Spark Tank - Edition 10

Welcome to the 10th edition of Spark Tank. We have about 6 founders today that are ready to pitch us their companies. They're gonna share their screen, show us their pitch decks. They're gonna have 3 minutes to pitch, and then they're gonna get feedback from the VCs today. I'm one of the VCs, Charles Cormier, run a firm called Mac10. Mac10 invests in YC companies, about $10 million per batch. We have Sunny on the VC side. Quick intro on your end, Sunny.

Yeah, Sunny Ray Holding. I've got— I started India's first Bitcoin exchange 13 years ago. I also sold my last startup to a company called Humanoid Global, a public company here in Canada. Happy to be, yeah, on the judge side of things today.

Emiliano, quick intro about yourself. You're with us, Raz Rocket. You've seen lots of pitches, so quick intro.

Hey everyone. Yeah, quickly here, partner at RushRocket, co-founder, CEO at RAISE Vertical Farms, part of the Techstars network, launched 3 companies before, I have seen hundreds of startups pitch, so happy to chip in both as investor and founder.

Cheers.

Kevin, quick intro about yourself, what you're building?

Kevin Daly, Metic Technologies, we are building a relationship operating system, which we will tell you about when we do our pitch.

Alexis?

Hi, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Tiro AI. We are building the AI-native learning platform for every classroom.

Mark?

Yeah, hi, my name is Mark Bamford. I'm from Victors and we are transforming the value of video through behavioral data measurement.

Libby?

Hi, I'm Libby Delkmaul-Harris. I'm the CEO of Strategic Book Advisors. We help busy professionals turn their expertise into authority books in just 30 days. Books that help people trust them before the first conversation, sales call, or investor meeting.

Tom?

Hi, Tom here. I'm the CEO of Jetisaifa. We built RFIDJet. It's an inventory tracking solution for stone slab distributors. So basically, we are the eyes of this, of their inventory.

And Jeffrey, finally?

Good afternoon and evening wherever everybody is. My name is Jeffrey Fry. I'm the founder of KeepSafe Care. We're re-engineering, uh, private duty in-home care to do one thing mostly: get more money in caregivers' hands and keep the cost down.

There you go. So we're gonna start with our first pitch of the day. Uh, Kevin, just gonna bring your pitch on deck here. Uh, excellent. There you go. Can see your screen. We can hear you loud and clear. You can begin.

Let's go. Let's talk about the loneliness and disconnect epidemic. Today, human connection is harder than ever. Work and technology noise have made it harder for people to have healthy relationships. The figures on this slide tell a story of a society that is moving towards or may already be at crisis level. Most interestingly is the fact that having healthy relationships gives you a better likelihood of living longer. Being lonely clearly shortens lifespan. To fix this, we haven't just built one app, we've built an ecosystem. Moner is our couples app, Vala is our female friendship app, and Varder is our male friendship app, all designed as tools that people can use to strengthen their bonds through concept called co-regulation, where friends and partners better understand how you're feeling, both through biometrics and mood tracking. Optionally, this all ties into a clinical therapy portal that helps clinicians reduce the cognitive load of recall in therapy by 40%. Making sessions much more efficient. Moner is built and in market, and we're funded to build the entire ecosystem by winter 2026. The marketplace is huge. Oh shoot, I lost my— the marketplace is huge. Something I need to emphasize is a concept called zero-knowledge encryption. It basically means that we don't have the encryption keys for our users. We can't read or sell their data. This helps us to address the systematic distrust that users have in health/intimacy apps is a game-changing competitive advantage. We are an experienced team, a builder and a leader who has led large teams in both Silicon Valley and Toronto, and a clinical intimacy expert who has deep knowledge of relationship dynamics. This is the perfect storm of expertise that will take— make it hard to copy what Medinc has. We are seeing validation through our 200+ beta users. Since consumer acquisition is costly, we're holding our powder till we have completed testing and in the therapy portal so we can focus our marketing on B2B. As I said, we're not looking to be one of those companies who lazily pitch, if we just get 1%, we have a plan to dominate. These are all game changers: zero knowledge, biometrics and symmetrics, and we build an ecosystem, not just one app. All huge competitive advantages. We've also built a proprietary AI playbook that allows us to build features 40 times faster, staying ahead of well-funded competitors. Plus, our B2B2C strategy will drive revenue through our lower-cost pipeline than a pure consumer acquisition. So join us for this incredible journey. We don't have a set funding request as we built different business plans based on different levels of capital injection. We're also not using funding to execute. We're funded and building our vision, investment or not. More money simply means we can go faster and build bigger. We will win no matter what. Thank you.

Yeah, it's great. I love it. Very succinct. Um, I love, uh, I think this can make a lot of money, but tell me about the clinical side of things, right? Because, uh, AI companionship seems to be dicey and potentially dangerous for society in my own eyes. Like, what's the, the science behind it?

We're not AI at all. What we're doing is we're taking the the telemetry of the apps, the 3 apps, which basically measure biometrics. They measure stress, they measure— you do check-ins and we're shipping them to the actual clinician. The idea is when you sit down, there's no, what happened this week, right? It's highly motivating for users because they actually are enhancing their clinician, their clinical view. Now we don't necessarily have— it's not like we're, We don't have to connect to a clinic. In fact, you don't even know you're connected to a clinician until they connect with you. So all the clinical pieces disappear. It's just a fun app at first. So we kind of have a consumer and a B2B. So it's B2B2C.

Okay, so you target clinicians, right? It's just like, it seems B2C with names like Moaner, right?

It's like, well, we initially want, we want, we can target both, but it all depends on how much money we have. Right now the play is clinicians, and we're, we're, we're actually targeting mostly sex therapists and people that deal with intimacy. But we will move it out, we can, we can sort of pivot later, but that's the market that we know and we have access to right now.

And you're running this business with your wife, is that what I'm—

Yes, we're a husband-wife company.

Interesting. Um, why did you decide to launch that? At this time?

Um, we decided because we, we saw a need. We saw our friends' relationships disintegrate, and we see our kids struggling with relationships, and we wanted to create something with her clinical knowledge about how to have better relationships.

Okay.

Um, and we can cite everything. We have science behind all of this.

Okay.

And so you would allow Uh, it would bridge a gap between sex workers and clinics. Like, help me understand.

No, no, no, sex therapy is not sex workers. This is, uh, sex and relationship therapy. So it's, it's actually, um, not about any kind of sex workers. It's, it's— they are legitimate therapists that help people be closer. Um, the, the— not so— for solo people, it's not even about sex. For couples, it's about sex and intimacy and connection. So we are, as far as sex therapists go, that's not sex workers. They are people that are there. They're sort of like marriage counselors. We can also target marriage counselors.

Seems that targeting is like all over the place. I'm looking at the website as well. It seems like B2C, then you tell me it's B2B, right?

So again, our targeting is With limited funds, we will target B2B, but there is a B2C as well, and we, we want both, to be honest. This is like $100 million of annual recurring revenue. This is not a small company we're building, right? Right. It all depends on the money, right? If I have $10 million, I will go B2C and then B2B, but, but right now it's B2B with the money we have, right?

Um, and How will you make money with this? What will be the pricing packages for the B2B? And then with the B2C, give me the—

So B2B is based on subscription. We're targeting about $50 per user US. We do pricing in US because we are mostly focusing on that market. For couples, there's couples packages. And for clinicians, anywhere from $50 a month. The $50 is a year, by the way, for the individuals. And for clinicians, anywhere from $50 a month up to $150 depending on what feature packages they want. How many transcriptions, how much AI summarizing. It's sort of a leveled, uh, leveled product.

Got it. Um, and at the moment, isn't there like active competitors in these niches? Uh, coming back to my question, why now? Like, aren't there existing competing solutions in that space? How are they doing?

They're doing very well, and we're going after them. They, they do not have a connection to a consumer app. So, so yes, there are pieces that do this, but there are very— there's almost nothing on the market that has a consumption connection to a consumer app. So the idea is the consumer app is a consumer app. You just download it and use it. If you connect with a therapist or the therapist recommends you use it, then it becomes a therapy app because the data we're connecting is relevant to both, both things. You can do fun things with it, with your partners to understand them, or a clinician can look at it.

And right now, uh, how many users? How do you get these users?

We are right now, we're hoping to pull them through the B2B play so that the consumer users will come that way. Um, right now we've done zero marketing. We did, we did do Pride, but that was just for awareness. Um, you don't market an app at Pride. You can't talk to enough people to make it worthwhile. We got 200 downloads, but that was all we could talk to. Pretty much everyone we talked to downloaded it, which was nice. But we are, again, it depends on funding. We are going to do a very limited push into the consumer space using Apple advertising and direct app advertising. But that's a really expensive game. Our competitors are already buying space on our listings, which tells me I'm on the right track. But it's a costly game. So how we're going to market it, we are going to conferences for therapists. We are going to be doing some direct marketing to therapists. And again, our— the minute someone gives me a check for $10 million, our strategy can change.

What's the feedback you've been getting, uh, so far from therapists and users?

Uh, therapists love it, and they're like— we've got 4 or 5 that are ready to go that are like, when can we have it? We're presenting at the SHA conference in, in Denver in October. That's about 200 to 300 therapists. No, actually I think it's 700 therapists and we're getting great feedback. They need a tool like this.

Interesting. I'll leave the stage to you. I've asked a bunch of questions. Sunny, any questions for Kev?

I actually like the whole B2B to B2B to B2C model, like where you're focusing on, you know, sex therapists, especially given that that's the market that you guys know.

Right.

But, you know, clinician-led growth is usually slow. Yeah, so I'd love to hear what your sales cycle looks like so far and how long does it take to get one therapist onboarded and active.

We're not in market yet. We're not in market.

Maybe the 4 or 5 that you have, you said earlier, it's pretty quick.

We are also targeting the huge coaching market. Like, you can— we can't be judgmental. You can be a coach by taking a 3-week course and declaring yourself a coach. Right. We're HIPAA compliant. We can give access. We have the proper legal contracts to give that data. That's why we're focusing on the states. But we're targeting coaches as well. And there's a lot of coaches out there that have no tools.

Got it.

And we're making the price accessible to a coach.

The other question, Kevin, I had was I love the zero-knowledge encryption. I think that's a real trust win. But it also means that you can't see user behavior yourself, right? So how do you learn?

We can see clicks. We can see clicks. That is not zero knowledge. So we track in the app clicks. We see behaviors. We are actively surveying our beta users. Like, they want more gamification, so they're going to get more gamification to make the app more fun. It is a challenge, but it's a hill we're willing to die on because we feel that that is our superpower. We don't sell data. Uh, Flo, which is competing with us on period tracker— yeah, we have a period tracker built into it. Like, we do too many things. I will own it. We can compete on period tracking. Flo sold data and their users are pissed. They've been sued 4 times. We will die on that hill. We want to address privacy. This is intimate data. This is who you're having sex with. We support multiple partners. You can have up to 7 additional partners. So if you're having sex with all of them, do you really want that to be something leaked?

Do you want to have 7 partners?

I can tell that number. Actually, no, I can't trace the user either. So no, I can't. But if I find the user that has 7 partners, I'm sending them flowers because they're crazy.

Yeah, I know. It's just I have a concern with like I use ChatGPT pretty much for everything in my life, and I don't have like a trust issue with OpenAI or with anyone and with my private life, because even if it's leaked, you know, it's like I'm good with playing open. So I guess that's not most people. But my question is like, do people really want to put their private data on any apps, including yours? Like, shouldn't they keep that like not digital?

It's if you can share it with your partner and get better insights and a better relationship, that's the motivation. Or if you could share it with your therapist and sit down and not spend half your session talking about what happened during the week.

Right.

Emiliano, do you have any questions also?

Yes, just a quick, quick one. And back to basics, wanted to ask Kevin, like, out of the 200 users that have downloaded, like, what's the main value proposition if you have to put it in one word, both on your perspective and what they're seeing?

Better relationships. They are finding it's enhancing their relationship. They understand each other better. We— can I swear on this podcast?

Yeah, you can.

Obviously, we use a pitch, less fighting, more fucking. And it sounds very crude, but it's— we've tried intimacy. It's a power word, and we can't use it in our Facebook advertising, but we can use it on Reddit. We can use it in many of the communities. People are finding it's enhancing the relationship. I'm understanding my partner better. I see their physical stress. I see the stress today. I see that they've checked in and said they're not emotional, like, or they're not emotionally connected. It's a really— it's a tool that allows you to have a better connection. And our, our users are giving us good feedback on that. The one negative— and we're getting negative feedback as potential investors— I'll give you what it is. It's like they want it gamified. Right now it's a little too clinical. So that's maybe our next release. Like, it's going to be— we're building a game engine, which is kind of crazy, but that's what we're doing.

It's very interesting. Um, thanks for pitching, Kevin. It's been a great pitch, interesting idea as well. And, uh, yeah, lots to ponder. So let's go with, uh, the second pitch of the day. Alexis, uh, we have you on stage here against your screen.

Go ahead.

Hi, I'm Alexis. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Tilo AI. We are building the AI-native learning platform for for every classroom. This is John. John is a school teacher. Every morning he walks into his classroom and sees 20 students. 3 are English learners, one has ADHD, another one is struggling in math. Each student learns differently, but John has only one lesson and limited time. Personalizing learning for every child feels impossible. This is where Telo comes in. Students work individually with Telo on their Chromebooks or through our AI robot. Through natural conversations, Kido adapts to each student's needs and learning level. Every conversation is analyzed, giving John real-time insight through teacher dashboard. He can see which students need extra support, which are ready for more challenging work, and where to focus his attention. Uh, we've seen great traction. We won 33 RFPs, giving us access to more than 7,000 districts and schools nationwide. We have 5 live pilots, and one of them just converted into a a paying customer. Our pricing starts at $120 per student per year. Our robot hardware is optional. Uh, if you look at competition, education has evolved from static worksheets to gamified apps to AI chatbots. Tilo is the next step— adaptive AI combined with real-world interaction and continuous assessment. Our go-to-market strategy relies on industry events, referrals, and targeted outreach. Education is a trust-based market where relationships and proven results drive adoption. We are starting with English learners with plans to expand into special education and the broader K-12 market. Tello can be a $100 million annual recurring revenue business while serving less than 9% of US school districts. Our focus this year is on English learners. We will then expand to special ed before addressing the broader K-12 market. Oliver and I combine 20 years of experience in product development. And thank you, I'm Alexis, the CEO and co-founder of Tilo AI, and we are building the AI native learning platform for every classroom.

Thanks, Alexis. Why are you the right guy to build this?

I've been building startups for the last 10 years in France mostly, and also I have very good, uh, counsel from my family, advices. My wife is an Italian language teacher, so she gives me advices on the products.

Right. Um, edutech is extremely hard, right? From a GTM perspective, me and Sunny have done lots of GTMs for edtech companies, and it's very hard to penetrate schools, right? And just get in the ecosystem. Can you double-click on your GTM plan? Because I need to know the details, know that you have a moat there, or else it's super hard to scale.

Well, I think you need to— of course, if you're building an app to help students with math, it's going to be very hard. There are hundreds of them. But if you focus on pain points of schools, especially English learners, for instance, to start with, we have less competition and the districts in the US are heavily incentivized to help the students get out of the English learner status. They have 4 years when they enter as an English learner to get out and they are tested once a year and they are scored and they need to get a certain level to be out of the program. So if a district does not do its job,, to help students, uh, become fluent in English, uh, after 4 years, they get penalties, uh, in terms of federal funding, in terms of state funding. Um, that's where we come in.

Sunny, any questions for Alexis here?

Yeah, I'm quite intrigued. Um, actually, I spent nearly 10 years actually working in robotics, and I sold, uh, we sold robots to all the top engineering institutions Um, and then like, as I mentioned, I'm also a director at a company called Humanoid Global here in Canada, which is a public company, and we invest in humanoid companies. So I have to ask, like, what does a robot actually add that a, like, a Chromebook with a good voice interface doesn't? Like, where's your kind of data on that?

Well, you have a lot of data on, uh, embodied AI helping especially, uh, students with special ed Already you have different competitors that did. I think the Now Robot did a study, for instance, and we see a lot of engagement compared to a screen-based approach. But if you just look at mirror neurons, that's how we work as a human. As humans, we learn much better from other humans than just screen in terms of vocabulary. Usually you need to repeat 3 to 5 times a new word to a child to make the child learn a new word. It's 10 to 15 times if you're in front of a screen. The robot hardware actually mimics the human form factor and helps the brain to learn faster. And also, second point is you don't get any attachment to a screen. The robot becomes your friend. So it's much easier for students to spend more time with the robot because the robot is going to remember their taste, their preferences, and then they can have a personalized conversation.

Interesting. Now, you build the robot yourself or white labeling an existing platform?

We use a white label to start with. It's easier. It helped us to be in the market after just 6 months of coding. Coding. We built the software on top of it.

Cool, thank you. Yeah, I'll hand it over to Mariano.

Hey, thanks, thanks, Alexis. Would love to understand a bit more about the product itself and how you're handling the hardware supply chain.

I'm sorry, what exactly?

Your supply chain on the hardware side, how are you building that?

Well, we are very— well, at the very beginning, I don't think that for now it's a big difficulty for us. When we'll be selling hundreds of robots. Of course there is a supply chain issue, but right now we are just shipping robots from the robot manufacturer to the schools. Of course we pay more than if we bought 500 units and had our own spot in the US to stock the robots, but we are not at this stage right now. We just sold 4 more units recently to a district. So, uh, we are not at this stage, but it's a— of course it's an important, uh, topic in the coming months, I hope.

Got it.

Yeah, so if you're outsourcing that, just make sure that you keep it defensible, right? So it not can be commoditized.

You have 4 pilots, Alexis, is that correct? 4?

We have 5 pilots. One of them just converted and they bought 4 more units, uh, a few weeks ago.

And what does that mean? Did they, did they pay you a couple grand or just written agreement?

No, they, they paid, uh, they, yeah, they paid more than $10,000 US.

Nice, nice. And you reached out, uh, through these guys, through events and outreach and so forth, right? So that's pretty reassuring.

It's events, it's cold emailing. Two of the pilots I've met, it was at the event at New York City EdTech Week last year in October. Other pilots are cold emailing, and we actually did a micro grant, so schools and districts had to apply to get a free robot, and that's how we chose the 5 pilots.

I love it. Yeah, I really love that part. That reassures me because edtech is hard, and you seem to have it figured out on the GTM side of things. Emiliano, Sunny, any other questions for Alexis or comments?

Friendly feedback on the design. I think you're underselling the product. I think the visuals can be improved. If you're already getting good responses on the outreach, if you run it, for example, to Cloud Design or many other tools right now, I'm sure you'll be getting better results.

Okay, there you go. Let's go to our next contender. Thanks, Alexis. Mark, we have you on stage here. You can go ahead and present.

Okay, here we go.

Okay.

Hi guys, my name is Mark Bamford. I'm the founder and CEO of Victors, where we live in a world where YouTube measures views in terms of value. But Victors, what we're looking to do is measure the value that's created from video. So essentially, Victus goes beyond counting what you would call a traditional video view to enable us to capture what the audience are actually interested in inside a video frame. This actually creates huge amounts of behavioral data of what people are interested within a video, and video is awesome at creating curiosity. We've just created the ability to harness that and measure that. And the problem we're solving is a pretty ubiquitous one. Audiences watch video, but they don't, they don't know what the things are in it. What's that? Where's that? Who's that? That real moment of curiosity is left unsolved largely by the YouTubes of this world. And then measuring on an industry level the value of a video based on how many people have viewed a video, which is crazy because that's just a vanity metric in my view. So what we've done at Victors is enabled us to create an interface when, when someone's watching a video, they can discover all the things that they are curious about within it. Not just the products and brands, but the places, the people behind the scenes, the events, all the other stuff around what inspired the video. This is really what we're about. It's about capturing and measuring the 360-degree curiosity of audiences within video. And when we start looking at the data, which you'll get a glimpse of in a second, we showed this to the guys at Sony Music and they actually said to them, We've never seen anything like this from YouTube or from Google. It was truly unique in terms of its value to them as a, as a big company looking to engage with brands. And that's actually led us to be actually a Google-backed scale-up here in the UK. In terms of the data that we generate, this is a quick screenshot. We're measuring what people are actually engaging in within the video frame. So I can tell them what products and brands are trending and what those percentages are and what those yields are. So this is really creating a win for the content creators in terms of providing this data, a win for audiences 'cause it's sold in their curiosity, and a win for the brands that are working with those content creators 'cause they get transparency of, of data and ROI. Now we are live. We've done about 35 projects live, some of those in American politics and some in cooking and some in music, but we've actually measured the ability to generate about 900 times more revenue per view than YouTube. This is almost a dollar per view, actually, and that is an incredibly large yield for a video to be able to generate. And obviously quite a few awards and stuff like that, you know, along that journey. Our business model is pretty straightforward. We sell insights back to the content creators under a subscription model, and the value that we generate on commerce and on advertising, we largely share that with the content creator. We take a 20% cut of that. So really the content creators are getting both money and insights out of this. Our team, pretty mature team. I won't go through everybody. We got people that have been COOs of the Guardian newspaper, worked for Richard Branson. Our marketing guy was head of marketing for Warner Movies, and we've recently onboarded some AI guys as well into the core team. Our go-to-market model is pretty straightforward here. Focus on the dots here. Our goal is to create as much data as we can from some marquee, about 12 marquee projects we want to deliver in the next 12 months. People like L'Oréal and Sir Richard Branson's team at Necker Island and some other content creators in the podcasting world. This is about transforming how video creates value and generating huge amounts of metadata off the back end of that. And we're looking for £1.2 million. This is in pounds, so about $1.5 million, uh, US dollars. This is largely to drive automation, uh, of the system, so scale, um, and monetization, and then do about 12 marquee projects to get to our first 1 billion data points. And at that point, I think in what we're doing, which is quite unique, certainly according to Google themselves and even Sony Music, um, that would make us one of the largest creators of video engagement data on the planet.. And this is like a clear blue sky space that no one seems to be playing in. So that's what we're looking to do. And that's me. That's Victus.

Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I think the presentation, coming back to Emiliano's feedback, like quick revamp could make it look better for the platform itself. I have so many questions, right? One that you left was what exact insights, video insight does your platform provide that YouTube doesn't? Right? Like, tell me about some of the metrics here. Yeah.

So YouTube measures about a dozen different things, but principally the view is obviously the main one. Um, but there's about 12 other, you know, smaller metrics on that. Uh, we are measuring at least 50 to 60 plus. We actually have no limit to the things we can measure in terms of interactions inside of our video frame. It really depends on the content in itself. If it has more activation points within it, then there's more data that comes from it. So actually, I think on average we're getting about 50 times more data points than YouTube by volume. But to answer your question in a slightly different way, what actually does that data convert to? So I can say to a content creator, I know that 86% of your audience discovered your shoes. Of that 86%, 52 were actually more interested in the Nikes than the Adidas. 23% of those people that looked at the Nikes went through to Nike store, and 2.1% of the people that made it to the store bought Nikes. This is actually giving a full ownership of attribution from the moment of inspiration all the way through to the outcome. And that is all data that is in one place. We actually were at Havas Media this morning, and they said we would— we could pull that together, but it would take us about 5 different systems to collate that fragmented data. We're actually taking the, the point of inspiration all the way through to the point of action and measuring what that is. So that's really the difference between the two, and YouTube doesn't do that.

Yeah, like walk-ins, but walk-ins are like less popular. It seems to be rocket science to try to calculate this. You need to rely on like an external API data provider, and that brings its lots of complexities, right? I'm like a Pareto guy, right? So 80/20. By the way, YouTube provides also pretty much everything in terms of stats, 50 to 60 stats, but probably only 5 or 10 actually matter, right?

Yeah, it's a smaller number.

Video duration, for example. Yeah. The click-through rate for the thumbnail is still important, right?

Yeah.

I'm still not sure why I would personally use you And also, like, can, can you tell me, are you more of an agency right now versus SaaS? Like, what's the current model?

So, so the current model is we just basically license our tech to content creators and then actually provide them with the data and enable the commerce. So I guess to answer your previous question or to address a statement like, why would you use us? Well, actually you don't really drive too much commerce of what's going on in inside of a YouTube frame. We do. Uh, you can't actually measure what people are interested in inside the frame. If you want to know what, what sunglasses you are wearing or what microphone you're using on this podcast, there's no way for YouTube to be able to provide that to you in its current format. That's exactly what we do. So actually, YouTube's business model essentially is actually not about the video at all. YouTube's business model is about mega views and the advertising slots in between the videos. That's actually how they make money. If you view YouTube as a— if you view video as a brick wall, I would say that YouTube's business model in the brick wall is focused on the concrete. That's how they make money. That's the advertising slots between the videos. That's where the algorithm sits and serves. What we've done is actually say, well, actually, people are here to look at the brick. They're here to look at the video. Let's actually measure what they're interested in inside the video. Isn't that behavioral data way more interesting than, oh, it had 1,000 views? Actually, we had the, the stat that I had on the screen before around 900 times. We know that that artist, there's a music artist, he had about 1,200 views on his video on his own website. We generated more measurable value from 1,000 views than he measured from 1.8 million views on YouTube.

And what was it, specific insights on that video? Like, what was the specific insights? I just failed to, to You see, because me, I'm obsessed with like how much time my videos get watched, the click-through rate, of course, right? So can you give me like examples of what specific data you provided that person?

Yeah, I'm trying to bring it up now to show you. So actually, if we look at the video from that, it'll come up in a second. We were able to tell them which brands were trending inside of his video. We actually know what the attribution was of those different products within that brand set. For that video. So this is an example of a, a music video from an artist in Los Angeles actually called Casamigos. For the last month or so, I can see where the traffic's come from. This is all the brands that are in the video. I can actually see which brand is trending, Versace, and I can see that Versace is generating, if you see these two bars here, this is the engagement with Versace. There's broadly like a 92% engagement with Versace in this video. That's 92% of the, of the views that happened. 92% of the time someone discovered Versace, of which 36% actually were then sent through to Versace's website. This is insight that you just don't get from YouTube.

Okay, that's interesting. That should be in the deck, right? Like, that's more—

well, this was— the screenshot was playing with my— with 3 minutes, I didn't really have time to do a live demo. So, um, This is live data, um, and we're actually going to be using AI agents and other AI tools to actually transform these, these dashboards into talking dashboards. So actually music artists can actually just ask the question of the AI and, um, it'll give them, hey, Versace is your biggest brand, you want me to try and reach out and do a deal with Versace? So the, the AI that we're using in the future is really about empowering creators.

Yeah.

Sunny, any questions?

Yeah, Mark, a great job, by the way. Um, your tagline leads with measurement, but measurement is what YouTube and the others sell. Your real pitch is action, right? So, so you—

well, action and value.

I mean, we—

they, they measure how many views, they measured attention, you know, how many people have seen the video, because that's what they're in the game of. Because the advertising world is getting more commoditized, so YouTube has to get more views with more video, with more content. What we're really interested in is a completely new set of behavioral data within the context of what people were interested in. Imagine this on the Super Bowl halftime show when you're watching all those people and you actually had percentages for 86% of the people interested in the shoes or the sunglasses and it created commerce directly from the video. You know, both the commerce that's created plus the data that is feeding the brands Super Bowl halftime show is like a dream slot for us, and, uh, it's one of the things that we've got on our, on our to-do list.

Yeah, and then you, your slide promises something like 3 to 7x investor returns within 12 months. That's a pretty extraordinary claim for a pre-revenue company, right? So can you walk me through the math? Like, what has to happen for an investor to 3x in a year?

Yeah, so we're looking at the moment of, uh, taking this $1.2 mil at a valuation of about $5 million We're doing it as an ASA, but let's keep it simple for here. Our goal is to actually get the value of the business up to £20 million plus within 12 months because we've already built a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about here today. We're not starting from scratch. We've already got clients like L'Oréal waiting at our front door, which is like the biggest makeup brand on the planet. So if we started working with them and the goal is in the next 12 months to really to do, you know, 12 standout projects that get us on the front page of Vogue magazine or Time magazine or Billboard magazine or Traveler magazine, whatever those magazines are. The next 12 months is about doing 12 projects, creating FOMO and getting to 1 billion data points actually and generating revenue consummate to that. And really at that point we see that the valuation we wanna go for within 12 months is about $20 million, which is about 4 times. So it sits kind of in the middle of that. That statement there.

Emiliano, any questions or feedback?

Yeah, just holding down on that, on the raise itself. Uh, congrats, by the way. And how long have you been going at it, and have you raised before? Would this be a pre-seed?

Uh, you got some angel tickets?

Yeah, so we've been going a few years now. Um, we've raised before. We did a friends and family round originally, um, and that was actually friends and family with one family office. Uh, we raised about $350K at that point. Um, we've been bootstrapping now for, you know, a couple I would say a couple of years because we'd gone through a pivot. We actually started the business really focused on music videos. The name of the business actually is named after Video Killed the Radio Star, which was the first music video on MTV, if you want to have a pop quiz about that one day. But then we realized when we saw that quote from Sony and we showed them the data I gave you a glimpse of today, and Sony Music were like, holy cow, we've never seen anything like this from YouTube.. And then to have YouTube and the team at Looker, which is the data side of Google, look at what we're doing. Yeah, we don't do this, we don't get this. So for us, that's really where we pivoted to data.

Around engineering, it just seems like with some of the traction you have and some of the names and some of the team you mentioned, Virgin, et cetera, sounds like you could go a bit more ambitious on the raise and we can talk about it another time, but just feels like if you open up to some international investors, US especially, uh, this would be more of a seed, so it would require—

it is, it is.

This is—

yeah, definitely, I'm all up for that conversation. Happy days to have that conversation. It just needs to make sense with the right partner, and then you kind of just work out what the amounts are going to be that are going to interest the, the people that are investing and what they're bringing to the table, and actually, you know, scrutinize that a little bit. If they're putting some more money in and I'm having to give away more, they better be bringing some skills to the party.

Mark, thanks for your presentation. Let's go to your next contender, Jeff. I think it's been your second or third time on the show.

Hey Mark, I got a little FYI for you with your video. Some 20 years ago, I did a patent for like— there was piracy in videos. To show that you could own it, we were able to put in the MPEG stream your name, like instead of Timex on your watch, you'd see your name where the Timex was. And so we had a patent for that. I love your idea, by the way. It's really, really great.

I did mention it was on the screen, but we do have a US patent as well that was granted in May. So that was a big win for us as well.

So yeah, yeah, okay, the stage is yours. Uh, we're listening to the presentation, Vitry.

Okay, here we go. So, um, I'm the founder of KeepSafeCare, and I'm gonna get through this probably in like 2 minutes, really quick. The industry is $220 billion a year, mostly for in-home caregiving for seniors. In the United States, 4 million people are retiring a year for the next 20 years. So there's a big demand for people, you know, they call it the silver tsunami, for people that are, that are receiving care in the home and caregivers to get into the home. The big problem is that wages keep going up and the costs keep going up. So wages don't go up as much as the cost. So there's a big turnover problem and an apparent shortage of caregivers. So what I did— and my background is an engineer, I'm not a healthcare person— and I had to take care of my mom. And one of the things I found out was how poor the caregiver was being paid and literally treated. So we re-engineered the way that, uh, you run a private duty agency on a unit level, and you had to make it more efficient. So We created what I call Private Duty in a Box, which is trademarked now, which is a full-stack piece of software that is a self-contained integrated system from soup to nuts on running a private duty agency pretty much in the cloud, except that you have to still hire people and bring people into the home. So with, with that, here's some real key aspects of it, and this is a problem in the industry. Turnover is 81%. Um, and 80% of the caregivers leave in the first 100 days. That is really upsetting to old people. They— it, it's just a dysfunctional industry. The average hourly wage is $17.86, and that's heavily weighted towards California and New York because they have the most caregivers. So they're getting like $18 in California even though they're charging $45. And, um, the market size is about $140 billion in 2024. It's supposed to go to $220 by 2030. And, um, here we go, almost 60% of all agencies report caregiver shortages. So how do you solve that? That's one of the things we have to do. So efficiency does one thing, it lowers costs, it reduces overhead. So that was my whole thing. I said, how can you get more money into caregivers' hands? You got to get rid of the cost that is keeping that from happening. So when you do that, you get higher wages in running a private duty agency on a unit level. That's the most important thing. We're looking at it. Most of the caregiving in the United States is done with a private duty agency, which is a company that hires caregivers and places them in your parents' and grandparents' home. You guys are a little bit young for this, but everybody's going to need a caregiver sometime in their life, hopefully before we pass. So here's the most important thing, and it really distills down to a real simple thing. When you pay caregivers more, no-shows, which is 25% incredibly every day, go down. Caregiver turnover goes down and customer satisfaction goes up. Real simple. It's a real simple sell.

It's—

and, and here's why we have an unfair competitive advantage. Because we compare caregivers more, in order to meet our caregiver price, you have to raise your rate. Which— so on the one side, if the competitor pays the caregiver what we pay It becomes too expensive for the client. They leave. They come to us because we're paying more and not charging more. The caregiver leaves if you don't raise the rate. The caregiver leaves because they're not earning enough. They come to us because we pay more. And finally, clients leave because of constant carousel of caregivers. Because caregivers are leaving, they're sick of getting new caregivers all the time. They come to us because we have consistency of care. So it solves a lot of problems. It's, it's, it's a real complicated thing that it's a real simple solution. So that's on the unit level. So how are we going to grow? The other aspect of it is that, okay, we were going to franchise, and we've actually done a little pivot too because our cost is so low, like 1/10 of the cost of a franchise. We could also open, uh, company stores, uh, and, and that, that is a big thing that's actually happened with us just recently. So it's about 1/10 the cost of, of, uh, typical franchise. One 5th the royalty and 1/2 the operating cost. So essentially, we're a software company, sort of like, you know, we sell a software license wrapped in an FDD, which is a franchise disclosure document, compared to a typical private duty agency. So here it is: accelerate growth, lower franchise fee, lower operating costs, higher margin dollars, differentiated offering. And the one thing that we're doing now with our franchise, that we're only offering multi-units, no single So, and it has to be over 2 million people because it's so cheap, and we charge 10 cents a resident. So for 2 million people, it's $200,000 for a franchise area, say Charlottesville or Charlotte, North Carolina, and the target is 1,000 units within 3 to 5 years. So ultimately, um, here's our finances in the past. This year we're probably gonna do about a little bit higher than 2 mil— 2.8 million. And it looks like the profit will double in 2027, 2028, and 2029. We're profitable now, so that's the nice thing about it. And, and finally, here's the bottom thing: whoever solves the caregiver problem wins. And the caregiver problem is you can't— you don't have enough caregivers, there's turnover, and, and you got to pay them well. And there's a big problem with that. If you don't solve that, you don't have a business. So what we did— and I should have put the logo up there— what we did, we've actually trademarked the Caregiver Company. We focus almost exclusively on caregivers, and everything else gets solved. And we have actually— our trademark is, we take care of caregivers, they take better care of you. That's it, done.

Love it, Jeff. Um, great presentation skills, just the visual, right? Like, I think we gave you that feedback last time.

Yes.

Feed that to Claude, you know, or some other tool and watch like the designs just be better.

Yeah, I agree.

The question I have for you, Jeff, because you've been on the show a couple of times, how has it grown in the last 3 months, right? You and I, we first spoke 3 months ago. Give me some growth stats.

We're, we're opening up in Dallas and San Antonio. We have a contract, uh, um, we have to check them out for all of Tennessee, so that's $400,000.

$500,000.

That would be like, uh, 10 locations. And then, uh, Southeast Florida, which is Miami-Dade, uh, we're in negotiations with somebody that wants to buy that as well. And that's, that's about 5.5 million people that would do that. So that's another $500,000. So the, the thing that we did, the big pivot, is that no longer onesie twosies. So because brokers don't want to deal with, you know, a $25,000 sale, they'll deal with a $500,000 sale. So because we're so efficient in growth and being able to expand, it's just an easier sell. And we make our money on the $2 an hour. I, we don't— I'm not worried about the franchise fee as much as I am about getting them up and going. And that's what we do that's much better than everyone else, because it's a hyper-local sale. So because we pay our caregivers so much, so much more, the people that refer to us, which is home health and hospice they were all caregivers. Those nurses, they refer to us almost exclusively because we pay better. It's a— it's, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I call it physics.

Sunny, any questions?

Yeah, so you pivoted to also doing company-owned stores, right? Yeah, I guess what triggered that? Like, did franchise sales stall, or did the math on owned units just look better?

I, I always— well, both. Um, we did— I did— I love Excel. I did a spreadsheet and I'm like, when I sell a franchise, they make most of the money. So the reason why franchisees— and to speak to the other one, a franchisee that buys, and this is in Tennessee, if he spends $400,000, in 3 to 5 years he's netting, uh, between $6 and $7 million in profit every year. Why am I letting him do that? Why don't I do that? So it's a little bit more risk for us, but we make that— we make, we make $2 an hour. They're making $7.50 to $8.25 an hour. So if I own it myself, I'm making $10.25 an hour as a company store, and I'm still paying my caregivers better.

1,000 units in 3 to 5 years is faster than almost any franchise in history, right? So that's like Subway pace or something like that. What's the realistic bottleneck? Uh, franchisee capital, caregiver supply, or your own?

It's awareness, essentially. People— it's mostly, mostly people are gonna say, 'Bullshit, you, you can't— you cannot pay caregivers two-thirds of what's going there.' And then I show them the spreadsheets. I said, 'Yeah, it's math.' And then they said, 'Well, how much money can I make?' So we made the pivot, and it's all about positioning. So most people buy a franchise, they're exchanging one job for another. They may be making $200K, $250K wherever, and now they buy McDonald's, they're making $250K, but a hell of a lot of work. And I said, no, no, no, no, I— if you're going to put that kind of money in, I want you to have generational wealth. You could, you could grow territories quickly because we have a proven model and it works. So part of the other thing that we're doing with the company store is to say, okay, say a franchise fails, I know how to take over that franchise location and run it as a company store. I, I want you to be successful. I want people to make money. But first and foremost, we want caregivers to get paid more. Once you do that, everything else falls into place. But if you're— if for some reason, God forbid, you die or there's a divorce or something like that, we can take over that, resell it if we want to, or just keep it for ourselves because we know how to do it. So it's, it's, it's that— that is the aha moment where like, I'm not going to wait for a broker to make a sale for me. It's so cheap to start up. So our store in, um, the store in San Antonio is a company store. We estimate it's going to cost us total spend $25,000 to open that up, all of San Antonio.

Nice.

Cool.

Questions, feedback for Jeff before we go to next?

Yeah, quick question. Beyond the franchisee, who's your ICP and how are you getting to your ideal customer?

I'm sorry, you used the acronym that I'm not familiar with.

Ideal customer persona.

Oh, thank you. I'm, I'm OG. So it's one of the things that, uh, it's OG, it's the original game, right? OG, it's original gangster, original gear, or whatever we want to do it. But actually, it's the adult children. Well, two, twofold. It's the home health and hospice nurses because they discharge clients. So when they discharge clients, they need care. So they're looking to do referrals, and that's where 90% of our business comes from. So when we go to them and show them how well we're paying our caregivers, because they were all caregivers at one time, they love the fact— we've actually had home health agencies, we're not referring to anybody else. I said, why not? Because you're paying $5 more. Than all the other caregivers. And they kind of say these— and they're not getting treated well. And our customers, when the customers do a customer satisfaction score post-discharge, it hurts that their score. That score affects them getting referrals from hospitals. So understanding this little stream of where money goes, you know, in the private pay area, we interject ourselves in there and we refer back. So like if one of our clients goes back in the hospital, we contact the home health agency, and we say, hey, Mrs. Jones is in room, you know, 230 at St. David's. Thank you very much. That saved them between $2,500 and $5,000 to market to a new client.

And how are you getting to these ideal customers at scale, or what's the plan?

Okay, in Texas they list them all. Literally, I, I have a spreadsheet that lists every agency that's licensed in Texas, who the admin and assistant admin is. With their telephone number and email, and you pick up the phone and you call, email them. And if you don't like doing that, you're going to fail. So if you don't like networking and meeting people, you're going to fail. And so we're really successful at that. I, I'm an engineer, but I incredibly— I like sales and marketing. So that's a weird combo, but it is what it is. So that, that's it. It's, it's just physics. It's you got to keep knocking on doors, eventually get referrals, if you keep— and we measure it. So we have a, we have a CRM that measures, uh, outreach to referrals. We have a CRM that measures clients, that intake, and also one for caregivers. They're integrated together. The software is really pretty cool.

So that's it.

Thanks, thanks for pitching again. Thanks for being present. Libby, we're gonna go with you. Uh, camera, deck, everything all good already? I guess Libby is not, so let's go with, uh, Tom. Tom, you there?

Yeah, can you hear me?

All right, yeah, we can hear you. Uh, you can present.

All right, hi again. Uh, my name is Tom, CEO, uh, like everyone has seen, uh, stone slabs, marble, uh, in countertops, homes, or lobbies. Now the distributors of these products are actually losing millions in revenue. And how I came to know that, uh, a couple years ago I was working as a software consultant for one of the major stone slab companies here in Ontario, and I was shocked by how they were tracking, uh, their inventory. So the company used to shut down, uh, 7 days, and they do that 4 times a year. Now during that time they don't generate any revenue, and they divert all their staff to the warehouse just to count slabs, right? Count slabs. But even then, there inventory accuracy levels was always below 80%. So they still shipped out wrong items to clients, spent hours searching for the correct slabs to, you know, fulfill orders. Now I realized one thing, that the existing solutions, uh, the ERP systems can track numbers on screen, but they can't physically show you, uh, where products are. And that's why we built RFID Jade. So basically we act as the eyes of inventory. Now, how do we— how does this work? We tag— we have proprietary tags actually that we tag on every product, as you can see in this picture. And then we have readers in different zones in the warehouse that are basically tracking every movement of these slabs. Now, these slabs look so similar yet unique, right? They have different patterns, different variations, different colors, and yet they look so similar. So it's very easy for you to pick a wrong product and ship it out. So what sets us apart with the existing solutions, still rely heavily on the barcodes and clipboards, Excel sheets. Our solutions just runs itself. You just put a tag on the item and we're able to pinpoint exactly where our products are, saving these massive warehouses over $500,000 every year. Market opportunity, just in North America alone, It's about $3 billion. Uh, they're about 20,000, uh, distributors. We charge each, uh, distribute each, each warehouse about $150,000. That's a fixed fee deployment. And then we charge an annual recurring revenue of about, uh, $40,000. That's subscription. Now this image, I like it so much. It's JP Morgan building in New York. It cost them over $56 million in their lobby just for stone slabs. Stone slabs alone. So this is a huge market opportunity based on how many more buildings out, out there. Attraction, uh, we've already deployed the solution in about 7 warehouses and generated about $500,000 in sales just, just the 15 last 15 months. So this includes a bit of pilots because we started, uh, doing some pilots on some warehouses, and then eventually I started getting revenue. Financial projections, uh, started with 2 warehouses in 2025. 2026, we are on our way to the 10th warehouse. We're already in 7 warehouses, trying to move quickly to the, uh, you know, 10. If we believe we're going to actually get more than that because we've partnered with some agents who are helping us commercialize and market. Again, 2027, as you can see, my graph goes high and to 2023, uh, where we anticipate to be fully deployed in about 500, uh, warehouses. Now, the team behind— again, I worked in the industry, uh, stone slab for quite some time, about 8 years. Uh, I'm a software engineer, uh, but then I've— I had to go back to do an MBA at University of Waterloo, uh, just to understand how to run business. When I figured out this pain point and saw how these companies struggling, I was like, hey, this is a pain point, there's an opportunity here, I need to know how to run business. So I went back for an MBA and I'm actually done with that, just to learn how to commercialize and grow the business. My co-founder Gibran is a software engineer, 15 years in the business. And then we have Alex and also work with other people who help us do the deployments and things like that. Currently, we're trying to invest about $2 million just to, you know, address the demand and scale. This $2 million actually is going in hardware. So the issue we have right now, we have to first get an order, then we start putting in the hardware purchases, which takes a lot of time. So with our vendors, so if we can stock and have inventory like hardware, like things that we need, if we can have it at hand, then we get an order, we'll cut down the deployment cycle to at least a week or two because it currently takes about 6 weeks, 6 to 7 weeks to deploy, uh, but considering the fact that we have to order the hardware, get to us, and then start deploying to the, to the clients. Yeah, so it's a validated, uh, opportunity. We already have traction, uh, fit for the market, and, uh, we're now working on scaling and distribution. Uh, I think that's about it.

How much are you raising, Tom?

We actually not raising, I would say. We haven't really looked into that, but, uh, right now we're just investing too much. So the money we get, we just invest it back in the business.

Got it. And you have 3, 4 clients, you said?

I have about 7 warehouses now.

Okay, 7 warehouses. How did you get these?

Referrals, uh, through referrals and word of mouth. I just actually— the last client, I just sent a LinkedIn message and they told me to come in for a demo here in Waterloo, and I went for a demo and they're like, we wanted this. The closing cycle took about 3 weeks and they deployed the solution because they had a problem with inventory.

And, uh, each client, uh, what's the business model? Do they pay per RFID? Uh, what's— how do you make money?

So basically they pay— first of all, they pay $150,000. It depends on the size of the warehouse. Uh, we average warehouse about 50,000 to 80,000 square feet. $150,000 for deployment, that includes hardware and, uh, hardware and implementation fees.

Then they pay about $45,000 for the recurring revenue, uh, per month or per year.

That's why, yeah.

Okay, interesting. Uh, isn't there competing solutions in market? Uh, how do you, uh, compete there?

Uh, so right now, yes, they are competing solutions, but a lot of these solutions, like the industry we, we're in, like the stone slab, it's so rigid. And we've also figured out a lot of, a lot of hidden things that RFID had. Like, I forgot to mention this, but RFID has been there since 1980s, but applicability has been an issue because there's a lot of obstacles, like collision, a lot of technical things that have— that has been happening. So right now there is no really dedicated company that is just offering RFID solutions. Like, a lot of these things are done in-house or they hire a company to do it, but there is no solid company out there that is just strictly on RFID. And also the beachhead, like, our target market being stone slabs, honestly, like they still rely so heavily on the barcode. So, uh, Zebra just focuses on hardware. They really don't have like the most solid, uh, ERP solution that uses RFID. I mean, they can offer that, but it's like a basic, uh, system that they give you. Uh, so a lot of companies are either offering hardware, they're not focusing on software. So for us, we've focused on software, and also we build up proprietary, uh, tags and readers. They're actually proprietary. Yeah, we're creating IPs on there.

Sunny, any questions, feedback?

Yeah, for sure.

Um, hey, I was gonna say, so your slide says $2 million is going mostly to hardware because you have to buy before you get paid. Why raise equity for that instead of hardware financing, or I don't know, making customers pay a deposit up front?

Uh, that's a good question. Actually, that $2 million has a little bit of money that we're trying to divert to marketing as well, right? But mostly it is going to hardware. So we just think, for through our mentors and, and all that, we believe that we can grow this organically because if we can close a couple deals and our profit margin is about, uh, 85%, so we think if we can really close about 3, 4, 5 extra deals, then we can afford to have hardware in stock, have inventory basically.

And then, uh, Tom, the other thing was the $500K in sales over 15 months across the 7 warehouses. How much of that is recurring subscription versus one-time deployment? And what's your actual ARR today?

Uh, oh, uh, that's— it's about 5%. A lot of them pay $40 grand, so that's about, uh, about close to $400,000.

Got it, got it. Cool. Okay, yeah, I'm quite intrigued. Uh, but yeah, Emiliano, I'll hand it over to you.

Very interesting. Yeah, I'm curious about how you're structuring the investing angle. Like, could you go to the slide when you're there?

Uh, I think it's this. Yes.

So you're looking to invest, it just This is Kostanis' point as well. I would happily connect you to a company called Tangible. They do financing for hardware, so this makes sense. But if you're pitching to investors, I think this slide needs to be changed because it's confusing. We don't know if you're raising or not, apparently not, but I think you could raise with what you have already in terms of traction, right? So I would really go around the financing strategy that you're pursuing so that it's really clear both for you and for the audiences and investors, right? I do think it's fine, like it's fundable given that you have already that half a million revenue and it looks like you're going on closing. And secondly, do you have a go-to-market slide here? You mentioned referrals, but I didn't see how you were addressing the market.

I don't have that, I don't have that. I just removed it because it was a lot of, uh, No worries.

But yeah, I think, yeah, that's fine. Feel free to share it to us afterwards. But I think really understanding how you can scale the referral side would be interesting, right? For the first one, it's totally fine, but as you know, it's not something that's scalable. So it would be interesting to see how you're thinking about going to market beyond the, the first 10 or so.

All right, well, thanks, Tom, for Thanks for the pitch. Let's go to your last contender. I think Libby, uh, you're back here. We can see your screen, everything. So stage is yours.

Sorry about that. I had a client call and clients come first, right? All right. So we are Strategic Book Advisors. What we do is create an authority platform that helps translate expertise into published authority, helping coaches and financial planners and a whole list of other people that I'll get to in a minute. Scale their own business and create credibility in their marketplace. So right now we're asking for a raise of $5 million using SAFE notes, and we have a future equity with a 20% discount. Right now what we do is we target clients who are interested. As I mentioned, they could be executive coaches, business coaches, founders much like yourselves, lawyers, et cetera, et cetera. I don't need to read the slide for you. You guys can do that. But what we help them do is turn their expertise into authority to help them reduce sales time, including sales cycles, sales calls, because in this day and age, there is a huge trust gap. People don't know who to trust, but if you have a published book out there, immediately your authority rises to the top. So all of these questions on a client's perspective, though, all of those are eliminated. I mean, imagine in an investor meeting, if I know I'm going to meet with you in a week, I send you a book with a personal note that says, hey, I'm really looking forward to talking to you about investing in my business. This is a little bit more about me. And you send them a book. How powerful is that? In addition to that, what we have is our use of funds. So every dollar has a job. For us, the buzzword of 2026 is marketing. Everything that we do for the most part is all about marketing. We have already put all of the systems in place and we are poised to scale. So we need money to invest in our marketing strategies. Some of the other money will go to a dedicated sales team, infrastructure, and those types of things. So our financial projections look like this for the remainder of the year, $1.4 million. And then in 2027, with some more revenue, we will be looking at $3.4 million in projections. One of the things I want to be clear about is although we have an entry point of a book, we also have an entire ecosystem designed to help that client scale. And what I mean by that is by creating courses for those clients. So literally they could be making money without having to even be there and creating a full suite of additional services, marketing, AI, AI responses, all of that kind of stuff. Most clients that we seek out are just having trouble establishing themselves. Just to give you an idea, our offer is $8,997 to get your book done. The cool thing about that is we don't drag it out. It's done in 30 days, give or take, depending on the input from the client and whether or not they get— we get feedback from them in a timely basis. Why is that a benefit? Well, we have speed to authority. People love speed, let's be honest. So 30 days, they have a book, they're ready to use, they're ready to scale. We also position them with a year of email marketing, embedded lead magnet, and a podcast to talk about their book. No other company out there provides that sort of service with that price tag. Again, this is our target market. I don't need to review that. You guys got that down. Our solution is that we have created this publication as a foundation for credible, um, element for our clients. So our positioning gives them a framework from which to build and helps them establish themselves, as I mentioned, as an authority in their niche. This is a little bit about myself and my founding team. All of us are published authors. I personally have published a number of books. My main niche actually is teen athletes. Nick is a financial planner. His is in finance. Jen is a life coach, so a lot of her books are in life coach. And Tanzil is also a sports performance doctor, actually, and that's where his books lie. So we have the experience, we have the knowledge. This is not something that we thought about yesterday. We've been in business for over a year and we have really honed and refined our offer and our systems. So as I mentioned, we are completely ready to scale. And we're super excited about that. So as I mentioned, we have multiple business models, and this is a little bit of our competitive comparison. All right, I think I'm done with my 3 minutes.

And Libby, you're raising $5 mil for this?

Yes, not all at once, but certainly over the next, what we would imagine, 3 to 5 years. Our goal in 5 years, it's to get to $100 million.

Okay, and, uh, tell me about like why this would be worth $5 million, uh, where— yeah, where do you justify that investment precisely?

So as I mentioned, it's not an all-at-once type of deal, and we are looking at safe investors with a $500,000 minimum investing. So we are looking long-term because ideally long-term. In 5 years, we're going to be selling the company for $100 million. So although we're asking for $100 million, it's not all at once. So if someone wanted to say, okay, well, I'm comfortable investing $500,000 now, we'll take that $500,000 and start putting it, as I mentioned, into our marketing, 55% of that, and then systems and other things.

Right. And books, right? Like, are books still a thing nowadays if users get most of their information through AI, uh, what do you foresee from, for the, the growth part of that market?

You know, there are a lot of companies out there that use AI. There are a lot of people who will say, oh, I can do your book and I'll get it done, you know, for $200 or $300, but it's AI generated. And our secret sauce truly is that we can take someone's experience, their knowledge, their expertise, and put that into a book. And if you've ever read an AI book, you know it's AI. And I'm not disparaging AI, it's a great tool, but we use it as a tool. It's not the end product. So when you say, are books dead? I don't think so, because if you look on Amazon, what are their biggest selling categories? Is— wait for it— books. So we know the book is still really relevant even in this day and age. And as I mentioned before, We make sure the book has your voice, your tone, everything about you so that when someone reads your book, they get to know you, the person. And again, closing that trust gap to help establish your credibility and authority in your niche.

You mentioned $100 million exits. Help me reverse engineer that. Like, what's the cost of products? How many would you sell a year and what would justify that? Yeah, let's say 6-7x markup, uh, that would be, uh, it's $10-15 million business a year.

Yep. I'm gonna refer that to Nick because, well, I'll just point this out, we're not just doing books, we're offering a complete ecosystem for a client, which is upwards of $50,000. The book is the entry point. So just be, to be clear, Nick, do you have anything to add to that?

If you guys can hear me, my—

am I back?

Yep.

So yes, just as Libby said, um, the, the idea of ultimately the $100 million that, that she mentioned, that you asked about, Charles, is— yeah, we roughly use a 5 or 6x multiple. So if you're looking at, you know, somewhere between $15 and $20 million, which is realistic within 5 years, uh, to get there, because just the, the cost structure that we have, a lot of our our ghostwriting and our systems are offshore. So we're actually not basing a lot of it here in the United States where expenses are higher. So we are able to, we have a lower cost structure, which, which is what allows us to price what Libby just included for under $10,000 when our competitors are charging 2 or 3 times that just for ghostwriting, not including all the other services like email and a podcast and so forth. So we're pretty confident that we're going to get there. And the scale that we're talking about, the ability to leverage the marketing, the advertising, the Meta ads, Google ads, you know, with AI, we're talking to a number of agencies that specifically target the people that we're looking for. So for example, founders, as Libby mentioned here, founders, entrepreneurs, financial advisors, lawyers, you know, I mean, any realtors, anybody who has a professional service. Is a potential candidate. And the example that I use in person— personally often is that people like Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, Robert Kiyosaki— the reason that we know those names today is because they originally wrote a book. I'm not saying that every one of our clients is going to become Tony Robbins, but the idea is that the systems that made him successful and the reason why he is still so successful and builds the programs he does is exactly because he leveraged the power book, in his case 40 years ago, and he's just built an empire since then. So the idea, as Libby said, is the foundation, um, is, is still a book. A book still represents a credible authority that is still unmatched. I mean, when you're introducing someone as a published author, automatically they're taken more seriously because they literally wrote the book. So if I wrote the book on retirement planning, for example, you know, uh, versus someone else who's trying to be a retirement planner, I'm going to be taken more seriously just because people have that, that sort of prejudice and say, oh, he wrote the book, he must be serious, he must know what he's talking about. That's the what— that's what we tap into. So LinkedIn, for example, we do a lot of LinkedIn marketing. So we're going to the places where these experts exist and making sure that they hear that message loud unclear. So that's why $100 million is not a crazy number in 5 years.

Sunny, questions or comments?

Yeah, so, so I hear you guys, but you know, a book only works as authority if it's good, right? So in 30 days, how do you guarantee quality? And what's your refund or unhappy client rate so far?

Unhappy client rate, zero. Refund, zero. And I'll tell you why. We hire project managers that are dedicated to that client. That's the client that they work with. They work with the ghostwriter, the designers, everything like that. Everything goes through the project manager. The project manager can take about 10 clients per month as that's rolling over. But a lot of the work that we do, everything gets feedback. So let's say, for example, Sunny, you wanna do a book. Okay, cool. We're gonna do the outline and then we're gonna get started on the book. Then I'm gonna ask you, all right, your first chapter is about, uh, how you got started in a company in India. Okay, let's talk about that. Give me your stories. Then we take that information, we flip it over to the ghostwriter, and that story gets woven into the foundation of the chapter of how you start a business in a different country or elsewhere, whatever the case may be. So that piece of it, that element, that personal touch— we have all of the recordings from all of the meetings. All of that goes to the ghostwriter so that we can make sure we are relaying your tone, your expertise, your sense of humor, all of that in the book. Understood.

Hey, Libby, so ghostwriting and done-for-you books is a service business, right? So, so revenue scales with people, not code. I guess my deeper question is, what makes this venture-backable versus a great, let's say, lifestyle agency? You follow me? Like, uh, like venture-backed businesses tend to be things that scale to infinity and beyond. So if this is by definition a service business, is, is this technically a venture business, or am I missing something?

So what we're trying to do— good question— um, what we're trying to do is, I, I call it— in fact, I just use the, the Big Mac model. So if we could scale what you're talking about, the venture-backed, the scalability of this, is that the systems that we have that we're putting in place, it is a service. Like, there's a human being involved, of course, but the idea is that we want to cookie cutter this as much and as often as we can. And that's part of the experience. The learning curve is ability, just like Big Macs didn't start out as Big Macs, right? I mean, eventually they got to the point where it was such a system and they were just doing it so well that that's, that's where we want to go. And that's the scalability that you're talking about. And that's, in fact, Libby will tell you scalability is a big word I use internally because we got it.

One last question, I'll hand it over to Emiliano here, but at $9,000 per book, right, that's like what 1 to 1.4 million this year means roughly 150 clients. So how many paying clients do you actually have today, and what's your close rate from lead to sale?

Close rate, we probably have about— let's see, it's between 25 to like 1, 1 out of 4, 2 out of 4, somewhere in there. Uh, we'll eventually—

if they have—

if they're in front of us, just like we're talking right now, if they are serious, we will generally close. You know, somebody might delay or something, but we'll close them. Um, you know, right now we're a couple hundred thousand dollars a run. I mean, that's our run rate right now, but we can get with scale. I mean, there's no reason— it's just a scaling issue. It's the Big Mac. It's basically we're trying to make a regular burger into a Big Mac, and that can only happen with scale.

Yeah, I, I do, I do buy the overall thesis though that the— that a book is a great way to quickly establish, you know, like, uh, some sort of reputation amongst your buyers, uh, worldview.

Cool.

So yeah, Emiliano, go ahead please.

Thanks. Just quick feedback. I like the vision. I understand it. Um, the energy, uh, Libby on presenting, I think was, was right. Uh, it was a good one. Definitely needs to work on the design side. Too much text, right? So I think it blurs everything.

Yeah, we're definitely gonna cut that down.

Gets us reading and distracted. So definitely streamline that, streamline that, and I think you'll be in a much better place. Um, and I would love to see like the funding trajectory. Have you raised before? Uh, you're starting with this $5 mil raise.

How's that look? We've pretty much, you know, we've been self-funded and some basic capital lines, small, small capital lines, nothing, nothing major. Nothing as far as equity investors right now, which is another, you know, the SAFE note potentially gives that equity down the road.

Yeah. So in this case, I do think $5 mil, like, at a get-go, what would it be if you want to dilute? Like, it supports a $20 mil valuation. So like, if you're starting, uh, I would definitely advise maybe if a, I don't know, $2-3 million round, it would make sense. Just consider it, but let's start gauging the market and really understand where you're at. Um, but after, after, of course, you, you refine the, the deck. But beyond that, makes sense.

And yeah, thanks a lot.

Thanks to both of you. Uh, let's close off the show, guys. Uh, thanks for the, for showing up again today, 10th edition of, uh, Spark Tank, uh, here. So glad to have all these founders on. Thanks for connecting, and see you to the, the next one.