Diamond is.
0:50:02 Their social strategy is obviously going to be pretty boring. And so, I think that’s where
0:50:05 you’re dropping the ball. And that’s what you’re going to need to get into retail because I’ve
0:50:12 talked to retailers. And what they care about is they need to believe that you are going to help
0:50:16 drive traffic to the store or that customers care about your brand and that they’re adding
0:50:22 young hot brands to the shelf. That’s what you need as your story. So, I think that’s what’s
0:50:27 missing for me right now. Absolutely. Yeah. Who, with the family business like this, do you and
0:50:31 your brother, are you the two owners or is your mother involved? Who owns the company?
0:50:37 Yeah. So, my brother and I are 50/50 owners. We do have my mom, who’s our chief flavor officer.
0:50:41 She’s in charge of making sure the nuts taste as good as they do. I mean, she’s the original
0:50:44 person who created these recipes and we just took them and started selling them.
0:50:50 Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. I bought in with Sean as well on the story. The story was
0:50:54 very good. I saw your about page. I saw the personality. I was like, “All right, this is
0:50:58 definitely going to be something interesting. I’m now a customer. I’m very eager to try it,
0:51:03 but this is pretty badass.” Sam, do you remember the name of that nuts brand that he’s kind of like
0:51:08 on Twitter? Nutty Nerds? Is that it? It’s like a peanut butter brand, right? Yeah. They do
0:51:14 many eight figures that you’re in revenue. Many eight figures. So, tens of millions of dollars
0:51:20 in revenue. Yeah. Have you looked at these guys, Austin? Yeah, I’m familiar with them.
0:51:26 And I think they just got popular on social media and their shtick is different than yours.
0:51:32 There’s the opposite of… Indulge. Yeah, it’s like indulge versus what you’re trying to do.
0:51:40 But you do have… I’ve invested in a bunch of these seed oil or seed oil-free companies.
0:51:44 I think TBD, if it’s going to be mainstream yet, but it definitely seems like it might be.
0:51:49 But this is super fascinating. You have a lot of tailwinds to help you out here for sure.
0:51:55 I think you want to include that in your pitch, by the way. An investor doesn’t really know how
0:52:01 big a nuts brand can be. And your numbers, while I’m not saying that they’re bad, they are
0:52:06 on the small side for an e-commerce company, right? So, if you’re… We’ve done a million
0:52:10 dollars across seven years. Okay, that’s not huge. I think you got to paint a picture that this can
0:52:15 actually be really big. I looked up Blue Diamonds, by the way. Blue Diamonds says about 1.8 billion
0:52:22 a year in revenue. Correct. So, I would show the nut category is huge. And you have… Blue Diamond
0:52:28 does 1.8 billion in sales a year. The next one does this. The next one does this. And we use
0:52:34 this phrase on MFM that there’s a sea of sameness. You walk down that aisle and it’s all old brands.
0:52:40 There’s not one challenger brand. And all of them have the same problem that they’re lacking,
0:52:46 XYZ. We have fresh packaging. We’re a challenger brand. We have a better story. We’re hot on social
0:52:50 media. So, I think you need that part of the story. And I would include others like nerdy nuts.
0:52:54 And I would show examples of others who have come into this category and are doing very well
0:52:59 at how you’re the next in line. Again, it’s that sort of error of inevitability that you want to
0:53:04 paint. And so, when you don’t have the traction that shows that your own trajectory is inevitable,
0:53:09 you want to show the inevitability of a category, of a change. Some of the things you talked about
0:53:15 about sprouted products are growing 34% year-over-year in these stores. That’s kind of like you want
0:53:20 slides there because it feels like every category now has a sprouted product and the sprouted
0:53:25 products are overperforming. Guess what? Nuts doesn’t have a sprouted product. We are that
0:53:30 sprouted nut, right? And so, you want to paint that picture for the investor. But really good
0:53:35 overall. And honestly, I actually think of all the business we heard today, I think this is probably
0:53:41 the one that could be the biggest. Yeah. But I don’t think you’re using your strengths. And I think
0:53:47 if you keep going on the same path you’re going, it won’t be huge. But you’re still young and you
0:53:51 have time to change. If you actually take some of the feedback and do it, I think this could
0:53:56 actually be a lot bigger. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ed. Thank you, man. You’re the best. Awesome,
0:54:00 majors. Thank you very much. All right. We have the last one from University of Michigan, right?
0:54:07 All right. Hi, Sam, Sean, MFMFAM. We are a tour, the AI-powered salesperson for property managers.
0:54:13 Today, only 4% of apartment prospects that ever land on an apartment website
0:54:17 actually end up taking the in-person tour. And it’s no surprise that the in-person tour is
0:54:22 the highest-converting part of the apartment sales process. I mean, there’s nothing like someone
0:54:27 giving you a guided experience of something you’re about to buy. But when 96% of the potential
0:54:31 prospects that hit your digital storefront never get the chance to experience your tour,
0:54:36 that highest-converting sales moment in the apartment process, well, leads get missed.
0:54:40 Yeah, these leads get missed and these apartments are left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of
0:54:45 missed opportunities and unleashed vacancies that could have been filled if these prospects took a
0:54:52 tour. That is until the apartment installs tour. Tour helps apartments like Arbor Apartments scale
0:54:56 Mariana, their digital salesperson. Mariana doesn’t have enough time to tour every single
0:55:01 prospect that visits the property in person, much less all the prospects that visit the property
0:55:06 online. But what if we could recreate Mariana’s best in-person tour and replicate that on the
0:55:12 website so that Mariana is on the website for all prospects 24/7? Our property manager just
0:55:16 pasted a link to an apartment website. We scraped the website and generated video scripts that
0:55:21 helped Mariana with infrastructure to record the tour and the scrape combined it all together
0:55:25 with a knowledge base into a smart, virtual-leasing agent. Once the tour is ready, all the company
0:55:30 has to do is paste a little piece of code on the website and now Mariana is on the website 24/7.
0:55:34 And when a prospect goes on the website and starts to browse, we’re actually learning about
0:55:38 that prospect through the small digital micro interactions and Mariana can pop out of the
0:55:42 right-hand corner of the website at the perfect time and ask them if they’d like to take a tour.
0:55:46 Once in the tour, Mariana can teach them about the apartment and even offer to give them a tour
0:55:51 of like a specific floor plan or a specific amenity that we deem appropriate for them.
0:55:55 Mariana can also ask product qualifying questions for that prospect such as would you
0:55:59 like to take an in-person tour or would you like to schedule a call back all while driving engagement
0:56:06 in increasing apartments booked? Now, replicating that in-person tour for these apartments can drive
0:56:11 nearly three XT engagement and create more qualified leads for the apartment. We know this
0:56:14 because we’re working with some of the largest property managers in the nation and the spirit
0:56:20 of the podcast, we delivered our first million tours and helped drive over $30 million worth
0:56:25 of leases for the apartment. Additionally, this has helped us get to reach over a million dollars in
0:56:30 revenue. And that’s not all, guys. Do you remember those videos that we recorded with Mariana earlier?
0:56:35 Well, now those are one of the biggest assets for the apartment. Tour automatically repurposes
0:56:40 those videos to follow up with leads and automatically run TikTok, Meta, and Google ad campaigns.
0:56:46 Look, Shopify has set the experience and with the advent of Shopify, online shopping for
0:56:51 everyday commodities is compelling visual video first. But larger purchases like shopping for an
0:56:56 apartment online, otherwise known as leasing still remain stuck with static photos, manual
0:57:05 scheduling, and follow-ups. But that ends today with tour. That’s right. This shopping online for
0:57:12 apartments is nearly two X larger than all other forms of e-commerce combined. That’s right, guys.
0:57:17 This is the $2.5 trillion industry in which property managers rely on their tour to close
0:57:22 over 80% of their sales. We’re a passionate driven team who has designed and delivers some of the
0:57:27 best experiences, the best companies in the world, including growth at ramp and Google shopping.
0:57:31 We started on campus to solve our own problems and our own shopping journey. We got it to YC and
0:57:35 are just getting started with solving it for millions of more. With tour, the I sales person
0:57:42 for Poppy Matt. All right, all right, all right, all right. That’s pretty great. So you’ve raised
0:57:49 money already or what? Yeah, we’ve raised about 350 to 4K so far, but largely been bushdrop.
0:57:56 We’ve had many interesting moments throughout the journey, but we’ve been really focused on
0:57:58 getting the product experience as good for our customers as possible.
0:58:03 Can I tell you, I used to work in this industry a long time ago, can I tell you like the three
0:58:10 reasons why I think this could fail and you could tell me how I’m wrong? The first, I think that
0:58:14 there is this thing called Matterport that existed for a long time. I know Airbnb tested
0:58:20 on their website and I used to be an Airbnb owner. And when they had these, Matterport made these
0:58:24 like realistic models of what your apartment looked like. Like a 3D virtual tour. Yeah,
0:58:31 similar to this. And they found that it decreased conversion. And the main thing being is that a
0:58:36 lot of apartments for rent are shit. And like, it’s like, dude, just like, I just need to get
0:58:39 someone in the door. And once they’re in the door, I can like, like do some salesmanship to sell them.
0:58:45 But like online, it looks pretty shitty in a 3D way. The other one being that there’s
0:58:52 like right now, I don’t know, do apartments need to be filled at the moment? Like it seems like
0:58:56 a lot of these folks are like, dude, I’m killing it right now. My vacancy is quite low. Why should
0:59:02 I spend money to do this work? And the last one being is a lot of apartments that you need,
0:59:08 I would imagine to do sales on the apartments are kind of shitty. And I don’t want someone to see
0:59:13 them online. I need them to see them in real life so I can sell you on it. And, you know, it’s,
0:59:17 you know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t want like a user video of like a 1994 Honda Civic.
0:59:21 But if I get you here and you’re like, dude, I got $1,000. I’m like, this shit box is for you.
0:59:26 And I don’t need a video for that. You know what I mean? So can you like refute some of those points?
0:59:30 Yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. Matterport is one of our comps. You know, they’re
0:59:35 doing 500, they’re still doing $540 million per year. They are a public comp. But the big thing
0:59:39 that they do that’s different or that we do that’s different is where you’re telling me that
0:59:46 Matterport does $500 million in revenue? Yes. Yes. Now, the big thing that is put in perspective,
0:59:51 the big thing that we do that’s different is two things. The first thing is we are fundamentally
0:59:55 an active experience that’s partnered with the apartment to funnel someone down the whole
1:00:00 sales funnel. From the first moment they meet them to following up on email, following up targeting,
1:00:05 and that allows us to hit a much larger market than Matterport even does today.
1:00:08 And then the other thing that I think you talked about, which is the nature of most of these
1:00:13 apartments fundamentally being not necessarily like maybe old, drab experiences. I think the first
1:00:18 thing is, look, things change. Apartments are becoming one of the largest purchases we make.
1:00:22 It is one of the largest we make. And these are becoming more commoditized. They’re becoming
1:00:26 more monetized. I mean, the whole future is going into the experience economy. And I think the
1:00:31 experience is going to be a very important part of our Gen Z or even millennial shop.
1:00:35 So I think that experience is a very important part. We see that because a lot of our tours,
1:00:40 we deliver it over more tours. Many of them are international, out of state. And these are important
1:00:46 decisions that people are on the edge on which different shops or different departments they
1:00:50 might want to work with. Now, for example, one apartment might want to have a virtual
1:00:55 leasing advantage compared to others. And that’s why we help fundamentally become
1:00:58 part of the adversely leasing advantage. And then the last element I know because you want to say
1:01:04 something, it’s just that we’re also augmenting the sales force, right? So there’s a frontline
1:01:09 sales in most of these businesses are fundamentally high churn. There’s people leaving the building
1:01:14 all the time. If we can help augment their sales team, we have a much larger staying power with
1:01:20 the actual property, not just a one off virtual tour. And one thing I like to add is that Matterport,
1:01:25 yet their like essential goal is to communicate the like physical establishment to the customer.
1:01:28 And obviously, we do that. But what we’re trying to do is to augment the website to
1:01:32 better communicate that as well as segment leads so that they know how to allocate the
1:01:36 resources best to the highest intent leads. So that’s another area where they save money
1:01:42 by better allocating resources. And the tour, the tour that you give, sorry, I might have missed
1:01:47 this during the thing, or like, I don’t know, maybe have a demo. Is it just a girl talking
1:01:53 and photos? Or is it like a walking tour that you generate? Or do you go film it first? Like,
1:01:58 what is the actual thing? Okay, here’s the video. Yeah, we go and film it. So we have
1:02:02 two elements. We either have a video pro network that can help film it or building more and more
1:02:06 scripts that you can easily start start filming it from your phone. iPhone 16 is like rivals,
1:02:11 like Sony cameras. And once we got just so this is not AI generated. This is like a video you
1:02:15 guys make. Yes, yes. And then we take the knowledge base as well as that media and supply that
1:02:22 throughout the whole sales process. Got it. Okay, cool. So you guys go film a video when an
1:02:26 apartment social work with you. And then you have the AI wrapper around it where it’s chat,
1:02:31 it’s Q&A, it’s scheduling appointment, it’s following up with a targeted ad, it’s things
1:02:38 like that. That’s what you guys do after that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. And the 450K of ARR
1:02:43 that you have right now, that’s from how many customers? That’s from 130 property managers,
1:02:48 usually around the price point of $300, somewhere to 50, some are paying more.
1:02:53 And how’d you get the 100, whatever property managers? So the cool thing is we have a land
1:02:58 and expand motion. So once we’re inside a property manager, usually they manage many properties,
1:03:03 large apartment buildings. What we do is we demonstrate our results and most of our other
1:03:07 property management companies start expanding within the property managers. So one property
1:03:13 manager inside a company refers to some of her additional properties in her portfolio or some
1:03:18 of the other regional property managers. So how will you go from 100 something properties today
1:03:22 to 1,000 or 10,000 in the next year? What are you going to do?
1:03:26 So one of the big things we’ve been trying recently is automatically generating tours
1:03:30 so that we can demonstrate value to apartments before we even have to go in person because
1:03:34 obviously that’s a large cost of videotaping the actual apartment. So we can immediately
1:03:39 just scrape the website, pull some images, use flux to turn the images into somewhat of a mock
1:03:43 video, pull some information from their website and generate a tour that can act to segment
1:03:48 leads on the website. And then they can see the value of it. Oh, a tour lead came in. This is a
1:03:51 high intent lead. Let’s follow up on it. And then from there, if they’re pleased by the value,
1:03:54 then we can actually go out and record that video, making the tour even better.
1:04:00 Okay. So you’re going to auto generate these videos as a prototype, as a sample,
1:04:04 and then you’re going to cold email them and say, “Hey, we could do this for you guys.”
1:04:05 Cold email referral. Yep.
1:04:12 Okay. And then what do you guys run an A/B test? So on any of your apartment websites,
1:04:16 do you show if you have us installed versus if you don’t have us installed, what’s the difference
1:04:22 in revenue? Yeah, absolutely. So what we notice is when it comes to the actual properties,
1:04:26 like the amount of value we generate for the properties, usually an additional $300,000 to
1:04:32 $500,000 in leases. Now specifically, we do three things really importantly that leads to these
1:04:37 fundamental items. The first thing is we deliver a four-times number of tours, prospects who are
1:04:42 on the website get three times engagement, and also the leads that we end up capturing, just
1:04:46 obviously are going to be more qualified, right? And so those leases convert at a higher rate.
1:04:53 Okay, gotcha. That’s pretty convincing. If you told me, hey, however many tours you’re
1:04:57 giving per week right now, I could forex that if you add this thing to your website.
1:05:02 That’s a pretty compelling proposition, don’t you think, Sam?
1:05:08 Yes. I still think that there’s a bunch of… I think there’s a bunch of other questions related
1:05:14 to the things that I said, but that is compelling. I think I’m scarred from this industry of selling
1:05:19 to these companies and how hard it is and how old school some of these… Have you guys noticed
1:05:25 that about how old school your customers are? And it’s like the two customers that we’ve had in
1:05:33 this presentation or in this section have been campuses or colleges and apartment buildings.
1:05:38 And I’m like, oh my god, those are both really, really, really hard. Have you guys noticed that
1:05:42 when you’re selling to these apartment companies that they’re a pain in the ass to work with?
1:05:48 It definitely is an old guard. And things change ever so often. But I think they’re realizing how
1:05:52 important it is, particularly when they’re looking at e-commerce and how things are evolving,
1:05:56 that it’s important for them to be extremely competitively advantaged. And so just the nature
1:06:00 of competition has really been trying to somewhat push the… They’re just slow. They’re really slow.
1:06:06 Yeah, I do think though, again, back to that idea of you want to make this feel inevitable,
1:06:12 I think it is… There’s a clear line you could draw where you say, look, if you were a apartment
1:06:17 building and back 15 years ago, you might have been able to get away without having a website.
1:06:21 But about 15 years ago, you now had to have a website. You had to have a website. You had
1:06:26 to be findable on Google. That became mandatory table stakes. And then after that, you had to
1:06:31 have photos. If you didn’t have photos, you were not even competitive. You’re non-viable.
1:06:35 And then you had to have videos. And you had to have videos. And then after that, you had to have
1:06:38 a booking thing where somebody could schedule a tour without having to call you. That became
1:06:44 table stakes. And now 98% of apartment sites all have a way to book a tour online. Well,
1:06:49 guess what the next one is? The next one is an AI agent that’s helping you book those appointments
1:06:55 by either answering questions, upselling you, or putting together a higher quality
1:07:00 in a pitch to get in front of you. And that’s the next wave of this. All websites had to go
1:07:05 through this. And when the tech made it where it was possible, it just became too competitive.
1:07:09 If you didn’t have it, you were left in the dust. And that’s what’s going to happen in this space.
1:07:15 All websites are now going to have an AI agent that helps them sell. Agreed. Yeah. I love that,
1:07:22 Sean. And you guys have done great with your matching zip-ups that are nicely merchandised.
1:07:26 Congratulations. That’s step one to being a startup. So you’ve nailed that one.
1:07:31 You’ve also nailed the revenue thing too. So congratulations to you guys. The million tours
1:07:35 is also pretty good. And $30 million of leases that came through your appointments. That’s also
1:07:41 that’s okay as well. But really, the jackets are fantastic. All right. Thank you guys. You guys are
1:07:49 badass. Well done. Thank you guys. We kind of grade them on a curve. It’s like, if you’re already in
1:07:55 YC and you already have like, you know, a million tours done, then yeah, I kind of feel like these
1:08:00 are unfair. To be honest, I feel like if you are in YC or taking a gap, you’re in San Francisco.
1:08:04 Well, I don’t know. The gap here is fine. That’s like, yeah.
1:08:09 Do you even go to college if you’re at YC? Well, that’s what I’m saying. Those guys put up a team
1:08:13 slide and it was like, I’ve experienced at Google, at Yelp, at like all these companies. Like, dude,
1:08:16 I thought you’re supposed to be like 19 years old. What’s going on? Are these even college kids?
1:08:22 What’s happening? All right. I think we have one more left. The final pitch coming in from Illinois.
1:08:27 Who do we got? Hello. My name is Odd Vaigota. I’m the CEO and founder of Pathlet. It’s really
1:08:32 nice to meet you guys today. What’s up, brother? Nice to meet you too. All right. Until a month ago,
1:08:37 we were working on a no-code engine that helped businesses automate their daily tasks with AI.
1:08:42 And it was going really well. We were working with extremely large enterprises like the Big Four
1:08:47 and had more than a million dollars in VC money to accelerate our growth. But the more we worked
1:08:52 with enterprises, the more we realized that our most valuable automations for them ended up being
1:08:57 email related. They wanted help managing their cluttered inboxes that looked something like this.
1:09:04 A fun story. Our lead investor once told us that she went for a week-long break
1:09:09 and had 8,000 unread emails. And a business owner that we were working with told us his
1:09:14 employees were spending more time on emails alone than the job they were actually hired to do.
1:09:20 And these stories are not one-offs. According to McKinsey, the average employee processes
1:09:26 more than 600 emails per week, wasting 13 hours and thousands of business dollars.
1:09:30 Despite it being an essential part of our lives, email has become a burden and we find it hard to
1:09:36 keep track of even the most important emails in our inbox, often losing them. But according to
1:09:41 industry select, 86% of business professionals still prefer using emails for some reason,
1:09:48 so clearly we can’t get rid of emails. So what can we do? Well, to solve this exact problem,
1:09:52 we are currently building a virtual executive assistant or secretary that handles your emails
1:09:58 for you. What if, just like a real secretary, it could learn from you and respond to emails on your
1:10:03 behalf? What if, just like a real secretary, it tells you what the most important emails in your
1:10:08 inbox are every single morning? And what if, just like a real secretary, it could automatically
1:10:13 respond to emails that you don’t care about? Well, you can have that secretary because our
1:10:18 mobile app does all of that, and we are launching on the App Store next week. And no, we’re not
1:10:23 joking. We have been actively working with a Big Four customer, netting us six figures in annual
1:10:28 revenue, and are starting a pilot with the largest children’s enrichment franchise in the world next
1:10:33 week. Not only that, but we have also been working with five global financial institutions and
1:10:38 completed an oversubscribed seven-figure raise. We were also fortunate enough to win first place
1:10:43 in one of Midwest’s largest startup pitch competitions. My name is Adva, and together
1:10:47 with my co-founder Mark, we collectively bring more than a decade of experience in AI and building
1:10:52 companies. My entire teenage years have been spent building and scaling numerous online security
1:10:57 businesses to millions of users, and Mark has tons of AI research and startup experience under his
1:11:02 belt. We’re now working together to change the way you interact with email today. So join us in
1:11:16 helping to reclaim the biggest part of your daily workday. Thank you. All right, a quick break.
1:11:20 I know that if you’re listening to my first million, that means you love numbers. Well,
1:11:24 I’ve got a new podcast called Moneywise, and the premise is simple. We talk to high-net-worth
1:11:30 people, so people who have somewhere between 50 to 500 million dollars, and we start with simple
1:11:35 premise, which is tell me exactly how much money you have, how much money you make every month,
1:11:41 what your portfolio looks like, how much money you spend every month, and every other bit of
1:11:46 information that involves your net worth and your spending. And the reason we do this is because I
1:11:53 want to demystify money. So we just had this woman named Ann, who has a $94 million portfolio after
1:11:58 selling her business, and she spends $360,000 a month, and she talks about where the money is
1:12:01 and what she spends it on and why she spends that much, and if it makes her happy or not.
1:12:05 And then we dive deep on different topics like children buying versus renting,
1:12:09 giving money away. We basically are having a conversation that I see a lot of rich people
1:12:14 having behind closed doors. We do it publicly. So check it out. It’s called Moneywise,
1:12:21 and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. So I’ll hold on. The first five set words of your
1:12:27 pitch was pretty funny. You said, “Until last month, we were doing this thing.” So let me answer
1:12:33 some questions. But then you have a six figure enterprise contract, and you’ve raised a million
1:12:38 dollars. I don’t understand. Can you briefly tell me the… They had a product. They’re pivoting.
1:12:42 They raised money. They had a customer, but it wasn’t a thing. So they’re pivoting. Is that right?
1:12:49 Is that… Yes, for sure. So I can answer that question. So essentially, it’s the same business.
1:12:56 So we worked on the generative AI engine that we started just this February. So all the contracts
1:13:01 that we have are now converting to the email client. Essentially, we were using our technology to
1:13:07 develop email automations for all these businesses, and we had raised money on that. But now we simply
1:13:13 changed the user interface from a workflow builder that looked kind of like Zapier, etc., to more of
1:13:19 an assistant email client interface that we found that it works better with enterprise customers.
1:13:27 Got it. All right. Because your website doesn’t tell that story, but then if you click… You have
1:13:33 this folder up top that says, “New exclamation point, our email client,” which is pretty cool.
1:13:37 That tells that story a little bit better. Understood. Can I give a PSA about the…
1:13:42 Our team has decades of experience. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t want to get on that, but yeah.
1:13:48 Yeah, I got to say because a couple of the pitches have had that. I don’t think you should do that.
1:13:56 It seems… What you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor that, “Wait a minute.
1:14:00 I think this is even bigger than what they’re saying.” So this is a subtle art where you’re
1:14:03 desperately trying to convince them that this is going to be big and awesome and it’s going to work,
1:14:09 but you cannot appear to be overselling it. You have to feel like you’re underselling it,
1:14:14 and then they feel like they’re finding some diamond in the rough. So how old are you?
1:14:21 I’m 20. You’re 20, right? So to be like we have a combined 12 years of experience,
1:14:25 I think that’s a bit of a tell. What you would be better off saying is,
1:14:29 I started coding when I was 8. By the time I was 12, I had already built blah, blah, blah.
1:14:33 And when I was 14, I hacked into my school’s thing and changed my grades. And now I’ve figured out,
1:14:40 for the last few years, I’ve really been obsessed and focused with the AI. And that’s a more believable
1:14:44 and exciting story for me is like, oh, this is one of those boy geniuses, right? Like, oh,
1:14:49 you’re one of those hacker types that started early. I can pattern match and say, yeah,
1:14:54 a lot of the best performing founders I know have that same story. And that story works better
1:14:59 versus when you tell me, you know, me and my co-founder who are 18 years old, we’ve got decades
1:15:03 of experience. It’s like, no, you don’t, right? Okay. Now what else can I believe out of this?
1:15:08 Even if it’s technically true, the whole cumulative years of experience of your team is not a real
1:15:11 metric that most people put in their pitch deck. So I would get rid of that.
1:15:15 Yes, you’re right. Having said that, all right, that’s public service announcement. I do have a
1:15:19 question. It seems like you’ve done a great job of selling into people that are really hard to
1:15:25 sell into. So how did you go get an enterprise contract from a big four consulting company worth,
1:15:30 you know, over $100,000? I’m curious to hear what you did there. What’s the short story?
1:15:34 Yeah, very good question. So short story was that I was working as a consultant
1:15:41 on campus as part of a university organization. And thanks to my opportunity there, I was able
1:15:47 to connect to a very high level business executive within a big four enterprise through my mentor,
1:15:52 who happened to also be the director of the consulting org. So long story short, it was very
1:15:58 network driven. They were looking for a solution to fit certain problems that they had within an
1:16:03 enterprise. And what I was building as a personal project happened to solve those exact problems.
1:16:06 So once I had that, we essentially made it a company. And what did they say when you’re
1:16:10 pivoting? I mean, did you pivot because of them? They are partly the reason we pivoted,
1:16:15 but it was also when we started engaging with more and more prospects. So our initial
1:16:21 generative AI workflow engine was essentially you could take AI and plug it into any legacy
1:16:27 systems to automate any complex day to day task. For example, if you’re a VC and you receive a
1:16:31 lot of pitch decks every day via email, we could create an automation for you where you would
1:16:36 automatically process those pitch decks, analyze them against your investment thesis, portfolio
1:16:41 companies, etc. And then also send out replies saying, hey, we love this, we would love to
1:16:46 have a meeting or no for the following reasons. And what you’re describing is that sorry, I want
1:16:52 you to finish, but is what you’re describing similar to Lindy.ai? Yes. So Lindy.ai was definitely
1:16:58 a competitor of ours in that space. But then as I was saying earlier, the more we engaged with
1:17:03 customers and prospects, we found that our product was explicitly being used for email
1:17:08 automations. And a big problem with products like our previous one and Lindy.ai is that
1:17:14 the barrier to entry for a lot of non-technical users is quite high. You have to almost be a
1:17:19 developer to actually use even these no code tools. And that is why we decided to change
1:17:24 the interface into a much easier to understand virtual assistant or secretary. Gotcha. I think
1:17:30 the challenge with this business, because you seem really smart and I think whatever you work on
1:17:35 will be interesting. I think the challenge here is you’re going into the most competitive space.
1:17:41 So I do feel undoubtedly that email inboxes are going to start to have AI in them. And the AI is
1:17:47 going to help you process, categorize, summarize your emails in a way and help you with the responses.
1:17:53 The problem is, do I really believe that you are going to be able to get people off of outlook,
1:17:58 off of Gmail and onto your service? Or in addition, you know, they’re also going to be
1:18:02 doing that, right? Google’s definitely going to be adding AI into this. And so is superhuman.
1:18:07 And so is Microsoft, right? They own OpenAI basically. And so I do think that this is going
1:18:12 to be just an absolute bloodbath category. And so I think from an investment point of view,
1:18:16 that would be my problem with this, which is even if I like you, and even if I agree with the idea,
1:18:20 it’s kind of that second inevitability I talked about. One is, where is the puck going this way?
1:18:24 There’s, yes, of course it’s going this way. The second is, are you going to be the team who
1:18:28 captures that opportunity? And it just seems highly unlikely that you would be the team that
1:18:33 captures that opportunity given people don’t want to switch email clients and that all of the email
1:18:39 clients are already aware of this capability and are highly incentivized to add AI to it.
1:18:43 Did you say how much you raised so far? You said a million?
1:18:45 Yes, we have raised a little more than a million.
1:18:48 Are you still in school or are you in living in San Francisco?
1:18:54 Currently, we’re on a gap semester. I’m on a gap semester. Mark’s also on a gap semester,
1:18:57 he has one class left, but everyone else is full-time. We have four people.
1:19:04 Dude, I think that first company, Meet Your Class, it’s that middle funnel things that’s the issue.
1:19:08 All these kids, all these smart kids are bailing on university. That’s amazing that you guys are
1:19:16 all just picking gaps. Well, I just told you that you’re probably going to fail. Tell me why I’m
1:19:21 wrong and I should kick rock. Yeah, for sure. So businesses switching to our email client is
1:19:26 definitely a very big hurdle that we were also trying to navigate. But what we found is by
1:19:31 verticalizing in a lot of businesses with our own kind of information management secretaries,
1:19:36 a lot of businesses prefer us over their standard email clients like Gmail and Outlook.
1:19:41 For example, currently, as I said, we’re starting a pilot with the largest children’s
1:19:45 enrichment franchise. They entirely run over Gmail, but they’re still willing to switch to us
1:19:51 simply because some of the features that we provide is something Gmail and Outlook just
1:19:56 can never do because they have to cater to large groups of audiences and they cannot fit specific
1:20:02 niches of certain requirements that a lot of customers have. Okay. All right, fair enough.
1:20:10 Sam, what else you got before we wrap up? I don’t think I have much. I think that it’s so early.
1:20:15 It’s hard to ask questions because I’m on your website and it looks like it’s very much beta,
1:20:19 so it’s hard for me to fully understand. I think, Sean, you were asking about replacing Gmail.
1:20:21 According to their website, it’s an integration. It’s not replacing Gmail.
1:20:28 It’s hard to fully understand because you’re so new. Do you just keep using Gmail and this is
1:20:33 overlaid or is this a new client you download and you’re supposed to go here instead of Gmail.com?
1:20:37 Yes. So essentially, you just log in with your Gmail. So one way we’re beating that
1:20:42 barrier to adoption is by not saying that you need a new TLD and a new domain ID.
1:20:45 You simply log in with your Gmail. We get all your emails and then you start using
1:20:50 our interface rather than Gmail’s. Yeah. It’s like superhuman, right? So you keep your email address,
1:20:54 but fundamentally, you’re not supposed to go to Gmail every day. You’re supposed to go to
1:20:58 Superhuman and open up your email and use that for all your emails. Yes, that is correct.
1:21:05 All right. Good pitch. Thank you. Best of luck. I think this is a huge idea. I think it’s going
1:21:10 to be super competitive and if you did it, that would be amazing. This is a multi-billion dollar
1:21:16 win if you can actually do it. That’s the good news. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Round of applause.
1:21:27 Thanks, brother. All right. To wrap it, can we just name, I think, do you guys want to do the
1:21:34 winning school that we thought brought the heat? Secondly, our favorite pitch, the best pitch,
1:21:39 meaning the one we would be most likely to put our money into. And then I think we should maybe
1:21:46 do an audience choice as well, which is let the crowd react and see which one they think is best.
1:21:51 What do you think, Sam? All right. So let’s start with school. I have a winner. Let’s recap real
1:21:57 quick. Michigan did Meet Your Class, which was helping universities with the summer melt. The
1:22:02 middle final. Yeah. Middle final for universities. Mill U, which is the personalized skincare,
1:22:08 microbiome stuff. And Tour, which was the AI department tours. And then UIUC was basically
1:22:13 Meet Metafrazo, which is the dubbing company. Brothers Nuts, which is the sprouted nuts company
1:22:19 and Pathlet, that one we just heard about the AI email client. So those are the schools. Sam,
1:22:25 what’s your pick? Illinois all the way. I think that Michigan is an incredibly impressive school,
1:22:35 but I think that I thought it was incredibly impressive that the Metafrazo guy was at
1:22:43 Founders, or what’s it called? The Inc. The way this young guy who just went, the way that he
1:22:48 had already raised a little bit of money and was taking the gap year. And then Brothers Nuts already
1:22:53 has a business that is doing like 400 a year in revenue. I just thought it was more impressive
1:22:56 that a Midwestern school, their people are like going to the coast. And I think that’s a really
1:23:02 good thing. Do you agree or no? I would disagree. I would have gone Michigan. I think that traction-wise,
1:23:10 I mean, tour, let’s break the case here. Tour had the most traction, right? Half a million dollars
1:23:16 in ARR, a million tours served. I think tour and they’re NYC. I think tour was doing the best.
1:23:21 I think Meet Your Class has a real business. I think he stumbled into kind of actually like
1:23:24 a cool business where half a million people have used this thing and now he found a business model
1:23:30 that might actually work. So I thought that Michigan had had the better businesses overall.
1:23:35 All right. Good. They each could vote, but we disagree.
1:23:42 And it’s a tie. All right. So let’s do our favorite business out of these. If you were going to
1:23:45 invest your money into one of these, Sam, which one would you have invested your money into?
1:23:52 The business that I don’t want to invest in, but I wish I owned, and I think the people who
1:23:58 own this one might get the richest, the fastest of all these businesses is Brother Nuts. I think
1:24:03 Austin Major or Brother Nuts, I don’t think they should raise money. I don’t want to invest in
1:24:08 them, but I would love to own that company. I think it could be a family business that makes
1:24:12 hundreds or hundreds of millions or even more throughout the next handful of decades.
1:24:15 Okay. I like it. I would say that’s my favorite business.
1:24:20 My head tells me it’s either Meet Your Class or tour, but my heart is with Brothers Nuts.
1:24:27 And I’m going to go with Brothers Nuts as well. I think that they are one, you know, one step away
1:24:32 from actually making this like a real legit business that you’re going to see on the shelves
1:24:36 in every grocery store. I think they’re not far away from doing that. And I actually think it’s a,
1:24:41 I would actually invest in this business because I think it could actually make it happen.
1:24:48 It’s not theoretical here. I think that most of the companies had an AI element,
1:24:54 and I applaud that. I think that’s where the puck’s going. But it’s hard to stick out, man.
1:24:56 There’s just so much going on.
1:24:58 We picked the one with an Allman element.
1:25:04 Yeah. An Allman element. I don’t know, man. Right? Doesn’t it seem kind of seems like it’s
1:25:10 TBD as to like, who’s going to be the winners? It seems really hard to pick a winner at the moment.
1:25:14 Yeah. It’s sort of a trade off of like more competition, but maybe more upside.
1:25:19 Well, you said it well. You said, you said, this is definitely what’s going to happen,
1:25:23 but it’s going to be a bloodbath. Yeah. And that’s how I feel.
1:25:27 All right. So now the crowd’s choice. So can you guys unmute? I’m going to say
1:25:33 the name of the business. Crowd reaction is going to dictate who wins the audience choice.
1:25:36 Let’s see if this works. This might be crazy with the audio situation here.
1:25:41 Our producer’s freaking out. Turn the laptops. I want to see the crowd, actually.
1:25:44 Okay. So we got the crowd.
1:25:50 Yeah. All right. We’re going to start off from Michigan. Meet your class.
1:26:03 Okay. From UIUC, Metaphrasem.
1:26:09 All right. They might just be closer to the microphone. We’ll give them credit for that.
1:26:14 All right. From Michigan, we have the skin microbiome company, Milu.
1:26:21 All right. They can see exactly putting his mouth next to the mic.
1:26:27 All right. We’re going to go from UIUC. We have Pathlet.
1:26:38 Lukewarm. Lukewarm. I’m going to call it what it was. From Michigan, we have Tour.
1:26:46 All right. So from Michigan, it looks like Milu was the loudest.
1:26:50 And now from UIUC, last one, we have Brothers Nuts.
1:27:01 So Sean, I think I know who won that one. I think it was the Metaphraso.
1:27:03 Metaphraso, I think had it. I think they had it.
1:27:08 We miss you, bro. We miss you.
1:27:11 All right. All right. Okay. Wonderful. Guys, great job, everybody.
1:27:14 This is really impressive. You guys are way ahead of where I was in college.
1:27:18 I think, Sam, probably the same for you. You guys are ahead of the curve.
1:27:23 I hope our feedback is helpful. Even the people we shit on, like if we ask
1:27:28 hard questions or give you a hard time, of all the six people who presented the six companies,
1:27:33 you’re going to be in the 1% of the 1%. You already are in the 1% of the 1%
1:27:35 and what you’re doing is bad-ass. Exactly. Just by being active, you’re bad-ass.
1:27:39 And it’s a sign of respect. If we are willing to keep it real with you,
1:27:43 that’s because we actually think that you can win. If we just wanted to be nice and say,
1:27:49 the participation, I’m so happy for you. That wouldn’t have been helpful to you,
1:27:54 but it also would be actually not a sign of respect. We respect all of you for doing this.
1:27:59 And I just want to say, I would not have become an entrepreneur had I not had a class like this
1:28:04 where a speaker came in and just got me hyped about the idea of doing a startup.
1:28:10 I did not know what to do. My first idea was terrible. My execution was absolutely horrendous,
1:28:14 but it got me on that path. It just seemed like more fun. And so if you’re listening to this or
1:28:19 you’re at one of these schools right now, if it seems like something that you would want to do,
1:28:23 and it seems like the lifestyle, go for it. Don’t let that hold you back.
1:28:26 This could be a tipping point moment for you just like it was for me.
1:28:32 And you are currently in the phase of life where it will never get easier to do these things
1:28:36 than where you are right now. For the next, you have a four-year window where it’s like,
1:28:43 you have nothing really big to worry about except for this. And also, I think it’s Austin and Tommy.
1:28:45 Give these guys a shout out. You guys are the man.
1:28:59 It’s really hard to organize this type of stuff. And I think that getting this type of energy in
1:29:03 one room like you guys have done, it’s contagious. Sam, you thinking what I’m thinking?
1:29:08 I don’t know what you’re thinking. I got two words for you. I got two words for you, nationwide.
1:29:13 We’re taking the power hour nationwide. And then the second two words for you,
1:29:19 pizza party sponsored by MFM. I think we should give these guys some money. Let them host some
1:29:23 events and have some fun. So we will connect with you, Tommy, after this. And we’ll give you guys
1:29:29 some cash so that we can encourage you to throw more events and get more people excited about this.
1:29:32 And I like that it’s underground. I like that it’s off the books. I like that this is not
1:29:38 the entrepreneurship club of the school. This is just the people who actually care about building
1:29:44 stuff and want to do cool things and want to get off the conventional career track. I’m for that.
1:29:50 Thank you all for doing this. We appreciate you. Have a wonderful Wednesday. And if you’re listening
1:29:55 on MFM, you got to go and give all these guys a little bit of love on their websites and check
1:29:58 out their products. All right. Thank you guys. That’s it. That’s the pod.
1:30:02 I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
1:30:09 I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
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