Spark Tank - Edition 12

Welcome to another Spark Tank. Today I think is 12th edition. We've got a couple founders, couple of investors with us today, and it's gonna be pretty fun. It's founder pitches and investor feedback, and we're gonna say for in or not. Now it's a winner. Today we're not a lot, but we're mighty. We're gonna start with a couple of rounds of intro, so I'm gonna start. I'm Charles. I'm founder of GTM Ventures and Raz Rocket, I do GTM and fundraising, I'm also VC at Mactan.com, Mactanfund.com actually, which is a new YC investment fund. Mir, do you want to start with a quick 10-second intro about yourself, and Mike, you can go after.

Hi everyone, my name is Mir, Mir Ali, I'm the founder and CEO for Circles, and looking forward to explaining to you what Circles is all about.

Mike?

Yeah, Mike Feinman. Excited to be here. I want to introduce you to Exit On My Own, which is just a way where you don't need a business broker to exit your business and live a great life.

James, quick intro about yourself.

Yeah, my name is James Bates. I'm the founder and CEO of Advinao Medical. We completely automate medical practices. I also have a family office. We invest in fintech and health tech companies mainly. And then I have a hedge fund that— an automated trading algorithm-based hedge fund that trades in the options and futures market.

Sunny?

Hi everybody, my name is Sunny. I'm also one of the co-founders with Charles at GTM Ventures and Raz Rocket. I also founded India's first Bitcoin exchange. It's called UnoCoins. 13, I think it's gonna be our 14-year anniversary this year. Um, also a director at a company called Humanoid Global. It's a public company here in Canada that invests in humanoid companies. Happy to be here.

Kathleen.

Hello, my name is Kathleen. I'm the CEO and founder of two companies. The first one is Aloha HP. It's a traditional staffing company, and then as a result of that staffing company, I am CEO and founder of Aloha Insight. It is the command center for the modern staffing agency. It is AI native.

Uh-oh, Charles left. Oh, I don't know what happened. Maybe it's, uh, something from Uber. This will happen often, so I guess we can keep the conversation going. Maybe while Charles is waiting, do we want to maybe talk a little bit about I don't know what we're going to be pitching. Should we pick out an order? Maybe we'll just go in the order that we're all listed here. Mira, do you want to kick us off and maybe do your deck first?

Pitch deck?

I had offered to go first.

Oh, you'd already offered to go first?

Okay.

Yeah, I think we just lost her for a second. Okay, so if you want to go first, then— hey, Charles, what happened to your phone there or your connection?

I stepped on my computer's plug. Um, so yeah, sorry guys. Uh, yeah, Kathleen, I'll be back in a second here. Let me see if I can see your screen somewhere. Uh, yes, I can see it here. So add to stage. Do you want to start with your pitch, Kathleen?

Yep, I would love to start. And thank you. Yep, thank you, Charles, and, um, uh, fellow pitchers. I'm Kathleen. I'm the CEO of Aloha Insight, and my co-founder is Anthony Corto, who is a software engineer and AI expert of over 14 years. We built this from inside the staffing industry, not from outside looking in. Let's get into it. 79% of recruiters still manage their businesses in spreadsheets. 88% of those spreadsheets contain material errors. The average cost per hire is over $5,000, and the medium time to fill has not moved in years. The industry knows it has a problem. 76% of recruiters expect to replace their primary system within 2 years. The replatforming is happening and we intend to lead it. Traditional platforms are systems of record. Aloha Insight is a system of intelligence. One login, all full AI command center that researches, scores, writes, and remembers. Your team acts instead of types. Our flagship feature is a category of one. A recruiter types a job in plain English. The system identifies the workers' comp code, calculates true labor cost, generates a branded contract and proposal in minutes. It reframes the sales conversation from hourly rate to total cost of labor. Nothing else on the market does this. A typical agency pays $2,500 to $8,000 a month for 5 tools that don't talk to each other. We replace the entire stack for $1,200. One login, one data model, everything connected. Over 27,000 staffing agencies in the US. Our near-term wedge is the 5,000 to 7,000 still running spreadsheets. 1,000 to 1,200 subscriptions put us at $300 to $400 million in TAM. The opportunity isn't TAM, it is timing. We're at the inter— inflection point where switching is easier than staying put. 3 tiers: launch at 1,200 a month, scale at 2,200 to 3,000, enterprises at 4,500 and up. Simple to buy, hard to outgrow. Pre-revenue— we are pre-revenue, so I'll give you the unit economics instead. Um, customer acquisition cost is $500 through association partnerships, and lifetime value is $36,000. That's a 72:1 ratio. Our target is 100 paying agencies by Q2 '27 with $120K MRR, or $1.4 million M-A-R-R, um, ARR. That's the trigger for our Series A conversation. 3 property assets, a client potential score across 7 weighted signals, a lead magic engine that would take a competitor 6 to 12 engineer months to reproduce, and a contract magic with no other direct competitor. And once an agency's data lives inside Aloha Insight, Switching becomes genuinely painful. The data is our moat. We're raising $1.2 to $1.7 million at an $8 million pre-money valuation. BridgeSafe available now for $360K to $750K. First in, best terms. At $360K, you get 4.3% ownership with a $4.3 million return on a $100 million exit. Use of funds were convert pilots to paying customers and hit $10K to $12K MRR. Anthony and I built this from the inside problem. We— I ran operations, he built technology. Our incoming Chief Growth Officer Deb Paul brings an elite go-to-market track record from Mozilla, Lyft, RingCentral operators, and enterprise commercial leadership. Exactly the team that markets need. If aloha becomes the daily workspace, point tools become the archive, and that's our thesis. Thank you.

Hey, Charles, you're muted.

Thanks for that. Hey, Kathleen, there's a bit of noise. And yeah, thanks for the presentation and showing up on early notice, right? Like, that was pretty fast. I know a bit about that business. I have a friend that has a staffing agency and he was a client of mine. And yeah, they're called Premier Stuff and they were actually building an app like yours, right? Like you, it's been, Kat, there's a lot of noise on your side if you could stop moving things. So they've been building such an app in the early vibe coding days, which I liked a lot, right? And he was trying to build something very similar. I'm pretty sure he scaled it. So what feature do you have live? You know, like which, because there's been like 6 features you showed us, Uh, which one is live and ready to be used?

Yeah, so they are all live and they are being used in my staffing agency. So Anthony, my co-founder, um, is someone who's worked in my staffing agency as a software engineer and AI expert for over 2 years. So he built within the staffing world, saw the problems, and came up with solutions. So I— my staffing agency has been the beta test.

Okay, interesting. And yeah, that's why I love it, right? Is that you, you drink your own champagne. So that's pretty promising. Are you— do you have any sales going? Because, uh, $8 million valuation right off the bat. Do you have any ongoing clients right now?

LOIs?

Yeah, we are working on LOIs. We're actively gaining them because we need security clearances for our software to be able to sell. So it's kind of cart before the horse. So we're working on the LOIs right now.

Okay. Um, the GTM system to get new clients using the platform, what would it be?

Uh, to get new— so we, because of me being in, um, in the staffing world, uh, working within our networks, um, is how we're going through that American Staffing Association, TempWorks, um, California Staffing Professionals, which I'm a board member, or which I'm a member of, I'm not a committee member of. So we're working within those systems and talking with people, um, that way to gain, uh, market share.

I would start a podcast targeting, uh, staffing agencies, get data from them, which would guide you for the next features, and then sell them on the back end of that. That'd be pretty smart. That's all from my side. I love the pitch. Um, I know you came in early, right? So like a bit more practice so that you don't read too much. But I liked how it sounds and I like how it looked. Mike, any questions for Kathleen's business?

I thought it was a really strong presentation. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Yeah, Kathleen, super strong. I would— the only thing I would suggest is You banged through it. I would slow down at a couple of points. I think at your ask, I would just take a breath. I think I heard you say $60,000, 4.3%, but I'm not sure if that's what you said because that sounds low. And I think that that's kind of the pièce de résistance at that point. And so, yeah, just have, you know, just plan out some points where you say, I'm taking a breath here., but you're super strong and I, you know, you have a huge amount of credibility in, in the way you present and obviously in what you're, what you're, what you're providing, the offering. So it's very effective.

Awesome. Thank you so much. So it's $360K.

That's why.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'll take $60K.

I know.

James, any questions or comments for Kathleen's business?

Yeah, it, it, I mean, it looks great. There's a lot of AI that can be applied to almost any business, and the whole point of what will be successful going forward with businesses is workflow automation from the beginning to the end, which is what it looks like you have. And so from that standpoint, the vision, amazing. What was unclear in your presentation was the maturity of the software. I mean, previously Amir asked, hey, does this even work? I mean, is anyone even using it? I think Charles asked that. And if you're dogfooding it yourself, then you need to talk about that, right? And I would spend a lot of time not talking about the product the way you talked about it, but talk about how many candidates you have serviced with the product and then what the ROI was. How much would it cost if a human did it? How much did it cost with your software? And how do you turn that into ROI for the recruiting agencies, because just saying, hey, there's this huge market of recruiting agencies, everybody knows this. I've heard 1,000 pitches about recruiting agency optimization and they've all failed. Right. And the reason they fail is because humans have to get involved in order to customize the messaging, to talk to the candidates, to get them to apply, because these aren't people who are looking for jobs in general. And so if you're automating that, How are you doing it? And what is the time savings for humans? Turn that into an ROI. Without the ROI, your pitch is a dream. If you have the ROI, it turns it into a reality.

Yeah, I love that.

Absolutely. Yeah. And just a comment on that. We have automated client acquisition and we have automated candidate acquisition. It's a big deal. And you're absolutely right. I need to talk about that. Like, Overnight, we were able to get rid of like a whole department like staffing management, which is, you know, but we have the human in the loop there at the end, the final mile. So that's really important, that high touch, the real human piece. But to be able to automate, it's a real deal. And we're doing more than we did before. And I'll tell that story the next time I pitch.

There you go, Sunny.

Yeah, no, I thought you did a great job presenting, so thank you for that. Um, I did have a few questions. So what did your time to fill drop to after switching from spreadsheets to Aloha?

Yeah, time to fill, um, well, uh, an estimate of like, uh, 2 weeks to 3 days.

Oh wow, okay. And then if a human recruiter costs, you know, X per placement, what's the same placement cost with your software? Like, can you, can you show that kind of side by side as well?

Yeah. Um, in this moment, no, but yes, I can.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think those two things would be really helpful. And then the, and then the third and final question is like essentially like how many candidates has the system actually placed inside your own agency and what, what it did to kind of like save you per hire?

Yep. I can get that data as well.

I think those three data points would be super useful. But thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Yeah. And thank you. And of course, this is being recorded, so I'll get a copy of this to share with my team.

You will. You will. So next contender, we have Mir. Mir, welcome to the stage. You can pitch us Circle.

All right. Hey, everybody. One, thank you for your time. I know everybody's busy. Appreciate the time and appreciate everybody being here. Can you guys hear me?

Yes, here you see your screen, everything perfect.

So Circles is basically a relationship platform. What we are achieving is replacing third-party dependencies with direct customer relationships. And let me explain what I mean by that. Today, if you look at the market today I know that's a very busy slide, but I just want you to take a second to look at what that slide says. The market today, the middleman is more powerful than the business. And across the board, you go from Google, Meta, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Stripe, Yelp, Facebook, YouTube, the middleman today sits stronger than the business. And What Circles is trying to do is flip this paradigm to say we provide the platform, but a business has a direct connection with the customer. I'll just take one, not to spend too much time on the concept, but I'll just take DoorDash as an example. I'm sure every one of you have used DoorDash and ordered from DoorDash, and if you are ordering 5 times a week from the restaurant that's 2 miles down the road, Today, that restaurant has no way of knowing who you are. They don't know your name, they don't know where you live, they don't know who you are. All they know is that somebody is going to come in, pick up the food, and I invested half a million dollars to launch my restaurant. I'm going to make the food, they're going to pick up the food and go away. There is no re-engagement, there is no retargeting, and there is no growth. So the— at the bottom line, what's happened is this middleman architecture has captured the acquisition channel for most businesses. But in that process, the growth channel has completely come to a halt, right? You're now hijacked by the middleman. And essentially, that's the problem Circles is solving. Um, I'll stop for a second, get any questions you have before I jump into where we are and how far we've progressed.

It's just that slide. Are you saying you're replacing all these companies? Like, my brain cannot wrap itself around that.

That's a very good question, Charles. No, like I said, all of these companies are— they serve a very important purpose, and that is acquisition, not to be confused with growth. We're not— our goal is not to replace any of these companies. You continue to acquire. Every business needs to acquire new customers, but growth and acquisition are two fundamentally different things that a business needs to think about.

Okay, just like me, I don't like that slide because it's like, it doesn't take much. Yeah, it's very busy. And also, I like these companies, dude. I think they changed the game. Like, it's not— the Stripe is not my enemy, right? Like, they allow me to, to take payments. And then Uber is like, it's rocket science in itself. But yeah, it's very, it's very busy. Uh, I'd love to understand what Circle does on the slide one, but that's That's me.

I'll get into that. I'll get into that next. So like I said, we are not competing with these companies. We're not replacing these companies. We are clarifying the purpose and what business need these companies meet.

Okay, do you have other slides after that?

I do.

All right, let's slide in.

Based on this Right now, today, like yesterday, business grows on renting attention. I'm going to ask this to Kathleen, who's a founder with me here. She gets the software ready, she takes it to market. You're going to acquire customers on any of the multi-billion dollar platforms that exist today, but you're going to rent attention on those platforms. You're going to continue to rent attention, you're going to convert some of that attention, but once you convert, the other attention you retain is essentially lost, and that's how the platforms are designed, right? So next month you're going to rent more attention, you're going to convert some, and the month after you're going to rent more attention, but that renting cost has consistently gone up and the returns on those investments have consistently gone down in the last decade. And if you, if you look up the cost pre-COVID, post-COVID on your advertising campaigns on Meta, for example, so the future for Circles is yes, you acquire them, you rent attention, but then you own that relationship after that. So you convert that into direct first-party engagement You convert that into predictable revenue that you can count on, and it enables one fundamental thing that the middleman today does not allow you to do, is create personalized relevant offers. It's a busy digital world today, right? We all want personalized offers. I just don't want to know that an airline ticket is available for $39. I want to know that it's going to be the window seat and leaves no earlier than 9 AM and it's going to Houston. A flashy ad for $39 isn't going to make me go buy an airline ticket, right? If we're not opening a Sunday newspaper for coupons anymore, right? We're educated consumers. So the market is changing, but continuing to rent temporary attention to grow your business is continuously being demonstrated that those returns are going down month after month.

Emir, there's 2 minutes on the timer.

Just, uh, so let me go to the next slide. So where we are today: our product is built, it's in production, we're a revenue-generating business, we have paying customers across multiple industries, extremely useful use cases that are on our website. You can go see. Restaurants has proven to be a very attractive option for us. We're now at a point where we want to scale execution, not build product. We're not looking for payrolls, we're not looking for product building, we're looking for how do we scale this business. The high-level architecture of the platform is by industry. We have a backend solution, Qbyte, Qshop, Qplay, Qserve. Qbyte is restaurants, Qshop is for retail, But all of this comes together into a single mobile app, which is for the consumer. So we have a backend for the business, frontend for the consumer. The mobile app itself has everything from push notifications to education, to engagement, to loyalty. It's a frontend and a backend combined solution. And the website explains more on what the product is. The beauty of our model is that we have a growth flywheel. Every business that joins the platform brings its customers. Those customers add more value to the platform. The platform gets more engaged consumers. Those, those engaged consumers attract more businesses. So that's the benefit that we've been enjoying so far, that every business we bring on board brings on board another couple thousand customers, which is now more valuable for the next business we bring on. Restaurants are a big beachhead, mainly because it's a large market. It's a highly, highly fragmented industry with multiple players in the middleman space. I just took a couple names— DoorDash, Uber Eats— but there are many more that are in that space, and restaurants are struggling. The minimum commission rate is about 20%, and you all know restaurants are not a 20% margin business. 7 to 8% is the industry standard. Um, now we have a low execution risk. The platform itself on the back end integrates with most of the industry standard tools. It's production ready, it's AI powered. We have native mobile apps that do a ton of stuff. Business itself, we are paying customers, live deployments, multiple verticals. We've got some extremely good use cases there on the website. I would love for you you guys to spend a little bit more looking at it. A couple customer testimonials. We've validated the model, we've validated success with customers, and if these are all real-world deployments, why we win our category— we're creating the category of own relationships, proven technology. We've just expanded into 3 verticals. We have a line of verticals that we want to go into. It's a managed services model and it's AI-powered. It's a repeatable expansion model. Like I said, we only have now gotten into restaurants, entertainment, retail, and professional services. Healthcare, education, manufacturing, and other planned verticals are right coming up. And all of these share the single core platform architecture. Q2, our target today is to have 300 restaurants online in this quarter. We're well on target. I think we're at 79 as of this morning out of the 100 we wanted to do by the end of the month. I'm hoping you can meet that. One of those would be 100 paying locations across the board. The engine and the sales process is repeatable, and our plan is national growth. And essentially what we want to do is scale what we've already proven. Use of funds will mainly go towards the sales organization, customer success, product acceleration, hiring, leadership, getting us into the right organizations, into the right conferences, and of course accelerate our customer acquisition. To sum it up, what Circles and I stand for is that the era of rented attention is ending. If not today, it's going to end very soon. The bottom end of the market has already fallen out. Most small businesses don't want Meta, Google Ads, and other things, right? That bottom half that has fallen off is going to keep growing. Rising acquisition costs and shrinking ROIs are forcing businesses to rethink. Circles is the next chapter where your marketing is now an asset, not a monthly expense.

Thank you, Mir. How much are you raising here?

So my goal today is to enable a conversation. I'm not looking for one specific amount.

Okay, okay, thanks for that. Um, yeah, busyness, like you said, right? Like many slides were busy. The first thing that came to my mind was like you're trying to be everything to everyone. Um, The second thing was you're trying to disrupt the ads market, which is very established. And I mean, no one likes ads really, but it does make sense, right? Just like me having ads on my podcast. No one likes to listen to ads on podcasts, except if they're really good, right? Which they're not. So is that the right way to fix the problem? Is it like better ads? More personalized ads like the right solution to it. The third thing that came to my mind was like, oh, Mir should pitch himself maybe as Skool. You know, skool.com from Sam Ovens? Um, I think, um, I think Sam is doing it well. Does it mean I would invest in Sam's business? No, because Building communities is super duper hard, which is also what you're trying to achieve, uh, there. And then if you're building your own platform, how are you a solution to that? Aren't you another guy trying to divert our attention away from all these existing platforms? So that's what have gone through my mind while I was listening to your pitch. What do you think about that?

So, um, Number one, we are not saying stop ads, right? We're not saying replace ads. So again, those methods, whether it's ads, whether it's social media, whether it's Google, whatever you do, continue to be your acquisition. And you can never stop acquisition. Circles is not intended to, to say you start with Circles and tomorrow morning you have zero ad budget, right? But the goal is That ad budget, what's the exit ramp from that ad budget? Let's say I'm spending half a million dollars on ads in my business. What is my asset that has grown from that half a million investment?

Well, do you retain clients? Hopefully, right? And it's just the cost of doing business. It's like HR, right? It's like you don't need an exit ramp, it's just cost of doing business.

But that cost is going up and the effectiveness of that cost is going down if you're not good at ads.

There's a lot of people that are genius, right? I run a Facebook ads agency for quite some time, uh, but you're right, it's extremely hard, right? Like, even I had the B2C business that failed because the ads were in the green someday and, uh, in red some other days.

Now, the other challenge is, if you look at the SMB marketplace, not every organization is equipped with a Facebook expert, with the technology team, with the meta tagging, with the pixel tracking, with how do I connect the website conversion to— so most businesses on the lower end, which is where this most of the struggle is, have no clue if they should or shouldn't continue to spend on Facebook, right? So that's first on ads. Second thing I would say, yes, building communities is very hard. But when you're building communities out of interest, it is harder for sure. We're building communities out of the same mechanism that's working today. So you're responding to an ad, the same thing that's driving you to say, let me click on this ad. You're now doing it on a Circles app, right? It's not just, uh, we're not building a kumbaya community for a business. We're actually enabling a dedicated sales channel. So for example, let's take a Lone Star Car Park, one of our very successful clients. Because of the private community, what they used to do before was have an ad campaign, especially targeting days that they want people to come down to the, the car park, run the campaign, people would come down, they would leave. After Circles, they have recurring monthly revenue because they've been able to capture the people that actually interest— that are interested, that live in the 3 to 5 to 7 mile radius and are now on a monthly plan. So that business now, because of Circles, has monthly recurring revenue versus generally—

why would they pay? Why would they pay a small fee?

Because for $19.99 monthly plan, you get an awesome deal. You live 3 miles away, you don't want to buy a $29.99 ticket every time you go. So you get a—

consumers don't want to pay for random other platform when they clicked on an ad. That doesn't make any sense to me.

No, no, no, they're not paying for Circles.

So Lone Star Kart Park, the, the kart park, being the community, it's like school, right? Like school.

No, no, no, no, no, Circles is just a platform, it's in the background. The customer has nothing to do with it. Lone Star Kart Park, a go-kart place before Circles, would post ads on Meta, engage consumers. They would come down, they would buy races, they would leave. After Circles, because they've built a business community, those same people are now in a business community. So he went to the community and said, hey, you guys come down here all the time. What if I start a monthly membership for Lone Star Kart Park, $19.99 a month. Instead of you coming down every time you want to come down, you buy a ticket. Think of a car wash, right? You can go get a car wash for $30, or you can buy the monthly unlimited car washes, right? So because of the platform— am I— are you with me, Charles?

Yeah, but it's hard. Um, I, I— Mike, any thoughts on your side just to give the, the stage under VCs.

I, I, I think I understand what you're doing. I think to get to clarification, I would love to see a calculation of the, the TAM, SAM, and SOM, and, and, and, and see it as a litmus test because you're trying to change societal behavior. And I've seen couple of other opportunities which are trying to use community to drive credibility because obviously it's more credible, uh, similar to when you think YouTube or, you know, getting, getting your, you know, your songs out there and it becomes really trafficky if, if you're not spending a bunch of money to really advertise it and, and to promote it, right? And, um, so the community thing is really a big change to our society And I'm not thinking that you're completely off track on what you're trying to do. I just think it's a huge, huge peak that you're trying to run up. And I don't know that it's— I don't know it's takeable as a hill.

It's a very heavy lift.

Hey, James, any questions or feedback for Mir?

Yeah. So I I probably parrot some of the other thoughts that have been on here. Um, it looks like to me you're just trying to replace Facebook. Facebook is essentially a community that connects, allows vendors to talk directly, and has— I mean, it sounded like it was a Facebook Me Too. And so I don't know why anyone would choose you. And so the— from a Facebook standpoint, you're paying for Facebook ads, you're renting eyeballs. So that whole concept of renting is not wrong, but that, that's all you would do as well, right? I mean, you would be dragging eyeballs to their property just like Facebook does. Um, so I, I, I just don't know what the differentiation is. I, I can't see it. What I, what I do believe is that from a thesis standpoint, you do have a little bit of a point that the world is changing, right? This whole idea of search goes away, but the ads don't go away. And now you're going to have ChatGPT that people go to. And if you, you know, you will see the little ads on the bottom of ChatGPT today, right? I mean, any, any of these free services are still going to have ads and they're going to still drive traffic and they're still renting the attention. And there's no way to avoid that if you want to try to expand your circle. If you want your circle to be exactly what it is and you don't want to expand the circle, then a Facebook group or Facebook Marketplace for your friends, or, you know, you know, it's, it's, we already have that. So I, I just don't see, I just don't see the product.

So I'm going to ask you a question on that, James. I'm going to make you CEO of Facebook for a minute. If every business has a Facebook page and everything they post is reaching all followers of that page, where would Facebook monetize the platform?

So Facebook monetizes the platform by selling the data. So if you have a car wash that wants to sell to other people who like car washes then it would basically take anyone who showed any interest in any car wash on any page, and it would, it would try to drag them to your site. Why wouldn't you just be doing the same thing?

I agree, but what I'm saying is, if you, if you look at Facebook as a business model, right, Facebook is designed for you— everything you do on Facebook, the first question is, hey, do you want to boost it? And that's how Facebook's monetization works for, for today, right?

And all of that is going to evolve. Health, because that is— and if you listen to what the leadership at Facebook talks about, I mean, none of them expect the current ad model to exist really 5 years from now. Nobody is expecting that.

I 100% align on that because it's going to change. And most of the clients that we have signed up, right, the under $5 million to $10 million in revenue are beyond frustrated with Google and Meta spend, right? Because it's hard. It's a hard technical problem to solve. You're competing with some really big deep pockets. And if you go—

it's not about the deep pockets, it's the existing network. I mean, it's the network effect that is the problem. The problem isn't how much money Google and Meta have. I mean, that's not the issue, which they have a lot, but that's, that's not the problem. The problem is that they have already signed up and have a trust network with billions of people, and so they get that.

Although that trust is eroding in Facebook case, but yeah, it's incredibly hard to crack that chicken and egg. It's almost impossible.

No, it is. And Facebook has been— user adoption has been continuously declining, and it's a big red flag.

TikTok is increasing, right? Like, TikTok is, is hyper— and that's because they hacked attention. They have a product that hijacks the attention like nothing else ever did.

Yep.

So, well, I mean, I think that that's going to go away as well from a, for, from a general standpoint. I, I don't believe the whole endless scroll and all of that will continue to be around for us. I, I think it'll all evolve over the next few years. But just the reality where it is today, the network effect that you would rely on to bring your customers, the circle that you talk about, you're going to have to buy that or acquire that somehow. And that is what I just— that's the missing gap for me.

No, no, for sure, for sure. And, and what we're doing isn't more— we do say continue acquisition channels, right? Again, ads and acquiring new customers, we're not saying change any of that. That continues as you do it today.. But in the process, by adopting Circles, you're building an asset that you can monetize over just a year.

But people would go to school, right? And your, your beachhead needs to be stronger. Restaurant owner, as you may already know, Mir, incredibly hard to sell to, incredibly hard. They don't have cash for, for, uh, utensils, right? Like, they don't have cash for anything. It's super hard.

95% of restaurants fail, so I own 3 restaurants, so I can echo what Charles is saying. I mean, it needs to be— I stopped advertising on Facebook and I stopped advertising on Instagram and even CTV. I mean, I just, you just can't. It's different if I'm selling a product, like let's just say I'm a manufacturer and I'm selling a knit or a net. And I can get conversion on Facebook, but if I'm trying to get attention on Facebook to get traffic into my restaurant, there's no way. I mean, I shouldn't say there's no way. It's expensive for me to know whether or not that ad drove traffic. And so I completely moved away from social media and I'm not looking for a replacement. I'm looking for other, other ways that I can track that I know work.

So, Mike, I'm really not trying to sell you another platform to market your business. What I'm trying to sell you is a community that is focused and only belongs to the 3 to 5 mile radius of every restaurant you own. Those are the people that are coming back to your restaurant, not a stranger.

Well, the communities are also very dangerous, and I'll give you an example. There's been people who came in and wanted free stuff and we said, we're, you know, I'm sorry, but we, we're an independent business. We can't give you free stuff. And so they get on those platforms and they destroy you.

Oh, they do.

And so I, I would prefer if Yelp didn't exist. I would prefer if Google reviews— I, you know, we're over 4 stars on my restaurant. So I guess that's pretty good. I'd rather be 4.5, 5. And last year I was 4.5, 4.6. So we're going in the right direction. But I'd rather that not even exist. And I certainly don't want to open up another avenue for people. You know, opinions are like, you know what, everybody's got one. And the last thing I want right now is for more opinions just coming.

What I'm getting is like, right pain point, you've identified the right pain point, but maybe not the right solution is what I'm picking up. Sunny, any thoughts?

Yeah, can I just, can I just say that I, I I could be wrong, but I feel like we're grading the wrong pitch. Nobody's downloading a Circles app. Diners join the restaurant's community. So he's turning ad spend from an expense into an asset. So I guess my— so I get what you're doing. He's not trying to compete with them. So if you're invisible, right, this is my deeper question, Mir. What stops Toast from copying this in a quarter?

So the, the moats that we have right now is one, the community that the business has already built, which I think will really go in our favor. And two, as our platform expands, it's, it's the growth flywheel that's adding to the platform. Yes, I 100% envision competitors in any of the bigger players in the market like DoorDash. If I wish we would get to that day where we are threat to DoorDash and DoorDash tells customers You don't have to go to circles. We'll give you access to the customer. That's the—

what you're doing is you're actually turning their cost center in ads and turning it into something that actually makes the money because you're introducing this monthly recurring kind of community element. Is that right? But you're behind the scenes.

Nobody sees your brand.

Exactly.

No one—

my second call with you this week. It took me that long to get it, and I'm, you know, an electrical engineer. I see 20 deals a day. Uh, so I feel like you're on to something. And I'll be honest, even at the top of this call, I kind of didn't get it, and I've been going back for the AI for the last half an hour, but I, I think I finally get it. I think you have a messaging challenge here.

And, uh, yeah, the, the way you guys have read Wes, Wes Bush's book, right? The Red Ocean and the Blue Ocean. So if you're in the red ocean, I'm making a coffee cup a dollar cheaper, a day faster. I can walk up to you and say, here's a coffee cup, I'm making it a dollar cheaper, a day faster, you want to buy from me? Saying And you go, yes, mir sounds good. So Sunny here writes a check and says, you're gonna save me $5,000. I'm in the blue ocean. I'm not comparing myself to anything that exists out there. We're redefining the market because I envision the market changing within the next 5 to 10 years. This market is changing. The SMB market has already fallen off the radar. And Mike here himself, right, said 3 restaurant— an owner of 3 restaurants that I don't do Facebook Why? Because that's the only platform. Even today, Mike with 3 restaurants, I'll guarantee, has no way to reach that 3-mile to 5-mile radius of demographics without going to a global platform. You're dependent on a multi-billion-dollar global platform to find people in a 3-mile radius that have already come into the restaurant 10 times. We want to be the platform that helps you retain that engagement. And monetize it forever. That's the fun. And we are different. We are not doing what everybody else is doing. We're not trying to create cheaper Facebook ads. We're not trying to create a cheaper Google or replace Stripe or replace anybody else. We're saying the connection— what a software platform should do is provide the platform.

Okay, um, thanks for that, Mirt. Uh, Sunny, do you want to give a go at, uh, I don't know, your potpourri pitch you shared with me today? Saying that was—

I've got— yeah, I mean, for what it's worth, yeah, I'll quickly go through something if it's okay.

Mike, can you check your screen as well on your side, or it's, uh, or you guys?

Sure. Oh, sure. Oh, or sorry, go ahead.

Exit on my own or something else?

Well, if you don't have something, sure, maybe Sunny start. Um, but yeah, I was asking if you have a deck to share as well.

Yeah, I have something that, uh, is— it's a little bit raw but I'm happy to share it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go.

I guess, how do I share your screen?

Sunny, you can go first if you'd like. The plus button.

Okay, I'll be fast. Uh, let's see, let's see, let's see. Okay, so this is hot off the press. I am Sunny Ray, and Charles and I, we help the daring build legendary companies. Okay, so I'm gonna explain how we do that. So this isn't really a pitch for investors, this is more, uh, I would say a pitch to tell people like what we actually do at this like crazy place. Uh, so our— so in my view, our whole thesis rides on this one idea. We think everybody's doing sales wrong. We think everybody's raising capital the wrong way. And what they're doing is they're saying, hey, They're going out into the world, they're saying, hey, I'm amazing, I built this amazing widget and I have this amazing company and I want your money. That's what everyone's saying. Our approach instead, instead of getting going out in the world and asking people for stuff, we start giving stuff. And we believe that the most artful thing and most powerful thing to give is essentially a spotlight, okay? I've done now 20 years of business development, entrepreneurship, sales, marketing. Hosted personally hundreds of conferences, been to thousands of Google Ads SEO events, content referrals. The one thing that I noticed as a common denominator is you're essentially trying to get into the inbox, you're trying to get people's email addresses. So when I met Charles Cormier 3 years ago, and from a first principles argument, he convinced me that if you can get people's emails, why wouldn't you just start there? Now, a lot of people know that, well, guess what, you can get anybody's email. But then the question is, is how do they go about doing it? They reach out to those people, they're ICP or their ideal investor, and they say, can you give me something? Never works. Our approach is we go to them, we first isolate and identify who that ICP is or the ideal investor, and we go to them and we say, can we give you something? Again, a spotlight. That now turns cold email into something that's like mediocre or less than mediocre or arguably red ocean territory. And by coupling it with podcasting, you turn it into Blue Ocean. And we, we talk to 20 to 30, actually combined maybe 50 founders a day, and we haven't seen anyone doing what we're doing. And we think that your cold market, you can essentially turn it into warm. And, uh, and by using our system that we've developed, that one conversation, that podcast, which Charles and I do 3 to 5 times a day each, can be turned into clips and shorts, a written piece as well, newsletters, and the episode itself. Not to mention that the guest, even if you don't close them at the end, they're producing content in their network and all of their people in your ICP are retweeting it and resharing it on LinkedIn. So it has this multiplicative kind of effect. And then the most genius thing about Charles's system is that in one fell swoop, we do both marketing and sales. So in this kind of pre-interview and then this podcasting that we do in one action where not just creating content that is, you know, in our view, the best and most useful for both AI to pick up and for people to read, but also you're essentially, you know, interviewing people that are in your pipeline, which I think is next level genius. And the people that we're targeting for our founders that we work with are usually their customers, partners, and investors, right? And because you're the one that's asking on the podcast, you're essentially— that podcast doubles as a sales call, uh, because a good salesperson is also asking questions. Um, but now what we're doing is we're adding that spotlight there. This is a pull from my actual calendar this week, and this is what it looks like. I obfuscated the names and the email addresses, and our system on autopilot makes your calendar look like this. Like, that is begin with the end in mind. That is literally what we sell. Anyway, there's pricing information on here and all that other stuff. But yeah, that's kind of the short presentation. You guys are like, I don't know, the fourth person to see it. I just showed Charles yesterday.

I think it's good.

I love the animation of the slides. I think pretty much everyone that have a Slack now, they— it's like a deck, they should have animated slides. I think that is one thing. Love to see the podcast keyword earlier though, like just to understand that. And maybe even one sentence, right? Like, you're not the next Joe Rogan, you're the next Relationship Builder or something like that, right? Because most people think a podcast like a content play, but it's like a relationship building engine, it's a sales engine. Um, but yeah, I loved it. Uh, Mir, what did you think about this?

I was—

I just wanted to say that's the shift the market is going towards. Words. It's the relationship, it's the connection, it's the understanding. That's the only thing that continues to sell.

Yeah, I, I was, um, I think I was number 3 on Sunny's list, and I'm, I'm honored to have already been through this. And, um, and, and I'm looking actually to partake, uh, on, on the business that I'm getting ready to share with you on how we go to market. So I'm super excited about it.

James, any thoughts, comments, feedback?

No, I mean, it's, it's the obvious playbook from a number of people, and it looks like Sunny is automating it. Um, so from that standpoint, that, you know, it makes sense. What my, what, what my thought is, is that I don't know how scalable it is.

Right.

So I've gotten just by being on your stuff, Charles, and being on a couple of podcasts, I must have inbound, I don't know, 20, 30 people who have invited me to be on podcasts and 50% of them are terrible. Right. And I know as soon as I get on the call and, you know, they're on a bad connection and, you know, and it's just so unprofessional, it's terrible. So as soon as you try to scale this model, the quality matters and it's going to drive people away. I know it drives me away. I don't even respond anymore, right? Unless it's somebody that I know.

Right, right. Thanks for the feedback, James. Michael, do you want to try to share screen?

Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me hit the plus here.

Hold on.

So I hit the plus and then share screen. Let's see if that works. Share screen. Oh, I have to allow it.

You do.

And systems.

E.G., just while he's pulling it up, yeah, I think that's a great comment, by the way. Yeah, like, how does it scale? I mean, for us, we think of it more as like a service, obviously, right? It's more It's not like, I don't, we don't see it as a venture-backable business for that reason. But stay tuned because AI is flipping the equation. I think you could see Charles and I potentially building, you know, the first two-man billion-dollar company.

Pretty contrarian, right? Because everyone's going the AI route and, uh, we're just going the human route. We think like human connection won't disappear even with like AGI and superintelligence.

Right, so we're not, we're not forgetting about AI.

We're not forgetting about AI. Like, the only reason I can do 5 streams and 20 meetings in a day and be prepared for all of them and be able to follow up is because of AI. Like, I wake up in the morning and I'll tell my AI, because it has full context, just crank out 100 follow-up emails, and it'll like do it all based on what we talked about and everything. So I don't know, I wonder if some of these, you know, older VCs still exist, right? Like like I said, podcasting is a bottleneck, but we're also training an army of people. I actually just yesterday whipped up a group with Charles Cormier of 100 people like that in like a couple of hours of all entrepreneurs. And maybe some of them will become, you know, kind of podcasters. Many of them are already. So we're not gonna, you know, try and reinvent the wheel, but we do think podcasting replaces the sales— the traveling salesman, if that makes any sense. Like, this becomes becomes the new form of sales.

Um, it's good because there's so many steps, and as we can see right now, right, like the technical issues, the noise here and there, and it's hard just to try to systematize like this full system. And we need SOPs, right? Like we need, um, yeah, I don't know, agents to, to guide, or podcasters, which will still be humans for a very long time, and Quality is always an issue when you scale, right? And that's, that's a challenge to not rule the full— to not ruin their reputation, the full ecosystem. Hey guys, let's keep it to this for today. Thanks for showing up. Thanks, Mir. Thanks, Jane. Thanks, Sunny. I was, uh, 12th.

It