Business Modeling Masterclass

Let's go make no excuses now I'm talking here and now I'm talking here and now let's go your time is running out I'm talking here and now I'm talking here and now it's not about what you've done it's about what you doing it's all about where you going no matter where you been it let's go, let's go Let go There is no better time I'm talking here right now I'm talking here and now let's go Right now is where you shine I'm talking here right now I'm talking here right now it's not about what done it's about what you doing it's all about where you going no matter where you be let's go let's go let's go let's go tonight let's make it happen let's make it happen tonight let's make it happen let let's go let's go.

All right. That was. That was a good start. Got me pumped up. Got a few of you pumped up. So it is 1204. Four minutes past. So why don't we get started? We are looking pretty good on the attendance. Should be an exciting session. My name is George Bandarian with Untapped Ventures. Welcome to our business modeling masterclass today. And this is going to go quick. Hard to do a master class. Whoops, wrong button. Let's see here. All right, there we go. So some housekeeping. If you haven't already. Just drop your name and location in the chat. We want to see who all is here and welcome you. It is. The webinar is being recorded. If you have any questions at any time, you could let us know. We have the Q and A feature enabled. So if you have any questions, drop it in the questions box and I'll get to that after we get through the core of the masterclass today. We do use polls pretty actively, so we'll ask for a couple polls along the way, make sure that you're responding and then buckle up. We're going to go quickly and I think it's going to be for some of you, a great learning experience. For some of you, it's going to be eye opening and you're going to have some great takeaway value and nuggets. So what we're going to cover today is obviously business modeling best practices. That's why we're here. Some of you are getting started and so how do I start? Right. And how do I kind of Save months and years and, and just basically adopt the best way to get started. Some of you have been at this for a while and you might be stuck or have facing some roadblocks and, you know, hopefully this will help clear those up. Many of you are trying to raise money and so you're not. Maybe some people are having success, some people aren't having the success they want, and it's not clear. And I can maybe shed some light from a VC perspective, like what I see when I look at decks and canvases and business models. And ultimately this should help you get more customers and more investment. So that's what you'll get out of today. The way we're going to do it is in terms of going through the two aspects of a business model. Your business model itself and then your traction model, which is related to that. And then I was going to do an example. I was just going to make something up. But last week my team challenged me and they said, well, you know what, why don't, why don't you actually pick somebody from the audience? And at first I was like, well, I don't want to put them on the spot or, you know, how and what. But my team reached out to some of you that registered last week. You might have been contacted, asked a few questions, talked to a few people, and we were able to pick somebody. And so I'll pull them up today and what we'll do is we'll actually teach, go through the lessons, but with the actual live example. And I think that could be really fun and exciting as well. So that's a, that's a surprise, a bonus, and should hopefully help make this more exciting. From there, we'll go into Q and A. I won't spend too much time about myself if you don't know me. I'm George Bandarian, born and raised here in LA. I grew a company called AMI, sold it in 2018. I wanted to have as much impact and make the world a better place. After that, I took a lot of time to think about how I would do that. And the answer to that was Untapped Ventures, where we are a venture studio and a venture fund, meaning we're a fund. So we're a vc, we invest, and we're a venture studio, meaning we build ourselves. So we found and fund. We fund and found companies primarily in B2B, future work, kind of HR, tech and mental health, personal development, primarily in those areas. And, you know, untapped is really part of what we're all about. You know, we're we're looking for those amazing untapped founders. We are all about helping those founders, you guys that are here today tap your untapped potential that's inside of you and ultimately create companies that create big untapped markets. Right? So, so that's a little bit about us. So we have our methodology, our untapped traction system that we guide our startups and our founders through, whether you're going through our accelerator, whether you're going through our studio. And so it all starts. The core steps are the validation and traction steps, but really the entrepreneurial journey starts with mindset. And we covered that last time. Right. So last time, if you weren't with us last month, we did a webinar which was the 10 must have mindsets to go from idea to unicorn. And part of what we talked about is what separates successful entrepreneurs today is not different skill sets, but it's different mindsets. And so you really got to start off thinking about your thinking and thinking about things the right way. And these were the ten that we covered. And as a matter of fact, today we're going to go deeper into the first three, which is, which is the business modeling. So if you missed that, you could catch the recording. Nelda from my team is here. She'll share a document right now which actually has links to everything. So it's going to have links to that recording. It'll have links to the materials you'll need for today's masterclass so you could follow along. And as a matter of fact, it includes. So when I went through our methodology, it includes our first two playbooks and tools and that's what we're going to go through today. So Nelda, if you haven't done that already, please go ahead and do that now. It should just be a Google Doc that is accessible to all and you'll have a bunch of things that I'll talk about as we go through this today. But anyway, so that's what we talked about last time was mindsets. And what we're going to talk about today is ideation. So let's go ahead and dive into it. But I just want to take a moment and get an idea of kind of where people are at. This will help us and kind of customizing things as we go through. So I'm going to launch our first poll. So let's see. There we go. So it should be on your screen now, so go ahead and just let us know. Oh, and I forgot to give a special shout out. So we have our usual Collection. As you guys are filling that out, we have our usual collection of founders and startups and advisors and venture studios that are here. But today we have some special guests. We have a number of students that are here today, which is, I think on midterms day as well. So thank you for joining. I know we have some students from usc, my alma mater, some students from ucla, our good friends across the way, and we also have some students from overseas from AUA and others. So I appreciate you guys joining, especially if it's right in the middle of midterms and I promise to make this worthwhile. So basically, tell us where you're at. Are you just kind of learning? You know, I'm in school, I'm just learning. Great. I'm actively searching. And we do like to get close to 100% participation on these polls. So unless you're not paying attention, if you could just take a second and tell us where you're at. Are you ideating? Are you validating? Are you building, raising, scaling? So I'll give it another second. We have about 50 people that have already responded. So if you haven't responded, go ahead and do that now. As of now, from what I'm seeing, and I'll share this in a second. Go ahead and end up poll and share the results. So, yeah, it looks like we have a lot of people learning and validating and building and a few people searching and ideating. Looks like ideating is the most. So that makes sense. Not as many people raising and scaling, which also makes sense as well because this kind of business modeling is the start of your journey usually. So cool. That's helpful to know and let's go ahead and dive into the materials. So if this is a business modeling masterclass, what is the best tool for business modeling? And the answer to that is it really is the Lean Business Model canvas. I know there's other canvases out there and we'll talk about that, but the Lean Business Model canvas is the best tool and there's a lot of boxes there, but where do I start? And you know, the best place to start is really to think about not being, not having the innovator's bias, which is, hey, I have an idea, I want to go build this thing and you know, what, what problem can I solve with it? But really having the innovator's gift, which is, let me take a look at what the trends are, what's happening, you know, what are people doing and how are they solving their problems today? And where can I see a better way to solve a problem. So, in other words, you know, what are the problems worth solving? Because if you're going to dedicate the next three to five to 10 years of your life to a venture, certainly if you start something, you know your ego is going to get you committed to that for at least one to two years. Why not make it, like, the best thing it could be? So take. Take your time, go slow at first, and. And make sure you're really finding a problem worth solving. Right. And so the way we do that is by paying attention to the out, outside, four boxes. Right? So we call this the leaner canvas. So we just kind of collapse everything. And let's just start with the most important, which is this leaner canvas. So with that said, what I'd like to do at this point is as. Because we're going to go through the materials with. With one of our participants. So at this point, I'm going to pull up Alfredo with Gustavo AI. He was one of the people that filled out the respondent to our team, saying, hey, I'm okay being put on the spotlight. So let me go ahead and pull him up now. So I'm going to promote you to panelists, and if you accept that, Alfredo, you should be able to come on. So it looks like now you're on. That's me. Hey, I'm back. Yeah. How are you? I'm good.

I'm good, man. Pumped up.

All right, cool. So I know, you know, you and I had a quick prep call on Tuesday, just. And you mentioned that you were okay, you know, being put on the spotlight and all that, but why don't you just take a second and introduce yourself? And. And, you know, we only talked on Tuesday at 4, like, right as the Dodgers game was going. By the way, speaking of the Dodgers, that's. That's going to be tough. Now, coming back from 3:1. Do you think we can do it?

Yeah, I have hope. I'm from la, so you're going to see it.

Yeah. So we got to win three games in a row. We'll see if we can make it happen. Anyway, so. So you actually have done did a great job. You kind of dove right in. We had a brief call. I really just wanted to make sure you were okay with. With, you know, being kind of this public coaching. And you said you have thick skin, but I just want to ask for the benefit of everybody again involved. So are you okay with me being direct and transparent and kind of just giving you coaching, giving you the good, bad, and the Ugly, public, good, bad.

And the ugly is the best advice, man.

Okay. All right. For the benefit of yourself and all involved. You're okay with that? All right, awesome. Good to see. All right, so now maybe you could tell us a little bit about. Just give us the, the one liner on Gustavo and more importantly, kind of bring us up to speed. We talked 40, less than 48 hours ago. And what's happened since then?

Sure. So Gustavo AI is a SaaS application that helps professional service organizations, consultancies, internal departments really increase the speed of analyzing conversations through the use of recordings like the recording we're doing right now. So yeah, normally they do that, but either got to go through video or you don't catch stuff. Really trying to increase the speed that insights and scope is identified. Hopefully get people out of, out of so many meetings.

So yeah, so, so we had a brief call. I didn't really give you any coaching. I just wanted to make sure that you know, again, you were going to, you were a good candidate for this. But you. I did share the links to the, to the materials. You dove right in. You completed both playbooks, you completed both tools and you were emailing me with all kinds of like AHAs and breakthroughs. So what breakthrough insights did you have that kind of shed light onto potential blind spots that might have been holding you back as you've been working on this over the last three years or so?

Yeah, so I think kind of my background as like a software engineer, architect, I had a very intense focus on technology as a solution for whatever. As an agency owner, I kind of started removing myself from that mindset a little bit and you know, started looking at dollars and cents. But then I think when I went through the materials and you kind of put me through the ringer the other day, it kind of like had like a couple things snap and click into place, like understanding like the existing alternatives and how to understand those and leverage, you know, what the solutions to those things are and you know, what problems they cause and you know, how to really explain what you know, not the features of the product, but what the product is trying to solve. What human real world problem the product was trying to address. I was really stuck with that over like three years.

Yeah, and that's super common. We work a lot with technical founders. So like our, our specialty is strategy, sales and marketing. So it's a real complement to kind of very technical or product focused founders as we work with them on the studio side or even as they come through our accelerator. So you know that that's what you're experiencing, every aspect of what you're experiencing is what the other hundred people on the line, many of them are experiencing. So that, that makes a lot of sense. So why don't we kind of dive into a little bit about. A little bit more about what we just started here. So if I share my screen again, so I won't go into a lot of detail, but, you know, I think what's common about Alfredo that might be common in your journey is a lot of great progress. Right? So my team had asked them, like, hey, what have you done and where, where are you stuck? So, you know, if you look at it, you know, he's been putting in a lot of time and money last three years, got an initial ux, initial prototype, found the CTO development team. You know, he's gone ahead and created his business model canvas, created the value proposition canvas, got him into some programs, created a pitch deck, you know, identified risks. So he's done a lot of work over the last three years. Right. And then when we asked about the roadblocks, you know, here's what we, what he shared, which was, you know, developing customer acquisition, developing marketing strategies. So I've done a lot, but there's still some fundamental things that I'm a little bit stuck on. And then I think one of the things that jumps out at me is my, you know, my co founder and I are unable to dedicate more than a certain percentage of our time. And, you know, to me, when I see that, it really is based on conviction. Right. So him and his co founder do not have the conviction to leave whatever they're doing in the belief that this is a greater opportunity, which is really normal. Right. So people wait to quit their jobs or whatever the case is. Some people dive right in. And I like the burn the bridges kinds of founders, but in some cases, you have to, you have to like, you know, have that confidence. And our system is all about giving you that confidence because there is that side of you inside that knows whether you have something yet or not, whether you validate it yet or not. Because when the signals are clear, you develop that conviction. And it's very clear to see this in founders. So I think what you're hearing in Alfredo is he's definitely a lot clearer than he was 48 hours ago. And hopefully we can make some more progress as we go. So back to the leaner canvas. So what we look at is the customer segments. I think we all understand who's the market, what are your customer segments, and then who are the early adopters? Right. And for the early adopters, what we really want to look at. And we're going to flip over to Alfredo's canvas in a second, but what we want to look at here is what's changed. So don't necessarily. So here is what, here's what Alfredo had done. And so this is kind of the first specific example. So I'm going to go ahead and switch into the. So here is Alfredo's canvas. Let me just refresh it in case you've made any changes to it. Actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to my other screen so I'm not looking down. Alright. Alright, cool. So here is his canvas. And so I'm going to click on this button, I get into the leaner canvas and this is what I do. So if I, if you guys want to know, like, you know, how does George do what he, what he does? This is the first thing I do. Anytime anybody shares a canvas, I block out everything. I first want to see how well have they nailed the leaner canvas. So as I look here, I see, okay, customer segments, professional services organizations, consulting agencies, product companies, enterprises. Okay, so people that need to track scope, right? Because his, his product is all about, you know, automating and improving the way we track scope, using tools out there, leveraging the recording, AI, machine learning and all that. So that, that makes sense to me now. Early adopters, this is what I was beginning to say is that, you know, it's common to take one and say, okay, I know this one the best. These are my early adopters. But what I would, what I would teach you guys today is focus on what has changed. Who are the early adopters that have had some big change that's impacting them? That would be the most likely group to go ahead. And it's not necessarily a customer segment. What you want to look for is what is a common behavior pattern, a common criteria of triggering events and behaviors that you could, you could group a certain set of people by. And it's not necessarily, not necessarily the customer or market. So one of my favorite things about early adopters is Mike Maples, the VC from Floodgate Capital. He has a podcast, Starting Greatness. That's my favorite podcast for startups. If you guys aren't listening to that, I definitely recommend you get on Starting Greatness. And also he's come up with this thing called back casting, right? Which is like essentially go into the future, look at what the technology trends are, what the user adoption Trends are what any regulatory trends are. Imagine what the future is going to be like. Create a solution that would be needed in the future and then bring it back and make it a reality today. That was kind of my short version. We might do another breakout just on that if you guys are interested in that. It's a really fascinating way. We've now incorporated it into our ideation process. But the easy way to think about that is what has changed, right? So if we're thinking about the workplace, there's a lot of changes that have happened at work that may or may not impact Alfredo's solution. And I'm going to ask you in a second, Alfredo, but, like, there's, you know, the whole remote work, hybrid work. There is, you know, the great resignations happening. You know, there is global competition. If I start to get specific, specific for Alfredo's, there's global competition happening. I think, you know, videos has become, you know, video recording has become very common as more and more things are on video, like police body cam footage. Right. And, and more and more things are being recorded because we have sensors everywhere. My Tesla's recording everything, right? So, so, you know, we might be, we might say that, hey, I would imagine a world where all meetings are going to be recorded, at least the ones that are on Zoom. So that's just going to be normal. Like, it's going to be normal to record all meetings and to go back to it. In our case at untapped, we pretty much record everything just so like, we don't have to slow down and stop. We can go back to the recording to capture anything that we needed to go back to. Whether it was a moment of genius, somebody set some great, you know, copy, or came up with some great ideas and flow. We don't need to stop and transcribe that. So we, we record everything already. So I could see that as a trend. Right? So you start thinking about what are the trends and what's going to happen in the next two, three, five years and that are going to create. And what are the things that are happening right now that are going to create triggering events. So, Alfredo, I've given you a lot of time to think about it. So if we were going to go back and change your canvas and instead of putting the niche that you're choosing, how would you think about what early adopters you would. How would you think about grouping early adopters that might have a triggering event that might make them more likely to adopt something like this? Sure.

So when I start thinking about triggering events I'm thinking about like the really like painful events that have happened when I've been dealing with this. And like the most tangible one is like when scope is missed and there's like a contractual agreement. So that's like one thing. And then like the actual event is like a renegotiating of scope and budget. We didn't scope enough, we didn't make enough budget because the scope wasn't correct. Those are renegotiations internal to the team. Or worst case scenario, when it's an external team, external client. You know, I've even, I've talked to some, I've done some customer interviews and I almost got into this situation before, but like getting into a breach of contract lawsuit, which is like the real juicy one, if you miss scope and someone's paid you a lot of money to do something.

Yeah. So this is common, which is, these are great triggering events. Now the question is, how might you find the people that have had these issues? How might you group them and find them? Where could you go? What community? What. How would you find them on LinkedIn or in a group or how would you run an ad? And it's hard because this is such a, it's, you know what I mean? It's like, it's not like, it's not like 22, like college graduates looking for a, you know, summer abroad experience. Like, you know, so it's one of those that it's common, but it's just, it's, it's hard. So there isn't that many lawsuits going on, I don't think. Yeah, yeah. But any ideas on, I think really.

Like, you know, like the missing scope and I guess anything like, usually, I guess, tools that help manage project scope. Like some of the tools that I want to integrate with jira, project managers, you know, maybe online communities that help, you know, project managers find solutions for managing scope.

Okay, Something along those lines. Yeah, I like that. Project manager communities. And then you want to like insert yourself into or you want to open discussions. Find and create discussions around scope management. Yeah. Okay, awesome. So I like that. Right. So like your early adopters would be go where the project managers are and start having conversations and, you know, maybe creating content around scope management and, and then the people that are having this issue will come to you and they might come across these segments. You don't know. But now you're, you're kind of starting with who's had this triggering event, who's facing this issue. So I think that's good. So why don't We. Anything else you want to add there? I think this was a good refinement of it.

That's good.

Okay, so, by the way, let me. What I should have done is I should have cloned this. But if you're okay with it, we'll just work off of this. Okay. All right. So once we've done that, then the next thing we want to do is go to the existing alternatives slot. And so if we go to the existing alternatives, what you'll notice is. But here, what we want to understand is how do they currently get the job done? What do they use? And for the audience, notice that we didn't say competition. Your direct and indirect competition is not your only competition. It's how do they solve it today. So, like, how do people manage scope today and avoid missing items? And I thought Alfredo did a great job. Well, they use Google Docs. They have multiple people take notes. Maybe they have a dedicated business analyst. Maybe just the meeting takes longer because we're stopping to clarify at every point. Maybe we add somebody. Maybe we add an admin or an assistant for headcount. Maybe we record it already and maybe we go back to the recording and maybe we. Maybe we use an automated transcription service. Like, I know there's like a number of them that integrate with zoom and stuff that have AI that just kind of transcribe the whole thing. And so. So I thought. I thought. I thought you did a great job of laying out the existing alternatives. And I think what you said was this is like, the area you had your biggest breakthrough, right? Where you kind of started to realize, like, well, shucks, they have a lot of options, right? So I'm like, I'm really competing against all these options. And how do I design a product that they don't say, well, we already do this, we already do that. It's got to be like, exponentially better and really solve the problem than what they already do, Right?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So I thought that was good. So now let's move on to the problem. So then really, how will you cause a switch? Right. So, yes. List the problems worth solving that this customer has that are there's some triggering events happening. And keep in mind how they're doing it today and what they're using. And ultimately, what are the problems worth solving? Right. So now let's take a look at what you came up with. So not enough time to read through notes thoroughly enough to identify scope. Having to wait for business analysts to finish documenting scope. Increasing employee utilization to cover scope. Excessively increasing budget spend. Not enough time to listen to entire conversation Recording transcription. So I guess, what are you thinking about as we were having this conversation? And how would you. I think these are all problems. Nothing's like, it's not jumping out some. Nothing's jumping out as, like. As a strong. I don't know. What are your thoughts.

In terms of, like, the key, like, problem that would motivate somebody to. Yeah, exactly.

You asked my question better than I did. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think, like, I guess it's the issue of trying to really identify, like, it really boils down to, like, money, like, the budget spent. Like, if you're putting too many heads, all of a sudden budgets go out of proportion and people are losing money or people are getting fired or something. And then also I think, especially with, like, increasing time and utilization and meetings, like, everyone is, like, so burnt out. They were burnt out before COVID with, like, meetings. So those are like, the, you know, the key problems where, like, you know, if I could get a couple hours back to my life to spend with some, you know, my family and not be in front of a computer, then, you know, I think those are, like, the. The tangible, like, problems that you could feel. It's like a person, you know, as a consultant, like, I don't know any consultant that works less than 50 hours a week, you know, and everyone's, like, already, like, fried. And I don't know any, like, partner that likes seeing their budget, like, go up or sees, you know, like, that zero coming close before work has even started. So.

Yeah. So then, you know, I think what I hear you saying is like, meeting burnout, you know, just tired of more people at more meetings to clarify scope and requirements over and over again.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Like, am I saying it in a way that it's kind of some of the same things you're saying, but am I saying it in a way that somebody's going to start nodding their head saying, yeah, I feel. I hate that. Right.

Like, yeah, yeah.

And then budget overruns. Like, we didn't understand. We didn't understand the scope proper, you know, or client didn't explain it properly or now they're changing it, bottom line, you know, we're not going to be able to ask for more money. It's causing, you know, bottom line, you know, causing, you know, less margin. So I don't know. I'm not saying that these are, you know, just. Just different ways of thinking about it. Like, I think, like, a single clear problem. Sometimes people try to list A lot. And I think like, what I saw from like from some of your work is you're like me. I tend to be thorough too. So. But like with everything else in life, or most things in life, less is more. So, you know, it's better to have one crisp problem that you're going to nail versus like a lot of things because it just makes it more confusing and creates more complexity. So if you can summarize this down to one or two or three problems, that you could put it in front of this early adopter project manager. Or is it a project manager? Or is it the executive stakeholder? Maybe it's the project manager. You could you start by is it like a. So we'll get into that later.

Sure.

So anyway, so I would go, I would do another edit on this based on our conversation. Right? Yeah. And try to clarify. I think it's all there. I think you have the symptoms there. So. So now I would say this, this looks like it's at a good start. Right. So like we understand that people that do consulting and these kinds of professional services engagements, especially the ones that are having issues keeping up with the scope and changes and they're having issues, they're trying to manage things differently. But ultimately it means more time, more meetings and budget issues. So we understand the customer and the problem really well. Now we're ready to go on to the rest of the canvas. Right. So now we can pop back out and start to fill in the other boxes. And what we're going to focus on today is the most important ones when we pop back out, which is really the solution and the UVP unique value proposition and the revenue stream. Right. The monetization model. So if we go out, take a look at what and by the way, I think I said it before, but if I didn't, anything I say to Alfredo, I'm not just saying to him. Right. I'm saying to all of you guys. So if I ask a question about, about, you know, whatever I mentioned, you know, as far as clarity about the problem, it's not just to him, it's for, it's for everybody. Right. So Alfredo's just volunteered himself to be a great example to teach through. So let's take a look at your solution. So multi context notes based on recording text, audio, video images, traceable conversation, scope items, automatic meeting, recording integration. So to me, and I had some other people from our side review this as well last night, like maybe it's similar to the problem. I think you state things like features, items. Yeah. Like Features. Yeah, well, like, it doesn't. You're not really telling me, like, the solution should really be about the benefits. Yeah, and I'm not saying like, don't tell me what the product will do, tell me what the product will do, but tell me what it will do for the user. Yeah, I don't, I don't see that here. It's just, it's not clear. I don't even understand. So maybe we could take another stab at it.

Yeah, sure. So, like, you know, based off of what you just said, how you helped me kind of clarify the problems. So meeting burnout, like, would reduced meeting times be a solution? Help reduce meeting times?

Well, yeah. Yes, but let's let like, let's not skip past what the solution is. So, so what, what will the product actually be or do as it stands now in your, in your mind?

I think. Yeah, I guess I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what's a feature and what's like the value proposition, which has been my problem for three years. But.

So for example, what do you mean by multi context notes based on recording.

Really, that sometimes it helps to see a note, sometimes the note doesn't make sense and it's better to hear the recording. Sometimes a screenshot of a whiteboard is more important than what was said in the recording. So it all depends on the context of how you're looking at something. Being able to have all of the multiple types of ways that conversation is engaged in audio, visual, textual.

How about something like this? So SAS software that integrates with meeting software like Zoom and teams to pull recorded meetings and create context to scope items via text, audio, video and images through both user and machine learning input, or something like that. Sure, sure. Is it, Is that a little more clear on.

Yeah, yeah. So we're kind of discussing the product. This has software and we're kind of, I guess we're, we're talking about some, some features, but like, like Zoom and Team pulling recordings and recording. Meaning that's kind of a feature, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. All right.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, so, and then like another suggestion that I would have. And it's funny because in that meeting that my team said, hey, why don't we have a live audience example? We were just joking. We're like, hey, you know, like it would be great to have. Because a lot of what we're doing is capturing action items. Right. Next steps, it'd be great to just have like we have like a Alexa when we, you know, we talk to an Alternative, of course it's going to come on my Alexa that's on my desk. But like, it'd be great to have like a, hey, whatever, like. And the example we gave was like create a task to assign, you know, for George to, you know, update the calendar by Friday. Right? Yeah. So that makes it a lot easier because if you're part of your goal is you want to build something that's cool and automates it, you know, because you and I talked about you have a big problem if you, if, if we think a big problem to solve. If, if your goal is to have the machine learning go in, understand what was scope like? Humans don't understand humans, let alone like the AI. Right. So we talked about that on Tuesday. But if I'm calling it out now, that's a constrained use case and it's a lot easier because I'm giving it the format it needs. I'm telling it who to assign it to, what the action item is, when, when the due date is, what project to assign it to. Right. So if your app is your AI is Gustavo, we could be in Zoom meetings and I could say, hey, Gustavo, in Asana for the marketing holiday party. Assign George to contact the vendor by Friday. Right. And then we could assume that that should get right, like, you know, that that should work and stuff like that. And that'll take maybe some adjustment. But then if everybody starts talking that way in meetings because then they know it's like automatic, automated, then that could be pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So something like that might be like a voice assisted AI to capture scope. Sorry, the capture action items into PM system. And I don't know if that already exists.

I was trying to say that with like so in the unfair advantage section like that, anchoring important sections of conversation. I was trying to hint to similar to what you're saying right now where you'd be able to speak like a keyword.

George.

That sounds pretty important. And then when you look at the context of the conversation, you know, you don't have to look through an hour conversation or look at minute, like 46. You kind of just have like a marker, like an anchor where like, you know, that important keyword was said. So you're like, Forget the previous 30 minutes. You want to dial into what Jordan Alfredo was talking about, you know, when he hit the easy button and it got marked in the conversation or the important button.

Yeah. Or actually, yeah, you could do that too. I mean, maybe there's a button to make it easier even. Although, hey, Gustavo, seems like it's pretty unique. But if there's a button in Zoom.

I think there's both. There's a. There's already a feature for both. Both of those things right now. I think people, the way that I've seen it, people think differently. Sometimes you say it, sometimes someone else on the team is like, oh, this is important, but doesn't want to stop you.

Yeah, perfect, perfect. So start describing that. So like, there's a button and you know, that allows any user to capture scope item. I think it's just, it makes it clearer because, like, I'm an investor that I came from the company, I built, we did enterprise implementations. We were a consulting and professional services provider. But like even me, when I read some of your bullets, it doesn't. I'm not saying you're doing a bad job. I'm just saying you could make it a lot clearer by just. See, this is. Sometimes people fill out the problem and, and they do. You know, humanity is facing an existential crisis. Like, no, like, what's the problem your actual customer has? Like, you know, you. It's. It's best to state it the way a user would state it, either in their own words or if you were talking to them. Right, in plain English. And that's something that a lot of people get hung up on. All right, so I want to keep moving. By the way, if you guys have questions, put them in the Q and A box. I don't see any. Any questions there yet. So we will get there shortly. So from there, what we want to do is, is make sure that we were nailing the uvp, right? Because. And people hear me talk about this a lot, there's a lot of me too solutions out there. If you've thought about it, chances are others have thought about it. You really need to go out and once you do come up with this, go out and do the research and see if there isn't already three to five other startups that are being funded doing some version of what you're thinking about. You kind of have to assume there is. You just.

There's like 10 at least that I've identified.

Yeah. So then why you. Right, like, what's going to make this different? And you know, what I like to say about this one is like, if. If you. If your website was just one sentence and then your cta or if you had a billboard and it was just the one line, like, what would be your UVP that clearly not some fancy marketing copy, but really, like, clearly compellingly states, like, what it is that's different that your user needs and is worth paying attention to it, like really kind of boiling it down to, you know, what separates you from the competition that you uniquely do that, that matters to your customers that they would be willing to pay for. So this sounds really generic. You know, you really have to make it specific. And I'm going to speed, speed up a little bit. But so I think making it specific, the old example of Domino's pizza, right, like 30 minutes or less or your money back at that time, when it came out like 20 years ago, was very clear and compelling. 30 minutes or less or your money back at that time. Now we, we expect that. And so, so it has to be really clear. And then my other comment here on high level concept was I don't know if I'm supposed to know what TRIMT is, but I don't. So you want to make sure your high level concept is like, you know that you're going to assume that whoever you're presenting this to, if you're meeting with an investor or an advisor or a customer, that, that it's, it's something that they understand that they're familiar with whatever reference you're giving. So anyway, let's go to the revenue stream. So what you have here is subscription white label. So all that makes sense. I do want to spend a couple of minutes on the Traction Roadmap, which is the next thing. Right. So he's identified. Let's just say now we're good with this. The next thing we want to do is say, all right, well, is this a venture scale business or not? And the way we determine if it's a venture scale business is we have our Traction roadmap tool. Right. So what I've provided you guys is for everybody that's in attendance, we provided you our first two playbooks, the Mindsets one and the Business model Design one, and our first two tools, which is the lean canvas that we went through, and the Traction roadmap. So Alfredo filled out the traction roadmap, but I think he might have gotten hung up a little bit. He chose Marketplace accidentally. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to reset it, if it's okay with you, and, and we'll just start from the, from the beginning. And I think that'll be valuable as well. Sure. Have you thought about how you would price the tool? Yeah.

In terms of the, the model, like subscription? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was going to be subscription. I was trying to select the, the multi sided model.

Yeah. Yeah, that, so that one's not available yet. So then you chose Marketplace, which is kind of like the ebays or like the Airbnbs. So that, that's not the best one for you. I think that's, that's what kind of threw it off. So for, for you, even though you, you're right, you have, you're selling B2B, you're likely going to have a user that's different than the purchaser. Yeah. So it's what, it's what we consider a multi sided. Since that's not available yet, let's just go ahead and do direct. Sure. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select direct. So the minimum success criteria is as a VC, I need to know that in three years from now this could be a $10 million business. Right. So that, you know, we're looking for that venture scale growth. So I'm going to put in $10 million here and then the idea is it works, we want to work backwards. Right. So if it's 10 million and three years, it's a million in two years, it's a hundred thousand in a year and that's like 10,000 in 90 days. Right. So it's basically we want to go through that progression because we're building an exponential, you know, hockey stick curve business. So your subscription is, is it per user or per account or how are you thinking about it?

Per user, Per user.

C. Okay. So on average, I know it's going to range. You might have a small customer with just 1pm using it or a big one. But, but what are you, how many users do you think you'll have?

Average customer, I think for small size agencies, like 10 seats for enterprise. I don't even really know how to gauge it.

Okay, let's just start with 10. And then how much per seat are you thinking about?

$69 per seat.

$69 a month?

Yeah.

So you think a small agency would pay $690 for a month for this.

Tool if it saved, if it made them more and save them more?

Yeah, I would just look at their other SaaS tools and you know, and think through that relatively.

Yeah, I kind of, I priced it a little bit more premium than Jira, for example. And I think it was like at $41 and I tried to give it a little bit of premium but it was like, you know, the head to head for what they're already purchasing is about like $49.

Yeah. So generally they have a tough time thinking like if I'm paying $50 for Jira and JIRA does everything. And this is just going to be one little module. Like people have a tough time paying more than Jira what they consider a small part. So, so I, I would just push back on that right now and say, and we can talk in the next webinar on validation and pricing. I, I could go with this right now. But I would say based on everything you've said, my coaching would be start off with 25, you know, 25 per seat. So if they have 10 seats, we assume our average billing for the customer will be $250 a month. And let's just see where that lands usually. Sure. Okay. So retention. So on this, you know, unless. So we don't know yet. But you know, I like to use three years on average, kind of an average enterprise one. If the tool is working, they stay with you longer. If it's really good, they, they cancel sooner if it's not working well. Acquisition. Right. So this is about converting your web visitors into trials. So 10% is what we say. You have no data. So you know, we just Recommend Starting with 10% and then conversion of trial to paying customer 10%. So 10 and 10 is a good place to start. Referral, we expect virality, but until we can't prove that out, we just recommend leaving it at zero. And then the growth scale is, we're operating on the Fermi system, so you know, we're going to leave it at 10x. So really I just needed to put in a few variables there in the beginning. And it, it pops out my customer factory and it says, so if I want to reach 10 million per year with the pricing model of $250 with the expected customer lifetime value of 3 years with acquisition rate of 10% and no customer referrals yet, will need about 2200 visitors per day. Hitting our website in after year 3, just so we can maintain our business model at about 3,300 customers. So that's, that's basically where he needs to get to. So this is kind of the first reality check of. All right. So in order for this to be venture scale, I'm going to have a business where I have about three to four thousand customers in three years that are paying me about 250amonth. And then you're like, okay, well what does that mean? What does that look like? How would I get there? And we can dive more into that next time. But the important thing to take away from here, what I like about this is as we Work our way backwards. It says like, all right, well then in order to reach product market fit, I need 334 customers. In order to reach my. You know, this is like Series A, right? This is seed. I need to be at about 30 customers by seed. And to raise Series A, I need about like five, six customers. Right. So that kind of where this lets you end off is where I need to be in order to go to a VC like George that invests early stage and say, hey, I validated this. I've either sold or pre sold a certain number of customers and I've proven that I'm on track, that there's. That this is a problem worth solving, that customers have this problem, they want to solve it. With my solution, I've gotten six customers to give me pre orders for it, or maybe I have the product and they've actually signed up for it. So I'd like to raise a half a million or a million dollars from you and I'd like to go ahead and, and do that. So that's, that's the traction roadmap tool. And I know we kind of went through that fast here at the end, but hopefully that was helpful. This one's a little easier to just kind of plug in the numbers and think through it. So with that said, what I want to do is I just want to. Alfredo, I want to thank you for volunteering. Thank you for coming up. Hopefully this was helpful. Yeah, you'll. You'll have the. Don't go anywhere, guys. I'm gonna just wrap up here and take some Q A. I know we're at the one o' clock up mark, so. So let's see. I'm just gonna leave you. If you want to just mute and go off camera. Alfredo, thank you for again volunteering and. Sure. So yeah, so let's go ahead and wrap up and take a few questions. I'm willing to stay a little extra. Hopefully this was valuable. I don't know how it went. We tried it with the. This new format. Hopefully it was really helpful to see a live coaching example. So. So we're going to jump into questions and as we jump into questions, let's just talk about some next steps. So definitely go do what Alfredo did. Dive into the playbooks, dive into the tools. When you're ready, let us know. We'd love to take a look at it. Me or somebody from my team happy to jump on a coaching call with you. Our next webinar will be the training will be on the Idea Validation Masterclass. Where we'll go through how to think about goals and risks and validation, planning, all this good stuff. If you're a little further along and you want to kind of get involved, let us know. There's a few ways to do that. Next week, we'll be@the.la summit. Really excited that the LA kind of scene is back and events are happening. So we're happy to be a community partner with la. And so I'll be there and a few people from our. Our team will be there and we're giving you guys a 50% off promo code if you guys want to meet up over there. So with that, let's go to questions. I just want to open up one. One more poll real quick as we go to our questions. So I'll leave this up, let you guys take a look at this. Essentially, this is just in terms of next steps. Helps give us an idea of what kind of content and offerings you're looking for from us. So while you guys are filling that out, if you guys can take a minute to do that, what I'll do is take a look at the questions. Okay, so Khalil is answering if the webinar recording will be shared with us. Yes. Everybody will get an email and it'll have a link. In the email, Gerald is asking, where can I find the traction roadmap? So I'm not sure about the link that John provided, but if you click the link that Nelda. Nelda, can you provide the document again? If you can provide that link in the chat, that gives a link to our private experience that we have set up for you guys that includes the two playbooks and the two tools. I think John is linking to a different experience, so I would not use that one. So hopefully that answers Gerald's question. So Christian was asking the same thing. So. And Kevin answer that for him. So, okay, Caroline has some feedback for Alfredo. I would recommend, Caroline, if you want to follow up with Alfredo, that sounds, you know, he. I'm sure he'd want to hear from you just for the sake of time. And then Cal is saying, all right, the incumbent, our main competitor startup in our space, Back of House Restaurant Management, just raised a 30 million.