Startup Pitch Competition: Three founders compete for $25K | E1999

You seem like a winner to me. Are you a winner or a loser?

I'm a winner, Jason.

Okay. Winners know their value. Say it.

I know my value.

Say it again.

I mean my value, Right?

If anybody wants it for free, what, are you going to tell them off? Yeah, tell them if. Try one more time.

Yeah.

I want it for free. I want it for free. I want it for free.

Off. Jason. I know my value. You're going to pay.

I love you Now. Now I'm in love with you.

This week in Startups is brought to you by Fidelity Private Shares. Fidelity Private Shares manage your cap table and data room. Get faster, more accurate 409A valuation and fully automate your next financing round. Visit fidelityprivateshares.com mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first year paid subscription. Google Cloud. Accelerate your startup journey with the Google for Startups cloud program. Get up to 200k in Google Cloud credits or up to 350k for AI startups plus training and guidance. Apply@startups.google.com Twist and Runway looking to level up your financial planning? Runway is the modern and intuitive way to model, plan and align your business for everyone on your team. Sign up@Runway.com twist to get your first two months free.

All right everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis. With me is Kelly Schrecker. She is a principal here at the Launch Fund. That's my venture fund. We got 20 people at the company and one of our passions is helping founders figure out if they want to start a company. And we meet them in year zero at a little format we call Founder University. You can visit Founder university and this 12 week program has a bunch of modules about how to start a company. We accept 250 startups to each cohort and then every week they check in with us and Kelly and the team and just tell us how they're doing. We wind up investing in about 5 to 10% of the graduates of the program. Sometimes we do it during the program, sometimes we do it when people apply to the program. We get super impressed with the company. Sometimes we do it after they graduate. We give them two offers. Hey, do you want us to be your first check for but 25k so that you can incorporate and sometimes we'll give them the 125k check that standard in Silicon Valley like Techstars, Y Combinator and Accelerator do. And Kelly brings me the best companies. We feature them here on this week in Startups so you can See what companies we're investing in. Because the greatest proxy Kelly of where the technology industry is going and where entrepreneurs are going to is where the capital allocators place their bets. So what you'll see here today is three of the top companies that Kelly selected for me to meet, and we'll find out if I want to invest in them. Kelly, did I miss anything with the program? Maybe you could tell us when the next one is.

Absolutely. Our next cohort is going to be Cohort 9, which kicks off on October 25th. So we've got plenty of time, founders. But don't wait. Go ahead and apply at Founder University, and hopefully you'll get to come and join us for 12 weeks.

Okay. To have their best chance of getting accepted. What are the top two or three things you hear me say over and over again lead to success with a startup? What are the factors we look for in Founder University companies?

Absolutely. A few of the things we look for are definitely builder founders. So developers, designer, UI UX folks, growth hackers. You know, really people that can bring the product to market and get it out there without having to spend a whole bunch of money. Outside of that, we really love product velocity. Even if you're very early and you maybe don't even have those customers on the platform yet, just seeing that you're out there getting the work done week over week moving forward, not just changing your logo every. Every week or so, which we do see from time to time, but we really want folks that are in it to win it and are willing to put in the work. And, you know, being a developer, designer, UI growth hacker is a good start there and then just working really hard.

Okay, so we love product founder builders. We like multiple teams. If you're. If you're two or three developers, man, chances of us funding you are very high. If you're one developer, one designer, one growth hacker, it's pretty good. If you're three idea people, a salesperson, man, you can't build the product, and you got to ship a bunch of money to some development agency. We're not going to fund you. So there you have it, folks. Or unlikely. So let's get to work. Who's our first company? We got two minutes on the clock for them to present. Yeah.

Yes, we do. All right, first up, we're going to have Eric at the public board.

All right, Eric, welcome to the program. You have two minutes on the clock. And remember, most people are listening. So if you're listening right now and you want to see this deck and see the product, go to YouTube, do a search or listen to us on Spotify, where we have video incorporated into this week in startups. Three, two, go.

Thank you. Hi, I'm Eric, CEO and co founder of the public board. We're decentralizing access to digital billboards everywhere. Our product aims to make it as easy as sending a tweet to every digital billboard in the country and beyond. This is the construction company I used to own. And when I had it, I wanted to display content on digital billboards. But I never did because I found the process was just too slow and painful. So after I sold that company, I thought what an interesting pain point I could resolve for other people. The easiest way to test assumptions and get feedback was to bring digital billboards to major events. And our model was to give one free display spot to everyone and then upsell from there. We did that for six days. We had over 2,700 pieces of content uploaded by about 2,200 free account creations, about 250 of which paid for upgrades in our automated sales funnel, generating us about $31,000 in revenue. And our customers loved it. They loved the photos, they loved sharing them all over social media. And that created an incoming supply of new leads for our sales funnel. And that's exactly what our competition doesn't do. They're living in the past. They're thinking too small. We're opening up a new market and when we're successful, people will no longer refer to billboard advertising, they'll refer to public messaging. We're a marketplace for billboard owners. Our beachhead customer is the consumer market. It's the highest margin and the maximum virality and it opens us up to move into SMBs and enterprise in the future. We have a variable take rate based on performance. The more revenue we generate for a board owner, the more take rate we end up getting. In a summarized simplistic sense. If we look at a sample city of about 2 million people, based on our take rate, we think we can generate about $5 million of revenue in that type of a city. Which means we need about 20 cities in order to hit our 100mil ARR in the United States. And that's before we go international. My co founder and I are repeat founders. We're a technical team. We're really grateful to be here on the Twist podcast. Thank you Jason for your time. My name is Eric, CEO and co founder of the public board.

Okay, this is a great presentation. Public board, their board, or it's a board for the public to Use. I like your vibes and I like the energy, I like the making it really easy for people. It's a marketplace, it's software, you know, we like all those kind of things. How many co founders are there in the company?

Myself and my co founder Bargaph, just two.

Great. Where did you each work? Anywhere notable? Did you work somewhere notable before this? Each of you?

Before this? We were founders. You know, we exited our past ventures, we met through LinkedIn and I was looking for a co founder and we got along really well a few years ago, so doing this together was a no brainer.

So your startup founders, you had a previous company, each different companies. How did those companies do? Did you sell for a profit? Did you sell for break even? Did you have an Aqua hire? Did you shut them down? Tell me.

Yeah, my last company, the one that I sold, brought it to about 6 mil. ARR. I built it from 0 people up to 60, exited on a cash sale. It was in construction, so a little lower margin. More like an EBITDA calculation, not tech valuation. Yeah it was. And co founder Bargav, same thing, grew his to 20 million users on the tech side in the fitness world and exited to battery ventures.

So both of you are technical, you're writing the code or what are the skills here? How do you break things up as co founders?

Bargav is definitely the co founder that does all the code writing. I get really involved in the ui, the ux, understanding the customer, working directly with them. That's my passion and kind of my forte in the relationship. We're kind of like, you know, two peas in a pod here.

Love it, love it. Now you're not going to own the billboards. You're going to find billboard owners and then convince them to give you some of their inventory, all of their inventory. How's that going to work do you think?

Yeah, we start with some, build that trust, grow it up and when they can see that we generate more revenue for them than they would on their own, we end up with the whole thing.

Okay, so this is a great idea. What about, you know, these digital signs? I'll see, you know, when I'm at a urinal or something or in a cafe. You know, I noticed people are kind of putting up these things in alternative places and I've been pitched on dozens of startups over the last 15 years that do these kind of things. What do you think of those? I'll call them micro billboards.

Yeah, to me it's, you know, the way of the future is to have digital billboards kind of everywhere. So there's no stopping that evolution. It's definitely not our beachhead customer. However, I would imagine in the future it's kind of inevitable that we would probably end up touching any digital billboard, an elevator, or on an Uber car, or wherever it happens to be.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your vision. Very clever. And I think it could work really well for events. By the way, you know, your little pop up there got me excited. If I put one of these billboards up at the all in Summit, let's say in the lobby, or I put 10 of them up all around the event, at the parties, etc. And then we told the sponsor, because we do this for our sponsors at our events, we'll have their logos in rotation. Now if we had the logos in rotation and we told anybody at the event, you know, put something up on the board for, you know, 10 minutes for 100 bucks or whatever it is, or 500 bucks, that could be kind of powerful. You know, I mean, I mean, I might not do it, but I could see Coachella doing it. I could see, you know, any number of events doing it. A volleyball tournament at the beach, putting up a couple of these or, you know, whatever it happens to be. So I find it kind of compelling to put these up in different places. I know there are mobile billboards that people are using, a whole bunch, you know, like trucks that deliver, like one case of Topa Chica. But, you know, while they're on the way to deliver them, they drive through really popular neighborhoods. So very cool vision. Thank you so much. Okay, founders, are you overwhelmed by cap table management? And are you up to your neck in all of this due diligence? You have to do well. Shouldn't managing your investors be easy? That's where Fidelity Private shares can help. Because dealing with equity is confusing. And fundraising shouldn't have to be your full time job. And you got to have a solution provider that you trust. With Fidelity Private Shares, you're going to easily be able to manage your cap table and your data room. You're going to get faster and more accurate 409A valuations and you're going to be able to do sophisticated scenario modeling, which I'm telling you, a lot of founders don't focus on it, and they should. You want to know what that pro forma cap table looks like and, you know, do some scenarios, hey, if we get bought for 100 million, a billion, what happens? And you're going to want to automate your next funding round. You want it to go smoothly and you want to come across as professional, all on one collaborative platform with awesome support. Fidelity even has an amazing startup community for access to exclusive events for founders and VCs. So experience the difference that Fidelity can make by visiting fidelity privateshares.com mention our podcast and you will receive 20% off your first year paid subscription.

All right, wonderful. Next up, we have Matt at speedai, right?

Matty boy with an AI. Here we go. I wonder if you have speedai Tech. Maybe get a tech domain. My favorite. All right, here we go. Three, two, go.

Hi, my name is Matt and we are Speed AI, an app that creates adaptive training plans coaching for runners. From the day you decide to register for a marathon to the moment you cross the finish line, we hold your hand every step of the way. Be Tim. He's a new runner registered for the New York City Marathon, but doesn't know where to start training. Tim downloads the app and answers this dynamic questionnaire about his fitness history. He connects his wearables like Apple Watch or Whoop, and Speed's algorithms incorporate all of this data to create a tailored training plan for the New York City Marathon. As Tim trains, his Whoop detects. He didn't get much sleep. Speed's assistant AI detects and suggests an adjustment to the upcoming workout for the day. Soon after starting his plan, Tim then receives his monthly nutrition box filled with energy gels and hydration products. Speed's unique nutrition training tells Tim exactly when to use the energy gels to maximize their effectiveness. Our closed beta users like Tim are telling us that our training approach incorporating nutrition is helping them set new personal records. With speed, we're offering three product tiers at $18.99 a month, a training plan for $29.99 a month training and coaching, and for $59.99 a month training, coaching and a monthly subscription box. We have a closed beta with a small group of users. We're releasing our open beta in two weeks time for September 1st. In the meantime, we've released the nutrition box to our waitlist and had a surprising amount of engagement from interested athletes, influencers and even some brands asking if they can include products at Speed. We have a love of endurance sports, having competed at events like the Ironman World Championships and numerous marathons. My brother, sister and I are a family team of software engineers with experience working for startups, government and large tech companies like Twitter and Datadog. Thank you.

Okay, we've done a lot of coaching apps. Most of them have not Worked out so well. But I do think AI brings something new to it. How do you make sure that the AI is actually giving good advice and not hallucinating? I was a marathon runner for many years. For a decade, I did 11 New York City marathons. I would have loved to have a coach. I would've loved to have an app. I was writing everything down in a journal, basically, to keep track of my training and then maybe a spreadsheet. So, you know, I do understand that marathon runners have a unique need. But isn't the AI, like, going to be bad? And how do you make sure that it gives good advice?

Yeah. So the biggest thing for us that we've seen in our testing is really making sure that the context that the AI has is accurate and has a good background. One of the things that we've definitely seen is for the users who are using the app, the guardrails are definitely something that we're working on for sure.

Awesome.

But it's something we need to improve.

And then with these bars. What's the point of getting the bars from you when I can buy them on Amazon? I'm curious if that's, like, a major part of the vision or it's a distraction. Tell me your thinking.

Yeah. So one of the things that, when we've been talking to users is the nutrition and how to actually take those energy bars and gels during training is one of the things that's left out of most training protocols. And so that's one of the things that's key to the training plans themselves. So if you're training for and you're going on your long run doing a race simulation, we say, you know, 15 minutes in, you need to be taking the gel that we've supplied to you, and then 30 minutes, and then you can you. Your body actually is able to acclimate to these gels.

Okay, tell me about the founding team.

So we're a brother, sister team.

Three of us.

We're all siblings.

Three siblings, okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

And we're all software engineers, so we're done.

Three software engineers, siblings. Love it. You've worked together before on projects, I take it. From building sandcastles to startups. Good enough for me. Okay, Kelly, let's keep the trains moving here. Give me my third company. I'm really excited. I want to invest in one of these. I'm feeling frisky. I want to make a bet. And I love the first two. The third one is good. I'm going to have a big problem here. Let's Go.

Next up is Joe at Potengine.

Hello.

All right. I love pods. Go.

Perfect. I'm Joe, CEO, co founder of Podengine, the podcast audio intelligence platform. Meet Sarah. Sarah's head of marketing at a growth stage fintech. She needs to grow revenue and knows that podcasting as a channel is a no brainer to explore. But she doesn't know where to start. She's found it impossible to do herself. Existing tools and agencies are time consuming, manual or really expensive. Then she found Podengine. She creates an account, Podengine AI enriches her profile and creates a podcast strategy for her just like a real agency. Because Podengine transcribes and analyzes thousands of episodes every single day, she starts receiving opportunities immediately into her inbox. Relevant podcaster guests aren't or sponsor and alerts for her brand and her competitors. After just two weeks, she's really impressed. She's booked interviews of four industry leading podcasts as well as Uncovered, which competitors are sponsoring podcasts. And she's received alerts when her brand has been compared to other competitors. This industry has really surprised us. It's built on manual and labor intensive work and it's perfect to streamline. With AI as well. As our initial platform, we're now iterating super quickly. We've got a guest booking, workflow, media margin solution and we think the world's most powerful search engine for podcasts. Our roadmap is equally as exciting, bolstered by customer demand and inbound interest. It's the huge opportunity. There's over half a million active podcasts, a rapidly growing industry. Majority of podcasts take guests or seek sponsorships. However, podcasting as a growth medium is yet untapped by most businesses. We're the team to do this. We're serial builder, founder, friend, entrepreneurs with multiple X's under our belts. And despite being so early, we have great traction. We've got five pay and media monitoring customers, we're working closely with 10 pilot agencies and API customers and we have over 400 freemium users. I'm Joe Tanarella, CEO at PodEngine AI.

Okay, well done. You did a great job, Joe. I know this need. So having two podcasts, one of them is like really, really big. And the other ones, this podcast we're on right now is niche but makes a lot of money, has been sold out for I don't know, 12 or 13 years since we've had advertising. The first year we weren't even trying. And so I did research manually. I think I hired Magic Assistants. And then I was using Athena wow.com assistance to go through the top business podcasts and add new sponsors to our Google sheet to give to the partnership team. And I just said, hey, go to the top 50 podcasts. Look at the notes, show notes. It was very manual, but, you know, if we put somebody on it manually who costs, you know, 10 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour, and they can find, I don't know, but five new sponsors a day, an hour, and they do it for 10 hours, and we have 50 new leads. Oh, my Lord. You know, each of those leads is worth, to me 10 bucks. So, you know, it's easy peasy lemon squeezy. But you have something else here, which is people want to be guests. I get bombarded. There's these podcast agencies now that literally all they do is book people on podcast authors, business people, etc. Influencers. And I hate these companies with all my heart. And I block their domains using Superhuman. I hit the shift exclamation key, and I literally not only block that person, I block at pod, you know, bookers or something. And then I have a little thing where if they try to get around me and hit me with the Gmail, I reply to them and say, we do not take guests suggestions. And they're like, okay, well, I just have these three suggestions, so how do I get them to you? And I'm like, hey, dummy, we don't take suggestions. However, I do know that other podcasts do. The one concern I have is you're boiling the ocean. 500,000 pockets. Way too many. What you really want to do is tell this two constituents. These are the top podcasts. These are their advertisers. These are the new advertisers. So, hey, here's the. This week in startups, we just started having Oracle as an example, which has a really great cloud offering, and they're on the pod. So my competitors would want to know, hey, Oracle started doing this week in startups. Are they doing any other podcasts? Right. So there's like a very kind of interesting nuance here. The long tail, I don't think actually matters that much. So I'd rather see you focus not on the 500,000 podcasts. Do the 5,000 that are notable because 90% of the revenue is in the top 500 podcasts probably is my guess. And I saw some. Some notes about that. So I love the idea. What does it cost? What are you charging right now?

So at the moment, to be completely honest, we're still figuring out pricing Just like we're figuring out product, market fit and what that looks like.

Okay, tell me what you think.

So between $50 and $300 a month, depending on kind of size, we have a free minimum.

I'll give you a very important piece of advice right now, the cheapest price is $500 a month. Anybody who can't afford that is a mid loser. You don't want to talk to them. Yeah, you want to talk to the people who are serious. If you're hiring a PR firm, that's between 2 and $25,000 a month. If you're looking for advertisers, the typical ad buy is probably between ten and a hundred thousand dollars on average. For an average podcast, that means $500 a month, $6,000 a year. I would make people pay for the year upfront. I would make them sign a two year commitment maybe. And then you could fall back to monthly. If they want to try it, I would give. No, free. Zero. Free. In order to use it, you have to have a credit card. Please trust me on this. Do not be a loser, okay?

Yeah.

You seem like a winner to me. Are you a winner or a loser?

I'm a winner, Jason.

Okay. Winners know their value. Say it.

I know my value.

Say it again.

I know my value.

Right.

If anybody wants it for free, what are you going to tell them?

I'm going to tell them they got to pay.

Yeah, tell them if. Let's try one more time.

Yeah. Off.

I know my value. I want it for free. I want it for free. I want it for free.

Off. Jason. I know my value. You're gonna pay.

I love you now. Now I'm in love with you because I have so many founders who say they have the greatest product ever, but they don't want to charge. Are you a chicken?

Not a chicken.

Or are you a man?

A man.

You're a human, okay. You're a man. Charge for the goddamn product. Okay. And charge a lot. Yeah, charge a lot. I would make it a thousand dollars actually. And then just have people beg you for a discount. Say, you know, there's no reason to discount that if you're serious. You get one booking for your client. It's worth $10,000. So you need to get one a year to break even your second one. You're profitable, you get one advertiser, jcal. You're profitable, you get. If you tell me that, I'm all in.

Great.

So this is a great idea. You can crush it. Most people are not going to like this idea. Most investors are not going to like it. Savvy ones know that data systems, data subscriptions are a great business. You can look at a lot of different databases that charge, whether it's Crunchbase or there's a bunch of advertising. Database people love paying for the shit. But they will not respect you if it's less than $10,000 a year. So I would say it's $10,000 a year. If you don't want to pay $10,000 a year, it's $2,500 a month for one month. You can try for one month for 2,500, or you can pay 10,000 for the year. It's a yearly contract. You got to give A, you know, and that's it. But B, hardcore, great idea. And tell me about your team. How many co founders?

Two co founders, both technical.

You write code?

I'm writing code. Luke, my co founder, he's computer science. He started and sold a consulting business in software. So he's the hardcore one. I'm contributing to the website. Yeah. All right.

Well done, well done.

Okay, thank you.

Great job. All right, everybody. You know, being at a startup is a team sport. You're not going to get there alone, man. You got your founders, you got the early team members, of course, investors, most importantly, that first couple of customers, right? And you all work together to get your company off the ground. And I have great news for you and your team. Google for Startups cloud program is now a partner here at this weekend startups. And listen, you all just want to know the number. Here's the number. 200,000. 350,000. These are the two numbers. What are these two numbers? You're going to get $200,000 in Google Cloud credits. And if you're an AI startup, you can get up to $350,000. Google is serious. Google for startups cloud program is here on this week in Startups just letting you know they are serious about helping your startup. The number is the number. Okay? And there's two great numbers here. 90% of generative AI unicorns choose Google Cloud. We all know that. They do a great job. So here's your call to action. You need to get these credits. You need to start building. You're going to find out everything about this amazing program, Google Startup cloud program@startups.google.com twist. Okay, very simple. Hit the rewind key, bookmark this, write it down. I want you to sign up right now. Pause the podcast because these are big numbers, folks. They really want to support you. I don't know how long they're going to do this for. So startups.google.com/twist. All right, let's get back to this amazing program. Kelly, let's have a conversation. Give me your ranking of these three companies based on your. You've been how many years in working for me as a venture capitalist?

Three years.

Three years. Okay. Based on your three years rank, 1, 2, and 3 in terms of if we all. If we invested in each of them at the same valuation, you know, and wound up owning whatever small percentage of the company for supporting them and giving them cash, which one's going to give us the biggest return? Second best return, Third best return in your estimation and tell me why.

Absolutely. So I'll. I'll start with who I think will have the hardest time getting there, which is speed.

AI.

You know, running as a really big space consumer can be a little bit hard. I think really talking to your customers is going to help you figure out exactly what is needed in a crowded market and then just go as hard as you can on that with Pot Engine. Love a SaaS business. Podcasting is huge. I think it will only get bigger. And so if they listen to that good advice about pricing, I think that they have a good chance of returning our fund and then even more if we were to invest.

Okay, and just to be clear, it's not SaaS, because that's software as a service. This is a data play, right? It's a data subscription. So it is a subscription. But let's just make sure we're clear. It's not SaaS, it's data. Keep going. And your number one. And what?

Cool. My number one is public board. You know, disrupting, frankly, a really boring business and removing a lot of friction just opens up a whole new world of customers, which is really interesting in the VC world. The other thing I think is really interesting is not just that it would be the, you know, out of home advertising, but as you said, there's event applications here. You know, on the B2C side, you can celebrate life milestones and graduations, promposals. Right. People are willing to really do that thing for the wow moment and the experience. And so I can see how, you know, especially with the. The idea that you can test it for cheaper, free, and then you get really addicted to it. All of a sudden, it's gamified. Your friends are pulling pranks on each other. Who knows what it looks like, right?

Okay. Your order is almost perfect. The correct order is Potengine. Then the billboards Then the marathon app. The reason is Potengine has the easiest chance of returning a large amount of money. Those data businesses get bought for a lot. The marketplace going to be a little bit harder, but again it could get very big. But it's going to have less odds in the third one. Obviously consumer finicky, low odds if it does hit. It's a niche market, but not that small of a niche. But all three are great and all three have great teams. I'm joking with you. Nobody knows but we'll have this on record and hopefully you can pull this out in 7 years when your order was right and mine was wrong or whatever. We'll see. That's why in our company I force everybody to make hard decisions and this is an easy decision for me. I'd like you to invest in all three companies. Can you do that for me, Kelly?

Of course I can.

All right, listen, let's bring everybody on for a second here. It's not the Oscars, you don't have to give an acceptance speech. But would it be okay with you all if I just gave you some, a little bit of chatter to kind of get things moving here and invest in it and you're all going to work hard. Yeah.

All in.

You're all in. I like it. Okay, great job everybody. Everybody. Splashy, cashy, gets a little bit of an investment and you know, let's work hard here. Startups aren't complicated, folks. You gotta obsess about your customers, build a product or service they love with good product velocity and the way you have good product velocity and you know what your customers have is by having a kick ass, aggressive team that comes to work every day and puts in the time. The way to win as a founder is effort and time and having that product velocity and obsessing about your customers. If you obsess about your customers and you, you know, really have good product velocity, you know, you're not afraid to charge a good, a good enough price. Things can go well for you. Nothing's guaranteed. But you all have my respect. These are great businesses. And you all came to Founder University and had a good time? Yeah, absolutely.

It was great.

Yeah.

Okay, so I just want you each as we close here to tell me what was the most valuable part of Founder University for you specifically you personally, not your co founder, not your team, just you personally. What would you say you got the most out of it? Just so Kelly and I can hear and the other people can hear because they might want to go after they see this to Founder University and apply with two or three of their friends to build a great, great startup that focuses on team, product and customer. Let's go. We'll start with you, Matt. Matt, what did you personally, Matt, get out of from Speed? I. What did you get out of the program?

Number one for me, having an engineering background, learning all of the business side of things. So related to the accounting, how to structure, how to set up a company, the setting up the cap tables, all of that, that was extremely valuable.

So blocking and tackling a lot of the chores you have to do as a founder suck. And then having somebody who's invested in 400 companies has seen it all help you with little modules and some bullet points and some point you in the right direction, it's going to save you a lot of time. So that's great to hear that we did our job. Okay, Joe from Podengine, you're up next. What did Joe from Podengine get out of the Founder University?

The thing I like most about Founder University I think was the community. It's just so helpful to be around like minded founders. You know, I jump into a discovery call with them and likewise with me and some of them I think are going to become customers in the future as well.

Great. Okay. And Eric, your turn. Eric, what did you get out of Founder University?

The biggest value that I got out of Founder University was to really analyze and deep dive into my tam, my total addressable market. I remember before Founder University I was doing random ChatGPT searches on what is our market and coming up with a wild array of answers. But then when I was watching and listen to Kelly do her her bottom up TAM approach, I really got to understand who is my beachhead customer, who's my initial, my ideal customer profile, how does that relate to our go to market strategy and how does that relate into our long term planning as well? And I'd never really dove that deep into it ever before or had anyone question me on it. No one questioned it. Kelly did and I learned that from Founder University. I get to take that away forever and that's a great value.

Awesome. So Kelly did her job and Kelly, it's good to hear you did an adequate job. And you know, for you too, Kelly, you can always work a little harder, but you're doing a great job. I mean, I'm starting to sound like Trump in my old years. Tremendous Founder University. Great job. Founders. Love it. Okay. No, it's great to hear. And you know what I love about these answers, Kelly, is that when we go around the horn like this, everybody gets something different out of it. You know, some people already understand market size, total addressable market. They were some wonky McKenzie person, you know, and they just grind it out and they got it done. Other folks, you know, hey, they don't know the blocking and tackling. And, you know, like Matt, maybe I don't. I've never set up a cap table. How do I do that? You know, you can make a lot of mistakes with your cap table. And if you avoid those mistakes, man, that could save a company and, you know, just, just. Great job, everybody. Are you looking to level up your financial planning? Well, there's an amazing company called Runway, and they've completely changed the way businesses handle their finances. I recently did a tour of the product with one of our founders and with the company, and it is mind blowing. Finances are hard. We all know that, right? But Runway makes it simple and even fun. How do they do this? Well, they use plain English formulas that you can understand that integrate into more than 650 tools, pulling in all your accounting data, your HR data, even your CRM. And that gives you a complete picture of how everything in your business fits together. Runway also makes headcount planning and scenario analysis super easy. You can just drag timelines to adjust your plans and all of your metrics will automatically update. This is stuff that startups need to be doing. You really need to get finance dialed in in order to scale your company. And Runway is the way for you to do that. You can add real time charts, text, even video to investor reports. And Runway will help you make better decisions by making the impact on your business crystal clear to everyone. And if you want a personalized demo, head over to Runway.com twist and sign up to get your first two months free. And there are a ton of companies using Runway. A number of them are in my portfolio, like two of my favorite companies, Superhuman, that I use all day long, and eight Sleep, which I use every night to get that sleep score up. So once again, go to Runway.com twist. It's an amazing product. I got time for one question. Any, any question for Kelly or I from the three of you. Just, you know, now that you're funded and you're going forward, any question that you might have, raise your hand and go ahead and ask it.

Sure. Yeah.

Okay, good.

Thank you. Imagine, six months from now, we're talking again. I'm really curious, in your mind, what would be the number one thing you would want to see? Like, there's so many versions of Traction. There's so many things to look at. What would be your number one? We get together. Boom. Is that there or not?

You know, if you understand your customers really well and those customers are over the moon, we don't need a lot of them. We just need to know that these five customers think that this is the greatest solution ever. And then when our team does due diligence and they say, hey, if this product didn't exist, how would you solve the problem? And they panic. What, it's going away? Are they going out of business? Because I, this is critical for my business. And you know, Paul Graham refers to that as like hair on fire problem. Like, my hair is on fire, I need a bucket of water. So, you know, I think we would really. The nature of that relationship with your customers. I'd rather see five people who you are essential for than 50 people who are dabbling. Right. Then I will also say that a lighthouse customer, somebody notable, you know, so in your case, if, you know, I'm gonna pick a brand that is, you know, if there's like, somehow you got, you know, Starbucks, you know, to, to promote the app and their new lemonade summer beverages that my daughters love on their things and they thought it was killer, you know, okay, wow. How did he get Starbucks? Like, whoa, you know, or for Pot Engine, you know, if you got, I don't know, Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss to pay you and you were like, hey, yeah, Joe Rogan's using it, Tim Ferriss is using it, their ad teams are using it. Look, boom. So, yeah, we love that.

Thank you, thank you. That's a great answer. I appreciate it.

No problem. I've got to take one more if you got one, Matt. Joe, any questions from you too? Yeah, go ahead, Joe.

Hey, thanks. So you mentioned Dataplay. I love that idea. What do you think marketing and go to market strategy looks like for a data play and how is it different to a SaaS?

You know, what you're going to find is when you send a report and you send a couple screenshots to the right person, they immediately respond. So you find my three account executives and you say, hey, I've got this new product, Pod engine. We've analyzed all the sponsors we know. This is a list of sponsors on this week in startups based on our data. Did we get it right? Because we also have it on these 25 other people and we can get you the 25 people that you don't and their advertisers and we can tell you who you have and who you don't have. So that list where you say to, you know, I don't know, some New York Times technology podcast or you know, Yahoo Finance has some tech podcast and you tell them this is jcal's advertisers. These are your advertisers. These are the ones jcal has that you don't have. Vice versa. That's super powerful. But you got to find the right person and you email them and then they lose their mind. It's really that simple. But it's your job to figure out who's that title that you find on LinkedIn or using Lead IQ or in Crunchbase or whatever it is. You know, maybe you just email the sales at, you know, this week in startups or partners@thisweekinstartups.com and you get it and you'll figure that out over time and you're just solving a simple problem for them. Do you want more leads? I noticed that you've appeared on these four podcasts. We could tell you 40 other podcasts that would probably want you as a guest. Would you pay for that or not? I'm just curious. And how much would you pay? Because it seems like each of these podcast appearance must be worth 10, $20,000 for you. Our service is only 12,000 a year. I think you should buy our service and get on another five podcasts.

Amazing. I love it.

So I'm quantifying the value for people and I'm putting it at what I think is realistic. You know, if you're a venture capitalist and you get on another podcast, you know, VCs probably think that's worth 5, 10, $20,000. If you are a book author, maybe you think it's worth 1, 2, 3,000 dollars. And that's what you have to learn is what's the value they put on that. A PR firm, you know, might buy one account and they might be in an all day and you see they're using six different IP addresses, you say hey listen, I know you're using six different people are using it. We see the searches. You really should be buying a five pack. How do you feel about that? Right? So the land and expanding. So just watch the abuse and you want to see abuse. Abuse means consumption and engagement. So you know, let them abuse it. Tell them in month six, you know, or month four. I noticed that like you got six different IP address using this all the time. It's obviously got multiple people using it. Can we talk about a multi seat thing? Because I see you getting so much value. All right. As we wrap your Matt, you have a question.

I was going to ask if you've seen any successful growth strategies for consumer apps.

Sure. We have fitbod is one. We have Steezy, we have com dot com. Making an app that is essential for people's lives that they get a lot of value from and they tell their friends about is the highest form of product market fit. Because then that means you're not doing the marketing other people are. And that's called Net promoter score. And so I think you hiring people for your company who have the skill set you need and are marathoners who love the product is critical. You know, Steezy, if they hire somebody who's into dance and they're good at marketing, FitBot only hires people who are into CrossFit and fitness. So when you look at their retreat, it's like this looks like a rugby team, like they're all in great shape and you know, they do a retreat every year and I think it's, you know, one of the lakes here in Austin and they have a great time and I see them all at their retreat. I'm like, wow, these people are buff. They look great. And they told me we only hire for those two types. So if you hire and you understand the marathon or mindset and the person skill set, I really encourage you to do that. So you have two full time people on this or. I'm sorry, you said three.

All three of us, yeah.

Yeah. And all three of you run or no?

Yeah, we all run. Yep.

Perfect. So when you hire your fourth, hire a marathon runner with the skill, hire a runner who understands the product and then your product market fit is going to be tighter. I've hired people to work for me who aren't passionate about startups but are great at their job and they, they become good contributors, they can be an okay or solid contributor. They rarely become extraordinary contributors. But when I hire somebody like Kelly who's passionate about startups or Jackie who's passionate about technology, startups and entrepreneurship and they have the skills, boom, you know, you get that like really great. So if you make an x, y axis, you don't want to hire people who don't have the skill. So then it's a matter of you're only hiring with the skill and with the passion for the vertical. That's my best advice to you because they're going to help you get that product market fit better. They'll understand the customers. Also virality in the product is another big unlock. So you have Net promoter Score which is they go off on their own and tell people about it when they're training for the marathon. The next piece is they add their friends who they're running with to their account and they share their training with them. And then they ask them, so do you have multiplayer mode and virality built in yet?

That's what we're working on.

That. Okay, yeah. So I mean, listen, If I add five people, like when I order from UberEats, you know, or I'm at an off site with our team and somebody doordashes something, they share the link and say, here, order doordash, put your order in yourself. Person's forced to go to the website, create an account, open an app, and then all of a sudden, we're off to the races. So that, that's like one of the big hacks is if you can have multiplayer mode. Because then everybody who you pay to sign up, like, let's say you start paying people a hundred bucks to sign up and you'll lose $50 on them. Well, if they invite two friends and one of them joins, now you made $50, right? I'm just saying, like, if it's a hundred dollars to acquire a customer and each customer is worth 150, you hire, let's say it's $150 to get a customer and you make 100 off a customer. Okay, you lost $50 getting them. They invite two friends and one comes, you made another $100. Now you're instead of net negative 50 or plus 50.

Right?

But this is very simple. You don't need to overthink it. Two things. One, people won't shut up about your product, not saying nice things about it. They are in the 910 category for net promoter score, which means they tell their friends. And then two, you have virality. Another amazing episode of this week in startups. Go to Foundry University, come to Founder Fridays Tech and meet other founders. And if you want to apply for funding from our firm and you're not quite in the Founder University place, you go to launch Co Apply. That's our common application for everything. And you will meet with one of our team members if you've got a halfway decent idea and a good team. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.