SPEAKER_00: All right, everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. We wanted to try something new, a live, L-I-V-E, a live call-in show where you get to Ask Jason. People love to do Ask Jason, but previously, you know, we get a sound file, like people would leave a voicemail. Sometimes they would send a short video or they would just email us the question. That lacked the dynamic nature, the dangerousness of having a live caller. So we wanted to try doing live Q&A. And so let's get started.

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SPEAKER_05: Let's get our first caller on the line. Tommy, are you there? Yeah, I'm here.

David Friedberg: Oh, great. Awesome.

SPEAKER_09: You have a question for me? Yes. I was wondering, in 2024, would you think pursuing a master's in fintech is a worthwhile thing?

David Friedberg: Okay.

SPEAKER_12: I've never heard there was a master's in fintech because fintech usually refers to startups and applications.

SPEAKER_05: But who's giving a master's degree in this and what do you learn in that?

SPEAKER_09: Um, it's through the University of Missouri St. Louis and like the main it's like normal finance stuff and that you learn about like applicant applications of blockchain and AI and like how they work in the finance world.

SPEAKER_16: So, and how much is this going to cost you and how much in time and money?

SPEAKER_09: Like, what does it cost to do this time, it would be like an extra year of school for me because I can do the accelerated version and then, um, in terms of money, I think, yeah, it would be normal tuition, which would

SPEAKER_23: be ballpark, 10,000, 50,000, 25,000, 20,000 a semester, I think 20,000 a semester and you'd have to do two

SPEAKER_25: semester's or four, uh, just two of the, the master's.

SPEAKER_23: Okay. So $40,000 for you to get a master's in fintech.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. So the degree is going to mean nothing to anybody in our industry. So is your goal eventually to work in tech and to, and what type of job do you think you want to have in tech?

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I mean, we're being working for a startup.

David Friedberg: Like, uh, finance out of any startup would be a dream job, I guess. Okay. So you want to work at a startup and you want to work on the finance side. You you're an accountant, you're a CPA.

SPEAKER_32: You're not yet. Yes.

SPEAKER_16: Okay.

SPEAKER_12: So, you know, adding 40,000, I mean, if you're independently wealthy and you want to take a year.

SPEAKER_16: To, you know, talk about fintech stuff that seems expensive and it seems like it takes a lot of time. How old are you? Tommy.

SPEAKER_35: Oh, 23.

SPEAKER_16: 23. Okay. So, man, my guess is what you're going to learn.

SPEAKER_12: There is not going to match what's happening in the marketplace. I think being a CPA is great because you're always going to have work. Uh, and if you love accounting and you love finance, that's great. Finance is a really good skill to have. I think a better thing for you to do, uh, would be to get inside of a startup that's working in the fintech space and be able to be a Jack of all trades operations person, uh, where you could help the startup and try to be a co-founder. And you could help with accounting, you could help with raising money, building decks, building models, uh, you know, doing HR, all that kind of stuff. So there's typically somebody in a startup who does all of the tasks operationally that the developer or the salespeople don't want to do.

SPEAKER_37: So that's kind of the Jack of all trades.

SPEAKER_16: Um, I don't know, you're going to learn a ton in this, and I don't, I don't mean that as a dig to anybody, but a year of your life and $40,000 plus living expenses. You're going to still go on, right?

SPEAKER_37: So that you're talking about 60, 70 grand, which are living expenses. I assume you spend three grand a month living.

SPEAKER_00: I'd rather see you just take a, get a job at a startup, you know, just.

SPEAKER_12: Find a co-founder, start hanging out, uh, you know, where do you live? Tommy, uh, St Louis, St Louis.

SPEAKER_16: Okay. So I'm going to give you a piece of advice right now, take the 40, get the hell out of St Louis, move to Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_12: Silicon Valley and just start going to demo days, get a cheap apartment and just plunker yourself down right in the middle of all the action.

SPEAKER_29: Literally get a apartment somewhere on the peninsula, San Mateo, San Carlos, whatever, and just start meeting with people there and trying to get yourself into a startup and then have some discernible skill that they need.

SPEAKER_16: Now, right now finance, you're going to have your, you have your undergrad now or no?

SPEAKER_48: No, I, uh, I'll get it after the semester.

David Friedberg: Any work experience to date? Um, not in that sector. No. Okay. Any specific skill that you have that startups need a specific skillset that they can't live without that, you know, of, um, other than accounting?

SPEAKER_51: No, not really.

SPEAKER_00: Great. Accounting is a skill people know. So then the other possibility is try to find a startup, uh, that works in the accounting space.

SPEAKER_53: And there are tons of them, but, uh, have you spent much time outside of St Louis in your life?

SPEAKER_09: Um, no, uh, like traveling, you know, for weeks at a time, but nothing like living there. And now, yeah, so I'm going to give you like the best piece of advice you ever had, I think, which is get the hell out of St. Louis and put yourself in San Jose.

SPEAKER_37: Okay. Get out of St. Louis, go to San Jose, San Mateo.

SPEAKER_12: Just get yourself into California. You find yourself a small apartment and then just be part of it. If you want to be part of it, then you got to be there. So just be there.

SPEAKER_58: All right.

SPEAKER_12: And then you'll figure it out. Get yourself an apartment, get a roommate, start going to all the events, start going to the demo days. There's like, you know, all kinds of events going on, uh, where you can network and then start a blog about startup accounting and finance. Right. And then just try to find an internship or a job anywhere and just tell any founder you'll work for free.

SPEAKER_16: You'll work for $3,000 a month, $4,000 a month. You'll be an operations person. Just try to break even, right? If you're willing to do that. Right. And just be part of it. Sounds like you have a little bit of resources to do that.

SPEAKER_37: Right?

SPEAKER_60: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: It sounds like $40,000 living in for your living expenses in San Mateo will get you further than getting that master's degree.

SPEAKER_00: Nobody in our business cares about the degrees anymore, less and less every day. Um, and 40, 40, 50, 60 grand. It's way too much money. Just get your ass to Silicon Valley. One way ticket.

SPEAKER_12: All right. That's it. All right. Talk to you soon, bro. Let me know how it works out. Uh, we'll check it with you in a year. See if you have the chutzpah to just get that one way ticket right now.

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SPEAKER_67: Hey, Jason. My question for you is what are some common mistakes you see first time founders make? Wow. Where do I begin?

SPEAKER_00: You know, the, the number one mistake is probably building a product without talking to customers, you know, essentially using your incredible brain power, having two founders sit around and they just brainstorm ideas. And then you figure out some really killer idea in your mind, um, because you imagine if the world had this, it would be better, but you don't actually have that coming from a specific customer need. And so, you know, people will be like, oh, you know, dentists should, you know, be able to manage their businesses over their phone, or they should be a marketplace to get dental cleanings. Because isn't it hard to get your teeth cleaned and it's like, is it hard to get your teeth cleaned? I don't know. Um, is there a better solution to that? I'm not so sure. You know, what you want to do is go talk to a dentist and say, how much of your business is, is teeth cleaning and, uh, tell me about that.

SPEAKER_73: And just listen and say, um, okay, you're a single pro solo practitioner.

SPEAKER_37: You've got one dentist in this practice. Uh, tell me about your day. You know, what do you do all day? And you just kind of keep double clicking, right? So you try to see if there's something that's missing from dentists. And then maybe they say, you know, yeah, we have a lot of last minute cancellations. Okay. Last minute cancellations. Okay. Um, or we, you know, insurance is the problem or, you know, uh, we, we don't have reoccurring customers or whatever. Oh, okay. Maybe there's a membership club where you can get unlimited, you know, teeth cleaning, whatever it is. And you, you, you kind of come up with a idea based upon an actual customer need.

SPEAKER_40: I think that's not talking to customers would be number one.

SPEAKER_12: Number two is I think people, uh, sometimes don't have skills. And so they build a team of idea people. What you really need in, in this kind of a business is to have a team of builders. And so the companies that go far tend to have three co-founders, sometimes two, sometimes four. And so I would say, Sam, you want to have, you know, two or three co-founders in, in the team. And have at least two of the three be actually building the product. So you have a startup. I take it. Sif AI is your startup. Yep.

SPEAKER_66: We do. How many co-founders? Uh, just one other. He's a technical co-founder. He's a recent CS script in Berkeley. Great.

SPEAKER_29: So there's two of you. And what do you do at the startup? You're the idea guy. You're the business guy. You're the sales guy. UX.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. Just about everything you said. UX, biz dev, sales, talking to customers. And part of the reason we asked that question is the first time we took a spin in our idea, we weren't talking to customers. We just kind of thought of the solution first and kind of in search of a problem. But how did that go? It didn't go well. Um, we had, and we had to pivot our product quite a bit. We actually talked to Sonny Madra, your friend, and he kind of guided us in the right direction and to, um, first speak to customers and come back to me and we'll talk about the idea. And so we got gathered a lot of feedback. And now we think we're building a product that, um, customers actually want. And now it's just about execution and, um, kind of beating the competition. Yeah.

SPEAKER_89: Who, who are the customers you're going after?

SPEAKER_66: We're starting, you know, primarily startups and fast growing companies, uh, small businesses. Uh, I don't think we have the, quite the, our platform, not the technical capability to reach the kind of the enterprise. They have a kind of a different set of requirements.

SPEAKER_93: So you want to go with emerging high growth companies. So. Right. Yeah. Three person companies, 10 person companies, something like that.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. We're doing AI powered sourcing and interviewing for recruiters. And so the enterprises typically have a little bit different requirements, which. Like several integrations and, um, kind of compliance needs that we're not quite there yet. But, um, initially we have onboarded, you know, quite a few, uh, beta customers and we're kind of iterating the product still. But, um, yeah, we're really excited.

SPEAKER_12: So how would it work? I send a link to a potential candidate and they talk to a chat bot, which asks them a series of questions.

SPEAKER_95: How would it work? Sort of.

SPEAKER_66: So we're kind of trying to do the entire pipeline of recruiting. So first of all, it's a sourcing tool for recruiters, right? So instead of using LinkedIn, which is what most recruiters do today, where they kind of just scroll through LinkedIn, doing all these Boolean filters to manually click and click. Now we can just use natural language, just like you do with ChatGPT, but it's pretty much like ChatGPT for people search. So a recruiter can just give a long thing, like I'm looking for a software engineer in the Bay area that has fintech experience at a series A or series B startup. Something super specific that LinkedIn and other platforms kind of struggle with. And then we'll return a list of results. Um, our best ones that we kind of vetted using our kind of AI and other filters we have. Um, and we kind of give like, uh, like certain analytics and a certain one sudden summary of the candidate. And then we also like link to their GitHub account. So you can kind of show like what they've actually built and not just what's on, um, listen, their LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_97: And so I guess then the question is, is the HR people you're talking to or the founder who's looking for a person?

SPEAKER_00: Everybody would love to just have the list of ideal candidates. So the question is, can the software do that? Give you the list of ideal candidates. And is that actually the problem? The list of the ideal candidates or is it getting a meeting with them or is it qualifying them?

SPEAKER_12: So what's the good, the good part now is you could actually give the product to somebody, the people you talk to and say, Hey, remember, we talked here's the product we built. Um, and I remember you're, you know, looking for developers and you're looking for developers who are on this time zone and who have, you know, experience working at a fintech company. Here's the results we got, you know, we did a combination of, you know, crunch base and LinkedIn and we, we found these folks and then we got their githubs automatically and put them in a table. What do you think? You know, then you can at least have the next conversation where the person says, okay, well, next I want to get them onto, I want to get a meeting with them. How would I do that? Oh, well, you have to send them an email, send them an email, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_16: So I think you've, you've learned, uh, one of the first lessons of startups, which is you can't talk to customers too much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_100: Now they might tell you things they want that they don't actually want.

SPEAKER_16: So there's a whole nother series in the science where sometimes people will be nice to a founder because they know you're a struggling founder or you're trying to do something entrepreneurial.

SPEAKER_12: So you have to be careful that sometimes, you know, you'll ask them, Hey, do you need something? And maybe they are just being kind to you. So you'll find out, um, or how do you think you would find out if this is mission critical for that founder to, to have the, the, the process you just described?

SPEAKER_40: How would you find out if it actually wasn't important to them or how important it was to them?

SPEAKER_66: Well, first of all, whether they're paying or not, instead of just being like, yeah, it's whether they're putting their credit card in. That's really the thing. And one of the things we actually did is for early customers, we are requiring like a payment. I mean, we're not pricing it fully what we would price, but they are still paying customers, um, kind of testing it out. So, um, we tried to vet it that way a bit. And, um, yeah, I think just whether they actually put their credit card in and not just saying that's it.

SPEAKER_16: That's it. You got it. And that was, you know, how rule, you know, with superhuman figured it out as well.

SPEAKER_107: You can only sign up if you put your credit card in and you're willing to do a half hour on boarding call.

SPEAKER_12: So he sort of challenged people, put up those roadblocks. And then you actually know if people really need a high end email client that saves them an hour a day or, you know, 10 hours a month, whatever it does for a person.

SPEAKER_37: So congratulations. Well done and keep grinding. And we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, of course.

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SPEAKER_78: Next up on Ask Jason Live is Clint. All right, Clint, you are here on Ask Jason Live. This is live. You're looking good. You got a great podcast studio. Yeah. You got a great beard. Look at the neon behind you. We have to do things right. You got the, you got the lava lamp and a great shirt. I get the sense I'm going to get an awesome question. Give me a nice thing.

SPEAKER_115: You absolutely are. I'm just waiting for you to grow the beard out so we can fit in, you know? I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_16: It comes in pretty rough. It comes in pretty rough. It's not a great beard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_117: Yeah. Firstly, thanks for your time. Also, just want to thank you. Beginning of last year, beginning of 2023, you said there's just a minute of audio that

SPEAKER_119: you said on the podcast about the need for startups to survive 2023 and that those have a great proposition for investment and to become the next unicorns. And that clip we actually took and that fed us through 2023, just that minute. So that fed us, it fed me, it fed our team. Thanks.

SPEAKER_120: And I think there's a lot to that in cultivating hope as you made it through that brutal, yeah. So thanks for that.

SPEAKER_16: If you survive, you can thrive. So survival is super important and a lot of times you survive and then things can break your way. You know, timing is everything. So, you know, we have this amazing startup cafe X, the robotic coffee machines. You may have seen me talk about, or I talked about in my book and made that investment, you know, I don't know, seven years ago or incubated eight years ago.

SPEAKER_12: And man, it's been hard to launch a robotic coffee machine in San Francisco where they fought against it. They wanted us to use powdered milk. Homeless people were breaking the machine.

SPEAKER_00: People were stealing the iPad ordering system, just really gnarly. Couldn't get into airports, you know, and then also trying to make the software work, the hardware work, the retail experience work, uh, and a great actual drink. So you, you start thinking about how complex that was. And here we are now. I just was going through the airport.

SPEAKER_16: With my daughters who were born right around the time cafe X was born and they were thrilled

SPEAKER_50: to order their drinks from this machine, order cookies, and they went crazy. And there were 10 people around the machine ordering and, you know, just warm my heart that

SPEAKER_00: that company survived. And there were many times where, you know, COVID et cetera, it should not have survived. And it did.

SPEAKER_76: So yeah, there's who survive have, you know, a special place in my heart, but you have a question for me.

SPEAKER_117: Let's hear it. Yeah. Thanks for that. So my question really does, um, go around that period of time.

SPEAKER_119: I just like to hear your thoughts on companies like ours, startups like ours that have been going about three years. We launched on the downturn, uh, made it through the 2023.

SPEAKER_117: We're now extremely tight on funding. Uh, we stuck between, um, not having the metrics to raise some of the investment we need, uh, and not having the money to build those metrics. My personal belief is really around that if we can't find a way to help these startups in this position, that it's really a, quite a detriment to innovation versus a country in particular, uh, cause I am in the States. Um, and so, you know, that's, that's kind of a problem that's developed over the last three years. How do those startups survive this period? And they're kind of feeling like they've been left out in the cold a bit as well.

SPEAKER_119: And then if you have time, if you could just tap on something about valuations, cause obviously when we had our previous and now is different.

SPEAKER_73: Yeah. So this is a really, really tough situation to be in.

SPEAKER_12: You know, you start during the Zerp environment, you're able to close the seed round. You get to work, you get some level of product market fit, and then the market bottoms out, funding dries up, company's not dead. You've learned a bunch, but now it's a three-year-old company and you're, you don't get the benefit of selling hope, right? And a dream. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you've got investors now who just want to see metrics, as you're saying, right? And they're saying, prove it to me. And so, yeah, you're, you're, you're caught between a rock and a hard place here. There is no easy answer other than solving a problem, an acute problem for a small number of customers and then using that customer love and data to try to win over angel investors and seed investors. And having a low burn rate is very attractive today.

SPEAKER_00: So if you're only burning 10, 25 K a month, 50 K a month, I'm sure you're probably in that range of had to guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_131: So how many employees do you have full time on the project?

SPEAKER_117: Three. Perfect. One of the things that you did as well is how prompted us really early with your foresight to cut our spending. So we were one of the earlier ones. So yeah. You took the medicine.

SPEAKER_134: Yes, sir. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. Well, and what's happening is you are part of the Zerp era of startups who has made the transition to the AI lean startup methodology. So there was lean startup methodology. People threw it out the window. There was like, you know, Steve Blank, Eric Reese. They did a great job of explaining to people how to do stuff really affordably. I'm sure you read the books. I'm sure you understand the concepts. Then there was Zerp where people were like, well, we can always rate. We're optimizing for raising the next round. So we raised the million dollars in this round. We got 10 people. Yeah. They're just being, we'll raise 2 million in the next round. If we did a million in the last round, we'll just raise 2 million in the next run. And then the bottom drops out and the game on the field changes. Because now you're up against startups and we're seeing this over and over again. They have 3 founders and they're each taking a draw. 2 of the 3 are builders. So this team is super lean and they're shipping product constantly. And, um, the Zerp era startups might have, you know, 6 or 7 people in the company who don't build the product and 3 or 4 people who do build the product. And they probably need to get rid of a couple of those people and get back down to basics and just be grinding on product until you have market pull. Right? And so it's very depressing when these companies get big and you get to 10 people, you probably experienced this because you don't have product market fit. And then there's 5 or 6 people who are in sales, marketing, growth, whatever, operations. And they're like, Hey, when are we going to have a business here? When are we going to have a kick ass product that people want?

SPEAKER_78: You're better off just not having those people hang around and be annoying, pesky, depressing, and then a weight on the founder.

SPEAKER_140: Better off just having 3, a lean product team.

SPEAKER_81: Boom. And I'm assuming that's what you have now, a lean product team. Yeah.

SPEAKER_117: Lean product team. Uh, you know, honestly, the last year has been just one of the best. One of the best moments in the company.

SPEAKER_119: Uh, when we look back on it, it was not fun to go through. It was terrible, but I do know that had we raised that money earlier, we would be spending it on the wrong thing. So hindsight's 20, 20. And as you know, to your point, the buy in from the team through difficulty, through struggle has just been amazing. So, um, yeah, lots to learn from it, but, uh, yeah, I do think that. Tell me about the three people.

SPEAKER_101: What's every, um, you're the founder. What do you do at the startup? What do you contribute? And then who are the other two? And what does they contribute? I'm just curious, the composure here of the team.

SPEAKER_117: Yeah, absolutely. It has changed over time. We had three founders. Initially, we had to release one, uh, usual story, right? Um, I'm the CEO. And so I obviously, well, what don't I oversee, right? Everything. Uh, and then I've got my other co-founder is chief product officer. So he's a builder, which we like to have obviously.

SPEAKER_146: UX design or developer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_117: Yeah. UX design, but overseas development. Got it. It's off, but very close to it. Got it. Um, and then, you know, in replacing the third co-founder kind of got creative, uh, brought on COO for equity. And yeah, it's been really good. Who's doing the development of the product? You have an outsource dev team or something? Outsource dev team that we have used for two years, actually, initially out of Ukraine.

SPEAKER_119: Now it's scattered, but haven't missed a beat. So really good. Um, obviously the goal is now to build our own.

SPEAKER_37: Yeah. So that's the question is like this team, um, out of Ukraine and maybe scattered. Is there, are there one or two of those that want to come on full time and make this the mission, you know, which, uh, may or may not be possible. That'll make the optics look even better for you. And then any customers, people paying, what does the company do?

SPEAKER_78: And do you have ideal customers using the product and do you have the credit cards? Yeah.

SPEAKER_153: Yeah. We did a, we did a weird thing. We built in the live space, uh, within 11 months of the company, we went live on the

SPEAKER_117: app stores and got approved in seven countries.

SPEAKER_119: Google then ran a, a, uh, article saying we wanted the apps that they love. So we picked up all these users before we were ready for them. And so that was good and bad, you know, but ultimately ended up around 1300 users, uh, 380,000 active converted only 40 to subscription.

SPEAKER_117: Mm-hmm. The description model. We actually took a leaf from your book. What does the app do? Point to socials. Yeah. So the app, uh, gives you a space to capture all your meaningful moments in life. Yeah. So we know how superficial, you know, social media has made us.

SPEAKER_119: Uh, but this is really a first person, my insights, my thoughts, my experiences, completely private, shared privately and shared forever generationally.

SPEAKER_117: So you can be known in first person. Yeah.

SPEAKER_97: Got it. So you got a little ancestry in there. You got a little journaling in there. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_37: And you know, what's really nice about those kinds of apps is, yeah, people will want to pay to maintain that stuff. So if you can come up with a format, um, then you just have to figure out who is the documentarian, who is the archivist of that family.

SPEAKER_00: Um, and then that's, you know, that's, those are the people who are motivated to use this kind of apps. How do you find them? You got 40 of them. How do you find 40 more?

SPEAKER_117: Yeah. The initial testing was actually with a nonprofit. Uh, we launched the MVP through a nonprofit of five and a half thousand families that all have life threatening illnesses, uh, in their kids. Mm-hmm. Um, that was tough, you know, communication through nonprofits difficult.

SPEAKER_119: Uh, that was our initial push, but, um, yeah, I mean, we've got, we've got quite a few strategies. One of the things is we're building a podcast. My background is radio, so, uh, that'll build the wait list. And we go after interviewing people on the podcast that have good audiences.

SPEAKER_134: So it's not to build a podcast, it's to, to reach, um, reach scale.

SPEAKER_37: I've been pitched on these kinds of memory apps all the time. I think they're very interesting. You know, people a lot of times do it after the person dies and then they start doing this. I, I've given a lot of advice over the years of, you know, giving people prompts to ask family members

SPEAKER_12: and then collecting those videos for future generations. So I would love if my two brothers as, but one example, um, and I asked my parents questions. You know, every time we saw them and then videotaped them and then somehow put them together. And then it became some kind of output, like a documentary about my parents' lives. But that kind of, that kind of app or scripting I've been pitched on people. There are people doing this service where they charge you $10,000 or $5,000 to make a documentary about your life, your family's life, et cetera. And, um, they, they kind of do this. I think they give you a script, you make the videos and then they stitch them together. Are you aware of these like documentarians? Yeah. Do it work for hire?

SPEAKER_167: Yeah, but it's not frictionless, you know? No, I agree.

SPEAKER_168: But it is indicative of there's something there on the high end.

SPEAKER_117: It's a developing landscape, no question about it. And we think our timing is really good. Uh, so yeah, it can do something with the wheel or something. And the price points there, I mean, $7.99 a month, $79 annually works pretty well. We're looking at bringing that down to $5.99. It's a kind of a throwaway number.

SPEAKER_16: It almost feels too cheap. Yeah.

SPEAKER_134: I like the idea.

SPEAKER_16: It does feel too cheap. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there's a higher end version of this.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. But, um, where, just gonna think out loud here for a second with you. Yeah. There are archivists in the world or documentarians. They need work. I wonder if you could match me with a documentarian who I paid to ask my parents in an app on a zoom call, whatever it is, you know, 20 questions, and then put those answers into the app for me.

SPEAKER_50: In other words, I'm thinking of like a marketplace here of documentarians to jumpstart this.

SPEAKER_00: Now there are people with more money than time, and those people tend to be, you know, really great customers. And then over time you automate that, right?

SPEAKER_16: So what are the 20 questions every child should ask their parent and document for future generations?

SPEAKER_12: You know, tell me about grandma. Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about how you met mom. Tell me about the day I was born. Tell me what you remember about my childhood, whatever it is. You know, what was I like as a child?

SPEAKER_16: And, you know, those kinds of things are people will be willing to pay for it.

SPEAKER_37: I know I would pay as a high end consumer. If you said this was available for $1,000 or $500 to hire a documentarian and have them fill out these videos into my, you know, app.

SPEAKER_12: What is your app called?

SPEAKER_183: Capsule. C-A-P-S-L-L.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, Capsule.

SPEAKER_107: If there was like Capsule Pro, you know, and I could spend 500 bucks, you know, having somebody interview my parents, I would do it. I'd do it in a heartbeat.

SPEAKER_184: Yeah, no, totally. I hear that. Can I just change the perspective a little bit in that sense? Sure, please.

SPEAKER_117: Yeah, so, you know, when we speak about this sort of thing, one of the things we've got to deal with as a company is that it's not a full one day. It's not only memories that we're dealing with. Actually, the way we engage in these moments now actually has a lot of meaning right now. It builds authentic connection, the opposite of social media that reveals your self-worth, the worth of those, and obviously passing it on is cross-generational, which we've done in humanity from the beginning of time. So, it is a one day thing, but actually that's not our application. Our application is to save your moments now. The one day add on is a great feature set for that.

SPEAKER_119: But we think we can reverse the division that we've seen in social media through this kind of activation. Interesting.

SPEAKER_117: That's what we're doing now. Yeah. And there's a lot of study around that too, which is great.

SPEAKER_188: And do the 40 people who pay you have something in common?

SPEAKER_117: Generally, moms, families, particularly age, we aim at Gen X's in particular. Perfect age. Gen X's. We've all got kids and we're all trying to.

SPEAKER_132: Very nostalgic. That's grandma's photo albums that are no longer relevant, right? That's what it is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: It's amazing. I wish you great success with it. I think, you know, keep grinding it out, understand the customers. And then in terms of raising money, you know, I think raising prices and showing growth and then going to raise money with, you know, a vision of how this could go from 40 to 400 to 40,000 is what you need to show.

SPEAKER_12: Right? Yeah. What you are maybe going to prove inadvertently is it's a niche product. Right? And so that's one of the other things you'll contend with is sometimes startups run experiments. You get to your three, four, five, and what you've proven is, oh, there's a niche market for this. Right? Yeah. And so how do you break it out?

SPEAKER_00: Right? And I've been in this position myself many times where we're working on a startup and it, it proves, okay, yeah, there's a $10 million business here or a $5 million business, which then takes you out of the VC race. So you got to be figuring out how does this get millions of people every day to use it or tens of thousands of people to pay hundreds of dollars a year, something in that range where you can get to millions of people who are part of this editorial hook. You know, there's usually some behavioral loop in these apps that make people come back every day and pull them in.

SPEAKER_202: That's exactly right. Yeah, that's what it is. Have you figured that out, the behavioral loop or no?

SPEAKER_153: Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_117: So while we had the MVP live for two years, we were doing picture, audio, and video in digital time capsules to be passed on. We learned that video is the place to be. You know, we already do this with our phone. We already do selfie videos and like concerts, moments like that. Or when you're capsuling a moment, that's what you want. Kids first steps or your thoughts after something happened, after you fell in love, remembering those memories. So video only, and I won't say too much more than that.

SPEAKER_37: Well, I think going for the vertical video is a smart move. You may eliminate some people who don't want to be on camera, but then you gain the lunatics who live on camera all day long. All right, great job. And keep us up to date on your progress. Well done, Clint. Thank you very much.

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SPEAKER_76: Terms and conditions do apply. So Daniel's up next. Good to have one of our portfolio companies come on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_212: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I'm Daniel, founder of Hey Hire. We help the service industry hire locals in two days or less, LA 26. And my question to you, Jason, especially because it's relevant to us right now. So in a world full of pivots where pivot has become a buzzword, can you share a story of a pivot gone wrong and the lessons learned from it? That people don't really talk about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: I mean, I could tell you one from, uh, myself when I was doing Mahalo, we were trying to do this like search engine, which actually perplexity is now doing, which was instead of just 10 blue links, pulling in some, uh, editorial. So my idea was like Wikipedia plus Google search results or Yahoo search results. And it started to get some traction. We had SEO, um, and the SEO was printing $10 million a year and advertising. It was, it was really starting to crank. Um, and then Google got, you know, kind of, uh, kicked our ass with the Panda update.

SPEAKER_12: Uh, and we lost all of our SEO as that he, how, how to this, how to that. Everybody who had demand media was a company that had a lot of SEO juice and they just basically cut off everybody. And so then I had this other business, which was YouTube and we had done a bunch of shows. Um, well cast, uh, being fat sucks, uh, a recipe show or Mahalo video games, et cetera. And those channels, um, it had really started to get traction. And then, uh, but it wasn't interesting to me, the YouTube kind of ecosystem, but we were having success. And then I just started doing inside. Cause I was more interested in the journalist in, you know, content side. And I probably should have just stuck with the YouTube side because YouTube was very tiny back then, 10 plus years ago. We were part of their like programming group where they had given like little bits of money to it. And I should have not pivoted to, to news and inside. I should have just stuck with the YouTube thing and I probably would have had a great exit. So that was a mistake on my part. I, I just thought YouTube couldn't work because they were taking 45% of the revenue. And I built my model. I was like, this can never work because you're giving away 45% of the revenue. What I didn't realize was it was going to get to as big as it gotten billions of people.

SPEAKER_00: So that was, you know, just strategic mistake on my part. So if I could have changed it, I probably would have just done video games. I probably would have just done my, I would have made my hollow, my hollow video games. I just done one thing. So almost always, you know, something's getting traction and you don't stick with it enough. Um, and yeah, it's just, you know, people make that mistake all the time.

SPEAKER_16: The best way to understand what to do is to obviously listen to customers and see what's going on there. And we knew that they were having breakout video after breakout video after break.

SPEAKER_220: Have video on YouTube.

SPEAKER_00: Um, but it wasn't interesting to the founder. Right. And so there's, I probably should have just handed the company off to somebody who did care about video at that point and just let them run with it.

SPEAKER_212: So that's kind of the dilemma that we're having right now. We're listening to our customers. Uh, we mostly help restaurants, but we have a few restaurants that also do catering and they want something that's just going to help them with last minute staffing. And there's a huge need for it. And the, the dollar amount on these deals is going to be 10 to 50 X potentially. So right now we're at that crossroads. Do we focus on this and just building a pilot for that ad? Uh, because even like a minimal pilot will, will take some work and we're kind of limited. Um, or do we stick to our bread and butter, which has been proven to work, but lower ticket. So yeah.

SPEAKER_224: So yeah. And I know what your, your startup does just briefly.

SPEAKER_37: You help restaurants who need workers where there's a big shortage here in America, you know, use, uh, your software and platform to, to get waiters, dishwashers, runners. I guess all of those different people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: And, um, what you learned was that there's another group of people catering companies who need 50 waiters tomorrow.

SPEAKER_37: And so this happened to, um, a company called point, um, and the guy, Andrew running it, um, had an issue where he, um, people started using point. Instead of to do surveys and, you know, it was kind of like, uh, um, you know, um, a survey tool. They started using it to, um, you know, like for petitions and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_12: They started to petition businesses to give them better deals. So people started using his platform instead of to petition people to, you know, save the whales. They started doing petitions to, can I get a free yoga class and introductory class for $5? Or can I get half off if I buy, you know, a hundred hoagies or whatever it is. And then everybody, what Andrew told me on this very podcast was everybody started working on the, that idea. Everybody in the company wanted to work on that because it was succeeding. And the other thing wasn't succeeding was having modest success. And so he was like, well, I can't stop everybody in the company because they want to work on this. So we'll just work on that. And they, he let the employees and the customers determine where they went.

SPEAKER_00: And that became Groupon, which became a huge success for, for a significant amount of time. So my question to you, Daniel is what does the team want to work on?

SPEAKER_12: Does the, and you know, are these customers more interesting catering companies that need 50 people, 25 people? Are they a more interesting customer base? Because man, you can get 50 people work, a hundred people work, 25 people work just by working with one of those companies.

SPEAKER_37: Right. Um, and handling it, it's a bigger ticket size. And, you know, uh, the people who are on the other side of the marketplace who want work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Maybe they like those jobs better because they pay twice as much. Right. Or three times as much. Uh, and they're looking for more freelance than going to the same place every day. So I guess that's my question.

SPEAKER_12: What does your team find more exciting, the existing business or this new business, this adjacent business? I'll call it.

SPEAKER_229: I would say exciting.

SPEAKER_212: We're all looking at the catering part sounding more exciting, but again, I mean, it's, it's kind of a 50, 50 right now between me and my co-founder and our advisors are like, yes, focus everything on catering or no stick to the bread and butter. Um, and it also depends because most of our restaurant customers, well, not most of them, but I would say about half of them. They also do catering. Um, so, so for the, it's, it's going to be the same customer, but just another feature that they really want to use. And if they're not able to do that with us, they're just going to pay someone else for that software. Uh, also our job seekers, we currently have 20,000 job seekers on the platform. Uh, they're also going to be able to opt in for last minute job requests. So it's, it's going to just make it a more wholesome experience for both sides, business and job seeker.

SPEAKER_107: Sounds like it's part of the same flywheel. Then, um, this is like an adjacent thing.

SPEAKER_12: So in some ways this is your Uber eats to your Uber business, right? Or this is your Uber. Is it, this is like door dash going into convenience stores after doing restaurants, right? It's kind of an adjacency rather than a hard pivot. And that's why I really like it because it does seem like if you have those 20,000 folks and there's no jobs for them, or they are looking for extra work, man, you can just email them. Hey, there's a thousand of these people in Texas that we have their contact info. And we can say, Hey, we've got a catering job. It pays this much. Would you like to qualify for it? You have to answer these five questions, you know, and then you get more data from them. It's like another reason to leverage the supply side, which is what, which is what Uber found, you know, is another way for them, uh, to get the drivers more work. And actually Uber now has an Uber test rabbit type service. I heard.

SPEAKER_00: So if you're an Uber driver, you can also deliver goods, and then you can also work in somebody's house as an assistant or, you know, um, and I think what Dara was saying on one of the earnings calls is it's like, they're getting more work. For the same base of people, which then is super efficient. So I, I like it a lot actually. And this doesn't feel like an, or it feels like an end. Right. And then you just have to think MVP wise.

SPEAKER_37: What's the lightest version of this.

SPEAKER_12: You can create that solves the problem and then price it. Right. So don't be afraid to price out the bottom half or the bottom two thirds of people. For this product, make it expensive and just capture the top 20% of people for catering to start. So it's profitable out of the gate. Does that make sense? I like it.

SPEAKER_232: No, it makes total sense. And what are you planning on charging for it?

SPEAKER_212: So that's the thing we had, um, our customer that suggested, he asked us for it. He's like, can you please build something like this? And he said that he works with certain venues that are paying a 100 K a year licensing fee, just for access to a certain list and people who are opted in for, for last minute jobs. So we don't really know. It will really depend on the size of the. Sounds like $500 a month is a good starting point.

SPEAKER_12: You know, if the, if they're a caterer, how many, how much money do they make per year?

SPEAKER_64: You think this caterer, this customer, you think they make millions per year, 1 million, 5 million. It really varies.

SPEAKER_212: It can, it can be in the mid hundreds and it can go to the, it can go to the eight figures too. Right.

SPEAKER_12: So if there, if this is a mid six figure business, often low seven figure, let's say.

SPEAKER_00: So your ideal customer profile is somebody doing a million dollars in catering business a year, 80,000 a month, let's say everything.

SPEAKER_241: Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: So if they're doing a million a year and this is their most painful thing, 500 a month is 6,000 a year.

SPEAKER_00: That's not even 1% of what the, if they were, if you go for just people who make a million, this is 1% would be 10 K. So this is 50 basis points a year, 6,000 a year, whatever it is to solve their most acute problem. And this sounds like it's their most acute problem. They're, they're constrained, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_212: And our, our money for value is, is definitely our value for money because most of them are currently using gig platforms, um, that charge them double the, triple the hourly rate of what they're currently paying. They're, you know, I've had catering company owners tell me like, I, I pay my, my in-house cooks 20 bucks an hour. And my last minute waiters 50 bucks an hour. And I feel terrible about it. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah. Doesn't make sense. And we're not going to do any of that. We're just going to connect them with the people. You pay them how you want you onboard them how you want. We just get you the people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_78: So in a way you're like this database, you're like loop net or something, or just Craigslist in a way.

SPEAKER_37: So if you just said, listen, it's 5,000 a year. And you can post up to 10 job 20 jobs a year or whatever it is. Right. So you could just give them $500 a month. You can post five times a month, different jobs, you know, some, you know, rate per usage or something. But yeah, start with 500 bucks a month and ask the person for their credit card and just send them to a type form and see if they pay it. You know, and then you can, as Paul Graham has always said, like do things that don't scale. You can just be all bespoke to start.

SPEAKER_00: You just email your database manually. You just do slices of your database. So if it was 500 bucks a month or even a thousand, you say it's a thousand bucks a month and you have to buy a six month subscription. And we're going to go to, we're going to really work hard. You'll be our first customer and we'll solve this problem for you, man. They're going to, I mean, they might just have, you know, half a million dollars in profits sitting in their bank account. And $6,000 a lot cheaper than hiring somebody who's a manager for 50, 60, $70,000 a year to solve the problem. So maybe a thousand dollars a month.

SPEAKER_247: You do see how that goes, but whatever you do overprice it.

SPEAKER_00: So you get only the serious folks it's and just tell people this is for people who make a million dollars or more in catering. That's why it starts at 6,000 a year. This isn't for people with a quarter million dollars a year. I like that. Catering business. Just, just neg them, you know, this probably, this isn't for you. If you're making, if you're only doing like one or two catering jobs a year and you need three or four waiters, not for you. You know, this is a more bespoke, high powered, you know, industrial strength solution for a million dollars in catering up. We, we don't do like small catering jobs. If you need three or four people, go use Craigslist, you know, or text people. This is for, you know, you need 20 waiters. You need to do 10 jobs a year, 30 jobs a year.

SPEAKER_247: And you know, it's a, it's a serious problem for you. I love it. Great job. That's great.

SPEAKER_252: I appreciate that. And I'm going to definitely bring it up on our next call with everyone. All right.

David Friedberg: Great job. Next on the program is Greg. Greg, you have a question for me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_254: Hey Jake. I was curious to get your take on, you know, is it worth trying to raise before product market fit? You know, for example, you know, we're currently in a pre-seed stage with a rolling safe and trying to determine what metrics and are most critical for pre-seed and seed investors. And, you know, when several of those are metrics related to product market fit or revenue generation, you know, capitals often needed to get there also to thoroughly test acquisition models, you know, to generate, you know, the desired data that they're looking for. Yeah. I'm just curious what investors prioritize from a startup, you know, before product market fit and, you know, pre-revenue versus after.

SPEAKER_12: So before there's product market fit, they're going to be looking at the team. So how, and this is what our firm launch would do. How many people, how many co-founders do you have? We got three.

SPEAKER_260: Three.

SPEAKER_12: Perfect. Okay. So you got multiple co-founders. That's a checkbox of our 13 things we look at in the pre-seed. So you got one of the 13. Um, have you raised venture capital before? Yes.

SPEAKER_262: Uh, great. Checkbox. Checkbox.

SPEAKER_12: So now you've got multiple co-founders and you've raised venture capital. Have you had a successful exit before? Have you sold the business to another company or money or stock in that company? No, not. Okay, great. So you don't have that one. Do you have world-class design of the current product? Even if it's not launch world-class design being apple would feature it.

SPEAKER_00: And it's got like an incredible, you'd win a design award for it, or are you not there yet?

SPEAKER_265: Yes. No, our design is probably one of our strong suits.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. So for us, we, if we see world-class design like Robin hood level, you know, com level that we like that too. Yeah. Um, and then product velocity. So how often is the product? Would you say, how often do you ship new features in your product right now?

SPEAKER_254: Um, we're probably shipping new features.

SPEAKER_265: I mean, uh, two weeks sprint usually a core feature is included in one of those. Um, so we look for product velocity as well.

SPEAKER_16: So you probably have that. So you have like three or four of the things we're probably looking for in that.

SPEAKER_12: Has your team worked together before you previously, uh, the three co-founders.

SPEAKER_269: Did you work together on your last startup or at Google or something?

SPEAKER_254: Yeah. One of the co-founders, him and I worked together, uh, in consulting capacities together alongside with clients, uh, pretty much in the top step.

SPEAKER_272: And the other one is now. Um, great.

SPEAKER_97: So that's another thing we like people who've worked together before because we've seen that have great, you know, greater success. So you've got a couple of the check boxes.

SPEAKER_37: We like to look for congratulations. That's awesome. And, uh, that'll help you in your journey. I think, um, with this.

SPEAKER_78: So you could raise based on those factors from seed funds, potentially from angel investors,

SPEAKER_37: just on like, Hey, here's the pitch. This is what we're going after. You might be able to get 25 K to 250 K checks. Where are you based?

SPEAKER_265: Um, in St. Pete, just outside of Tampa in Florida. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: So there's no VCs there to speak of angel investors, maybe, but you're in a tough location, right?

SPEAKER_12: So if you were based in Silicon Valley and you were meeting with people, this would go a lot faster, like 10 times faster, because you could be meeting with folks all the time and showing your progress. Generally speaking, if you can get the product launched and get 10 customers for it. Um, people would love to see that because now that you're off to the races and then that unlocks about, you know, 50 times the number of investors who just want to see a little bit

SPEAKER_37: of early product market fit. Um, and so your instincts are correct.

SPEAKER_100: You're living like way outside, you know, Silicon Valley, New York City kind of Austin hubs, where, you know, there might be some VCs who, oh, you're local, we can meet together.

SPEAKER_12: You've got a track record, sort of you've worked together before. You might be able to convince them to do a little pre-seed investment.

SPEAKER_16: Uh, because you're in their backyard, but being in Tampa all the way away from the action going to be harder, right? So then I think you do have to prove it. I would get the product launch. I get to 10 customers and then start talking to them about it. You're going to have to perform two or three times your Silicon Valley, New York, Austin contemporaries to get the funding. So just be aware of that as well.

SPEAKER_282: It is what it is, right? Yeah, right. That's it.

SPEAKER_16: So good job. And, uh, yeah, customer traction is great. And then you could do, you know, take, um, uh, take 10 meetings with seed funds, I would think. And then the other thing is you could join an accelerator and incubator, um, and that acts as a validating proof point because you would have to beat out. Like, for example, in our accelerators and our pre-accelerator found university, you're going to beat out 90 to 99%.

SPEAKER_199: Pre-accelerator, you have to beat out 90% of people. Accelerator, you got to beat out 99% of people. YC accepts one and a half. You got to beat out, you know, whatever it is, 98.5% of the, you know, a hundred people.

SPEAKER_16: So if you can get into a higher end accelerator, that can also be the start of the validation process. You got through that filter and seed seed funds do look at that.

SPEAKER_40: They'll say, Oh, this person got through the tech stars filter, the launch filter, the YC filter. That means something as a first level pass, but ultimately the, the good investors will want to talk to your customers and ask them, Hey, what do you think of this product?

SPEAKER_76: How good is it? Right. And that's going to be the big unlock. Yeah.

SPEAKER_288: That's all good.

SPEAKER_227: All right. Well done. I think we have time for one more. Okay.

SPEAKER_290: Oliver. What's your question?

SPEAKER_293: Thank you. Um, question pretty much just on the initial push for customers. So we serve real estate agents and real estate brokerages. We're getting a lot of interest from brokerages for like a complex solution. So, which would be a heavy buildup, but would also be like five or 10 grand a month. And then we're also getting interest from agents, which would be like $20 a month. Um, so we have like 23 different brokerages on wait list, about 2,500 agents. And we just don't know which one to our manpower towards initially, which would be a lightweight.

SPEAKER_295: And then add or.

SPEAKER_37: Yeah. So you're, you're now getting into total addressable market kind of discussion. Tam.

SPEAKER_16: Um, so how many real estate agents are there in the United States right now? It's hundreds of thousands active and, uh, over a million who've got the certification.

SPEAKER_37: Am I ballpark, correct? Yeah. Do you know the exact number of active real estate agents?

SPEAKER_291: Like it's like 1.3 million.

SPEAKER_299: So, and then about 20% of them do the majority of the business. About half of them sell more than one deal a year. So got it.

SPEAKER_37: So if 20%, you, you think there's 300,000 people who are in the $20 a month, Tam. Yeah. Okay. So $20 a month, 300,000. If you capture the whole thing, 6 million a month, 72 million a year.

SPEAKER_12: Pretty good. Pretty good. Question is $20. Would they pay 50?

SPEAKER_303: You think if you added features over time? Yeah.

SPEAKER_78: So it could double, uh, in terms of those individuals paying for it.

SPEAKER_37: So it could go from 20 to 40, maybe even a hundred a month at some point. Seems reasonable.

SPEAKER_305: I think it's reasonable. Definitely.

SPEAKER_16: Right. So what that means is the 72 million, there's room for it to 4X in terms of how much you charge, 5X in terms of how much you charge. And now you got $350 million, Tam, for them.

SPEAKER_81: Now for brokerages who would pay 5,000 a month, 60,000 a year. How many of those do you think there are?

SPEAKER_306: The, like the regional, regional brokerages, probably like two to 3,000. Okay.

SPEAKER_16: So 3,000 and, uh, you think 60,000 a year. Uh, so now, uh, a thousand had 60 would be 60 million. 3,000 at 60,000 a year would be 180 million. So they seem like similar Tams. Um, so then the question becomes, you know, are there competitors for either of these products in the market and is one of them going to be harder to displace than the other? Is another way to look at this? What's the answer to that question?

SPEAKER_199: Do you have more competition for the going direct to brokers or more competition with the $5,000 a month solution to brokerage houses?

SPEAKER_299: Like going direct to agents. There's not a lot of brokerage solutions currently. Got it.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if you can get those brokerages to put down the money, then you're a SaaS business.

SPEAKER_12: Um, and it feels like, you know, you could have a sales team, uh, and an onboarding team and a customer success team and land and expand and raise prices over time. And then you've got a smaller number of targets to go after.

SPEAKER_37: You just couldn't have somebody in Manila, you know, research 3,000 people who have these agencies, put their names into a database for you. And then you're just going to spend the next 10 years seeing of those 3,000, how many you can get. Now, if you were going to do the one for brokers, you're going to have to figure out a way at

SPEAKER_12: scale to get to a large number of brokers, podcasts, Google search. Influence or tick tocks. I don't know how you reach them, where they hang out message boards. I know there was like a real estate message board where they all hang out and, you know, hand ring their hands, Reddit forums, whatever. And so you just have a different life where you'd be trying to do in one case, you're going to have a sales team targeting leads, warming them up, you know, doing meetings, maybe whining and dining people. And it's a small number of people paying you a large amount of money, low turn on the other side, high turn, high marketing, you know, having to, you know, you know, reach a ton of them. Now, a lot of them may sample it.

SPEAKER_00: So it's going to be a high turn business. And, but it would be more defensible, right? Because if you did get to scale with a large number of brokers, you got 100,000 brokers.

SPEAKER_16: Well, yeah, you're not, if you lose a thousand of them, it's no big deal, right?

SPEAKER_40: You've lost 1%. Whereas in the other case, if you start losing dozens of them, it could have a serious impact. So I think you know the answer to this question that you're asking. You're probably just looking for confirmation.

SPEAKER_285: Was my assessment where you wound up?

SPEAKER_293: Yeah, it was just like a little indecisive, I guess. Yeah. But no, I appreciate you thinking through this. Thank you very much. I clarified a lot for me.

SPEAKER_316: Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: Have you done an enterprise software company for a B2B company before? No.

SPEAKER_316: Is this your first company?

SPEAKER_16: Yeah.

SPEAKER_316: First AI company, I was in real estate and then I did my masters in AI.

SPEAKER_293: So I just kind of like know the domain. And, um, so we have like two pilot programs with brokerages and then we did a conference and then it's just exploded. So I was like, oh, which way do I go?

SPEAKER_78: But, uh, I like the idea of going after the big high end folks.

SPEAKER_12: You could eventually, you know, uh, if you look at something like Slack, you know, there are people using Slack with five people in their Slack instance. And there are people using it with 5,000, right? They, they're the solution kind of works for all of them. If you make this industrial science solution and people are paying 60,000 for it, you could always have a lightweight version. Eventually, I guess.

SPEAKER_37: I don't know why you'd want to. It sounds like if you own the brokerage, you could own the whole business and it's going to be a much easier business.

SPEAKER_12: And it sounds like they want what you're selling and it sounds like you could name your price if you're saying it's five to 10 a month. So I'd say you name your price and let's see if they actually give you, if they pay a six month, you charge upfront six months, you know, you do those strategies to make sure they're serious.

SPEAKER_37: So, Hey, you know, we're only gonna be able to have five pilots this year.

SPEAKER_16: It's a, you know, 5,000 a month is $25,000 on signing for the first six months. And then you go to monthly payments after that. Might that work for you and just be a little bold.

SPEAKER_37: And then if everybody says yes, then just raise the price, just literally double the price for the next 10 phone calls and say, Hey, you know, we can only do 10 of these trials this year.

SPEAKER_12: And it's not cheap. You know, this is a high end software, but you know, it's 10,000 a month. You gotta pay 60 on signing. But of course, if you sell one home, you know, your average home sells a million or two. So it'd pay for itself with about one sale.

SPEAKER_37: So that's all you need to determine is if you can sell one. And, uh, you may have heard on the earlier phone I did where I was saying, like, just challenge people and go after the high end first, as opposed to what a lot of founders do is they go for the low end and then they have problems later because they run out of money.

SPEAKER_00: All right. Great job. I wish you great success, Oliver. All right, everybody.

SPEAKER_16: This has worked out fantastic. We'll do more next time. And we'll see you next time on this week in startups. Bye.

SPEAKER_50: Bye. Hey, everybody. I talked to a lot of founders here on this week in startups and as an investor, and they tell me the same thing over and over again. They want to spend time together. So we've been working here on a new meetup program. We call it founder Fridays and founder Fridays are an event by founders for founders. This is an event that is hosted in cities by people like you. If you're listening to this week in startups, you're a founder. Now, why is it important for founders to get together?

SPEAKER_328: Shouldn't you be at home just focusing? Shouldn't you be in the office just focusing on your startup? Well, if you get together with other founders, true founders who are in the arena building like you are, you're going to get a lot of value from that because you can trade notes about what's working at your startup and what's not working. The truth is, if you're facing a problem, there are hundreds of founders out there who have probably solved it already.

SPEAKER_50: And instead of you banging your head against the wall, when you sit there and you talk to three or four founders, somebody say, Oh, you know what? I had that same human resources problem. Oh, I had that same technical problem. Oh, I had that same marketing problem. And they might tell you about a tool or a service that'll solve that problem for you. This happens over and over and over again. When I do founder Fridays with our portfolio companies, now we're going to give you that same experience. But here's what I need you to do. I need you to host this in your city. So you're going to go to this week in startups.com slash meetups. That's it. And you'll see a landing page where you can sign up and you can say, I want to host in my city. Now your city may already be hosting. So you can just join that person. We're using a wonderful piece of software that we've invested in called river. You can sign up for a river account just by going to this week in startups.com slash meetups. And we're going to do these on a rolling basis. You can join an existing meetup. If it's already occurring in your city or you and one or two other founders can start your own. Please go to this week in startups.com slash meetups. If you are a founder, this is for founders by founders. We vet everybody to make sure you're a founder. And if you host it, it's a non-commercial event. So this is your chance to connect. Go to this week in startups.com slash meetups.