MFM Demo Day: 5 Startups Pitch Sam & Shaan and Raise $1.7M

so here's the here's the here's a situation so this is recording so this is gonna go live on our podcast feeds so the people listening on the podcast there's you and then there's people who are live right now i think over a thousand people live so we're on this thing called stocks dot com i guess i got gotta i gotta i gotta do it close disclosure i'm an investor sean or uni investor no but fan fan so stocks dot com it's they we we're friends with them they asked us to do this and it's actually we say note everything with this is a cool idea so basically five star ups are gonna pitch us and we're gonna maybe invest but very likely tear them apart and also compliment them we're gonna make like some good content out of this right yeah yeah okay great i'm down and we don't know much about the startups ahead of time so it's all gonna be kinda fresh and there's a comment section do you see the comment section sean like where people are chatting yeah so like if there's any good questions and also on the side vets right like they can put in money yeah so like if they see something i i don't think they can like they're not literally gonna fund the company right there but they're gonna like i'm interested let's talk and honestly that's probably what i'm gonna do i'd never like on these things i i cannot like i've seen these things and someone's like i'm in for a hundred thousand dollars and they say they're like right on the spot i'm not that impulsive are you yeah i'm that impulsive and it's also more dramatic so i'm a i'm a sucker for the drama i'll do it oh alright well at least one of us will and then do if you go to the chat of this video thing you'll see the order of of people that they're gonna go and we're gonna talk to one person i think they get two minutes and then we get eight minutes to talk to them and then it's gonna say like time's up move to the next one does that make sense this is pretty sick let's do this alright we have john hancock from s is like our assistant here he's gonna be feeding the startup so john do you wanna bring the first one up john is that a real name i don't think so hey guys what's up how's it going thank you so much for the time okay take it away awesome my name is darius from the founder and ceo five x been fortunate enough to spend my career in the data space from being the first data engineer salesforce the most recently running data who we work supporting thousands of employees what was the last four years being super interested in the modern data stack it's estimated that over seventy seven percent of companies in the next ten years in some way shape or performer are gonna use the modern data stack the problem is that there's a big disconnect in what vendors are selling today and what customers need over ninety percent of customers are investing in data to get a business roi yet the vendors are really focused on selling individual categories what this means that that customers have to have expertise they need to sign multiple contracts they need to stitch this together all of this is taking away from actually getting business output five reps to the first end to end data platform which is focused on business output so we license and integrate with the different vendors in this space and as an end result we can provide customers with an end to end platform depending on their use cases industry sized budget on top of this we also have a services model where we can give companies access to high quality engineers were pre trained on this stack today we interview hundreds of engineers fully automated and we get to hide the top zero point one percent end result customers can implement end to end data strategies in weeks instead of spending time signing all these contracts well less than know your old million dollar run rate on a poc with zero marketing and we're super excited that we we are gonna be profitable by the end of this month alright good stuff sam so what does this business do that's what i'm i'm trying to i i i was trying to interrupt you earlier but i guess i was muted i need can you kinda dumb this down for me for a little bit i'm looking at you so so let me for the listeners alright so the website is five x dot c right now you are raising three hundred thousand dollars at a twenty five million dollar valuation you got to a million dollars in arr in less than a year i don't know what poc means when i see poc i people of color is what i thought about was a video point point of concept okay so like some companies are telling you that they're gonna pay you up up to a million dollars right or collectively or they actually have they're actually up paying us monthly dude do you got a million dollars at a proof of concept that sounds pretty sick to me okay yep but i'm gonna be honest i don't know what the hell you do it can you explain to me i've never worked on a big company before it so i'm kind of like a big dumb idiot it's not just for big companies think of you know if you wanna get value from data fundamentally you need two things you need infrastructure you need tools infrastructure you might have heard of tableau or snowflake and the second thing you need is people now the way the infrastructure is working today is every vendor is really focused on one small part of the stack if you wanna do something like analytics you need to go sign four or five different vendors sign these upfront contracts and pitch this together yourself now for industry is gonna become mainstream then you can't really expect ninety percent of customers who don't when you say words like vendors it's it's still hard for me understand give me a very specific example you use use format yeah you use a format that's like x x company had y problem yeah they they tried z but the problem is z is this so then we came in and we do it differently instead sure so x company you know wants to figure out where the customer coming name name way yeah i mean sorry that so use one of our customers bank noble wants to figure out where the customers are coming from how do they personalize their app how do they save cost and you know optimize their sort of cash flow they now don't know where to go they can go buy a single reporting tool like tableau but coming the end to end data strategy is a lot more comprehensive there's a lot more than just having a dashboard tool instead of having to hire multiple engineers instead of having to go sign all of these different tools and vendors they come to five x five x instantly gives them an end to end platform which has got all of these vendors we license these vendors and can give customers an end to end platform on top of this if bank if bank nova doesn't have their resources to figure out how to go use it they can add engineers on our side were pre trained on the platform end result they're getting business output in weeks whereas if they try to go do this themselves it would be twelve times slower and six times more expensive alright that's way better and one question how on earth did you get people to spend a million dollars with you on a proof of concept because it sounds like a very hard thing to sell in a million dollars there's a lot of money on earth and is it actually like they're gonna pay you a certain amount of money every single year yeah so you know at the moment you know we so in the next two months our self service platform will be live right so anyone will be able to go to five extent enter the credit card for a few hundred bucks a month you'll have the you'll have the you'll have the platform so early stage companies can do this by spending very little money what we do today because the self service platform isn't ready we combine the a semi automated platform plus a services model so you get engineers plus you get plus you get the platform so our average order value at this point it's about ten k a month multiply that by about ten fifteen customers where at a million dollar plus run rate which basically means you're doing it by hand from now and then you're raising money so you can automate it all correct it's semi automated already it would take a consultant about three or four months just to give you that platform they would go build it and they would start from scratch we do it in less than one day today that's semi automated and where are these customers are coming from so let's dig into this one million of arr so you said you got ten k per customer roughly ten fifteen k and roughly ten customers that are paying you monthly right now so you got a hundred k a month you know roughly roughly in in revenue where did these customers come from is this inbound outbound do you have a growth strategy like do you have a strategy that which just leads you to the next three million also sure at the moment we've done zero marketing we've been really been focused on on the platform we have been producing content on my linkedin on youtube mainly getting customers by word and by that so really the last eight months we're early on using this as a proof of using this as a proof of concept this is not just the technology problem you have convince all of the vendors in the space to give you api access to provision them integrate with them build for them so you know you need it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem where you need customers and at the same time you need to show these vendors that you that you they they actually extract option and we'd become an added sales channel for them okay i what else sean i guess i'll just give you a little bit of feedback on the pitch itself so so a couple things your house or wherever you're at super nice almost distracting nice i kinda like my founders to be a little more scrappy than that just gonna put that out there where are you i'm in bali hi is it bali bad it's probably it's bad not not the most expensive place yeah yeah fair enough second thing you know i think you wanna i think you try to get the most information into the pitch whereas i think you want kinda wanna slow down and you needed to just like work on that first thirty seconds to figure out the thing that i was confused about samus confused about most of the chat if you look on stocks was confused about which was i don't really know what this does right when you say end to end that makes sense to you because you're meaty in it but for us we've never heard of five x before so we're like end to end what and yeah you know all of the all of the words were quite you know generic so like you know vendors blah blah blah and and and so you what you wanna do is basically just be able to to paint a picture so you know did you're ever work at a company that had this problem more if you've ever been the marketing manager the company you know that you spend almost you know six months getting your analytics platform and then integrating it and then you have to get your crm and then integrate it then you have to do this and then integrate it and so it takes months just to get set up with the things you need to be able to see your business and every business has the same problem so what we do is we go to that person and we say hey use us and you get x y z right benefits out of this and people are choosing it because this we got a million dollars in in arr already as a you know during our pilot just you know in a couple weeks or whatever it is now i'm kinda more engaged what else here and look this is actually quite easy what year did you join we work someone in the chat said this guy made a bunch of money off the we work ipo and then i just went to your website and it said you were to we work so i i don't know what the truth is i joined i think or twenty seventeen i did not make money of the ipo that that's okay that's irrelevant i i mean they would have been sick if you were it looks like you did it because you'll in that nice house but i guess what i was trying to get at is i would do exactly what sean said but i would use the we work story so we were at when i when i worked at we were because you were the head of data it looked like at we work or something like like some i'm like pretty you led data for we work your bios that's sounds impressive it doesn't matter if it is but it sounds like it and so i would use the story of like i led data at we work when we were this size and i grew the company to this size and a problem that we consistently had was blank blank blank and we solved it by hiring tons of people and it was still like riddled with airs and and talking to other people in this data world i noticed they all had the same problem and so to bootstrap this company and get it up the ground i hired a couple friends and we actually have been doing this by hand and we convinced x y and z to give us some money and slowly or quickly we've actually automated a lot of it and we've automated by doing x y and z so now all these companies who wanna get this thing done they can actually use us and instead of hiring thirty people they just use have one person use this bit of software and it saves them x amount of money and x amount of time you know what i mean like i by the way i'm just totally r i don't know any of this is true no that's great but you what i mean yeah totally but now if if we should just get to the product i think it sounds the neat and it looks like my good friend anchor invested and he's actually quite he's actually quite impressive as he knows his shit i i think it's a cool company yeah i would i would definitely just based off your traction alone i would wanna learn more because i'm like okay you know a good pitch is not necessarily a good business but a good traction is usually a good business and so you actually have good traction at a bad pitch that's okay so i would wanna learn more and and dig in to understand how much of this is a service and consulting business versus is this gonna be software and this gonna be automated because sounds like you've actually found a problem that people care about we'll see how how kind of durable that is and then we can go from there so thanks for coming on man i think you know for both of us it seems like the answer is like we'd actually wanna learn a little bit more and and look at the deck before we we go too far amazing thank you thank you you're awesome thanks for freaking brave and doing this so sean he so on the stocks platform it says he's got seventy five thousand dollars of interest i do agree this potentially is more of a services play but we actually just talked about that company worldwide technology and this sounds just like it doesn't it yeah there's a there's several companies that are like this there's a lot of lot of saas companies that have like a like a either a consulting thing that's how they get it embedded or it's like just an ongoing revenue stream and it actually can get quite substantial so i think that's a complete no i didn't i didn't anything that i i didn't mean that as a dis oh i kinda said it as like this is just a consulting because if it was just consulting company i i would not do it but but yeah i i was just so confused for half the time that didn't really get to think about didn't really get to think about the business to be honest so i was trying to figure out what that heck does but yeah that was a a little bit of an error hopefully he'll fix that but this type of business i think it'd be sick to own i don't know if you if i don't know why you'd wanna raise money if you got a million dollars and and just selling by the way the simple test here is like just say the first like thirty to sixty seconds of your pitch to somebody and then be like to a friend and just be like hey can you play that back to me like so based on what i said what does my company do like and what you wanna know is do they get it first of all like you have to get it and then are you interested in it does it sound compelling and if it's like if you don't get it it's not compelling like don't move forward don't go to the rest of the pitch and you need a friend or you need like random people are gonna do that and the format you use was good because you you sort of like added the team and credibility well when i was leaving data for we work right you know all the shenanigans were going on but in my little corner of the world we actually had this much you know this big problem that we had to deal with and that's where i kinda of realized that every company has this issue that bank blank blank and it's like oh yeah that's a good format generically for a pitch yeah i agree alright john hancock you wanna send us the next one alright alright kenny you got it hey guys thanks for having me on the shop so i am kenny i'm one of the c cofounder of ba eye and we've built the world's first online marketplace for group air fair and the problem that we set out to solve is that group air flights of ten or more people traveling to together it's sold offline so what does this mean say that you are a you're organizing an eighth grade school trip and you're flying fifty people from san francisco to orlando if you wanna shop for for quotes you actually have to call the air call the airlines group desk over the phone and once you get something that you like well the offline nature of groups doesn't end there it's really important to note that group air fair is unlike booking a normal ticket so it actually takes place in five unique stages and that's from shopping to deposit to final payments and make names list and before back i all of that happened over the phone so we thought in twenty twenty two this is insane that world with so much money in it operates totally offline so we created what's like a b b ex media like marketplace for shopping for flights of ten or more people in terms of traction we we did launch ba eye in october of twenty twenty one we have really strong growth great unit economics and we're actually profitable as a business model we make between ten and fifteen percent margin on flights and from january to april we've done four point two million dollars worth of total sales we take about profitable seventeen hundred dollars in revenue per per group and have forty corporate customers that are using the platform today and one of the most exciting things that happen as a result of the pandemic is we got a ton of inbound from corporate meeting and team off sites that are looking to book group air air it's our fastest growing customer segment and it's caused us to build out a bunch of tools to meet the needs of meeting planners and you're probably asking why is why is this the team to bring group air fair from analog to digital well we have really deep domain expertise in group travel our ceo eric previously sold a tour operator business where he kinda learned the ropes of the business and then our team internally from the service side to the tech side we have a lot of deep expertise in travel tech and we think that we have a shot to be both the storefront and the underlying operating system for group air so we love to answer any questions that you have about our business are we live or can you hear us dude the top comment is actually pretty funny which is says fly together and group flights dot com is available go by the domain yeah go by the domain yeah get on that one no you got you got the the the stocks chad adding value here they're the real value at investor i love this also like how you just like looked out he's like m go by the domain we're smile meatloaf yeah good ba eye i thought you were like a a chinese gambling website when you when when you first came out i this is ba well they podcast that one wouldn't be a bad idea too business is crazy fair enough what can clear let me ask a clarifying question on the pitch you said that you get ten to fifteen percent and i think your chart said did your charts say a hundred thousand a month in bookings or did it well you're i forget what you're but you you said four million between the traction side i guess yeah it was like four million between january and april does that mean that you between january january and april you did four million but then yeah so we correct we did yeah exactly so we've sold four point two million dollars worth of group air fair and we're averaging about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue and that's the revenue that like it's real revenue that yeah that's what you and how old the business so we started in twenty eighteen we survived the pandemic just barely and then probably like half of our clients kind of didn't make the pandemic so it's kind of like a fresh restart for us prior to us launching flight shopping we were just a trip management platform for tour operators so like if someone did like a lot of student travel sending people to like dc and orlando they would use our trip management platform just a way to stay organized and make sure that they don't miss deposits and final balances and then we had a lot of time to ourselves during the pandemic so we made flight shopping because it was our number one request people don't wanna call the airlines for for quotes and then how many people work there we have eleven now cool got it okay okay so maybe in each of these sam when we do like first i kinda like clarifying questions slash like reaction to the business and then maybe some back at the end of like how to get that better but like okay so reacted reactions to the business and clarifying questions so you are trying to do group travel for corporate and and you send something at the beginning which was like it's in saying that there isn't really a good solution for something with this much money in it i didn't catch did you say how much is spent booking group travel every year yeah so i didn't it's about a hundred and thirty billion dollars worth of just total group spend and that equates to about five percent of an error airlines revenue so floating around about two hundred and twenty five million passengers fly as part of a group pre pandemic okay cool so five percent of airline rev airline revenue is done the via these groups and that's all kind of the over the phone or some like some other old school math at at the at the current currently exactly yep okay cool and then what's the why now because people have been doing like travel startups forever like you know booking dot com price sign and these were i think booking dot com price i came out like a nineteen ninety five or something crazy like that yeah and so why has nobody tackled this part of it because i've seen travel startups in every angle but what is there anything that's unlocked now or you're just you you finally had a great idea what's going on here no so not finally have the great idea we do have some people that are competitors that sell a saas solution to airlines that allow airlines to make like a white label version of what of what of what we do the why now is before the pandemic lu tons american airlines united is rumored to be working on it they wanna go digital for their groups and they've actually instituted a private white label and so we see it happening in the same way that like single tickets team online we think groups will come online so the airlines are already starting to do the underlying tech and we think that's amazing and we wanna be basically that that second shelf that they sell their their their group air how how are you getting the customers now because isn't travel like the hardest like when i think of like hardcore customer acquisition people i think of like online gambling i think of gaining and then like travel yeah like that seems like the most cut one of the most cut throat industries to get customers because i think the guys who started reddit started hit monk and it didn't work out because they just like couldn't you get like or you know it wasn't as bit nearly as because reddit how how are you getting those customers yeah so currently right now about ninety nine percent of our business is b to b so we at customers really in two core ways one we have a referral pro of referral program so we are a we're a preferred partner for like meeting planners and tour operators in the student travel space and if you refer us business we give you like five dollars per per per ticket book that has been enough to send us so much business that we have to like hire and raise money then the second way is kinda old school like industry events are still really popular just meeting with meeting planners and tour operators and then something that we'll try to get better with in time is like seo there's not a lot of comp of competition for like the keywords group air before the pandemic we got it down to like seventy two cents a click but admittedly since we just survived them me to have the capital to run a bunch of marketing experiments we're not doing any paid at the moment and then until now you got a bunch of savages in the chat they're all gonna start beating you up i this all they already bought the domain fly together before you can get it so explain what are the terms of the race you're raising how much at what valuation yeah so we would like to raise one point five million dollars at fifteen million dollar cap great and so for somebody listen to the podcast there's people who listen to podcast that don't they're not part of like the angel vest seen how does a come are you just fifteen million dollars wait but you said you're doing a hundred fifty thousand a month in revenue so is it some revenue multiple just explain where's this fifteen million magic number come from for you yeah so we have our customers booked pretty far out so like our average customer books nine nine months out so through the end of the year we should make about one point five one point six million dollars in revenue and so we just took that top line number and times it by ten to kind of be safe no there's been crazy stuff happening but we wanna be set up for success and fair so we just times it by ten and then what is the like what's actually happening under the hood so you didn't show like a demo or a search engine or how somebody actually does this is there are there apis or you just like calling the airline yourself out the hood like what's what's actually happening yeah so under the hood we are connected with two are you familiar with like travel technology no okay so really high level i know that where time is running out so we're connected to two g called sa and ama that's how we get the flight content and then we had to build some stuff on top to make sure that groups work because there's limitations of the legacy system but i think our time is up and that could be a whole let me ask one let me ask one more question this is something that i love asking everyone that i invest in which is like five ten fifteen years down the line how does this how big how much revenue are you gonna be making and how am i gonna get my money back yeah i think that we can be both the store the the storefront and the underlying pipes for groups so if you were thinking about getting like a ride you would open the the uber app if you were thinking about booking flights of ten or more i think that you come to back right dot com but how do i open but not so how big you think the business will get and what's gonna happen someone's gonna buy you for a billion dollars someone's gonna buy you for a hundred million dollars you're gonna go public what do you think will happen yeah there's a there's a really a a really clear path for us that we get to like fifty million dollars in revenue in the next like five to six years and beyond that i'm not totally sure but i the path to fifty is pretty clear that's a good answer okay yeah that's great answer in in general fantastic pitch actually the thing was saying before gotta be clear gotta be compelling in the first minute you were extremely clear extremely compelling i think it's pretty pretty clear you know your stuff as you were asked questions about you had good honest answers you didn't overs sell but you you got to the point on on on each one of those questions so i think really strong really strong pitch as far as temperature yeah i would i would i'd love to learn more awesome yeah that was a good one nate it was very it was very very very very clear one thing that wasn't clear which is like how big is this i mean i don't know anything about group flights and it turns out so he said it's it it's a hundred billion dollars worth of tickets booked a year as group flight is that what he said hundred thirty billion of group spend which is five percent of all airline revenues what he said yeah he buried the lead on that one a little bit yeah exactly so like you know that question we asked that's gotta go to the front of his presentation which is like you booking group travel sucks and by the way this sounds like it might just be this fringe thing but there's over a hundred thirty billion a year going through group group group travel today that's all done still on the phone which is crazy because most of all other ticketing and idea other eighty percent of the other ticketing is just done online now yeah that's gonna happen for group travel and we're gonna make it happen right i would've have been like alright so group travels is defined as ten or more tickets guess how much revenue is booked per year doing that yeah guess how much revenue is is a nice one a confidence b makes the other person insecure see they're almost always gonna guess wrong when you have a really high number because they just don't have right the right frame and say a hundred and twenty eight billion that's five percent of all tickets are booked that way and guess how they book in they have to call the airline and book it all like manually it's a pain in the butt like that's how i would have done it but he did he did really good and i would put a screenshot of the website to be like this is you know if i go to like whatever delta or i go to ex like look all the there's a million buttons on the screen does not want if you wanna find the group button go to help go to phone this is where you go for that this is where a hundred thirty billion flows through right like i'd really emphasize that problem and then i'd show my screen which is like a google search engine that's like here's how it works on fly together you just go here you just say how many people where you're going and that we take care of the rest we do a bunch of crazy stuff under the hood to make that automated and it's working we have you know we've done four million in bookings so far that translated into a hundred fifty thousand dollars a month of revenue for us so we're on a x mill you know a two million dollar run rate and by the end of the year blah blah blah dude i agree of everything things that one thing that what bob there's two things that when startups when i'm talking to that bothers me one is when they use arr and it's not actually annually recurring revenue and then they're like well it means at annual run rate i'm like dog come on you know like we've none of us like use that word that way and the second thing is when they say revenue but it's gm which stands for i don't with gross merchandise volume so it's like if your ebay you sell technically like let's say a hundred billion worth of stuff but ebay only captures five percent of that you know making that up but like i i need it's so confusing me when they think that i i wrote this note during the thing right like i have this little whiteboard i'm writing on i wrote revenue presented weirdly because he wrote four point two million in sales but i was like that's an aggregate over five months then he wrote like we take one point seven per customer it's like dude just how much revenue you have like make that the first one we do this much per month per year that's our current run rate that's that's not gm that's what we take home in terms of gm we've done this much right like that would be a big improvement over over the traction side but bear very cool company though you wanna do another one mister hancock where at hello what's up all good and that's we're doing that it's actually really fast fascinating so my name is ore i i'm the call founder and ceo of munch and i'm accompanied by peter and my call founder cto with both have and i have too many years of experience in business and tech leadership growers and we've been building much for the past few months getting out of a validation phase and into our mvp and initial traction so what is much think about your favorite youtuber apart from results let's say this person has one million subscribers on youtube now what if i'll tell you that chances are that this person has almost all of of other content professionals has only one to two successful distribution platforms i mean this is mostly the case in in in almost all cases this is because it takes a lot of time money professional know how to succeed on each in every social platform it's actually pretty different to be successful on tiktok facebook or instagram or youtube or totally different platforms and different audiences due to that most of them don't even try to to put it in that effort and kind of give up even though it can grow the revenue streams and the monetization potential quite quite you know in quite reasonable numbers so we are a team of builders dreamers and content creators on a mission to build the first platform that we serve as a home for calling content professionals there are no other platforms currently serving as a home as a place that content professional can do everything from creating their their new content based on data driven processes we're purchasing the content for different types of platforms doing your research on what's the next next content they want to create and actually distributed on all platforms and monetize the current creation market is currently estimated at around sixty five billion dollars with an annual growth rate of fifteen percent this means that it will get to one hundred forty billion dollars by twenty twenty six and combined it with the creator economy we're talking about to two hundred billion dollars market it's a by the bigger market and we are currently raising five hundred thousand dollars on top of the nine hundred thousand dollars be already raised we have two fifty thousand already committed and we're looking for two fifty more the idea is to take this money and use it to boost our dev team and created the the first version of the product by this november increase of and start and and start testing different pricing levels with their initial paying customers so we're looking so for some new partners that can actually us a bit more about the media business okay for first of all let me say the people who are not english speaking in pitch fucking awesome that would i can imagine how hard that it's not easy it's not easy i could tell what's easy it you you did pretty good but golly that seems like a rough thing to have to learn how to do congratulations i think i we we we can barely speak when it's our our native language so you know respect for that okay now i could be mean that was a horrible pitch though i respect the attempt but the actual structure of the pitch which just not great and like you know in the chat here on stocks on a scale of one to ten ten being that was super clear and compelling one being i i was cloudy and not compelling give it a score one to ten i'm curious what it was for for you guys one being low not clearing a bell ten being very very clear compelling type it in the chat and they're on like a way they're on like a fifteen second delay by the way and so it's gonna it comes through it's gonna start coming in so i'm seeing an eight and then two two three two one three one two one two one one right okay so your job warren is to get that two into an eight right because like right now i can barely even give you kind of feedback on the business it's self like i i went to your website go i went to get lunch dot com and it looks like basically what you're doing is a creator spends a ton of time let's say making a video or a long form post they're kinda drained by the end of that and and so they posted on the one platform they post on youtube you take that content you turn it into clips you put it on tiktok you take that content you turn into tweets you you basically repurpose the content you chop it up and repurpose so they can get more juice out of the content they made is that right this is the penetration product like this is what we currently do we currently have online and we can actually if you want to see an example i allowed myself to take one of your episodes do you have to see that can you see that yes yes okay so let's take for example this episode k it was from six i kind of played out with it and what you have here is our system in choosing between three to five the most engaging parts of the original video what do you mean by engaging we do analysis both on scenes and visuals and any different types of audio effects as well as analyze with using ai the actual spoken words in the in the video in order to understand what would be the best clips that can fit into let's say your one minute tiktok or it's three minutes tiktok or one minute is to come real so the idea is that you as a creator can get your original video chopped up into like you said into a few clips and then turn from landscape to portrait so we can publish it directly to other to the other platform oh doing so go ahead yeah i'm i am human optimization and i i think sean have you ever heard of jelly smack i'm shocked or you didn't talk about them you've heard of jelly smack right was working through to raise the name yeah we heard a lot of mac wave actually we love mac will love what they're doing and we'll have the fact that they are doing or the market education for us tech talking to content creators about content processing at the and the fact that you can be successful equally on all platforms but jenny and again we really admire what you're doing oh come on orange we really admire what they're doing but they've been around for six and a half years and they have five hundred customers and two thousand employees manual labor is not really high tech new kind of what we're looking for using the nlp and computer vision we can do what j does fully automatic on a self service basis and fully scalable this is a whole new level of a of a content management and just to be clear we're starting with content very repurposing by the is that we used to be the content for the content creator on their behalf on all platforms so we can take back the at the analytics that we get from the platforms and then create a kind of a cockpit in which the integrator sees everything that is going on and can understand what exactly they need to focus on where is their niche what is the topic they need to talk more about and and kind of you know progress along the lines that every content piece can become thirty to fifty different types of common pieces let's create more data that you can then analyze and then like where the whole field fiber loops so yeah this is the idea we'll i have question real real quick but what's stopping this to me maybe there's a world where this kind of becomes like the you know buffer buffer dot com started just by like you would schedule like tweets to go out and then like everyone kinda offered that same thing and that feature became somewhat of a commodity is there a world where this this thing that you've built becomes a commodity and you actually have to offer more stuff like for example i don't actually know if this is true because i i don't entirely know how they were but it seemed like jelly smack one of the ways they make money is they actually don't charge the trader but they put ads on the creators videos and they take a cut and so it's like the technology that they're offering is just like a feature and the real value is that they are giving the creators more revenue by giving them an ad split and is be the money maker yeah yeah so is there a world where this technology have really just becomes a commodity and you gotta offer other stuff in order to keep people on yeah so the idea is is is actually you know like drop shippers have have shopify and marketers have hubs hubspot content creators will have much and the idea behind that is that currently there's no platform like that but there's a lot of vacuum in this space and currently this vacuum has been filled by hundred of thousands of freelancers on fiber work and little to to medium agencies so this is something that people already consume but either they're paying premium money for their services or they're giving up like between and is on rim numbers thirty to fifty percent of the revenue that has been generated by the agencies so yeah the idea is that it's gonna be the central platform for calling creators the central copy that can use and in terms of the business model this is what you're asking so we have like two options and we're currently we still proceed we still you know add your wrong experimenting with the business models we can do both things we can charge a premium fee for the premium features and there's there's a lot of things that we can charge for like you know creating taking your podcast and creating twilio threads for the next month that we can in the right time or we can just use this inventory that has being created via much and integrate brands into it and do brand and get money from brands and pay the creators so we're still not sure which business model will win right experiment with both in the next few months but yeah it's it's like looks like a huge of potential so so i would not be interested in investing in this business for a couple reasons but i i would say like you know the main the main two is like i feel like it's going to be based on how difficult it was to get us interested in the business i think you're gonna creators are super busy thousand opportunities coming at them at all times and it seems like you're gonna have to really punch through the noise in order to be able to get there and i don't really have confidence you're gonna be able to do that that's kind of the first piece second is like the time somebody's using ai i'm like oh okay you know i gotta see it to believe it now i what i will say is your pitch with the slides was putting me to sleep but the pitch where you showed my face i'm like oh wait this is me great of course you know so so i would i would definitely lead with the demo but and that's not just for us because we create content a lot of people create content and a lot of investors do but even if it wasn't us hey this is a popular podcast blah blah so here it is it's the one hour thing not everything's is gonna watch it today they pay you know editors and social media people a thousands of dollars a month to go find good clips cut them out post them on tick tiktok post them on whatever because they know they're leaving so much growth on the table if they don't do it but with months they'd either be able to do it themselves or they can hand this tool to their person they can make ten times more clips you know and and not have to hit hire as many people and so then you're explaining you know the the fit like your demo was the most impressive part of your thing where you're like look long video push a button i get a properly formatted clip option and i have you know ten of these that i could choose from and we're trying to do this all automatically right so so i think that you can you can make your thing more compelling if you kind of like work on how you explain it versus like it was all intellectual it was all theory based whereas you want it to be story based right so instead of saying you know content creators fit you know have complexity when it comes to managing multiple platforms that's intellectual you wanna make it a story which is like here's these guys they do this stuff they record this three hour thing the last thing they wanna do is this or hey for your podcast right now we have a five thousand dollar clip contest running it's like you're paying five thousand dollars just for somebody to cut clips of your of your video into and to stick tiktok what if i told you i had a tool that would do that automatically for you and you a producer could just go do this you know in ten minutes after their thing think they don't have to rewatch the video they don't have to do blank blank blank they don't have to resize it they don't have to export it we've done all of that for you and the best part is you know blank and so you i think you can make this a lot more compelling but as it is right now i would not be interested in the business well thanks for the feedback for that reason i'm out do we do the shark tank thing i don't know yeah yeah yeah yeah thanks for the feedback and regarding customer acquisition actually this is exactly what we're doing we we we're creating preemptively the videos for them and then we send them via an email marketing machine that currently has like a four to five percent conversion rates and at the base of eight hundred hundred thousand iconic creators on youtube and we're using influencer marketing because it turns out after talking with more than hundred content creators the way that they learn about new tools and new platforms is by watching bigger influencers so we're using influencers in order to get to more more customers it's kind of needs because we just got to two thousand users in less than two months so yeah it's it's it's kind of starting growth cool sam anything else on your side the same question that i that i asked the other folks and i don't know why you guys aren't doing it but paint the picture of like how is this gonna make me wealthier you know like like i i like get down to like my my primal in my like my primal desire here of like i'm giving you money so how big is this going to get and how do you sell or go public and i get paid more than what i gave you you know like paint that picture for me yeah so why once we have five thousand users paying users we're gonna hit the one million dollar arr it's an actual arr because it's recurring your venue once you charge them on the on a monthly basis and there is a serious vi and symptom in the area of content creation it's kind of a p because once you create content with mag we have our logo and sam mentioned to much on on the content the idea is that other creators are watching and getting into the game so it's gonna be a very very quick growth in terms of sizes current market is sixty five billion dollars is gonna grow aggressively in the next few years so you know sky is the limits it's gonna be unicorn it's gonna be a big company and this is what we're aiming for good i appreciate you thank you very much thanks for coming thank you for sir alright bye hi sean man like what i was saying to him about the the english thing dude it is if you don't speaking if you have a an accent you're at such a logistic like in just in terms of logistics and understanding everything you're at such a disadvantage for these things it's a really really hard thing to to overcome and it it's i mean it's cool that people overcome it but holy moly i would not wanna be in that position it is tough right it is really hard and and you know i feel like that's why i think the the deck and the story i think need to be kind of like crafted well so that that can be the kind of like universal language that you're working with as you as you go through this i like as an investor and even just like when i'm ever trying to assess out anything i have to work extra hard to be like okay this person well like a lot of times we're investing sometimes we're investing just on charm like alright this person is charming enough that i feel as though there could they can convince other customers to buy or or they can convince employees to join their company you know that's like kinda like that adam we work guy thing and then there's other times where i'm like okay but like what's the idea here and is the idea good and i have to kind of challenge myself to be like to like look beyond the where they currently are because of maybe like a lack of it's just hard to understand man that that it makes a difference and that and i have like overcome that a little bit yeah and i would say some of my best investments have come from very charismatic ceos and some of my absolute worst investments have come from charismatic ceos it cuts both ways on the totally by the way i can't get into stocks it's like dead for me so i'm not know i to refresh it as well and everyone in the chat is saying they had to refresh it too yeah when i refresh them let but alright either anyway way that's okay i don't i don't need that open we wanna do another one i think one more or two more one more there's allison nickel pass alright or za sorry i don't know who's presenting alright that's me hey guys how are you you guys can see my name i think they can alright yeah what's going on name is za ceo and c cofounder of nickel pass before this i was the head of international expansion at huffington post after that i was groomed to be the cro where i discovered we were not profitable we were the largest new site in the world outside of china and i didn't know before i took the job that we actually hadn't found a way to monetize the two hundred million people coming to our websites globally i'm allison pass coo and c founder our part of this i was actually a banker for about ten years and our way of sharing news and information on the team was to have my ea print out an article leave it on the center conference table and say please read and that's certainly not a way of sharing news and information that scales when you're working on remote teams distributed teams nice asynchronous team so nickel pass really solves for all of that and awesome i'll just jump in one of the things that we've come up with is the what we call cocktail party pitch when we're at a party people are like what does nickel past do and what we say is you know how you get an article from a friend shared with you and you get that pop up that says pay for the full site while we invented a product where you never see that again and the way our business works is we sell it to enterprises which allows them to get up to seventy percent off of retail and we customize the past based on what each department and team and user needs to be successful so here's the nickel pass i'm in front of a business insider pay wall i click a button that's i don't think there we go okay there we go through the pay wall so i hit a pay wall i go to my nickel pass which is a chrome extension click on business insider and that's it i never see a pay again so it looks like we're having a little bit of who's sharing what but you guys saw the product a couple things about the business so because of our background the chairman of the company is the former head of strategy at cnn we've been able to collect a network of over two hundred publications including the the la times crunch based pro time magazine and we always like to point out that beer business daily is on here for a reason if i'm an enterprise we work with an he bus they don't need just the new york times they also need beer business daily which tells them about how the craft beer market is doing in the pacific northwest in terms of the business we booked over a million in revenue so that's a million of hard revenue one point two of bookings as some the companies we work with include an push mentioned visa and also public and h us which are respectively the number one and number two marketing and p agencies in the world in terms of why people come to us if you wanted to get these subscriptions yourself be our guess it costs you over a thousand dollars a year just for five different sites obviously that's not gonna scale if you're an enterprise and some of the other problems in the space and the reason we've been able to get some attraction me months number two there is no tech enabled way to buy group subscriptions so if you wanna ten licenses from the new york times today you're essentially filling on a form and then number three now three out of every four new sites require us subscription or have a pay when we started the business now a little over three years ago that number was at thirty percent so about one in three sites so we'll stop there this is awesome this is awesome so and we can just recap because i think some people are having trouble in the stocks platforms they might have missed the beginning of the pitch but basically what you did is i work at a company i go try to click some article to read some important news story that some like coworker sent me i hate hit here with a pay i'll shit hey man what did it say i don't have a business insider subscription u and our company which is let's september we're work at google oh google uses nickel pass so i can just use the chrome extension and bypass the pay wall because google has paid for a multi seat licensed to business insider so business insider is getting this huge bulk subscription buy at they'll give it at a discount yep google wants its employees to be able to read news and employees don't have to pay for it out of pocket that's what happens that's that's it but that's exactly all i'll add some other things publishers right now can convert us in one percent of the people that come to their website to pay for the full subscription so it's a win win for everyone where they they're basically getting all of these people that they would be monetizing it cents on the dollar per year from advertising but do you if if google buys twenty seats do they only get business insider or do they also get all the other publications you had listed there and if they if the second one how do you figure out who which publisher gets paid what money right yeah so we have over two hundred publishers in our network we add more every day we create bespoke packages so how we have an initial package that's you picked six out of ten publications it includes business insider and many others and that's twenty three ninety five a user a month for that package after that we'll upsell from there and we work with customers to design custom packages based on the industry you're in and the role you're in in your industry so if you work at a big bank and you're in marketing and p you're gonna need a very different set of publications than someone who's at the comm team at google but you're we'll be able to work with you to customize that and a lot of that you're now able to do on your own on our administrative panel but then how does if let's just use round numbers let's say it's thirty dollars a month does biz and you have two publications does business insider get ten dollars new times get ten dollars and you guys get ten dollars so what we do is we work with the publishers to either take rate cards they have or create ones from scratch and so that way in the custom package the publishers has always made whole so in your example it all depends on the number of seats that google signs up with so if they sign up with ten people or a thousand people the price may go from ten dollars a month which is a twenty percent discount off of retail to two dollars a month which is you know much more off of retail and then we bundle that and then charge an administrative fee on top of that and that's the bespoke package what's the fees percent so right now gross margins is anywhere from forty four to fifty five percent and that's a combination of not only the seat fee but we integrate with o microsoft active directory the so it's really single sign on for news couple of weapons ins and we basically handle all of that admin for both the enterprise and the publisher that's amazing so let's talk let's talk about the traction okay so you showed a bunch of publications that you guys have gotten to agree with this how many companies are paying for this i i don't know if i i missed that part or wasn't in there yes yep so we have over a hundred and twenty five companies who we currently work with and we're we're adding more every day both smaller companies as well as large enterprises and what does that mean for revenue for you guys yep so we're at one point two million arr and we're on track to be three million by the end of the year and rating at a fifteen million dollar valuation and that's correct three million as in net revenue and you get or is that three million as in you there's three million there's three million for the bundle and you take forty five to fifty percent of it correct right right the the second one correct so more like one point five million is that in real in net revenue is that right in net revenue yes one point five and okay great and so and how do you how do you go on onboard customers so what what do you do to go get the next twenty five fifty customers what what happens well i think one of the things that we're really excited about is the hundred and twenty companies we have they have over four hundred thousand employees so what we've found is that it's much easier to upsell within organization once you land them so what we're seeing is that our growth trajectory if we go from the one percent to the three percent that's how you get to the three and that's why i'm only focusing on two segments right now marketing and p and the consumer finance that doesn't count tel code doesn't count on some of the tech companies you mentioned and it doesn't count international which is actually my background post gotcha so you're just gonna expand within the companies you're already in to get to to get to three billion gross okay but how do you get more customers from here what is the strategy is it outbound is it inbound is it yeah referral program what do you do yep yeah it's we primarily have a cold outbound marketing strategy so we do a lot of lead gen and then we do some organic sourcing organic social and now this is a cost to companies at a time when a lot of companies are cutting costs right so today yep they're just not paying for this and employees are just not getting the benefit or they're paying you know employees pay out of pocket yep if i do this and i have you know one percent of my employees doing this all of a sudden and i've added a i don't know what your what your average volume is but let's say ten grand ten ten grand a a year what what is the average cost of company so that that's grown when we first started it was a roughly the seven to ten grand a year and now what we're seeing is fifty k and that having opportunity to grow and here's the thing you know people see it from two lenses so there's the cost savings and they look at our costs and they're like well it's better than everyone buying at retail than ex back to the company so that's one thing and the second thing is in a time like this if you miss a critical piece of news in your industry the opportunity cost for that is much higher and so you're gonna feel some type of way for not paying the fifty bucks per person per seat because you're like oh i was trying to like basically refine the cost we like to say what we're going after is the budget people used to use on soda machines because this is one of those oh oh i think for you lost files out there but yes this is an spends that people actually already have they just don't realize it frequently it's being put on personal cards and then expense back to the company so the other thing that we're doing is actually giving finance and procurement a single line item so they really understand how much they're spending on news and information the data which for the forty professional the forty million thousand the forty million professional services workers in the us is extremely important to know okay great i also feel like there's probably some strategy where go to an h bush and then has you you know once they have their one percent of people and you go to every other beer your company out there and you say hey an bush does this so that their employees can read beer journal daily and this and that you know would you guys be interested there's a you i think within industries you could sort of play play off each other a little bit exactly and we we've seen that social proof model work extremely well with marketing npr firms and with financial services firms allison and how big is this gonna get you know what do you what you you're gonna get to a hundred million in recurring revenue what's gonna happen yeah without a doubt so we are we see ourselves as really the next version of cable and how we access news content and information digitally it's gonna change drastically from how it it works today and nickel pass is gonna be the single stop solution for that what how many employee let me ask that what same question a little bit differently because sam sam likes to hear the kind of how big is the dream i like to hear a little bit differently which is what would i need to believe for this to be at a hundred million in revenue meaning how many companies how people what what it how do you work your way to a hundred million in revenue yeah so our goal has always been to get everyone access to quality news and information and by everyone we don't just mean professional services workers we also mean individuals and there's a certain price point that individuals can pay for access to quality news and information so we're exploring what that is but i think it's extremely important to note that over the past five years we've understood and i could the general problem could give be the math so like this many companies paying this much a month is a hundred million dollars of revenue and then i need to know is that a i believable number of companies that's like you know out of the total universe so how many companies would you need to be paying you for you to be at that point yeah so we'd need to be at about ten thousand companies based on on our initial math ten thousand companies and you think that those will like you know right now you're at whatever twenty five you think by the end of the year you can get to maybe forty or fifty something like that how phone it is so we're at a hundred and fifty right at a hundred fifty great we're we're you know well beyond the that initial group and what are you guys gonna have to do to go from a hundred fifty to ten thousand companies what will actually need to happen yeah so it's it's too pronged it's that we have to increase our penetration rate on the existing companies from one percent of three percent and that number is even achievable up to the five or ten percent range and then we have to increase our penetration in this in the specific sectors from currently point o one percent to closer through to one percent in each sector so financial services marketing and p and then universities associations as well gotcha okay alright thanks i think we may applied one more did you have you raised any money so far and from who yep yeah so we've raised about five million so far that's our last round was led by river park ventures so the seamless food ordering company cofounder because they took the same b to model to get to a b2c model and we have a number of other institutional as well sixty eight capital rate ventures damn you raised five million at a fifteen million dollar valuation no smaller valuation in the past so this new this new round is fifteen million pre money so you gave up a lot of the company yeah what are you how are you gonna stay motivated you gotta yeah so i understood so we are reworking the cap table as we speak because basically we pivoted the company from a blockchain micro payments and so that's total over the pivot that's by the way you're respect for pivoting away from blockchain that sort of shows me that you're a clear and independent thinker that didn't just like oh here's the trend we are a web three company for micro payments you get a lightning and it's like what what do people what do our customers actually want and in this case you found out what they actually wanted which was not not that not nothing else yeah customers hated it publishers loved it but it wasn't selling to to anyone as as recurring revenue right and we could have raised it a much higher valuation but we chose to pivot i think i think your product is awesome it sounds like your cap table is shitty to be blunt i would love i would love to hear a little bit more about how you i don't wanna hear about it now but like how you're gonna get out of that situation i think it's it's hopefully it's fixable because this product sounds pretty sick and we gotta ask people are asking why what does nickel pass what is this name why are you named after nickel back news used to cost nickel so that's why okay alright great and kinda twenty twenty three dollars per person per month twenty dollars yep congratulations this is sick this is sick i think your pitch was awesome i said what i thought about the cap table at the product's badass yeah it's one little thing between you guys you through you're act together though between you and your c cofounder you guys should figure out who's gonna answer questions and which types of questions so you automatically know when to defer because it's a little bit of a signal when you're doing a pitch and like both are kind of like me sanders we talk over each other a little bit it's okay to podcast or realm but as a company you kinda need to know okay technical questions this person's gonna answer growth questions this person's gonna answer or this one gonna answer everything and then they're gonna say know why don't you talk about that you're your you know she knows it's better than anybody and so you'll be able to kinda defer a little bit better in that sense but could you really good job overall with the pitch that's my only kinda like me feedback for you great thank you grace this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better sick sick company god day man that cap table really fucks things up for her yeah yeah i think that's okay though i think it's recoverable or you know like some people like you know how are you gonna stay motivated some people are motivated you know the numb whether the number whether they're own fifty percent or thirty five percent they they sort of feel the same about it's their baby and also they can be motivated by the regret that's getting away so much of that company in the first crazy to be i i am i am friends with this guy who sold his company for a billion dollars and he nine hundred ninety million and he walked away with three million dollars because he had it was five of them either or four of them so it was four or five of them and then they raised all this money and he walked away with three million dollars on a billion dollar value sale isn't that crazy i i can't i don't understand how you get motivated when you're not gonna get paid yeah well some people some people motivated by the mission some people don't do the math some people are like well fuck i'm stuck now i made that mistake and now i guess i gotta live that gotta i guess i gotta eat that one and by the way shout out to her we don't do public math but we sure as he'll make founders do public math when they pitch us because you know you gotta be able to answer that question in fact i don't even care what the like some people think that when i ask that question how do you get to a hundred million or how do you get to ten million arr i'm like judging whether i'm judging whether that thing sounds feasible or not and that's part of it but the bigger part of it is does this seem like the first time they've done this math or have they done this before is it they haven't done if they haven't done it before like oh this person is not actually thinking of plotting how to like take over and like how to build this into something big they're just kind of like buried their head in product and like they may not have if they haven't thought of it up till now they're probably not gonna be thinking about that in the future in this case i thought that she she had an answer i haven't done the math could go check if that answer was like you know bullshit or real but she had at least thought about we need ten thousand companies at our current you know pricing and scale to be at that you know that revenue mark well and i can't and i think people like think it's a trick question towards like how does this get big or how are you gonna exit and they'll say like this bullshit of like well we're not thinking about an exit it's like dude come on just like this like talk real like like a a good answer is like well the worst case scenario is i think we'll get the five million in this many years and someone's gonna bias us for fifty million dollars and you'll get a two or three extra return i think that's like a likely worst case scenario best case scenario actually think we have a clear path to seventy five million and we're gonna figure out as we go and i think these possible doors might open up and then we could either go public which i would love to go public or we could sell for this much money or we just own the company forever and we grown into this yeah i think that answer works on you because you invest your own money from most venture capitalist investing other people's money they don't care about the two to three x i know but i the downside protection it's like to them it's either a zero or it's huge and so you're better off focusing most of the energy on the how this ends up huge and you might just say you might say things like so you don't have to say oh man i can't wait just to go sell this for a billion dollars but i think you could say like like we had a buddy ramon who who was telling us about this he's like look right now i have you know i don't know what what it was like hundred thousand you know like pet owners who have bought from me and i know their name their address their dog's name their dog's breed their dog's age i know everything about them he goes and named like the big you know chewy doesn't know any of that because they sell on store shelves but i have the largest database databases this i think that asset gonna be worth a lot of money to one of these companies and i think that you know that's beyond just the sales that we're already doing and so you can kind of say your downside protection that we're building a valuable that's kinda what i mean i'm just saying that like at just it it's okay to show weakness and it's okay to show uncertainty but at the same time you also wanna have like a yeah but i think this could happen and here's how what the flight booking guy said is also perfect which is you don't have to say this gonna be a billion dollar company just gonna autopilot it like a you know venture capital robot like you know what he could say is basically you know he's like he's like you know i don't know what i don't know where the ceiling of this is because nobody's ever done this before but there's a clear path to seventy five million and we're gonna get there we're gonna look up and figure out what's next and i i think that's a totally honest but also exciting version of that answer which is to say like look we don't know how high this think can fly but i know there's a clear path to this i'm just laser focused fifty million arr before i go to bed i kiss my daughter night and i say fifty million in arr and when i wake up and i'm brushing my teeth i say fifty million arr because i know that that's what's in front of us and like i can't sleep because it's so obvious that there's a step by step path and go get there so you could say some bullshit like that and people get like people start to believe that you believe that that's your certainty that there's a clear path that that makes them certain there's a clear path to it badass let's do the last one what's up colton take it away hi i'm colton wood founder of lil duck pool company i'm a pool industry expert with a knack for sourcing companies that may not know they wanna sell in creating acquisition plan started out with my own pool maintenance business from zero clients now i make about eighteen thousand monthly reoccurring revenue all in under three years my father owns a large pool res servicing company in orlando florida and found our first private acquisition deal from a friend who was feeling like he was ready to retire instead of just letting his business dissolve we negotiated a purchase at about a multiple of you know four months of the monthly gross revenue currently we've secured two upcoming purchase contracts in south florida pool construction sector with another in negotiation for quarter four we are projecting ten point three million dollars in gross for our twenty twenty three sales with a yearly increase of thirteen percent as we streamline the processes and add in modern tech or working to build a portfolio of pool construction companies in south florida and gain a majority of the market share and then add in pool cleaning and maintenance on these accounts for additional monthly reoccurring revenue ideally we like to secure locations in all of south florida with in the next five years with four owner operators in place who know the industry know the business how to utilize specific contractors we're looking to take over the industry and build an empire like real estate in now is the hottest time to invest in south florida pool construction six so let me bay is this basically like a pe play where you're buying baby boomers businesses who put pools and of people's backyard in a simple and a simple explanation kind of yeah i mean it's a it's a little hard than that because you know south forty you dig fifty four inches you hit water so if you don't know what you're doing you could really mu it up but yeah so we know the industry we know the pool we know pool construction so we can find people that are already retire and instead of letting their business just go to the wind and the other guys pick it all up we can utilize different contractors that specialize in you know foreman and steel excavation take his company and he sub contracts out to the plumbing guys and the tile guys the screening closure guys and he's spending so much money on paying subcontractors whatever they need to charge because he's gotta hire him because he can't do it himself so we buy these individual companies that can complement each other bring everything in house and we can get our permits done faster reduce our wait times and increase profits and turn over more projects year over year so that's why we're looking at thirteen percent increase on sorry problem so just multiple choice answer your company does what do you a sell software b by existing pool companies c invest in cool or d other which one of those four things do you do b we we buy pool companies mergers than acquisitions yeah you you're rolling up pool companies and you're rolling them up and you are a good you are not buying them for less or anything like that you buy them at some fair value but you are better operating because you do what a you have different expertise in house b you have better software c you have economies of scale what is the the advantage you have buy the a and b so we we know the business we do it well and we implement modern technology so three d modeling designs for the pools so we can email to gus we don't gotta go to their house with a pen and paper and show them how it's done so we can just email it over and then also since covid hit permitting has been horrible slowed down a lot now we can do digital permitting where we can be on video chat with the with the county that we're working with and when they of you right on the phone we could show them step by step and get the phases approved without having to wait for time on their schedule for them to come to the site so the result is you guys build pools for faster and cheaper how much faster and how much cheaper we build them faster we don't build them cheaper but how many fast point it it depends on the county you know each county is gonna be a little bit different but if you don't have to wait on the subcontractors to get you on their schedule or not show up and and reschedule on you it's it's gonna be at least twenty percent faster five percent okay great and you up till now you've bought how many pool companies so right now we've signed we have our own we own two but we bought we have two purchase contracts signed an agreement and we have one in negotiation that we're looking to get another round of funding for and then explain would you buy a business like this yeah you know it has this much in eb typically it's been in business for ten years or whatever and you're buying it at at some multiple and you're financing at how well the first two we sold our houses okay what do you do for the next two but we're looking to raise capital and then we're also gonna make a plan using the signed contracts usually you're two years out you know two years booked out with these with these contracts for the pool companies that we're buying so not only we're buying the company we're buying the crew we're having the owner stay on for two years as a consultant while we put a project manager in place for him to train and then we're getting all of those contracts and they get paid in phases so we'll use some of the working capital to put aside into another fund to use to purchase more businesses as we as we roll out all the locations we need between like i said foreman and steel activation shot creek tile mar site plaster guys we're we're gonna buy all the specialty contractors and roll them all to one company so well sean and i one of our best investments ever we i think we both invested at the same time into a biz shawn is still there yeah we both invest we invested into this business that started by our friends c eva called lin ventures and his whole premise was to buy businesses that baby boomers who wanna retire and their kids don't wanna take it over basically that's exactly what's going on and sam z it sam sells the guy who basically created the reit he owned sc bikes he owned the tribune he owned a bunch of stuff rich guy he owned waste management i think anyway he said recently in a podcast that he is making more money off of buying businesses from baby boomers who don't wanna pass their companies onto the kids than he has ever made in real estate yeah and so that's just for the proof that this is actually quite interesting and i think c actually bought a pool business denis sean yeah golf and pools it's in arizona yeah and they're killing it i would argue that that's probably the path you should go and for these pitches you should entirely pitch it that way another way that you could maybe pitch is the guy who started i was gonna bring this up on the podcast on but the guy who started we were we up upwork have you heard of upwork it's like the outsourcing tech company he started this new company called i actually don't know how he's air e r g e o n and it's a fence contractor an installation and repair business and he just raised like forty million dollars for it and he bootstrap to like four hundred employees do you see this sean no i've never seen that that's great crazy dude it just got launched like or it just got released like two days ago on tech crunch he was like i they're were like i we we wanted to keep this in the d but basically we boot bootstrap this into a monster business and we just raised financing for it and at a huge valuation because getting someone to build a fence is the pain in the ass well we just went and just like you so what they did is they used a little bit of technology and they made the process easier and better what c is doing is he just saying no one wants these businesses we're gonna buy them for cheap and we're just gonna install a manager and let it run so anyway i think if i was to you i would go one of those two routes and i would go all in on one of those two routes i imagine seeing that your website it'll i went to it it looks like it's built on wix technology technologies is not gonna be where you're gonna play it's gonna be the pe route but the problem is is you don't actually seem entirely bought in on that route so that's like my fairly critical feedback did do you think i hit the nail on the head there sean if i can go ahead called if i can interject i i think that yeah that's that's pretty accurate it's a little it's a little bit more difficult you know these guys they are retiring but they also it's very difficult to get in this industry you have to have four years of experience and then go in front of a board the dp even get approved to have the license to do it so it's not like millennials or gen z can just hey i'm gonna start a pool construction company today you're gonna have to go work for somebody for four years to get that experience to even do it so it's it's really not super turnkey so there's not a lot of competition for the pe to go out and scoop them up you know we're we're poised and ready to strike okay but yeah i would say i'm just gonna give you some pitch feedback because i think your pitch was confusing and therefore hard to raise money which is what we're here to do right so number one like use a you you had a slide up there that had a bunch of text but then you talked a bunch and you weren't talking exactly you weren't just saying the points on the slide you were telling a story which is good it's good to tell a story but if you can tell story just put like a picture on the screen so it's like you know this is you know this is my pool company we've been doing this this business spits off this much cash and we're you know we're not alone there's four hundred these just in the florida area where you know where i'm from and i bought two more of these and these are great businesses to buy in fact i sold my house to buy these because there's such better investment than my home and you know this first one we bought we bought it for this much it's already paid itself off in two years and blah blah the second one blah blah same thing and for each one of these we have a playbook of how to buy it grow it and like improve it from where it was we improve each of these businesses by over twenty five percent within the first year okay great so we're gonna keep doing this so we have a plan that is working you know but i don't have any more houses to sell so it's time for me to go raise some money and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna raise five million dollars i'm gonna go buy twenty million dollars worth of of pool pool companies and we're gonna start rolling these up you've probably seen these roll ups get pretty big this roll up in the dental space got this big this roll up in the pool space got this big in a different state you know sam z the guy who invented the reit is doing doing these roll up the guy who started yelp upwork is now doing this with fencing companies this is a strategy that works now the problem is most people don't have what i have they don't have fifteen years of pool construction experience so even if they wanted to do this they wouldn't really know where to start they wouldn't know the nuances of permitting and i can say a bunch of words you're not gonna understand but the that those are kind fifteen years of hard warrant lessons and so today i'm coming here i'm gonna raise this i'm gonna build a billion dollar pool roll up company and like you gotta say the category of your company the size of the all of that i think would be like i don't know if you heard that in the chat i know stocks savvy surprise right but if you heard that a chat go one to ten where was my pitch on a scale of one to ten if clear and compelling because that's where you need to get this to because i think you actually have a really good idea i don't i don't think we we we need a smart investor like you sean because man you you said it perfectly you he wanna do the work he wants you to do the work yeah i want you to be the one who says like you know i i wanna invest in people who figure these things out if i'm if you need me for help honestly it's usually a bad sign for my investment like i wanna be helping of a rocket that's already going and not yep like pushing into something that's at a standstill things and so well you know you know the investment industry and you know the roll ups and you know the comparable i'm i'm out here doing the doing the hard work managing the crews fair enough fair enough and so i think take that and basically say okay the problem was i wasn't clear on what type of investment vehicle this is this is a roll up second i gotta weave my story just a bit of my story which is that i'm i got tons of experience doing this i've already started my roll up this is not just a idea that's pie the sky i already got the first two under my belt i did those myself bootstrap and they're working and now i just gotta tell you how we're gonna go from two to twenty doing this and that when we have twenty it's gonna be worth this much because i can just do some math say twenty times each one is worth ten million dollars i got a two hundred million dollar roll up if we if we could pull this off right beautifully said the other thing is you didn't say about debt are you taking on debt for for doing this you said you're kind of raising money to buy the next ones why aren't you using debt now we haven't taken any loans we thought about it we thought about doing sba but i mean it it just made more sense to seller finance so what we we actually did was negotiated like a ten percent down with seller financing over five years of the balloon payment and the it's so cheap we can just why why don't you say that that's a that's a great point i'm buying these for tires down i'm giving me my secrets over the internet to thousands of people and now millions of your podcast listeners so here you go they're what's gonna you you it's not a secret so you selling not a secret in fact you kind made it low sound like you don't know what debt is because you didn't say anything but now we've revealed the truth okay great honestly again i think you actually have a very good business idea presented slightly differently that'd be you know i think it could be very investment worthy especially right now you know you see stocks going down see crypto going down these private companies are raising at huge valuations with like you know software and a dream whereas you're like actually i buy successful profitable companies and i'm just a better operator than the mom and pop and i'm am gonna aggregate these because like i just have a playbook that i could just keep rolling out and by the way i buy these for ten percent down so that means you know you know my cash on cash return after you know fifteen months looks like this and so you you have a very very strong pitch and you just gotta like you know put it all together yeah after thirty years of doing something they're gonna be real tired they don't wanna they don't wanna push the needle they don't wanna make it bigger they have a paycheck coming in salary they're taking care of so right there was a guy so right now for the listeners colton he's sitting in front of a book show that's empty and someone just says you peter t zero to one is not in his books shelf and for that reason our model this is where all of my trophies are gonna go for for all the wins we're about to have oh lean start not on his books shelf for that reason i'm out yeah dude you you seem to be spending too much time actually billy your business i need somebody who's way more into reading about business yeah you don't seem like you do yoga i'm out you're on a gamer chair you're not like auto auto a treadmill desk i'm out you eat carbs i'm out yeah that's hilarious thanks dude thanks for coming on thank you so much alright i asked i don't know if ollie is gonna pop think guy i start stocks but that was that was fun some i think some people need some work on their pitch not as much work on their business but work on just like saying what the fuck they do so let's go most interested to least interested let's rank the companies based on on that i'll i'll kinda remind you what they were so there was five x that was the first business that pitched which was doing something that we could barely understand but at a million dollars of of arr commitments you know for his kinda like marketing stack that he was or you know this like vendor stack that he was putting in a box then we had i think fly together which wasn't their name it was like ba mckay or something like that group booking on travel third one we had was or who was doing much i think which was taken creators content and letting you chop it up into bits and letting them re picking it easy for them to repo using a ai software then we had the last guy was duck and before that we had nickel pass that i'd miss anyone yeah alright i did miss someone or no no i don't think you missed someone i think my ranking from most to least from the ones i would wanna invest in to the least i would actually put nickel and fly together maybe nickel first but the fly together b i would put that they would trade for one or two in the middle would be five x and then tied for the bottom ones would be the jelly snack competitor and du keys okay alright i like it mine would be fly together number one i thought that he seemed great and the business seemed you know pretty straightforward and had momentum and you know i need to go look at the competition like is it really as backwards and he's kind of the only real one doing this as as it made it sound but i i like this sound of that one i i actually think that duck is probably the second or first best investment but i'm not sure i would wanna invest in colton just because you know he seemed like i think i wanna hang out with him but i'm not i wanna invest in him because i feel like i'd just be frustrated because he speaks a different language than me he speaks like dig holes in the ground and build a pools and like i speak like frameworks and like you know hey colton i like you just change the way you look for me please yeah just like just talked entirely different for me for yeah if i invest in it i'd be like look we're allowed to hang out but we'll never be allowed to talk about the business and like in twenty years just mail me a giant check and just in between i need to pretend it's gone so so that be a second by the way i'm calling them i'm messing with you also i love the name of that little duck that's a great pool name i do nico pass three and then the other the two probably wouldn't invest it so there's are kinda like four and five alright ali you're here the crowd has beating you up because stocks was crashing ali just is it because we're too popular are we just too popular is that what happened or or is this something something is ali mo is the founder of stocks yes thank thanks for having me guys great great show loved the real talk honestly i it's it's the best real talk we've had on stocks and and and you know the comments show it yeah so you you guys crashed stocks you you this this is one of our biggest events and we were also in the middle of like a code migration so there were more issues at this event than the last like fifty events put together so the stream crashed a few times but a page refresh it fix it but it it will be a lot more stable going forward so thank you for hanging in there and i can attest that so people don't know this min you we used to compete at our previous start so you built stream labs we we were building be we're both trying to build tools for live streamers on twitch and so i've seen you execute from you know first of all that we became friends kind of towards the end but like you're good and when you decide to do something you guys pull you know you guys are scrappy and you pull it off and actually when we were competing against each other i had asked i told michael bur who was the founder of of the original be and he was our investor i said yeah there's this company stream labs out there and he he was like who's behind it and i told him your name and he goes i know these guys used to have some company called peanuts something and he's like oh these guys these guys are like you know they always just find like the thing that people want and he was basically described just very scrappy entrepreneurs who will just like kind of like you'll never die and you'll like kind of just keep iterating until you find this i hook that people want and then you're like go for it we go for it with like full force is that accurate thank you thank you you are you're duke guy and sean met have a lot of respect for what you did as well amazing products and you got take your ass for what it's worth i feel like the in the end we we're repeating to you guys but it really you guys kicked our ass no no it's it's right i mean i have a lot of respect for for for you and you know what you what you've done in birch as well but amazing amazing event today guys it's just our our our team has been loving it the chad been loving it i think sam asked everyone should be do it again it seems like seem seems like the chat is really into it yes so on the podcast yesterday we talked about this company called steak and they're like an online crypto gambling website and they basically give drake a certain amount of money like ten million dollars a month in order to gamble twenty million dollars a month in order to gamble on the website and he tweets about it and people come and watch him gamble and they give him free house money to play with in order to attract more users so we'll take twenty as a gambling this is a gambling website it's called steak dot com yeah it's awesome so it's really effective for that company usually we is is this a do we need to set up like money for you guys like a house exactly okay yes exactly i think that you give us each like ten or twenty grand do invest different startups ups and by the way we will invest random mass influencers and also so we'll go get you know we'll get jake paul in here we're we'll can just go get a bunch of like house other famous peoples to be our friend of the house and just give us a house budget to go best in start you know this is this is actually not a half joke health idea but this is actually not a terrible aid here this is oh so we have a we look we're smile don't don't don't don't assume smiling me the joke i am not joking might be a dead serious we should do this so so the way we could do it is we we we have a small font it's called the best of stocks fund and we do write checks into interesting startups particularly high traction or or great c investors similar to what you guys look for so what we could do is for your next event we could each give you one one check so you pick your one favorite start out of the five or so that pitch at your next event and and we'll write that yeah but i want we you well you want to stakes some edinburgh oh okay so that's that's a little more work i mean have figure it out that's alright let me let me get back to you maybe maybe we can give you some carry on that or yeah that would be for something out okay that'd be cool alright so also people need to know that ali mo is not the same as mo ali the the other guest on our podcast all the time and i call them mo ali my you you said it right but people the chat like wait is this the deodorant guy like no there's there's mo ali that's the deal guy who's ali mo that's the stocks guys so yeah i'm not i'm an investing guy not the d guy you gotta be sick of that i i have to assume you know it's fine it's a it's more followers for both of us people we we confuse all our followers great that's amazing okay and also we've been doing this books shelf meme this whole time get us a book off the shelf there something that has helped you've sold a company for over a hundred million dollars i believe and so so you read books and you've had success give us a book off that shelf there that you will recommend to the crowd something that you think has helped you i think bring it over go grab the book okay okay dude he's got a nice house so he lives in san francisco i was actually my test to see if he's wearing only underwear on a lot on a on zoom and no he he passed he's wearing wearing shorts if you ask up right now you might be you know this this stream might might be rated you know pg thirteen at least are you wearing on only underwear right now i'm more in my jam b's which are which are are more than underwear okay so this this is what i'm reading right now i have the same one sensory three but huge huge fan so looks like i've actually bought this as well so it's a compilation of night from nineteen sixty four i think up until two thousand ten or i forget the year of every single one of warren buffett annual letters and what you'll notice i actually analyze this his words per sentence actually gets shorter and shorter each year and i would argue that's because he's becoming a better writer and what's really interesting about that book is he explains like really complicated topics like geico car insurance and incredibly easy to understand ways so i i think that's a good book to read that's cool connor the chat so you picked the heaviest book has power move i agree absolute alpha move of you just now to go pull a a a you know thirty six pound book off the shop i i appreciate that alright well ali thanks for help tell your boy john hancock and the rest of the team thanks for making this happen this was awesome sean i think i guess we'll do this again this was is was pretty good i think we had a little kinks workout but it's pretty good yeah let us know tweet at us if you're if you're were here live or if you listen to the pod tweet us if you if you want us to do more of these or or you know if this should be a one time thing