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

So here's the, here's the, here's the situation. So this is recording, so this is going to go live on our podcast feed. So the people listening on the podcast, there's you, and then there's people who are live right now. I think over 1,000 people live. So we're on this thing called stonks.com. I guess I got, I kind of got to do a disclosure. I'm an investor. Sean, are you an investor?

No.

But, uh, fan, fan. So Starks.com, it's— they, uh, we were friends with them. They asked us to do this, and it was actually— we say no to everything, but this was a cool idea. So basically, 5 startups 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.

Uh, yeah, okay, great. I'm down. And we don't know much about these startups ahead of time, so it's all going to be kind of 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—

they can invest, right? Like they can put in money.

Yeah. So like if they see something, I don't think they can— like they're not literally going to fund the company right there, but they're going to say like, I'm interested, let's talk. And honestly, that's probably what I'm going to do. I never like on these things. I know I cannot— like I've seen these things and someone's like, I'm in for $100,000 and they say they're like right on the spot. I'm not that impulsive.

Are you? Uh, yeah, I'm that impulsive. And it's also more dramatic, so I'm a sucker for the drama. I'll do it.

All right, all right. Well, at least one of us will. Um, and then do you— if you go to the chat of this video thing, you'll see the order of, of people that they're gonna go. And, um, we're gonna talk to one person. I think they get 2 minutes, and then we get 8 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.

All right. We have John Hancock from Stonks is like our assistant here. He's going to be feeding us startups. So, John, you want to bring the first one up?

John, is that a real name?

I don't think so.

Hey, guys. What's up, Tarush?

How's it going? Thank you so much for the time.

Okay, take it away.

All right. Uh, good stuff. Um, Sam, so, uh, what does this business do?

That's what I'm, I'm trying to, I was trying to interrupt you earlier, but I think I was muted. Um, I need, can you kind of dumb this down for me for a little bit? I'm looking at you. So, so let me, for the listeners. All right. So the website is fivex.co. Right now you are raising $300,000 at a $25 million valuation. You got to $1 million in ARR in less than a year. I don't know what POC means. When I see POC, people of color, that's what I thought about. Point of contact. Okay. So like some companies are telling you that they're going to pay you up to $1 million, right? Or collectively, or they actually have.

They actually are paying us monthly.

And dude, you got $1 million at a proof of concept. That sounds pretty sick to me.

Okay.

But I'm going to be honest, I don't know what the hell you do. Can you explain to me? I've never worked at a big company before, so I'm kind of like a big dumb idiot.

It's not just for big companies. Think of, you know, if you want to 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. So if you want to do something like analytics, you need to go sign 4 or 5 different vendors, sign these upfront contracts, and stitch this together yourself. Now, if an industry is going to become mainstream, then you can't really expect 90% of customers who don't care about it.

When you say words like vendors, it's still hard for me to understand. Give me a very specific example.

Use this format. Yeah, use a format that's like X company had Y problem. Yeah, they tried Z, but the problem with 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 customers are coming from.

Name, name, name.

Yeah, name. Sorry, that was confusing.

I'll use one of our customers. Bank Novo wants to figure out where the customers are coming from. How do they personalize the app? How do they save costs and, you know, optimize this sort of cash flow? They now don't know where to go. They can go buy a single reporting tool like Tableau, but the end-to-end data strategy is a lot more comprehensive. There's a lot more than just having a dashboarding tool. Instead of having to hire multiple engineers, instead of having to go sign all of these different tools and vendors, they come to 5x. 5x 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 Banknova doesn't have the resources to figure out how to go use it, they can add engineers on our side who are pre-trained on the platform. End result, they're getting business output in weeks, whereas if they tried to go do this themselves, it would be 12 times slower and 6 times more expensive.

All right, that's way better. And one question, how on earth did you get people to spend $1 million with you on a proof of concept? Because this sounds like a very hard thing to sell, and $1 million is a lot of money. And is it actually like they're going to pay you a certain amount of money every single year? Yeah.

So, you know, at the moment, you know, we— so in the next 2 months, our self-service platform will be live, right? So anyone will be able to go to 5X, enter their credit card. For a few hundred bucks a month, 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 semi-automated platform plus a services model. So you get engineers plus you get the platform. So our average order value at this point, it's about $10K a month. Multiply that by about 10, 15 customers, we're 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 3 or 4 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.

Hmm.

That's pretty semi-automated.

And where are these customers coming from? So let's dig into this $1 million of ARR. So you said you got $10K per customer, roughly $10-15K., and roughly 10 customers that are paying you monthly right now. Um, so you got $100K a month, uh, you know, roughly, roughly 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 would just lead you to the next $3 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 MyLinkedIn, um, on YouTube. Mainly getting customers by word of mouth and by that. So really the last 8 months were really on using this as a proof of concept. This is not just a technology problem. You have to convince all of the vendors in the space to give you API access to provision them, integrate with them, bill for them. So, you know, you need— it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem where you need customers and at the same time you need to show these vendors that you that you— they actually is traction and we become an added sales channel for them.

Huh, okay. I, uh, what else, Sean?

Uh, I guess I'll just give you a little bit of feedback on the pitch itself. So, um, a couple things. Your house or wherever you're at, super nice. Um, almost distractingly nice. I kind of like my founders to be a little more, uh, scrappy than that. Just gonna put that out there.

Where are you?

I'm in Bali.

Oh, he's in Bali, man. It's probably, it's probably not the most expensive place. Yeah.

Yeah.

Fair enough. Uh, second thing, um, you know, I think you want to, I think you tried to get the most information into the pitch, whereas I think you want, kind of want to slow down and you need to just like work on that first 30 seconds to figure out the thing that I was confused about. Sam was confused about most of the chat. If you look on Stonks 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 knee-deep in it. But for us, we've never heard of 5x before. So we're like, end-to-end what? And you know, all of the, all of the words were quite, um, you know, generic. So like, you know, vendors, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, and, and so you, what you want to do is basically just be able to, to paint a picture. So, you know, did you ever work at a company that had this problem or, If you've ever been the marketing manager at a company, you know that you spend almost, you know, 6 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 XYZ, right? Benefits out of this. And people are choosing it because of this. We got $1 million in ARR already as a, you know, during our pilot. Just, you know, in a couple of weeks or whatever it is. Now I'm kind of more engaged.

What else? Here, and look, this is actually quite easy. What year did you join WeWork? Someone in the chat said this guy made a bunch of money off the WeWork IPO. And then I just went to your website and it said you worked at WeWork. So I don't know what the truth is.

I joined in, I think, 2017. Uh, I did not make money off the IPO.

That's okay. That's irrelevant. I mean, that would have been sick if you were. It looks like you did it because you're 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 WeWork story. So we were at— when I, when I worked at WeWork, because you were the head of data, it looked like, at WeWork or something like, like some, like, pretty— you led data for WeWork, your bio says. That 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 WeWork 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 errors. And in 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 off 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, um, and we've automated by doing X, Y, and Z. So now all these companies who want to get this thing done, they can actually use us, and instead of hiring 30 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 have— by the way, I'm just totally riffing. I don't know any of this.

That's true.

No, that's great.

But you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Um, but now if we should just get to the product, I think it sounds neat and it looks like my good friend Ankur invested and he's actually quite, um, he's actually quite impressive as he knows his shit. I think it's a cool company.

Yeah, I would definitely, just based off your traction alone, I would want to learn more because I'm like, okay, uh, you know, a good pitch is not necessarily a good business, but good traction is usually a good business. And so you actually have good traction and a bad pitch. That's okay. So I would want to learn more and dig in to understand how much of this is a service and consulting business versus is this going to be software and this is going to be automated? Because it sounds like you've actually found a problem that people care about. We'll see 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 want to learn a little bit more. And look at the deck before we go too far.

Amazing.

Thank you. You're awesome. Thanks for being brave and doing this. So Sean, he— so on the Stonks platform, it says he's got $75,000 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 several companies that are like this. There's a lot of SaaS companies that have like either a consulting thing, that's how they get embedded, or it's like just an ongoing revenue stream and it actually can get quite substantial. So I don't think that's a complete—

no, I didn't, I didn't like that. I didn't mean that as a diss.

I kind of said it as like, is this just a consulting company? Because if it was just a consulting company, I would not do it. But, but yeah, I was just so confused for half the time. I didn't really get to think about— didn't really get to think about the business, to be honest. I was trying to figure out what the heck it does.

Yeah, that was a little bit of an error. Hopefully he'll fix that. But, uh, 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 want to raise money if you got a million dollars and just selling.

Yeah, I agree. Um, all right. Uh, John Hancock, you want to send us the next one? All right. All right, Kenny, you got it.

Are we live? Or can you hear us? Dude, the top comment is actually pretty funny, which says, fly together and groupflights.com is available.

Uh, go buy the domain.

Yeah, go buy the domain.

Uh, get on that one. You got the, uh, the, the Stonks chat adding some value here. They're the real value-add investor.

I love this.

Also, I like how you just like looked off screen, he's like, 'Ma, go buy the domain.' Yeah, because Bakarai, I thought you were like a Chinese gambling website when you, uh, when you first came on. I thought this is baccarat.

Well, based on your last podcast, that wouldn't be a bad idea too. Uh, Australian business is crazy.

Fair enough.

Let me ask a clarifying question on the pitch. You said that you get 10 to 15%, and I think your chart said— did your chart say $100,000 a month in bookings, or did it— what, your— I forget what you're— but you, you said $4 million.

Did you pull up the traction slide again?

Yeah, it was like $4 million between January and April. Does that mean that between January, January and April, you did 4 million, but the—

yeah, yeah, so we did—

correct, we did. Yeah, exactly. So we've sold $4.2 million worth of group airfare, and we're averaging about $150,000 a month in revenue.

And that's the revenue that, like, it's real revenue? That's what— and how old's the business?

So we started in 2018, uh, survived the pandemic just barely, um, 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 the 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 want to call the airlines for For both.

And then how many people work there?

We have 11 now.

Cool. Got it.

Okay. Okay. Um, so maybe in each of these, Sam, maybe we do like, uh, first I kind of like clarifying questions slash like reaction to the business and then maybe some pitch feedback at the end of like how to get that better, but like, okay. So reactions to the business and clarifying questions. So, um, you are trying to do group travel, uh, for corporate. And, um, and you said something at the beginning, which was like, it's insane 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?

Okay, cool. So 5% of airline rev— uh, of airline revenue is done via these groups, and that's all kind of the over-the-phone or some, like, some other old-school method at the current—

currently?

Exactly.

Yep.

Okay, cool. And then what's the why now? Because people have been doing, like, travel startups forever, uh, like, you know, uh, Booking.com, Priceline. These were— I think Booking.com, Priceline came out, like, in 1995 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 finally had the great idea? What's going on here?

No, so not finally have the great idea. Uh, 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, Lufthansa, 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 came 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 want to be basically that, that second shelf that they sell their, their, their group airfare in.

How are you getting the customers now? Because isn't travel like the hardest? Like, uh, when I think of like hardcore customer acquisition people, I think of like online gambling, I think of gaming, and then like travel. Uh, yeah, like that seems like the most cut— one of the most cutthroat industries to get customers? Because I think, um, the guys who started Reddit started Hipmunk, and, uh, it didn't work out because they just like couldn't get like— or, you know, it wasn't as big, nearly as big as Reddit. Uh, how are you getting those customers?

Yeah, so currently right now about 99% of our business is B2B. So we get customers really in two core ways. Uh, one, we have a referral pro— a 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 $5 per, per, per ticket booked. That has been enough to send us so much business that we have to like hire and raise money. Then the second way is kind of 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 competition for like the keywords group airfare. Before the pandemic, we got it down to like 72 cents a click. Um, but admittedly, since we just survived and we didn't have the capital to run a bunch of marketing experiments, uh, we're not doing any paid at the moment.

And then until now, you got a bunch of savages in the chat that are all going to start bidding you up. They already bought the domain FlyTogether before you could get it. So explain, what are the terms of the raise? So you're raising how much at what valuation?

Yeah. So we would like to raise $1.5 million at a $15 million cap.

Great. And so for somebody listening to the podcast, there's people who listen to podcasts that don't, uh, they're not part of like the angel investing scene. How does it come? Are you just $15 million? Wait, but you said you're doing $150,000 a month in revenue. So is it some revenue multiple? Just explain where's this $15 million magic number come from for you?

And then what is the, like, what's actually happening under the hood? So you didn't show like a demo or search engine or how somebody actually does this. Is there, are there APIs? Are you just like calling the airline yourself under 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 our time is running out, so we're connected to two GDSs called Sabre and Amadeus. 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 podcast.

Let me ask one, let me ask one more question. Um, this is something that I love asking everyone that I invest in, which is like 5, 10, 15 years down the line. How does this, how big, how much revenue are you going to be making and how am I going to get my money back?

Yeah. I think that we can be both the store, the storefront and the underlying pipes for groups. So, uh, if you were thinking about getting like a ride, you would open the Uber app. If you were thinking about booking flights of 10 or more, I think that you come to Backride.com.

But how do I— and so how big do you think the business will get, and what's going to happen? Someone's going to buy you for a billion dollars? Someone's going to buy you for $100 million? You're going to go public? What do you think will happen? What's your aspiration?

There's a, there's a really, uh, a really clear path for us that we get to like $50 million in revenue in the next like 5 to 6 years, um, and beyond that I'm not totally sure, but I— the path to 50 is pretty clear.

That's a good answer.

Okay, yeah, that's a great answer, uh, in general fantastic pitch actually, uh, The thing I was saying before, gotta be clear, gotta be compelling in the first minute. You were extremely clear, extremely compelling. I think it's pretty clear, you know your stuff. Uh, as you were asked questions about it, you had good, honest answers. You didn't oversell, but you, um, you got to the point on, on, on each one of those questions. So I think really strong, really strong pitch, uh, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, I would, I, I, I would, I'd love to learn more.

Cool.

Awesome. That was a good one. It was very, very, very, very clear. One thing that wasn't clear, which is like, uh, how big is this? I mean, I don't know anything about group flights, and it turns out— so he said it's like, it, it's $100 billion worth of tickets booked a year as group flight. Is that what he said?

$130 billion of group spend, which is 5% of all airline revenue, is 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 got to go to the front of his presentation, which is like Um, you know, booking group travel sucks. And by the way, this sounds like it might just be this fringe thing, but there's over $130 billion a year going through, uh, group, group travel. And today that's all done still on the phone, which is crazy because most of all other ticketing, 90, other 80% of the other ticketing is just done online now. That's going to happen for group travel and we're going to make it happen, right?

I would have been like, uh, all right, so group travel is defined as 10 or more tickets. Guess how much revenue is booked per year doing that?

And you say $128 billion, that's 5% of all tickets are booked that way. And guess how they book it. 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, be like, this is a, you know, if I go to like whatever Delta. Or I go to Expedia, like, look, all the— there's a million buttons on the screen. There's not one. If you want to find the group button, go to help, go to phone. This is where you go for that. This is where $130 billion flows through, right? Like, I 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 then we take care of the rest. We do a bunch of crazy stuff under the hood to make that automated. Um, and it's working. We have, you know, we've done $4 million in bookings so far. That translated into $150,000 a month of revenue for us. So we're on an X million, you know, $2 million run rate. And, uh, by the end of the year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I wrote this note during the thing, right? Like I have this little whiteboard here I'm writing on. I wrote revenue presented weirdly because he wrote $4.2 million in sales, but it was like, that's an aggregate over 5 months. Then he wrote like, uh, we take $1.7 per customer. It's like, dude, just say how much revenue you have. Like, make that the first one. We do this much per month or per year. That's our current run rate. That's, that's not GMV. That's what we take home. In terms of GMV, we've done this much, right? Like that would be a big improvement over, uh, over the traction side.

But very, very cool company though. You wanna do another one, Mr. Hancock? Where you at? Hello.

What's up?

All good. And thanks for doing that. It's actually pretty fascinating. So my name is Oren. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Munch. And I'm accompanied by Peter, my co-founder and CTO. We both have some— I have too many years of experience in business and tech leadership roles. And we've been building Munch for the past few months. Getting out of the validation phase and into our MVP and initial traction. So what is Munch? Think about your favorite YouTuber, apart from yourself. Let's say this person has 1 million subscribers on YouTube. Now what if I tell you that chances are that this person has almost all of, of other content professionals has only 1 to 2 successful distribution platforms. I mean, this is mostly the case in almost all cases. This is because it takes a lot of time, money, professional know-how to succeed on each and every social platform. It's actually pretty different to be successful on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. Totally different platforms and different audiences. Due to that, most of them don't even try to put in that effort and kind of give up. Even though it can grow their revenue streams and their monetization potential quite, quite, in quite reasonable numbers. So we are a team of builders, dreamers, and content creators on a mission to build the first platform that will serve as a home for content professionals. There are no other platforms currently serving as a home, as a place that content professionals can do everything from creating their, their new content based on data-driven processes, repurposing the content for different types of platforms, doing research on what's the next, next content that they want to create and actually distribute it on all platforms and monetize. The content creation market is currently estimated at around $65 billion with an annual growth rate of 15%. This means that it will get to $140 billion by 2026. And combine that with the creator economy, we're talking about $200 billion market. It's a rather big market. And we are currently raising $500,000 on top of the $900,000 that we already raised. We have $250,000 already committed and we're looking for $250,000 more. The idea is to take this money and use it to boost our dev team and create the, the first version of the product by this November, increase our traction, and start testing different pricing levels with their initial paying customers. So we're looking for some new partners that can actually teach us a bit more about the media business.

Okay. First of all, let me say the people who are not English speaking and pitch, fucking awesome. That would— I cannot imagine how hard that is.

It's not easy.

It's not easy.

I could tell it wasn't easy. You did pretty good. But, uh, golly, that seems like a rough thing to have to learn how to do. Congratulations.

I think we can barely speak when it's our native language. So, you know, uh, respect for that. Um, okay, now I could be mean. That was a horrible pitch though. Uh, I respect the attempt, but the actual structure of the pitch, um, was just not great. And, uh, like, you know, in the chat here on Stonks, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being that was super clear and compelling, 1 being I, I was cloudy and not compelling. Give it a score, 1 to 10. I'm curious what it was for, for you guys. 1 being low, not clear, compelling. 10 being very, very clear, compelling. Type it in the chat.

And they're on like a, they're on like a 15-second delay, by the way, so it's going to start coming through. It's going to start coming in.

So I'm seeing an 8, and then 2, 2, 3, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, right? Okay, so your job, Oren, is to get that 2 into an 8, right? Because like right now I can barely even give you kind of feedback on the business itself. Like I went to your website, I went to getmunch.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 kind of drained by the end of that. And, um, and so they posted on the one platform, they post on YouTube and you take that content, you turn it into clips, you put it on TikTok, you take that content, you turn it into tweets. You, you basically repurpose the content, you chop it up and repurpose it so they can get more juice out of the content they made. Is that right?

This is the penetration product. This is what we currently do. We currently have online, we can actually, if you want to see an example, I allowed myself to take one of your episodes. Would you like to see that? Can you see that?

Yes.

Okay, so let's take for example this episode. Okay, it was from April 6th. I kind of played around with it. And what you have here is our system choosing between 3 to 5, 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 video in order to understand what would be the best clips that can fit into, let's say, a 1-minute TikTok or a 3-minute TikTok or 1-minute Instagram Reel. 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 the other platform.

Oh, this is— go ahead.

Yeah, I am human optimization.

Sean, have you ever heard of JellySmack? I'm shocked, Oren, you didn't talk about them. You've heard of JellySmack, right?

I was waiting for you to raise the name. Yeah, we heard about JellySmack. Actually, we love JellySmack. We love what they're doing, and we love the fact that they're doing all the market education for us, talking to content creators about content repurposing and the fact that you can be successful equally on all platforms. But JellySmack, and again, we really admire what they're doing.

Oh, come on, Oren.

I have a question really quick, but what's stopping this? To me, maybe there's a world where this kind of becomes like Buffer, buffer.com started just by— you would schedule tweets to go out, and then everyone offered that same thing, and that feature became somewhat of a commodity. Is there a world where this thing that you've built becomes a commodity, and you actually have to offer more stuff? For example, I don't actually know if this is true, because I don't entirely know how they work, But it seemed like JellySmack, one of the ways they make money is they actually don't charge the creator, but they put ads on the creator's 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 always be the moneymaker.

Yeah. Yeah. So is there a world where this technology you have really just becomes a commodity and you got to offer other stuff in order to keep people on?

Yeah, so the idea is actually, you know, like dropshippers have Shopify and marketers have HubSpot, content creators will have Munch. And the idea behind that is that currently there's no platform like that. There's a lot of vacuum in this space and currently this vacuum is being filled by hundreds of thousands of freelancers on Fiverr, Upwork, and little 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 these are real numbers— 30 to 50% of the revenue that is being generated by the agencies. So yeah, the idea is that it's going to be the central platform for content creators, the central cockpit they can use. And in terms of the business model, if this is what you're asking, so we have like two options and we're currently— we're still pre-seed, we're still playing around, experimenting with the business models. We can do both things. We can charge a premium fee for the premium features. And there's a lot of things that we can charge for, like, you know, creating, taking your podcast and creating Twitter threads for the next month that we can distribute in the right time. Or we can just use this inventory that is being created via Munch and integrate brands into it and do brand deals and get money from brands and pay the creators. So we're still not sure which business model will win. We're going to experiment with both in the next few months. But yeah, it looks like a huge potential.

So I would not be interested in investing in this business for a couple reasons. But I would say the main two is 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, 1,000 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 any time somebody's using AI, I'm like, oh, okay, you know, I gotta see it to believe it. Now 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.

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're creating preemptively the videos for them, and then we send them via an email marketing machine that currently has like a 4-5% conversion rate and a database of 800,000 content creators on YouTube. And we're using influencer marketing because it turns out, after talking with more than 100 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. Kind of neat because we just got to 2,000 users in less than 2 months. So yeah, it's, it's kind of starting to grow.

Cool. Sam, anything else on your side?

The same question, um, 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, uh, how's this going to make me wealthier? You know, like, like, I, I like get down to like my, my primal 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 once we have 5,000 users, paying users, we're going to hit the $1 million ARR. It's an actual ARR because it's recurring revenue once you charge them on a monthly basis. And there is a Serious virality symptom in the area of content creation. It's kind of a PLG because once you create content with Munch, we have our logo and some mention to Munch 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 $65 billion. It's gonna grow aggressively in the next few years. So, you know, sky's the limit. Uh, it's gonna be a 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.

See you, Oren.

Bye. I, uh, Sean, man, like what I was saying to him about the, the English, uh, thing, dude, it is— if you don't speak English, if you have an accent, you're at such a logis— like, 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 overcome. And it's, I mean, it's cool that people overcome it, but holy moly, I would not want to be in that position. It is tough, right?

It is really hard. And, um, and you know, I feel like, uh, that's why I think that 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 suss 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, all right, this person is charming enough that I feel as though they can convince other customers to buy or they can convince employees to join their company. Uh, you know, that's like kind of like that Adam WeWork 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 where they currently are because of maybe like a lack of— it's just hard to understand, man, that it makes a difference. And I have to 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.

Totally.

Absolutely. By the way, I can't get into Stonks. It's like dead for me.

Um, so I don't know, I had to refresh it as well, and everyone in the chat is saying they had to refresh it too.

Yeah, when I refreshed, it didn't let me in. But all right, uh, either way, that's okay. I don't need that open.

We want to do another one? I think one more or two more? One more. There's Allison Nickel Pass. All right, or Zaza. Sorry, I don't know who's presenting.

All right, that's me.

Hey guys, how are you?

You guys can see my screen? I think they can. All right, what's going on? Uh, name is Zaza, CEO and co-founder 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. Uh, we were the largest news 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 200 million people coming to our websites globally.

I'm Allison Pao, COO and co-founder. Um, prior to this, I was actually a banker for about 10 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, and asynchronous teams. So Nickel Pass really solves for all of that.

Um, 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. Uh, when we're at a party, people are like, what does Nickel Pass do? And what we say is, you know how you get, uh, an article from a friend shared with you and you get that pop-up that says pay for the full site? Well, 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 70% off of retail, and we customize the pass 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 paywall.

I click a button.

Oops, I don't think—

there we go.

Okay, there we go, through the paywall.

So I hit a paywall, I go to my Nickel Pass, which is a Chrome extension, click on Business Insider, and that's it. I never see a paywall again.

This is awesome. This is awesome.

So we can just recap because I think some people are having trouble in the Stonks 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 of my coworkers sent me. I get hit with a paywall. Oh, shit. Hey, man, what did it say? I don't have a Business Insider subscription. And our company, which is— let's pretend we work at Google. Oh, Google uses Nickel Pass, so I can just use the Chrome extension and bypass the paywall because Google has paid for a multi-seat license to Business Insider. So Business Insider is getting this huge bulk subscription buy and they'll give it at a discount. 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, that's exactly.

But do you, if, if Google buys 20 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 200 publishers in our network. We add more every day. We create bespoke packages. So how we have an initial package that's— you pick 6 out of 10 publications. It includes Business Insider and many others, and that's $23.95 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 PR, you're gonna need a very different set of publications than someone who's at the comms 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, uh, if let's just use round numbers, let's say it's $30 a month, does business— and you have 2 publications— does Business Insider get $10, New York Times get $10, and you guys get $10?

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 publisher is 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 10 people or 1,000 people, the price may go from $10 a month, which is a 20% discount off of retail, to $2 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 fee percent?

Uh, so right now gross margin is anywhere from 44 to 55%, um, and that's a combination of not only the seat fee, but we integrate with, uh, Okta, Microsoft Active Directory. So it's really single sign-on for news publications, and we basically handle all of the admin, uh, for both the enterprise and the publisher.

That's amazing. So, uh, 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 don't know if I, I missed that part or it wasn't in there.

Yeah, so we have over 125 companies who we currently work with, and we're adding more every day, both smaller companies as well as large enterprises.

Uh, and what does that mean for revenue for you guys?

Yep, so we're at $1.2 million ARR, and we're on track to be $3 million by the end of the year.

And you're raising at a $15 million valuation. And that's correct. That's $3 million as in net revenue. And you get, or is that $3 million as in you, there's $3 million, there's $3 million for the bundle and you take 45 to 50% of it.

Correct.

The second one.

Correct.

So more like $1.5 million. Is that? In real, in net revenue. Is that right?

In net revenue?

Yes. 1.5.

And, um, okay, great. And so, and how do you, how do you onboard customers? So what do you do to go get the next 25, 50 customers? What, what happens?

Well, I think one of the things that we're really excited about is the 120 companies we have, they have over 400,000 employees. So what we found is that it's much easier to upsell within an organization once you land them. So what we're seeing is that our growth trajectory. If we go from the 1% to the 3%, that's how you get to the 3. And that's why only focusing on 2 segments right now, marketing and PR, and then consumer finance. That doesn't count telco, doesn't count some of the tech companies you mentioned, it doesn't count international, which is actually my background.

Post. Gotcha. So you're just going to expand within the companies you're already in to get to the, to get to $3 billion gross. Okay. But how do you get more customers, uh, from here? What is the strategy? Is it outbound? Is it inbound? Is it, what's a referral program? What, what do you do?

Yep. Yeah, it's, we primarily have a cold outbound marketing strategy. Um, so we do a lot of lead gen, um, and then we do some organic search and 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. Uh, 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. If I do this and I have, you know, 1% of my employees doing this, all of a sudden I've added a— I don't know what your average volume is, but let's say $10 grand a year. What is the average cost to a company?

So that's grown. When we first started, it was roughly the $7,000 to $10,000 a year. Now what we're seeing is $50K 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 it at retail and then expensing it back. To the company. So that's one thing. 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 $50 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 Uh-oh.

Oh, I think we lost Zaza there. But yes, this is an expense that people actually already have. They just don't realize it. Frequently it's being put on personal cards and then expensed 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 and data, which for the 4D professional The 40 million thousand— the 40 million professional services workers in the US is extremely important to know.

Okay, great. Uh, I also feel like there's probably some strategy where you go to Anheuser-Busch and Anheuser, you know, once they have their 1% of people on, you go to every other beer company out there and you say, hey, Anheuser-Busch does this so that their employees can read Beer Journal Daily and this and that. Uh, you know, would you guys be interested? There's a— 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 and PR firms and with financial services firms.

Alison, how big is this gonna get? You know, what are you, what you're gonna get to $100 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 is gonna change drastically from how it, It works today. Um, and Nickel Pass is going to be the single-stop solution for that.

What, um, how many employees?

Let me ask that same question a little bit differently. Uh, cause Sam likes to hear the kind of how big is the dream. I like to hear it a little bit differently, which is what would I need to believe for this to be at $100 million in revenue? Meaning how many companies, how many people, what, how do you work your way to $100 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 5 years, we've understood—

and I think the general public— actually, could you give me the math? So like, this many companies paying this much a month is $100 million in revenue. And then I need to know, is that a 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, um, 10,000 companies based on, on our initial math.

So 10,000 companies, and, um, you think that those will, you know, right now you're at whatever, 25, you think by the end of the year you can get to maybe 40 or 50, something like that?

Uh, oh no, no, so we're at 150, right?

Sorry, you're at 150, great.

Yeah, we're, we're, you know, well beyond the, that initial group.

And what are you guys going to have to do to go from 150 to 10,000 companies? What will actually need to happen?

Yeah, so it's, it's two-pronged. It's that we have to increase our penetration rate on the existing companies from 1% to 3%. Um, and that number's even achievable up to the 5 or 10% range. And then we have to increase our penetration in this, in the specific sectors from currently 0.01% to, uh, closer to 1% in each sector. So financial services, marketing and PR, um, and then universities and associations as well.

Gotcha. Okay. All right. Thanks.

I think we might be up to time. I had one more. Did you, have you raised any money so far and from who?

Yeah. Yeah. So we've raised about $5 million so far. Um, that's our last round was led by, uh, River Park Ventures. So the Seamless, uh, food ordering company co-founders, um, because they took the same B2B model to get to a B2C model. Um, and we have a number of, uh, other institutionals as well. 68 Capital, um, Rain Ventures.

Damn, you raised $5 million at a $15 million valuation.

No, smaller valuation in the past. So this new, this new round is, uh, $15 million free money.

Oh, so you gave up a lot of the company? Yeah.

What are you—

how are you going to stay motivated? You gotta—

yeah, so I understood. So we are, um, reworking the cap table as we speak because basically we pivoted the company from a blockchain micropayments, and so that's total over the pivot.

Yeah, customers hated it, publishers loved it, but it wasn't selling to, um, to anyone 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 want to hear about it now, but like how you're going to get out of that situation. I think it's, it's hopefully it's fixable because this product sounds pretty sick.

Um, and we gotta ask, people are asking why, what is Nickel Pass? What is this name? Why are you named after Nickelback?

Ah, uh, news used to cost a nickel, so that's why.

Okay, all right, great. And now it costs $23 per person per month.

$23 a month.

Yep.

Congratulations, this is sick, this is sick. I think your pitch was awesome. I said what I thought about the cap table. The product's badass.

Um, one little thing between you—

you got to get your act together though.

Between you and your co-founder, you guys should figure out who's going to answer questions and which types of questions so you automatically know when to defer, cuz it's a little bit of a signal when you're doing a pitch and like both are kind of like me and Sam, we talk over each other a little bit. It's okay in a podcaster realm, but as a company you kind of need to know, okay, technical questions, this person's gonna answer, uh, growth questions, this person's gonna answer, uh, or this one person's gonna answer everything and then they're gonna say, you know, Allison, why don't you talk about that? You're, you're, you know, she knows this better than anybody. And so you'll be able to kind of defer, uh, a little bit better. Um, in that sense. But good, really good job overall with the pitch. That's my only kind of like pitch feedback for you.

Great. Thank you guys.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

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. Sick, sick company. Goddamn, man, that cap table really fucks things up for her.

Yeah, uh, yeah, I think that's okay though. I think it's recoverable. Or, um, you know, like some people, like, you know, how are you gonna stay motivated? Some people are motivated, you know, the number— whether the number— whether they own 50% or 35%, they, they sort of feel the same about it. It's their baby. And also they can be motivated by the regret. That's giving away so much of the company. That's crazy to me.

Well, and I, and I think people like think it's a trick question towards like, how does this get big? Or, um, how are you going to 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, just like, talk real. I'd like, like, a good answer is like, well, the worst case scenario is I think we'll get to $5 million in this many years and someone's gonna buy us for $50 million and you'll get a 2 or 3x return. I think that's like a likely worst case scenario. Best case scenario, I actually think we have a clear path to $75 million and we're going to 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 grow into this.

Uh, I think that answer works on you because you invest your own money. For most venture capitalists investing other people's money, they don't care about the 2 to 3x, uh, I know, but I'm facing 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, uh, how this ends up huge. And you might just say, you might say things like, um, So you don't have to say, oh man, I can't wait to go sell this for a billion dollars. But I think you could say like, we had a buddy Ramon who was telling us about this. He's like, look, right now I have, I don't know what it was, like 100,000 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 he named like the big, Chewy doesn't know any of that cuz they sell on store shelves, but I have the largest database of this. I think that asset's going to 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 asset.

That's kind of what I mean. I'm just saying that like, just it's okay to show weakness and it's okay to show uncertainty, but at the same time you also want to 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 is going to be a billion-dollar company and just going to autopilot like a, you know, venture capital robot.

Lot.

Badass. Let's do the last one.

What's up, Colton? Take it away.

Sick. Is this basically like a PE play where you're buying baby boomers' businesses who put pools into people's backyards?

In a simple explanation, kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's a little harder than that because South Florida, you dig 54 inches, you hit water. If you don't know what you're doing, you could really muck it up. We know the industry, we know pool construction, so we can find people that are ready to retire. 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 form and steel excavation. Take his company and he subcontracts out to the plumbing guys and the tile guys, the screen enclosure guys, and he's spending so much money on paying subcontractors whatever they need to charge because he's got to hire them 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 13% increase on our productivity.

So just explain, uh, multiple choice answer. Your company does what? Do you A, sell software, B, buy existing pool companies, uh, C, uh, invest in pool companies, or D, other? Which one of those four things do you do?

B, we, we buy pool companies, mergers and acquisitions.

Yeah, so 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 advantage you have?

A and B. We know the business, we do it well, and we implement modern technology. 3D modeling designs for the pools so we can email it to customer. We don't got to go to their house with a pen and paper and show them how it's done. We can just email it over and then also since COVID hit, permitting has been horrible. It slowed down a lot. Now, we can do digital permitting where we can be on video chat with the county that we're working with and they can be 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.

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. How much faster? It depends on the county. Each county is going to 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 reschedule on you, it's going to be at least 20% faster.

20% faster. Okay, great. Up till now, you've bought how many pool companies?

Right now, we've signed— we have our own, we own 2, but we have 2 purchase contracts signed. In agreement and we have one in negotiation that we're looking to get another round of funding for.

And then explain when you buy a business like this, it has this much in EBITDA typically, it's been in business for 10 years or whatever, and you're buying it at some multiple and you're financing it how?

Well, the first two, we sold our houses.

Okay. What are you going to do for the next two?

We're looking to raise capital and then we're also going to make a plan using the signed contracts, usually you're 2 years out, 2 years booked out 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 2 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 use some of the working capital to put aside into another fund to use to purchase more businesses. As we roll out all the locations we need between, like I said, form and steel, excavation, shotcrete, tile, Marsite, plaster guys. We're going to buy all the specialty contractors and roll them all into one company.

So, Shaun and I, one of our best investments ever, I think we both invested at the same time into a business. Shaun, you still there? Yeah. We both invested into this business that started by our friend, Sieva, called Endure Ventures. And his whole premise was to buy businesses that baby boomers want to retire and their kids don't want to take it over, basically.

That's exactly what's going on.

Yeah, Dolphin 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. Um, um, another way that you could maybe pitch is The guy who started— I was going to bring this up on the podcast, Sean, but the guy who started WeWork, uh, we, uh, Upwork.

Have you heard of Upwork?

No, I've never seen that.

That's crazy, dude. It just got relaunched, like, or it just got released like 2 days ago on TechCrunch. He was like, I— they're like, uh, we wanted to keep this in the DL, but basically we bootstrapped this into a monster business and we just raised financing for it and at a huge valuation because getting someone to build a fence, it's a 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 Sieve is doing is he's just saying No one wants these businesses. We're going to buy them for cheap and we're just going to install a manager and let it run. So anyway, I think if I was 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, I went to it, it looks like it's built on Wix. Technology's not going to be where you're going to play. It's going to 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 you think I hit the nail on the head there, Sean?

If I can interject, I think that, yeah, that's pretty accurate. It's a little bit more difficult. These guys, they are retiring, but they also— it's very difficult to get into this industry. You have to have 4 years of experience and then go in front of a board, the DPBR, to even get approved to have the license to do it. It's not like millennials or Gen Z can just, "Hey, I'm going to start a pool construction company today." you're gonna have to go work for somebody for 4 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 poised and ready to strike.

Okay. 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, um, number one, uh, 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're gonna tell a story, to put like a picture on the screen, um, so it's like, you know, this is, uh, 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 400 of these just in the Florida area where I, you know, where I'm from. And I've bought 2 more of these and these are great businesses to buy. In fact, I sold my house to buy these because they're such a 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 2 years and blah, blah, blah. The second one, blah, 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 25%. Within the first year. Okay, great. So we're going to keep doing this. We have a plan that is working, um, 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 going to do is I'm going to raise $5 million, I'm going to go buy $20 million worth of, uh, of pool companies, and we're going to 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. Sam Zell, the guy who invented the REIT, is doing these roll-ups. The guy who started 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 15 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 could say a bunch of words you're not going to understand, but those are 15 years of hard-won lessons. And so today I'm coming here, I'm going to raise this, I'm going to build a billion-dollar pool roll-up company. And like, you got to say the category of your company, the size, the price, all of that, I think would be like, I don't know if you heard that in the chat. I know Stock's having some problems right now, but if you heard that in the chat, go 1 to 10. Where was my pitch on a scale of 1 to 10 of 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 need it.

We need a smart investor like you, Sean. Because, man, you, you said it perfectly.

Yeah, but he didn't want to 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 want to invest in people who figure these things out. If I'm— if you need me for help, honestly, it's, uh, usually a bad sign for my investment. Uh, like, I want to be helping a rocket that's already going and not, uh, like, pushing something that's at a standstill.

And so, um, well, you know, you know the investment industry, and you know the roll-ups, and you know the comparables. I'm out here 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 got to weave my story, just a bit of my story, which is that I got tons of experience doing this. I've already started my roll-up. This is not just an idea that's pie in the sky. I already got the first 2 under my belt. I did those myself bootstrapped and they're working. And now I just got to sell you how we're going to go from 2 to 20 doing this. And that when we have 20, it's going to be worth this much because I can just do some math, say 20 times each one is worth $10 million. Now I got a $200 million roll-up, uh, if we, if we could pull this off, right?

Beautifully said.

The other thing is you didn't say anything about debt. Are you taking on debt for doing this? You said you're kind of raising money to buy the next ones. Why aren't you using debt?

Dude, why didn't you say that? That's a great point. I'm buying these for 10% down.

I'm giving away my secrets over the internet to thousands of people, now millions of your podcast listeners.

So, here you go. Bro, no one's going to— You, you, it's not a secret. Seller finance is not a secret. Uh, it's in fact, you kind of made it sound like you don't know what debt is because you didn't say anything, but, uh, now we've revealed the truth. Okay, great. Honestly, again, I think you actually have a very good business idea. Um, 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, you see crypto going down. These private companies are raising huge valuations with like 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 going to aggregate these because I just have a playbook that I can just keep rolling out. And by the way, I buy these for 10% down. So that means my cash-on-cash return after 15 months looks like this. And so you have a very, very strong pitch. And you just got to put it all together. Yeah.

After 30 years of doing something, they're going to be real tired. They don't want to push the needle. They don't want to make it bigger. They have a paycheck coming in, salary, they're taken care of.

Right. There was a guy— So right now for the listeners, Colton, he's sitting in front of a bookshelf that's empty and someone just says, Peter Thiel's Zero to One is not on his bookshelf. And for that reason, I'm out.

This is where all of my trophies are going to go. For, uh, for all the wins we're about to have.

Oh, Lean Startups not on his bookshelf? For that reason, I'm out.

Yeah, dude, you seem to be spending too much time actually building 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 on a treadmill desk, I'm out.

You eat carbs, I'm out.

Yeah, that's hilarious. Uh, thanks, dude. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much.

Um, all right. Uh, I asked, I don't know if Ali's going to pop up, the guy who started Stonks, but that was, that was fun. Um, 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. Uh, let's rank the companies based on that. I'll kind of remind you what they were. So there was 5X. That was the first business that pitched, which was doing something that we could barely understand, but had $1 million of ARR commitments, um, you know, for his kind of 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 Bukhari or something like that. Group booking on travel. Uh, third one we had was, uh, Orym, who was doing Munch, I think. Uh, which was taking creators' content and letting you chop it up into bits and letting them re— making it easy for them to repost using AI and some software. Then we had, uh, the last guy was Duckies, and before that we had Nickel Pass. Did I miss anyone? Yeah, all right, 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 want to invest into the least, I would actually put Nickel and Fly together. Maybe Nickel first, but the Fly together. Bakari, I would put that they would trade for one or two. In the middle would be 5X, and then, uh, tied for the bottom ones would be, uh, the Jelly Smack competitor and Ducky's.

Okay. All right. I like it. Mine would be Fly Together number 1. I thought that, uh, he seemed great and the business seemed, you know, pretty straightforward and had momentum. And, you know, I'd 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 it made it sound? But I like the sound of that one. I actually think that Ducky's is probably the second or first best investment, but I'm not sure I would want to invest in Colton just because, you know, he seemed like— I think I'd want to hang out with him, but I'm not sure I'd want to invest in him because I feel like I'd just be frustrated because he speaks a different language than me. He speaks like digging holes in the ground and building pools. And like, I speak like frameworks.

And it's like, you know, hey, Colton, I like you. Just change the way you look for me, please. Yeah, just like, just talk entirely different for me. Will you?

If I invested 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 20 years, just mail me a giant check and just in between, I need to pretend it's gone. Uh, so, so that, that'd be my second one.

And by the way, I'm Colton, I'm messing with you.

Um, also I love the name of that, Lil Duckies. That's a great, cool name. Uh, I'd do Nickel Pass 3, and then the other 2 I probably wouldn't invest in. So those are kind of like 4 and 5. Um, all right, Ali, you're here. The crowd is beating you up because Stonks 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 else?

And this is Ali Moiz, the founder of Stonks.

Yes, thanks for having me, guys. Great, great show. Loved the real talk. Honestly, I think it's, it's the best real talk we've had on Stonks, uh, and, and, uh, you know, the comments show it. Um, yeah, so you guys crashed Stonks. You, you This, this is one of our biggest events, um, uh, and we were also in the middle of like a code migration, so there were more issues at this event than the last like 50 events put together. So the stream crashed a few times, but a page refresh did fix it, uh, but 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, me and you, we used to compete at our previous startups. So you built Streamlabs, We were building Bebo. We were both trying to build tools for live streamers on Twitch. And so I've seen you execute from, uh, you know, first afar, then we became friends kind of towards the end. Um, but like, you're good. And, uh, when you decide to do something, uh, you guys pull, you know, you guys are scrappy and you pull it off. And, uh, actually when we were competing against each other, I had asked, I told, uh, Michael Birch, who was the founder of the original Bebo and he was our investor. I said, yeah, there's this company Streamlabs out there. He was like, who's behind it? And I told him your name. He goes, I know these guys. He used to have some company called Peanut 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 as 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 like hook that people want. And then you'll like go for it. Uh, we would go for it with like full force. Is that accurate?

Thank you.

Thank you.

You are, you're too kind, Sean. Have a lot of respect for what you did as well. Amazing products.

Uh, and you guys kicked their ass, for what it's worth.

I feel like the, uh, in the end we were competing with you guys, but it really— you guys kicked our ass.

No, no, it's, uh, it's great. I mean, um, I have a lot of respect for, for, for you and, uh, you know, what you, what you've done, and, uh, Birch as well. Um, but, uh, amazing, amazing event today, guys. It's just our, our team has been loving it, the chat's been loving it. I think Sam asked Um, everyone, should we do it again? Seems like, it seems like the chat is, uh, really into it.

So we'll take—

this is a gambling—

this is a gambling website?

It's called stake.com. Yeah, it's awesome. So it's really effective for that company.

Is this a hint? Do we need to set up like house money for you guys?

Like, yeah, exactly.

Okay. Yes, exactly. I think that you give us each like 10 or 20 grand to invest in different startups.

And by the way, we will invest random-ass influencers in also. So we'll go get, you know, we'll get Jake Paul in here, we'll just go get a bunch of like other famous people to be our friend of the house and just give us a house budget to go invest in startups.

You know, this is, this is actually not, uh, a half joke, half idea, but this is actually not a terrible idea.

This is— oh, so we have a— look, first of all, don't, don't, don't, don't assume smiling means a joke. I am not joking. I'm being dead serious. We should do this.

So, uh, so the way we could do it is we, we have a small fund. It's called the Best of Stonks Fund, and we do write checks into interesting startups, particularly high traction or great co-investors, um, similar to what you guys look for. So what we could do is for your next event, we could each give you, um, one, one check. So you pick your one favorite startup out of the 5 or so that pitch at your next event, and we'll write that.

Yeah, but I want— we want stakes in it, bro.

Okay, so that's a little more work. I have to figure it out.

That's all right.

Let me get back to you. Maybe we can give you some carry on that. Yeah, that would be fine.

Okay, that'd be cool.

All right, so also people need to know that Ali Moiz is not The same as Moiz Ali, the other guest on our podcast all the time.

Did I call him Moiz Ali?

No, no, no. You said it right. But people in the chat are like, wait, is this the deodorant guy? It's like, no, there's, there's Moiz Ali. That's the deodorant guy. There's Ali Moiz. That's the stocks guy.

So I'm not, I'm the investing guy, not the deodorant guy.

You gotta be sick of that. I have to assume.

Uh, you know, it's fine. It's, uh, it's more followers for both of us. People, we confuse all our followers.

It's great. That's amazing.

Okay.

And also we've been doing this bookshelf meme this whole time. Get us a book off the shelf there. Something that has helped you. You've sold a company for over $100 million, I believe. Uh, and, uh, so, so you read books and you've had success. Go give us a book off that shelf there that you will recommend to the crowd. Something that you think has helped you.

Um, I think—

bring it over, go grab the book.

Okay.

Okay.

Dude, uh, he's got a nice house. Does he live in San Francisco?

That was actually my test to just see if he's wearing only underwear, uh, on a lot— on, uh, on Zooms. And no, he passed. He's wearing, wearing shorts. If you ask me to get up right now, you might be, uh, you know, this, this stream might, might be rated, you know, PG-13 at least.

Are you wearing only underwear right now?

I'm wearing my jammies, which are, which are, are more than underwear.

Okay. So this is what I'm reading right now.

I have the same one.

It's a dense read, but huge fan.

That's cool. Connor in the chat goes, "He picked the heaviest book he has. Power move." I agree. Absolute alpha move of you just now to go pull a 36-pound book off the shelf. I appreciate that.

All right, well, uh, Ollie, thanks for help. Tell your boy John Hancock and the rest of the team thanks for making this happen. This was awesome. Uh, Sean, uh, I guess we'll do this again. This was, this was pretty good. I think we had a little kinks to work out, but it's pretty good.

Yeah, let us know. Tweet at us, um, if you're, if you were here live or if you listen to the pod. Tweet at us if you, if you want us to do more of these or, or, uh, you know, if this should be a one-time thing.