6 College Students Pitch Us Their Startups | MFM Shark Tank

yeah so just to preface here i'm tommy tommy potter student at you mis really excited to be bringing these startups today just have to illustrate the community where power hour which is the cia for college entrepreneurship and what i mean by that is that you don't know like who we are you don't know where we meet we are this underground society of handpicked picked killer founders wow hold on hold if you're building the impossible we got tommy like tommy potter like harry potter and then there's no there's no meeting place there's no information there's no way in and there's no way out of this club it's it's a tap on the shoulder just like the cia we let you know love individually where we're gonna be meeting sam they're speaking your language already this is some real skull and bone shit i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a day's off on the rolling and i i i wanna preface this is live audience of if sam and sean you don't know i'll hand the we got like sixty five people here ready for you message here shut yeah makes noise the ecosystem is out here today i know the same is going on down at ui they got a massive room how many you got in that room there austin here i'll pan the camera too real quick so but yeah we still on all points the time decide i basically hope get all the amazing founders as well as entrepreneurs content creators i would be that's doing awesome stuff in the same room down here at ui so we're we're we're super pumped on both sides and ui is that illinois carbon fine and you the illinois urban champagne the big eye so alright so that's still we so got tommy we got austin the club called happy hour is that what you said no we're we're power hour oh power hour power hour gotcha an hour full of power and and it's all student run there's no faculty nobody who's who's making this happen is this a like is has been around for ten years or did you just invent this on thursday what's going on do you remember bobby bobby fire which was on this this podcast about two years ago i may never forget bobby so the bobby started all of this bobby started this bobby started this and it's kind of been planting around and and ui as their community we're very like deep in our partnership there as well this is so this is fantastic so to give the the listener background two years ago we had this guy named on bobby bobby i think was in michigan bobby gathered like this like group of maybe fifteen entrepreneurs and like four of them pitch us and they were awesome and apparently bobby has fight club this thing and gone out from university to university to like convince you guys to join on and this sounds awesome and so today i think six of you so three each are gonna pitch us is that right totally correct yeah there's a lot of school pride on the line in terms of which school is gonna come out on top in this competition so mh we're laying it all on the line for you we have you know tons of creators in the audience it was tough to get it down to three three startups ups but we're giving you our best so can't wait we're ready to we're ready cool so this is college shark tank style two schools pitching from both we're gonna have a winner we're gonna maybe have a a few other awards that we come up with i invested in one of these last time sam out of out of michigan so i how's it going company already failed so we're not gonna we're not gonna hold that against y'all you win some you lose some and we lost that one pretty hard pretty quick but that's alright alright but let's see if you guys can beat michigan so the first one that we're gonna hear from is meet your class and i think is you never see a michigan are you guys doing three in a row and then it's gonna be we're gonna fourth alright alright so we just need to set aside and let this kid see this he's got natural go more of a host see i'm using college words is it let it bake or let them cook which one is it whatever which let we're gonna let them bake alright alright the first one is the folks that a michigan okay hello my name is jonah and i'm the coo of mic class two years ago my c cofounder and i created a platform for prospective college students to meet each other before coming to campus and meter class quickly grew in popularity largely because the communities we built actually extended beyond our own platform and integrated with the social media apps than nearly every high school uses on a daily basis within two years this system has scaled to over four hundred thousand account creations and even generated over six hundred thousand dollars in revenue through a freemium business model while this was a great success an even larger opportunity emerged when we were approached by a university called the christ college which was struggling with enrollment basically they were having issues filling seats and they were not alone this is a really big issue recent polls have found that over two thirds of universities cfo are deeply concerned about declining enrollment a really big factor in this that the christ college and really the majority of universities across the country struggle with is a phenomenon known as summer melt summer melt refers to when a prospect gets all the way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel just to at the last second rene on their deposit rene on their commitment and decide they no longer want to go to college at the k college believe it or not this was happening with every one in three students which eventually was leading to a thirty three percent vacancy rate at the school the christ college believe the mic class could help decrease the summer melt because our platform had gained a reputation as being able to build up excitement for prospective students and also to give them a support network furthermore we also found through discovery that meter class data was very valuable for universities in helping them to allocate their limited time and resources towards students who needed the extra attention and help and we're very excited to say that this worked at the christ college students who used weaker class last year experienced a sixty one percent reduction in summer melt which is expected to add one point seven million dollars back to their top line and we're so excited by these results because at a minimum this summer melt issue is calculated to cost the higher education system over eleven billion dollars per year and it's of course gonna take more than one case study it's really good after this market but luckily we now have skilled to eight partners for the upcoming admission cycle and amazingly that same b2c business that i described at the start is helping us and empowering us to create a product that's industry leading loved by students and administrators it also got us admitted to techs stars and has allowed us to bootstrap our way into a much larger much more qualified team ready to take the higher end market by storm well wow alright that was great oh we do you have a ending for us so sharks who's ready to you know blah blah and are are you raising are you actually raising money or not not not raising money right now we're planning to been actually open to a seed round when we graduate in the spring okay is awesome that is awesome by the way the six hundred thousand dollars in revenue how many people are working there what's your profit do you have any profit on yeah so us as initial c founders have not pay ourselves a dime and we reinvest every single penny back into the team so i don't know the exact profitability off the top of my head you know we try to keep the bank account enough to stay alive but we we reinvest every penny back into growing the team and gang to more university partnerships and we're trying to get fifty by the end of this upcoming admission sucks of this of the six hundred thousand how much is in your business account right now i think around three hundred thousand we of course we got a hundred and twenty thousand from techs stars and then it also won some pitch competitions okay okay cool and blake your name is blake great my name is jonah blake is my amazing c cofounder okay great so jonah great first great pitch really cool business at first when you were talking about it i thought well you know you sort of created facebook twenty years too late you're trying to help college kits connect but then what the story got really interesting when you start talking about how colleges are struggling to fill enrollment and they have vacancies just like a hotel has vacancies college as vacancies and that maybe your tools actually could help them decrease that and then then they would be your customer right you'd be charging them did you charge that first college and what are you charging those other eight colleges who you set our partners with you on this yeah so our initial partners are heavily discounted relative to like the market rei for a solution like this because we're trying to get more logos more case studies currently those partners are at under ten thousand dollars but there's a very clear path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name you said market rate who else is doing something like this and what are they doing we do have a handful of competitors so this initial thing that we're describing is called like mid funnel conversion it's basically getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel and then trying to convert them there's a few competitors listed in that second column where we really stand out from them is our integrations with social media because we're able to get a large organic user base at the earliest and latest stages of the enrollment funnel so a lot of our competitors are like third party apps where the university basically emails all their students says hey download this and kind of forces them to use it and the reason they do that is because these communities generate so much valuable data and they have a lot more control over it and social media stand really doesn't do this for them because it's not a tailor made higher tool higher at tool so we're basically retro these social media platforms and bringing all the data that they pay for these brands so jonah if you were charging them what you think you can charge them have you added any conversations about how much they would do we be willing to pay either as a percentage of sort of save students or as a flat fee what's your sense of how much each college can pay so initially just for this mid funnel conversion tool we believe that it should be pretty reasonable of course the college is very inside but we've seen these at the lowest us for the smallest schools around twenty thousand dollars and then we've seen them scale past two hundred thousand this is of course just like one small part of the enrollment funnel there's many more issues that we believe we're trying to solve that's just a generally like i i was wanna say a comm rate that or sees like comfortable paying for this is this the biggest problem or is there a bigger problem this is one of the biggest problems as i mentioned for the christ college one in three students were melting so when we so it's just like kind like the lowest hanging fruit to initially go after because these are kids who arguably should be going to college they got varied they gotta wait to the tail end of the enrollments funnel and then we then converted more of them on but they obviously wanted just get more blocks and seats throughout the entire process jonah how's this you know i always ask how the story ends is there a vision for where you where you're gonna be in ten years with this we're still trying to figure that out we are very motivated by genuinely improving the student experience and making it so college is worthwhile so in the long run we want to put power back in the students hands a lot of students don't know that they have negotiation power and the tuition price and a lot of them also end up at places that are suboptimal optimal so we kind of want to in the long run become the go to place that students come to and they figure out where they're going to be the most successful two for ten years down the line did you just say that you can negotiate to tuition price because i have no idea them possible it is possible i i personally didn't do it on some members of my team could speak to it a lot more but students have a lot more power than they realize universities need students in order to stay in business the majority of schools not the university of michigan but the majority of schools are tuition dependent for revenue tuition in michigan is like a very small percentage of revenue so if us for decreased tuition here that likely would not pan out because they're not really struggling with any financial situations but at the end of the day colleges need to act like a business otherwise they're gonna go under i was just googling today's companies sean here had a uni buddy that la you did you google any of those community apps i had no idea the stuff existed some of them are actually quite large how big uni buddy i think raised thirty million dollars they raised it during covid so there's you know tb if it's legit but it seems like it's a business that does many tens of millions in revenue yeah jonah my quick take on this i think you actually have a real business here one of the biggest investments i missed on was the very first guy whoever pitched me as an angel investor he had a idea for something called a applied board and what he was doing was helping international students get into he was helping like kind of these small colleges get more international students because international students just didn't know their name i i had never heard of christ college so you just said it and he was charging about two to three who charged the university two to three thousand dollars per student that actually got admitted and enrolled there and so he was making you know tons of money that that company really took off so i think you i think of have a real business here the only thing i would say i guess to to wrap up is i don't think you should ever raise money for this i think you should bootstrap this thing and if you actually just stuck with this idea and you bootstrap it you know in four or five years you would be sitting on probably twenty million dollars which would be a phenomenal place for you to be exiting this business and i think the biggest risk for you is not a business risk it's a we raise money because we pitch investors that this could take over the world because we thought that's what we're supposed to do we thought you have an idea you pitch investors you raise round one round two round three and suddenly we're looking at you saying how are you gonna be a billion dollar company and the reality is this might be a phenomenal fifty dollar fifty million dollar company but no chance at a billion dollar company so my my advice you would be don't raise but great pitch overall sam and need last thoughts i completely agree completely agree let's jonah thank you big round of a applause alright so what are we going now illinois yeah we've got our guy out in a san francisco in a s car so what's going on guys nice me meet you alright i love you drop out what you're you're not even in college what's going on no i'm actually on a gap semester hey sean i'm in founder inc know you know stuff juan oh no background so i just met him yesterday i'll company me me and my couple of my buddies aren't i'm just visiting in san francisco here seeing if this is the right place for us but yeah alright well gap year i like i like the sound of that already i about a year ago me and my c founder watching the spanish tv show money hi on netflix unfortunately neither us no spanish very well so we had to watch a english dub anyone has ever watched a dub movie knows that there's a bunch of issues the lips are not synchronize with the audio the voice actors sound nothing like the actual actors there's one scene or two voice actors had the same actor making everything extremely confusing we looked at this issue a bit further and found that it is extremely technically complex expensive at hundred to fifteen hundred dollars per minute time consuming and low quality to double a video nowadays with all of this dub is a sixty billion dollar market in twenty twenty two and there's been no clear solution for this we started by translating content for creators like mister reese mister nightmare and found that they're essentially use cases within education imagine the millions of people trying to get an education in their second language where the content is meant for them so we created med an automated authentic and affordable translation solution for educators all the user has to do is input a video into our solution press the input and output language press submit and within minutes get a lip sync voice clone and text on screen translated video just like this one that we translated for our client ui uc and gi and cor thereof utilitarian ism suggests that an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people pretty so as you can see professor voice is perfectly cloned from english to spanish to french his lips are synchronized and our key differentiator any text on screen is translated with the same font text and color as well for our enterprise clients we have a human in the loop process where we translate videos with industry specific terminology keywords idioms none that google translate issues we also have the most languages and cheapest product on the market right now we're at six thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue trans videos for university of illinois and corporations like velcro corporation we actually are in talks with cor syrup for a potential integration in quarter one of twenty twenty five as well just to look at one of our potential deals after our paid pilot with keys just one degree looks like thirty thousand minutes in five languages generating one point three five million dollars in revenue for our company this actually saves the university ninety one percent and actual cost and creating the course as well our team combines business and technology with myself taking gap year for to focus on this and our machine learning team of five machine learning of an engineers having thirty seven years of experience and computer vision hi my name is carla cole and my purpose is a brake language barriers thank you guys very much alright that's awesome great pitch great pitch thank and leave some of the slides up so and we might need to go back to them so first of all the demo was great can you just tell us a little bit about that the magic there so you said translates the voice makes the lips match which i've never seen anyone do that did you see dana white do that sean you didn't see dana why white do that for the independence day it was great no i didn't see that so what are you doing to make the lips is it or is it super imposed on top of of their lips yeah so essentially we take one of my buddies yc model we take any original video and original audio and we got are allowed to synchronize the lips based on the input of video and audio in our back end system we then curate you're gonna say took one of your buddy's lips and he he's a model so you're saying there's an off the shelf library basically a lot off the shelf model that does this already you guys are just integrating that correct this through this true okay and another question you said something like if they did this just one course for one university that's like a million in revenue for you are they currently are you convincing them hey you should dub this or they're already dub it just at ten times the cost yeah so right now they're translating videos automatically and they're translating courses like imagine quizzes tests and just like reading papers but they're not translating the videos so a spanish user has to go on cor era and you know take the course in spanish but have to read the subtitles on an english video for these videos at the these courses that they're creating right now we're basically providing the solution that standardize the actual viewing experience for the end user so they are doing this right now just without paper you said that you said i think in twenty two or twenty three or something like that that dub was a seventy or sixty billion dollar what what is that number tell me about that number that's absolutely ridiculous just looking at traditional dub this means in film education marketing just translation in general huge market bunch of different positions that we could put ourself in was trying to tell you guys that we also translated for content creators like mister beast nightmare but i found that the niche was in education for us just is an essential need think about the applications of translation for people that have life changing opportunities trip for them because they can't take a course in and their like preferred language or they're not able to understand the professor in a classroom so that's where we got that number right but the key key distinction you said they're already doing this but but actually the way you said it was they're translating the tests and the quizzes they're just not tran they're not doing the videos today and so for them to agree to do this this would be a new cost of a of a million dollars to them that they're not currently spending so in in terms of translating a video in general they're trying to translate these videos but for them for like a person to translate a video just like for a ten minute video it takes four hours they have to curate new slides have a new professor go in you know speak in a new language of the contract these people this would cost them three million dollars to edit these videos you know go over edit the screen text in right but this there's a big distinction basically let's say i'm sitting at this university and i look like i am with this vest on right now and i i'm sitting there and i've got my budget but what i'm asking you is today they don't already spend in this you're not saving the money from something they're already spending they're currently not spending because it would be too expensive to do it too slow too expensive and so you're gonna be a new cost to them right so that's gonna be a big point of friction because they're not gonna make more money necessarily off you might be able to convince them that if you do this you might be able to get more customers but day one it's gonna be just extra cost with no extra revenue is that correct that is true however they are going the direction of putting these courses online digital translation is a thing that they're already doing this would just be an added cost for them at the end of the day but it would provide a better solution potentially being a marketing applied for international students to come to the university globe but to answer your question yeah what are you doing for velcro first of all i didn't i didn't know velcro was a brand i thought velcro was like clean tissue you know i thought was a thing that's pretty wild but what are you doing for them and how did you close those guys because they looked like a big old old sluggish company yeah we had a personal connection to one of the higher ups of the company we do in internal communications for them so every month there's a ninety minute internal town hall where the ceo basically speaks in english he's a italian woman she had a bunch of issues with when she's speaking english she lacks emotion she kind of doesn't feel like herself and we were able to provide them a solution where she was bit able to provide the company with updates in her true persona in the new language by speaking in italian for ninety minutes into our camera we'd put that into our solution within three hours we're were able to curate a transit video that she's able to send all the plants at vocal corporation in ten different languages and we provide that solution to them today but it sounds like you're you're not doubling down as much on enterprise you wanna go for this university education niche is that right so we want to go into the education niche this is universities this can mean educational content creation this can mean corporate trainings as well we understand that these educational sales cycles are extremely long which is why going to these translation agents agencies for educational content as well can help us kind of applied like a geometric approach to our sales cycle as well just to speed everything up faster having having us get more traction to and then the university brand itself creates a stance where people say hey university of illinois uses i'm an educational content creator i trust them i'm gonna trust this company as well right well i think you have a solid pitch and i think you have a really great product but i think this is a product in search of a market i think you're gonna run into a lot of trouble because you're gonna go to these universities and you're gonna say hey we're great gonna say yeah that's awesome but they have no budget they they won't have the budget for it or it's just gonna be seen as an extra cost without a clear extra payoff or sort of roi attached to it and so i think that's gonna hurt the sales cycle what's already a slow sales cycle is university sales i think it's gonna get harder because you're costing the money rather than saving the money but one thing to consider is if if there's already a big market for dub out there and they're doing it manually this is actually could look like a private equity play where you go buy existing dub services that have existing books of business and then you just fire all the people and replace it with the ai that's gonna do it better and faster and cheaper yeah then they're currently you said it cost like a hundred dollars a minute or whatever to to dub with with humans doing it and so what you could do is you could go buy companies and then rip out the cost structure by replacing it with ai and that might be actually be a better way to go to go to this market and again this something that you don't really hear a lot here in san francisco now a lot of people don't talk about this but there is a whole other avenue of business you know roll ups and private equity where they're looking for this they buy something at a fair price and then they cut slash the cost in half by using technology to make things more efficient you could do that here understood and we actually are trying to do that right now partnering with the transition agency to understand exactly how they derive their clients how they are going through these sales cycles with like refugees people that are going through different educational content the one thing about universities is that i do seeing this being globalized in systems and and learning management systems like cor so we just had a meeting yesterday with cor to essentially say at the university of illinois pilot goes as well they're willing to give us a shot at integration for a translation for a couple of courses there that would you know allow us to dub from going like a thousand minutes for every two week to maybe a thousand hours for every two weeks just to just to show you the final of chance that we're taking in terms of universities we're going for the learning management systems not the individual university hey sean i don't pay attention to this world too much but how that video that we saw how impressive was that i mean it's definitely impressive and i think they're doing a couple other things that are specific like changing the text on the screen so anything i think you know that that makes the whole solution work because then the actual course works so it's it's definitely impressive but i you know there's gotta be ten other companies i could do this today or you know there's nothing like scientific breakthrough with what they're doing so this is really gonna be a question of who builds the best business around this new technology the technology exists and anyone's gonna be able to build a business around this so it's really gonna be about who figures out the right market the right go to market strategy the right pricing model to actually build a business out of this what are your parents think but you take a gap year we got we got into techs stars in june and ended up declining that parents are south indian they kind of are driven by you know percentages like prestige was able to show them that hey maybe i'm like top one percent of pre seed companies by getting this accelerator i'm show them that they let me take this gap semester and then can have to show them some kpis like keep on take think i'm up with school but i'm loving it right now are know listen to this hey kids or parents the your kids are amazing this is he's gonna it's gonna it's gonna turn out alright it's gonna turn out more than i think there's a kid at f f where you're at right now that office at right now there's a kid there think he's not a kid anymore his name is johnny dallas and he was in eighth grade when he started working with us and he started in the summer and then he started working every day after school and then i think in eleventh grade or so here's pretty clear this guy is awesome and he should just work your full time and we made him an offer and his mom was freaking out couldn't i can't my son's gonna be a high school dropout out this is crazy and say no gonna test out he's gonna graduate he's gonna get his ged and what i convinced her of was he's not dropping out he's going pro the same way lebron james went pro because he had incredible skills and that reframe i gotta tell you that was some of my best work with that mom on a bench in a park convincing her that he's going pro he's not dropping out and then we got him to got him to go full time with got you got you dude congratulations on your success good job and thank you for letting us listen and you're the man well alright what do we have next i'm nathan shots c cofounder of mil and we are creating personalized skincare that's built for your microbiome my journey with microbiology began when i was eight after i had a life threatening the encounter with a flesh bacteria this experience sparked a fascination with the world of microbes like bacteria and fungi since then i've been driven to understand how the skin microbiome which is the trillions of microbes living on our bodies affects human health let me paint you a picture think of the skin microbiome as a city a complex community of microbes each with a unique job just like these little guys on the screen in our skin city some help manage inflammation others retain moisture and some even fight off viruses this microbiome is unique to each person like a fingerprint and its well being is essential for healthy and beautiful skin but here's the problem many common skincare products contain pre conservatives and harsh chemicals that are detrimental to your skin microbiome using these is like dropping a nuke on your microbiome city leading to chaos and any number of skin problems acne dryness anti aging and other comments can concerns drive a one hundred and fifty billion dollar industry yet most products rely on an outdated one size fits all approach that overlook our unique biology this leads to a frustrating cycle of trial and error where consumers waste their time and their money looking to the right product for their skin often to no avail people need skincare that is hyper personalized and that is why they'll use is different we create skincare that works with your unique microbiome so here's how we're changing in the game meet the mil microbiome sense system this is a comprehensive solution that combines microbiome science ai and personalization to meet your skin unique needs it starts with our at home microbiome collection kit simply swab your skin mail it back to us and complete a short survey about your skin concerns lifestyle and habits in our lab three miles west of here we analyze your microbiome sample our ai powered algorithm then integrates the data with your survey responses to create a personalized skin insights report along with custom formulations a serum and a cleanser designed just for you as you use our products know you adapts do retest and reform we ensure that your skincare evolves with your skin changing needs restoring microbiome balance for lasting skin health plus our plant boxes and recyclable packaging reflect our commitment to sustainability mil offers high quality personalized skincare for fifty nine ninety five which includes the test kit analysis and custom products and with a sixteen ninety five monthly subscription you get refills and retest as needed we are pioneering a science driven personalized approach to skincare and we're currently inviting new members to join our beta program please visit our website to learn more and join us in making a personal care truly about you thank you frankly hold on brother keep that up i'm gonna try it go for it i there you go this is pretty cool when i thought microbiome sean what did you immediately think i thought it got yeah i thought it was gut and poop like do i gotta i got poop it of thing and you're gonna give me a thing to help my skin but that's i didn't know that skin microbiome was a thing that's pretty taller how's your care routine and you know body wash that goes in my arm also goes on my face not very good but i'm i'm bought in to the idea that it is important and i have i i i do want to get better so this is interesting to do you have any revenue at all no revenue we're currently in development we're doing beta testing okay gotcha and really smooth pitch by the way you are a talker that was really well done okay so let's give some thoughts on this so and by the way his deck sean was great those those cartoons they told the story organically yeah who made who made all that do you made that the the deck in the story yeah no one made it that's just my story well it made it something the graphics are cool oh the deck yeah my my c founder ron and i worked on it and then we also workshop it with like a bunch of other students in the community so gotcha okay you know one thing i think that would help you is this type of story i think would go viral on tiktok like basically what you told us if you were like i used to think care routine well i i used to think you know i whatever i didn't care about my skin and then i got a flesh eating bacteria this is me after my trip to costa rica and you show a picture you're like so here's what i did to get rid of this and while never look at any of these skincare products the same again knock over a bunch of bottles on a table right you do something like that you're gonna get like two million views on a tiktok you can actually include that in this which is gonna be like we know how to tell our story and get out there and that that story resonates with people that people are looking for something that's more personalized that's actually science based and not just you know a fancy brand and we're gonna use content to our advantage and that's how we're gonna have much cheaper customer acquisition right the smart brands in the d space are basically content first right now they know how to tell their story on tiktok and instagram and youtube and that's where they're getting just like a a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody else who just doing very basic static ads on facebook type of thing yeah absolutely i mean we observed that many of our competitors son got a ton of their initial revenue and advertising and so we're looking at sort of a different go to market strategy we wanna please fifty people in our beta testing we wanna work like very closely with a smaller group of people to make sure that our product and our algorithm is really working the way that it's opposed to before we go like mass market but i like the idea of doing short form content because i know that definitely hits with with the younger audience which is target market who's your competitors so are there other people doing this well there's no one that's doing exactly what we're doing there are skincare companies that do microbiome testing and there are also personalized skincare companies the biggest skin microbiome company currently is parallel health and they offer a two hundred a month protocol where they do sequencing on your skin microbiome super high market high end product there's a a company that's successful they've been in business for seven years now called proven health they were actually sorry parallel no it's proven care they're own they were on shark tank and they do personalized care that's based off of a quiz only so we we have a quiz and we have microbiome testing so we're sort of the baby between those two ideas a lot of times with health stuff health health stuff or skin and anything involving in your body that's very it's very controversial because there's always there's a bunch of people who love something typically and then there's an equal or more amount of haters which doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong it just health is very controversial what would the haters say about this like would they say like dude microbiome stuff it's not actually important if you just use these three things it's gonna do most of the job you don't need to worry about this other stuff like what are the haters gonna say about you i i'd say the biggest like liability there is that the the skin microbiome field is actually very nascent so the basically we're testing a hypothesis we believe that skincare that's precisely tailored to your microbiome is better than the traditional methods out there i think people would likely continue to hold on to this societal idea that all bacteria is bad or like we need to stay in this sort of sanitized mindset like people really like to feel clean and so i think that that's the biggest objection to this is like we love germs we wanna harness the power of the germs that are on your face and we believe they owe a lot of potential so people might be like oh it's gross but you know it's just science science is gross why i i like i think the criticism i'm an idiot but i pay attention to health stuff i think the criticism is like you know that's like that that thing will just move the needle by one percent whereas if you do these other things it's mostly gonna get you there and be perfect do you know what mean you know what saying sean yeah hundred percent i health stuff you can listen to humor in for ninety two hours and suddenly you're or brian johnson or whatever you're trying to take forty two supplements a day but eighty to ninety percent of the gains are gonna come from like you know good sleep drink water eat clean whole foods and if you just do those things and you're not probably probably not already doing those things that'll get you the bulk of it the rest is really like you know on the edge optimizations and i think you're right sam that you know sort of a smart skeptic would probably have that thought but i don't think that's what's gonna drive successor failure in this case so i think actually one thing you were missing from your pitch is to convince me that people care about hyper personalization and that that's where the puck is going and really what you want in a pitch is for this to feel like an an inevitable outcome of what's what's happening here of what's happening in this space whether it's you or somebody else that's sort of secondary but you really wanna convince investors of two things one inevitably this is where the puck is going and that inevitably we are gonna be the ones who take advantage of score when that puck gets there so you kinda need to make two cases when you make a pitch and so for example i know that in hair care and kind of beauty products makeup up products there's a lot of this already the trend has gone in this direction where isn't it like you they you do quizzes and you figure out oh i have curly hair and my problem is that it's dry and then for that you're gonna get a certain product and i think what you would wanna show is that the companies that came out in the last wave for beauty products that went the personalization route have outperformed have had all these really great exits but nobody's done it for care yet but they will and here's what they're here's what's gonna happen in care the same thing that just happened in makeup and hair is gonna happen for skin right same thing that just happened vitamin them it's gonna happen and that makes it sort of feel inevitable oh my god he's right they're the next wave of successful skincare companies are gonna use this kind of science based hyper personalized thing that i think was missing from your pitch that's kind of my feedback for you thank you that's good that's very good feedback i thought you did a great job on the story i'm still well i'm still trying to understand what i already asked that question but like the other answers could have been like everyone agrees that this is right but the the question that we're trying to figure out is can we or anyone even figured this out like i wanted to figure out like what's gonna be what is this all hinge on because you're talking to like on a beta like what's what is this what are you having to convince the world that that that needs to happen owner for this to be a massive breakthrough let let me ask you a very simple question do you believe it let's assume it works do you believe that it's gonna be visually different result meaning if i just showed you two pictures one person who's using your thing and one person who's just using off the shelf stuff honest question do you think it's gonna be where i could just point though yeah that's clearly better because if it is then all your marketing is gonna work that way and if it's not then the the science kind of actually in the world of supplements and and vitamins and and creams let's be honest nobody has a clue if any of this ship actually works and so then it's all just a branding game it's all a marketing game it's all who's can convince the consumer that what that if you buy this product you'll be more beautiful and everyone will love you and think you know if things will go well for you in life right and so i think we're kind of unless it's literally visual where you can see the difference and it's gonna be ina then it's just a question of are you gonna be a great marketer right l'oreal why is l'oreal successful it's not because we know that they're their product the product scientifically is better than anybody else's products because they're are better marketers that's the reality of the situation yeah we we certainly recognize that we definitely want to sort of latch into the the trend towards clean and sustainable beauty which is why we made a box that you can plant in the ground and it grows flowers we think it's really like the beauty and the details here so i absolutely agree with you before and after pictures are like one of the best things that we can get and the results of our beta testing are currently looking very promising but before i start to make claims and put those pictures on the website i wanna do like real really thorough analysis of how the products are working how the algorithms working to make sure that we have something that is it's really solid alright brother we appreciate you congratulations on this and and and solid pitch we gotta go the next one good job thank you is brother brother nuts is that is that who's up next it is yeah hey guys my name name's austin majors i'm the c founder on brother's nuts here bubba nuts our mission is a chick the fake food to the curb and revolutionize healthy stacking with organic sprout nuts and seed snacks so first off my family found that half of the stacks out there weren't actually healthy in the other half tasted like garbage but first off why do we create this business well our business started back in twenty ten actually when my father diagnosed with stage four brain cancer it was given seven weeks to live and through the changes in diet and lifestyle turned that seven weeks into seven years but one of the biggest issues him and my family had was finding a stack that was as healthy as it was tasty and so our current day cfo aka chief flavor officer a aka mom being the amazing mom that she is one to work and creative what is now known as the crackle cheesy almonds now my family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were flavorful but also very crunchy and that's what makes us very different all of our other seeds are sprout but how has it gone over the last seven years so i started this company with thirteen years old when my father passed away with my older brother who was fifteen and over the last seven years we've done over million dollars in sales we sold over a million dollars worth of nuts we're currently available in two hundred retail locations in the future is very promising we have a clear path forward over the next four years to take this business to ten million dollars in sales in be national brand how are we gonna do that we're gonna do that by doing the hard work that no one else wants to do and i know that one else wants to do it because i speak to these stores and no one else is doing so what is that first of all it's expanding and making more money from our current clients clients like fresh thyme mom's market fresh market but it's also expanding distribution and getting new grocery stores like whole foods sprouts h e b key accounts how are we gonna how are we gonna grow within those stores where gonna continue shaking hands doing what i just did for you guys telling my story having people try the product and letting people know that there there's something out there like this and last we're gonna continue innovating through our product right now we're developing a clean chocolate almonds and we also have a we're developing a high protein variant of our most popular flavors something that's never been done in this space now kind of more grand scale i mean there's sixty two thousand grocery stores and the nut market selling ten billion dollars this year i looked at the biggest companies out there and we can absolutely get there but what's really cool is we are on the up and up speed oil free where that sprout gluten and free gut friendly we check all of the boxes finally something that my dad did in twenty ten is now mainstream and we are on the cutting edge of it in the last period over period products labeled sprout grew thirty four percent in their velocities and sales we are on the up and up but let's remember why we're doing this look the reason why we're able to have the success why we're able to land these retailers get through these to these gatekeepers is because we're doing this in every sale that we're making in milestone it's contributing to continuing my father's legacy they were doing it to grow his legacy and create my own along with my brothers because we know that by changing what people snack on every single day we'll leave them to live longer better healthier lives with their families and so if you're ready to join us to kick the fake food to the curb and evolve the way you snack i'd love to talk to you alright see that one that was great man i got goose goosebumps what amazing story good good for you dude i'm i'm i'm really happy to to hear about this this and i just placed a fifty two dollar order i'm gonna to try the cheesy ones the garlic ones and the spicy basil pumpkin seeds let's see what you're about throw some extra stuff in there for it this is great so you you're in some stores today can you just give us the the basic run rundown so how many stores are you currently in and is that one chain or multiple what what's going on yeah so it's multiple chains our very first store that gave us our shot was fresh time market there about seventy stores across the midwest i mean the story with that is my brother cold called the ceo got a cold got a callback and the lunch room of the senior of high school we sat out with the team got three stores proved ourselves in three stores they gave us thirty we proved ourselves again they gave us seventy stores only give you those that that many and allow you to expand if you're selling well so after we had that success story we went out and we targeted smaller chains like mom's organic market on the east coast the fresh market which we're starting off small list and with that data we've we we're now going to new stores like we met with whole foods we got a yes from them we got pushed back we're fighting get a bigger and better yes and we have a huge meme with sprouts tomorrow actually wow and so and what was the what's the revenue so far yeah so since inception over the last seven years you sold over a million dollars worth of nuts this year alone will do four hundred thousand last year two hundred thousand in next year with some of the launches that we're planning we'll do probably closer to two million and what are the retailers tell you so that that fresh time that that you're in you're sorry you're in seventy stores with them or they have stuff now we're in all seventy of their stores we're in total two hundred retail stores across the country from some of those bigger players and some just smaller one off stores health food stores golf courses and like you know the way that retail works is they need to see the velocity of two you know how how much you're selling on the shelf at their stores for you to get into more stores and so what data do you have and is that currently a strength is it a weakness what what what's going on with the current cycle cycle rate or whatever they call it for retail consumption yeah so the velocity and the data is the biggest thing so our product is incredibly unique in that we are one of the only ones who offer a product like ours we have very few competitors i can name them and so what we have to do with of course first demonstrate a gap on the shelf hey you are not you don't have any nut flavored nut options that organic sprout it and then contain no seed oils so first we have to do that and then we just show share the data i mean our velocities if they were bad and thousand an issue we fresh time would not have let us go from three to thirty to seventy stores they came to us we didn't have to approach them on that we were just killing it so much okay okay fair fair enough i feel like you answered a question that should be and answered in numbers with letters that's okay alright so here's the problem that i have with this business i like i like your name i like your story i really wanna try your nuts alright but here's the problem when i go to your tiktok i see fifty followers and when you're young you have a lot of disadvantages you're not gonna have the same level of experience you're not gonna have the same amount of funding and resources you're gonna not gonna have the supply chain experience that you're gonna that your competitors all have but you do have a story and what you should be is amazing at social media there you should be telling your story on social media should be getting people excited about this and taking that to the retailers and saying look where this young exciting brand that consumers really care about and consumers are excited about and you don't have an option like that you're you're they're the nuts shelf for you guys is stale it's just blue diamond and it's the same old brands that do the same old thing and they're not they're not on on trend they're not c oil free they're not whatever right you have that story but you're you need the social side to be kick ass because social just takes creativity it doesn't take money and you're part of the generation that should be better at this than whoever the ceo of blue diamond is they they're you know their social strategy is obviously gonna be pretty boring and so i think that's where you're dropping the ball and that's what you're gonna need to get into retail because i've talked to retailers and what they care about is they need to they need to believe that you are gonna help drive traffic to the store or that customer's care about your brand that they're they're adding young hot brands to this shelf that's that's what you need as your story so i think that's what's missing for me right now absolutely yeah who what with the family business like this do you and your brother are you the two owners or is your mother involved who who owns the company yeah so my brother and i are fifty fifty owners we do have my mom who is our chief flavor officer she's in charge of making sure the nuts taste as good as they do i mean she's the original person who traded these recipes and we just took him to start selling them dude this is awesome congratulations i i'm bought in with sean as well on the story the story was very good i saw your about page i saw the personality i was like alright this is definitely gonna be something interesting i'm now a customer i'm very eager to try but this is pretty badass ass sam do you remember the name of that nuts brand that it's kinda like on twitter you might be not is that it it's like a peanut butter brand right yeah they do many eight figures that year in revenue many eight figures so tens of millions of dollars in revenue yeah have you have you looked at these guys austin yeah i'm familiar with them and i think they just got popular on social media and their stick is different than yours theirs is like the opposite of of yeah it's like indulge versus what you're trying to do but you do have like i've invested in a bunch of these like seed oil or seed oil free companies i think tb if it's gonna be mainstream yet but it definitely seems like it might be but this is like super fascinating you have a lot of tailwind to help you out here appreciate i think you wanna include that in your pitch by the way so you know an investor doesn't really know how big nuts brand can be and your numbers while you know i'm not saying that they're bad they are on the small side for like an e commerce company right so you if you're you know we've done a million dollars across seven years okay that's not that's not huge i think got a paint a picture that this can actually be really big i looked up blue diamonds by the way blue diamonds says about one point eight billion a year and revenue correct so i would show the nut category is huge and you know you have blue diamond does one point eight billion in sales a year the next one does this next one does this and we we use this phrase on m that there's a c of same the all you walk down that aisle and it's all old brands there's not one challenger brand and all of them have the same problem that they're they're lacking x y z we have fresh packaging we're a challenger brand we have we have a better story we're hot on social media so i think you need that part of the story and i would include others like nerdy nuts and i would show examples of others who have come into this category and are doing very well and how you're the next in line again it's that sort of era of that you wanna paint and so when you don't have the traction that shows your own trajectory is inevitable you wanna show the of a category where a change some of the things you talked about about you know sprout products are growing thirty four percent year over year in these stores you know that's kinda like you want slides there because it feels like every category now has a sprout product and the sprout products are over performing guess what nuts doesn't have a sprout product we are that that's sprout nut right and so you wanna paint that picture for for the investor but really good overall and honestly i actually think of the all the business we heard today i think this is probably the one that could be the biggest yeah but i don't think you're using your strengths and i think if you keep going on the same path you're going it won't be huge but you're still young and you you have time to change if you actually like take some of the feedback and do it i think this could actually be a lot bigger awesome thank you so much yeah thank you man you're the best awesome majors thank you very much alright we have the last one from university of michigan right alright hi sam sean m fam we are tour the ea powered salesperson for property managers today only four percent of apartment prospects that ever land on an apartment website actually end up taking the in person tour and it's no surprise that the in person tour is the highest converting part of the apartment sales process i mean there's nothing like someone giving you a guided experience of something you're about to buy low winning ninety six percent of the potential prospects that hit your digital storefront never get the chance to experience your tour that the highest converting sales moment in the apartment process well please get missed yeah these leads get missed in these apartments are up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of missed opportunities in unleashed vacancies that could have been filled if these prospects took a tour that is until the apartment stalls tour tour helps apartments like arbor apartments scale mariana their digital salesperson mario doesn't have enough time to tour every single prospect that visits the property person much less the all all the prospects that visit the property online but what if we could recreate mariana is best in person tour and replicate up that on the website so that mariana is on the website for all prospects twenty four seven our property managers just paste the link to an apartment website we skype the website and generate video scripts that help marian with the infrastructure to record the tour and scrape combine it all altogether with a knowledge base into a smart virtual leasing agent once the tour is ready all the company has to do is paste a little piece of code on the website and now mori is on the website twenty four seven and when in part when a prospect goes on the website and starts to browse we're actually learning about that prospect through a small digital micro interactions and marian can pop out of the right hand corner of the website at the perfect time and ask them if they'd like to take a tour once in the tour marian can teach them about the apartment and even offer to give them a mature of like a specific war plan or specific amenity that we deem appropriate for them marian can also ask for qualifying questions or that prospect such as would you like to take an in person tour or would you like to schedule a callback all while driving engagement and increasing appointments booked now replicating that in person tour for these apartments can drive nearly three x engagement and create more qualified leads for the apartment we know this because we're working with some the largest property matters in the nation and the spirit of the podcast we delivered our first million tours and help drive over thirty million dollars of worth of leases for the apartment additionally this has helped us get to reach over a million dollars in revenue and that's not all guys do you remember those videos that we recorded at mariana earlier well now those are one of the biggest assets of the apartments so tour automatically repurpose those videos to follow with leads and automatically run tech tiktok meta and google ad campaigns look shopify has set the experience it with the advent of shopify online shopping for everyday commodities is compelling visual video first but larger purchases like shopping for an apartment online otherwise known as leasing still remain stuck with static photos manual scheduling and follow ups but that ends today with tour that's right this shopping online for apartments is nearly two x larger than all show all other forms of e commerce combined that's right guys this is the two point five trillion dollar in in which property managers rely on their tour to close over eighty percent of their sales we're a passionate driven team who has designed and delivers some of the best experience is the best companies in the world including growth that ramp in google shopping sri we start on campus to solve our own problems in our oil shopping journey got to y and are just getting started with solving it for millions of more with tour the ai salesperson person for puppy matt alright alright alright alright that's pretty great so you've raised money already or what yeah we've we've raised about three hundred fifty to four k so far but largely been boost bootstrap we've we we've had many interesting moments throughout the journey but you know we're we're we're we've been really focused on getting the product experience as good for our customers as possible can i tell you i used to work in this industry a long time ago can i tell you like the three reasons why i think this could fail and you could rip you could tell me well how i'm wrong the first i think that there was this thing called matter port that existed for a long time i know airbnb tested on their website and i used to be an airbnb owner and when they had these air matter matter port made these like realistic models of what your apartment looked like basically three virtual tour yeah similar to the this and they found that it decreased conversion and the main thing being is that a lot of apartments for rent are shit and like it's like dude just like i just need to get someone in the door and once they're in the door i can like do some salesman ship to sell them but like online it looks pretty shitty in the three d way the the other one being that there's like right now i don't know do apartments need to be filled at the moment like it seems like a lot of these folks are like dude i'm killing right now my vacancy is quite low why don't why should i spend money to do this work and the last one being is a lot of apartments that you need i would imagine to do sales on to the apartments are kind of shitty and i don't want someone to see them online i need them to see them in real life so i can sell you on it and you know it's you know you know what i mean it's like i don't want like a user video of like a nineteen ninety four honda civic but if i get you here and you're like like a thousand dollars i'm like this chip boxes is for you and i don't need a video for that you know what i mean and so can you like refute some of those points yeah i mean i think you're absolutely right mat and use one of our comps you know they're doing five hundred they're still doing five hundred forty million dollars per year they are a public comp but the big thing that they do that's different or whether that we do that's different is where you're telling me that matter port does five hundred million in revenue yes yes now with the the big thing that is to put it in perspective the big thing that we do that's different is two things the first thing is we are in fundamentally an active experience that's partnered with the apartment to fun funnel someone down the wholesale funnel from the first moment they meet them to following up on email following up targeting that allows us to hit a large much larger market than mat even does today and then the other thing that i think you talked about which is like the nature of most of these apartments you know fundamentally being not necessarily like maybe old dr experiences i think the first thing is look things change apartments are becoming one of the largest purchases we make it is one of larger make make and like these are becoming more comm monetized and becoming more amen i mean the whole future is going into with experience economy and i think the experience is gonna be a very important part of our our gen or even millennial shop so i think that experience is a very important part we see that because a lot of our are towards we've delivered over remote tours many of them are international out of state and these are important decisions that people are on the edge on which different shops you know different shops that they or different different apartments they might wanna work with now for example one apartment might want to have a virtually advantage compared to others and that's why we help fundamentally become rather adversely advantage and on the last element i know just you want way to say something is just that we're also augmenting the salesforce right so if there's a frontline sales in most of these businesses are fundamentally high churn there's people leaving the building all the time if we can help augment their sales team we have a much larger staying power with the actual property not just a one off virtual tour and one thing i'd like to add is that matter port yet their like essential goal is to communicate the like physical establishment to the customer and obviously we do that but what we're trying to do is to augment the website to better communicate that as well as segment leads that they know how to allocate the resources best to the highest intent leads so that's another area where they save money but better allocating resources and the tour the tour that you give sorry i might have missed this during the thing or like i don't know maybe have a demo so is it just a girl talking and photos or is it like a walking tour that you generate or do you go film it first thing what what is the actual thing okay here's the video yeah we go and film it and so we have two elements we either have a video pro network that can help implement it core building more and more scripts that you can easily start start building it from your phone iphone sixteen that is like rivals like sony cameras and then once we have gotcha so so this is not ai generated this is like a video you guys make yes yes and then we take the knowledge base as well as that media and supply that throughout the whole sales process got it okay cool so you guys go film a video when an apartment social work with you and then you have the ai wrapper around it where it's chat it's q and a it's scheduling appointment it's following up with a targeted ad it's things like that that's what you guys do after that yeah exactly okay cool and the four hundred fifty k of arr that you have right now that's from how many customers that's from a hundred thirty puppy managers usually around the price point of three hundred dollars somewhere to fifty some are paying more and how'd do you get the hundred whatever property managers so the cool thing is we have a land expand motion so once we're inside a property manager usually they manage many properties large apartment buildings what we do is we demonstrate our results and most of our other property management companies start expanding within the property managers so they the problem one property manager a a company refers us to some of her additional properties in our portfolio or some of the other regional property managers so how will you go from a hundred something properties today to you know a thousand or ten thousand in the next year what are you gonna do so one of the big things we've been trying recently is automatically generating tours so that we can demonstrate value apartments before we even have to like go in person because obviously that's a large cost of like video taping the actual apartment so we can immediately scrape the website pull some images use flux to kind of turn the images into somewhat of a mock video pull some information from their website and generate a tour that can act to segment leads on the website and then they can kinda see the value of it oh a tour came in this is a high intent let's follow up on it and then from there if they're pleased by the value then we can actually go out and record that video making the tour even better okay so you're gonna go you're gonna auto generate these videos as a prototype as a sample and then you're gonna cold email them and say hey we could do this for you guys cold email were for referral old yep okay and then what do you guys run an ab b test do you on any of your your apartment websites do you show if you have us installed versus if you don't have us installed what's the difference in revenue yeah absolutely so what we notice is when it comes to the actual properties like the amount of value we generate for the properties usually an additional three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars in leases now specifically we do three things really importantly that least that at least to like these fundamental items the first thing is we deliver four times number of tours prospects who are on the website get three times engagement and also the leads that we end up capturing just obviously gonna be more qualified right and so those leases convert at a higher rate okay gotcha that's pretty convincing if you told me hey however many tours you're giving per week right now i could four that if you add this thing to your website that's a pretty compelling proposition don't you think sam yes i still think that there's a bunch of the i think there's a bunch of other questions related to the things that i said but that is compelling i think that i just i think i'm scarred from this industry of like selling to these companies and how hard it is and how old school some of these like have you guys noticed that about how old school your customers are and it's like the two customers that we've had in this presentation or in this section have been campuses or colleges and apartment buildings and i'm like oh my god those are like both really really really hard i have you guys noticed that when you're selling to these apartment companies that they're a pain in the ass to work with it it definitely is a old guard and and you know things change you know ever so often but i think they're realizing how important it is like particularly when they're looking at the e commerce and how things are evolving it's important for them to be extremely competitive advantage and so just the nature of competition has really been tried to somewhat push the they're just slow they're really slow yeah yeah i do think though again back to that idea of like you wanna make this feel inevitable i think it is there's a clear line you could draw where you say look if you were a apartment building and back you know fifteen years ago you might have been able to get away without having a website but about fifteen years ago you now had to have a website okay you had to have a website you had to be find on google that became mandatory table stakes so it didn't after that you had to have photos if you didn't have photos you were you were not even competitive right you're non viable and then you had to have videos and you had to have videos and then after that you had to have a booking thing where somebody could schedule a tour where without having to call you that became table stakes now ninety eight percent of apartment sites all have a bit a way to book a tour online well guess what the next one is the next one is an ai agent that's helping you book those appointments by either answering questions up upsell you or you know putting putting together a higher quality you know a pitch to get in front of you and that's the next wave of this like all websites had to go through this and when the tech made it where it was possible it just became too competitive if you didn't have it you were left in the dust and that's what's gonna happen in this space all websites are now gonna have an ai agent that helps them sell agreed yep i love that show and and you guys have done great with your matching zip ups that are nicely merchandise congratulations that's that's step one to being a startup up so you've nailed that one you've also nailed the revenue thing too so congratulations to you guys million tours is also pretty good and thirty million dollars of leases that came through your appointments that's that's also that's okay as well but really the jackets are fantastic alright thank you guys you guys are badass ass all done thank yes if you we kinda grade them on a curve it's like if you if you're already in yc and do you already have like you know a million tours done then yeah i kinda feel like these are unfair it'll to be honest i feel like if you are a yc or taking a gap you're in san francisco well those i don't know the gap year that's fine that's like do even go to college if you're at yc like saying those guys put up a team slide and it was like i've experienced at google at yelp at like all these companies like dude i thought you're supposed to be like nineteen years old what's going on i are these even college kids and what what's happening alright i think we have one more left the final pitch coming in from illinois who do we got hello my name is ot gupta the ceo and founder of pat it's really nice to meet you guys today what's up brother to meet you too alright alright until a month ago we were working on a no code engine that helped businesses automate their daily tasks with ai and it was going really well we were working with extremely large enterprises like the big fort and had more than a million dollars in vc money to accelerate our growth but the more we work with enterprises the more we realized that our most valuable automations for them ended up being email related they wanted help managing their cluttered inbox that looked something like this a fun story our lead investor once told us that she went for a week long break and had eight thousand unread emails and a business owner that we were working with told us his employees were spending more time on emails alone than the job they were actually hired to do and these stories are not one offs according to mckinsey the average employee processes more than six hundred emails per week wasting thirteen hours and thousands of business dollars despite it being an essential part of our lives email has become a burden and find it hard to keep track of even the most important emails in our inbox often losing them but according to industry select eighty six percent of business professionals still prefer using emails for some reason so clearly we can't get rid of emails so what can we do well to solve this exact problem we are currently building a virtual executive assistant or secretary that handles your emails for you what if just like a real secretary it could learn from you and respond to emails on your behalf what if just like a real secretary it tells you what the most important emails in your inbox are every single morning and what if just like a real secretary it could automatically respond to emails that you don't care about well you can have that secretary because our mobile app does all of that and we are launching on the app store next week and no we're not joking we have been actively working with a big four customer netting us six figures in annual revenue and are starting a pilot with the largest children's richmond franchise in the world next week not only that but we have also been working with five global financial institutions and completed and overs seven figure arrays we were also fortunate enough to win first place in one of midwest largest startup pitch competitions my name is ad and together with my cofounder mark we collectively bring more than a decade of experience in ai and building companies my entire team is yours have been spent building and scaling numerous online security businesses to millions of users and mark has tons of ai research and start up experience under his belt we're now working together to change the way you interact with email today so join us in helping to reclaim the biggest part of your daily workday thank you so hold on you the first five set words of your pitch pinterest pretty funny you said until last month we were doing this thing so let me answer some questions and but then you have a a six figure enterprise contract and you've raised a million dollars i i don't understand can you like briefly tell me the they had a product they're pivoting they raised money they had a customer but it wasn't the thing so they're yep is that right is that yes for sure so i can answer that oh so essentially we have it's it's the same business so we have a we worked on the generative engine generative ai engine that we started just this february so all the contracts that we have are now converting to the email client essentially so we were using our technology to develop email automations for all these businesses and we had raised money on that but now we simply changed the user interface from a workflow builder that looked kind of like zapier etcetera to more of an assistant email client interface that we found that it works better with enterprise customers got it alright because your website doesn't tell that story but then if you click you you have this folder up top it says new exclamation point our email client which is pretty cool that tells that story a little bit better can i understood psa about the our team has decades of experience oh my god i didn't wanna get on that but yeah yeah i guys think because a couple of a couple of the pitches have had that i don't think you should do that it it seems you know what you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor that wait a minute i think this is even bigger than what they're saying so this is a subtle art where you're you're desperately trying to convince them that this is gonna be big and awesome and it's gonna work but you cannot appear to be overs selling it you have to feel like you're under selling it and then they feel like they're finding some diamond in the rough and so you know how old are you i'm twenty you're twenty right so to be like we have you know a combined twelve years of experience i think that's a bit of a tell you what you what you would be better off saying is i started coding when i was eight by the time i was twelve i had already built blah blah blah and when i was fourteen i hacked into my schools thing and changed my grades and now i've figured out you know the you know the last few years i've really been obsessed folks with the ai and like that's a more believable and exciting story for me is like oh this is one of those boy geniuses right like oh you're one of those like hacker types that started early i can pattern match and say yeah a lot of the best performing founders i know have that same story and that story works better versus when you tell me you know me and my c cofounder who are you know eighteen years old we've got decades of experience it's like no you don't right okay and now what else can't i believe out of this even if it's technically true the whole like cumulative years of experience of your team is not a real metric that most people put in their pitch so i would i would get rid of that yes sir you're right thanks having said that alright that's public service announcement i do have a question it seems like you've done a great job of selling into people that are really hard to sell into so how did you go get a enterprise contract from a big four consulting company worth know over a hundred thousand dollars i'm curious to hear what you did there what's the short story yeah very good question so short story was that i was working as a consultant on campus as part of a university organization and thanks to my opportunity there i was able to connect to a very high level business executive within a big four enterprise do my mentor who happened to also be the director of the consulting org so long story short it was very network driven they were looking for a solution to fit certain problems that they had within an enterprise and what i was building as a personal project happened to solve those exact problems so once i had that we essentially made it a company and what did they say when you're pivoting i mean did you pivot because of them they are partly the reason we pivoted but it was also when we started engaging with more and more prospects so our initial generative ai or flo was essentially you could take ai and plug it into any legacy systems to automate any complex day to day task for example if you're a vc and you receive a lot of pitch decks day via email we could create an automation for you where you would automatically process those pitch decks analyze them against your investment thesis portfolio companies etcetera and then also send out replies saying hey we love this we would love to have a meeting or no for the following reasons and what you're describing is that sorry i i want you to finish it but is what you're describing similar to lin dot ai yes so lindy dot ai was definitely a competitor of ours in that space but then as i was saying earlier the more we engaged with customers and prospects we found that our product was explicitly being used for email automations and a big problem with products like our previous one and lindy ai is that the barrier to entry for a lot of non technical users is quite high you have to almost be a developer to actually use even these no code tools and that is why we decided to change the interface into a much easier to understand virtual assistant or secretary gotcha i think the challenge with this business because you seem really smart and you know i think whatever you work on will be you know interesting thing the challenge here is you're going into the most competitive space so i do feel undoubtedly that email inbox are gonna start to have in them and the ai is gonna help you process categorize summarize your emails in a in a way and and respond help you with the responses the problem is do i really believe that you are gonna be able to get people off of outlook off of gmail and onto your service or in addition you know they're also gonna be doing that right google google's definitely gonna be adding ai into this and so is superhuman and so is microsoft right they own open ai basically and so i do think that this is gonna be just an absolute blood bath category and so i think from an investment point of view that would be my problem with this which is even if i like you and even if i agree with the idea it's kinda that second in i talked about one is where's is the puck going this way there's yes of course it's going this way the second is are you gonna be the team who captures that opportunity and it just seems highly unlikely that you would be the team that captures that opportunity given people don't wanna switch email clients and that all of the email clients are already aware of this you know capability and are you know highly incentivized to add ai to it how did you say how much you raised so far you said a million yes we have raised a little more than a million are you still in school are you in living in san francisco currently we're on a gap semester like i'm on a gap semester everyone else on the mark's also on a gaps semester has one class left but everyone else is full time have four people dude i think like that first company meet your class it's that middle funnel things that that's the issue all these kids all these smart kids are bailing on university that's amazing that you guys are all of just like picking gaps so well i just told you that you're probably gonna fail tell me why i'm wrong and i should kick right out yeah for sure so business is switching to our email client is definitely a very big hurdle that we were also trying to navigate but what we found is by vertical in a lot of businesses with our own kind of information management secretaries a lot of businesses prefer us over their standard email clients like gmail and outlook for example currently as i said we're starting a pilot with the largest children's and richmond franchise they entirely run over gmail but they're still willing to switch to us simply because some of the features that we provide is something gmail and outlook just can never do because they have to cater to large groups of audiences and they cannot fit specific niches of certain requirements that a lot of customers have okay alright fair enough sam what what else you got before we wrap up i don't think i have much i i think that i think that it's so early it's hard to ask questions because i'm on your website and it looks like it's very much beta so it's hard for me to fully understand i think sean you're asking about replacing gmail according to their website it's in integration it's not replacing gmail it's hard to it's fully understand because you're so new do you is that right do do you just keep using gmail and this is overlaid or is this a new client you download and you're supposed to go here instead of gmail dot com yes so essentially you just log in with your gmail so one way we're beating that barrier to adoption is by not saying that you need a new tl and a new domain id simply log in with your gmail we get all your emails and then you start using our interface rather than gmail yeah it's like superhuman so you you keep your email address but fundamentally you're not supposed to you know you're not supposed to go to gmail every day it's just to go to superhuman and and open up your email and use your use that for all your email yes is correct alright good pitch thank you good best of luck you i think i think this is a huge idea i think it's gonna be super competitive and if you did it that would be amazing this is a this is a multi billion dollar win if you can actually do it that's the good news yeah thank you alright round of applause thanks brother alright to wrap it can we just name i think do you guys wanna do the winning school that we thought brought the brought the heat secondly our favorite pitch the best pitch meaning the one we would be most likely can put our money into and then the i think we should maybe do a audience choice as well which is you know let the crowd react and see which one they they think is best what do you think sam alright so let's start with school i have a winner but let's recap real quick michigan did meet your class which was helping university with the summer melt the middle the middle funnel for three you which is the personalized skincare microbiome stuff and tour which was the ai apartment tours and then you ui c was basically meet meta which is the dub company brothers nuts which is the sprout nuts company and pamphlet that one we just heard about email the ai email client so those are the schools sam what's your pick illinois all the way i think that michigan an incredibly impressive school but i think that i thought that i thought it i thought it was incredibly impressive that the med guy was at was at founders in or what's he called the the the way that this this young guy who just went the way that he had already raised a little bit of money and was take a gap year and then brother's nuts already has a business that has is doing like four hundred a year in revenue i just thought it was more impressive than a midwestern school their people are like going to the coast and i think that's a really good thing do agree or no i would disagree i would have gone michigan i think that traction wise i mean four let's make the case here tour had the most traction right half a million dollars in arr a million tour served i think tour and they're in nyc i think tour doing the best i think meet your class has a real business i think he stumbled into a kind of a actually like a cool business where half a million people have used this thing and now he found a business model that might actually work so i thought that michigan had had the better businesses overall alright good they each we disagree that each could vote but we disagree and it's a tie alright so let's do our favorite business out of these if you were gonna invest your money into one of these sam which one would you have invested your money into the business that i don't want to invest in but i wish i owned and i think the people should the people who own this one might get the richest the fastest of all these businesses is brother nuts i think austin major brother nuts i don't think they should raise money i don't want to invest in them but i would love to own that company i think it could be a family business that makes hundreds or hundreds of millions or even more throughout the next handful of decades okay all i get my would say that tells business my head tells me it's either meet your class or tour but my heart is with brother's nuts and i'm gonna go brothers nuts as well i think that they are one you know one step away from actually making this like a rural of a legit business that you're gonna see on the shelves in every grocery store i think they're not far away from doing that and i actually think it's a it's i would act i would actually invest in this business because i think it could actually make it happen it's not it's it's not theoretical here i think that all the most of the companies had an ai element and i applaud that i think that's where that's where the puck going but it's hard to stick out man like we get i there's just so much going pick the one with an almond element yeah an almond element i don't know man right doesn't it seem it kinda seems like it's tb as to like who's gonna be the winners it seems really hard to to to pick a winner at the moment yeah it's sort of a a trade off of like more competition but maybe more upside well you you said it well you said you said this is definitely what's gonna happen but it's gonna be a blood bath yeah and yeah and that's how i feel i so now the crowds choice so can you guys unmute gonna say the name of the of the business crowd reaction is gonna dictate who wins the the audience choice let's see if this works out this might be crazy with with the audio situation here our producers freaking out i turn turn the laptops let's i wanna see the crowd actually okay so we got the crowd yeah alright we're gonna start off from michigan meet your class okay from from ui c alright they might just be closer to the i'm we'll give from credit for that alright from michigan we have the skin microbiome company mil you alright the you see definitely putting his mouth next to the night alright we're gonna go from ui we have pamphlet luke lukewarm luke lukewarm i'm gonna call it what it was from michigan we have tour alright so from michigan it looks like mil was the loudest and now from ui last one we have brother's nuts so sean i'm i i think i know who won that one i think it was the problem i think had it i think they had it what's your shawn you guys yeah we miss you both we miss you alright alright okay wonderful guys great job everybody this is really impressive you guys are way ahead of where i was in college i think sam probably the same for you you guys are ahead of the curve i hope our feedback is helpful even the people we shit on like if we ask hard questions or or give you a hard time every or of all the six people who presented the six companies you're gonna be in the one percent of the one percent you already are in the one percent of the one percent and what you're doing is being active if you're bad ass and it's a sign of respect if we are willing to get keep it real with you that's because we actually think that you can win if we just wanted to be nice say oh the participation i'm so you know so happy for you you know that wouldn't have been helpful to you but it also would be actually know not a sign respect we we respect all of you for doing this and i just wanna say like i would not have become an entrepreneur head i not had a class like this where a speaker came in and just got me hyped about the idea of doing a startup i did not know what to do my first idea was terrible my execution was absolutely horrendous but it got me on that path it just seemed like more fun and so if you're listening to this or you're at one of these schools right now if it seems like something that you would wanna do and it seems like the lifestyle like go for it you know you know don't let that hold you back this could be a tipping point moment for you just like it was for me and it's the the you are currently in the phase of life where it will never get easier to do these things the than where you are right now for the next like you have like a four year window where it's like you have nothing really big to worry about except for this and also i think it's austin and tommy give these guys a shout out you guys are a man it's really hard to organize this type of stuff and i think that getting getting this type of energy in one room like you guys have done it's contagious sam you thinking what i'm thinking you don't know two words for you i got two words for you nationwide we're taking the power hour nationwide and then the second the second two words for you pizza party sponsored by m i think we should give these guys some money let them host some events and have of fun so we we will we will we'll connect with you tommy after this and we'll we'll give you guys some cash so that we can you know encourage you to throw more events and get more people excited about this and i like that it's underground i like that it's off the books i like that this is not the entrepreneurship club of the school this is you know just the people who actually you know care about building stuff and i wanna do cool things and wanna get off the conventional career track i i i'm for that thank you all for doing this we appreciate you have a wonderful wednesday and if you're listening on m you gotta go and give all these guys a little bit of love on on their websites and and check out the products alright thank you guys that's it pod i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's all on a roll less travel never looking back