Founders pitch me their startups: Web3 gaming, AI scheduling assistant and more

All right, so on today's episode, we're going to basically do a pitch session. What that means is founders are going to come on and I'm going to hear their pitch and I'm going to give them feedback and help them make it 100 times better. Literally 100 times better. This is for founders, and it's for one of the hardest things they're doing, because we keep hearing that, like, you have to pitch 100 times and get 100 no's. Jeff Bezos did that, and this other founder did that. The Airbnb founders were selling cereal boxes and whatnot. It's hard. And I'm going to help you. So let's get started.

My name is Luke. I'm the founder of a company called Pixels. Basically, Pixels is building out the next generation of gaming, and we're using Web3 to do it. Pixels is sitting at about like, 400,000 daily active users. We have the, like, 168th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world. It's sitting at a market cap of something like 440 million as of like, 10 minutes ago. And what we're trying to figure out is basically, how can you grow games without spending money on ads? We're still firm believers in play to earn. We've been doing a ton of work in incentive design, and we've grown to this level of users without spending any money on advertising. So that's where the interesting stuff is to us. We still think that Web3 Gaming has a really strong place in the world, and we kind of view it as a future of not just Web3 gaming, but in general, the consumer application evolution, where most consumer applications are going to start paying more people inside their ecosystem to create value inside of their ecosystem, which Web3 Gaming is really just the starting point to get there. So, yeah, we've done all this growth, no ads, good monetization, and it's been super exciting. There's tons of deep tech to dig into here.

I think the first question, considering where the market is on crypto today is a very obvious one. And I would ask you, is this just a bull market business? I'd want a really good answer to that if I were you, because that is the obvious question in my mind. I might even ask you, why bother even raising any money? Because you seem like you're going to have cash flow and all that good stuff based on what you described. Be like, mid journey, stay independent.

Yeah, so we were monetizing in the bare market actually quite well. We were making about a month in profit through selling these battle passes inside of the game. And what we've been working on for the last two years, we've had a live game for two years, basically was benchmarking it against Web2 Games and making sure the metrics before any incentive design lined up against Web2Games. Then we even turned on monetization for a little bit as well to make sure that the traditional Web2 gaming metrics also lined up against Web2 games. So yeah, we were monetizing inside of a bear market. And now that the bull market is here, this is our time to really pour fire onto user acquisition. Basically when markets start heating up, that's kind of like free user acquisition money if you use it properly. And that's kind of the stuff we're experimenting with. It's like I'll use a token to create great incentive structures to help retain users, to monetize them and keep them in the ecosystem for a long time. And then, yeah, in terms of raising, this is a less traditional raise that we're going through right now is what I can say. We have a token that's live on the market and there's a few different mechanisms that we use to fundraise right now. We basically want like a balance of the types of raises. I will say this is not going to be a cheap raise. We're raising it like quite high valuation now just due to where market's at, where the traction's at. But it is an exciting time for.

Us putting the context of who your target investors are going to be for this and what they're going to be buying here, which is a discount on the token. And the token's already live. I would still consider not raising.

Yeah, we still have room to play on the equity side too. I haven't really explored that. I just haven't raised equity because I haven't needed to so far. And there's advantages and disadvantages now too. Like I'm a solo founder, solo board member right now and actually now it's at the valuation where it's like, okay, it's actually probably more ethical for me to have a board. So yeah, I'm trying to figure out what we do on that. And then two, we have a bunch of equities that we can still raise from, so that's the option too. But yeah, it's kind of hard to price us given like huge crypto valuation. So we have to figure that one out.

This is an interesting conundrum, in my opinion, that you have. That's not really about the pitch as much as about crypto dynamics in terms of your pitch. I would lead fully with the traction first. This is the way I would restructure the pitch. We've been around for X amount of years. Even during the bear market, we were pulling in in profit or cash or revenue, whatever, whatever the metric is a month. Now we're doing this much. I'm assuming it's higher. If it's not higher, we should talk about it. But I'm assuming it's higher. So now you've already got their attention. You don't just have their attention. Like, what is this thing? So then that makes everything else you say much easier because it implies a lot of things when you start with how long you've been out, what you've been doing in the bear market, what you're doing now, and then getting into. What is this business.

Yeah, no, appreciate it. I haven't done a 60 second pitch in so long, so this is good feedback on that. Normally it's like I get 15 minutes to run you through like all the cool tech that we're building. This kind of stuff. Yeah.

And one of the coolest things about a 60 second pitch is that's the pitch you extrapolate everything out of. I'm really glad that I talked to Luke. When a company already has traction and an extremely meaningful traction and they're in a kind of hot, new, weird space. Hot, new and weird. That's kind of kind of crypto to me. Maybe it's not new, but it's definitely hot right now. And it's always weird. I don't want to get into that. But it's always weird. Crypto is always weird. He's got so much to play with and so many ways to frame this narrative. But it wasn't until I really sat there and thought about it. And then he mentioned how Web3 is different than Web 2.0 and the kind of traditional Internet that it really clicked for me and what his pitch could be and how it needed to be about both monetization and growth. Hey, Austin, what's going on?

Not much. What's going on with you?

Can't complain. Going to jump right in though, because I'm excited to hear Howie from your perspective.

Sounds good. Howie is the fastest and most responsive scheduling assistant on earth. He's entirely email based, so you can interact with him the way that you would with an executive assistant. Ccing him onto an email thread and offering any parameters, like how can you find a time for us to meet in July or how can you find a time for us to meet tomorrow? Or if you don't specify parameters then it just offers the soonest availability as possible. And but that kind of control is one of the one of the reasons that some of our early users prefer it over booking links like calendly because sometimes you want to meet with someone the week after next and if you say that on a booking link and share the booking link, they can still book you tomorrow morning. And then the kind of guest experience as well is another reason that people kind of like it relative to booking links is how he's super fast, super responsive and can understand natural language. So you can just kind of coordinate the meeting. And we started working on it about 120 days ago, around day 100 onboarded our first paying users. So we have about 30 paying users right now. The waitlist is 1500 people now. So we're kind of just slowly letting in a small number of people while we get the product dialed in. And in terms of just meetings scheduled by Howie in January he scheduled 65 real meetings and in February 172 and then first seven days of March, 75 meetings. So so tracking for significant growth there. That is Howie.

Awesome. So I have tons of advantages here but I do know you're a multi time founder so you had the narrative of the pitch like perfect. But this is the one question that I think I would want to ask you and I think other people would too which is where does this go?

Yeah, totally. So I've spent a lot of time interviewing people who have have really high end executive assistants like executive assistants that make 150k sen sit at the desk next to them. And a huge part of the EA's job is to just give this person more time in their week in terms of the kind of being aware of the context switching and the types of meetings that are kind of give that the person gets energy from versus the energy draining meetings and the kind of buffer times that are preferred. The number of like video calls that work throughout a day for you and all those types of things. And the belief that I have is that all of that can be kind of productized. And so what we want to do is not even necessarily replace those people because that's a really small market. The people that can afford a 150k EA, but we want to give that magic of a person who works around the clock to make your calendar work for you to millions of professionals at a price point that millions of professionals can actually get it.

So you're really trying to productize the EA and you're starting with productizing scheduling just because that's the lowest hanging fruit to get in the door and some of the time, most time wasted. Is that kind of accurate? Ish.

Yeah, totally. I think there's a lot that, that an EA does and the things that we're excited about are all related to scheduling and calendaring. And so for, for quite a while, like we aren't, we aren't going to try to try to in the short term do a vast number of things that EAs do. But the belief is that like finding a time for a meeting, coordinating the, creating the calendar invite, like some of those things are the low hanging fruit. But then once you get that dialed in then there's a lot you can do around the structure of someone's day and week, giving them insight in advance of meetings and coordinating follow ups. Yeah.

So I love that additional context that you added. I wish you had it in your pitch. What I mean by additional context is it's two or three things. So one thing it's like I know you've talked to a lot of EAs. I'd want you to start with that because I think what you're defending is in your business is your wedge. So the way you defend the wedge is by talking about why this wedge is important. And I think the start of it is the tea leaf of hey, when I decided to start another company and you see what I did there. It's like another company have few before. They need to know that I interviewed this many EAs because I was really into understanding the repetitive tasks they were doing. Maybe you had an EA at the last job, maybe you've had one before, maybe you watched eas. I don't know what it is. Right. But it's this repetitive manual tasks that I'd be saying is your defense of why disrupt the calendar link and then obviously bookend it with where you're going which is like we're going to stay in this area until we are 100% sure. The repetitive tasks of calendaring is not anyone's problem anymore. The people who are doing that today that get paid to do it, they get paid a lot of money to do it. And there's these big businesses like Calendly and Cal and all these things trying to do it the old way, but the new way is you don't even have to worry about it and the EA doesn't have to worry about it and the machine's doing it. And if we do that. There's so many more areas we can get into because this is about the most important thing in people's lives, their time.

But I am curious, like when you, when you think about it, like, what would your concerns be about the like, big picture and like, of where it's going?

The classic analogy I would use here is like mailchimp, when they went free and built freemium, their whole thing was we want to bring the power of enterprise email tooling to every single business on the planet or every single person on the planet. There's like a level of that here that's really powerful that you have as well. And so I think with all those things, like, it's very hard to dismiss what you're doing as long as you can frame it that way. That's Austin. He's actually one of my investors for my company and a friend of mine. And so I had a lot of context. And he's also a multi time founder. So you saw a example of a damn good pitch for what he's doing. But if I were pitching this right now, there's a couple of those things I would add that help people see how badass he is when he, when he decided to do this. Because he probably talked to a ton of EAs and he used that to figure out what should he be doing, what is the right starting point for what he's doing. And then he was missing in the pitch, like, what's the big picture? Where does this go? Hey Omar, how's it going?

So everything's good here?

Awesome. Yeah, everything's good here. I'm glad everything's good there. So you got 60 seconds. Let's get started.

All right, I'm Inbox is a commercial open source email app and platform that gives businesses a modern email experience with tools for customizable communication workflows. And the best way to kind of really dive down into that is to give an example. So imagine you wake up and there's tons of random emails in your inbox. And overnight one of your biggest customers emailed you with an issue that the service is down. You wake up, you're having your coffee, there's too much junk, you don't want to filter through. You wait till you get to the office, a couple of hours later, you're managing to catch up with stuff, and by now the customer wants to churn. Your competitor also had an issue overnight, but they're using an inbox. And the difference is that when the customer emailed saying they've got a problem with their service and it's down 15 minutes later, the CEO, sorry, the CTO was added to the conversation automatically. Ten minutes after that, the on call engineer was added to the conversation and woken up using their pager duty. Whatever other system engineer fixes everything, leaves a note on the conversation saying, this is what happened. And they email the customer from engineering at whatever domain saying, hey, we noticed an issue on your account. You now wake up and you see a clear conversation. You email the customer. Is everything okay? The difference between those two situations is that in one is the old email experience. Everything is manual. Everything needs a lot of process. You got to filter through stuff. And with the new email experiences, we have the flexibility to be able to go through and create any kind of customized workflow or experience that you or your business needs. So that's an inbox.

I think you have something extremely compelling. I even liked your story, but it was too long. So the first piece of feedback is as you were telling the story. It didn't click until you got to the second half of like, you know, the CTO and stuff like that. But like even then when you were talking about it, it didn't click like click, meaning why is he telling me the story? I would 100% recommend, if you're going to tell a story, make it way tighter. And I would say lines like, we're not just an open source email client. We've discovered workflows that need to be embedded in email that are not today and we're embedding those. So the first part of your pitch was great because it's like open source email client. And then if you said and more, that would get me curious. Then you went into the example, I might call it out. I'm going to give you a quick example of how our product's different or what we discovered that needs to exist. That doesn't. Right. That's the key there. The unique differentiation. Then the most important thing is the close. What's the close on a pitch? All that dope traction stuff you said, but in the right narrative, in the right order. We're pre launch right now, but we've got the open source project running and we've been working on it and getting validation and feedback. Here's what our traction is so far with that context and then you can lay out some of the things that you said.

Perfect. That's amazing insight. I really appreciate it.

Open source, I probably have a high bias towards open source things right now. And so he got me right there. And what you'll See, with investors is sometimes that just happens because it's something that's on their mind. What he didn't know is that this email category and disrupting it in a real big way is actually something else on my mind. Because I truly believe if you were to build a productivity suite, you need email in a big way as part of your suite, like Google and Microsoft have. It's a very good pitch, in my opinion. It just needed a lot more tightening up and it needed some of those additions around traction. When you have traction, you need to talk about it, even if it's not customers and revenue and things like that. You need to tell a story about it so that it people understand you, your business, how you're executing, what you've gotten to, how far you've gotten, things like that. Reflecting on this pitch feedback episode, I found that there are more consistent patterns that I'm developing as I do more of these with founders that I have developed in the past. But also it's just solidifying some of my opinions. One pattern is people are in the idea phase that shouldn't be in the idea phase if they're trying to raise money. And then one other kind of reflection is like traction beats everything else, except when you don't know how to describe the traction in a way that aligns with your customer and your opportunity. And I think we saw this pattern in a few of the pitches where there was tremendous traction or an ability to speak to it, but probably not enough alignment with the story, the narrative, the customers and the market. All right, thanks for listening to the show today. It was another great pitch feedback session. If you want to join the show yourself and pitch me and get my feedback, go to Heaton Show. The show is produced by Supermix. Thanks for joining.