SPEAKER_00: All right, everybody, welcome to Monday. I am back in Tahoe just for a little summer jaunt, uh, to see the lake, take the girls out for a little rope course, maybe, uh, get on the lake on a boat or something, some hiking. They like to go to the beach, the pool, everything. SPEAKER_02: How's your summer going, Sonny? SPEAKER_03: Summer's been good. You know, I'm, I'm in build mode, you know, it's a summer of AI. It's the summer of guests it's all around. So this one's been pretty heavy on the work front this year, but that's good. It's sort of, it's a, it's an important set up summer, I think for a big, SPEAKER_06: big fall and set up. SPEAKER_09: Oh, I was calling it no, I started the summer stress-free summer. SPEAKER_12: Oh no, and then I got halfway in and now it's the set up summer. I, I, I, I tried to have stress-free summer. It didn't work. SPEAKER_16: Um, but I am doing, we had three, we had three years of that 2020, 2021, 2022. SPEAKER_18: Those were not stress-free, those were, but yeah, they weren't depressing and like licking your wounds and trying to fix everything in your portfolio. Yeah. SPEAKER_21: I've been meeting with a lot of LPs and that has been, uh, very instructive because now SPEAKER_12: venture capital is kind of back to basics, back to square one, like back to, you know, just find a great company, invest in it, burn a low amount of money, get product market fit, be super focused, be super lean. It's a different world. And I got to be honest. SPEAKER_22: It's the J-Cal sweet spot. It's the J-Cal sweet spot. Yeah. SPEAKER_12: It's kind of like exactly where I like to get, you know, what Carmelo Anthony would like to get that little 12 footer. Go ahead, back you up. Yeah. SPEAKER_24: Try to do that little floater. SPEAKER_12: I kind of like, I got my spot on the floor and, uh, you know, they're feeding me the ball constantly. SPEAKER_27: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Embroker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist, lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. And Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the pod cover to any mattress. Go to eightsleep.com slash twist to check out the pod cover and get $150 off at checkout. SPEAKER_21: The thing that's most interesting is I'm getting a lot of great AI companies and it, they could be dismissed as AI wrapper companies or chat GPT wrapper companies, or, you know, pick your language model, wrapper companies. SPEAKER_09: But what I'm finding is they're finding all kinds of pockets of where to add value in the wrapper. SPEAKER_21: So, you know, there's a website or an app, a wrapper around an iPhone or a wrapper around AWS. SPEAKER_32: I guess you could diminish it to that way. But I'm curious, your thought on this debate in Silicon Valley, and if you can explain it SPEAKER_34: from your own words, the AI wrapper debate. SPEAKER_36: Well, look, I'm going to lean into a company that you are famously known for angel investing in Uber. Oh, yeah, I was in that one, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And one could argue back then, someone would say the location API on an iPhone through iOS. Oh, you're just building a wrapper around that. Yes. Right. But that was a very important API. That API has led us to have Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, you know, a whole bunch of, you know, services with location kind of being at the core of it. But then they had to build a whole bunch of infrastructure beyond just the location API. But without it, you know, you probably couldn't get off the ground. I view AI as the same thing. AI today is an API. It's a very powerful one. But if you're going to build a business, you need to build a lot of infrastructure, a lot of scaffolding around what's happening. And I think the companies that are focusing on that are going to get there. Now, obviously, Apple, you know, benefited tremendously off of building the platform SPEAKER_40: and off of building a place for developers to build off of. But many companies, and probably in aggregate, the value of those companies exceeds Apple's, or it's at least maybe close to it. And so I think when people go to that argument, say, Oh, everything is just a wrapper. Well, we can boil that down to almost, you know, all technologies that that have scaled off of a good platform that got off the ground. SPEAKER_42: Yeah, I think it's very well said. SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we had in our discussions here, you brought me a company called Ventress AI. Yes. Remember on episode 1774? We did them. Yep. I interviewed the Fanu Emanuel. I like the product so much. I offered him a 25K investment live on the air. And now Ventress just accepted the $100,000 offer from the Launch Accelerator. Oh, right. So it's our first full circle demo as an investment. SPEAKER_12: So I'll make sure that you get a little tasty poo. Oh, okay. SPEAKER_47: No, I'll just write a check. Or you can write a check. I'll just write a check. SPEAKER_46: I'm good with that. SPEAKER_00: That was the perfect example of a wrapper company, right? And you could dismiss these, but I can tell you, like, the level of detail they went into in doing a SWOT analysis, the pastel analysis. Pastel analysis, yep. All this stuff, they're getting traction amongst, and for folks who don't know, it's a very simple concept. I'll share it with you right now. SPEAKER_02: Are you explaining the concept while I pull up my screen? SPEAKER_35: Well, yeah, the concept is, you know, if you have an idea, what it does is it takes your idea and it breaks down the basic types of analysis that you would do for any idea. SPEAKER_36: You know, everything from SWOT, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, to PESTEL. And, you know, it gives you, like, here's a framework right here. Exactly. And it can formulate a business plan for you, an MVP, unique selling points, and go-to-market motions. This is, you know, look, for a long time, this is what you'd pay a consulting firm to do for you. Yes. Or you'd go get an MBA, and you'd understand this through, you know, obviously some type of business school. And for many people, I think what this does is help them understand, because a lot of people have ideas, and, you know, you and I have both seen that throughout our careers. Yep. But what people struggle with is, like, how do you take the idea and then start to test its viability and which framework should I use for testing it? Now, some people will just go and build something and see that it works or fails in the market, but this allows you to do some higher level analysis before you get into the build phase. SPEAKER_54: And maybe, you know, before you spend your money, your energy on building something. SPEAKER_00: And this is, as we've discussed with generative AI, you may not want to make a healthcare decision on it right now, or a finance decision. Obviously, they can hallucinate. SPEAKER_21: But when you think about just ideation, coming up with ideas, fancy word for coming up with ideas and developing them, brainstorming, another word for that, chewing the fat, you know, jam session. SPEAKER_00: And this is just giving you so many jumping off points. SPEAKER_32: So when you start doing these analyses, and the one I'm showing on the screen here, if you're watching, is for the venture capital school I'm thinking about starting, like, I want to start a program to train people to be associates at venture firms, and have them work at our venture firm as part of it, really does do a great job of giving you some ideas, you know, some of them are obvious, leverage social media to share success stories of alumni and showcase the expertise of faculty members. That's actually very succinctly said, if you were going to start a school, those would be two blocking and tackling things that you might forget. And yeah, oh, wow, you know, we should move that up the list, obviously, testimonials, and you know, the dossiers of our faculty members would be critical. So the other thing is, when you look at this, when I make investments in early stage companies, everybody asks me, like, how do you make your decisions, and one of them is product velocity, you can see here, they have updated their, you know, whole site since we talked to them a month ago or something. So they definitely are adding things like path to an MVP and unique selling point, I don't think we're part of the analysis. SPEAKER_21: And here they're upselling you, hey, you got to pay for this, right. So back to the rapper companies. I think there's so many ways to add value to, you know, some verticalized app, whether it's travel, whether it's business analysis, sales, you can add so much. SPEAKER_00: Imagine taking each of these ideas and using it as a jumping off point and just having group discussions inside of this app, right? Like just being able to store them, you know, people using these as jumping off points, right? SPEAKER_32: Or moving them from a bullet point to a base camp, like a punch list, you know, a project management platform, right? You can go from ideation to project management. Pretty interesting idea, right? SPEAKER_36: And I, you know, I've used it a few times now. And a lot of people similar to you, Jake, how like reach out and have an idea or something like that. And I, I literally will just take what they sent me, put it inside the tool and send it back to them. And now you're a genius advisor. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'll be very transparent. I say, look like these are the things you need to think about right then. Yeah. And then, you know, I'd create the, I think it's, I really think it's an incredible tool. I'm, I am excited. We demoed them. I'm excited that they join the accelerator and, you know, writing a little check. That'll be nice. Yeah. SPEAKER_32: Yeah. All right. So, uh, the voice. Demos. Voices you're hearing, Jason Calacanis, Agile Investor, Sonny Madra, co-founder of Definitive Intelligence. They provide AI enhanced data analytics of, uh, public and private data, including autonomous data science agents. That means people going out on the internet and working on your behalf. Not people. We like to do demos. Robots. Bots. Yeah. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Agents. Bots. Agents. Yeah. Pick whatever term you like. SPEAKER_72: Listen, I work with super early stage companies at launch, like literally year zero. They haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the series a people have thousands of dollars in MRR and they, maybe they've only raised a couple of hundred thousand before that series a, and they don't have their insurance set up. And in fact, we recently had a great startup that didn't have D and O and we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings. They were making massive decisions. There were legal issues. And they didn't have the basic D and O insurance that protects directors and officers. So we send them right to in broker and broker is business insurance built specifically for startups. A single application will help your startup get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Think about that four quotes, four lines, 15 minutes. And they're going to connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. We use it at launch. It's easy peasy lemon squeezy. It's easy breezy. What more do I need to tell you? I use it. I love it. A lot of our startups use it. They love it. Try and broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10% off their startup package in broker.com slash twist. That's E M B R O K E R.com slash twist and use the code twist for 10% off. Okay. Let's get back to this amazing episode. SPEAKER_77: So let's get into our demos. SPEAKER_32: We always like to talk about demos and we're, you and I are on the chat thread and we're constantly sharing things we find on the internet. People talking about stuff, generative AI, it's obviously moving quickly here. SPEAKER_79: So what do you got for us this week? SPEAKER_36: Okay. So this is a build off of something that we've been continuing on a theme on, which is from transcription to click or to, to, uh, subtitles. And you know what? After last week I found this tool, which is called clap. And what it does is you give it a link to a YouTube videos, uh, in, in this case, the free version is limited to under 30 minutes. So I found this, uh, clip from your session with Tim Ferriss. Oh, cool. Uh, and in this particular session, you were talking about wealth and happiness. Yep. Uh, this might, you know, it's Tim Ferriss. I'm assuming the whole thing might've been a couple of hours because he doesn't do seven minutes. Yeah. It was two hour podcast. Yeah. SPEAKER_35: And I, I haven't listened to it, but now I've listened to this clip. And so I gave it the clip and then what it does is it, it's called clap.app, K L A P dot SPEAKER_36: A P P. Yeah. Okay. And what it's done is it's generated nine Tik TOK style videos from that seven minute clip. Got it. And those videos have all the standard, um, uh, subtitling and all that. But what I really like is it found a way to generate nine videos and it gave them all a virality score. And so the first one here has a virality score of 85 out of a hundred. And it's, it explains that, uh, this video has a high virality potential because it touches on a relatable topic of redefining success beyond financial wealth. Wow. Really interesting thing that it kind of pulled from that discussion. Right. SPEAKER_35: And then it, it sees your enthusiasm and passion for life can resonate with viewers. And it gives a reason of why this thinks this is 85 scary. SPEAKER_00: I'm, I mean, good video editor, you know, like an offshore video editor, why this was a good viral clip. They, they, they wouldn't be able to say, right. In all likelihood. SPEAKER_35: Yeah. When this goes back to our theme, AI, remember J Cal we were talking about last week and said 18 months, they'll be as good as humans and even better. SPEAKER_32: I mean, this is the, this is the crazy bet that you have made. I, in 18 months should be, we'll be sitting here in, uh, the new year, basically January, 20, 25, you're claiming Sandy that in January 1st, 2025, like it's going to be as good as a human to do these kinds of tasks is a bold prediction, but I, I, I would have a hard time saying over, under, I might say over by a little bit, but it could be under by a little bit. SPEAKER_98: Yeah. Yeah. But we're not in orders of magnitude anymore. We're just within like, you know, you're not saying 10 years away. Right. SPEAKER_00: So no, no, no, no, it's not, it's not the 20 year. Yeah. It used to always be when you made a prediction. Hey, when will we have flying cars? You say 20 years. Cause nobody remembers you made the bet. SPEAKER_105: Yeah. Right. SPEAKER_35: You can see it's done all that. And then, you know, as you scroll through, it shows different scores. See, this one is a 72 out of a hundred, this is a 72, this is a 70 and you can go 68. And so this I'm just looking at number six out of them and says, well, why is this a 68? SPEAKER_36: Well, this is moderate potential for virality. And it's the topic about finding fulfillment and doing what you love is relatable and can resonate with a wide audience, et cetera. SPEAKER_35: And so, and it explains, however, the lack of visual elements and the length of video may limit its reach compared to. And so it's kind of looking at like just the real nuances of what. SPEAKER_00: So they trained it that the clip is too long and it's not visually exciting enough. Yeah. SPEAKER_107: Because it would be cool if I could say add collateral and make it more. SPEAKER_36: Well, you know, it's funny. That's exactly what Nick and I were talking about when we were just doing like our dry run here. We're like, that's the next phase where you're like, okay, we'll make it better for me. Take this from a 68 and make this into a 100. You know, that's a standard collateral thing. SPEAKER_107: Like what we did, we did a video one time on our tick tock where I was talking about the movie, the founder. Yeah. And, uh, it got a little bit of traffic, but then I say, can you remake that and put clips from the movie in it? SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And then that one was the one that went viral. SPEAKER_36: Yeah. So, so look, you know, this is just an evolution and, you know, let me make another prediction in less than three months. We'll find one that does what, you know, both of you guys are saying, which is now it's taking a seven minute thing, turning it into 10 clips and scoring them. I think in less than three months, we'll have one of these that'll not only take the clips, but it'll, it'll, it'll give it the boost of what's needed. SPEAKER_111: Um, through an understanding of, you know, either doing like, you know, adding amazing transitions and things like that. Yeah. SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, and if you fed it, which I'm, I'm guessing, well, what do you think the founders did there? Do you think they said, here are some heuristics we know, these are great rules. So, you know, look at each video under, you know, with, and in the prompt or something, they're saying, Hey, examine the video for these qualities, visually appealing quotes, whatever. Or do you think they said, here are, these are trended videos from tick tock, you know, infer what should come. Yeah. You know, in the next video. Cause if it did, it'd be like, you should be a sorority girl dancing during rush week. SPEAKER_118: Dude. Yeah. Um, those are pretty popular right now. Unbelievable. SPEAKER_79: Um, what I would say. They don't have a block on tick tock. Why don't they have a block on tick tock? Like, can I just say no, none of this, just more food. SPEAKER_32: Yeah. SPEAKER_121: Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_32: I need to just tell them. Yeah. Please no more dancing. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_123: Uh, sorority. And it's like the group chats that get you. SPEAKER_02: Cause someone will send you something in a group chat and you open it and then it's like in your algorithm. SPEAKER_29: Right. Oh, right. Yes. If somebody sends you something. Yeah. Now you're, now you're tied to it forever. Yeah. Exactly. So that's like tick tock bombing. You could tick tock bomb somebody. If I sent you like, Oh my God, these five tick tocks are amazing. Yeah. SPEAKER_18: Five tick tocks. Yeah. About like people who like to dress like evil clowns. Yeah. And now I've like turned your tick tock into like evil clown talk. Yeah. The tick tock bomb. SPEAKER_128: It's like, there's a, it's um, remember the Rick rolls. There's an equivalent of Rick rolling. SPEAKER_32: Yeah. SPEAKER_79: Yeah. SPEAKER_32: The tick tock. SPEAKER_36: So what do you think they did here? I think they just put in their heuristics, right? Well, it's, it's very similar to like, you know, Venturas, right? Where look, there is some set of frameworks that people understand, right? In their case around business. In this case around what it takes to make a viral tick tock. I think in building a startup, it's, you know, built by two folks. SPEAKER_03: I think it's like, look, they've, uh, they've started. And I think they have their names at the bottom. We can give them a quick shout out here. So it's built by, uh, you know, Theo and Victor here. SPEAKER_36: Oh, Hey Theo. Hey Victor. Yeah. And so look, my, my guess is that they haven't done the, you know, deep training of like, here's a bunch of videos, figure out what happened, apply it. I think it's like, they have some known. You know, uh, formats and things that they want it to talk about. Cause in some of it's a little bit repetitive. You can see it say the same thing, but look, if you're going to build these things, this is where we, where we started the conversation. A location API just gives you, you know, where a person is just some lat long, right? You've got to build a lot of infrastructure around to build a company and you don't build, SPEAKER_54: start up by building all the infrastructure. You kind of crawl, walk, run. So I would start in the same Spotify with them. Yeah. SPEAKER_42: Yeah. And you can totally see that the people who are jumping in, figuring out how to do these verticals, SPEAKER_00: which you could be cynical and say, Oh, I, if I had the right prompts and I had an unlimited amount of time, I could be on chat GPT doing this myself. Right. Yeah. But we all don't have unlimited time and we all don't, uh, you know, sit there and obsess over it. So yes, you could theoretically build your own Airbnb, like make a message board software, you know, email all your friends and say, does anybody have a place or know somebody? I mean, yes, you could do all that work. Yeah. Or you could let Airbnb maintain it. Right. Yeah. Build the network. SPEAKER_32: Okay. SPEAKER_36: What's next here. Okay. So next is an interesting one. This is like one that is kind of near and dear in some ways, but like, and it, I think it, it makes sort of the use of the technology easier here. What is the name of this? SPEAKER_139: Oh, sorry. SPEAKER_36: This one is called kick resume. Kick resume. Okay. And like these resume builders have been around for a while. Like that's not a new concept, but like this one uses the power of AI in a couple of different ways. And so I kind of did like a, and it can pull your stuff in from LinkedIn. I didn't want to have it do that because I just didn't want it to scrape my LinkedIn, but it has the ability to do it. And what I can do here is I can say, I'm going to add work experience. So I've just got like, you know, for the folks listening, I have a resume UI on the right hand side. And I have a, on the left hand side where I can ask, I'm going to add work experience. You have like prompts over there. SPEAKER_143: Like you had a work experience, like a four. SPEAKER_36: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to say, I said working at twists and I'm going to say, I'm a podcast host. Right. Yeah. And you know what I'm going to do and say, oh, you know what? I don't know what to do. Cause like resumes are tough. And so I, this AI writer and I can basically say, generate content. And it's like, well, for what is I say? Podcasts and generate. And you can see here on the left, it starts to write the content. SPEAKER_35: And on the right, it starts to put it into the resume and fill it in for me. SPEAKER_147: Wow. And so. Right. SPEAKER_36: Look. And it, it does this for all the different sections, like your skills and, you know, and, and other areas. SPEAKER_00: It's an incredible starting point because it says here, like, listen, I collaborated with a team of producers, editors, and sound engineers to ensure seamless production and delivery of high quality podcast episodes, maintaining a strict release schedule and meeting all project deadlines. Who knows where they, you know, chat GPT or whatever, Claude or whatever they're using here, got that information, but somebody apparently had put that on their resume. And so it scraped it or, you know, and then put it into its language model. Guess the next word. What's the most next likely next, next word after collaborated with, you know, for people who are having podcast producers. Exactly. And, uh, here you have it. And it's a great way to start. Cause you'd say, you know, we didn't have, uh, really sound engineers. We just had editors. So collaborate with, and, oh, it wasn't really a team. It was a producer and an editor. Yeah. So collaborate with, you know, a senior producer, an editor, and you can just edit it from here. SPEAKER_21: Yeah. But again, brainstorming with you and suggesting things that you might not have thought of SPEAKER_36: and giving you great, perfect grammar and, and structure. And, and look like this goes back to, yeah, can you do this in open AI? You can, but you're not going to get a full on framework, like the resume that's coming out of it. Right. And you may not know like the template you want to do it in around work experience and the tense and the voice, and this helps now beyond that, it does some interesting things. It has like this AI toolbox, which I'm just loading up here. So we'll give it a second. And what it'll do is it has a, um, it'll score your resume for you. Yeah. And it'll tell you, Hey, you know, you've got these repetitive verbs. Maybe you're doing it. It's got like a built. Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_155: Exactly. Results. SPEAKER_36: You're using like, you know, words that are overused. Yeah. And look, and you know, it's got the checklist. Make sure you got your email address, last name, work experience. It's telling me I didn't put my phone number and, uh, I don't have an education section. Uh, it's giving me some benchmark scores in terms of like word count, start date, end dates, SPEAKER_35: you know, just a bunch of framework stuff, which, you know, I thought was really cool. It then has a, a section that will help you prepare for a job interview. Wow. SPEAKER_161: Okay. So put in here, you want to be. Yeah. A. SPEAKER_162: Podcast producer. SPEAKER_163: Podcast producer. Sure. Yeah. I want a podcast host to producer. Yeah. Right. SPEAKER_166: Right. SPEAKER_32: Can you tell us about your experience as CEO co-founder and how you contributed to the company's growth and success? So that was based on your first title on your resume. My first one. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What strategies did you implement to increase market share and establish the company as a key player in the industry? SPEAKER_00: How did you secure venture capital funding, uh, and utilize it to expand operations and accelerate product development? These are great questions. SPEAKER_32: And yeah, this would be great. If you think about this, like a resume coach to run you through an equivalent here would be hundreds to low thousands of dollars. SPEAKER_169: Like what is a resume coach slash writer charge 500 bucks, a thousand bucks probably. SPEAKER_48: Yeah. I, I never had to use one other than when I was in college, when we used to do co-ops and then our, you know, department, our co-op department help us with that stuff. SPEAKER_35: But, um, but you know, look, this is a real thing for folks. Like, you know, people still like, you know, expect resumes. And even if you're applying maybe even to be a fantastic job at any level and look, not a lot of people have access to these kinds of tools and you know, they may not know what to do. And then this going back to what, maybe we'll stick on that theme today. A lot of people may not know what to do in chat GPT. If you got access to it, even for free and say, how to, how to have it helped me with a resume. This puts a framework around it. Yeah. And, and it may, you know, makes it a lot, you know, more straightforward. SPEAKER_36: Great. SPEAKER_06: Awesome. SPEAKER_36: Yeah. SPEAKER_06: Um, really. And then you can download it, proofread it. And it's got this. Yeah. All the basic stuff. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. I mean, and when it gets more and more data, it's going to get better and better. So, you know, right now they don't have, you know, I think when they get a hundred podcasting related people to build their resume in there. Yeah. Now they'll have a training set for podcasters. I mean, of course they're probably scraping, uh, a ton of like resumes they're finding on, you know, career sites or LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. You know, building up data, but you know, that that's going to be one of the interesting big debates. There was a company in Israel that sued LinkedIn and won, or LinkedIn sued them and the company won. That was just scraping. You know, basic data off of LinkedIn's public profiles and they wound up winning. SPEAKER_32: So LinkedIn tried to stop them from taking that data. SPEAKER_176: So now of course, building a derivative product, I don't think you're going to win, but it was a high Q labs that did that. You can look it up H I Q labs. SPEAKER_72: Okay. Listen, you got an idea for a tech startup. Great. SPEAKER_34: You think you want to change the world. You think you got this. This is the one. Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity. You need to go fast. And how are you going to go fast? And how are you going to control your burn rate? If you got no engineers? Well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than a thousand on-demand developers? And those developers were all vetted, experienced, result oriented, and passionate about startups and building great products. Well, what if they also charged competitive rates? Does this all sound too good to be true? I know it does. 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SPEAKER_36: And this was like, like the demo coming up after the next one, but I'm going to jump forward. Okay. Because, you know, the topic you're talking about is like, and I know you've been talking about this a lot for the, you know, the team at launch and inside. So this is a new service called browse AI. And what they do is they make it super easy for you to build a structure data extraction robot or a site monitoring robot. Um, and, uh, this one, I'll just play their video. SPEAKER_142: Cause it's a little bit. SPEAKER_179: What, what are those words mean in, uh, English? SPEAKER_142: Sorry. SPEAKER_180: Okay. Extract structured data monitors. SPEAKER_181: Yeah. If you want to scrape, if you wanted to scrape something from a site. SPEAKER_47: Okay. And so if there was a website like ESPN and ESPN had a bunch of player profiles and you say, you know what? I just want to get their last five games points scored. Yeah. There's no API to do that. Uh, or I might not be a programmer. Yeah. I could use this tool to structure. Yes. Take all the Knicks players and give me how many points they scored and then tweet it out. SPEAKER_188: Yeah. SPEAKER_190: Correct. Where every 15 minutes X out, tweet out. Yeah. Put a post to X doc. SPEAKER_18: Okay. Tweet. I'm going to say tweet. So we know what we're talking about. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah. Tweet to X.com. Yeah. It's, you know, Brunson or Steph Curry, right? You can have Steph Curry point score. Every time he scores a point, it tweets. SPEAKER_47: Yep. You would be able to get the data through this and then put it in there. Got it. SPEAKER_36: So one, one is like, so they have two, two types of robots. One is like, sort of like a one time, like you just want to pull a bunch of data. Ah, okay. And the second one is site monitoring changes. Right. And so one is like, imagine you're trying to monitor a competitor's pricing and you're like, Oh, I want to make sure if they, if they set their pricing lower, I set my pricing lower. And this first one is more like, Hey, I've got a research job and I've got to scrape a thousand profiles and I need to put it into some kind of tool. And so what they do in this example, and I'll just, I'm going to just quickly scroll through it. I won't play it. Cause it's a seven minute video. But the example that they do here is. And I'm assuming they must be Y Combinator funded. I didn't check, but they scrape the Y Combinator logged insight. So they even allow you to log into something and it scrapes the Y Combinator site. And the way it does it is, and this is like a fantastic use of AI. You basically install a plugin. And with that plugin, you kind of highlight the sections you want. You tell it what those sections mean on the page. So you can say like, this is the company name. This is the location. This is the description. And then basically it will from that create the scraper for you. And then ultimately that turns into like a list that exists on their site here. Right. That has the location, the logo, the link and everything else. And so it does what, you know, you would typically ask a programmer to do if they're writing a crawler for you. And does it sort of by using a browser plugin and your own like human knowledge around it. And it automates it for you and then it can dump it into, I think you'll see in here, they'll dump it into like a Google sheet. Right. They'll export it to a Google sheet here. And then here you go. So this is that all that Y Combinator information from the logged insight of Y Combinator companies. And they've got all the different parameters here. So going, you know, I know you've been talking about this a lot, needing this for research or needing this for a lot of different purposes. Now you have the ability to do this, you know, pretty easily without any programming knowledge. SPEAKER_00: And how is it doing the AI? The AI is to figure out what the different columns are in your spreadsheet eventually. SPEAKER_36: Exactly. Like what they're doing and look like I, you know, we should maybe have them on or something to talk about in more detail. But like my guess is that when you install the browser plugin and you tell it the sections you want that underneath the hood, they're taking that and turning it into the, you know, grabbing those sections and code and saying, Hey, the name lives here. This lives here. Got it. And then they're using that to then like code interpreter, write a script that says, Hey, I know that in these CSS elements in a, in these HTML elements, this is where the name is. So go and grab it from me by going to this URL. SPEAKER_79: Got it. And then how does it know where to go for the next one, the next one, the next one, and like do the crawling part. That's the, that's the AI bit, right? SPEAKER_36: That's like that when you show it two or three, it knows, okay. It figures out the pattern like H, you know, you've written some HTML back in the day, right? You'd see like H1 and then it'd be sitting in a table and you just see it over again. That AI can kind of figure that out from, from that repetitive nature of it. SPEAKER_00: So there'll be in a way it's an intelligent crawler. Yes. So it's an AI crawler in addition to an AI data analysis tool. It's probably doing, it's probably doing both. It's not analysis. SPEAKER_36: It's, it's an extraction tool. It's not doing any analysis. Yeah. You would do your analysis and code interpreter. Yeah, exactly. Let you have it. SPEAKER_205: Yeah. SPEAKER_12: So just extracting. Yeah. I think this is why you may have seen, uh, Twitter like didn't allow people or Facebook doesn't allow people who aren't logged in to see data. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And this is the reason these tools are getting so sophisticated. Yes. And then, you know, if you're not, so they're going to require you to be logged in. So they can, if you load too many pages in too short a period of time, they can turn you off. SPEAKER_32: And then the concept of an open web with data on it is kind of going away. Yeah. Which in some ways is sad because if you leave all the pages open and you don't stop people, they can just fire up crawler after crawler with different IP addresses. SPEAKER_02: And then just, you know, over time have everything you. SPEAKER_36: And it's, it's, it's a tough balance because in this case, like they'll allow you to log in. So they're doing it as a browser plugin. So they'll even allow you to log in and then let the browser run automated. So they'll work around like sort of some of the, the automated crawl issues. Now I think by running it through a browser, it'll stop. Like, like, it's not feasible to crawl all the tweets that have ever happened. You're not gonna load 10,000 pages. SPEAKER_02: Exactly. SPEAKER_00: But if you load a thousand, it probably won't care. And if you do it every five seconds, it won't care. But if you do it too fast, the website might have a trigger that says anybody loading over 10 pages. Yeah. You know, I dunno, anybody loading over a hundred pages a minute is a, is a spider. SPEAKER_211: Yeah. SPEAKER_00: So, you know, just throttle them. SPEAKER_211: Yeah. And I think like the flip side to that, cause I know you like the flip side is yeah. Like sometimes you're doing some work and you want a list of folks. SPEAKER_36: Right. Like, look, I pay for LinkedIn and LinkedIn is pretty expensive. Like, you know, hundreds of dollars a year, thousands of dollars a year. Yeah. SPEAKER_00: Exactly. I want to get a list of a hundred podcast producers. Why can't I do that? And they're like, well, you can do it. We just want to slow you down because you're a paying customer. Yeah. I can load one page at a time. And it would be better if I could say, put, if I, if I could do searches of up to a hundred people at a time, and I could do this a hundred times a year. SPEAKER_32: So up to 10,000 people as a paid user, and I could export up to 10,000 records at a time. That would be fantastic. Yeah. But instead people have to use tools like this and, and the people who get the value are not the paying customers. The people who get the value are the people who are the most gray hat hackers who are able to do this kind of stuff. Yeah. Whereas the people who actually have a valid business use, eh, they don't. But yeah, that would be like a cool tool. If, if your premium account let you, you know, give you, gave you the results instead of in the kind of, you know, webpage after webpage results. Yeah. If it gave you actually a, a, a more of a table, you know? Yeah. Which Crunchbase does. So yeah. I mean, that, that's my idea. Basically premium is you get some structured data as opposed to unstructured data. Yeah. Unpaid. If you're not paying, you get the webpage with the data on it. SPEAKER_03: Everyone wants walled gardens, right? And that's the problem versus like, you know, and, and if you're using it for business, it's challenging, but another great segue, J. Cal, you're on fire today. It's gonna be a good week for you. Okay. Yeah. This is a new style of, uh, like zoom info tool. Okay. Uh, so it's like lead research. So I don't know if you guys use zoom info. SPEAKER_225: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: We have an investment in a company called lead IQ. There's zoom info. Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_36: So, so this is like sort of an AI powered one. And, uh, what it does is like, you give it like a name of a company and you know, like I'll give it something, one of our customers. And, and then like, it'll just find like similar companies related to it. Right. And so I find, um, it's like really great. Like it's, it's sort of, um, and if you don't know what you're looking for, you can ask the AI to help you and say, oh, like, I, you know, find me companies in this particular industry. And I'll give you kind of ideas and names. And so the whole, the whole look, it's like an AI lookalike finder, which I thought was like really neat. Cause I, I think zoom info is great and we use it, but like what we're seeing now is this enhancement in and around the search interface that exists. Right. Yeah. And so this allows you to kind of leverage the power of AI for search. Um, and you know, uh, related, but unrelated, like we even saw this and I, I think you had it back and forth with Elon on Twitter last week where someone was complaining about like search on X and he's like, yeah, we're going to make it better with AI. So we're just starting to see that happen in all industries where someone's like, let me make the AI, like, let me leverage the AI to make the search so much better on my product. And then that lets them get a chance to even just build a competitive product. Right. And so, uh, so if I go here and I write HR software and it'll, it'll basically come up with a list of companies that it believes, you know, are, are good for HR software. SPEAKER_98: And, and, uh, you know, I'm off to the races for my, my lead gen work. Fantastic. SPEAKER_230: Yeah. SPEAKER_32: That is definitely, um, what people are looking for and there's going to be, you know, and then there's also write the email for me to contact this person or research this person. Tell me more about, you know, the targets at this company. So you can find people by sector. SPEAKER_00: You can find people by, um, yeah, you can find people by a specific company, all of those different things. SPEAKER_32: And this is what people use things like G2 or, you know, other software, Capterra, different software rating websites. And they'll go to the software rating websites and say, Hey, I've got a partnership with Zapier. Who's similar to Zapier. Oh, if this, then that this other automation tool, oh, I use notion and Coda. What are other knowledge management, you know, business process tools, boom, here are the other ones. And so, yeah, it's very, very powerful. I think to help find leads and then to get you in touch with the right person. And this is going to just lead to many more people contacting us to sell us SaaS software, which to be honest, I'm there for it. I love SaaS software. I am been able to, I would say conservatively, I've been able to get 25% lift every year using SaaS software. And now with AI, I think it's going to get us like 40, 50% lift every year. SPEAKER_00: We just did an analysis inside our company and I haven't really reviewed it yet, but I got it yesterday where people talked about all the major tasks they do and then how many times they have to do that a year. Then how much time it takes to do each time and then normalize that into minutes and hours. And, you know, it's like, okay, sorting through the inbound companies takes us, you know, each week, you know, whatever it is, 400 companies, five minutes per company. To sort them. SPEAKER_32: Now that sounds like, okay, so that doesn't sound like a lot, but you know, five times 400 minutes is 2000 minutes, 2000 minutes to divide it by 60. It starts to be like, okay, that's a full time job. Just doing that at least. And could you use AI to do that? Right. And the AI could sort it. Hey, these are the, or you could, we, we have our own internal ways of sorting it. Like, is there a product in market or not? You know, we already have some sort of sorting, but over time. We can look at the companies we've invested in that have been successful and then try to put it against this database. I think that's two years out, but I do think that. That's why I'm building up this database of all these startups just to start. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Knowledge. SPEAKER_36: Well, you know, the other thing that's happening is in what you just talked about there. When you force your team to take processes that are loosely documented and are maybe even heavily documented, but put them into like a, an AI framework. Um, what you're doing is you're capturing and memorializing that and you're codifying it. Yeah. And for many companies that a lot of times that knowledge get lost. Yeah. So I don't know, like, you know, for you, but if you have like a really great analyst. Yeah. And that analyst, most of it's documented, but there's a few steps that aren't. SPEAKER_16: I think there's a real power for companies to, to move stuff into the AI world by documenting these processes. Yes. SPEAKER_00: Yes. Yeah. It's a hundred percent correct. If you're forced to document everything you're doing or teach somebody else how to do it through the documentation. And this is the right first culture that did particularly well at Amazon where people had to write like little six pagers, they call them. SPEAKER_32: And there's a great book working backwards that explains the philosophy and there's tons of short articles about it on the internet. SPEAKER_00: But basically if you have to write something down, you explain it to people. They'll even write the press release for a product they haven't launched or they'll write the FAQ. SPEAKER_32: And they'll have an internal FAQ frequently asked questions and an external one for customers or partners. And if you have to write those, you have to brainstorm. Hey, what are the questions people are going to ask me about this new product or service I'm making? Or if you're taking an internal process and doing an FAQ for it, you know, you just do whatever the most common questions people have, which could come from a meeting or it could come from brainstorming or AI. You'll have documented it, which means the, which then means you could make an AI process out of it eventually. SPEAKER_211: And I think, you know, that's starting to happen inside the enterprise, right? SPEAKER_36: And that's, you know, one of the things that we've seen on the enterprise side of things is the big consulting firms are making. Huge investments because they, you know, they've had these eras, right? They had the client server era. They had the, you know, migration to Linux era, the cloud era. And, and now you're, they're having this AI one. And, and in this particular one, the unlock is, is incredible and it's huge for them. SPEAKER_145: So, yeah. All right. SPEAKER_00: This has been amazing. Well done. Tons of great, great, uh, demos that got us all thinking about how AI will. SPEAKER_32: Impact our startups in the enterprise. Sandeep Madra, definitive intelligence. Thank you so much. You can follow him on Twitter. SPEAKER_12: He's at, are you sunny or Sandeep? Sandeep. Sandeep. Sandeep at Sandeep on Twitter. SPEAKER_32: And, uh, in between these Monday episodes, he's talking about AI and you'll get a little preview of probably what he's going to talk about here if you follow him on Twitter. SPEAKER_12: Okay. Next up on the pod, Igor from Tonebase. SPEAKER_00: Tonebase is a subscription-based service that we invested in that has grown phenomenally over the years. And, uh, people pay to learn how to play classical guitar, violin, et cetera. SPEAKER_32: It's an incredible interview, uh, about getting true product market fit. Stick with us. SPEAKER_77: If you want to get ahead in your career, then you gotta be ready to fight every day. You gotta grind it out day after day. This is obvious. You're listening to This Week in Startups. You're grinding right now. But if you're a workhorse, you need to get a good night's sleep. Period. Full stop. We all know that getting great sleep equals better performance the next day. Sleep is a secret weapon and your secret weapon to getting great sleep is eight sleep. You know, I love my eight sleep mattress. I use it every night. I got it in both houses because I want to be able to control my temperature and I want to make sure I optimize my sleep. And you can do this with their new product. The pod cover by eight sleep fits on any bed, just like a fitted sheet. It's going to keep you cool all night, all the way down to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, if you like. And it will improve your sleep by automatically adjusting the temperature on each side of the bed. And you get personalized sleep reports. If you're one of those quantified self people, you're going to love this feature. And when you get great sleep, you get great performance. And listen, everybody's been talking about it publicly on Twitter.com. I'm sorry. X.com. Beno, Kosla, Paul, Graham, Zuck, myself. Everybody's been talking about how great eight sleep is. Invest in the rest that you deserve by going to eight sleep.com slash twist. They're going to give you 150 bucks off the pod cover because you're friends with this podcast. That's E I G H T S L E E P.com slash twist for $150 off the pod cover. And they're shipping, not just in the U S and Canada, but they got the UK and select countries in the EU and Australia. All right. SPEAKER_255: Welcome back to the program. Next up is Igor Likman. He is the CEO and co-founder of ToneBase. They provide online music education from expert instructors. How do I know this company? SPEAKER_230: Well, they came to our accelerator's 10th class back in 2018. The launch accelerator is just seven companies. We introduced them to a couple of hundred investors and helped them with their pitch and how to think about scaling their business. SPEAKER_32: And now they're doing millions in revenue. I won't say exactly how much, but they've got thousands and thousands of subscribers and they teach you four instruments. Currently classical guitar, piano, violin, and now a cello. SPEAKER_257: It's not cheap when compared to your Netflix, but it's not expensive when compared to hiring a music teacher. So think 50 bucks a month, 300 a year, something to that effect. So Igor, welcome to the program. SPEAKER_259: Thanks, Jason. I'm excited to be here. SPEAKER_257: So when we met, you were trying to figure out product market fit. You had some videos up on a website and online education was starting to become a thing. I am most interested in how you've been able to, I wouldn't say bootstrap the company, but you have been incredibly frugal or capital efficient as we like to say internally. SPEAKER_261: You've been incredibly capital efficient while getting product market fit. So the subscribers to Tonebase are very loyal. So maybe you could explain a little bit about what you've learned over the last five years in growing from, you know, tens of thousands to millions in revenue from dozens of subscribers to thousands. SPEAKER_257: So what have you learned about product market fit, and how to scale a company so capital efficiently? SPEAKER_263: Yeah, I mean, obviously, there's so many, many things, you know, we will learn. SPEAKER_266: But I mean, I think what it comes down to is to really narrowing down and focusing on that exact thing that you can prove that you solve for customers. It's, there's always a discrepancy between the ideas that we have and the missions and the visions and the big kind of, you know, idea for the future, but at the end of the day, we'll learn that like, ultimately, I mean, you know, it's nothing new here, you probably heard this, you know, and this is one of the things that you also recommend to your founders all the time, focus on the customer, provide solutions to the problems, and do more of that over time. SPEAKER_261: Yeah. And how do you or how have you been able to understand the customer needs? What are the tools and techniques that you've used and added to your toolkit over the years, to really understand the users, so that you can refine the products and, you know, because sometimes users tell you they want something, you build it, and then nobody uses it. SPEAKER_257: So it's almost like, you know, you ask them, like, hey, what if you ask somebody what we should add to the product, they might tell you a bunch of things that they have no interest in using. So now your user is just guessing and throwing ideas at you like in a brainstorming session, as opposed to, hey, we've studied their behavior, and we talked to them, and we know they want x, y and z, and then they actually use it. SPEAKER_266: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so in terms of like tools, I mean, obviously, everyone is using the same kind of, like, if we're talking about data analytics, we're using all the heaps of the world and kind of like, and all that, and just kind of like understand, I mean, we're like a video, like the way we solve problems for our customers is through video content, it's live, and it's pre-recorded. So this is kind of like the canvas, the vessel, how we kind of like, you know, pack its value, and then give it to the customer. And I think it was through, yeah, just like over time, just like, recording a lot of stuff and releasing it, and just tracking, you know, and then you see that some things get a lot of engagement, some things that don't get a lot of engagement, and then like over months and quarters, you kind of like realize it, huh, somehow, it's always the same things that kind of like tend to get a lot of engagement and a lot of use from our customers. And then so we kind of like, you know, try to kind of narrow in and kind of like really zero in on that type of videos and that type of content and, and really build, build things, build things from there. SPEAKER_261: How much of the business has turned out to be live versus library? And this is something content creators always think about, we did a little experiment here with live shows, it was good. People liked it, you know, us talking about the news, but it seems like what they really wanted was founder guests, investor guests really going deep on information as opposed to live. SPEAKER_264: How do you look at the world? What have you discovered about live versus library? SPEAKER_266: Yeah, life is certainly a certain important aspect of the of the overall product experience. But I think it's just, it's just, let's say 30 to 40% really, I mean, I think, you know, today, it's it's content, because with content, pre-recorded content, you just have so much more control over the final outcome, like you can design the solution for that problem, trying to solve with that piece of content. Whereas with life, it's more like a point in time kind of situation, also really heavy depends on the on the artists, it's heavy depends on the format, we do use some of kind of the group workshops and kind of like webinars where people can ask questions and sometimes, you know, play something and present and we bring instructors in. But at the end of the day, you know, I think it's it really comes down to like, content and really targeted content specific to to people's problems. Let's demo the product real quick, what we're looking at here is, is the dashboard, you know, I can log in. And the majority of our customers are sort of like intermediate through advanced. So these are not people that just kind of like bought the guitar yesterday, they're a little bit more inexperienced and they know what they want. It's basically that this is the content library, you know, people can either learn a piece or develop their skills and knowledge, right. So let's assume, you know, I want to learn the Moonlight Sonata. That's a piece by Beethoven. That's something that I want to play. Then I find this new chorus by Seymour Bernstein, who is a fabulous, wonderful musician is a 96 year old man, great, great artist, actually, Ethan Hawke made a documentary of him. And so here, I'll just drop down the volume a little bit. So basically, this is the format. This is this wonderful musicians spent his whole life, you know, teaching and and kind of playing this music, walking the viewer through the pieces we see here, we built a number of kind of, you know, custom tools to enhance the learning experience, we have the scores. SPEAKER_261: So I see you can download the workbook, download the edition. And so this is all a custom video player. So unlike YouTube, you can have all the stuff on YouTube. And here you can have all this backup material, etc. SPEAKER_266: Oh, yeah, right into the video. Yeah, absolutely. So this is built right into the video. And then obviously, we have 1000s of these videos. And, and also, you know, the beginning of when the customer signs up, they're assigned a level based they go through like an onboarding question, we asked them a number of questions, a number of to identify kind of like their playing proficiency. And then based on their playing proficiency, this is kind of like where we go from creating content. And it's been it's been a relative recent development, something very excited about this question, how do we personalize the learning experience? How do we really make sure that each customer is paired with the right type of video? And so here we have from level one to level 12. And based on that level, people are recommended a number of, you know, courses, repertoire skills and knowledge. And yeah, so this is kind of like how the content consumption functions. And obviously, then we have the the live events that are in various formats, you know, sometimes it's artists that come in, and we interview them, sometimes it's webinars, sometimes it's workshops, sometimes it's group settings. And then obviously, there's a big aspect of the platform is the community, which is which is very important to a number of customers is really this ability to interact, you know, with each other. But also, you know, we have things like, you know, community challenges, you know, we've asked people to, like this, for instance, you know, it's just one unfinished is say what it is. Yeah, so yeah, so we're basically here we ask people, we give them a prompt, and be like, Hey, we all have this pieces that we kind of started, but they're never really finished, right? So they got it, go in, and here's your unfinished unfinished business challenge. And, yeah, and people are participating. Wow, that's great. Yeah, yeah, the uploading. Yeah. SPEAKER_261: And so, you know, typically, when we invest in a startup, we look for great founders who understand their customers really well, and build and are just have product velocity. But you know, we really watch what investors say when they look at companies. And I think anytime you pick a niche here, classical music, or, you know, music instruction, for the higher end, people might say, Hey, the TAM is too small. Talk to me about, you know, what you actually think the TAM is for this product, ultimately, can this be, you know, you've proven you can make millions of dollars a year, can it be 10s of millions, hundreds of millions? And how do you get there? And how do you explain that to investors who maybe, you know, are skeptical? SPEAKER_266: I mean, so the way we think about this is really bottoms up, really, I mean, I think, you know, we approach things from, you know, this understanding that, you know, if we are serving everyone who wants to finesse and prove their playing ability and instruments, then I think there's no skepticism that there's a lot of people that, you know, play instruments. The way it works for us is that we see the overall TAM not so much expressed in the number of individuals who participates, who are basically part of that market, let's say, obviously, you know, the market for beginner guitarists, you know, or the market for, I don't know, people who want to ride a bicycle, obviously, larger of people. But the way we kind of like qualify a market is less about the total size of that market. But by the market, the kind of like the value how much people are willing to pay, right? I mean, right, I don't know, to make very remote example Palantir, they have like 100, 150 customers, you know, they make a lot of revenue. SPEAKER_230: Yeah, and they, they typically have three letter acronyms. So they have large budgets in here, the SPEAKER_261: equivalent is, you know, you're not selling a $5 a month app, you know, we're talking about a $50 a month SPEAKER_32: app, these people are 10 times more committed, and probably even more than that, but I would say 100 times more committed than a casual person looking for music instruction, the teachers. And I understand SPEAKER_261: it's, it's tough to make money as a musician, obviously, and a music teacher tough to make money as a music teacher, really hard to find students. If I'm a music teacher, and I live in Reno, you know, I've got a population of one hour drive, and I might have to drive to them. So is remote music and these live seminars and stuff like that is, is that just mind blowing for the teachers in terms of the ability to make money? Or how does the model work in terms of their compensation? Are you helping them make a business out of this? SPEAKER_266: The way we work with instructors is both, I mean, on the pre pre recorded side, it's a it's a one off production, they're fairly compensated. On the live side of things. No, they're also like they're vetted, they have to be invited for us really, it's about controlling the what we present to the customer. So we don't really focus on one on one, kind of like people can't really book one on one lessons with instructors as other players in that market. Personally, I don't necessarily believe this is a very viable business solution kind of like taking a cut of a transaction that's small already, and the solution is a lesser version of the real thing, you know, so, um, this is where the control kind of, you know, comes in. And this is where the the live aspect of life kind of a portion of the product is, is an important add on, but it remains an add on and kind of thing. Chamath Palihapitiya: Got it. And it does seem to build community. I saw when you were going through the community site, SPEAKER_261: that's like a great way for people to meet each other. And it's hard. I mean, if you play cello or violin, you know, those are more niche instruments, though, those students probably don't get to interact with each other all that much. How many could there be if you lived in Reno? How many serious players are there? So the community aspect, does it drive revenue? Or does it just keep it from help with retention? SPEAKER_302: It's certainly it's certainly helps with engagement and retention. Yeah, I mean, I think SPEAKER_266: we haven't we haven't found a very direct correlation between revenue and community engagement, but we certainly know that some of the most of the power users, you know, they are very, very active. And this is also where word of mouth happens, you know, where people talk to their to their to their friends and their colleagues and their students and the teachers. And so I think this is this is, but it's hard very to put like a to quantify the impact, you know, of the community on net revenue, if you will. SPEAKER_261: How do you think about scaling the business from here? There's the venture community that put pressure on you, I think, and the entire startup ecosystem during the boom days 19 2019 2020 2021, SPEAKER_307: go faster, go faster, burn money, invest. And now we have austerity. And hey, can you hit profitability? How much runway do you have? How are you growing in a sustainable way? You've always taken the approach to grow sustainably. I get your updates. I'm like, hey, can we grow faster? What ideas do you have? Where is this all going? And you and I have always this dialogue. And I've SPEAKER_264: always respected that you are very committed to sustainable growth. So maybe you could talk a SPEAKER_307: little bit about how investors and there are, you know, looking at tone base, how they're maybe we're pushing you to go faster, and then maybe now appreciating your methodical approach, not that you're going slow, but you're going you are going methodical. SPEAKER_266: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, I think, you know, just comes down rather to this, like, you know, I'd rather build something really, I'd rather grow to 200 million in like 10 years, you know, then crash and burn in three. And so I idea I think that the investors, such as you know, yourself, you know, supported the business, you know, you know, they understand, you know, the, that's every company has its, like every growth trajectory, and every growth story is unique to each business and sort of like shoehorning every business across the board into one, you know, exponential viral, you know, growth expectation may or may not harm to the longer term outcome of the business. The way we think about really scaling the business instead, like, the music community or the art community is really, it's fragmented by its definition. You see, like, we have, like, obviously, um, when we talk about music, we have different genres within different genres, we have different, uh, instruments within different instruments, we have different communities, see, and the way we think about this is that if we can build one replicable, write one replicable playbook, how we deliver and product experience that is unparalleled, you know, versus the zero to one kind of, you know, approach, you know, we launched flutes, you know, this month, within a month, you know, I can, I can, you know, I think it's fair to say where the market leader is that sort of SPEAKER_261: In flutes, yes. And this is the playbook, just like Travis or DoorDash, they went from city to city, you're going instrument to instrument, you've got the playbook, how do you get the first 100 flute players involved? How do you reach flute players? There's no database of that? Or is it or does a search based advertising work? Are there communities on Reddit, or other message boards where that you can kind of participate in authentically to get users? SPEAKER_266: My co founder, Chris, that you know, and that you met, you know, who runs the marketing team is obviously the, the more qualified to answer the question. But obviously, you know, the way we think about high building is, you know, it's a combination of content, it's combination of targeting the target community, and creating basically building a lead list, you know, we would run a tripwire. So we call them like, hey, like, give us your email and download a free practice tip for flutist, for instance, you know, and we built in an email list of a couple 1000 people, you know, and then we obviously recruit really famous food is ahead of the launch, you know, we then share some of the trailers, you know, out of time that we prepare. And then we get those to those 100 flutists. And actually, the first day, it was more than 100. SPEAKER_261: But I'm curious about people having profiles on the site, do people have profiles on the site yet? And can they kind of start to feature their work? Because that was the other thing I always thought, as you as I see the activity in the message boards, I would think some people might want to say, hey, here's my profile, you know, I'm tonebase.com slash, you know, Jason. And hey, SPEAKER_264: here are here's some of my guitar solos and kind of making a profile, have you thought about that? And then they could be public profiles where they share their passion for their instrument? SPEAKER_266: Yeah, this is where the community comes in. You know, we're talking about UGC. This is where we encourage customers and users to share their progress, share their thoughts, share their ideas, if it comes to the pedagogical content that we then present, you know, to the customer. This is where we kind of like have to be very selective. And this is where, yeah, usually the this this idea of like, you know, you just see this didn't really work out so far. SPEAKER_321: I see. But you just show no profiles yet. No, not, not yet. Not yet. I think it'd be control. SPEAKER_32: Yeah, it's gonna be very interesting if people could start to build profiles and share it. But I SPEAKER_261: mean, what an incredibly beautiful product, all the product design, all the video work done in house, you set your own standards, you took your time with that. Yeah. SPEAKER_323: Yeah, yeah. In terms of the videos. SPEAKER_261: Well, there's how well produced the videos are. And then there's how well, the how great the UX is on the site. I'm curious, just what you learned there, what your philosophy is there of production, inside the video, and then the wrapper, the UX on the website, SPEAKER_61: you know, how much you've invested there in terms of your cycles and time. SPEAKER_266: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you're building out our our own studio in Pasadena, we're building out a second now in Europe, and we have a third one on the East Coast. That was, that was crucial, you know, to really controlling, controlling AV output, controlling the costs, and controlling the visuals. And this is, you know, our head of production, Sean Mulholland, he's done an amazing job really to really kind of control and really shape that the visual identity of the content. Because this is also something, you know, that a lot of customers are kind of responding to really positively, if we are charging $50 per month, or $300 per year, that screams premium product. And if we are a premium product, we have to deliver this premium experience. So if somebody opens the video, they're like, Oh, wow, like, this is where this UGC thing kind of like, you know, it's a little bit difficult. Janky. Janky. SPEAKER_261: I understand. It's janky. I mean, let's be honest, I feel like you're a niche version of masterclass, where masterclass, you can, I'm sure, you know, Yo-Yo Ma, somebody's on masterclass, doing a masterclass for cello, but they're not going to do the next 1000 cello videos, the next 1000 flute videos, or 100. So, you know, the masterclass, what STEEZY does in video, what you're doing, it's all just amazing in terms of helping people get an education. And you had a nice bump during COVID, and you sustained that bump, it didn't go away, right? Or did it go away a little bit? SPEAKER_266: Janky. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you know, if you now look at, now that we have, what is it, three years at this point, if you look at those cohorts versus other cohorts that didn't, that didn't retain that well, I think it's, it's, it was a bump, certainly, you know, it was interesting. But I mean, again, you know, I think at that point, even we knew it's like, it's a, hopefully it's a temporary occurrence, you know, it turned out to be longer than we all hoped for. But I mean, you know, I think we're focused on on because I feel like building a SPEAKER_302: sustainable business means also like targeting the right type of customers that are in there for SPEAKER_89: your ideal customer profile, the drive by, you know, transient users, they eat up cycles, SPEAKER_261: they don't use the product, it's not product market fit. So yeah, it's, it's kind of a waste of everybody's time. I mean, it's not there's no harm, no foul, if they want to sample it. But then you having to service them, as opposed to putting time into finding the people who are truly passionate, how many instruments per year? Are we going to release? Do you think is it one per year? And in 10 years, we've got, you know, the 15 major instruments or two per year? How do you think about SPEAKER_266: what's the right pace? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think it's, it's, it's interesting. I mean, last year, we released one new instrument, this year will be two new instruments. Next year, we're planning on doing three to five. So it's, it's, it's really, it's really about optimizing, the more efficient we become, the more profitable we become, the more content, the more revenue, we can reinvest into scaling more verticals and doing that more effectively. And then it really becomes about the process, really. And so I hope for you is, you know, you just keep investing in SPEAKER_339: the product, you cannot go wrong, every dollar that goes into the product, you can see it on the screen, SPEAKER_261: you're really, really produced something that was always quality from the start, you always had SPEAKER_230: quality, but you have scaled quality production. And for that, you have my great respect. I'm so proud of the effort the team's put in and the passion comes out, you know, every time I see an update from you, and you've been great keeping the investors updated. So I'm just so happy for you and SPEAKER_261: the team. And just kudos on staying relentlessly focused on something you're passionate about, it's very easy to get distracted, keep investing every dollar you can into the business. I'm fine with the business losing a little bit of money, breaking even whatever you choose. But I just love the fact that every time you make another video, it just adds to the value for those users, it makes it harder for them to churn. And, you know, it's, I look at what you're doing, like I look at my epic pass for skiing. I'm like, you know, okay, this thing's $600. When I get to day four or five, I've now day three or four, actually in America for skiing, I've broken even on the cost of my thing. And then I'm like, Oh, I've hit 20 days. I've hit 30 days, 40 days, 50 days, it's cost me $10 a day to go skiing. That's literally how I look at it. And it's the same thing with your beautiful service. Every time you had those videos, the cost per video for the user goes down, right? And they get to just SPEAKER_61: keep enjoying it for the same low price. And this is this is why the majority of people are SPEAKER_313: on yearly plans. And another third is on lifetime plans, just because people invest in their SPEAKER_61: long term development. I love the lifetime plan. I know accountants, they lose their mind over SPEAKER_261: $700 one time transaction. But listen, if you know, if it gets a bunch of passionate people to help underwrite the business with that lifetime, com.com did it a number of people have done it. Now you don't have to sell a million of them. But if you sold 1000 of them, it's not the end of the world. SPEAKER_34: Those people become your super advocates. And you can always discontinue it or keep raising the price of it. Yeah, but I love the lifetime. It's 700 bucks lifetime. 700. Yeah. Wow. So amazing. All SPEAKER_61: right. Listen, continued success. Everybody go check out tone base tone base.co tone base.co go to tone SPEAKER_349: base.co and see all the magic. All right. Well done. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups.