Capitalism Incubator Pitch Week - May 2022!

Here they come.

We can't hear the music, Ryan.

Oh, it's starting. Don't you worry, Stan.

I was early.

Really. Scam likely calls right when we're playing. Just forget that never happened.

Forget that.

Just. We're doing it over. We're doing it over. Pitch week hasn't started yet. Now it's starting. Take two.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs of all ages, you have stepped into the ring. You have stepped into the gauntlet that we call the capitalism.com pitch week.

Ladies and gentlemen, these young entrepreneurs have been hard at work for the last three months. Casting visions.

Pitching investors, preparing their pitches, only to be torn apart by your terrifying panel of judges.

Simon Cowell's got nothing on this bunch. Ladies and gentlemen, let's meet your tormentors for this pitch week.

In the blue corner.

They call him the man that gets massive exits. The exits are so massive that they put mass in his name. You'd think that wood mass was a throwback to something else that's massive, but.

No.

It'S how big your exit would be if you worked with him. He sees more deal flow than anyone. It's Corin Woodmass.

Hey, Ryan. Hey, everyone.

He's the controller of the purse at the capitalism incubator that he's a controller of the purse at the capitalism fund.

The manliest man in Oklahoma with boots so shiny and so leathery.

They make cows all over Oklahoma go moo.

Ladies and gentlemen, he's the man you need to get through if you want funding from the fund. It's Samuel Prentice.

Thank you, Ryan.

I like it.

Ladies and gentlemen.

He'S the only man arrogant enough to introduce himself in the third person.

He's the only man arrogant enough to start an entire product around things he did.

The man with the manliest beard on the panel.

The man currently speaking to you in the fourth person, it's Ryan Daniel Moran.

Ladies and gentlemen. He's the next eight figure exit. He's a man with the story everybody aspires to be. He came in here with $3,000 and now he's about to have $3 billion.

The head coach of the incubator, it's Jason Franciosa.

He's our favorite case study. The man we brag about all over the place.

The man who got hit by a train and then said, that won't stop me from becoming a millionaire.

He packed up his own units by hand in the frigid ice cold en route to a multi million dollar exit. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Jared Springer.

Thanks, Ryan.

And now your host, the man who will literally eat your face if you ignore his advice.

The president of capitalism.com.

Newly married.

Former Mormon.

Minister, master of ceremonies.

He has the hottest dance moves at the entire wedding. It's Stanway.

I'll work on that one, Stan. Next time it'll be better. My next intro for you will be better, I promise.

Oh, so good. I love that, Ryan.

Thank you. My speech at your wedding was better than my intro for you at pitch week. I'm embarrassed about that. I'll work on it.

We'll livestream that next time.

All right, next. The next time you get married. Let's hope that's not a thing.

No, that cannot be a thing.

All right, guys, welcome, welcome, welcome. You beautiful capitalists from all over the world. We are blessed and honored to have your presence here for pitch week. We have assembled as Ryan has introduced the most handsome group of bearded white men possible on the panel today.

We really try. You know, we really try. You can tell our efforts by this handsome group of bearded white men.

This is my public outcry. If you know a successful woman entrepreneur who would love to be on our pitch panel, this is a public invitation to recommend them directly to us for next time because we would love anyone but bearded white men here.

Now.

That being said, guys, welcome. As someone who works deeply with our incubator students, this is an exciting time. For those of you who are here who are incubator students like this, this could be you next time. I told everyone who's going to present today that today is going to change lives. And it's not just going to change their lives. It's going to change their businesses lives. But more importantly, it's going to change the lives of everyone who ever consumes their products. It's so powerful. The stories that are going to be told today with these pitch decks, I will be on mute because as Ryan saw at my wedding last week, I will weep at anything. I will mute myself during these pitches because these are powerful businesses that are going to present to us. But those of us, those of you who are here watching within the incubator, please just understand, you're. You're just a few weeks away from a perfect pitch deck and the ability to pitch to investors and to be able to go and find the strategic advisors, the investors, the partners, whatever you need to build the business of your dreams. So that being said, everyone else who's watching, we're thankful and honored that you're here to watch our incubator Pitch week, our shark tank, as we call it. And Ryan, are we ready to get going?

We're ready. Who is our first terrified presenter today?

All right.

He is anything but terrified. Our first presenter today is not just a brilliant man, but a brilliant business owner. Someone who has multiple exits under his belt already. I would like to introduce and give the floor to Shane Cope here.

Shane.

Stan. It says. It says, host disabled participant screen sharing.

It's no good.

Our livestream has taken away the button.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Now try it. Now try it.

There we go.

Yeah. Let's go, Shane.

All right.

Give them hell.

All right. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, Dan. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Shane Cope and I am a practicing dentist turned entrepreneur. Before I get into the reason why I'm here today, I want to first tell you a quick story on how I got here. Your throat begins to hurt. The your tongue becomes dry and you find it hard to chew, swallow, or even talk. Food begins to taste different and your breath smells bad. Like millions of other people, you suffer from dry mouth and it is ruining your quality of life. We have all experienced dry mouth from time to time. You wake up with your tongue glued to the roof of your mouth, or you try to swallow and it feels like sandpaper sliding down your throat. But I want to tell you about a patient of mine who dealt with this affliction for years.

I was still in dental school the first time I saw CeCe as a patient. This was back in 2004. She came into the office already wearing dentures, and she had suffered from severe dry mouth for longer than she could remember. As her only remedy for the painful dry mouth, she was always sucking on mint or candies to generate saliva. She had come into the office that first time for the sores on the corners of her mouth, which we treated her for that day. Over the next six years, cece had several recurring yeast infections which made it difficult for her to eat. Her dry mouth got progressively worse until I saw her again in 2014. I noticed on that visit, Cece had lost a significant amount of weight.

Everything she ate burned her mouth and she had a hard time swallowing when she could even bear the pain to eat. She was constantly dealing with yeast infections in her mouth by that point, so we tried every treatment available to help her. Those treatments showed little effect.

December 15, 2015, is the date that I vividly remember telling myself, there has got to be a better way to help people with dry mouth. That's the day that Cece, my mother, passed away.

She was 68.

She passed as a shell of her former self. Over that last year, she grew exhausted. Exhausted of not being able to eat or talk. Exhausted of the ER visits and feeding tubes. Exhausted of not being able to live a normal life. That day will be forever etched into my memory as the day that I promised myself to find a better solution. And that's the reason we are here today. I promised myself that if a better treatment wasn't available, I was going to do something about it. But this is about more than my mom. Much more.

This is about the estimated 109 million people who suffer from the same condition. Some experience mild discomfort, while others struggle with significant medical issues due to dry mouth. Beyond the challenges of tasting, swallowing or talking, it can also increase the chances of dental decay, demineralization of teeth and oral infections. Roughly 2 in 10 people deal with dry mouth, which is a lot. But 5 in 10 people over the age of 50 suffer from it. And that's statistically crazy. Why is this such an issue for people over 50? Thousands and thousands and thousands of the most commonly prescribed and over the counter medications within the US have a common side effect of dry mouth. As people over the age of 50 tend to be on more medications than those under 50, this leads to a profound set of overlapping side effects that often end in the chronic painful dry mouth. If that many people suffer from this, surely there has to be a lot of good solutions, right?

There are a few currently on the market, but not any good ones. These products contain a lot of chemicals that are difficult even for me to pronounce and I'm a practicing dentist. They often taste bad and in many cases they are simply inconvenient to use. In fact, it's so bad that candy, yes, candy is the number one recommended product by dental professionals for dry mouth dentists. Recommending candy is that how far we've come?

That's why our team has developed an all natural oral spray made from a proprietary combination of essential oils, coconut oils and aloe. It's simple, all natural, tastes good, easy to use. It's exactly what the market needs. It's what our potential customers have been asking for. It's the product that they will look forward to using. Not only to ease their dry mouth, but also because it tastes great and they know exactly what's in it. Unlike this stuff, this is the ingredient list from the largest player in the market. Now, I like to think I'm a fairly smart guy. I've spent a lot of years in school, but I have no earthly idea what Most of this stuff really is. Heck, I had trouble just spelling them. Yet this is what they expect us to put into our bodies, into our mouths. This alone tells you the market is ripe for change.

First, let's take a moment to dive into this opportunity that currently exists in this market. Number one, there's a lack of competition in the marketplace. This space is wide open. Second, customers desire natural products. People are a lot more aware now than in years past of what of what they put into their bodies. And third, people not only know a lot more about essential oils today, but they also accept them as viable alternatives. This market has boomed over the last few years, so let's talk about that market for a minute. It's already big. The dry mouth market is over $900 million. It's also projected to grow another 88% in the next 10 years. 88%.

In terms of how the market breaks down, the United States represents about a third of all dry mouth sales. This provides an opportunity to grow our sales here at home and then either partner with an international firm or take our sales to the rest of the planet ourselves.

Now, there are a few reasons why demand for oral sprays is increasing. Lowering prices, ease of use, the big medication problem we've already talked about. In fact, oral sprays are expected to hold 32% of the market in 2022, with artificial sprays forecasted to grow at 13%. Compounded annual growth into 2026.

After conducting exhaustive market research through hundreds of surveys, discussions with thousands of patients, and consulting with other health care providers, it's clearly evident that people are ready for a change. People simply want a product that is all natural, tastes good and easy to use, and to the surprise of no. 1, taste was the number one characteristic that people focused on. If it doesn't taste good, you will never use it. If it tastes like chemicals, you will throw it in the trash. Then tell your family and friends what you just did. We are going to enter the market with a retail price of 1999. Working with our manufacturer, Tropical Labs out of Tampa, Florida. This will give us a gross margin of around 65%. We are expecting to hit $1 million in sales by year one, 3 million by year two, and 10 million plus by year five. How do we plan to do this? Through developing products that can be marketed to the same customer base. Essential sprays has a long Runway with plenty of other products that the market is demanding. Better solutions for the purpose of an entrepreneur is to fill unmet demand within the marketplace. Being a practice, practicing dentist has given me a firsthand look into the needs that aren't being met with in this space. The desire to fix issues for patients like my mother has brought me here today as an entrepreneur, practicing dentist and son. Granted, the initial big idea for essential sprays was influenced by my mother, so in other words, this was personal to me. But once we began exploring this space, we realized there are a lot of opportunities for a team with our experience and positioning to help others in a variety of similar ways. And we've already started we're currently running a number of email campaigns to generate both awareness and sales. With the help of a marketing agency. Our plan is to officially launch our spray in August early next year. We plan on introducing those daily refresh and whitening sprays and by this time next year we will launch products four through six into the marketplace. Although each one will serve a different purpose, they all share one common trait. Each one will be an all natural solution to issues affecting millions of people.

Our team also has the experience to know that even the best products in the world don't sell themselves. That's why we have already engaged with several subject matter experts, people who know more than we do in many regards. We have already engaged an advertising firm to extend our reach, influencers to leverage their audiences and a natural product development path and we are already finding success spreading the word about our brand. Honestly, word of mouth is doing a great job of that already as people who suffer from chronic dry mouth are ecstatic that there is finally a product out there that not only solves their problem, but is all natural. It tastes great and it's easy to use.

This has helped us grow our email list over 4000 members which I mentioned earlier. Be Interactive Marketing Agency will leverage the various social media platforms to drive awareness and conversions for our products. They specialize in E commerce which makes them a perfect fit as we grow essential sprays. Be Interactive has worked with startups on a shoestring budget and eight figure brands trying to make it to nine figures. They not only help clients directly, but are also the agency that other marketing firms turn to when they have client problems that seem possible. They spend tens of thousands of dollars annually on internal education programs to stay on the cutting edge of marketing and they will help us grow our customer base both online and off. We are building various Facebook groups to both provide support for our current customers as well as to build further awareness of our brand to attract new customers. Our products will be available in select retail stores and through our partner programs with other healthcare providers. Our VP of sales and merchandising has a proven success record in growing retail operations by orders of magnitude, which we plan to do with essential sprays as well. And that success has proven to be something other companies notice. Take GlaxoSmithKline and a company called Lackweed out of California. Lackweed made a product named Biotene, a somewhat effective but chemically filled dry mouth treatment. Biotin brought in about $50 million in revenue back in 2007, with 65% of sales coming from inside the U.S. in 2009, GlaxoSmithKline purchased Biotin for $170 million. And yet there is nothing natural or good tasting about this product.

There's an old adage that says you don't invest in products as much as you invest in people. I firmly believe that, which is why I'd like to take a moment to tell you why our team will make your investment a smart one. As a practicing dentist with specialty degrees in periodontics, orofacial pain and oral medicine, I have firsthand experience with patients and their issues that no focus group can provide. I know their pain, I see what they have to cope with, and I empathize. Aside from that, I've built a successful dental practice that brings in over $3 million in annual revenue. So I understand how to build and manage teams on top of understanding how to run a successful venture outside of my dental practice, I have built two other success I've had two other successful exits for my businesses. I was able to grow revenues in those endeavors by 15% year over year, generating over $5 million in revenue and cutting vendor expenses by 10%. I have the proven ability to run successful, profitable and complex projects in three different industries, all while being able to efficiently serve two times the industry average client base by optimizing workflows. Our COO, Jeffrey McClintock has experience managing people and operations as well. He ran a successful international nonprofit for seven years. After that, he launched a digital marketing firm for contractors that was responsible for bringing in $1 million in additional revenue for their clients in just one year.

When dealing with a product based company, we know that retail will be key. Jeff McClintock is our VP of Sales and Merchandising and he was responsible for helping grow the company HHGRigg from three to 276 stores, $1.2 billion of their sales. A full 50% of their revenue was brought in by Jeff. Our executive team knows how to build a successful business and grow that business as well as build and manage the teams that are backbone of any profitable venture. We are asking you to join us in doing it again with central sprays. To be a part of this opportunity, we are seeking a $250,000 investment. In return, we are willing to offer a 10% equity stake in our company. We have plans to grow our portfolio through product development. If you prefer to hold on to your equity stake, you may enjoy staying on with us as we grow. If you are the type who deserves an exit as soon as possible. Our growth projections and products make us a prime acquisition target for other large firms, which happens often in this space. As we have shown with GlaxoSmithKline's purchase of Bioteam. It is our belief that there will be ample opportunities for our firm in the future. We would love for you to join us in this endeavor to enjoy those opportunities and reap the benefits while also helping people whose needs are not being met at the moment. We thank you for your time today and we will now open up the floor to any questions that you may have.

Thanks.

Thank you, Shane. Everyone, give Shane your love there in the chat. You're getting the hashtag claps from everyone. Shane, if you could go ahead and stop sharing your screen please.

Absolutely.

Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Sure.

Ryan, what questions might you have for Shane?

Well, Shane, one of the things that came to mind for me was how you plan to go to market. You have the email list and you have experience in the space, but I didn't see a really clear go to market strategy that made it clear how you were going to get to the first million. That's my first question.

Sure. So we have, as I said in the presentation where we have signed on with Be Interactive who is going to manage all of the social media, all of the online funnels, sales pages. We are interacting with influencers. We've been signed up a couple influencers who are going to help promote our products.

We're starting pre launch in June and then just continue to build that base. I'm doing kind of like community and some of the Facebook groups. I'm doing kind of town hall meetings just developing our product. One of them has over 12,000 members of that group. So just all the different areas we're using to push that forward.

Do you have influencers already on board?

Still in discussions, but we're pretty sure we have at least two.

Okay. Do you have a way that you know that you are going to take the first 500 sales? Like do you have a direct path that you're like we're going to do this in order to get sales on day one and build the snowball from there.

Yes. We're using the email marketing list we are using and then we're going to do a lot of online advertisements, social media advertisements.

Cool. I have a couple thoughts I should have piggyback on that if that's okay. So just some of the thoughts that I had going through yours. 1. Great job on your pitch, by the way. Shane really, really liked some of the thoroughness that you demonstrated there. There were a couple things I would have liked to see you pause on.

A little bit more.

There's actually one slide that was really good where you talked about the market timing of clean ingredients, talked about the expansion of essential oil consumption, having that market shift, talked about a little bit because I think in the last decade that business really taken. In the last five years, it's really taken off. Hitting that just a little bit more would have been helpful for me as investor kind of see that piece, the price point comparison of what's currently in the market, comparing that to what our current price point is. I think that hitting on that a little bit to show how much of a discrepancy is there. Of course people are willing to pay for premium, but knowing what that difference would be would be nice to know. But then I did have one thing on the audience piece there that Ryan was mentioning is talking about the audience was great. I like that you brought that up. That's one of the assets of the company. But then maybe given a little bit of detail of like how they were obtained and anything that you can do to speak to why the audience is, I've written like brand loyal, product loyal, etc. So we know kind of like what that asset actually looks like. Because when it comes to launch plan, like knowing how responsive that audience is or isn't how they were obtained, what that relationship looks like is really, really key. And you might want to speak to that in a second. You can. The last input I had was in your use of funds. I didn't show any budget for the initial run of inventory. Has that already been purchased or those kind of things? That was the only question I had left on my side.

Yeah, we've purchased a little inventory just to give out for, you know, as we're develop, developing the product. I believe on that last slide that.

I had there, it had how I.

Was breaking down that the sale or the use of the money. And one of them was Pratt product acquisition.

Cool. And then the audience piece you want to speak to just real Quickly of how.

Absolutely. So.

Yeah.

Yep. So we, we've been running, we've, we've started this a while back and we've been running like we have a webpage set up, we have some Facebook groups set up and I can tell you that audience loyalty, these people are hurting. People with dry mouth.

Are tired of having dry mouth and not having a good solution. So these are some of the most interactive patients or customers you will ever see in any other industry. They are dying for a solution.

Yep. I love it. Yeah. We've actually done a similar deal with another brand that when you're able to solve that pain point, it can be very, very attractive. So very well done on your pitch. Lots of good stuff I saw there.

Thank you.

Hey, Shane, just to jump in here, mate, echoing everyone else, said, I liked your presentation. The fact that you added the personal story is always a great touch and it takes you back when it's a real story. So it's clear that there's a reason you're doing this. And also the market is massive. Even though I've personally never heard of this market, I've seen it peripherally, but I wouldn't have guessed it was that big. My biggest question is, since you're a dentist, why not use the John Paul Mitchell systems model? What they did, if you're not familiar, is they focused on going into hair care, but they went through professional salons and leveraged the haircare professionals who are touching their hair advising the client. You could do exactly that with dentists. Is that part of the roadmap at all? That seems obvious.

Yeah, yeah, that was included in that slide where we're going to have partner programs with other healthcare providers, chiropractors, acupuncturists, dentists, hospitals, even potentially dental supply companies. So all of those things are definitely things that we've already explored and are in the process. We already have some offices actually that are ready for product.

Oh, great. Yeah, it might be worth considering as you're looking at deploying the capital to focus on one of those areas first, like Ryan mentioned, to get those first 500 sales, first thousand, first 10,000. If you narrow down your approach, you're not wasting marketing dollars outside of where, you know, could be a really big lift straight away.

And we, and I didn't mention, I didn't put that together with Ryan's question, but yeah, we already have at least one office I know that's already kind of pre purchased 100 units, so it's definitely outdoing that stuff. So thank you for the comments. It's wonderful.

Perfect. And the last thing, and then I'll let everyone else jump in, is it'd be helpful to know in a pitch like this how much money you've already invested, just to kind of give context to that 250,000 that you're asking for. You don't need to share that here, but that's what I'd like to see if I was looking to invest here.

Okay.

I had two quick questions. One, do you have any intellectual property or any sort of.

Or I guess.

Moat around the product itself where someone can't just copy it?

I do not.

Or is there any sort of FDA approval that's needed for this or some sort of barrier to entry for competition?

There is not. We're working with a manufacturer who has FDA approval for the manufacturing of these types of products. So that's where kind of the compliance comes in, not in the sales themselves.

Okay.

Or the product itself.

When Glaxo Klein bought the other product there, was that a. Did they have some sort of patent on it or some sort of approvals for its use or certification?

I'm not exactly sure. But as far from what I've understand in the lawyer, like the research my lawyers have done, there's no, like, there's nothing required because it's not like a supplement. So you don't. It's not. It doesn't follow kind of the same standards that maybe supplements would have.

Okay.

And then do you have. Is there any supporting data or evidence as to the effectiveness of these natural ingredients for dry mouth? And is this just treating the symptom versus treating the cause or. I guess, do you have any evidence supporting how effective the product actually is.

With people that we have already given the product to? Yes, unfortunately, there is no. There's two prescription medications for dry mouth, but there's a lot of other side effects for those, so a lot of people don't use them. So other than that, there's really not a lot of other solutions out there. Effective solutions.

Yeah, I'd love to see those things addressed because, I mean, my first instinct when you're looking at the valuation of the company down the road is, okay, well, a huge corporation might be interested in buying this, but why can't they just make their own if there's really not much complexity to it?

And then what does your competition look like if this does take off? You know, do you have a bunch of copycats that are just undercutting your price?

Sure.

Yeah.

Great presentation.

Thank you.

For future. For future Reference. The way you answer that question is the intellectual property is my many years of experience working with people who have this problem. And I have lots and lots of feedback from people who have tried this product and love it and were first to market, and we plan to beat everyone else to market to take advantage of this. That's how you answer that. The strength of your presentation and the strength of your. Of your offering is your experience and the team that you've assembled. And you glanced over that way too quickly in your presentation. You focused more on the product, which is going to make it easy for someone like Jason to say, well, what if somebody copies it and you're going to swing and miss. If you're answering from a product perspective, that was not the strength of your presentation. It's not the strength of this offering. The strength is in you and the team that you've assembled and the audience that is starting to form that needs more attention from you. And when you answer questions from that, I'd encourage you to answer from that place rather than just talking about the effectiveness of the product. This can be copied, but you and the team cannot be copied.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Jared, I'm curious to hear from you because Shane has an approach where he's obviously got some influencers, some partnerships in place, but you were a paid, paid media guy with your brand before your exit. What kind of questions might you have for Shane as he.

First of all, Shane, awesome presentation. Everybody else kind of asked 90% of my questions. My biggest question would be kind of like, along with what Ryan said, like, what is your path? You didn't really say what you're going to do Amazon or you're going to do Shopify or your own website. Like how? Like, the only thing I'd like to see is, like, how. What path you got? You have tons of people lined up. You have a marketing agency, but, like, what approach are they going to take to set you apart as a unique item in this place?

Sure.

So we have our own hosted website. We're going to connect that to a Shopify store. We already have it connected to a Shopify store. So we're not wanting to do Amazon right at the beginning. That's something that we'll look into in the future. But right now, all of our sales will be driven through Shopify.

Awesome.

I guess me, because I have a big, like Stan says, marketing background. The biggest thing I like to see is because anyone can say I'm gonna hire an agency and they're gonna run Facebook ads for me, but that doesn't tell me how you're going to sell it. Because anybody can throw up an ad on Facebook. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be successful. You have to kind of have like, you know, a unique selling proposition or something. So that's where I would be. Like, you need to have some sort of, you know, finite plan of how you're going to sell it. Not just I have an agency because that to me just means I have somebody who could possibly sell it. But it doesn't have, like any firm, you know, graspings.

Okay.

But otherwise, awesome job, Shane. And I really love the story your mom. I was like almost tearing up, so I was like, I'm turning off my mic.

Thanks.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Shane, for presenting. We honor your time. We are excited to hear from our next presenter today who is Ines Al Qadi. He is obviously one of our incubator students and he is actually coming to us from Jordan today. So, Anes, the floor is yours. Please share your pitch with us.

Go get him, Anes.

Awesome. Hey guys, can you see my screen?

Yes.

Awesome.

So it was dinner time. I went to the college cafeteria and I got my dinner. I sat on the table with a few classmates. I asked the question, is this bacon bites or red potato skin on the mashed potato? But I did not get an answer. The reason I asked because I'm Muslim and I practicing Muslim, so I have a dietary restriction. I don't eat pork or any pork byproduct. I did not get an answer, but instead I got weird looks that made me feel uncomfortable and honestly made me feel a little bit stupid even asking the question.

That's the time when I realized when someone is scared to ask why what's in their food, then there is something wrong in the world that has to be changed.

However, the struggle did not stop there.

When my wife decided to convert to Islam. We promised ourselves that we can adapt and we will live by our faith and we adhere to the dietary restriction of the halal food. But that was not easy. When we added the layers of being parents, pregnant, pregnancy and being parents, things just got complicated and it was exhausting.

Our shopping experience was not fun at all. We walk into the to the grocery store, we pick up something from the aisle, we turn it, we look at the the label, we look at the ingredients in one hand and in the other hand we have our phone and we are researching every single ingredient just to know if this is something we can consume. And this is not only our problem, this is the problem of many Muslims lives in America that brings two emotions right away, the fear and the belonging. Muslims are in general are afraid of being discriminated against. So they don't ask what's in their food. And the other one is the belonging because they are scared to ask what's in their food. They started making private groups on Facebook or on Telegram or WhatsApp just to ask if this food is Halal or if this food or brand produce Halal products.

That's when we decided to create Mahalal Company. Mahalal Company is a brand built by American Muslims for American Muslims.

American Muslims who lives in the, in the United States, the community is over 10 million people. There is over 10 million consumers. They feel they are not included in the shopping experience. There's an increasing number of Muslims in America, but there are not enough companies or products serving them. The second main problem that we see, Halal requirements are not understood by major food and beverage companies and not understood by the pharmaceutical companies either.

The third main problem we see, most of the products and the brands are imported are not designed for American Muslims. The next gen, the new generation, the first and second generation of Muslims, they want to eat tacos, they want to eat hot dogs, they want to eat barbecue ribs, they want to use sauces, has no white wine in it. They don't want to only eat tikka masala and hummus.

So there is also, there is people who want to consume supplements and vitamin to enhance their life and enhance their health.

Our internal research showed that 100%, that's 100% of Muslims stated they are not included. They don't feel like they are included in the shopping experience. 82% of them, they say there is not enough Halal supplements and vitamins options in the market. Of those 70% they say they are not happy with their vitamins and supplements. And that means there are millions of American Muslims are looking for a brand that they can consume on a repeated basis.

So what the opportunity looks like. The global dietary supplements market size was estimated at $151 billion. The US market by itself, it's about $50 billion with a growth rate of 8.6. The prenatal alone is about $445 million. Muslim women on average have more children than women of the seven major religious groups.

But you might ask, why now? Muslim consumers globally drive $2 trillion of sales in food and pharmaceutical categories. That's $2 trillion only in those two top categories. There's an increased number of Muslim population and increased sense of adherence to religious Guidelines. There is also an increased demand on halal food from non Muslims. This is a trend that we are seeing in the United States and the European as halal food is seen as an ethical, a sustainable way of consuming food. And the last but not least, Halal food market is worth over $26 billion in the United States alone and projected to increase by an additional $8 billion by 2024.

So what the demand looks like on the biggest online source in the world. So people are looking for Halal prenatal vitamins with dha, folic acid and iron. So that's the specific ingredients they are looking for. But what they are finding, they are finding brands with bad taste, bad ingredients, too big, too big of a pill to swallow. On top of that they have to consume three to four different types of products just to meet their dietary daily dietary supplementation. What Muslims specifically looking for, they are seeking Halal vitamins. They are asking in those groups what type of products they can consume in Halal. That brings us to our initial product. So our initial product is Happy Baby Bomb is a pre and postnatal protein powder. What makes it unique? Our formula packs more nutrients in one serving. The protein powder and gummy vitamins combined includes, already includes in it the things that people are looking for. Folic acid, high dose of folic acid, dha, choline, calcium and iron. Also it gives our customer more control over the taste as they can have it on its own or they add it to their favorite drink.

So was the keyword research on Amazon for that specific product. For prenatal protein powder there is over 8,000 monthly sales. If you type in the Halal prenatal protein powder there is over 4,000 monthly sales. However, this is the cool opportunity. This is where we see our window of opportunity. People who actually buying Halal prenatal protein, they are finding zero. That's zero products. They are Halal certified. So what they are actually buying, they are ending up settling for something else for vegetarian or vegan. And that's where we come in. The average prices for the top selling brands anywhere from $35 to 49 to $49. But however, because our formula replaces more than three products, woman multivitamin which goes about $27, prenatal vitamins is $30. Protein shake $17. And we're not even talking about the iron and the DHA supplementation right now we are about $74 for those three products. If we add the iron and DHA supplementation we're talking about close to $100 of cost with our product. With our product starting at $47, it's a very great value to our customer.

The lines of products that we have is the Happy Baby Bump, the Protein Shake and the Happy Mama Postpartum Capsules, Happy Baby Bump Bar and Kids Multivitamin.

Our target markets are American Muslim Moms, American Muslim dads, Muslim countries with halal certificate requirements on those they are increasing by the day and other e commerce sites like Amazon US UK and Europe and OpenSook.com the last one. OpenSook.com is the biggest and the largest e commerce site in the Middle east and North Africa and was acquired by Amazon a couple years ago.

So our go to market strategy we have already partnered with eight different successful influencers specifically within the Muslim community and we are partnering with even more. They're going to send us leads to our email list, we send them to Amazon listing, we upsell them we upsell them for our subscriptions on the like the week, the monthly and two months subscription. Also we have at least two retailers they are going to carry our products on day one.

Because we are selling to the same customer all four products the same customer our LTV higher than our competitors with 105 monthly per customer and our customer service and community leaders initially for the Muslim led by Muslim mothers from different professions. Our job as a mahalal company is to educate to educate our customers about what makes vitamins and supplements halal and the importance of having vitamins and supplements during pregnancy.

Our professional team, myself the founder Anas Al Qadi strong and personal professional network in the in the Islamic community inside and outside the United States have experience on Amazon, us, UK and Australia health partners. I was I was led the DevOps team coordinator one of the big five biggest companies in the Midwest and have extensive experience in sourcing as an entrepreneur I have the passion and the dedication to solve this problem.

Our co founder Taylor Murray she's a registered healthcare professional and occupational therapist, American Muslim mother and co founder of a local Bear Together chapter, a Muslim interfaith organization. She's integrated and well connected to Muslim women communities online and offline. Taylor says I'm starting my halal company so no mother will struggle the way I'm struggling. I'm building it for my daughter.

We have Rania Del Moran and the CAT Inc. Team they have eight figure exit and advising entrepreneurs are seven and eight figure businesses. Ryan and the whole team they have an extensive experience in the supplement space as they are advising it and they have their own brand.

Also we have Youssef Abdi Daxtar Consultancy. They are key partner in the Twin Cities, Minnesota which is home to the largest Muslim Somali population in the United States. And he's a current and previous owner of successful local businesses and he had few exits. Also we have Anissa Hoyer. She's the CEO of Leonora, a successful American Muslim woman entrepreneur. She's the founder of Leonora Organic Skin and Hair and hair Care. She got a line of products on that. And she's the CEO of Leon Nara Marketplace. It's the marketplace for Muslim women.

Maybe you're wondering how to be part of this cool opportunity. So we are offering a 20% share in exchange for 200,000 in working capital at a 1 million valuation. We're also offering four seats at 2.5% for board advisory position. The capital amount will allow us to aggressively develop and release products on Amazon to achieve eight figure revenue in two years. 30% of the capital will go towards inventory. 50% of the capital will go to our customer acquisition, digital marketing and influencer marketing and 10% will go to our consultation services related to the product development.

Thank you. Thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to share the vision of my halal company and how we are changing the world and serving American Muslim. If you are interested or anyone you know in this eight figure opportunity, we love to chat with you. Thank you.

Good work, Ines.

Thank you. Ines. That was absolutely amazing. Please stop sharing your screen. Yes.

Ryan, I saw you nodding at the beginning of that presentation.

Kind of.

Tell me what, what kind of questions or feedback would you have Furnes here?

Well, I thought you did a really good job framing the opportunity at the very beginning, showing the size of the market and showing the lack of solutions. I thought you did a really good job there because your person is super clear. So that, and that's where Stan caught me nodding. It was like he obviously knows his person and the pain point. And it's easy for you. You are that person. This is that. It's just, it's a really clear entry point there. I also thought it was really interesting and wanted to hear more about the acquisition that happened in this space. So that was like a confirmation of the market size. I was hoping to hear you comment more about that, but that was a really interesting open loop and you also, I thought, did a really good job catching my interest. When you talked about how in motion you were, the fact that you have eight influencers that you are. Oh shoot, we got eight influencers that you're already working with. There we go. That was that was really interesting to me. I wanted to hear more about those relationships. Are they solidified? Have you tested some things? Who are they? How big is their audience? So you had these moments in there where you had really good insights that I wanted to hear more details about because those were the moments where there was a lot of momentum, acquisitions, clarity of person. The influencers that you're working with, I wanted more detail there because there was momentum in that direction. The one place that I would advise you to add more context or do a little differently is I had a slight cringe moment when you only showed Amazon data. I want to hear more than that. If this is going to be an Amazon brand, say it. But you didn't. You just used Amazon as one verifier. And I wanted to hear more about how big the market was overall. I think the fact that you are clear on your person makes this really easy for you to move forward. And that's why I really liked this. Good work.

Awesome.

Awesome.

So do you want me answer any of the questions about partnership or.

Tell me, tell me about the influencers.

Sure. So the influencer, the influencers, some of them, they already have their brand. They are serving the same exact customer. So we're going to partner with them to put our products in front of their customer. Like the lady with the skin care and the organic one. That's one, two very specific influencers. They work within Somali community even they are on TV channels specifically for that. So got on a meeting with them. They were really excited. They haven't heard of something like that the brand will serve on, on this level. And as soon as I'm flying back to the US next, next week, so as soon as I get there, I have a meeting with them and we're going to work on media production specifically for this product.

Got it.

Thank you, Ryan. I'm curious, Corin, what kind of questions might you have for aness here?

Yeah, this is. This is really interesting. I love it when, like Ryan said, it's so clear who you're serving and there's clearly a massive gap in the market. It just makes everything so much easier. You're talking to the right people. You have the connections like you mentioned, and there's. Everyone's searching something like this already.

Do you think?

Just a side note, do you have a launch, a product roadmap that would include baby formula? Have you looked into this at all? Because one of our team is pregnant right now and there's a massive shortage of baby formula. So if you can spin that up fairly quickly. That might be as of right now?

Well, yes, actually we got, we got suggested specifically by, by mothers to do that even before the shortage. But when we looked into it, it needs, it needs a little like a lot more capital and is a little bit more experience to enter that market. But that's one even someone here in the cap ingredient, they connect us and they say this is much needed in the marketplace. But it's not a gateway product. It's not the first product. But once we have the base is, I mean that's a home run baby formula.

Absolutely. Yeah, I like it.

Thank you Corin. Jason, what kind of feedback or questions would you have for ms?

So the big question that I have.

Is you say this is going to be eight figures in a couple years but the products that you showed on your roadmap didn't seem like it was going to get you the eight figure product. So I think you have the person nail just like Ryan said. I think you have an incredible market opportunity. I think you have a huge plethora of potential products you launch. I'm just not convinced that these are the products that can get you eight figures quickly or even ever to be.

Honest.

Based on the data that you showed. So what I guess.

How is your plan to get eight figures with the product line that you laid out and then I guess corn bringing up formula, that's an eight figure product all alone, correct?

Yes.

But why is that not in your roadmap?

Well, our roadmap is only for the first four products and basically this one is for women mothers so you can duplicate it if you're going for dads will be this, they have their own line of products. If you go for kids, they have it. We have also, I mean I don't know how much time we have but also we have specific.

How are we getting to eight figures on the timeline you projected with the products that you presented?

Good question. Yeah. The first, the first product, the protein 1, it's 104 Muslim moments but is going to be loved by more than that because it replaces three different products and the highest quality. Like even our manufacturer was surprised with the premium formula that we have.

So.

Okay, just be honest, it doesn't fully make me confident.

It's a little bit of hope and pray. There's a little bit of hope and pray to that.

Right.

Where whereas if, if you, if you're going to say that there's an eight figure opportunity, you've got to have more than hope and pray to back that up. And your presentation was lacking in the proof side of that. And that's where you could probably shore.

This up the most.

And you said that there's a $2 trillion mark opportunity for halal foods, but now you're telling me that peripheral sales outside the halal realm is what's going.

To get you to eight figures.

So to me, it's like you have a $2 trillion potential opportunity here. Stay focused on your person and who you're serving. Don't try and hope on someone else coming into the mix.

Right? Yeah. I think is that probably our global market? That's why it is when going globally, especially in the Middle East, Malaysia, this one, I did not include that in the presentation. But our global market is what going to get us to the eight figure, which actually.

Potential dollars. What is the most popular product in those 2 trillion? And can you go after it right.

Away and win in it?

Because that's going to be a much faster path to success. If you already have a huge market demand for the product that you're launching and the problem you're solving is serving Muslims in the halal field, it's going to be a lot faster to get eight figures and trying to do it with these short wins. It's like what Ryan always talks about where he's like, okay, well you want to get the eight figures, why are you going to try and get to a hundred thousand dollars a year with one this product and then another a hundred thousand? You need 50 products. Why not go after the product that's going to get you eight figures right away?

Okay, gotcha. Awesome.

Thank you for that feedback, guys. Sam, I'm curious to hear from you because you're the guy who handles the purse strings at the capitalism fund. When you hear Ines pitching here, what are the high points and what are the low points that you're thinking of as an investor?

Perfect. It's like you're reading my notes on my screen. I'm not sure my screen am I, because my notes are under high points. And so first off, great presentation.

The thing I would have, honestly, this is maybe a personal tweak, but I think your high point that I heard, we're just basically demonstrating that halal vitamins, supplements, those kind of things are a requirement, not a choice. So like, that doesn't take a ton of explanations. I think spending a little time focusing on the market, like what specific products are there, There could have been some time with that initial focus, time of almost trying to prove that up was spent, could have been devoted to other things. That would have gained more traction. But all in all, that was a good thing to bring up. I like that there's shortage of quality options and then like basically insinuating or saying that a premium price would be supported. I think Jason touched on that as just showing what that premium pricing support looks like and where that's demonstrated in the market gives me more confidence that the premium pricing would be supported. There is a demand, those kind of things.

The launch strategy, I like that we talked about the influencers. It would have been nice, though, to have some talk as to the audiences, their reach, their engagement, that kind of stuff. Just anytime we can prove up the strategies in place, that's what investors are always looking for. Where can we take our likelihood of success and increase that percentage? And so every time we take a very, like right now, there's 50 variables and every time you can go in your pitch and your business and anybody can go in and take one variable and do some sort of testing to eliminate that variable or give us a better read on what that variable outcome will be in the future, that's going to be really, really valuable. So that would be the only thing I'd say, is if you can take some of the variables and turn them into at least where you have an indication of which direction those variables will follow, that keeps me from throwing 50 dice out and I can be throwing out 10 and that's a lot more fun as an investor.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Cool.

Thank you. Thank you.

Well done. Well done.

All right, thank you, team, and amazing job. Ines, I think you can tell how the entire team here is very excited because you're so clear on your person. So with that being said, guys, we are going to move and transition to our final presenter today. Some people know her as an amazing woman who teaches other women online, but we know her as a member of our incubator family here. Team, could we please make sure Ruth has the ability to share her screen? And Ruth, the floor is yours to present to our panel today.

Get them, Ruth.

Thank you.

Fact, busy women are tired of being hungry all the time. They are tired of having to choose between enjoying life, loving their body. They're exhausted by the thought of trying yet one more diet that not only makes them miserable, but doesn't actually work. They need a better way.

My name is Ruth Zuckup and my company is Thinlicious, your next investment into what will be a billion dollar brand. And it's based on the idea that getting healthy should taste and feel good.

So here's the big idea. Thinlicious combines delicious food products with a simple, flexible system for losing weight, specifically designed for busy, high achieving women over 40 who can't afford to go through life being hungry all the time. And I understand this woman because I am this woman. Since first starting my company, Ruth zookup Omnimedia, I've launched several successful brands, including Living While Spending Less, Elite Blog Academy, and Do it scared. Together, all three brands have amassed more than 1 million subscribers and over 250,000 customers while generating more than 25 million in sales. I'm also the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, the creator of the Living well Planner. I've been featured everywhere from the Today show and Good Morning America to magazines like Martin, Martha Stewart, Living, Woman's Day, and Time, just to name a few. And my recent TED Talk has more than 200,000 views so far, a distinction earned by less than 1% of all TED speakers. But I'm also a wife and a mom of two amazing teenage girls. And my reality, like so many other busy women over 40, is that between all the demands of a high pressure job in an active family, my own health and wellness often takes a backseat. That is why our target audience for Thinlicious is women just like me and so many of my friends. Busy women who tend to live life on the go while we try to ignore the fact that our weight keeps creeping up. We are pretty good at hiding it with the right clothes and lots of Spanx, but the truth is that we think about it almost all the time. It feels like the one area of our life that we just can't seem to get a handle on. We have tried so many different diets over the years, but nothing seems to stick. It's a battle that almost every woman is fighting, even if they'll never actually say it out loud. In fact, a recent survey from Good housekeeping found that 87% of women, nearly nine out of 10, have tried dieting for the purpose of losing weight or changing their body shape. Three out of four women, 74%, admit to consistently judging the food that they eat and losing, labeling their eating behaviors as either good or bad. 60% of women, three out of five, say that the way they feel about themselves is largely influenced by their weight, shape or size. And most shockingly, 17% of women, nearly one in five, would literally trade years of their life in exchange for their ideal body if they could. Basically, as women, we are almost all thinking about our weight almost all the time. It literally impacts nearly every single thing that we do.

For me, the turning point happened when I saw this picture someone had taken of me on the 4th of July. It was the heaviest I have ever been. And honestly, when I saw this picture, I didn't even recognize myself. This was the moment I realized something had to give. But after trying and failing to lose weight so many times before, I also knew that I'd have to figure out a solution that would actually work for my busy life. I started diving into the research and I discovered that most diets fail because they rely on willpower, not metabolic science. They're too complicated, way too rigid, and ultimately based on a flawed assumption that we gain weight just because we eat too much and exercise too little. But there is actually a whole lot more to it than that, especially for women over 40. And that is exactly how Thinlicious was born. Armed with the whole new understanding of how our metabolism actually works, I developed a whole new way of eating. Within six months, I lost 40 pounds and completely transformed my body with zero deprivation. I was never hungry. I ate out all the time. I continued to socialize every weekend and my teenage girls never saw me dieting. At Thinlicious, we believe to the depths of our soul that getting healthy should taste and feel good. And that is why we aim to be the best in the world at helping busy women lose weight and keep it off. Thinlicious works because we are different. We understand the emotional toll that weight gain causes and the frustration that comes from trying so many different diets and always failing because they're simply too hard to maintain. We are committed to helping our customers love and enjoy their life rather than waste time and energy feeling deprived or hungry. Our incredible line of food products, starting with our Meal Replacement Shake followed by our magic protein bar and then our Keto Snack Bites, will be both delicious and satiating, providing easy, convenient and satisfying meal and snack options even while on the go. Our goal is to make them so good it would be hard to even consider them diet food. Of course, given that they'll be packed with wholesome ingredients, zero sugar and plenty of healthy fats and protein, there's actually no need to try to hide them from the kids. From there, we will be releasing a whole line of low carb food products including baking mixes, sweetener, nut butters and more. And while our food products make eating the Thinlicious way easy and convenient, it's our education products that will help our customers easily understand our system and adapt it to their lifestyle. Our 28 day metabolism reset provides a basic overview along with fast results. While our full TAS program will go more in depth by the end of year two. We also plan to launch a bestselling book along with a certification program to develop our own tribe of leaders within the thinlicious community. We then plan for our line of products to expand to include keto friendly cocktails and drink mixes, supplements tailored to the specific nutritional needs of women over 40, and a number of helpful and essential weight loss tools including a custom built app to help our customers easily use our system on the go.

So what's the market? Well, obviously the weight loss market is a gigantic industry. In 2020 the global weight management market was valued at 439 billion while the US weight loss industry reached 78 billion. On top of that, the global ketogenic market was 9.6 billion and has a projected annual growth of 5.5% per year through 2027. But we are especially excited at the opportunity to focus specifically on women across several segments of this huge and growing market because 56% of women have tried to lose weight in just the past year alone. Which is why we would like to get moving as quickly as possible. Our first year plan is split into four distinct phases. Our first three months, which we call our buildup phase and which we are currently in, has been focused on setting up the business, gathering the right people, working with our manufacturer to develop our first few food products, and creating and executing our early marketing strategy. Our wildly important goal for this early phase is to grow our community to 10,000 hyper engaged early adopters who are just excited to be part of the ride as we wait for our first products to go into production. Phase two will be primarily focused on marketing, growing our list, educating our audience, and building an engaged and responsive community of superfans. By the end of this period, we will be ready to begin taking pre orders of our first food product. Phase three will be primarily focused on releasing our first three food products to our audience in quick succession and then ramping up sales of each product to 50 plus per day as quickly as possible while still continuing to grow and nurture our audience. In phase four, we'll switch gears slightly in order to launch the beta version of our TAS program in January 2023, after which we will work on scaling as quickly as possible. And while this may seem like an ambitious plan for a first year, it's important to know that my team and I have already done much of this many times before. In fact, together our small but mighty core team shares more than 45 years of collective experience. Experience in the e commerce and online business space. Not only that, we've already set up our other brands to operate with full time managers. We are all in and 100% ready to build Thinlicious into a billion dollar brand.

Also, because our products will be dealing with women's health and weight loss, we felt it was important to bring in additional expertise and authority. Dr. Edie Wadsworth is a physician certified life coach and natural health enthusiastic. She has agreed to serve as the Finlicious Program Health Advisor and will be a key influencer partner for our brand.

In order to gain momentum quickly. Our goal is to grow our community of superfans as fast as possible and to engage this audience of early adopters in our journey of launching this new brand. We will start by tapping into our existing audience of 1 million women. We've been teasing it for a few months already to our audience and we know that a huge, huge portion of our community is going to be super excited to come on board. Our next growth strategy will be to create and promote a beautiful, compelling lead magnet which we will promote via paid advertising with a goal of adding 250 additional subscribers a day. We'll also release a paid challenge called the 28 Day Metabolism Reset which will help to build excitement for our program and also help to provide our audience with quick wins. Our goal will be to add at least 25 to 50 new challenge participants every day. Our next strategy will be to build a thriving, vibrant and super engaged community on Facebook. This is going to be a place where we can create buzz, share weight loss triumphs and drive huge excitement for each new product release and everything that we're doing as a company.

While our existing audience and paid ads will help us to build momentum quickly, we'll also be working on our long term content strategy to help us assist establish dominance in organic search results as well as publishing delicious low carb recipes and sharing them to Pinterest. These will all be optimized for key search terms. As we're starting out, we will primarily focus our social media efforts on Instagram because that's where we know our demographic lives. Our Instagram feed will be a beautiful combination of delicious looking food, helpful tips and inspiration and inspiration while our stories and reels will help us engage on deeper level.

Finally, we will make sure that our product packaging sends new customers to a free starter guide in order to create brand loyalty even for customers who find us through sales channels. And once again, while this may seem ambitious, this is all stuff that my team does every single day and is well equipped to handle.

And of course that brings us to the ask. Well, at this time we are fully funded and not actually seeking any capital. We are interested in finding the right strategic advisor as well as one or more influencers to partner with. Specifically, we are looking for a partner advisor who has significant CPG experience in the keto or low carb space and who has ideally grown a brand to a nine figure exit. We know that our brand is positioned for tremendous growth and will do so quickly. So for the right strategic advisor we have set aside a portion of equity and we hope that you or someone listening today is the right fit to help us scale this brand. We are also interested in partnering with one or more serious influencers in the low carb space. Our ideal candidate will have a reach of at least 100,000 followers or email subscribers, as well as medical or dietary expertise. Essentially, I am looking for partners to help me serve this already amazing audience of high achieving women because ultimately they deserve nothing but the best.

To contact me about potential partnerships, please reach out via email@rsuthsoukup.com or find me on Instagram at ruthsoukup. I would be happy to answer any additional questions at this time. Thank you.

Good job Ruth.

Thank you.

Oh that was so nerve wracking.

I want to stand up and like slow clap for you Ruth. But yeah Ryan, I covet to hear your thoughts here.

I have some. So first of all Ruth, your proof was really strong. You did a really good job highlighting the market size, showing your experience, your background, your own influence. That was really, really strong. As strong as I've ever seen somebody pitch in the incubator. It was really good.

The first thing that came to mind as I was hearing your pitch was I've heard this promise before, heard the promise of dieting. Shouldn't be laborious. So how do we close that gap? How do we position what you have as brand new as as very different from every other promise. I would either make a different promise or find a different way. Find a different way to come at that promise because that's going to be something that comes up a lot is I've heard that promise before. You've got a really big vision, which I love. Your downside is you're just early, right? So we haven't done pre sales yet. So I wanted to see less specifics as you were going through because it's already so early. This plan could go out the window as soon as you launch. So you're so dynamic and well spoken. I would have preferred to see you just Stay really high level and high vision to match where you are in the process of launching the company. Because I would have fed off more of that excitement rather than you reading some of your prepared notes. I think that was the biggest thing that you could have done differently is just bring that natural excitement that is already always exuding from you instead of going into the specifics. I think you can have a billion dollar business, I think you can have a billion dollar brand here. In fact, it makes me a little bit sad that you're not raising capital because now I have to qualify as having a nine figure exit or being influencer in the health and wellness space. Neither one of which I have. I know both of those people, but now I want to get in the door somehow. And so there was some exclusion at the end where I was like, it's not cool. Like just pick evaluation and at least let me say no. So there's a little bit of that. But overall I think you.

Here's what I'll say. Make me an offer I can't refuse.

Okay, Got it, Got it. I think you have a great plan. Very good work.

Thank you, Ruth.

I would also encourage you to ask for those connections to the people Ryan's referring to.

So.

Ryan, open that Rolodex for Ruth here.

Sam, I would love to hear your thoughts on Ruth's presentation today.

You bet. Ruth, first off, very well done. I enjoyed it. It was a good presentation.

Yeah, and actually it just can piggyback on what I said to Annette is very similar stuff as anytime, like everybody knows businesses have variables and investments have variables. Otherwise if it were a sure thing, we all would be doing it. And so when you can stay in the lane of where you're at and focus on these things, that you can control variables and you can focus your pitch around those kind of things. So any variable you can eliminate and anything you can focus on that is more predictable. Like what's predictable is you, your team, your influencer, those kind of things. Like that piece of it, like the things you can focus on there is great. All the other ones where we have like five different projections that are layered on top of each other. Well, I mean, like I nerd out on those things. But there's a phrase we use in the financial industry where it says if you torture numbers long enough, they will confess to whatever you want. And so we can use that same thing with any kind of data we want to do is we can torture the data lineup. It'll say whatever we want it to say, say, which gives You a little bit of cynicism when it comes to all those things. So that being said, I fully believe in you getting eight figures. Let's be very clear. I take off my like encourager hat and put on the business hat. The business hat says go after the things you know are in your predictable range. And so same thing as if you have an audience that you started to build. If you can reference the size, how they were acquired, where they're housed, why you think there will be brand or product loyal to you, et cetera, the audience of the influencer, like who they are, where they're housed, how they were acquired, why they would be brand or product loyalty. You any kind of current sales general. There are none yet. Like if there were sales or pre sales, any kind of testing that's been done to test that would be really, really helpful. Yeah, I mean just eliminating the variables as much as you can, which if you're not trying to raise capital then that's a moot point. But for anybody looking at the opportunity, I think is going to appreciate that kind of mindset.

Gotcha. Thank you.

Very well done. Excellent work. And congrats on the health changes. Like in addition to all the image stuff. It's great from just like a lifetime health. The goal is to keep doing this life for a long time and sustaining quality of life high.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

Jared, as our in house living case study and dear friend, what were your thoughts as Ruth was presenting and going through through this pitch deck?

First of all, awesome job, Ruth. Like every time I had a question that I would write down, you'd answer it within like one or two slides and I'd be like, damn it, there goes my question that I was going to ask. So you did a really good job with that. The one thing I would say is like upplay your audience that you have because you briefly mentioned it and then you went into a bunch of other things. But that's a big thing like from an investor. If you already have that audience of, you know, million people that are your ideal customer basically sitting there, you have like this massive audience that already knows you, likes you, trusts you and you can pitch to them. So I would definitely upplay that a little bit in your, you know, just letting people know about that a little bit more of how they're such a good fit for this business. Other than that, the only thing I had is like I like the zero deprivation thing, but the health market, I think there needs to be like some sort of like really, really, really good hook and I Don't know what that is. Like, I like the zero, zero deprivation. But there's a lot of like diet stuff like Ryan has mentioned that kind of goes into that. So that would be my only.

Like I would actually disagree with that having been a woman who's been on every diet that there is. There's actually not a lot of diets that don't make you feel deprived. And that's not actually a very common thing to hear. And it's. And the way. And actually, and even in the low carb market, which I do like, the, the what I use is a version of keto. It's. There's some differences, but it's even in the low carb market, pretty much 90% of the products are targeted and geared towards men, marketed towards men and look like they're designed by men. We like, as you can see from my slides, we do things for girls and we target towards women and we make it cute. It's always cute. And it's a big deal, right, for women to feel like somebody is speaking to them. Especially for women over 40 who feel invisible. Because even if there are things out there for women, they're targeted. Have you ever tried to find stock photos for women over 40? They're not out there. Everything is targeted towards 20 year old women or no women at all. And so we had to go out and do a photo shoot just to like make these slides and just to be able to start putting our website together because we couldn't find any stock photos of 40 year old women. And that's a big deal. So I think that there is a market for this. There is. And even though the diet industry is huge and even though the women that are buying this stuff, the huge chunk of the audience is women over 40, nothing is actually targeted towards us. It's a forgotten demographic. Even though it's probably one of the most lucrative demographics out there.

Very good answer, Good answer. I'm obviously not a woman, so I don't know.

Now that you mentioned that it is easy to see and I love. Who was it Leah's comment, who is like all of us women over 40 know and my wife's over 40 and she watched me recently like cut a ton of weight and she's cut a ton of weight and has to work twice as hard at it.

So.

That is very true, Leah. My wife's like, you work out and just eat basically keto and you dropped like 40 pounds in a few months. And I'm like, yeah. And I still got more to go.

But it's easy for men.

So obviously you know, you know more about this than me and the women stuff. So very good response though, to my criticism. I really like that response. You like nailed everything down and were like, no, you were wrong, this is why.

And I love that.

Sorry, little passionate about that.

I loved seeing the true Ruth come out right there. And I am curious. I'm going to ask Corin for your feedback because as Jared was saying, I don't know, as if there's really a unique selling point for this. I saw you nodding and then I saw you sit back as Ruth responded to Jared's feedback there. So what are your thoughts here, Corin?

Yeah, so thanks. Thanks, mate. I was going to jump in if you didn't say, didn't call me out, Ruth, so love the presentation, love your energy, all of that, the presentation. Like you said, everything's very on brand. I love that. I do have quite a few questions, but I want to start with that point.

I think.

That was maybe misinterpreted what the guys were talking about here. It's yes, we are all, as mentioned at the beginning, we're all white bearded men on this, on this panel, unfortunately. But we can't change that. But what I think what I saw in the beginning of the presentation was.

No new hook in the way that the promise is different. So you touched on this. You said, hey, a lot of diets out there claim that you won't deprive yourself, that it's easy, you don't have to change anything. Like that is the diet claim. But the reality is very different, like you said. So a great book on this is Breakthrough Advertising and they use a lot of diet examples throughout the ages that you could look at how the evolution of a promise changes over time. That's not to say that you're, your market isn't underserved. Totally is. The bad news is it actually gets worse. The older women get, the more money they have, the less attention they get from advertisers, et cetera. It's crazy. Like you mentioned, the income potential just goes up and up and up but no one's talking to you. So I think on that front, 100% go for it. But maybe think about a hook that is more unique outside of just, hey, we're over 40 and we're women.

Right.

But to that end, does that make sense before I go into my other questions?

Yeah. Our tagline currently is because answering the question in the chat is because losing or because getting healthy should taste and feel good and that's really what it's about. I think the way that we plan to address that. You're right. I mean, it's not that we don't know this is a crowded industry. I do believe, believe that there's a huge opportunity for what I see as an underserved market or an ignored market within this industry. But I also know that my strength is building, building community and building buzz. Right? Like, that's what I do. I'm a marketer. I'm a bestselling author. I've already got a gigantic audience and, and a very loyal audience. And so the minute I start, I mean, we haven't even announced this to our audience yet. We plan to today because obviously this is public. So. So I'm going to be sending out an email today to talk about it for the first time. We just hinted that something was coming on an email to, in one email 3 days ago and instantly had 1500 people sign up for the waitlist. They didn't even know what they were signing up for. And they were ready, like, ready to.

Go.

Talking about this.

Why was that not in the pitch?

I just was excited.

I was saving that for the Q and A. But I, like, this is. Women are so hungry for this. I don't think even be like, pardon me for saying this, the stating the obvious, but you guys are men. You don't understand.

The deep pain for women that comes from not only getting older and feeling invisible all of a sudden, feeling like you've tried everything and you turn 40 and your metabolism doesn't work anymore and you don't understand why. And nobody's talking about that, right? Nobody's talking about the fact that it's different when you're older because your metabolism isn't working the same way that it used to be. And there's all these diets and they make all these promises, but they're not working because they don't fit lifestyle and they're too hard and too complicated. And they also aren't targeted specifically to this market.

Absolutely. No. I couldn't agree more. I think on the front end, you're going to get a lift. Definitely. With such a big audience and people already signing up, you've got that initial buzz about it. What I'm wondering, and I know you're not looking for money, but if I was looking at the longevity of this would be how do we continue to improve our messaging, our offering, our products to appeal to that audience? Because as soon as you start talking about this audience and have some success the roadmap you've laid out a million other women can do and will do as soon as you have cut through in the market. So you've always got to stay 10 steps ahead right on that messaging. But that's not the only point. That's just messaging. I wanted to.

Can I answer that question?

Yeah.

So we do have a plan for that. And that's part of partly our strength is in building audiences and building communities. So we plan to do that, but then we also plan to not only just build an amazing community, but to actually train our community to continue building that community. So we teach. And that's my background in all of our other brands is education. And so in the previous presentation, Jason was asking about intellectual property and proprietary information. Well, we have all of that with the actual program that we'll be teaching and then the program that we'll be certifying other people to teach in order to build sort of this big community tribe cult like mentality around the thinlicious brand so that we can then move into other.

Markets. So we'll start with the food products, but then we will also have, you know, the cocktail, the cocktail market and we will have hopefully be able to even partner with other other brands that work within our program in order to really create this, this I live the finlicious way. Right. Like this is, this is my brand. This is who I am. And women, because they're identifying with our cute marketing and they can, they feel like it's for them. It's something that we really plan on building a community around.

I love it. My sister, I'm Australian, if you can't tell. My sister was telling me and I, I was racking my brain. I can't remember the name of the brand. I can share it after if you like. But there's a lady in Australia who started a community very similar to this. She actually started as a MLM reseller and she built a community so large that she created her own products and she's done exactly this, but she did it in the mum market. So mothers wanting to lose weight after having kids and that's how my sister found this brand. And the audience is massive. I actually reached out to see if I could if she needed capital. But it's very clear she's raised a lot of money at this point to keep the traction that she's got. So I think you're totally onto something. A couple quick questions. I know we're gone a bit long on time. Do I still have time, Stan, to ask more Questions or should I just pause?

Go ahead, Corin. I'm not going to cut you off. You have a beautiful accent.

Okay, cool.

So with your personal story again, I'm prefacing this like Sam did with expecting you to be asking for money and you're not, but this is just how I think so. Um, I'm also thinking about potential exit value on the other side. So on both ends with your story of your personal weight loss, I didn't see how that linked to the products that may have linked to the products, but I didn't quite get that connection as far as why start with product? Why not start with the 28 day reset? Because that actually would be a shorter.

A shorter jump. Right. To get people from where they are now to your program and then figure out what they want. But there may be a reason why you're starting with shakes and bars and bites.

We are. The 28 day reset is a digital product that will be becoming out on June 1st. We are officially launching that and we'll begin selling it on June 1st. And that will be the first official product, but it will be a digital product. And then our first food product will be the meal replacement shake which will be launching in. Will be in taking pre orders hopefully in August and then we'll be ready to ship by September. Does that make more sense?

Excellent. Yeah, yeah, totally. It looked like it was the other way around. I was like, why would you start with that? But you also held a few things back from us. The size of the audience, et cetera. I would have put that way at the front, but that's fine.

I did mention the size of my audience, but you may have missed it.

Well, the 1 million women that you have access to through your other businesses, I may have missed that if that was in the beginning, but I wrote it down and then it was kind of towards the end. Yeah, that's cool. My only last question, and it can be rhetorical, or we could talk through it if you want, is who else speaks to this market in this weight loss world? There has to be people already talking to who's talking to them already. What are they saying? What are they offering? And as far as you can tell, what are their results? That would be an interesting one.

Well, I mean, what you actually already mentioned, one trim healthy mama, is a good example. But I think even something that to me is more comparable to my vision for this brand would be something like Beachbody. However, what they're offering is. And even something like Dave Asprey and Bulletproof.

Is is a similar kind of model of, of what I'm looking at, but it's definitely a, definitely a different system and like slightly different positioning. And again, I. As far as exit value of this brand, I know that we're starting out using my personal story because we would be silly not to. Right? I am, I'm the influencer. I'm the same CEO, but I'm also the influencer behind the brand and I already have a following. However, this will not ultimately be a brand that's only built around me as a personality. It's going to be built around a system that works, that is, that is proven that we are then building coaches for and we're building the whole community around. And so as the business grows and as the company grows, I will become less and less of the. Of the. Of a presence within the brand, if that makes sense. That's the plan.

Well done.

I love it. Sounds awesome. Why aren't you raising money?

I don't need it.

Why are you first? It's great to know what your brand actually is because you've been coming to college every week and I have no idea what you're doing. So this is great to actually find out what you're doing. My personal perception, your biggest competition, I guess we Weight Watchers, you know, how do you compare with Weight Watchers and to me that they speak specifically to women a lot to older women. I mean they crushed it throughout the 90s and the early 2000s. They kind of died off. But to me that's the parallel that I see more than any other brands that you mentioned. And I don't think you're like, when you started talking about your products, I was not excited. When you started talking about your community, that's when I got excited because you're offering much more than products. The products, honestly, I could care less if you even launched them because I think you'd have a huge amount of community who wants to get into this. And really any weight loss success comes down to accountability.

Right.

And that's what you're providing. So I just didn't see those two things mentioned. I think that would have been. It's much more enlightening. And then you can also look at Weight Watchers and their success. And look, this was targeted at women, maybe not specifically over 40, but they built a huge community and it was specifically around what you're doing coaching and program and everything else, right?

Yes. Yes. And having. Being a woman over 40, I have done Weight Watchers, as have pretty much every woman I know.

I had a conversation with a friend just a couple of weeks ago. We were having dinner and talking about the fact that she's done Weight Watchers and her mom had done Weight Watchers for years and would, you know, lose a few pounds and then go off of it and then go back and then go back on it. And she kept going back to Weight Watch and she's like, mom, why do you keep going back to Weight Watchers? It doesn't work. She's like, well, it's the only thing that works for me. Right. Like, it's this mentality that these diets, we keep going back to them over and over and over again. And so really what I'm. What the education piece that I feel that I'm one so, so passionate about for women is the quality of life and understanding how to, how to make the way that we eat a lifestyle something that you can embrace, that there's no deprivation. So you don't have to feel like, I'm on this thing, I'm suffering until I lose £5 or £10 or £15. No, this is just the way that we eat. And it's amazing. The food is amazing. Everything that we do within this lifestyle and when women can learn how to embrace that and almost change the mindset, it's life changing. It's certainly been life changing for me. It's life changing for the other women that I know who have experience the same thing. And so that's where. And that's where I also believe the.

Community Weight Watchers 2.0.

Essentially, it's weight Watchers, and there's some great pieces of Weight Watchers that we definitely plan to incorporate, you know, of not copying Weight Watchers, but, you know, with the point system and making it super easy. That's incredibly important. Now they use a few different tenants that are, I don't believe are in line with the metabolic science and the research that we've done. But that's okay. Like, right? Everybody has to figure out their own, own thing there. And there certainly are good pieces of, of of Weight Watchers that really do, that people are, that women really connect to. And specifically it's the ease of use, the fact that you don't have to count calories, that you just get these points. And, and that has always worked. So yeah, there's certain, there's a lot of good parallels.

I heard you mentioned all the times that there's no competition on there done this. But I mean, Weight Watchers, one of the biggest ones ever. And so I do think you have a great comparison for your business. And it sounds like keto Weight Watchers 2.0 is kind of where you're going.

So either way, Ruth.

Either. Either way, I want in. I want in, Ruth.

All right, all right, let's talk.

This is.

I just want to, like, take a second and pause. Like, how many of you, and I can only see those of you who are in the incubator on the zoom call right now, but how many of you are, like, super certain that Ruth is going to go and crush it? I'm just curious. Yeah, that's literally 100%. I'm watching the chat. I will say the first couple of people after Ruth presented, I direct messaged Ruth and I was like, don't let these men beat you up, Ruth. Come at him. And I. I've got to say, this is the honor of knowing Ruth and also Aness and Shane, they're passionate about their people.

Okay.

And. And Ruth, I'm so excited for where you're going, where Aness is going, where Shane's going to go. I personally don't sit on the panel on these days because I. I'm biased. I'm very biased. I want to invest in everyone because I get to hear literally dozens of hours about these companies before they ever pitch. But what I'll say to our panel and also to anyone else watching, these are people who are well prepared and positioned to go and do great things. And those of you who are watching here in the incubator, like, look, guys, amazing things are going to happen after today. And everyone else who's watching on YouTube, like, the chat went crazy, Ruth, when you started passionately talking about your person. And I have no doubt if earth earlier in the conversation Aness or Shane had started talking about their person, they would have gotten equally as passionate. Okay. Which is why here@capitalism.com we talk about being capitalist, but we talk about being the change. Okay. Over on the YouTube comments right now, there's a lot of love for you, Ruth, because you've talked so passionately about your person and I have no doubt that you're going to crush it and everyone else here. So that being said, I want to thank everyone who's attended today. You guys are absolutely amazing. It's humbling to be able to sit in your presence and see you build these amazing brands that influence the entire world. I hope that those of you in the incubator will press to be on our next pitch week to go in and get the investors and the funding and have Ryan Moran literally begging publicly on a live stream to push, please be a partner in your business. That is what I hope and I pray for all of you guys and anyone else who's listening or watching this replay anywhere else, Please understand the capitalism.com community is where we help take you from where you are to where you want to be in your business. And it's an opportunity to not just change your life, but once again, the lives of all the people your business will ever touch. So with that being said, thank you, guys. I'm going to let Ryan close us out and give us his final thoughts and words. Thank you, Ryan.

Team, this is why we do this. We do this to highlight you in front of investors and advisors, both privately and publicly. That's why we do this to help you cast a bigger vision that requires that you bring in outside help to help you accomplish it. We just saw a really good example of that to close us out. We're all really, really proud of you, rooting for you, and we have your back the entire way. Congratulations, everybody, and we'll see the rest of you at the next pitch week.