University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups For $5000 Prize Money
By the way, you like how he was like, so sharks, you want to come take a swim in the maritime industry?
These kids are the best. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I thought this was going to be stupid. These are— these guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.
Also, if this is like the bar, if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then like, uh, you know, like I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had like short shorts and nobody could use their left hand and like, you know, it was a peach basket for a hoop. It's like, oh wow, these These guys can jump.
Yeah, it's like we just— like LeBron just learned how to lift weights. Like, that's what this feels like.
All right, what up? We got a special episode. This is like a Shark Tank style episode. So this is the My First Million pitch competition. We got the University of Michigan, so Wolverines are here. We got 5 companies, I believe. Each company is going to have 2 minutes to pitch, a 5-minute Q&A, and the winner will get $5,000 at the end, as decided by me and Sam, whoever is the best at pitching. And little do people know this, this is how I became an entrepreneur. I was going to be a doctor, and then I entered a pitch competition at my university, and I won that baby for $25 grand. And, um, that was what got me on the path of entrepreneurship altogether. I would've never, ever, ever done startups, uh, if it wasn't for that competition that we randomly entered. So this could be kind of for somebody out there, this could be their break too. So here we go. University of Michigan pitch competition. First up, um, who is it? Jake. So Jake from Aria, is that right?
Yes.
Hey guys, what's up? All right. 2 minutes is all yours. Go.
Cool. So, hey guys, my name's Jake. I'm the founder of Aria. We're bringing e-commerce abilities to in-person shopping. And so as an e-commerce business owner myself, we, we know quite a bit about our customers, such as who they are, what they're interested in, and how they engage with our business. And so this, this type of information informs all aspects of our operations from developing new products and then driving more sales. And so The question that comes to mind is, why aren't these same necessities available to retail business owners? Why is this limited to just e-commerce? And this happens because the source of the transaction, which is the barcode, um, at Aria, we're making a new type of product code that brings, uh, e-commerce abilities to retail. So this is called OneTag. It uses radio frequency identification. This is the same type of technology in contactless credit cards and garage door openers, and it recently became affordable at a mass scale. And, uh, OneTag is super versatile. There's a lot of uses for it. It costs pennies to manufacture, and it's printed on a sticker to attach to merchandise. So by replacing the barcode with OneTag, retailers unlock new capabilities in a variety of things. I'm going to go into one example now. So this is a traditional retail setup. You have your products, then you have barcodes, and each one is individually scanned. Instead of that, let's just replace all these barcodes with with one tag. So now, uh, uh, shopper can just bag all items as they shop, and then they can pretty much just walk through an antenna which instantly scans all of their items at once. And then payment can be done through a kiosk for quick self-checkout or through an app. That uses, uh, something called Ultra Wideband, which is a new type of technology, uh, that's brought to iPhone in as recent as 2019. And so, um, this pretty much tracks location of the customer and shows what products they purchased and how they purchased it. And so you could pretty much walk out and then payment's instantly processed as you walk out, just like Amazon Go. And so what this does, in addition to autonomous checkout, is it brings a bunch of e-commerce capabilities to retail. So now we have an e-commerce profile for a bunch of offline purchases, and this allows us to do abandoned cart recovery, personalized product upsells, uh, in-depth shopping data, and subscription reorders. There's also loss prevention built right in. And then the location accuracy of RFID is super high, so inventory management is pretty easy. All you really have to do is put an item in its proper location, and then if an item is ever misplaced, Area pretty much will map the entire location of all these items. And so instead of arduous stock checks, you can pretty much just instantly know where things are misplaced and address those directly. And so yeah, that's my product. This is OneTag. It's checkout, security, and inventory all in one product. Most importantly, it brings e-commerce abilities to retail.
Uh, I own a sex chocolate brand.
What is it called?
It's called Tabs Chocolate.
Yeah, we, we've talked about you, uh, a fair bit, uh, on the pod, I think, right? You've got like a crazy, uh, Instagram or TikTok or something like that.
Yeah, that's cool. Wait, you're in college?
I am. I'm a sophomore now.
My God. Okay. Uh, cool.
All right. So Sam, what do you think?
Yeah, so I've talked to a few companies in this space. I know there's a few people trying to attack it and some of 'em I think are actually quite big. I, the, one of the most interesting, so basically Jake explained it in a more sophisticated way. I'm gonna explain it in a more dumb way, which is like, this little tag goes into clothing and, you know, the clothing's history and you could track it and things like that. And I saw a company that was doing this with high-end luxury goods. So like, I don't know if this was their customer, but basically like this would get sewn inside of a Louis Vuitton purse. And whether, you know, how people buy and sell used purses, you could see like where it originally came from, who originally bought it. And as a collector of like old stuff, I thought that was awesome. I thought that was great. So I— it's, it's interesting technology to me. I don't really know this market that well, but I do think there's a few people doing this, right, Sean?
Well, I, I think you are looking only at a little niche use case. It seems like to me what they're doing is they're trying to take the Amazon Go store— like, Amazon's like, hey, what if there was a grocery store where you could walk in and just walk out? There's no checkout process, right? That's more efficient, it's more convenient, um, and it's lower cost because you don't have to, you know, employ all these checkout folks at the, at the store. And, um, they're trying to just provide that as a, like, anybody, any store should be able to have that if they want kind of the, uh, the next level of self-checkout is I think what they're trying to do. And so I think that's a cool idea. I think it, it ticks a lot of boxes. So, um, technology that really wasn't possible, wasn't cheap enough until a few years ago. I like that, like these little I, I don't know if they're called— I don't know if these are NFC chips or whatever, but like the very cheap, like pennies, uh, of these, like, um, the pennies, like pennies now to, to manufacture or add these little chips to, um, to any kind of goods. So I think that's really great that that's now possible. It wasn't possible before. I think it's clearly cheaper, faster for the person who's doing it. Um, but I do have some problems with your pitch, so I'm gonna give you like 3 bits of pitch feedback for you.
All right, Jake, so Keep in mind though, he's doing this with like in the most like hoodrat way ever right now. We've got like one person talking, another person hitting slides, and there's a delay. So go a little easier.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, of course. And also he's like sideways on my screen, so that doesn't help. Uh, but basically the, the, the main things I would have said in the pitch is basically like, uh, you know, you have 3, 3 major ways that you could have presented this. Number 1, you could have shown a barcode. And just been like, can you believe this hasn't been upgraded in like 100 years? Like, this is the same thing we've been using for 75 years. We got iPhones, we got all this crazy stuff, all this amazing technology, but the barcode is still the same. And like, you could have presented it from that angle. Like, the barcode is, is outdated. We're, we're revolutionizing the barcode and the barcodes on everything. So like, that's how big this idea is going to be. The second thing was basically like, we're taking the Amazon Go checkout and we're making it available to any store. Right? That, that's a very simple way for me to understand what you're talking about. Um, then the, the third thing is that you have a really cool backstory with, with the chocolate stuff. So you could be like, I'm Jake, I'm a sophomore in college. This year I sold $4 million worth of sex chocolate. Um, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a hustler. I don't think my career's gonna, you know, I don't think sex chocolate's the big idea for me, but it led me to what I think is the big idea. And already I'd be hooked cuz I'm like, who is this college sophomore that sold $4 million of sex chocolate? Like, tell me more. Right? So that's my pitch feedback for you. Um, on that side, on the, on, and the actual idea itself, the part I felt was lacking was the go-to-market. So this was, this was all about technology, technology, technology, but how are you gonna get customers? And are, you know, are these stores gonna be willing to revamp? Are pro— are customers gonna understand what the hell's going on? And I think that's where this technolo— that's where this, a company like this would struggle, but you didn't really talk about that at all. So can you talk about How are you going to go get your first, you know, 10 or 100 customers? Have you done that already or how are you going to do it?
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm talking to customers right now. It would pretty much be, there would really be no retrofitting for a store. Um, the first MVP would be pretty much an iPad kiosk, uh, that's self-checkout.
So, but they have to tag every product, right?
They do.
Yeah.
But a lot of retailers, especially small retailers, don't even use like universal product code. They have to tag. Barcodes. So it's not really an increase in labor. And, um, the way, the way I'm envisioning for the MVP is, uh, customers already have to check out somehow. They go to the front desk, there's an iPad there that says Instant Checkout, they put their bag there and pay with credit card. And then soon you could add in things like, uh, antennas with adapted inventory, and then ultimately autonomous checkout with an app.
So who are you going for? Like small stores, big stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, huge brands? What— who you going for?
I'm thinking clothing stores and convenience stores, at least initially. So convenience stores give a lot of the benefits of the just walk out stuff, the convenience stuff, and then clothing stores prioritize the e-commerce abilities a lot more to be able to retarget customers and be a little bit more pointed with the way they're selling things.
So for how young and how impressive you are, I have got incredibly high standards because you're like, you're amazing. I mean, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're a certified badass with your background and how young you are. Thanks. I am shocked at how much you are. You are screwing this up though, like with this pitch, because first you build them up. Well, my standards with him are so high because like I would invest in a lot of things that this guy does just because he's him. I think if you're that young and you're this successful already, like, you clearly have some type of it factor. Jonathan, by the way, can you mute them? You clearly have some type of mute factor or you have some type of it factor. Sorry. And you're amazing. I think, though, that when Sean nailed it, where he said that— I don't— he didn't say it this way, but basically, this isn't really a tech problem. Like, the tech exists and you're going to be working on that. This is a distribution and marketing problem. Can you just get this in the hands of the right people? I don't have a lot of experience selling to like, uh, convenience stores and things like that. I think that would be a pain in the ass unless you got like a 7-Eleven or something like that. But like, I think going like from store to store to store is gonna be the worst. But anyway, uh, I think this is like a distribution customer acquisition problem.
It's a sales problem. Yeah, and your problem— and like, if you're gonna sell to a convenience store, like, the dude who owns the convenience store is working there. That will tell you how much he thinks about efficiency, right? Like he just sits there all day. And like, if you're like, hey, you have 4,000 SKUs on your shelves, could you just add this tab to it? And then when a customer comes in, you could tell them just to walk out. He'd be like, actually, it's fine. They just— I actually want them to come to the front counter so they buy a 5-Hour Energy also and a lotto ticket. And like, I don't want them to just walk out. That's like half the revenue. And so, you know, I think that, that if I was you, what I would say is Who needs this the most? Well, I guess if I was you, I'd probably actually lean on your strengths. You're like good at TikTok and shit like that.
That's my point. It's like, you're good at shit that old people are bad at.
You're doing a product that old people would be good at, which is basically enterprise sales, going to a Kroger and showing them that with this increase in efficiency or retargeting or whatever, they're going to get, you know, it's a 4% impact to the, you know, to their, to their operations. And that's a huge number for them., but that takes, that's like a year-long rollout or whatever. I think the SMB sale problem is going to be pretty tough here. So that's what I would say is the weaknesses, but really cool idea. And, um, the good, the good thing is I do think this is inevitable. Like I do think this is where all retail is going. It's the, how is it going to get there? That's sort of the challenge. And, um, so, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's the opportunity also.
I think it's definitely going to be challenging to acquire the first initial customers. The way this works though, is it gets easier over time. So you could build leverage with brands and have them install the tag itself. This is obviously a long-term goal, but once it's similar to a UPC where it's applied at checkout, the barrier to entry for a retailer to carry Area or carry OneTag in their store is virtually the same. And a lot of these benefits are actually pretty relevant to retailers. It's not really like this kind of archaic, like old thing. So I think, I think it's definitely gonna be challenging to like go door to door and pitch. And I think there definitely would need to be some sort of investor or person that could intro me to a bigger chain there where we could like do an ex— do a rollout of this that's much more efficient. But yeah, I mean, you're definitely right. It's going to take some, some legwork to, to get someone on board.
If I was you, there's a thing called Walmart Labs that you should check out. So Walmart has basically a giant innovation department, or at least they did. I don't know if this is still around, but like they acquired a bunch of startups. They put like millions and millions of dollars into Walmart Labs where they were going to like experiment with technology because Walmart's the biggest retailer. For them, 1% matters a lot. And, um, I would go talk to them and be like, hey, here's what we're thinking about. And I think that conversation will be pretty illuminating, um, to figure out like, you know, what's the— what is the appetite? What are the concerns? What's How would they realistically, you know, how would you realistically get this into stores? So that'd be my suggestion as a next step.
And I actually think that a lot— I know I'm currently filming this in Austin right now. H-E-B has like an innovation lab. I would imagine— I think Costco, I imagine, would. Sam's Club, which is also Walmart, does. But I think that as a 19, 20, 21-year-old person with a really successful background, I think you actually have this massive advantage to go to some of these like executives at some of these big companies, these gray-haired executives and they would meet someone like you and they're like, you're, you're special. Like, it's my job to like collect interesting talent and like be on the latest and greatest and know what's happening. I, I don't know if you're going to pull this off, but like, I want to, I want to be in business with you. And I think like 3 out of 20 people who you talk to would give you a chance just because of your success and your age. And I think that you should use every advantage you have.
Do you think I go to big retailers initially versus small shops?
I 100% would. I would, I would go big right away.
I think big retailers think about this stuff in a more like they, they need to be innovating and these efficiencies mean a lot more to them. Um, and they can sort of mandate these rollouts. So, so, so I think that's the, that's the play. And Sam's totally right. There's going to be an executive who's like, love this. You're gonna be like, wow, he loves the technology. He's gonna be like, he's gonna tell you, he's gonna be like, you gotta meet my son. He needs to be more like you. And really like the draw is gonna be he wants his 18-year-old son to hang out with you so that he could be more like you. And like, you know, that actually could get you a long way. That actually happened to me several times in my, like, basically between 18 and 24. I got so many either investors or intros or things like that just because people just thought it was endearing that I was this young kid who believed in this stupid thing and was going for it and was clearly smart and gonna do things later. And, uh, they just wanted that energy around them. They wanted to like support it.
They go, I just want a piece of the action. I don't know what it's going to be. But like when you see like anyone who's like at the top, oftentimes they'll be like, I appreciate young hustlers who are like, they're going to be the real deal. I see myself in you, whatever it is. And they build a relationship. And I would 100% use that because there's like this like 5 or 6 year window when you're still considered a prodigy and you should just like pounce on that. Right. Thanks, Jake.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks, Jake. All right. Who's next? We got Anant from Internet Activism. By the way, that guy's pitch was like a fricking Pixar movie or something. It was like animated in Figma. Like kids these days, they got the tools, man. I don't, I don't even know how do you do that? Did you, have you ever even seen that before?
No, that was all designed in Figma.
Yeah, that was impressive.
This, this one looks good too. I like Internet Activism. I like, I'm clicking on your deck now. I like your, I like your hacker design. It's cool.
All right, 2 minutes, it's all yours.
Go. All right, my name is Anant Sinha. I'm the CTO of an organization called Internet Activism. So currently the world is online. Over 64% of the world has access to the internet, and the world's poorest communities, people are more likely to have access to a cell phone than a toilet. But still, the internet's potential when it comes to distributing humanitarian software is heavily underutilized. In response to this, Internet Activism is the first nonprofit that's solely dedicated to developing software in response to humanitarian disaster. So now I'm going to walk you through a couple examples of what this actually looks like. In March 2022, we launched a website called Ukraine Takes Shelter. This is essentially like Airbnb for refugees. We connected refugees with potential hosts and Over the last year, we've been able to house over 100,000 refugees with just $10,000 in spend.
How did you track that? Like, you know for a fact you put them in their home?
Yeah. Another example of a project we worked on is the world's most popular coronavirus tracking dashboard. This was launched in January 2020 before COVID-19 was officially a pandemic. It was used by over 600 million people. It was recognized by Dr. Fauci as an invaluable resource in distributing COVID-19 information. We were also recognized as being able to compile coronavirus data faster than the CDC and sharing it with general public. And now moving on to what we're doing right now, we're building out an app called HyperLocal. This essentially allows people to message each other just using Bluetooth. So if you don't have access to data or Wi-Fi or cellular service, you can still message others using Bluetooth even if they aren't right near you. We can carry, store, and forward messages, so messages can hop between people across large distances. This app is completely decentralized, it's censorship-resistant, and it's secure. And we envision this to soon be a vital part of the modern-day emergency toolkit. So the central thesis for our organization is being low-cost, having a quick response time, and having building with small teams. We're going to build out an entire suite of products that we can tweak in a matter of days or hours to respond to crises around the world. And our main goal is to bridge the gap between the tech sector and humanitarian organizations. Our leadership consists of the world's leading internet activists, exited founders, and highly talented designers and developers. We're all young, ambitious, and we build really, really fast. And when crisis occurs next, we'll be ready to respond and move on to questions.
Wow. Wow. That was incredible. Did you— Yeah.
Who are you? These people are fucking amazing, by the way. How old are you? 21. And you're in college?
Yeah.
Why?
I'm asking myself that question too. Probably going to take a gap semester or a permanent gap semester starting next month.
This is amazing. Well done. Um, from the start, the pitch was amazing. Uh, you know, the world's poorest communities are more likely to have a cell phone than access to a toilet. Um, that is, uh, you know, a great attention-grabbing, you know, like, you know, grab them by the throat type of, type of, uh, hook. And then, then you backed it up and you were like, you know, we're gonna do this thing, we're gonna basically develop software, nonprofit developing software for the humanitarian disaster. Okay, it sounds interesting. But you've actually done it. So super impressive that you guys did this Airbnb thing and you housed 100,000 refugees. Um, I remember using this coronavirus tracker, uh, that you guys made. Um, so that's kind of amazing as well.
And it sounds like— how much traffic did you say that one got?
And how did it get so popular? What did you do? Did you just release it to the world and it just went, or was there any growth and marketing around it?
I believe it was because of how early it was released. This was before Johns Hopkins started like publicly aggregating all the data and releasing it. We just had an advantage of being like one of the first people to compile all this data and share it with everyone. Again, this was in January 2020, so this was 3 months before like the pandemic officially began. This was just in the early stages of the pandemic.
And so you said this— you show this leadership team, which is 3 people. How many people are there total in your group or your org? That like actively do stuff?
Currently there are 5 people.
Wow. So you're a 5-person team. All of you guys are like, you know, college age. Is that it?
Yeah.
Everyone's in between the ages of 19 and 21.
Have you made any money from any of this?
Government grants, donations. We're a 501, so we're going to be raising over the next few months. Okay. So our grand vision right now is we're just going full force with the nonprofit right now. So these are like a couple of cool projects, but This is small in comparison to what we're going to do over the next few years. We want to build out an entire suite of tools so that whenever a crisis occurs, we can just tweak it and then quickly deploy in a matter of hours or days. I feel like current nonprofits, the amount of time it takes to respond to a situation, it can be months, it can be years. We want to be able to do that in hours.
We want to become like one to one.
How many nonprofits are like run by hackers, right?
No one does this. That's why So we worked on these projects in the past and we're like, why is no one else doing this? We see how powerful the internet is in terms of distributing these solutions. We see that can literally save lives. So if no other organization's gonna do it, we're gonna do it.
But why is there an incentive for a for-profit investor?
This isn't for-profit. This is more, we're gonna be taking donations. We're a nonprofit organization.
But is there a way, okay, Maybe there's a philosophical reason why you're doing it, which is totally cool, which is cool that I won't debate you on that. But if—
No, we can talk about that. If we do make this a for-profit company and we're going into countries where we're establishing a presence, we're becoming their central means of communication. If we come across as a for-profit company, people are going to question what our main incentives are. Again, we're not trying to distribute this in like 1 or 2 countries. With the app that I was discussing before, Hyperlocal, that— okay, I'm just going to walk you through that app real quick. Basically, it allows people to just message each other using Bluetooth. So if a government shuts down Wi-Fi access like we're seeing in Iran right now, you can still message people close to you or across an entire city. You can bounce message across everyone in between you and that person who has their app downloaded, even if their phone is off. So if we—
this has happened before, right? These mesh network-like messaging apps, and they kind of took off. I remember when at festivals where there was no service, and then in some like disaster zones they were using these.
The thing is that most of these mesh networking apps, their UI and UX sucks. We're gonna improve that. And they don't have store and carry. So say you're standing near me, I can message you pretty easily. But if I want to message someone who's a mile away, my message cannot get to them. What we're doing is essentially— and first of all, our messages are completely encrypted, but Say I want to message someone who's on the other side of the city. If I want to message them, every person I come across, they will store my message and be like, Anand is trying to message this other person. So once they walk across other people, they're also going to be carrying my message until it eventually reaches that person. So you're able to create like a virus effect and spread messages and create entire decentralized networks and cities.
What are you and your team motivated by? Why are you doing this?
We want to like have a positive impact in the world. Basically, we know that there are existing solutions that can help out people around the world. We know that we can potentially save lives or just make the world a better place in general.
But just to, just to reiterate, this is not a profit-making thing and that is not your intention ever. You are just doing this because I imagine it's incredibly fun and because you just want to make the world better. Is that right?
Yeah, basically, look, if you, if you see that there's a problem in the world and you know that you have the means to create a solution for it, if you walk away from that solution, our entire team would basically be bystanders. And our team isn't bystanders, man.
This was, this was great.
Um, you're, you're, he, you're a visionary. I, I mean, I, I think this guy's fucking badass.
Yeah. I think what you guys have done is amazing. I think that, uh, it's really cool to see a nonprofit that's just driven by a, a, you know, a handful of builders, like engineers. To hackers, for lack of a better word. And not going to lie, going to be a hard pitch to beat. So, you know, I'm just going to put that out there.
The bar is very high. Starting off, our team is 5 people, but we're planning on scaling this as fast as possible. Half of our team right now is full-time students. I'm a computer science student here at University of Michigan. I have a lot of workload, but as soon as this semester ends, this is all we're going to be working on.
Why hasn't University of Michigan been like, dude, Bail, here's money. You're good.
That would be a good question for the university.
Both, both of the first two pitches got the My First Million bachelor's degree. You know, you got to be a badass from our, from us. You don't need to finish school. The one thing you should do though, is you should shout out if there's, because people listen to this podcast, if there's somebody at a school right now or a young, young person who's like, dude, that's awesome. I want to help them out.
Yeah. Okay. There's a website, internetactivism.org. If you go to that, you can find her contact information and reach out to us directly. Beyond just people who are interested in programming for us, if you're interested in working with us as a nonprofit organization or you're just philanthropic in general, feel free to reach out to us. We're looking for as many partners in both the tech and humanitarian space as possible. We want to reach as many people as possible within the next few years.
All right.
You're saving the world.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.
Good.
You're perfect. We love you. You're amazing. But by the way, he hit him with the, uh, if you don't want to sell sugar water.
Exactly.
While I'm drinking a Coke.
Amazing, dude. Um, I, I, I, these guys are so much smarter than us. These guys are amazing.
Dude, I was picking my boogers at that age and eating Chick-fil-A. And now I still eat Chick-fil-A. I just stopped picking boogers, right? Like these guys are so far ahead of where, where I was in college.
That's insane. I was, it's noon on a Friday. I was gearing up for the nighttime bar run for my hot dog stand. Like, I was like, again, I was chopping onions in my kitchen, getting ready for the 2:00 AM hot dog rush. These guys are so— to build a website that has 600 million people visit it, that is outstanding. This is just— these, these, these guys are crazy. Yeah. I don't get like the whole— not— I would, I would urge him. I mean, I could go either way. I would urge him to have a for-profit way of doing this.
No, no, no. He's doing it perfectly.
What are you going to live on grants your whole life? I mean, how does—
like, first of all, like, there's a lot of money in government grants out there. It's not like we're going to be starving or anything. We can still afford to like sustain ourselves. We also have people like Jake in our community, so if you want to work on side businesses, we have that opportunity unlocked too.
But you'll be fine.
This is like, you know, when people go do Teach for America for 2 years, like, go work for internetactivism.org and, uh, you'll come out the other side, you know, in a good spot. Don't worry about that. All right. So let's do the next one. Next one is Jordan is going to pitch us Yofi.
By the way, I'm inspired. I want to quit this and join that.
If I could hop in for 2 seconds. I'm Bobby. And also, like anyone who's watching this, we are a group of entrepreneurs. This is built for students by students. This is my community. These people are my best friends. And if you want to, like, get involved with these people in any sort of way, feel free to reach out to me at bhousel@umich.edu. We're building communities like this across the country and we want your help if you're a college student or young person that's excited about making things. But I'll let the next guy go.
Seafair, and from Minnesota.
All right, hit it. You got 2 minutes. Awesome.
Ahoy, sharks. This is Seafair, payroll and onboarding software for ships. Let's just jump right into the problem here. Paying the 2 million global seafarers is really hard. The average ship is made up of people from more than 3 different nationalities, meaning you deal with disparate local bank accounts, currencies, and regulations. That's why the current solution is literally paying these people in US dollars cash and/or sending slow and often delayed SWIFT transfers. On top of this, The documents that seafarers need to provide and that ships need to process are arduous and painstaking to go through. Take a look at this, Sam. I can see your face right now. You're having flashbacks to the DMV when you tried to renew your license. It's an absolute disaster to go through these documents. We're talking vaccinations, professional certificates, sailing history, you name it, they have to provide it. One seafarer I talked to once had to print out 700 pages of documents just to get hired on a ship.
By the way, what's a seafarer? Are we talking like, uh, like workships or what?
Yeah, we're talking merchant mariners. So any ship that's out in the ocean, primarily those like transporting goods and services, but outside like leisure as well as military ships. Yeah. Awesome. So what are my brother and I working on to address this problem? We're taking a two-pronged approach to this solution. First is with the payroll solution. We're talking multi-currency, low FX fees, direct deposit to local accounts, and a mobile-first approach that will bring this industry to the modern era. This will improve record keeping and financial management for these ships and will eliminate the risk of having cash on board. I'm sure many of you have seen the movie Captain Phillips and know this problem at hand. Second is we're working on an onboarding solution. For ships, this will be a single place where they can have a document upload, where our software will scrape those documents to determine eligibility, expirations, and everything else a ship needs to know, saving them money. Seafarers will love it too, as it'll be a one-stop shop for them to store their documents, track their certifications, and have an employment record at hand. So, Sharks, why now? There's two compelling reasons why this can happen right now. First is that fintech infrastructure over the past few years has exploded. Never has it been easier, faster, more efficient, and more reliable to build a cross-border payments company. Second, internet adoption on ships is finally growing. If you didn't know, lot of these ships didn't have access to internet until recently. With the dropping cost of satellite internet and Starlink for maritime launching in just this July, we see it really exploding. On top of this, there's a labor shortage of seafarers right now, which is putting pressure on shipping companies to provide internet in order to attract labor to work for them. So, Sharks, I'll leave you with a quote from Captain Jack Sparrow. And in the meantime, I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.
Bravo, man.
You guys are all great.
This is the—
this is way— like, we had Stonks. We did this with Stonks, and it was like these, like, you know, people who have been working in the workforce for years and some of 'em already successful entrepreneurs. This is way better. This is way better.
Yeah, this is really good. Um, what, what was your name again? Jordan?
Uh, are you Jordan?
Okay.
Jason. Um, Jason, I'd like to invest in your company. So I don't know if you're gonna win this pitch competition or not, but I'd like to invest in your company.
So, all right, let's set up a call next week.
No call. I'm in. Uh, the call is done. This is, this was the call and I'm in. Uh, I don't know if you have an entity or a corporation, but you need to get one and send me some wiring details. Sales, uh, because I'm in on this idea. This is, uh, you know, one of my best investments was a company called Deal that's basically like a payments solution for contractors around the world. This is like a niche that no, no payment company's gonna really like kind of focus on the unique aspects of this. Um, no, none of the modern companies are going to do this, you know. I think because there's probably a bunch of nuances that are specific here. It seems like You could go in and, you know, you found a problem that most people aren't even really aware of. Like, I didn't even know what a seafarer was for the first 2 minutes of the presentation. Um, you know, so I doubt most entrepreneurs are even looking at this. The question of course is how big can this be? So let's just do some math here. 2 million, 2 million, uh, what do we call, I'm not calling these guys seafarers.
2 million pirates out there.
I can walk you through the TAM calculations if you want quick. Yeah. So what is the, how much money can you make if you get like, you know, whatever, let's say, um, you know, some reasonable amount of like, If you had a tenth of that, so if you had 200,000 of these people using your platform, what would you be generating?
Okay, yeah, so 200,000, we're charging $10 a month, okay? So that's $2 million every single month times 12, that's $24 million in ARR if we capture 10% of the market. But you also have to realize that we're gonna be charging and sort of monetizing not just based off $10 per person per month, We're also going to be taking 25 to 50 bps on FX as well as getting floating interest on payroll deposits before they're sent out. So I would say that— how'd you know we like 10% of the market?
That's probably—
how'd you know we like bps? Yeah, that's Sam's safe word. Okay, so I think I'm clear. I'm in on this. I will invest in this company. Sam, what are your thoughts?
This— I'm, I'm I'm taken away. My breath is taken away. These guys are awesome, man. Like, the reason this is great is this guy's pitching a seafare B2B software. But at the bottom of a slide, he says, Alexa, play I'm on a Boat by Lonely Island. Like this, this, this, this, the dichotomy here of going on of just a bunch of dumbass shithead young kids who are fucking geniuses and incredibly successful. I'm all about it. You know, I said earlier in the first pitch, you do a good job pitching to some older executive who just wants to be around you guys. That's exactly how I feel right now.
So your, your brother says 5 years at AWS. So is this your brother who's older and outta college? Yeah. Yeah.
In a computer engineering degree. He's been working at AWS for 5 years.
And so this is currently just an idea, right? You don't have a product, you don't have any customers or anything like that.
Yep. Idea phase.
Did you work with Bessemer?
Yep.
I worked at Bessemer Venture Partners last summer.
Did you pitch them this?
No, I did not pitch them this.
Why not?
They primarily do Series A, but I'm happy to talk to some of my partner friends there after this.
Why didn't— How'd you come across this idea? Yeah.
Yeah. So my brother was actually born in Indonesia. He spent a lot of time there. And you might know them as like a global shipping hub. So he actually became friends with this guy named Dennis. Long story short is Dennis handled a lot of the payroll paperwork that has to be processed by these shipping companies. And he would talk to my brother basically every day about the pain points he faced. So we decided we should tackle this to help alleviate some of Dennis's pain here.
Is that how you know them, Sean? Indonesia as a shipping hub?
Yeah, I lived in Indonesia and I didn't pay attention to any of this shit. I met a guy named Poppy who was importing cotton. Yeah. I was like, whoa, shout out to Poppy if he's listening somewhere. Uh, yeah, I still remember you. So do you, how will you sell this? So who do you, who are you going to go to? And like, is the guy going to have like, you know, gangrene on his knuckles and be like, what are you talking about? Apps? You know, like who are you going to be selling this to? And what makes you think you could sell it?
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I know I look pretty young here, but I do have a past life doing sales at several early stage successful software companies. Most notably Patch.io, joined them pre-seed. They're now at Series B. So I've put in my 1,000 cold calls, put in my 100,000 cold emails. So I'm pretty confident that I can get on the phone with someone and sell something. I will say the people we're targeting, right, this is a fairly concentrated industry. A lot of the shipping companies control lots of like market share. So it's pretty long sales cycles, enterprise B2B sales cycles. But I directly reach out to sort of those working in the offices of these shipping companies, get them on the phone and sort of kick off that cycle. I'm projecting 6 to 10 months for the average sales cycle for these bigger companies. Um, but obviously we're going to work our way down to SMBs later on.
Yeah.
I'm so hot and bothered when you talk to me like this.
Did someone script this for you? Why are you saying all the right things?
All right.
So this is great. Jason, email me, Sean@SeanPerry.com. I'm investing in this company. I can't wait. Uh, this is, this is really, really interesting. Uh, well, well done. Good pitch. Um, all right, next one up we got— are we going back to Space Force? Are we going back? By the way, you like how he was like, so Sharks, you want to come take a swim in the maritime industry?
These kids are the best. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I thought I thought this was going to be stupid.
These are—
these guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.
Also, if this is like the bar, if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then like, uh, you know, like I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had like short shorts and nobody could use their left hand and like, you know, it was a peach basket for a hoop. It's like, oh wow, these guys can jump.
You know, it's like we just like LeBron just learned how to lift weights. Like, that's what this feels like.
I don't know what's happening. I— for my sake, I'm hoping this next one sucks. I really hope he sucks just so I feel better.
This guy Jason was supposed to go last, but he just interrupted and grabbed the mic like Kanye did with Taylor Swift because he goes, hey, bro, can I take this over? I got to run to class. Like, can we just reiterate that? If I was University of— what is this, University of Michigan? They seem like a fairly progressive school. If I was these guys and I heard what was happening, I would say, Bro, it was like, don't go to class anymore. Here's here. We, we got you covered. Do this stuff.
By the way, I wanna do this with like every university now. This is amazing. Uh, I need to know if it's just a University of Michigan thing or if this is, that's like the caliber of, of entrepreneurs. Uh, Jonathan, what should we, if, if you're another university or if you're somebody at a university listening to this, how do they get in touch with us to do this at their school?
It is, it is definitely partially a Michigan thing. And I will say like the biggest problem is universities don't facilitate this. It took me like 2 years to meet every single one of these killers. And like, we come together biweekly to bring together these kinds of conversations and to build together. And who's like—
who's this?
That didn't exist.
Bobby, Bobby, you organized this thing?
I'm Bobby. Are you a student? I'm a student as well. Yeah, this is a community of entrepreneurs, like 200 strong at this school. We meet biweekly and just enjoy each other. No context of like paying dues, like monthly membership, like screw that. This is not a club. This is just a group of killers that enjoy spending time together. Bob the Dotty, dude.
Even he's got a good pitch, man.
That's really good. This does not exist at other schools. And the schools that like pretend like they have these crazy entrepreneurship programs, like no hate on Michigan Entrepreneurship. Like there are some upside, but like they can't build this, right? Like this has only existed because I spent every waking moment at this school.
Like anytime anyone tells me they're building something, I'm going, "No, no, no." Bob the Discuter Braun, man.
What the hell? Who are you? You need to come on to My First Million.
I would love to help put this on at other schools. Like our mission is to bring this sort of community schools across the country, right? Like, built ground up for students by students. Screw the preconception of having to do anything. Like, yeah, come and be together and like make cool shit.
All right, Bob, put, uh, put George—
that was incredible. Also, just the Biweekly Killers, that's a great band right there.
Yeah, it's like a doo-wop band from the '60s.
This data is wrong every freaking time.
Whoa, I can see the client's whole history— calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed.
HubSpot, grow better. Put yo fi on. I want to hear from Jordan Shamir.
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. I guess I'm the senior citizen here. I'm a master's student, so a little bit older. But if we go to the next slide, One of the things we were working on in a previous life is we were all working on digital identities. How can these brands create, you know, meaningful, consistent relationships with their customers? Customers are always changing, but one of the things that we saw is that our understanding of who customers are digitally is really complicated. We can't interact with them, we can't see them, we can't see what they like. And so one of the things that we did is we actually worked with some of the world's largest brands, right? Working in the bot mitigation teams. I don't know if y'all like sneakers. Or anything along those lines, one of the things that we saw is that through all of our experience in e-commerce, but just larger brands in general, is that everything you consume digitally is being skewed because everyone has multiple personas or multiple identities online. So whether it's intentional, being bots, frauds, resellers, et cetera, or unintentional, right? We've all used multiple different email addresses to get 10, 15% off discounts. And this creates a huge issue for both brands and consumers., right? From brands, I don't know how many customers that I have are unique. I don't know which products to build because it's being skewed by these multiple personas. I over-forecast inventory, leads to a bunch of dead stock. But also as consumers, right? We all know what's going on with Taylor Swift, or we've all lost sneaker drop. We've all paid way too much for a concert ticket that we wanted to go to. The reason it happens, it's not 'cause other people are beating you, it's 'cause people are programmatically beating you with bots. And the second thing that I also, you know, that we see that's just fascinating is that The notion of omnichannel has changed drastically. You're not just competing Nike versus Adidas. You're also competing Nike versus D2C, Nike Dick's Sporting Goods, Nike unauthorized resellers. And these unauthorized resellers are actually costing brands millions of dollars a year. Even Dum Dums lollipops, like the ones that you get from the hospital or the doctor, is actually being arbitrage and it's costing them millions of dollars a year. And then we kind of know about these fake profiles on Twitter and these social media sites that we've seen. Or even if you live in New York, Austin, LA, you know, if you try to go to your favorite restaurants, big reason why they're booked is that the moment they come online, they're taken and resold somewhere else. So what we've done is we've actually created a platform, like in a digital identity platform, where in real time, without like interacting with the user, we rank every order between 0 and 100. So we kind of use this real-time graph networking clustering to be able to find all these patterns of randomness and associations between individuals. And we create these really nice graphs to be able to say, okay, well, these are bots, these are bad actors, these are duplicate accounts. And so we actually work with some of the largest neighborhood sneaker stores in the world to help them prioritize. Hey, I got a whole bunch of raffle entries, right? I got 400,000 raffle entries for 50 pairs of shoes. How do I use this to acquire new clients or prioritize existing ones? How do I choose? Because today what they're doing is they're just randomly giving it out and people aren't actually buying them because people aren't even checking the email addresses. That are going in. We've been actually working with a lot of this from a bad actor's perspective, but one of the new things that we've been able to see with this, which has been really cool, is helping brands actually find their best customers. Through using the same clustering technology, we've been able to say, "Who are your most influential customers? How are they, not just their individual lifetime value, but what we call a closed circle?" Can we pause?
Yeah. Can we pause? I think that might be over the 2 minutes. Sam, can you tell me, can you tell me what this guy does? What, what is the business?
Yeah, you, you're missing your one-liner, my friend. But basically, uh, it's a software that has 160 features that analyze in real time the patterns of randomness and similarities at the customer transactional product company. It's, it's confusing, dude.
Can you explain that, Jordan? Can you explain it to me like this? We help blank customer. So who, who's your customer? What type of person or business?
Oh, we help brands and retailers.
More specific. Like, give me one example. Like, we help shoe brands or something?
Yeah, we help brands like Nike to prioritize their best consumers for limited release products and also clean their data by pulling out kind of all the crap that goes in.
I don't— so prioritize their top customers. You basically, you tell Nike who their top customers are?
We would say like for sneaker drops and limited release products, like, hey, these are the new clients that you can acquire cheaply. Or here are the clients that you can actually prioritize that this is actually something meaningful compared to one person putting like 10,000 or 100,000 entries via bots to get those products.
So you just prevent bots from buying shit online.
We prevent. And then what we also do is we actually kind of clean the data downstream. So we flag all of those accounts that can get pulled out of the CRM system that are kind of bloating the CRM system. So like one of the things that we see from a lot of our clients is that they way overspend on you know, the products that they use like Klaviyo or, you know, kind of CRM products because a lot of the entries in there aren't actually legitimate. So when I'm actually making decisions around how many products should I buy or how many products should I make, what are people buying, it's actually being skewed based off the amount of what's in there is actually just a bunch of duplicate versus actually unique consumers.
Okay. You are not the best at explaining your own company, but you're not horrible. I kind of get it after you explain it a bunch. But that's all good. I think you can improve that. But do you have any— Even on your website, man, I'm gonna be honest, it's, it's a little challenging to understand, but I saw that you have a book demo thing. Do you, are you booking demos? Do, are you, do you have a product? Are people buying it?
Yeah, we have about 25 customers right now.
That's impressive. What's the revenue?
The revenue right now when we convert to revenue is gonna be around $15K MRR.
But it's free now is what you're saying.
It's free right now.
Yep.
Who's using— any notable customers that, you know, like are Anybody we would know of?
I guess like based off the area you're in, we work with a lot of like local sneaker stores. So like in San Francisco, we work on with a couple, same in Seattle, same in Canada. So mostly local sneakers.
Do they love it? And be honest, do they love it? Do they like it? Or do they think it's just okay?
They love it. I mean, right now we're providing from our cost to value, we're providing for like if we're charging them $1,000, one of their stores, we're providing $10,000 in net new revenue that we're acquiring in for them. A month.
Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Um, you know, honestly, it's tough to give you feedback because the pitch was so confusing. Um, so it's really difficult to try to suss that out, right? Like just from the beginning, you know, like Sam said, you need your one-liner or your one-sentence description so that people need to have a clear picture in their head at the beginning of the presentation, what the business does. So, right. So you, here's your first slide. Your first slide said, YoFi, keep business human. All right, cool. No idea what you do. Then I go to your second slide. It's a team slide. Experts at transforming data into recommendations. Our passion is keeping customer interactions authentic and meaningful. Still have no idea what you guys do. Then slide 3, everything is digital and you've been impacted. And it says something about ticket sellouts and fake social media and brand loyalty is harder. Okay. Still don't know what you do. And then the last one, which is prioritize and reward your best customers. We help you understand your customers and streamline every interaction. I feel like there's 50 different ways that that could be described, like that could mean 50 different, uh, solutions. And so, and then the last slide is just your title again, right? So that was the whole pitch. And so that's the, that's, I think the challenge here is for me at least, I'm not able to really give you any useful feedback except for, except for to say, I think you gotta like flip this on its head and say, we're YoFi. Uh, And we help, you know, we help businesses figure out who their most valuable customers are. For example, this is a shoe store. The shoe store does drops every Friday, but it's having this problem, which is blah, blah, blah. And that's a common problem. So we give them this app that shows them a screen like this, and these are all their top customers. They push this button and our app costs $1,000 a month. And look at this, our, we have 25 customers and on average we make them 10 grand a month in additional revenue.
And we also save them an additional $1,000 a month because of the bloated CRM and like they don't actually need those contacts in there. Right. And then all these other reasons. Yeah.
And then, you know, then you could go on and here's why, you know, we even found this problem because we've spent our career doing this, blah, blah, blah. Right. So I think that's how I would try to reorient this pitch if I was you.
But the good news is, is as you got into it and we were able to like work hard to kind of find the gold in all the dirt, you had some good shit in there. It does actually seem like an interesting product. It's pretty impressive that you have all these people using it. You're saying they love it. I have no idea if that's true, but you're saying they love it. That's really interesting. That's hard to do with the software product when you're just working on it part-time. So it seems actually fairly interesting. I think your branding is kind of cool. Um, but your messaging, um, needs a lot of work.
Yeah.
That's helpful.
Yeah.
And that's been our hardest thing is like, we kind of matured. It's like getting the messaging spot on. Cause like we do a little bit more, right? We started with sneaker bots. Now we've kind of expanded more to digital identity. So having like a streamlined messaging of like what we do, that's like a one-liner is But you're, I think you're making a common mistake, which is we do a bunch of things.
We don't have just one customer. We have like 5, 5 different types of customers and we do, we have 100 features in our app. So we do a bunch of things. So what you do is you try to create this giant umbrella. That's a catchall. Like we help customer, we help brands understand their customers or streamline their customer interactions. And the problem is nobody knows what the hell that means. So instead you should go way narrower and be like, Uh, you know, whoever you're most— of the 25 clients, is there one type that's like, you know, the majority or half, half of the customers? Is it shoe stores, sneaker stores?
Yeah, right now it's, uh, yeah, sneaker store and beauty.
Then just start by that.
So I would start by saying, we help stores do X. For example, we have 25 customers right now and half of them are sneaker stores. Sneaker stores have this problem, blah, blah, blah. You talk about that, you say, but it's not just sneaker stores cuz Yes, sneakers do drops, but so does Taylor Swift. She does drops too. And so does this brand. They do drops too. And they all have that same problem, right? And so that's kind of how you should explain it instead of trying to do this like umbrella thing. Um, okay, cool. Uh, thanks so much. We got the, we got one more, I believe.
Yep.
We got, we got Dolan from Deal Dog that's going to take us home.
So my name is Dolan and I created DealDog. So DealDog's an exclusive campus marketplace. We launched this semester at the University of Michigan, beginning with student football tickets. And since then, our traction has been good. We have over 2,000 verified Michigan students on the app, and those 2,000 students have processed over $93,000 of student tickets. Additionally, with some traction numbers, two-thirds of those tickets that have been listed on DealDog have been sold to other users, and we're growing in the next few months. So what's the core problem? Essentially, the way students buy and sell things on campus now is they go to GroupMe or Facebook Marketplace. Those are filled with bots and scammers, and basically it's just a mess. Next, they need to go to a platform like LinkedIn or Instagram to message the other person or verify their legitimacy. Finally, they need to transact payment, and there's friction between do you use Zelle, do you use Cash App? There's a chicken and the egg problem versus who sends the item first and who pays first. And overall, it's just a complete mess. So what makes DealDog different? First of all, we verify your UMich email, so you can't get into the app unless you have a verified student email. It's a centralized place to find relevant items to students. Along with tools like filtering, sorting, and searching. So here's an example on the left of what our app looks like if you were to log in versus on the right, this is the current state of the market, full of scammers, etc. So what makes DealDog actually different? So our app has gamified tools that turn student pain points into fun experiences, one of which that I demonstrated here is our tool called Final Offer. Basically, if you're dealing with somebody, they're wishy-washy, you can't reach an agreement on price, you can use our final offer tool to send them your best offer. If they reject it, the conversation is over, and if they accept it, you agree to sell them that item. This is highly scalable because when we expand it to new markets, we can add tools into this toolbar exactly like you do with iMessage to help solve those needs. So, how does this scale? There's two ways, one of which is we're going to expand to different categories on campus. We just launched the clothing and have great success. Our approach is to build things from the ground up instead of cloning other markets. And again, with our chat tools, integrations we're thinking about are to integrate on top of the APIs of existing clothing platforms so that, for instance, if you want to find Michigan gear, you can't find exactly what you're looking for on our app. It'll redirect you to an existing platform. And although we may lose that particular sale, we want to make that buying experience as easy, fast, and safe as possible for students. So our future plans are to expand to new campuses. Uh, we're going to build on top of the dominant ticketing APIs that exist in the market today. And additionally, we're going to have an ambassador program so we can scale even faster, both at Michigan and at other schools.
Does this exist now or is this just an idea?
So this exists now. Uh, it's been live for about 2 months, just at Michigan. We wanted to really validate our hypothesis, uh, and see what works with students and what doesn't work.
Did you think he was making up the traction numbers or what?
I didn't see it. Wait, I can't—
first slide. He's like, we have 2,000 students, 93,000 of GMV, and that's in 2 months.
That's pretty impressive. Uh, Huh, okay. And what was your take on that? You take 10%?
Yes. So one of the things that we wanted to hold off on is actually implementing the payments. We've already built it, but we didn't want to implement it yet because we're so new. Uh, we thought it'd be a little, uh, it'd be a point of friction for students to be like, hey, you know, we're launching this new app, by the way, what's your credit card number? Put in your banking details, stuff like that. Uh, we wanted to really get the product down first before we started actually You know, taking money between the two parties. When we do, it's going to be between 5 and 10% of whatever the transaction is.
Okay. Uh, all right, cool. Thanks, Sean. What do you think?
Yeah, I think it's cool. Um, I like some of the product details. Like I love the final offer thing. I think that's great. And I get it that like, you know, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, these things are like lower trust. So having verified student IDs, I think it's just great because it creates this like trust bubble. So I really liked that. Um, I don't know how big this gets. So that'd be my kind of question. I don't really like these kind of like small take rate businesses where you take 5 or 10%, then you need the number to be massive on the transaction side in order for you to like make a lot of money. Um, so I think that's the only question is just like, I think this is really, it's a useful product. I think it's a cool project to work on. Um, I wouldn't personally invest in this because I don't think it can be that big. You would have to basically take a Facebook path where you would say, We're going to go get every college. We're going to dominate that college. It's going to be like the way that you transact in a, in a trusted environment. And then you say, okay, but it's not just colleges. Now we're going to do neighborhoods because we can send postcards out and verify that you live at the address like Nextdoor does. And we're going to, you know, you'd have to really believe that like 2 or 3 more miracles are going to happen for this to be big. Um, so I think that's my only, that's my only knock on it, which is not really like, you know, Not every business has to be absolutely massive. It's just when I invest, I try to obviously slant towards things that—
but it's a net, it's a network's effect. It's a net in this business involves a network. So in order for it to be successful, everyone needs to be using it. So my problem is not with Dolan the entrepreneur. My problem is with this market. Uh, I think that even if you are a 10 outta 10 entrepreneur, this is just like social apps. Even if you're a 10 outta 10 entrepreneur and you have 10 out of a 10 execution, it's just like, it's so challenging to make this work.
You're going for like a 4 out of 10 opportunity.
Yeah, it's just, it's just so hard because you got— you're competing with Craigslist, you're competing with Facebook Marketplace. Now you're going to be competing with the other incumbents that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that are, I think, mostly failing. Like, what was that thing called?
OfferUp.
OfferUp and Lego or something like that. They bought billboards. They did everything they possibly could. I don't think it's caught on. And it's like, well, they— the entrepreneurs, I bet, were really great. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So capital wasn't an issue. And yet they still can't beat Craigslist, which is just 30 dudes in an apartment working out, which is— I know this because I rented their apartment. It was like a crappy apartment. It's just 30 guys who are hippies and they're just like, it's like, well, you're just not going to beat us because everyone already uses this. So it's like it doesn't matter how great you are. And so it's really, really hard. You have so many things going against you. And I want to invest in things that have tailwinds.. And I just don't think that no matter how great you are, you're going to catch a tidal wave. I think you're always going to be paddling upstream on this one.
Yeah, really good points. We certainly have a lot to prove. One of the things that we wanted to do is, A, begin with college campuses. The reason being is because at these big, large state schools, you got a student body of 50,000, 60,000 people competing for 10,000 tickets. And in that exact niche, the math really makes sense. But I do agree, in a lot of other cases, it might not. One of the things that we're expanding to working on, if I may, is a lot of these items that we're working on, whether it be tickets, secondhand goods, services, subletting, the core mechanics of those can be distilled down and then scaled to other things. For instance, if a campus group has a concert, they bring a DJ, whatever the case may be, they can use our app and underlying ticket technology to distribute that on campus. And so again, it doesn't solve your core issue of, you know, it's an incredibly difficult market.
So I think that makes it worse, actually. I think that one of the few ways that these— one of the few ways these businesses can work is by like being very niche. So you have Poshmark for women's clothing, you've got Grailed for men's streetwear. You know, there's like dozens of these that are like pretty big companies. I think Poshmark is a multibillion-dollar company. ThredUp, I don't know what their niche is, but some type of like clothing for a certain genre of person. I think that when you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. And I think that in really to make this work, you'd have to select like— I'm sure that there's— what's the one called for tennis or for sneakers? StockX or something like that.
Goat. Yeah.
Yeah. Like these are huge businesses because they just focused on one thing and it's far easier to have a wedge where you start with a small group of people who are passionate and care about them and get them to use it versus, well, we're going to do tickets and then we're going to do this and we're going to do this. It's like, no, man, I think you just build a big thing. You just focus on this one thing. And so appealing to everyone, so sublets, So apartments and then tickets and then you had clothing on your deck. I think that's actually, in my opinion, turns me off even more. Not again, not entirely on you. I just think that like there's just so many things outside of your control, you know, like Seafair was going to compete against like paper. You are going to compete against Zuck, Craigslist, and like hundreds and billions of dollars of invested capital into this. I just don't think it's, it's, it's not a safe bet. It's not a good bet.
Yeah. Really good points there. And something to work on for sure.
And by the way, I would say, uh, like when I was in college, our first idea was, um, it's always this, this and roommates. Well, no, I, this would have been better than my first idea. My, the one we did straight outta college was like a sushi restaurant chain. We tried to create a, a, a restaurant chain and like, um, it was the same thing. We could be 10 outta 10. Execution, 10 out of 10 creativity. Like, fundamentally, like, restaurants are like, you know, sort of like a 2 out of 10 opportunity. It's like one of the worst types of businesses you can try to start. And, you know, so we had a point where a year in, we were like, cool, we won this business plan competition, we, we can do this. It's not that we can't do it, we're having success with our first location. But like, we got to remember, this is just our first idea. Maybe we're more entrepreneurs than we are restaurateurs. And maybe this first idea is the one that got our wheels turning, but let's not commit more years to something. If we rec— once we recognize that this is a 2 outta 10 opportunity, we should just say, oh, okay, cool. Let me just be a college kid. Let me have my opportunity, my time back, and let me put it on another better opportunity. And so that's what I would do if, uh, if I was you.
But just FYI, getting $93,000 of transactional value, uh, transactional volume. Is super, super, super impressive. That is amazing. So maybe you can prove us wrong and be like— and you said 2 out of 3 tickets, you just be like, look, we're just going to build a different StubHub and it's going to be better because we're marketing wizards and who knows why it's going to be better. Maybe you're going to prove us wrong, but $93,000 and 2,300 users in 3 months. Incredibly impressive. That is wildly impressive. So you're also a superstar. I'm just going to— I don't know if you're going to pull it off. In this genre, but we'll see.
Yeah, awesome. Thank you guys so much. Uh, as a closing note, like, if you have any advice on this, it seems like the other people that do use our app, um, you know, they almost exclusively use it to sell their tickets and other things.
If you decide not to bail, I would stick with tickets and stick on that for at least 1 year and talk to users constantly and see what happens. But I would stick with tickets, and I wouldn't even worry about expansion. I would just figure out what makes them come back over and over and over again, because I imagine if I had to look into StubHub and SeatGeek, CAC is the biggest issue. I, and I'm just guessing, I've not researched this.
Um, and all right, what do we gotta do? We pick a winner.
We pick a winner now. So that is the, uh, My First Million presents University of Michigan pitch competition. Super impressive caliber of entrepreneurs. Like I said, um, love this community. You know, Bobby, Bobby, my biweekly killer, good job putting this group together. Um, we got to pick a winner. So Sam, how do you want to do this?
I think— well, so let's talk about, uh, like who's in the top 3, and then you and I slack with me. I just slacked you my top 2. You and I slack and just tell me, uh, what you want to do, and I'll tell you if I approve and I agree with your vote. But basically, um, let's go, let's go in order.
So third runner-up, uh, or like, you know, but maybe, maybe my top 3, I guess. Uh, I just give you, give you 3 in a random order. So, um, I liked Seafarer. Like I said, I want to actually invest in that. I think that that's a really cool idea going into a boring, boring industry that's painful, complicated, and I think, you know, not going to be easy to sell into. But if they do, very easy to get lock-in. And I think they can make money doing basically payroll for the shipping, you know, shipping industry for people who work on ships. So I really like that idea. Um, Internet Activism was super impressive. They, you know, have built a website that got 600 million users. They, uh, built an Airbnb thing for Ukrainian refugees that had 100,000 people stay, you know, in homes. That's kind of just crazy, ludicrous.
And that's a career maker, just that. I mean, that number.
And just the idea of a nonprofit that's not, uh, driven by, you know, what nonprofits are driven by today, which is sort of like fundraising and sales and marketing. It's like We're hackers. We just build stuff that's gonna help, help people. And that's what we do. And I, I really kind of resonate with that. Um, I've seen the power of that one time. Um, the guy who was investing in our, our idea lab, he was like, hey, I want to do this thing for this charity I support called Charity: Water. You know, but instead of just giving money, what if we gave our talent? What if we built something? And we built a charity website that was designed to go viral. It was like, could you make charity go viral? That was the mission. We spent 3 months on it. And I remember we got, I don't know, 5 million people to like come visit the thing. And we raised, I think, $800,000 for the cause. Um, and so like, I've seen how builders can help charity in a way that's kind of unique. And then, um, and then also Jake from Tabs Chocolate, who's doing the NFC tagging thing. I thought that was another good one. I think, I think a cut below the other two., but an honorable mention. What do you think?
Same. I agree entirely. I think Jordan just did a really bad job of pitching, but I actually think that that business is actually really intriguing and could be great. I think it's just a boring software company that I like. I think it could be a really great business, but he was so bad at pitching that it ruined the fact that it's a cool company, I think. And I actually think that he's got a lot— he doesn't have as much traction as Internet Activism, But if he does actually have 30 or however many, however many said 20 customers using his software, I think that's a fairly pretty big deal because it seems kind of hard to sell into them. So I sent to you what I think should be the winner. It's the last thing I said. Do you agree or not agree?
I don't agree. I think it should be this other one. What do you think?
Okay, so Let's just say who the top 2 are.
Yeah, top 2 we got are Seafarer and Internet Activism.
And let me explain, let me explain my perspective here. So Internet Activism, fucking amazing. This guy made me want to quit and join him. My issue with him— not him— my issue with giving them the money is they already have a great thing going and they're kind of crushing it. It feels weird giving this money to a nonprofit. I'd rather just give them my own personal money. But he is so impressive that I was— I— this guy's going to be on the COVID of Fortune or Forbes, I think, in the next 5 years. So I would be fine giving them money. But Seafair, it's an idea, man. We could just be the first money in to actually make them like build something. So that's why that's interesting.
Yeah, I feel the same way. But I think for Seafair, I would put my personal money in as an investment. But I think for the prize money of this, I think that if we put it into internet activism, it's going to save lives. And, uh, and honestly, like, he was of the bunch, he was the most missionary. And like, you could just tell, like, for example, the guy's a visionary. All these other people, I feel like if I talk to them 6 months from now, they could be working on something completely different. And that's totally normal and okay, especially if you're in college. I actually encourage that. But when you know, you know, this guy was like kind of aggro where he was like, you know, um, yeah, I could go work on a CRM tool or it's like whatever., but like, you know, F that, I'm doing this. And that is something I really, really respect. I don't think he was looking for validation. I think he was trying to get the word out. And so that I respect that, dude.
I looked up one of the co-founders of Internet Activism on Twitter and, um, he, uh, his background picture was Zuck, was Mark Zuck giving the middle finger. And I used to have that same background. And so I'm on board, man. Uh, I agree with you. We'll give it to Internet Activism. I think that they are awesome. I think all the folks here are, are, were incredibly impressive, dude. The one that we shit on the most, I think, was Deal Dog. The guy got $93,000 in transactional value in 3 months. Like, no one does that.
Very impressive all around. Kudos to everybody. And I gotta say, we're not picking Internet Activism for the do-good, like The guy's pitch was dope. His first line where he is like, you know, people in poor communities have, have, have more access to cell phones than they do to toilets, right? He, his pitch was good. His traction was good. We've built things that have gotten hundreds of millions of visits, right? Um, his idea was a big idea, uh, encrypted messaging app that can't be shut down, basically an unstoppable messaging app that's gonna help people in, in certain places, right? And I think he was the most committed founder. That's why, not because to charity. Just give him the money.
I also think he's a shithead. I think these guys are shitheads. I think that these guys are like the good type of shitheads. I think that they're the people who I'm gravitated towards. I like people who just like— and frankly, a lot of these guys had that vibe. I mean, Tabs Chocolate from Jake definitely has that vibe. They have this like attitude of like, screw it, I'm just going to do this and we're just going to see what we're going to see.
It finds out.
Yes, and I love that mentality. This guy just displayed it the best for this, in this particular case, but these guys all had this like punk rock vibe that I love.
So, and that's, guys, that's, that's everybody in this room right now.
Even the pinch man had it.
Yeah, even, even the people is building insane stuff.
We, we got 20 entrants, um, and Jonathan and Michael and I like, we were struggling to pick 5, um that we could have had 20 pitches.
He was like shitting on the traditional clubs and like other, like, official organizations. And he's like, no, we're the underground. We're the underground real ones. And I respect that.
Dude, this reminds me. I mean, they were further along than us and smarter than us. But when you and I were like 23, 24, 25 hanging out at your office at Monkey Inferno, we surrounded ourselves with these types of freaks. And a lot of them have gone on to build literally $20 or $30 billion worth of companies. You know, Jack Smith, your boy, Furqan, like these guys have built like huge— Ryan Hoover, all these guys have built some really huge companies. And these guys remind us of this. And I think that it's actually— I hope— send this to University of Michigan. They're blowing it, man, by not empowering you guys. So I think that's crazy.
Yeah. Send me a hoodie. I'm wearing a Michigan hoodie on the next pod. I'm a fan now. Me too.
You know who else came from University of Michigan was our boy Michael from from Future, who's a total— that has this exact same vibe of just pretty—
one of the, one of the first members of this organization, or whatever you want to call it. And, uh, yeah, this is, uh, this is credit to these guys and gals. This is not credit to University of Michigan.
This is, uh, all these people are what makes this special.
We love University of Michigan, we do, and we're going to take every single last resource until we leave this place. But until then, uh, Oh man.
All right. Well, whatever you want to describe yourself, I admire you folks. I think you're awesome. I think the listeners— hopefully this gets hundreds of thousands of listens. We'll see. I think this is going to be a hit. But yeah, you're awesome. So if people want to find out more, do you have your website? What's your website? Did you even say that?
Yeah, just again, it's internetactivism.org. We're looking for donors. We're looking for engineers. We're looking for nonprofit organizations to partner with. Anything. If you think you can help out or you're interested in working with us, just feel free to reach out. Again, internetactivism.org.
All right. And the name of the club is what?
Entrepreneurial Power Hour. My name is Bobby House. You can feel free to reach out to me and help me build this across the country.
All right. Thank you, Sean. You got anything to say?
We're out of here. No, that's it.
That's the pod. Good job, guys. Very impressive.