SPEAKER_00: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Rippling, the world's first way for businesses to manage their HR and IT in one system. For an easier way to onboard and supercharge new employees, go to rippling.com slash TWIST and get 20% off. And CALM. Seize the day. Sleep the night with the help of CALM, the number one app for sleep. This Week in Startups listeners get 25% off a CALM premium subscription at CALM.com slash TWIST. That's C-A-L-M dot com slash TWIST. Upcoming launch events. Apply for our next Founder University, September 9th and 10th in San Francisco at founder.university. And get your free Founder Pass for LaunchScale in San Francisco, October 7th and 8th at launchscale.net slash tickets.

SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, it's time for Office Hours with me, Jason Calacanis, angel investor here in Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_06: We're at Neighborly, a community space that you can rent for $100 an hour on 18th Street in the Mission District. I've had 50 entrepreneurs show up. I'm going to answer 20 of their questions, six or seven of them on this episode, and the rest on our Patreon, which you can join at patreon.com slash TWISTartups. And if you want to come to the next Office Hours, it's officehours.launch.co to apply. I'm going to do this every two months, and I'm answering as many questions as I can to be as helpful as I can to founders who are looking to change the world by building great products and services. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_08: So today's format is pretty easy. It's called Office Hours. It's just like if I was a college professor, which there is zero chance of happening. But if I was, you know, you might have 10 minutes for a student who's having a tough time. And this is a chance for you to tell me what your biggest challenge is. And I have a massive asymmetrical advantage since I became an investor, much like I had as a journalist.

SPEAKER_06: When you're a journalist, which is how I cut my teeth, you ask a lot of successful and smart people what's going on. They all tell you, and then you try to figure out the truth based on 20 different people telling you what happened. It's a little bit like Rashomon.

SPEAKER_09: And then when you become an investor, you might have eight people pitch you the same idea in the same quarter.

SPEAKER_06: Or 20 people pitch you on the same new platform, AR, augmented reality, let's say.

SPEAKER_08: And so you wind up collecting a lot of information.

SPEAKER_10: And when you place bets and you have skin in the game, like we have at our 15-person company, where we put $100,000 to $2.5 million into a company, your eyes get a little bit more wide because you have skin in the game. When you read those monthly updates from the founders and you see their problems and you try to solve them,

SPEAKER_08: you see what works, what doesn't work, and you get a little pattern recognition.

SPEAKER_06: So what I like to do is have founders come together and tell me candidly, what's your biggest struggle?

SPEAKER_10: The more candid you are with me, the more candid I can be with you. And so if you choose to sit in that seat, you're choosing to get the red pill. Have you ever seen The Matrix? Okay. Take the blue pill. Everything's delightful and wonderful. You take the red pill and you rip out the tubes in the primordial goo that you've been trapped in and see that you are being programmed and harvested. So we're going to go candid.

SPEAKER_13: We're going to go red pill. First up is Kelly.

SPEAKER_12: Have you chosen to take the red pill?

SPEAKER_14: Yes, I have. That's my husband's favorite movie.

SPEAKER_15: So we watch it all the time. Do you really? Yeah, The Matrix. That's got to be super annoying. I mean, it's a great film, but I don't know about the fifth viewing.

SPEAKER_17: Then again, I watch Blade Runner twice a year. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: I might be in that same camp.

SPEAKER_06: Well, great to see you, Kelly. Thank you for having me. Tell me about your company and maybe what your biggest challenge is.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, of course. So I'm Kelly Cambry. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Blue Studios.

SPEAKER_21: Blue Studios is a live stream and on-demand platform broadcasting the best and most engaging STEM classes for kids taught by the best STEM instructors. So we call ourselves the Peloton of STEM, Masterclass for Kids, or a CZ of STEM. And we broadcast our classes live from our studio in New York City. And we have everything from coding, microbiology, botany, robotics, you name it. We've got it at Blue Studios. And we tell parents to imagine a world where Netflix actually made your kids smarter and YouTube was safe. And that's what we call Blue Studios. And that's exactly why we exist. So we charge a monthly subscription, $9.99 per month. And that gives parents access to watch our classes, parents and their kids to watch our classes live or watch them later on demand. And if there is a project on our platform that requires special materials such as a microbiology experiment, we give parents the options of buying the kit directly from us. And those average about $30 to $40 per kit. So my biggest challenge right now is that we are at the beginning of the fundraising process. And we are talking to angels, super angels, micro VCs. And there seems to be a lot of stigma around ed tech. Ed tech is notorious for being slow, having very long sales cycles, and also just not having the greatest exits. And we see ourselves as more of a direct-to-consumer OTT play, where we just happen to be broadcasting, engaging educational content to kids. So how do we make sure that we broaden our base of potential investors and make sure that they see that this is an opportunity where we want to teach a billion kids STEM skills? Across the globe. And we want them to see that large opportunity.

SPEAKER_27: Okay. Number one, I love this idea. This idea is brilliant. Thank you. And I'll tell you why. I just got the Peloton bike. I'm sorry, the treadmill.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. And anybody here ever use a Peloton? Raise your hand if you have. I have. Is it mind-blowingly amazing? Yeah. It's going to, everybody in the room is going to raise their hand. Is this company public yet, Peloton? Do they file? They filed.

SPEAKER_35: I'm going to buy the stock. And I don't buy public stocks, but the product is so, and you've used it.

SPEAKER_30: Yes. I love Peloton.

SPEAKER_08: It is the perfect marriage of content, hardware, and community. They have nailed it. And to your question about raising funding, the last couple of fortresses that will fall are construction, education, and health care.

SPEAKER_06: Music was the one that we thought would never fall, and investors were like, oh, you have a music startup? Oh, my God. I wish you luck. I'll totally be a customer.

SPEAKER_30: I have to go right now. And then Spotify figured it out. Yeah. Right? But for every Spotify, there's a thousand zeros. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: And so in education, most people don't get it. In fact, I passed on master class. And I just had David on the podcast, and the episode came out yesterday or last week. Have you seen it yet? Yes. Great. So I interviewed him down in Sydney.

SPEAKER_06: And what I missed about that one was I thought, I don't know if Dustin Hoffman's going to be a great teacher, and I don't know if they can replicate getting Dustin Hoffman. And the valuation was a little bit high.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. And it was a huge mistake on my part because I love the founder. And I love the product. I love the concept. And it's one of the things I'm trying to fix in my game is sometimes you can let like one thing kind of dissuade you as an investor.

SPEAKER_09: And so if you, I love the framing. Yeah. It's Peloton for education. Yeah. Brilliant. So sometimes how you frame it gives people that chance. And then understanding exactly why everything else failed is super important.

SPEAKER_60: Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: So you can go into the meeting with those investors and preemptively understand and preemptively cut them off at the pass and get them to nod and in agreement like a hypnotist does. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: Or a cult leader. Pick your choice. Sometimes they're both. Yeah. It turns out Aaron Hubbard was one of the greatest stage hypnotists of all time.

SPEAKER_06: Nobody knows it. True. True story. Anyway. So we would, if we go back one cycle, you have Skillshare, which did great.

SPEAKER_69: You have Linda, billion dollar exit. So there are some check boxes for billion dollar exits. And I think maybe you have the Coursera and the edX that raised a lot of money. And I don't know if those are successful or not. Do VCs consider them successful when you talk to them?

SPEAKER_71: Not really. Not really. People don't really mention Coursera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Too complex. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: And so remember, you need not convince everybody. So how many investors have you had an in-person meeting with to date?

SPEAKER_75: To date? We've had, well, we literally just started. Perfect.

SPEAKER_71: So we've only had just about three or four. Awesome.

SPEAKER_78: And you source those through friends of friends or cold emails?

SPEAKER_71: Yes.

SPEAKER_79: Through friends of friends first.

SPEAKER_30: Great. Yeah. So that's great. You got the warm intro that you're down.

SPEAKER_10: Do you have the product in market yet? Yes. Okay. And then how many paid subscribers do you have?

SPEAKER_71: Yeah. So we actually started in terms of traction. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: We started with an in-person test kitchen in last October to test the methodology and approach with parents and get direct feedback. So we ran that for about, after about five months, we were at 12K MRR. So we actually didn't expect the test kitchen to do as well as it did. And then after that, we took 150 of those parents and we did a two-month pilot that just ended last month. And during that pilot, we grew our waiting list to about 4,000 parents.

SPEAKER_83: It was unpaid pilot.

SPEAKER_21: It was paid. It was paid. Yeah. How much did they pay? 10 bucks? Yeah. They paid 10 bucks and they also paid for the kits.

SPEAKER_85: So you made 1,500 a month virtually?

SPEAKER_86: Yeah. So you did an in-person test in a space like this or in an apartment or something? Yeah.

SPEAKER_71: It was literally a retail location like this. I wish I had neighborly. It would have been a lot less expensive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_89: Now you do. You know that.

SPEAKER_88: Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_90: And then you have 12K a month.

SPEAKER_16: Yes.

SPEAKER_90: I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_92: For 12K for the in-person. And what did you charge per person for the in-person?

SPEAKER_71: We had an average of $125 per month that parents were paying us for in-person classes to come in four to five times a month with us.

SPEAKER_93: So parents will pay $25, $30 a session, no problem.

SPEAKER_06: And it's an hour or two?

SPEAKER_71: It was 90 minutes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Perfect. So 90 minutes for $30 is cheaper than a babysitter in New York.

SPEAKER_94: Yes. Much cheaper.

SPEAKER_30: Half price. Yeah. And you're learning something. Yep. Oh my God. Amazing. I love your idea. Thank you. And you're based in New York.

SPEAKER_21: Yes. We're based in New York. And we're out here in San Fran for 500 startups. We're part of the recent cohort. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you.

SPEAKER_100: And what week are you in?

SPEAKER_21: We are halfway through. So we're about week five or six. They're kind of blurring together now. Perfect. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: Okay. That's an okay program. I mean, it's not much.

SPEAKER_06: It's all right, but it's good. So if you're in the... To get great investors, they're going to want to see a clear path with 20% growth month over month. Yep. So since you're in that product market fit phase, I would keep your expectations very low for being able to clear market.

SPEAKER_105: Do you want to turn your idea into a website, a beautiful website? Well, if you did that with Squarespace, you're going to be able to blog and publish content whenever you want. You can sell products or services because you've got all that great e-commerce functionality in there. And you can promote a physical or an online business, or you can announce that special event like I did, or a special project. Super easy. Squarespace is the answer. It provides beautiful and customizable templates and also powerful e-commerce functionality. So you no longer have to get those things in two different places. In fact, people had three or four different vendors putting together what Squarespace now does with one simple login and one simple subscription. You can buy domains and choose from over 200 extensions, and you'll get great analytics, search engine optimization, free and secure hosting. And of course, Squarespace's amazing 24-7 award-winning customer support. It's all optimized for mobile. So you're not going to have this phenomenon where you get super frustrated because somebody makes a beautiful looking website on their desktop and it looks terrible on an iPad or an iPhone. No, Squarespace looks great everywhere. Here is my CMO, Presh, browsing the templates on Squarespace to create a site in minutes. And he made this beautiful site for our portfolio company, Superhuman, and it's called superhumanwallpaper.com, a site that showcases all the Inbox Zero images. And look how quickly you just put that together. Bing, bang, boom, done. Go to squarespace.com for a free trial today. And when you're ready to launch, I want you to use the offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I know you don't need the 10% off, but please remember to use TWIST so they know we sent you. And if you want to, go ahead and thank at Squarespace on Twitter for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Again, squarespace.com, use that promo code TWIST and you'll get 10% off. Thanks again to Squarespace for being one of our longest running supporters. I truly appreciate it. Great job to the team over there. We love your product. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_09: What you really need to have is, I would say, a 16-week chart showing that you can grow, let's call it, 3%, 4%, 5% a week. Okay.

SPEAKER_06: Now, what happens is entrepreneurs get very caught up in the big vision. They get caught up in doing the meetings. They get caught up in the deck.

SPEAKER_09: And if you just take that energy and just put it towards something simple. We have 10 paid customers.

SPEAKER_112: Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: We churned 2 this week and we added 4. Now, we're up to 12. And you just do that for 16 weeks. And you own a chart. What it shows to investors is that you understand what matters and you can control your destiny. There's too many people starting companies today. So, when we were sitting here 10 years ago, I used to do something called Open Angel Forum.

SPEAKER_08: It was like this, except it was only two rows of people. I was able to find maybe 12 investors. Myself, Shervin, Ron Conway, Chris Saka, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Dave Moore. And it was a very small, Cyan Bannister, a very small group.

SPEAKER_09: And we'd have six companies come and pitch. And I could only get to three or four companies. And I had to ask everybody, do you know any companies who are raising money? Because there weren't any. Now, we call what's happened in technology the MVP Music Festival. This has gone from being like three or four people around a campfire to being Coachella. And what it means is most investors, and they're not going to say this to you candidly, but I will,

SPEAKER_06: will look at that giant music festival and say, 95% of this group of people are not serious about building companies. I need to get the 5% who actually make it across the desert to base camp and then want to actually climb the mountain. So, what you've got to do, your job right now, is you've got 40 people in your cohort or so. And then there's 200 at, you know, YC.

SPEAKER_08: And then we do seven, a class, seven times a year or so. We do that on purpose, which I can get into. But anyway, what you need to do is separate yourself from the pack.

SPEAKER_09: And the way to separate yourself from the pack is a relentless focus on moving the needle on what matters, the subscriptions. Yep. So, it used to be your ability to pitch, the product, the logo, the demo, the MVP is how angels made a decision. Now they have so many people coming at them.

SPEAKER_69: They just say, send me your last 12 weeks of revenue. Send me your chart. Tell me your go-to market strategy. What's your CAC? The whole game has gone up a level. Yep.

SPEAKER_08: It's a totally different ballgame. And so, you just have to focus on that. Yep. And I love the idea. I want you to come interview for our accelerator and come hang out on Thursday.

SPEAKER_138: Okay.

SPEAKER_139: We have an accelerated Thursday, right? Okay. It's in this room.

SPEAKER_140: Okay. I'm going to get you the directions. Okay.

SPEAKER_06: And I want you to come Thursday and just see what we do.

SPEAKER_143: Okay.

SPEAKER_69: Because if you don't clear market, going to two accelerators, especially if, like, it's 500 to YC or 500 to launch accelerator or launch accelerator to YC or Techstars to launch accelerator to YC, that can be okay.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Better to clear market and raise a million. But if you don't, you'll come to our program on Thursday here and just see what it's like and compare it to 500.

SPEAKER_147: Okay.

SPEAKER_06: Our program is for raising money. Theirs is kind of for getting product market fit. Yeah. So, theirs is an incubator. We're an accelerator. YC does both, in fact. But we are only an accelerator. You have to have the revenue. Yep. And so, I love what you're doing. Thank you. It's going to work. Yeah. You also want to find people who've had success in the, not the education space. That's probably one thing you're making a mistake in the target.

SPEAKER_08: You're thinking, oh, I need an education, people. No, no. Yeah. Au contraire. You need the person who understands subscriptions. Yeah. And the power of subscriptions. So, we have an investment in brilliant.org, which is doing brilliant. It's education. We have Calm, FitBod, Steezy, and ToneBase. All five consumer subscriptions. Calm doing $160 million a year. FitBod doing $8 million a year. The other one's doing a couple million each. And I don't know, I can't say brilliance because they're not public about it. But subscriptions equals yum, yum. Yep. And if you can get the subscription going through the App Store with Apple, do that as well.

SPEAKER_156: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Because it's a huge unlock. The 30% VIG you have to pay in the first year and 50% in the second year pales in comparison to the affluence and propensity to spend money.

SPEAKER_160: Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: Of Apple consumers. Without saying the names of companies, but they're the names of companies you well know.

SPEAKER_08: When they launch an Android and iPhone product, they will have 60% or 70% Android users and then 70% or 80% of the revenue coming from the iOS users. Wow. What?

SPEAKER_69: It's crazy. Yeah. So it's all about iOS and it's all about people being able to subscribe with no friction. Yeah. Which means the iOS server.

SPEAKER_119: So even if your iOS app is just super simple, do it.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah. But I love what you're doing. I want to be involved. I want to hear more come Thursday. Okay. Let's hang out some more. Let's give her a big round of applause.

SPEAKER_164: Thank you.

SPEAKER_06: Amazing. Our next guest on Office Hours at Neighborly.com is Manuel.

SPEAKER_11: Manuel, tell us, what are you working on?

SPEAKER_166: So I'm the CEO of Helpful Village and at age 63, my mom got knee surgery and had to stop working.

SPEAKER_167: So I said, mom, why don't you just retire? And she said, no, I don't want to sit at home and do nothing. And then she added, son, promise me you're never sending me to a nursing home. And that's how I realized that aging is broken. You're facing loneliness, depression, lack of meaning in life. So basically, as I started to learn more about it, obviously, realizing it's important, but it's not only for my mom. There's 50 million seniors in the U.S. that want to age in their own homes and keep their, you know, remain independent. And yes, be free. So with Helpful Village, we offer them a platform where basically they are staying in their homes, connecting with their neighbors. With a little bit of help from their neighbors, they can stay in their own homes. So basically, let me give you an example. My mom can volunteer and help Barbara go to the hairdresser on Friday. And then at the same time, she can ask for help and say, well, can someone take me to a medical appointment on Friday? So doing this, the efficiency of the support system, right, because we're tapping on to volunteers, makes that, for me, it's the only way we can cope with the growth of 100%, double the number of seniors in 25 years with baby boomers retiring. What's your biggest challenge? My biggest challenge is that we are already serving 10,000 seniors, right, in 50 villages in 22 states. So basically, these village founders start creating local communities. They call us from Kalispell, Montana, or Vermont and say, hey, we want to create community in our city. And we need to use technology to basically connect with our seniors. And then obviously we say yes. So the biggest challenge is you don't have developers or the biggest challenge is just about how do we bring this cultural shift on saying now these people that come to us, you say, because they want to create community. So we want to show them that we are solving the biggest problem.

SPEAKER_69: Let me hold on a second. Let me just make sure we all understand the idea.

SPEAKER_06: You have a company called Helpful Village. The company was inspired by your mom and her loneliness. Check. That's great. It's personal. We like that.

SPEAKER_09: And you find community leaders who will lead a chapter, a village in your parlance, and that becomes a social network online or in the real world. Yes. Which one?

SPEAKER_176: It's both. Okay. My mom would take the phone and say, I need a little bit of help. Okay. And other volunteers.

SPEAKER_06: So you made an app. This exists as an app with groups or is it on Facebook groups? Yes. No, it's an app. It's an app. How do you make money?

SPEAKER_181: Yes.

SPEAKER_167: So you pay a membership. Active members pay. How much? So they pay their local chapter as much as, you know, $450 or $200 per year. Got it. And then we charge $1 per member per month.

SPEAKER_181: Got it.

SPEAKER_06: So this is the same concept that meetup.com had, which is the people running the meetup would pay the fees, I believe, and then they could make it into a business. So you have sort of a franchise. How many villages do you have? And what was revenue in June? Just so I have a ballpark idea.

SPEAKER_173: So we have 50 villages in 22 states, and the revenue was $10,000.

SPEAKER_191: So $10,000 a month over 52 villages. Yes. So you're making about $200 a month. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_189: And you've been doing this for almost a decade. No. How long have you been doing it?

SPEAKER_196: Yeah. We were in launch 2016.

SPEAKER_189: Oh, you were at?

SPEAKER_196: Launch, UC Berkeley. Launch.

SPEAKER_189: Oh, there's another launch? Yeah. Okay, somebody get my trademark attorneys on the phone.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah, so they have their launch pad or something program as part of Berkeley or something. How much did they put in?

SPEAKER_197: They didn't put money. So no money? No.

SPEAKER_06: So you haven't raised money. You're making $10,000 a month off of essentially a SaaS subscription of $1.

SPEAKER_201: Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_09: And the value people get is they get a group of people that they can build a community around. It's very interesting. And I salute you for looking at a market that is underserviced and that also has time and money. So if you could describe a group of people who have nothing to do all day, 10 hours that they've got to fill, and they have a ton of disposable income, and they're looking for something to do, that's an incredible demographic, yet it is overlooked. And there's a very cool company I had on the podcast called Papa. Join Papa. Did you see that episode? What they do is, instead of doing home care attendants, which are a medical thing, they've essentially taken a Postmate or an Uber driver type person and said, for $25 an hour, go check

SPEAKER_06: in on mom, and she needs to go to the grocery store, and then maybe we'll go to the park and play chess with her friends, and then she'd like to go for a walk and have a coffee, and

SPEAKER_207: then maybe you can come home and play a little Scrabble with her or whatever. Mom's into games. And that's their approach to this.

SPEAKER_09: Your approach is to almost have a franchise and to have this sort of group thing. I think all of them are noble.

SPEAKER_06: I think you might be underpricing what you're doing by a factor. Yes. How many months has this product been in market?

SPEAKER_209: Three years. Oh, three years. Yes.

SPEAKER_06: So three years and only getting to $10,000 and not growing rapidly is indicative of light

SPEAKER_10: product market fit or moderate product market fit.

SPEAKER_213: I want to tell you about a secret weapon we're using to scale, mystartupinside.com.

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SPEAKER_216: That URL again, R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash twist to get that 20% off. Thanks, Rippling, for supporting the podcast. And let's get back to this podcast right now. Is that fair to say you have light to moderate product market fit in your mind?

SPEAKER_173: I think seniors adopt technology is lower, but they are more sticky.

SPEAKER_167: Once they choose, they are more loyal.

SPEAKER_46: So you have a hard time onboarding them.

SPEAKER_167: So the thing is, we are the first ones entering this older adults market. And we got this, you know, interesting position. The other thing I wanted to say about the revenue is that actually we were contacted by healthcare providers that realized that, and research shows this, social seniors are healthier seniors. So they called us on set. Of course, yeah. So, you know, there is the revenue we do today, but it's the model about how much money

SPEAKER_192: healthcare providers are saving if they get social seniors.

SPEAKER_49: I have a trick for you. Healthcare is going to take years to unlock.

SPEAKER_06: Slow, arduous, regulation, and problems. You've got a product that is super cheap, but not breaking out exactly. If you're making $200 a month per customer, you have to train that lead up, right, in order. And then how many people are in the average group? 50? 25?

SPEAKER_222: 200. Villager.

SPEAKER_06: There's 200 villages. What's the average village population in your world? The average village population?

SPEAKER_167: Yeah. So there are around 200 people, members per village. Got it.

SPEAKER_105: And how many villages do you have?

SPEAKER_167: We have 50. But sometimes this village...

SPEAKER_105: So 50 times 200 is 10,000. Yeah. So you have 10,000. This is likely under-monetized.

SPEAKER_09: And I think it sounds like if it hasn't been growing rapidly, instead of going for the Hail Mary and waiting for the insurance companies to come down from high above and bless you, which will not happen. They will drag you through the mud and slow you down and you will run out of money and you'll be banging your head against the wall. So here's an experiment I think you should run. A $100 a month program where you hire full-time somebody you think is extraordinary with the

SPEAKER_06: demographic you're going after, which is 65 and up, I guess. And this person might be 65 and just having an active lifestyle. And you hire them for $500 a week.

SPEAKER_09: And you, like Peloton, have the instructors and you skim the cream of the best people. And then you say, you're going to advertise to the people who might make this decision, which is the kids of the parents. You can try it out for a month for $100. And then if you like it, it's $1,000 a year. And instead of leaving it up to those coordinators, the village leaders, to lead the village people, you come up with programming that is extraordinary. So you're not just making their lives less lonely. You're making their lives epic. And instead of trying to make it for everybody, make it for the top 5% of consumers first and then work your way down. And the example for how this worked brilliantly was I invested in a cab company. And they didn't start with UberPool. They started with Uber, anyone?

SPEAKER_08: Black. When you start with Uber Black, what people don't know about Uber was they started with Uber Black. Lyft started with ride-sharing.

SPEAKER_06: Sidecar started with give a tip of any amount you want.

SPEAKER_09: Because Uber started with the black cars, they were profitable in their top 4 or 5 cities instantly. Then they had profits. And because they had profits, then they could do UberX at a discount and expand the pie of people. Then they could acquire the drivers, they could go to different cities, and they ran over Lyft.

SPEAKER_08: And the only reason Lyft even exists today and probably caught up was because of the self-inflicted wounds that Uber had. And if they hadn't tripped up, if they hadn't been infighting, Lyft would have 2% of the market right now because they were rolling over those guys big time.

SPEAKER_06: And it's because they chose the top end of the market and then worked their way down. You're starting at the bottom and trying to work your way up and hoping that some miracle, you know, Medicare or whoever is going to come and save you, they won't. So try and experiment. And I would try and experiment at $100 a month, $250 a month, and $500.

SPEAKER_09: And the $100 a month, you're doing, you know, you get to come to five events a month, five group events.

SPEAKER_08: Plus, you know, they can do an extra $25 an hour like Papa's doing. And then try another experiment where it's $500 a month. Because for somebody who's in the upper middle class, what do they spend on their parents going to a home? $4,000 a month on average?

SPEAKER_06: $5,000 a month on average? $60,000. So if they could stay at home and I could pay $6,000 for them to do something twice a week for a half day and they loved it and it was enriching, it's a no-brainer. And so your pricing is terrible. Your idea is brilliant. If you had to choose, this is the problem I would love to solve with you. Because if you had a terrible idea and you were charging a lot of money, you'd be out of business.

SPEAKER_09: But a great idea, charging too little, run that experiment. And see what happens.

SPEAKER_167: Yeah, one of our customers is the Palo Alto Senior Center. So they run the village. They charge the member $1,800. A year or a month? A year. Great.

SPEAKER_09: So permission granted for you to be a marauding capitalist and take the top 5% of the market knowing that if you make that work, you'll have the software, the bandwidth, and the footprint to then go down to the next 45%. Now you've got the top half of the market.

SPEAKER_06: And then like Uber and Lyft, you can start grinding away at trying to solve the bottom half of the market, which is pool. But you're not going to help anybody if your business goes south and you shut it down because you can't make money because you have no money to pay people. And if you want to hire great people, you need to have a little cashish or else they're not going to come work for you. And you're only as good as your people, as we heard earlier.

SPEAKER_207: Let's give them a big round of applause. Welcome back to Office Hours at Neighborly. Somebody in the back.

SPEAKER_06: You guys got to. We'll work on it. But it's a pretty good crowd here. Okay. Next up is Steve with Glide Cruisers. They design and manufacture stand-up cycles like the one we see right here, which I will describe for people. It looks like a bicycle except you stand on it. There's a flat area. There's a backpack in the back where you can store some stuff. There's a huge battery pack. The tires are fat. It looks like motocross tires. Not a motorcycle, but those dirt bikes kind of. And you stand on it. How fast does this device go and what does it cost?

SPEAKER_244: This particular unit behind me will do about 23 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_06: 23 miles an hour, which means you need a driver's license but not a motorcycle license.

SPEAKER_245: No. Actually, the ones that we are selling are governor to 20 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_247: Ah, which means you need to be an adult. It classifies as a type 2 electric bike. Got it. Perfect.

SPEAKER_244: So there's no license. There's no registration. And if you're over 18, you don't even need a helmet.

SPEAKER_249: Oh, amazing. I'm going to suggest you wear a helmet. What does it cost?

SPEAKER_244: What you're looking at right behind us is $4,200 retail.

SPEAKER_250: $4,200. So it's not cheap, but it's not expensive.

SPEAKER_244: No, you know, if you get a chance to go into a bike store and you'll see row after row of mountain bikes for $7,000, $8,000, $9,000. So our entry level starts at $2,700. Got it. You can go as high as $5,500.

SPEAKER_254: And I guess that is determined by range?

SPEAKER_244: Well, battery life is a big part of it. There's three different levels of the battery. This is a 1,000-watt motor. Okay. You do have a 2,000-watt motor. Okay.

SPEAKER_256: And then you can get into accessories if you want to go to – this is a 3-inch tire. Got it. You can go to a 4-inch. You can go to a lot of different – you can put a computer on it.

SPEAKER_49: What would the range be in San Francisco? Okay.

SPEAKER_06: So hitting, you know, moderate hills once in a while, what would you say the range is in hours of driving or miles?

SPEAKER_244: You know, and I've personally ridden quite a bit in San Francisco. Okay. So the average battery life is about 25 miles.

SPEAKER_92: Okay. More than enough to get you through the day.

SPEAKER_244: 100%.

SPEAKER_92: And then the charge time if the battery is depleted is?

SPEAKER_244: Zero to full in three hours.

SPEAKER_92: No problem.

SPEAKER_244: One of the nice things you can also do, the charger is literally about this big. And I could put three chargers in the backpack. Amazing. So you can take it with you.

SPEAKER_20: What's your biggest challenge with Glide Cruisers?

SPEAKER_244: You know, I think our biggest challenge is that we think we've done a great job developing a product, and we've done it with very little debt. But now we're at a situation where we need to take that next step. And we need capital, and we need guidance. And I think we're both – Chris and I are smart enough to know what we don't know.

SPEAKER_105: Okay. So you've been doing this for almost a decade.

SPEAKER_244: Yeah. Seven years? That's when the idea was really born. Got it. There was a lot of prototyping. There was a lot of mistakes. Got it.

SPEAKER_06: And so this must be particularly frustrating to be grinding this out and then suddenly have Bird and Lime jump the fence and have – and jump bikes –

SPEAKER_09: and have hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in valuation and capital pumped into them when you got there first. It's a little frustrating, is it not?

SPEAKER_266: I'm not going to lie. It is.

SPEAKER_93: Okay.

SPEAKER_06: Having the best product does not mean winning. Laser disc, Betamax, a lot of those things don't exist anymore, right?

SPEAKER_272: True.

SPEAKER_09: So – and then audacity and a 1% chance of winning is what drives Silicon Valley. What drives reality, if you were using your own money, what person would take their own money and put it behind a 1 in 100 chance? It's crazy. Our minds are designed to be conservative because when we got consciousness as humans, what we learned was the conservative human who didn't go across the river and find out what was around the next mountain,

SPEAKER_06: the person who stayed in the cave survived, and the person who crossed the river got eaten by a crocodile, and if they made it past the crocodile, they get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. So our minds are designed to be fearful and conservative.

SPEAKER_09: And when we get into business, this happens as well. What we do in Silicon Valley is we have a concept which people don't verbalize all that much, but it relates to, in poker, implied odds. In poker – you play a little cards ever? A little bit. A little bit. Okay. If you've ever played poker, if you buy into a game, and we're all playing for $100 buy-in, and let's say three of us are going to get in a hand and get all of our money in. The most the three of us can make, if we all went all in, is? $200. Well, three times 100. Okay. 300.

David Friedberg: I'm thinking profit.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, you're thinking profit, right. So if the 300 goes in the middle, the profit would be 200, right. Perfect. But there would be 300, because in poker, once you put the money in the pot, it's no longer yours. Yes. It's what everybody learns the hard way. So anyway, but yes, 200 in profit's 100 for that.

SPEAKER_09: Now, let's say we were each sitting there with $100,000 in front of us, and in order to see the flop, it cost $500.

SPEAKER_06: So for 50 basis points of our $100,000, we could see the three cards that come on the flop. Let's say in the $100 example, it would cost $25.

SPEAKER_09: So you put $25 to work, to see the flop, to know if you connected with it, in order to win $200. Okay, you better have a pretty good hand, because the best case scenario, as you pointed out correctly, is you can triple your money.

SPEAKER_08: But now if we each put $500 in a high stakes game, a deep stack game, for $500, if I got two other players to come in, I see the flop. Let's say I hit a miracle flop, a 1% chance, and I take all their money.

SPEAKER_10: I take $200,000 after putting in $500,000, well, now that's $400,000 to 1%. That's called implied odds. So let's put that back into startups for a second. The implied odds in startups is so wonderful, because if I put $100,000 into Kelly's company, which we saw at Blue Studios, which is doing the Peloton, let's say I give Kelly $100,000.

SPEAKER_08: The most I can lose is? $100,000. $100,000, very simple. So what's the most I could win if I gave her $100,000 for 2% of the company? Well, if the company became a unicorn, 2% is YumYumski's $20 million. If it becomes a $5 billion company, $100 million. So the implied odds are tremendous in Silicon Valley. Lots of failures, but when they do work out, it's bonkers.

SPEAKER_213: Are you struggling to sleep these days? I know many of you are. You're not alone.

SPEAKER_212: One in three U.S. adults does not get enough sleep. And if you're not sleeping enough, that's going to screw with your cognitive functions. Think learning or problem solving. Or most importantly for people listening right now, how about making good decisions? If you don't sleep, you're not going to make good decisions. It's that simple.

SPEAKER_213: And people who are sleepless, you know what? They're going to be more prone to accidents. They're going to get weight gain, maybe even depression.

SPEAKER_212: But when we sleep, we're more focused, relaxed, and happy. That's why we're partnering with Calm, the number one app for sleep. You'll get a library of programs designed to help you get the sleep your brain and body needs, like soundscapes and over 100 sleep stories. My daughters love them. We do sleep stories every night. I love them. I do sleep stories every night. And my CMO, Presh, loves to do sleep stories. Here he is. He's on the Calm site. He's going through. He opens the app. He says, you know what? It's time for me to sleep. What should I pick? The magic fountain, a little mermaid, maybe some soundscapes, a theory of relativity. Nope. He goes with Matthew McConaughey every time. Hey, okay, okay, okay. It's time to get you to bed with Matthew McConaughey. Good job, Presh. I hope you're, I mean, you might fall asleep right now at work. Don't do that. Do it at night. This week in startup listeners get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com slash twist. I am so proud to be an investor in this amazing company. And now six, seven years later to have them sponsor the podcast. I'm so proud and it just warms my heart. 40 million people have downloaded Calm. And as you know, because I've said it a hundred times, it was Apple's 2017 app of the year. What an amazing honor.

SPEAKER_300: Find out why at calm.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_08: And so I suppose when you went into this, you were thinking like a normal business person, what to do. What Bird decided to do was something outlandish.

SPEAKER_09: Let's put these everywhere and let the chips fall where they may on a regulation basis, on a stealing basis, on a damage basis. Jury's still out on if it will work. But what you should probably be thinking about is if you could throw a Hail Mary pass, but an intelligent one, what would that be? What would it look like? What would it look like if this worked and you figured out a way to get more consumption and lower the cost of entry and get more people to use it?

SPEAKER_06: That's the interesting part of all of this.

SPEAKER_08: And is this proprietary? Is this designed by you and made by you or is it using kind of hacked together off the shelf?

SPEAKER_245: No, we have a patent on the frame. Wow, great. And it's actually made by a local company in Sacramento called Ventana.

SPEAKER_244: Oh, wow. Which is the, they make the frame for us. Got it. We have designed the fender assembly. We, pretty much everything except the front suspension and handlebars is proprietary.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, I mean, it is an extraordinary looking device. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06: And I think it might be, what does the new Bird scooter or their Bird stand-up bike cost?

SPEAKER_256: You know, I don't know. I would have to check into that, you know.

SPEAKER_06: What are your guests? Because they designed their own. They copied somebody else's stand-up bike, right?

SPEAKER_245: You know, with the Bird and the Lime scooters, you know, I don't know that we ever want to play in that game. Right.

SPEAKER_06: I'm just curious what it costs, though.

SPEAKER_245: You know, I don't, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so I'm going to guess maybe those things cost them the $500 to $1,000 range. And so it's important to understand where the market's at.

SPEAKER_105: You have millennials who don't want to commit. They don't want to buy these things. They don't want to be married. They don't want to have a lease. They don't want to have a lease at the office. They're using mom and dad's Netflix.

SPEAKER_189: That's, I mean, they literally want to commit to nothing. I know I'm describing half the audience. It's cool.

SPEAKER_09: So I think the reality is selling these is going to be super hard. Okay. Because the people coming up do not want to own. So there is going to be some model here that you're going to have to think deeply about.

SPEAKER_06: Unless you want it to just be a boutique business, which is fine. We call that a lifestyle business here in Silicon Valley. And if I said to you, well, this is a great lifestyle business, you might be offended. I think we've done a bad job in Silicon Valley of explaining what we mean by the term lifestyle business. A lifestyle business, when an investor says that to you, is this is going to make an amazing lifestyle for you and you. But not for me, the VC or the angel. Because if this throws off a million dollars in profits a year and you and your co-founder sweep $500,000 a year and eventually you've only got to work 10 hours a week and you can work on two other projects and you're sweeping $500,000 over 20 years and you make your $10 million and you put it into other investment vehicles and buy homes and do all kinds of fun stuff,

SPEAKER_207: that's a better path for you than risking it all and only owning 10% of your company by the time it IPOs and there's a one in a thousand chance that happens. And so you might be better served making this a lifestyle business, to be totally honest,

SPEAKER_08: or finding a niche where people really need this specific design.

SPEAKER_319: A couple areas that we're looking at right now, we're concentrating on, the law enforcement.

SPEAKER_320: Well, that seems wise.

SPEAKER_245: Yeah, so we're doing some ride-alongs, some demos with Berkeley, Oakland, Sacramento PD.

SPEAKER_319: We think that has a lot of potential. The other area...

SPEAKER_08: What are their top... Let's pause for there a second. In talking to them, tell me three things that they report they need in this device

SPEAKER_49: and tell me three things that they haven't reported they need, but that you suspect might delight them. Or do you not have that information yet?

SPEAKER_244: You know, I would say three things they need. This is...

SPEAKER_49: No, they report they need.

SPEAKER_244: Okay.

SPEAKER_49: And three things that you think they need that they don't know they need. So this is a more specific question for a reason.

SPEAKER_328: Okay.

SPEAKER_49: What are three things they tell you they need?

SPEAKER_328: Speed... Speed, mobility, durability...

SPEAKER_249: Okay, so durability and speed. Sure. They want it to go 40 miles an hour, I suspect? No. 30?

SPEAKER_244: They're very comfortable with the speed. Oh, okay. One of the big areas that they love about it is community interaction.

SPEAKER_329: Ah. It's not intimidating.

SPEAKER_244: Exactly. Right. Community policing. Great. They're very comfortable, kids, adults approach the officers, there's a lot of... So that's a big area for them.

SPEAKER_207: They can even let some kid ride it if they wanted to.

SPEAKER_245: They can take a child for a ride. It's amazing. So they can do that.

SPEAKER_08: We need more of that, right? It's the New York City community policing before 9-11. They designed the uniforms in New York. I got a lot of family members who are cops and law enforcement. You know, they designed the collar to be nice and wide and to be light blue and to not have paramilitary boots, to have more like shoes and be friendly. That was the original design of New York City cops. I didn't know that. Uniforms. And then 9-11 happened. And we said, oh, we're at war. Let's put everybody into SWAT gear. And we were all walking around like, yeah, this person jumped the turnstile.

SPEAKER_09: You do not need the SWAT team. So anyway, I think that's interesting. So the reason I'm asking you this is you have to be a little bit more bold in your thinking and start thinking, okay, here's what they told me they need. Durable, got it. Easy, checkbox. Speed, great.

SPEAKER_49: Friendly, great. What could you add to it that they don't know they need but that would make it extraordinary?

SPEAKER_08: Do you have any ideas? By studying what they do every day, have you studied what a beat cop does every day? It's okay if you haven't.

SPEAKER_245: No, you know, as I said, and having done the ride-alongs with them, they love the product.

SPEAKER_244: There have been small recommendations on things they'd like to see change in it. But nothing that I really thought that stood out as a dramatic change to the product.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, so here's the difference, I think, between kind of the visionary outlier CEOs and founders and then lifestyle businesses. The ability to watch a human using a product and then say, if I created these three or four things, it's going to blow their minds and they don't even know they need it. So, in the case of, let's say, Calm, the meditation app we invested in, they added sleep stories for adults.

SPEAKER_49: No adults were saying, you know what I need? I need somebody to read me a bedtime story.

SPEAKER_213: I need Matthew McConaughey, okay, okay, okay, to read me a bedtime story.

SPEAKER_27: But lo and behold, Matthew McConaughey is reading hundreds of thousands of people a bedtime story

SPEAKER_08: every night. So, this is what you have to do. You have to give yourself a little freedom. Now, I'm looking at it, my mind's going crazy.

SPEAKER_09: I'm thinking that could be a device that if there were 50 of those out there with GPS and

SPEAKER_08: with front and 360 cameras on them, they could be recording where they are, having them do DVR recordings, either on the bike or whatever, uploading them to a server, and then letting them know if there was somebody who was a perp, a criminal, you could do some facial recognition

SPEAKER_06: and see if you happen to drive by them. Now, imagine this device. If we walked in and we said, we're going to drive around the corner on this bike, and

SPEAKER_08: we've put three perps on the street, and you put the three confederates on the street, and you go to Oakland, and you say, look, here are three people that are known violent criminals. And we're going to drive around the street, and when it drove around, it sent an SMS alert

SPEAKER_06: to the cop, to the sergeant, and said, you just drove by a suspect. Here's their picture. You may want to drive around again and just check it out. Or, if it recorded, and you knew there was gang violence and drug dealing going on, every time they drove by, it cataloged who was there, and then they could say, this is a hot spot, and they just draw the corner on Turk and Golden Gate, where they were selling heroin and meth every time I came out of my office. I know, because they offered it. It's very generous. Very fair pricing. Product, not so good. No, you know, I didn't buy the meth. I'm joking. But literally, like, this could be, like, a mind-blowing thing for them.

SPEAKER_08: Now, there's all kinds of other issues about, do we want to live in a police state or whatever. But surprising and delighting with your product might be a major unlock.

SPEAKER_09: So I would sit there and do a brainstorming with your team. What are the craziest ideas we could come up with for this platform that would solve their problems? So this is called first principle thinking. This is what Elon Musk does a lot. And then there are second order effects.

SPEAKER_08: This is all in this mental model thing that Silicon Valley people are going crazy about. They're trying to figure out ways to think about things. It all comes down to maybe coming up with creative products and services that customers don't know they need. You know, if Steve Jobs would have just made, like, a bigger keyboard for the BlackBerry if he was thinking about that. But he was thinking about touchscreens and if they would ever work.

SPEAKER_09: So I would give yourself permission, since you've been at this for a while, to get outlandish, to pick a beachhead, and then figure out if you can just delight them and solve bigger problems. What are the basic problems that police on the beat have? Could be taking notes. Maybe it's note-taking is hard. Maybe it's interacting with people. But make that list and sit around creatively and just think, if we spent $1,000 more dollars on this, what could we do? If we doubled the price, if it was a $10,000 item, what would it look like? How would it work? And then see what that unlocks. And maybe there's a news organization that wants to have 10 beat reporters have these and be able to drive around with HD cameras picking up stuff for the nightly news.

SPEAKER_08: Maybe it's a news-gathering device, right? So just start thinking of that and free yourself a little bit. Okay. Well done.

SPEAKER_352: Let's hear it for Steve.

SPEAKER_191: Thank you. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Office Hours at Neighborly.

SPEAKER_252: We're here in the mission at Neighborly.com's latest space. That's N-E-Y, Burly.com. You can rent the space for $96 an hour. I'm an investor in the company. It's a super groovy company. And here on Office Hours, I ask founders to tell me what they're working on and what their biggest challenge is. They have a minute and 30 seconds to do that, so 45 seconds to tell me about your company, 45 seconds to tell me about your biggest problem. Next up is Christine from Potly.

SPEAKER_354: Potly. So hi, I'm Christine Yee. I'm the co-founder and chief brand officer of Potly. That's spelled P-O-T-L-I. And we make infused ingredients. So we make cannabis and hemp CBD infused edibles. We make honey, olive oil. We recently launched a chili oil. And we are really trying to rethink the way that people approach the edibles category overall. So edibles is an interesting category because it's marred really by two key paradoxes. The first is that edibles is such a meaningful entry point for cannabis consumption overall because everybody knows how to eat something. Not everyone knows how to smoke something. But at the same time, it is notorious for being unpredictable and unmanageable and dosages are unreliable. And in addition to that, it also has the potential to be the healthiest delivery of cannabis because you don't need to smoke the product. No matter what you're smoking, it's still carcinogenic, right? And it's harsh on your lungs. But at the same time, the edibles category is really populated by treats and confections and sugar-based foods like chocolates and gummies and candies. And that just didn't really make sense to us. And so we make everyday pantry items that kind of straddle this area between cannabis and medical and recreational cannabis and the overall wellness industry. So our biggest challenge is that this is a really regulated space. So things like paid social, paid advertising, paid search are not available to us. So the advertising channels are really expensive, like billboards and magazine ads and activations, which are very cumbersome but necessary. And coupled with a really high, you know, call to get customers into stores and online, which is harder to transact than in a typical category, it's really tricky to gain that brand awareness. Got it.

SPEAKER_207: Can you show me the product? Yeah, of course. It's P-O-T-L-I.

SPEAKER_49: What is the domain name? Is there a website?

SPEAKER_354: GetPotly.com and PotlyShop.com. So PotlyShop is where you can buy the hemp CBD product and GetPotly.com is our cannabis site. So they're separate.

SPEAKER_359: Okay. Let's take a look here. All right. What do I got? A little olive oil here? Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_362: So we've got cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil. So you put a little bit of this, you make some scrambled eggs. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_207: And your HAF.

SPEAKER_360: Exactly. And the olive oil is sourced from Carmel Valley and it's cold-pressed Arbikina or Tuscan olives. So it's finishing great olive oil.

SPEAKER_361: So, uh, and honey.

SPEAKER_69: Honey, yes. Oh my God. This is so great. The first person coming to office hours today with gifts. Thank you so much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_354: So you're holding the hemp CBD honey and I'm, I've got here the cannabis.

SPEAKER_366: No THC?

SPEAKER_353: So this has THC product in it. So this is dispensary product.

SPEAKER_252: All right. What do we got here? Cannabis infused raw honey. Yes. Um, if I ate a spoonful of this, how many, what is it? Milligrams of THC?

SPEAKER_360: Yeah, exactly. So there's about 90 milligrams in that four ounce. So it's 90 and four ounces. Yeah, exactly. So depending on the size of your, you know, spoonful, you can get anywhere from 10 to 20 milligrams of THC. Five to 10 is what people take? Five to 10 is a typical dosage.

SPEAKER_361: I mean, a micro dose is anywhere from, you know, one to three under five. So under five, you probably don't perceive it or most people would not perceive it?

SPEAKER_360: It totally depends. If I have five milligrams of THC and I'm a regular cannabis consumer, I still, I still feel it. Got it.

SPEAKER_372: And 10, you're going to be couch locked.

SPEAKER_360: Yeah.

SPEAKER_365: Uh, totally depends. Again, that's, that's the tricky thing about dosage. Um, it's all based on, um, okay.

SPEAKER_08: So I understand your problem. You have these great products.

SPEAKER_06: You can't buy Facebook ads. You can't buy Twitter ads. So you're screwed. You can't reach customers.

SPEAKER_09: Except if you want to compete against Dan Belzerian to put up billboards with his poker

SPEAKER_27: money and his dad's inheritance that he never got.

SPEAKER_207: Um, okay. Okay, Dan. Sure. You won it all playing poker. Okay. Um, you didn't win it all playing poker. Daddy gave him his money, but, uh, I think he's making the most of it with his, what is his ignite?

SPEAKER_09: Ignite. Yeah. Ignite. Okay. So you're up against Dan Belzerian, um, and here and Snoop Dogg. Um, and there is an instructive lesson in that. What Dan Belzerian does is not just buy billboards.

SPEAKER_93: He does content marketing and he is selling a lifestyle.

SPEAKER_09: And the lifestyle is misogynistic and offensive to most. Um, but he's not going for all, he's going for a third of the audience, dudes who want to party in LA with chicks and bikinis and live that Dan Belzerian misogynistic and sane lifestyle. But what's instructive about that is he built up that social media following and then added

SPEAKER_207: a product to it.

SPEAKER_09: So there is a roadmap and that roadmap consists of Instagram, YouTube, and podcasting. So instead of giving your money to somebody who's already aggregated an audience, I would

SPEAKER_08: play the long game. You are culinary. You are considered. You are upper middle class. Yep. Uh, in targeting your big city foodie.

SPEAKER_09: Yes. Uh, based on just looking at the box. What would a big city foodie, upper middle class professional, perhaps boomer, perhaps Gen X is probably your target audience with some millennials who are starting to become foodies. Yep. Here's what I would do. I would start a YouTube channel and Instagram presence and a podcast. In which I cooked cannabis infused recipes, uh, with famous people. Now you're not going to get Martha Stewart in week one, uh, but you will get an influencer with 5,000 followers week one and do what's called a collab. Do you know what that is? A collab?

SPEAKER_385: Yeah.

SPEAKER_207: Um, that's when you see, like, uh, it's, um, it's, uh, Katy Perry featuring little John

SPEAKER_06: or whatever.

SPEAKER_386: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: What they do is they do that crossover and you get both people's audience. This is tried and true.

SPEAKER_207: It was kind of mastered by television when they did spin outs like Mork and Mindy, uh, from, and Laverne and Shirley from Happy Days and Joni loves Chachi, rest in peace. Um, only lasted a season or two.

SPEAKER_09: Um, and so doing collabs, collabs with models, chefs, fashion people, musicians, um, will cost you the time it takes to set up the collab and editing the videos. And then putting them out, people will search for them.

SPEAKER_06: And I think if we put cannabis infused Caesar salad, cannabis infused teas, cannabis infused latte, cannabis infused matcha latte, and you start owning the SEO for that, yum, yum.

SPEAKER_09: Because somebody coming to the matcha tea, uh, cannabis infused matcha tea, they might be

SPEAKER_207: looking for a specific brand or just trying to see if it even exists. And then you, who seems very personable, uh, along with, um, somebody who makes matcha

SPEAKER_387: tea and a matcha tea brand.

SPEAKER_388: We are actually known for that collaboration. So last summer we collaborated with Matcha Bar and they have three locations, two in New

SPEAKER_360: York City, one in LA. Yeah. And we were actually featured on ABC News. We were on Trevor Noah recently, not in like the best possible light. It was kind of a riff on does CBD do anything? So it was kind of like that. But we gained a little bit of notoriety for that matcha latte and it, it definitely helped kind of gain some brand recognition.

SPEAKER_09: I think also, if you're going to do the media thing, don't be afraid to alienate some people to gain other people. And so I'm not saying to go outright and be offensive and try to, you know, whatever. Um, but you also don't want to, there's a group of people who are never going to be convinced and who are not ready. So don't worry about them. Worry about the people who think it's cool and fun. So have you seen the Hot Wings YouTube channel? There's a YouTube channel. What's it called? Hot Ones. So there's a YouTube channel called Hot Ones where they have six chicken wings, six increasingly hot, uh, spices, uh, sauces.

SPEAKER_207: Um, and I just watched one with Halle Berry, Halle Berry, who's delightful.

SPEAKER_09: And she's like, I'm going all the way. And then, you know, they cut to her, like, literally just pounding this guy into submission in the sixth one.

SPEAKER_207: And then I was like, oh my God, Gordon Ramsay did this. And Gordon Ramsay's crying like a baby by the fourth one. He, he, he has to puke and it's so entertaining.

SPEAKER_09: So that's like stunt food. I don't think you necessarily have stunt food, but just start thinking about that. If you did it once and then you start getting subscribers and followers, followers, there's no rule against, um, doing a cooking show with cannabis on any of these platforms or podcasting. So you want to do the things that Facebook and Google don't control. They don't control email and they don't control podcasting. They do control YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. So for every hour you put into those platforms, put at least an hour or two into the ones you control, get people's emails. So you can go direct, uh, and get people to subscribe to the podcast URL and then you

SPEAKER_207: will win. And you don't have to name the podcast, uh, Potly.

SPEAKER_09: You should actually put, come up with another brand that stands independent of Potly and just be, make it super personal.

SPEAKER_207: And it's, you know, it's Christine from, I'm Christine from Potly and this is my friend, you know, Steve, uh, from a chef, a personal chef here in San Francisco. And every week we make something interesting and, um, we time lapse to, you know, 90 minutes later and you're goofing off laughing and having fun and it's all good. Uh, but you gotta be in the content business. Yeah. That's the only solution for you.

SPEAKER_403: Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_08: What's just curious. Um, what do you charge for four ounces of, uh, cannabis infused raw honey? It's $25.

SPEAKER_354: So that honey typically it's about $45 in a dispensary.

SPEAKER_105: Uh, and it costs, if I were to buy it without the cannabis, without the THC, it'd be $20, $15, $20?

SPEAKER_388: Around that. We actually harvest the honey ourselves on our own hives. Oh, wow. So we're based on the East Bay. So it's hyper local to the Bay Area. So it's great for allergies and things like that.

SPEAKER_406: It's fantastic. Yeah. And it's doing well so far.

SPEAKER_360: It's doing well so far. We've gained some traction. Um, we've been in sales for about a year. Um, and we're growing. We are going to be launching in MedMen this month. So that's a big chain of dispensaries.

SPEAKER_207: Yeah, no, I'm well aware. Yeah, they're doing pretty good. It's like the Apple store of cannabis.

SPEAKER_360: Yeah, that's what people call it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_207: Yeah. I think, um, the other thing I think that's interesting is influencers.

SPEAKER_09: Uh, so, uh, I'm a fan of a band called Rilo Kylie and the lead singer's name is Jenny Lewis and she has a solo album out now and she took one of the tracks called Rabbit Hole, I think, and made pre-rolled joints with a cannabis company and she's got this huge following and I guess she's cut into the sales. So if you found an artist or a chef and you co-branded the raw honey with them and made the series of videos and you just gave them five bucks every time you sold one of these, that's another way to have the same result and then have somebody out there stumping for you.

SPEAKER_412: Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_207: Um, in the same way, you know, Dan Belzerian is doing collabs with influencers and bikini models, you could be doing it with chefs.

SPEAKER_08: It's, it's not as distasteful and it's more on brand. I wish you great success. Thank you. Uh, and do you know about Cush.com, the marketplace for a cannabis? Yep, I know about them. So that's our single and only investment right now. Uh, they went through our accelerator.

SPEAKER_09: So we have made investments in cannabis where we don't touch the product and we're thinking about products, um, maybe next year. When do you think we'll have a national referendum like Canada had?

SPEAKER_409: Like, oh, like a federal, I, I would assume personally, I would think maybe three years down the line.

SPEAKER_418: Okay. Cause I was planning on doing it in my second or third term. Okay. Maybe third. Okay. But tremendous. Okay. Not for me. Not for me.

SPEAKER_422: But Jared, total stoner. Okay. Total stoner. All right. Let's give it up one time for Christine.