3 strangers showed us how they made $8M, $10M, & $40M/year

alright today we're playing shoot your shot where we let founders come in sit in the hot seat and pitch us their business we got founders that have million dollar businesses all the way up to hundred million dollar businesses they get fifteen minutes and in it they start by telling us the one big number give us the pitch and and truth a shot i can to ask any questions that they want we've done this in new york city this time it's in san francisco whether you're listening on spotify or youtube if you're working out right now whatever you're doing right now you need to stop and go to spotify or go to youtube look us up on my first million and let us know in the comments of which city you want us to go to next alright let's do it i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looked alright sam up we are doing a new episode do format we're calling it shoot your shot and then we basically we go from city to citi we invite founders from those cities to come and shoot the shot to come pitch us we got business owners that are doing million dollars year to hundred million dollar businesses that you're gonna see in this batch of founders what should we expect well the best part about this podcast but the reason why that people listen the reason why we even do it is we talk to like unique people they tell us stuff that we don't normally see it's gonna range from like people who are like way established and like killing it all the way down to people who are just getting started and we don't actually know who's coming we don't know who's coming this is blind to us these are all people who listen to the podcast right people who listens this podcast it's founders on entrepreneurs business owners like an audition it's like american idol except for business i guess alright let's do this so shoot your shot let's get the first founder in here who do we got what's up dude here he comes what's what's up dog alright have a seat so you got fifteen minutes but take a take a time here excited to be here what's your name drag rag okay and your company is pas that's right pas okay where are you from i live in san francisco okay in bay area to be precise grew up in india and you've been here for five years now how old are you i'm thirty two this your first company it is my first company i did run a project before this where we were trying to build micro winter turbines but everything that i've learned about porsche has been at porsche everything i've learned about building a business has been primarily at partial so we have one role which is we are shameless numbers guys okay and so we ask everybody give us a a big juicy impressive or interesting number doesn't feel that big but interesting number that would hook us go ahead so we're amongst the one percent of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes with one thousand real world deployments okay so while you're in the one percent of non bullshit robotics companies you've shipped thousand robots what your robots do we are putting a private chef in every home and we're doing that by building cooking robots for homes we thought that if way and tesla and zoo can use computer vision and ai to take you from point a to point b why can we not use the same technology to cook a fresh meal for you take out is expensive eating it at i mean cooking at home takes forever there's no way for you to eat food that is fresh that's delicious that doesn't take sixty minutes of your time in the kitchen that doesn't cost twenty five dollars per serving and and where where where the alternative dude my diet right now is man k you know what man k is i know it's three pounds of ground beef with rice that will last me for three or four days it's soy sauce so i'm on board with this did you raise funding we are backed by shell how much did you raise eight million eight million dollars and how long ago did you start it we started the company eight years ago this was right out of my you know parents ground floor this was back in india it was still a project we formalized the company about five years ago this the thing by the way this is the robot yeah that's the robot and it's it's cook you give us like what is there like a demo can it do something can it cook us something so what we did was we just cooked spaghetti alfredo with mushrooms that's i haven't eaten this is perfect and you know you need looks good by the i don't know if the camp the camera should have already seen this this looks amazing so wait did it come out like this we cooked using fresh ingredients fresh olives fresh garlic fresh milk fresh butter fresh pasta and we put some fresh parmesan cheese on top and it was on quote that machine did all yes did that all of this yep how much does that cost fifteen hundred dollars which is less than a month of takeout the two for a family of four okay okay and so what this is i mean give me a score great i mean nine or ten yeah this is very good yeah as i said thousand customers already use us three times a week which is more than the oven because your numbers people m six retention beats door dash hello fresh any other food service out there last month alone we clocked two million dollars in bookings we did that again sort of finished this that was great most be a taste yeah yeah like so walk me through this so i the viewer the the listener won't know this but the viewer will see what you did but tell us because it looks just like a bowl can you can you grab a couple of the things in the back it looks like basically there's ingredient containers so here is a pan it's a it's a pan that's dishwasher safe there's a detachable stir detachable spatula there are containers where you put ingredients there is a drawer which is super cool which has spices there space for oil and water and most impressively there's a camera that looks at change in color texture consistency make sure it is mimicking a human chefs intelligence so food can be cooked perfectly how did you train this so in the early days we had chefs alone training porsche now we have our customer training porsche we possibly have the world's largest calendar division data set for a cooking food and we are taking the tesla approach way more spent five hundred thousand hours of supervised driving in twenty billion dollars in venture capital to crack self driving tesla did it a different way tesla said we'll release something that's useful to consumers also use it to collect tons of data and then port turbo taxis out faint so how does that work hey i wanna tell you about something pretty cool we have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast so hundreds of episodes the team at hubspot went through they pulled out all these simple relatable interesting profitable ideas that we have brainstorm and they're all available for download for free just click the link in the description below thank you to our friends at hubspot for sponsored this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys back to the show if a customer's that good at cooking why do they even buy this and how do they how do they train your thing so customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal this can only cook one pot meals for now yeah one part meal so no one pot have you want this meal the brand of one pot meal i don't know if you go like reddit or tiktok there's like a whole like it's a category of cooking called a one pot meal where you're just gonna put a bunch of them me i call that a crock pot grown up so you're not gonna make cheeseburgers oh so it's right not going to do a stake right it's not going to flip burgers it's not going to bake a cake anything that requires us spreading out like pancakes is something it won't do what are the what's the most popular two or three things that people cook with this so the data changes as we change our customer base but our indian users cook a lot of pane our italian users would cook a lot of resort and spaghetti because it's so hard to cook resort at home because you have to continue to stir our thai with vietnamese users would use it to cook ti curry high green curry so not to be a hate but basically is the robot just taking up the easiest part of cooking which is just stirring the robot is taking away the stirring it's taking away the regulation of heat it's taking away you being there to add ingredients at the right time okay it's taking away you monitoring the food because you know an eight year old needs to know what charred onions look like what brown onions look like so all the intelligence and all the babysitting sitting is being taken away it does not cut down your time in this in the kitchen from sixty minutes to zero it cuts down your time in the kitchen from sixty minutes to to ten minutes so what's give us two things give us the big idea meaning you said something like it's already used more than the oven so do you have this sort of vision that like hey look are kitchens all come with these appliances these three and now here comes number four it's gonna be in everybody's home that that means it's this big like get get me excited about the big idea here so ten years from now nobody's going to be cooking because they have to they'd only be going to cook because they want to same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to they're only going to be driving because they want to cooking is going the exact same way door dash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat or when you're ordering corporate lunches cooking will become a leisure activity something that you only do for joy but not monday through friday when it's a chore and we are the company that's building the future where every house will have a robot chef that cooks food for you so you don't have to that's pretty cool okay so how much revenue are you do what's your like run rate right now so we did two million dollars in bookings last month and fifteen hundred dollars why you think bookings yeah because you don't have the devices yet so it's pre sale so we have about thousand units shipped on the field and a long pre order that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can so we're we're making sure our manufacturers can scale with demand we're making sure our recipe library can scale with demand we're making sure reliability supply chain logistics all of that is just scaling with demand this is awesome what's the current so the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things it's manufacturing it's also operations so whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days you always need to hand hold people something or the other can go wrong and you need a service infrastructure for people to have support if something goes wrong right is the same bottleneck that va has where'd did you get the two million in bookings is that just viral demos on social media basically did you do anything to get customers or just people like the novelty people did they give you the cash already yeah they give us the cash already there are three ways that we drive demand the first is organic word every paying customer gets us at least one more paying customer without us spending a single dollar on marketing second porsche is built for the camera so random nobody would get porsche home should content post it online and overnight they become internet celebrities we had this creator who had eleven thousand followers within six weeks she got x number of followers guess what x is i don't know she went from eleven thousand to four fifty thousand followers and all that changed was that she was not shooting porsche content then she started shooting porsche content have you seen them cinematic yes have you seen the maddox sean yeah yeah i've i've seen it because of this exact reason i own it fancy roomba it's awesome and it like there's like one viral moment but there's probably a few actually one it sucks up a sock and it like opens up its latch and it like throws it out and it's huge though like i live in new york city i this sounds awesome my wife complains about how much time it cooks and like dude just make man k it's fine and i would definitely rather eat that but that's huge i can't use that in new york yet you can't use it because you don't have counter space you mean or what counter space okay yeah so you're absolutely right and the good thing is that the market is so huge that there are enough people with space to put this in their kitchen we're working on the next version of porsche that will be mini that will fit in manhattan apartment but the version after that will actually replace the range in your home that's interesting and cook four dishes at a time i a question this can't cook meat right it cannot cook steak but it can cook meat as long as the meat it has been cubed and the size is one cubic inches or smaller okay so you put chicken in there cubed and then i cook it yeah hey what do your parents think they're extremely proud that i was able to break out of the family business which was which had nothing to do with tech and i used my education well to actually make a big impact in the world they're extremely proud in supportive of they like it yeah that's badass what was your family business my dad runs a food grain business so they grind wheat you might have heard of this thing it's called an okay they grind it yeah the grind wheat and then they sell fresh flower so fresh food has been something that's always been close to my heart from the very beginning what do you need help with you guys have built great communities you with m m and you with hampton we feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for porsche how do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow push let me say something really quick i think people use the word community and audience differently okay so for example m is an audience meaning if we quit doing this the audience eventually is gonna go away mh sean owns a a brand that has a community it has a a community online where lots of his customers are talking and interactive and that's a community and i think you'd have to determine which of those two are you actually talking about yeah the best thing i heard of this is if everybody was together which way would the chairs be pointing so an audience is all the chairs point at the stage correct the community is the chairs point at each other so for example to your question what's that air fryer brand that went crazy like just like the yeah maybe it's ninja but like basically the air fryer in the last like five years had like a big renaissance and actually the needed did too yeah couldn't ninja creamy did too where there's a community to people that are sharing recipes and it works because i think a little bit more than yours the user can kinda figure out i create new things that rather than like the app only lets you do fourteen items pick one of the fourteen and so if you have some element of u g you user generated cooking in this case a user generated recipes that they could share and they could kinda get props for from one another i think that's the the and you have to find you a hub for them is it is it on reddit is it on discord is it on facebook is it on instagram how are you gonna get people to share this stuff but i would study what the air fryer community did i would study what the ninja cream did and i try to replicate as much as i could of the factors of that success like for example i used to love this app called apt it was a fitness app and they had a facebook group and i was very active on the facebook group and we same with peloton i'm sure they have a facebook group where you like talking about your favorite instructors like has anyone tried this type of workout another one is ladders that's a another fitness app that they have this like community so that's their customers talking together it's super valuable and so what i would do is for every i would put like something in your when you ship it out like you just i don't know if it's like mostly moms out in what age they are i might choose facebook if it was nerds i would choose to read it whatever facebook so i do think are are still the best i think the other question is what do you what's the bigger benefit your attaching yourself too so are people buying this fundamentally for time savings so then you would say well this is for people who really value their time maybe it's a busy professional the bit the working mom etcetera etcetera and you need to create metrics and success stories and attract that type of person go to those influencers who are gonna spout that kind of religion or is the religion about foodie people who love food that but they've been limited by skill good i would love to cook i'd love to eat z but i don't how to cook and that skill gap is getting bridged by this thing and it lets me indulge my food ness and it's not about the time savings mh it's not about brutal like efficiency utility it's about enjoyment and so i would try to figure out and the easy answer is gonna be oh it's both it's all but in order to really get a community going and you wanna have a beach head you wanna have like an initial persona that you're targeting and really it's like what's the happy ending the dream outcome for that person the kinda inner itch that they've been waiting waiting to scratch that your your product helping them do that your product's not the hero it's the tool that the average person uses to become a hero themselves and so which one which one is that something i would kind of ask myself because that'll change a lot of your marketing a lot of your strategy but my gut tells me you're not gonna have a customer acquisition problem right i don't think that's ever gonna be the problem marketing team is like a total of one person i don't think that's gonna be the issue your constraint is not gonna be getting people to buy it it's they're gonna be does this thing actually work and kinda get it in their house yeah but it'll change your product strategy like if your product treasury about utility man like he wants health and he wants convenience yeah so he's willing to sacrifice presentation tastes and other things maybe along the way but you would create a different product like you would literally have different pieces of the robot different constraints on the manufacturing side versus if you were trying to make this this beautiful parmesan topped impressive thing when friends come over yeah i cooked this for the for the family i was never able to do that before could it maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture right i think community is important primarily because it's not growth necessarily it drives but but over time i think your c comes down because you know your k factor just jumps up people start talking about you second engagement increases and so retention increases and if retention increases so let's of the best community builders in the world how many of them use phrases like k factor engagement stickiness and c not this early at least don't think you get magic first communities from the soul you know what i mean and so you gotta like have two different parts of your brain there's met guy start a founder rick rico raise money from excel and there's feelings sky and there's feelings got there's soul guy we're gonna do this because it's awesome we're gonna do this because it's the right thing to we're gonna do eventually cool yeah inside but right now it's like cool shit that eventually gets popular does not talk about k factor it talks about silly it talks about emotion you know these types of words not k factor don't worry about that just get the fifteen hundred people who are using this get them to log in to facebook groups every single week to talk about to either yeah to complain to celebrate nerd out and then you also needs lore so laura would be like for us it would be like no small boy stuff like we say these silly phrases where no nerds in a room or and be like how do i get people are like like us more you know what i mean we just make up dumb stuff isn't it like we used to call the show their this episode the denim dungeon just because i were denim like do that silly stuff it doesn't have a math who cares but you just do this stuff where you create lore you can't recruit create catch phrases catch stories a common bond us rest of the world and that sounds silly when it comes to cooking but like you could still do it right you create this you create lore and you repeat it constantly gothic and you have a face whether you or if you have someone else that your company you seem very charismatic i think you could do it but you have like every every cult needs shared language rituals and a leader alright we gotta wrap up yeah rag thanks for coming yeah porsche yeah dot com you got the url good job amazing thank you so much for the time alright we appreciate you god bless alright see you thank you hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses alright we have another one who we got bring them in y what's going on good boys here i brought you guys what's good boys i use sounded like a hockey player alright we got spent too much time in the the locker room that's the problem so i know you so this is nick let's doing i know your product because i've been addicted to these things i actually had to we myself off of them i was like i needed a midday break of eating midday squares but i don't do you know nick or no never i don't i've just met him a second ago lurk on x yes well i've i have these in my office at hampton because my c founders is obsessed with them when i started eating them they are awesome i appreciate it so your nick i appreciate that midday square is your company sure is that you and your wife other partners yeah got i got shout out to my wife and my brother long so we didn't need did this on the got about his wife she's amazing he's the beast okay so before we start we want you to start with the one big number we basically sold forty billion dollars worth of two dollar and forty nine cent chocolate bars that equates to about let's just call it roughly sixty bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in three hundred sixty five days a year for you to hit that number gotcha so wow forty million in year and it the in the last twelve months yeah yes sixty of these bad boys every minute every every minute of the year every minute the year including five days year bob i'm not wrong wasn't kim kardashian spotted with with these in her bag true yeah yeah she she's not paid right not paid she's hooked this up two times on her social and i think that's the that's the beauty of like when you're when you're hustling and and we make it a a point to be in with all the chefs and so we're not looking for the direct connection to celebrities that's what everybody's doing so we've made it a point over the last decade to become friends with chefs and and that's so chef k shout out chef k who cooks for the kardashians i mean we were sending your product for years and years and years no and influence the influencer strategy so cool who who influences the influencers and then you actually influencing them is a lot easier but you find who the chefs are for celebrities yeah there's a lot of chefs on on instagram and tiktok that you can see who they're cooking for athletes yeah and others can you just dm them and say hey can i send you some yeah what's special about the product or what is the product okay so we started out as chocolate bars and crazy thing happened you know since we started this business in two thousand eighteen chocolate went parabolic like the cost of cocoa and that means we lost like twenty seven percent of our gross margin overnight we were killing it and chocolate we were paying four thousand dollars a kilo for cocoa butter went up to thirty two thousand just to give you there's like a cocoa crisis cocoa crisis what what why is there why was there the cocoa crisis it's the cycle that happens all the time which is super interesting it starts off with like a real mismatch in terms of weather will come in disease will spread then there won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports and then corruption kicks in though and corruption usually takes about two years i i got stories i went into the ecuador and forest us so like if you ever wanna go there we could go there but basically you know when you're backs against the wall i remember we started this thing with like no economics kind of like i'm not comparing this to tesla in any sense but build the product no gross margin nobody wants to manufacture this thing then we went to a big kitchen and then we built the plant and we had finally reached profitability everybody and then we get smashed by this coco thing i you raised money or this whole thing bootstrap no no we raised money through a quasi equity in our government so shout out to the canadian government's super pro and agricultural manufacturing so they were able to get much aggregate two million total you raised twenty two million dollars i built her own plan yeah they're a great follow on social in fact i've stolen many things from your social strategy so you guys his wife in particular they make this incredible content so they got sued by whatever hershey who forgot was hershey confirm nor yeah they get alec i can say this stuff they got a cease desist from someone being like you can't use the color orange or you know like stuff like was orange it was like a ridiculous sure we could all put two two together yeah reese was like hey get off orange so instead of just sort of taking the disadvantage they said how can we turn this into an advantage and they came out with this campaign where they were making videos to talk about how they're just this independent company makes she made a dis distract they made rap dis track they made a music video him and his wife and this like ridiculous but it kinda works and they tell the story and they tell the story about their plant and they tell the story about the they tell the story about the good things and the bad which i think everybody only tells the good and there's a lot to learn from y'all strategy but also you guys have a lot of like natural charisma story tell who made it midday squares because it's perfect thank you man i i i think it was me and my wife brainstorming r i shout out to five hour energy so i i listened to the podcast and five hour energy and i he was so methodical about like i want my product to be what it is and we were we really so the big gap that we saw was that the afternoon markets just as big as the morning breakfast market except it gets nearly no attention so like everybody's crowded into breakfast and nobody's really focused on the afternoon part for adults for adults yeah specifically and so was this a form factor that already existed that people were already doing these like kinda of square what don't even know what this is it's half meyer square yeah what's the bottom a peanut butter base peanut butter base you got jelly on top this is pb and j one or this that's p j this is also p j strawberry but you also have chocolate right and so you where it started the chalk is where it started where did the initial idea come from you're just sitting around and why this so mike my cousins my cousin was super high up at sm and he was just always pushing me to get into this game you know and we would always rip back and forth and finally through a few of his friends and stuff i started getting data and it was the data that like really sprung to me was chocolate was growing at a ridiculous rate so chocolate that wasn't using palm kernel oil at the time and refrigerated was growing so like the refrigerated category grocery stores fastest growing section of a grocery store so that's why i keep it seeing for refrigeration pop everywhere like fresh pet at the pet section they are starting to put fridge in the so every category started to have a refrigerated item item and we were talking about this with vitamins right like those liquid vitamins but you put in the fridge bingo go versus in the cab boy so go back your cousins at sc sm yeah shout by the way that's my cousin and he's like you gotta get into this jelly game and you're and so you're studying the data you noticed this trend of refrigeration in different categories so you know chocolates on the rise there's not a refrigerated chocolate yep you see a gap you see an opportunity big time tell us how much money you you put in of your own money to do it and then if you could remember each year's revenue leaving hundred yeah hundred percent so basically it took about sixty grand me and my partners basically put this together we put in sixty grand so we created a constraint we couldn't use facebook ads we had to get a million dollars of revenue and we couldn't use facebook ads that was constraint number one and number two it all had to be in our city so we couldn't like just spray and pray we have to we chose montreal where we came from or we're like we gotta get to million dollars here and if we get here then we can go to the next level where we can really start to start out a series so it was the first one on facebook ads just because hey we don't have a lot of capital so we're not gonna be able to reserve this much money to burn there or was it i get the mantra all one which is like look let's try to get people that we can see feel in touch here to love it yep because if they don't really love it we don't have it right yet before we earn the right to go to other cities i'm i'm contradict i think facebook creates a lot of false positives yeah for early least early on yes what you do to get mont montreal on board the content then it was so this was and this is where the brilliance of my my wife and my brother lo so it it was like really simple going up none of us had social following that's a really important piece right because a lot of people feel intimidated when they're getting into this thing like you gotta have a pre we had no following and so for the whole summer we just started posting when you're making food product you usually end up in really cool environments you know we're in labs with like food scientist and different manufacturing plants where we're testing stuff and so we just all told each other like everybody when we're doing something cameras on tell people what you're doing but don't reveal what you're doing just show the environment and people start getting interested like what what like what the hell are you guys doing you know especially all of us had not come from this industry okay so it it's like pretty young guys are like don't know what the hell were doing but you're saying your friends your own natural know what i was my mind was like what's going on what why isn't nick suddenly in this like yeah lab wearing a hair net you know testing different because we all my wife was in fashion my brother along was like a gym buff going around colleges and i had typically been in software my whole career part at that so so to see us with like hair nets doing stuff was like hey use content you use story to get to get it going yeah tell about the ramp so you start off tier one what you do this is where the magic happened okay so when we turned on the jets in september so september two thousand and eighteen we sold our product on our website for fifty cents and there's two reasons okay so you can buy one square for fifty cents and the idea was it was all a content play so we didn't want to actually make money but we didn't want freebie people so you have to get your credit card out to actually do a transaction and we hand delivered everything for five months so it was all in montreal yeah he's an animal so we did by the way nick's the only one who's not based in san francisco go doing this there he flew in for this yeah this guy is the ultimate hustle yeah the then message me like you have to are you you any chance you're gonna be in san francisco monday i'm like yeah of course he's like he's like here it is i'm like okay perfect i'm unfortunately the only way man gotta make opportunity so yeah so we're we're we're getting in the car we do deliveries for like five months here's where the magic happened on content we would wake up in the morning every morning and this i took i think i took do things that don't scale and we just went way too far with it so in the morning all of our orders would be ready and we would literally go on people's instagram so if you had a dog named chuck we'd be like shout out chuck and we would wear these crazy outfits and we took polaroid of ourselves okay no just meat had shit yeah we complete like this customers and we would take a polaroid pitcher and we would show up to their house and and this always happened okay so we would show up to the house to be like wait why are you doing the delivery and how we would do and so you would get to hang with the customer we would get more content out of it so we'd be filming the whole experience like then we would leave them the photo then they would post the we got to a million dollars in like four months like it was like boom that's that is amazing that is such a great story okay so the number tell us the numbers so okay so you're one i wanna say a million four then year two let's call it three million then we did a big jump like seven fourteen twenty two thirty forty and now this year we're on track for about sixty and you guys you guys got into costco we like we we we launched costco canada national costco us launching september first how'd did you get into costco not easy to do everyone wants to get into retail it's a crazy story too yeah this is a crazy story okay we're gonna have to extend the time limit on there just so you know you know this is a crazy story next take a walk for a very right so costco they had seen the content brings into action k brings in the action so we get this meeting with costco content brings in the action baby gotta grab that so we so we we basically go to the first costco meeting and about to say costco shout out costco like super respectful like we weren't seeing it tie we knew that our second most search term online was midday squares of costco like we knew we were gonna hit this out of the park they didn't feel as confident confident in that aspect and we knew that the right price point was nineteen ninety nine for our twelve pack there was a disagreement that lasted about two and half years k going back and forth right so gentleman's disagreement yeah like like just we just couldn't see iodine in the price and for wreck we wanted to be what i'm not gonna stay that yeah because because they're a great partner and they want to be lower and we just held our ground you know because this is a two and a half years during that why don't you guys is kinda let's just go into costco little so this happened on the third meeting this is where things it was the third meeting we drove out to the head office for the third time there's two ways to go into costco there's like you're in line or you could do a road show and the road show is like everything's on consignment you have to show up you only get paid for what you sell at costco and you gotta be in costco for fourteen days you mean like on same basically like sampling yeah you're sampling you're hustling it's like the oh so that's what's happening when you walk into costco there's kind of a cool product somebody's standing there go they're taking a consignment bet on their product to prove to costco back that there and there's no guarantee you're gonna get costco so i was really rattled again we we didn't see it this is the third time and like we're talking almost three years at this point in time and so i i looked at the buyer who we had started to develop actually a good relationship with him and i'm like if we do the road roadshow and we break the road show record like the most sales ever in fourteen days will you give us nineteen ninety nine and we shook hands that day what what made you wanna do that bold statement our search on google was so high for i knew yeah but you knew that it's high for you but you didn't know that it was how it compared to like just when the sw came out i don't you're correct i don't know there's just moments in life where you just had a impulsive thing or you planned to say that no it was impulsive we were we yeah it always looks at you during the meeting it was like my wife looked at me and we but she was i i don't know i guess you have nothing to lose at some point maybe married a wild stallion and this is how it rolls how it goes sometimes i run away i how much if you guys sell a hundred forty hundred we can't put a hundred sixty thousand and fourteen days and high broom one hundred and sixty was just was that just break it or did you always smashed the marriage the closest record i think prior to that was sub with all their content yeah and they made a story rallied man we rallied we rallied like we rallied okay so first off most founders don't spend fourteen like like we were doing full days figure out dude but he's saying we rallied that goes perfectly with backstage we were talking about nicotine pouches and he's like oh i used to put in my toes before ice hockey practice i've never heard of this okay it sounds like we have some d desi to explore it yeah i could tell by your tech for costco you you put it between the toes and you just went for it fourteen days it was like the craziest rally of life and it wasn't fourteen days we spent thirty six days straight in costco we had to do multiple costco so what's the trick when you're in the costco like kinda getting flagged people down what what what was show ship that worked yeah two things that i think are i really take away most founders don't do the road show themselves they leave it to a third party that's right mistake number one like that's because everyone hates rejection and and also time like you're you gotta be in those for twelve hours in a day like they open at eight and you're closing at nine you know so most founders brush it off and just they pay the service and they don't go every day to you don't understand it was bananas so you were just grinding you're living the my wife this whole team was there first thing is founders do it themselves do yourself the second thing is basically while you're there you wanna be really methodical so i would just stand in front and yell out keywords gluten free diabetic family and and and no i swear on my life so you're doing keywords as people are see words you bought like a like a white girl old dictionary yeah yeah and so you're throwing out like your keywords and it really works hispanic yes no i mean like so we would have so we would have this we would get so warehouse at one point like we were so out of our you start to hall you're in there so long sometimes that we would just be like it's a dog and pony show coming like you just started but the keywords are really key so the keywords why are the keywords key one it we changed our box because of the keywords that works so when you go to a costco is not this box it is a specific box i went into discovered it while you were there change the package afterwards yes what'd did you discover gluten free was a massive thing real chocolates huge at costco so i i so i think the second thing shannon is like don't just mindless be there while you're doing the road roadshow be intentional about what you're doing dude this is awesome congratulations what it's okay so ten years from now what do think gonna gonna sell the company get around forever what are you gonna do all i know is that my dream was to make the nhl and i didn't make the nhl and so no this but now you're gonna buy a team no no no only five percent of companies make it past a hundred million dollars of revenue i that's been my goal since the beginning and i don't know what will happen after but that's the goal you're the shipment man what people what's what's one thing we could help you with one having here today i i can't tell you how much this means to me been listening for a while did come on you know we met each other like five years we met in club lt tv so i used to host this thing homeowners owners he was in you probably only doing like five ten million of million bucks at the time five million at time but he had amazing energy i was rooting for since then so it's i'm not surprised that you're now at you know forty fifty sixty million keep going man what would you like to see as a flavor i mean you guys actually consume the product i would love to even if it it was a fully different direction let's not even say no brad p and j what's a flavor you'd like to see us do that's a good question i think what i would love to see you told me three things today and i've known about your brand for four years that i didn't know i think you gotta this sounds weird because you're doing content it sounds weird because you work on your packaging i think there's actually still like a long way to go in terms of like being able to through whether my point of contact is just seeing the box whether my point of contact is seeing something on social from you or from a celebrity how do you make it where the story really pops because you know just i i like i didn't actually realize that the reason your stuff tastes better and is better for you is because it's real chocolate that's refrigerated that's why there's no pre conservatives yes it's one thing to say no conservatives like it's kinda like when i've heard that type of stuff so much i just assume they're they're shoving something else in it don't know oh that no palm olive o than then they're using some other thing who knows and so i think just saying like hey this is chocolate you keeping in your fridge because it's in the fridge but this is the fries though just one one's all bread bookkeeping is your chocolate still your popular sku these are no i mean this is now the most size number one by far to keep going with this it seems like dude did you know who's making a huge comeback as un but yours just like fresh and healthier than like dude an un uncomfortable like if i buy that there for my kids i know i'm making a a bad a bad choice finally for me i'm making a a shameful choice this i don't feel ashamed yeah so congrats well thank you alright we nice for having us i appreciate it dude to see you thanks podcast is brought you buy my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like it very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic alright get guess number three can we get yourself dude listen what's up man alright introduce yourself your name what you do what's the name of the company okay sounds good my name is trace and i'm the ceo of day and we are adding a million dollars a month helping dentists automate back office task alright dude i've been dm you we've been dm we've been the dms together yeah we've been in the dms i love the name of the company and then i saw you were doing something for dentists and i was like just so smart i think i tried to invest or stuff i was like this is you know i i do these like cold outreach to invest off of no information just like a twitter bio or like two tweets and that's what i think i did with you that's my working yes it's working here you go i got you alright so you kinda already started with the big number you say let's say it against slower so you said so we're adding a million dollars a month in arr every single month across a bunch of dennis across the explain you do that yeah so basically what we do is i don't know if you've ever been to the dentist or a doctor and gotten a bill from the insurance company and been like you know what actually is this right yeah and that's because the insurance companies are trying to screw not only the patient's over but the doctor's over yeah and so the reality is in order to get reimbursed from the insurance company the doctors do a bunch of administrative work and doctors hate it and they do a bad job they lose money my mom is a dentist she's losing ten to fifteen percent of our money to these insurance companies i was like what if i could automate this process of dealing with the insurance company so verify insurance to say hey this is what trans insurance is gonna cover we submit the claim we appealed the denial because guess what they love denying these claims and then we do all the bookkeeping when the money does come in and in exchange the doctors pay us a small percentage of every dollar so it's like ai like negotiating with the insurance companies yeah exactly so we have ai calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims ai submitting the claims ai voice being like hey you did not approve this why not exactly here's why you exactly well the funny thing is on their side they also have ai and so there normally it's a war of attrition it's like they're gonna you have to wait to hear the menu then you have to say the number then they didn't understand it but it's like let's let my robot talk to your robot all day exactly and you what i was telling the insurance like y you're spending a lot of money we're spending a lot of money what if you just gave us the data and an api but this health care industry is so backwards that they don't want and it was not there the incentives not there and so we have to find all these creative ways to beat the system and make sure that our doctors and our patients get you read off a few facts so holds the company how much funding and like this year's revenue yeah so we're about nine hundred and twenty six days old two and a half years about about dude you know started of that was the ripped ceo do you know what his yeah yeah his stick is like how many hours old today we're two thousand two hundred and forty three days old sorry nine hundred twenty six days old is the second part yeah so we've raised eleven and a half million dollars to date by the end of this year we'll finish north of ten million in revenue wow and in another underrated thing is so the way our business started was we actually went out and acquired an existing service business so before you know people would be doing this work manually right so we actually bought this company and then we've just been improving their margin was their book of business when you bought it less than a million and so really the goal was you know when you run a service to business of one day you run out of either have to hire more humans you become more unstable quality goes down and so we got them right at the perfect time when they were like hey i think we could grow but we just don't have enough human talent so who came up with this name i did my mom's practice her name is the practice name is dream smile and so i i grew up working my whole life in this practice and i don't know if you've ever been an unpaid child worker but like the first thing you're doing is like day dreaming like to the unpaid child workers out there i see i see mechanisms this in the minds wherever you're at yeah or you know posting e b's in a dental office and philadelphia with you i'm twenty five wow so you were you're working in your mom's dental office you were forced to do some of this work or you saw debbie was doing this work and so that was there yep now you grow up you start thinking what can ai do what was the actual reason you like had the idea give it take us to the epiphany of the idea yeah and it's it's gonna get it's gonna get dark then it's gonna get positive i promise okay so i'm i'm fore warning thank you my my mom she's okay now but she had gotten sick and so i was i i graduated at stanford i was working today i started i like over the i like y i'm gonna dominate the world and then she gets sick and so i i go home and i start running our practice and you know i go from like a hundred to suddenly being the most over qualified dental office manager in america that was when i realized how much money we were losing like i think when i grew up i kinda knew that it was a problem but i was just i was just doing it and i just ready to just like finish and go like go home but then i saw it and i got to chance to see and feel what my mom felt for fifteen years of her life and i was like this is just unacceptable like i didn't have to be this it doesn't have end like you know i've been spent i've spent so much time know i'm more of a like a nlp nerd like i i always love natural language processing and i'd had seen the field like develop and so i was probably one of the first hundred people that have access to gp three because i was really into words and so when i got in computer science i got access to dude there's three v words there's just like there's like this venn diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity with like the circumstances in what you grew up and that you had the resources that you okay perfect so you know who else was working in their parents dental office and then went on to do big things z mark zuckerberg yeah did he really know this story know his first project was like he set up like the it system in his dad's office and like soup it up and like made it sick and he's like okay i guess i i've kind of outgrown this i should go do something else oh that's awesome and michael dell underrated his dad was an ortho adonis i believe doctor yeah doctor dell children of dentists yeah it's a mafia how drinks great it again there's tens of us how big i mean i think we're gonna serve every dental practice in america like are you wanting to be like a ceo of a publicly traded company yeah why not i mean i think like to me like the opportunity here is today what we do is we help dentists bring money into their business but soon we can store their money we can help them spend their money we can lend money to them i don't know if you guys have you know these pe roll ups they're buying up all these like taco bell dental practices and you know the truth is seventy percent of the market are still independent guys like my mom and they feel like they have no their choice but to sell to the big guy i wanna give them the third door which is like hey if i handle this back office is bs for you would you want to still be a dentist and own your practice and they're like heck yeah that's the multi billion dollar business here so let's go over the business model so you said you saved dentist you bring in additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed you take a percentage of that so you said that basically is let's just take a thousand dollars for every thousand or a hundred dollars every hundred dollars it comes in what do you guys take anywhere from two and a half to three and a half percent oh that's it okay yeah how does that matter works so you said ten million of arr but you're saving debt bringing in a million a month from that does us twelve million a year so how does that work you know we're adding as da is a business we're adding one million in arr net new and so we are processing but is it a is it arr yeah arr so when we submit claims and we post the payments which is like entering it in we take a fee so it's not just money we recover it's every dollar going to the business we are helping them process gotcha so you're like stripe on the back exactly we're like all their billing and then the better the part where you guys are even better you add that sort of ten ten fifteen percent to their practice overall how big your team so we have about sixty people but we have people on the billing team to service delivery team that's about fifty people i think we only have about ten people in the office so you're close to profitability yeah and i i think that's like you know we did raise venture capital and i think like i think it's nice to kinda have like we could like go for profitability we could keep on growing i think like we just wanna do more like i i i know that they're are like a hundred and fifty thousand dentist where the job's not done job not even like we can't even be talking about the job we we haven't even you know what mean job not done is job even in the room with us right now no i can't even see him them so things are going great you seem happy what is bad this is a safe space you can tell us and the millions of people that are gonna listen to this what's going bad everything it feels like you know what i mean like i know i mean like where we're are the bottlenecks right now i think again like a hiring engineers again like this is like our job is to take this service business and make it software you know software experience there's so few people talented to do this like really weird work and you know we're competing against like open eye and philanthropic yeah and i'm like so yeah it's that part is you have to pay crazy amounts of salary no i think we get really people on the mission like you can get a job you can have a career you can have a mission and like when i get people on the mission job's done you know what i mean like everything else i don't know what you mean when you like their mission is like ag he cure can't and your like back office dental to how is your mission winning out and against the mission of these labs there's no way i think it's like yeah very fair very fair back i think it's like to me the dentist or the underdog the small business the people who are like you know we're dealing with people in broken arrow oklahoma yeah great you can like make ai sdr str you can sell more ai slapped to people in s f or you could help the guy who you grew up to going for fifteen years that's awesome and like that's the mission and like yes we we sell a dentist right but like to me this the the story is so much more powerful which is like my mom knows who every one of her patience is going to prom but she knows when the kids are sick she knows she knows what she knows more about them than she does about me right and like that's the experience of health care and like that's i think the mission that people get excited about is like hey like i kinda missed being able to go to my guy the person i've been going to fifteen years we have a great pitch he's gotta he's gotta he's got a really good ability yeah you're great let's ask you a different question what's not figured it out yet in the business so there's you know a business you only you only need to figure out the sort of six inches in front of you guys are going and there's might be some things you don't know yet but it's kinda a little bit further away where you can keep punt it for until you get there what's un figured out you know like i think we're growing fast but we could be growing faster we'd we do creative go to market things but we could always be doing more of them so how do i get more of that hundred fifty thousand dentists exactly i get the benefits of off we're going after like you know these guys aren't on linkedin you never met a dentist how do they find you now honestly word mouth we're in these like facebook groups where there's like tens of thousands of dentists right and i just like i just comment for ten hours a week just like following facebook groups we go to conferences how do you make it an absolute no brainer for a dentist to to take you on so to how do you take all the friction out the same way you're taking the friction out of the billing how do you take the friction out of the onboarding so for example could you go to these dentist and just say hey day dream we will take over this you know this cost in every your business but basically if you just said like we don't charge you a penny until we've made you a hundred thousand dollars the first hundred thousand we make you we take nothing and after that we take two and a half percent some something like that where it's like oh these guys are basically saying they're gonna make me an extra hundred thousand dollars and for you onboarding that person your actual cogs is not a hundred thousand dollars your cogs onboard dentist is probably very very small and so you will just use that as your i create an offer so good they would be stupid to turn down yeah yeah it's so hard because some most people are like afraid of change management like that's what like dentists are like yeah like maybe i'm losing a little bit of money but like right yeah i mean that's oftentimes the the biggest thing that comes in mind like how do my what my dad is in this not this space but he owns a an old school small business and if you gonna like tell him like like i made this post about them saying like dad makes you know this which one of your selling onions and his crm is this notebook and filing cabinet and he all these people were like use a crm is he's like what the fuck is that no no i'm done and so i do understand like that pitch can be hard why don't you own a facebook group that teaches dentist owners how to make more money so we've tried putting in offers for those other facebook groups and then we have short of our own it only is about two hundred fifty members but we have someone offshore right now just adding them yeah yeah yeah and then like friend them from my account but like yeah like we need to like hyper charge maybe and you buy one of those groups we've we've tried i sometimes comes they'll block you there if you do that so you have to be careful because you might question making the offer you might get blocked what about the private equity guys so the private equity roll ups that are happening they already own a huge amount so in theory you sell one you get many but maybe they built this in house or they are really sensitive to margin and they don't wanna to do this what have you found so far i thought that they would be like a much more straightforward like very like logical but many of them just like bought a bunch of practices in twenty twenty one and like they're just trying to stay a afloat and like not like be able to service their debt these days to be honest and i i i think like yeah we we've tried one or two like fifty location groups but those have been the hardest deployment those have been the most like demanding things and and again maybe this is like something that's bad we were just like what if we just like stayed in the thing that like we're very good at for now and like yeah and like we'll i hope we can work there but like do you have a community manager you're looking yeah which is smart that you do it i would go super hard on like owning and running a facebook group and creating like you know we we're buddies with this guy named tommy mel who has a garage door business one garage yeah and it does i i think maybe close to a billing in revenue and now his job is he's trying to buy more service businesses to implement his playbook and so he actually created like a services mastermind conference type of thing and he was like the ticket prices will pay for my my team but the real thing was like if i can find a handful that i can buy i would love that and if i was you i one hundred percent would have a community manager probably an dentist or something like that and i would create like a community on facebook groups where it would be all the best practices where people share their tips and tricks on how they're making their lives easier the businesses better how many dentists are you onboarding every month about fifty like thirty to fifty thirty fifty and so really the question is like how do you get that number to be one fifty yeah so you start by saying well what's working today where do you get the fifty right now yeah so we do like direct mail campaigns like this where we send out like like a like what what's a direct mail you're not gonna throw it away like one with your face on it right brilliant am yeah that's them and so we have all these different options i this is a great idea who made this web vendor like you're like you did meet me and the team again we have like some of the smartest go to market people ever worked with so good and then we we've done this studies like the old school direct marketers not really no we've been mostly doing vibes you're do it yeah you're doing direct response marketing you should study the guys who basically cracked a single sales letter sent through the post you know what he's talking about that would make like millions of dollars no sorry okay so listen before the internet was the internet it was copywriter direct marketers so basically let's say i made vacuums and i would go to joe or a joe sugar or david og and i would say hey guys i need a bunch of people buy this vacuum so they would pay us a database to give them the addresses of a million house wives and they would come up the copywriter would come up with this amazing like angle to to capture the house wise attention and they would write out the letter they would type it out they put in them envelope and they would send it to him and it says here's all the reasons why you should buy this here's a little coupon care tear off write your checking information and put a check in there or whatever mail it back to me that's a very ar process so they got so freaking good at copy routing that every single word served a purpose and it was beautiful and it was incredibly effective and then the internet came along and the best copywriter tended to be people who are a little bit on the fringes of like they would sell like how to pick up checks or how it like these programs that were a little bit like f but they were the best and these guys still exist and you could get someone to help you with this opening letter and they could sell the shit out of these people and it's all via direct response long form copywriting you've sold me on this yeah it's like this is like a twelfth grade english glad worked done i mean what i love is that you're just doing the entrepreneurial thing right you're just stumbling around trying to figure things out as you go but you're gonna be able to like there are people who are masters at this either the old school people or the people who've studied them and do it today find them and be like hey i need you to acquire you know and here's a budget and i need you to acquire dentists at this this cost and see what they can do by the way this like one of the frameworks for copywriting one of the most simple one is ada attention interest desire action this is a you are that's the best attention grabbing headline you could possibly have so you're kind of doing it inadvertently that you one hundred percent can improve this you have the book a demo and get a free get free airpods so that's another thing they would do is the cracker jack you know gift gift thousands yeah they would do a thing where they would you know state they would paper clip a dollar bill onto the mail onto a letter and just by putting a like when you see a dollar you're just what it what is this yeah and it just had a higher response rate they figured out like all the different things that you can do to do this to make every every step of this works so this is one of the tactics is this bringing in everybody right now no no i mean there's not a single dental podcast in america that i've not gone on to okay just every single dental podcast every dental conference sponsor or you just went on as a sometimes sponsor sometimes as you go on as a guess again the story is like very you know something that i think a lot of dentists can get behind and then conferences like i think on any given like month i'll probably be at like three or four sometimes they probably you're like a freaked they're like who's this young charismatic guy at a dented like we've never seen this like you know you probably stick out right yeah look for better for words is this in a good way the way okay let's joe sugar is the author just called the cup the ad week guide to copywriting read that and then read on advertising by david og read those this week and your mind will change okay and then i like do the user's conference too the a one guy does this where they bring people together yeah just like we're gonna teach every everyone everyone everyone's we're we're just gonna be the main place for people to aggregate and share ideas and how to make the business better and hopeful and and just so you guys know we have this but regardless if you use our software or not this is like a great thing another question who influences the influencers so who who do a lot of dentists listen to like trust today obviously you've been on a couple of podcasts i don't know if podcasting is the main thing are there people on instagram like i found that for every space like we invest in this company that was doing stuff with auto shops it turns out there was just like a guy who was like the auto body guy and basically he had a fifty store chain and so everybody who owned one wanted to own fifty so therefore they liked listen in respect to this guy and he was able to drive like crazy volume i think this guy was making like twenty million a year himself as like an auto mechanic influencer which is just shows kinda like there's always influence in every niche you gotta find it and figure out how to get them on board with what you're doing yeah we've done like one or two but like there are so many dental influencers because my whole feed is just dental influencers now yeah the prince me of one my you know ea and his wife is a dental oh really yeah i know a few of them okay yeah i i i guess we just got our first influencers and our first guess at dream con the the user's conference you got the copywriter bug you what what's your killer like your kill shot with your marketing meaning you know the average practice is leaving x dollars on the table day captures ninety percent of or whatever what's what's your version of that like a one liner that immediately makes me realize how much money i'm missing out on if i'm not doing not using you guys if we can improve your collections by five percent and decrease your median time to payment to ten days that feels cl cookie when i say yeah so what does that mean in terms of like i'm a dentist i don't think about my median media collection i think about like how much money i made as if the average practice makes let's just use a million dollars a year mh and you're saying you increased their claims like five percent so you'd be adding fifty thousand dollars to their practice straight to the bottom line yeah fifty thousand dollars were in your pocket and all your money intended we fight the insurance companies and on average we add fifty thousand dollars take home pay for every single dentist that uses us right or like on average whatever whatever the claim is yeah you wanna massage that like try to get down to like a one liner that's just like a a marketing kill shot it's like if this is true okay i'm interested right and it's just gotta be that juicy for them but if this is true we used to have one that i like it was like oh like you're ferrari waiting or something like that because that's not how much you can get like for some of these practices we were covering enough money to like pay for a car right we just gotta like sorry i i like this is like very helpful i should be writing this stuff down we'll they'll be recorded and you go out too much it dude thank you so much for the man yes right you guys on great to meet you thank it's alright that's stand part one of future shot we got three more founders coming up on the next episode make sure you're subscribed on youtube on spotify we looked at the data i think eighty ninety percent of you guys are not subscribed who watched the episodes what are you doing subscribe so you can watch episode two and do me a favor whether you're a listener then you're gonna go to spotify or if you're a watcher go to youtube put in the comments the city that you want us to go through next right now we're doing this in san francisco we've already done new we'll go somewhere next to you so let know the comments right now i feel like i could rude where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a less travel never looking bag alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that's part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics we're from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast