Perfecting Your Investor Pitch with Anne Dwane, Village Global

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Your goal is not to be selling investors. Nobody really wants to be sold stuff. Your goal is to be compelling, to be the person with the mission and the idea that wants people to come along with you on the journey. And don't think of it as pitching, presenting, but more of sharing, teaching, conversing. It's just a much more winning strategy. The more skeptical, the more questions you get from investors. It's a better the sign because the worst is a meeting where everybody's just head bobbing and you're like, thank you very much. And they go.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness out of to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio Asana and many more.

Excited here today got Ann from Village Global, one of the top early stage funds on the planet with some of the biggest names in technology, from Zuckerberg to Bezos to Sarah Blakely invested as LPs in their fund. Adam's gonna school us on how to pitch VCs and wow them on your first go. You know, as founders, one of the hardest things, you're building your heads down, building the company and all of a sudden now you gotta pitch investors. And pitching investors is not always the same, like pitching your customers because you're trying to sell them on your product. Now here, you're selling them on the vision, you're selling on the mission, you're selling them on the metrics on the team and it can be very awkward. And Ann is going to show us how to wow them and get it right the first time. Ann, super excited to have you here. How are you doing?

Wonderful. It's so great to be here. Thank you. And I'm So excited to have so many entrepreneurs in the room virtually and in the cloud. And it's really never been a better time to be a founder. It is incredible, right? You can do more. You can do more efficiently. There's lots of support. So it's great.

You have this amazing fund and the who's who of Silicon Valley and just global tech is invested in it. And how did you come up with it? How did you get started? Your backstory?

Sure. So I was a longtime founder, started my first company back in the 1900s. It was called Military.com, a social and professional network for service members and veterans before either the term social or professional network existed. And we raised capital, but almost went out of business in 2001 because the dot com implosion back then. And then we kind of reset and grew very fast in a very disciplined way. And then we were acquired by Monster.com in 2004, which was kind of a job site. And they were our largest customer at the time. And then went to Monster, grew that company to over a billion in sales with that team, and then went back early stage to a little company called Zinch to make it a cinch to get in and pay for college for Generation Z. And we raised some venture capital for that. And then our largest customer turned out to be Chegg, which is the solution to a chicken and egg problem. But that was a resource for students, textbook rental and digital services. And that group, they acquired us and then we took that company public together. Before SPACs were cool, IPOs were cool. And then did a bunch of M and A with them, and then really decided to switch into venture maybe about four or five years ago. And it's really a joy to support founders like you. And then Village, we launched in 2017. And at the time the venture landscape was really crowded and we knew we needed to be a lot different, not just a little bit better. The idea is that an extended network can help founders learn and grow faster. A lot of venture firms were still operating like it was a cottage industry or like a hub and spoke system where you would talk to one partner and maybe you'd have their little network. But we were really by a couple of big trends. One is the idea of scouts and Sequoia piloted this. But the idea is don't wait for entrepreneurs to come to the firm. Put money in the hands of really trusted operator angels who are the first call for founders, people who are early trusted and helpful. And so most of our first checks as fund are written by those people. So It's Vivek at Superhuman, co founder of Superhuman. It's Jesse Janet at Lumi, it's Adil Mamoudji, who's head of product at Automattic, the maker of WordPress. So lots of really helpful operator angels who help us not just discover entrepreneurs, but support them as well. So then the second idea was it's great to get money from LPs, but is it possible to get even more value from them? So we went out to some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world and we asked them, are you interested in supporting the next wave of game changing founders? And to a person they said yes. And we said, if you had a more extended network when you were starting your company, would that have mattered? And almost all of them said yes. So we asked these really successful founders, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Magic Johnson, Abby Johnson from Fidelity, Sarah Blakely, Bob Iger from Disney, bunch of other people for not just money, but some time and to lend their name to our initiative. So even Zuck got board approval to have his likeness on the website. And turns out three and a half years later they have engaged. Many of them have followed on in rounds for the companies. They kicked doors open at their companies and other companies that they're related to to be early customers of startups in the portfolio made some really key introductions. So what we tell founders is if you're breaking out, those doors are open. And the third element of the network, besides the operator angels and then the engaged LPs who are successful founders, is really just a connected network. Just again, Traction does such a good job with this, but how do we connect founders to one another? So you have peers for support, but also people maybe a couple steps ahead that help you see around corners. And I've raised a bunch money as an entrepreneur over the years, but I'd never raised in a pandemic. And the reality is if you're raising Series A, the best people to talk to now are people who raised Series A in the past, you know, month or two. We really try to unleash that kind of community among founders. The good news about entrepreneurship is you probably are an entrepreneur because you don't just love following the rules, you're breaking the rules, you're making new rules and you're seeing the world as it could be, not as it is. And the topics we'll cover today are meant to give you some frameworks for thinking about something. There is no actual playbook, but sometimes having a framework can help you be an artist. From there I think it was Picasso who said that. Right. The best artists train classically and then they make up their own rules. So that's the purpose of today. And then the other thing is, I remember Charlie Munger who worked with Bill Gates or Bill Warren Buffett, he gave a commencement speech and his commencement speech wasn't what to do. He said, I don't know what to do, but I can definitely tell you what not to do. Don't let your relationships fall apart. Don't like overindulge in substances or something like that, and don't get help. So on the entrepreneurship front, what not to do, there's a few things just to keep in mind. So showing up and throwing up, telling an investor everything about your business is not the goal. The goal is to catch their attention and we'll talk about specifically how to do that and really get them to lean in, start talking and get to the next level of curiosity. If you're. And I'll just don't monologue and don't ramble. So think of pitches more as conversations than as sales presentations. Also, don't be defensive. If you get a question, acknowledge it, embrace it, and talk through it. Because part of the reasons is that investors ask questions is to get the answer to those questions, but also to get to know you and how you deal with uncertainty or risk or challenges and embrace the questions. And the reality is sometimes we can all learn a lot from the questions that are asked. And kind of a related point, if you get a question, honor the question, because for two reasons, it may actually be a good question, even if you hadn't thought about it before. And we'll talk about this a little bit more, but part of what you're trying to do in these conversations is, is win the investor over. And in a sense, early stage investing, the rational answer is no. Most early stage startups are not going to thrive. So what makes a yes? Part of that has to be emotional, has to be belief. It has to be a relationship with the person. And the reality is, early stage investors know they're on a journey that may take a long time, like years, like a decade. And so they want to be with people that they trust and that they believe in and they want to have rapport with. So think about building that relationships. And then the other thing, don't leave a meeting without understanding next steps. And if the next steps are, this is not a good fit, it's better to know that. And as a founder myself, I remember a quick no was so much better than it Involved process that gets to know. And one of the things that is disappointing is often you leave an investor meeting and you say, wow, that was a great meeting. And you get your hopes up and that's good. But many investors, most investors are in the business of having great meetings with founders. They are legitimately interested. But most investors end up funding a very small percentage of the companies they meet with. But it's totally in their interest to leave the founder feeling like it was a great meeting. The key for you, and we can talk about what questions to ask, but to really understand if there are next steps. And the key to that is trying to make this a conversation throughout. And at the very least when you're leaving, say things like, how did this strike you? What would need to be true for you to invest? What's holding you back? Or what gives you pause? Or specifically, what is the next step? Interesting to pull you behind the curtain of what's going on in the investor minds. Many of you are probably angel investors or have helped your friends raise and things like that. But just like all people today, like founders, investors are busy. And so when I think about the most important things to do for an investor pitch, the number one thing is to grab their attention. The second thing is to pique their curiosity. The third is to drive to clarity on what you're doing, why you're doing it, why now, why you're the right people. And we'll go through some of those questions before, but to drive clarity such that they can get to conviction, which means they write a check. But in today's world, it's really important, especially in zoom. But it happens whether you're in person or not, is that first step of grabbing attention. So let's talk about how do we get this? And what's interesting is attention is even more important than time, right? We're so fragmented these days. So there's a guy, Arif Halali, who used to be at Sequoia, and he wrote an article that said, start your pitch like a James Bond movie starts, which is grab the attention of the user. And you don't have to start at the beginning. You don't have to start with some boring market size thing. Your entire goal, no matter how you do it, is to grab the attention of the investor. So a couple of common ways people do this is a story. So this is a personal epiphany, which is for me, for the business. Zinch, one of the founders, was a first generation college student and he really wanted to go to the college of his choice. He was first in his family to go to college. And so he put together a portfolio of his computer science awards, his photography, his basketball awards. And he sent that along with his application and with the tagline I am more than a test score. And he was accepted to Princeton University. Went there, went to that campus and talked to more students, both there and other schools, and realized there were lots of students just like him. So that wasn't even my story that I was selling, but it was a story and it worked. And the funny part is I can do that little pitch on autopilot. So think about either a personal epiphany story which explains what you're doing, why it's a big problem, and why you are doing it. That's you had this learning. And the epiphany can be the ratio of guidance counselors to students in the state of California is 1,000 students to one guidance counselor. Or did you know that a billion pounds of plastic waste is created every day? Like it could be a shocking statistic. Really works well. Again, you're trying to get attention. The other is a question. Have you faced this particular issue in your life or do you think your portfolio company, for example, is facing this challenge? So the goal of this is to get them to answer the question and make sure that they're engaged. In general, you have about 30 seconds or a minute to gain people's attention in a meeting, whether zoom or not. So seize it. The other is really crisply describing a problem, hopefully viscerally like, how do you make this problem come to life? Even if it's not a problem that maybe your run of the mill investor might have, again, can't emphasize enough, grab that attention right from the get go. Next, how do you pique curiosity? So you want them leaning in, you want them asking questions. And it's okay. If an investor asks you a question, it's actually a great sign. It means they're paying attention and they want to learn more. It's not a challenge to you. Back to the don't be defensive thing. Okay, so how do you pique their curiosity? One is to overcome any common objections and questions. So let's just say you're doing something in the food delivery space or the online meeting space. Very exciting space. But there are a lot of companies in those spaces today. So maybe instead of not addressing that, you should address that right up front. I bet you're seeing a lot of pitches for X kind of business. Here's why we're different. Or there's three ways we're different or our approach. Because the reality is many businesses have a reputation. It's been tried before. It's really hard to do X. Like for example, selling to governments, really hard. Getting tech adoption in the construction industry, notoriously difficult. If there are things that you've heard or you perceive about your market, address them head on. Because that's what's interesting is you're defying conventional wisdom. The other just say, and this can't emphasize enough, your goal is not to be selling investors. Nobody really wants to be sold stuff. Your goal is to be compelling, to be the person with the mission and the idea that wants people to come along with you on the journey. And don't think of it as pitching, presenting, but more of sharing, teaching, conversing. It's just a much more winning strategy. The more skeptical, the more questions you get from investors, the better the sign. Because the worst is a meeting where everybody's just head bobbing and you're like, thank you very much. And they go, the next step is clarity. So how do you give clarity on what you're doing, why it matters, why you, why now? And that, I like to say, is about insight. So one of my favorite phrases is comedians don't see a different world, they just see the humor in the world. Entrepreneurs don't see a different world, they see the opportunity in the world. And what you're trying to convey is what do you see about the future, about the way things are working today, about how they could be? That is different because this is generally what people invest in, right? It's an idea and it's crisply stated. Simple is better. And I often have founders say, my business is very complex. I can't just put it in a one liner. And I'm like, look, we can talk about nuclear fusion in one line. Find the simplicity beyond the complexity. Because the reality is you cannot sell a complex business to employees, to hires or to investors. So yes, it may be extremely complicated, it may be extremely involved, it may be very technical, but teach me why it matters and what it is, simply and even. This is a core skill for entrepreneurs. And then the other is sometimes founders talk about why they've got a good product, but investors generally also want to know why it's a good investment. Meaning is it defensible? How big does it get? Can you realize the potential? So good product is important and often it does start that way. But the best pitches pitch it as an investment. Something where 1 and 1 equals 11 over time. Okay, so now how do we get them to conviction, which is where they open the checkbook, which is a very old analogy, but send the wire. So two things there is establish credibility for you and your team. It could be that you have years of experience with something. It also could be just you've done your homework and you've talked to hundreds of customers in discovery. But why should we believe you? And the reasons to believe that you can figure this out, especially early stage, you're not expected to have all the answers. And in fact, if an investor asks you a tough question, it's great to say that's a question we think about every day, right? Or and here's how we're tackling it. Because generally startups don't have the answers. And if you really think about it, startups don't have many advantages. They don't have more money, more people, more brand, more expertise than big companies. They don't. Big companies have smart people. They really do. It's what a startup has is focus and the ability to learn and iterate quickly, unencumbered by a bunch of legacy stuff. So your ability to share what you believe and how you can have evidence that you can figure this out or have proven things that underlie your business are really important. And even more than what you've accomplished, if you're early stage is how and how fast you've done it. Because generally we're betting on a great team solving a big problem. Most of the time the solution that is outlined in the beginning has to evolve, often significantly, right. Over time. So give us reasons to believe. Again, you can figure it out. Okay, so I'd like to say this. Investors are people too, so treat them as humans, meaning this is about starting a conversation with them. And I would say in the first couple minutes of a meeting, even a zoom meeting or an in person meeting, really think about how you're going to make everybody comfortable, how you're going to make them engaged. And that generally comes from just a little bit of research. Oh, congratulations. I saw you just invested in this company. Can you tell me about what caused you to get to conviction? Or I saw you're a fan of X or I saw your latest tweet or your latest blog post. VCs like many other people, like to hear themselves talk. And I don't know if you've ever seen the research, but if you have a meeting and you record how much time each person spent talking out of the meeting and then you survey them about how the meeting went, in most cases, the people who talk more think the Meeting went better. That doesn't say it's an effective thing and I'm going to fail on this metric for this presentation. But getting VCs talking is really good and so thinking about engaging them again, getting their attention and then even asking them some questions up front helps you, not the least of which you're actually getting intel. And my favorite is that sometimes someone will ask upfront to an investor, what's your average check size these days? And the investor will say okay, we're writing a million dollar checks or something. And then at the end the investor says what are you raising? And the founder will say oh we're raising about 500k. Okay, so wrong answer. Meaning you should tell your either don't meet with the investor or match the hatch know what they're doing. So active listening upfront can really help you make sure that you're tuning your investment pitch for success. And I would say whenever you pitch an investor, you are trying to close that investor. You can always vet them and decide whether to take their money later after you have the option to take their money. Big lesson for me, the number one job of an investor meeting is to get them to lean in to you as a founder and move them towards wanting to invest in you. Having them fall in love with your business is number one. Then you can talk about terms, right? Too many founders talk about terms up front and the reality is investor hasn't even decided whether this is something they'd be interested in doing. So have the investor fall in love with the business, then talk terms and then you can figure out if they're the right investor for you and you should be choosing because you're getting connected to these folks for years. Be authentic to yourself for sure. Because the reality is if people don't want to invest in you, then they're not the right investor for you. That being said, Kim Scott, who wrote a great book called Radical Candor, says you don't judge communication by what comes out of your mouth, but by what lands in people's ears. So you can still be authentic but be sensitive to what will the audience hear? Like what is their context and how do I make sure that my communication is as effective with them as possible and be relevant to them.

At what point are you ready to go and raise that seed round? How should people think about it?

Okay, there's no right answer here. And the key is to find the investors and often you find them by seeing what else they've invested in and whether they're product driven or vision driven. Or team driven or something like that. But I think you're ready to raise when you have a big vision really essential for venture. You might have it crisply, but you think this can be big. You have something to talk about, an idea, an insight with reasons to believe. The reasons to believe may be the fact that you've done 200 customer interviews. The reasons to me believe may be that you have 1,000 upvotes on product hunt or that you have a demo to show them. So I think unfortunately you just have to test the waters and try to think about which angels might be a good fit. And then I would say in the beginning, before you run a process, meaning I'm raising, say, would you be game to talk about X and give me feedback on why? Right. Because many investors will take a meeting before a pitch. Anytime you talk to an investor, they're probably considering you for investments. So I wouldn't, I would be thinking about how do I be compelling to them. But no set rules.

Most VCs or investors give you 15 to 30 minutes to pitch. How do your strategy need to change based on time allocation? And this seems like a very transactional situation here. So yeah, I'd love to.

Yes. Meeting times have gotten a lot shorter. I think it's a benefit for all involved. So a couple things. One, really be strategic about your opening. If you're going to be in there and just start pitching, I think it's a mistake. I think you have to open up with something that says, I heard about your post. I read your post. I appreciated this. I saw you invested in this. Can you talk about this? Can you tell me about what you're looking for in investments? What does it take for you to get to conviction and then just listen and have them talk. And if they talk for a minute or two or three at the beginning of the meeting, it's not wasted time. The second is I would have more conversation than think about presenting slides. You may want to have slides and we can talk about whether you send them or share them or whatever, but in a minute we'll talk about that. But really think about it. A conversation. That conversation likely follows the flow of a deck, which is part of the reason of doing a deck, just so you have it. Talk for about 10 minutes, trying to get as much conversation as possible. And then hopefully the rest of the time can be Q and A and be prepared. If the crickets are chirping, how would you stimulate conversation? And that really comes from knowing them.

I think if you go in like it's a transaction, then your body language and your pitch and everything will signal it's a transaction. And that's the antithesis of trying to build a relationship. Can you describe the best pitch you've ever heard?

Yeah, I can tell you it started with a personal epiphany with some shocking facts and then a team that was really robust like on that problem and that they had lots of reasons to believe and very clear about what they wanted to go do next if they raise money. So that to me makes an ideal pitch. And the goal of a 15 or 30 minute meeting is not to tell them everything. The goal is to get the next meeting, get their interest, pique their curiosity and get them to the next meeting. And there's good ways to get to the next meeting. I'd love to have you meet my co founder. I'd love to show you the figma or the product demo or whatever and that can be a really good follow up.

Building a relationship, it's like dating, it's like sales. You don't go to a bar and ask somebody to marry you. Optimize for the number. I'm attending a number of virtual pitch events. I can't really have a conversation in that setting. Figure out who are the VCs there, go into their LinkedIn and their Twitter and try to engage their prior like comment there, reshare, comment on their LinkedIn posts, try to add them, try to get a meeting ahead or after. You have to give to get. And so when I meet people I try to understand like what are their motivations and try to connect them with that and that ends up being like a first step to.

Exactly people, right? Yeah. Get to know the people, get to, you know, I mean, and love the process because the reality is got to, as I say, kiss a lot of frogs. But you can enjoy the process or not and every meeting is an opportunity for you to learn about them, for you to learn about the ecosystem, learn about feedback on the business, all that stuff.

So yeah, one anecdote I wanted to share. We were never raising. And then we as Bootstrap founders, We closed our 23 million USD Series A and that came about as a story. There was no pitch, there was nothing. We knew them through the traction community. They did an event like this with us and met some investors. We got to know them, but we never thought we were going to raise it. It just happened proactively. But it's so funny, over the years I always had an investor pitch deck and because investors are referral partners for us So I just pitched them and I feel like all those years of pitching different investors when I didn't need money, give me feedback to just improve the conversation.

Yeah. And it reminds me a little bit. And again, lots to learn from you, Lloyd, on this, on building community and raising money and bootstrapping a business and building a real business. There's a great book, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazi, I think. And his point is if you're not well networked, don't wait, just start, start putting people together, start asking people to talk about a topic. And I think that some people think they aren't well networked and they don't know where to begin. But I think, Lloyd, you nailed it. Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter is probably the best VC. Twitter is a thing now and you can get to know investors, you can reply in their threads and stuff like that and it is good and you will stand out, I think, if you're saying meaningful things to them. Great. Okay, so let's talk some tactics about the pitch deck or your notion memo or something like that. So the goal is clear, concise, simple communication and organization of your own thoughts. I think especially at seed, if you are walking someone through a presentation, maybe a fail, versus a conversation that takes them through things and the goal should be that your pitch, very high level, elevator pitch, a little bit more detail, whatever, to a full pitch is all available to you in your head. It's organized enough that if they ask you a question, you can jump to address it. You can collapse certain parts or expand certain parts based on their interest level or their questions. So again, just try to organize your thinking. The format doesn't matter. And some good things to remember are what do you want people to walk away with from the meeting? And it can be five things or less. I would say if you're doing a deck, 10 slides, max, max, max. And again, you don't even need a deck or you can have a notion or whatever you want. The contents you're trying to cover are dependent upon your business. But in general, and I'm happy to share any of this list but the vision, because generally the criteria for venture investors is can this be big, right? The problem you're solving, your solution, the opportunity size, which is related to the vision. But opportunity side, is it really good? And sometimes people are very vague about this is like a $6 billion spent in X. And that's okay, that's good. Not always is that available to a startup. So I like to use things like if X number of businesses were paying us about what they pay Slack each year, we'd have 100 million in revenue. Because many people when they say, is it a venture scale business? I think not always. A proxy for that is, can you get to $100 million in revenue? Relatively straightforward, whether it's a consumer business or B2B. Now there are certain things that we invest in like nuclear reactors and space stuff or whatever that's very different, that has a different kind of profile. But for many businesses, it's good to have a bottoms up thing. And then the reasons to believe in traction. Why now? And the team, why you? And then I would be thinking about if you had money from this investor, what would you go do? And the worst possible answer is this gives us 18 months of Runway. Because my challenge to you is what are you going to go do? And why don't you do it as fast and efficiently as possible and amount you're raising? It's interesting. I don't ever put this in writing in the deck unless I'm really. I have a term sheet and I know exactly what I'm trying to fill. In general, I focus on is the investor falling in love with this business. And then we can talk about term. Most people at pre seed sell between 5 or 10% and 20% of their business. Or hopefully not 20%, but somewhere in there, 5 to 10, 15% at seed, you're probably selling maybe 10 to 15%, then you don't have to do all those rounds. And then at a you sell 20 and roughly. And maybe it's 15, maybe something like that, but roughly. So the amount you're raising is often a signal, often not always a signal for what the valuation is. One tip I found helpful is sometimes I have a deck with the first slide being executive summary. And it says some of this like vision, problem, competition. And I start talking and I say, are there certain elements that you want me to dig into? And people often say, yep, I think you're in a crowded space. I would love to hear how you're different from competition. And then you can go there and you don't even have to move the slides if you don't. But you're having a conversation about that. So now let's get into some process things which are helpful. Before the meeting, there's a question, do you send or not send the deck? I am not a big fan of sending the deck in advance, especially early stage. I try to get a meeting with a blurb, meaning a couple of sentences of why the investor might think this is interesting. Sometimes they'll ask for a deck. Feel free to send a deck if they ask for it because that might be the key of the meeting. You do not have to send the whole deck. You could send a teaser deck, you could send a demo, you could send a loom, you could send anything. But your goal is to get a meeting do should you use Docsend again? I'm curious what Lloyd thinks and all this kind of stuff. I think Docsend is great. I don't gate it with email capture and thing you're sending around. You could assume it gets forwarded. We don't try to do that. But the reality is if your business is so replicable that somebody with a couple slides can go do it, you don't have much of a business and you don't have to put your IP in the DocSend again. You're trying to have either a teaser to get them going before practice your pitch. The best single pitch practice you can ever do is to record yourself in front of your phone and watch the video. And it's painful. Why am I saying why did I replicate that? How could I make this look like more energetic? How could I be clearer? All that stuff is great. The other is with your friends of course, and then just trying to get a normal human to make sure that you're explaining things simply. It's not that you can't go deep, but in the beginning meeting you're just trying to get attention, curiosity, all that stuff. Okay, so during more conversation than presentation, if you are finding that you are talking most of the time, it is likely that the investors have tuned out. I'm worrying about that with you right now. And then after the meeting I always send a follow up. Maybe with the deck that's up to you, but I always send a thank you note addressing what questions or conversations came up and treating them like a human right, building that relationship and hopefully there is some rapport or a follow up.

We said we'd take a few pitches at the end, so please raise your hand and we'll do that.

One liner.

I'm going to let Anatoly talk here.

So we're building a business tool for SMB owners which is a messenger plus deal making tools to basically help fix the broking process of entering into agreements. That's the one liner.

Good job. I think what's nice is what you're doing for whom. And I wonder if it was a pretty product centric because you did get it to the end which is fixing you said what you're Fixing. I wonder if it makes sense to make that pain point more visceral and. Or to add a little bit of the potential here. But that may not be needed because probably people realize how big a problem this is. But maybe could you say the last part again about what you're fixing?

Yeah, yeah. So I had the more boring one liner, which was like, we're building an agreement platform which helps you enter into an efficient agreement process without compromising speed and legal security. But based on the conversation here, try to make it a little bit more exciting. And what we're trying to do is we're eliminating email and a bunch of bundled tools, and we're providing one single platform for owners, key decision makers, people who enter into billions and billions of dollars of contracts daily to finally have a platform where they could do it simply and very efficient.

Okay, so again, there's no right answer here. And I think you're very clear in what you're doing. I just wonder if the most interesting James Bond moment was small businesses or businesses sign a billion contracts a day and it's fraught with email and back and forth, and we're ending that with one platform to make agreements simple, secure, something like that. Just what's the shocking statistic or the big problem that gets the attention of the user?

Yeah, yeah. We have a review that there's probably $8 billion of contracts in business and professional services signed daily.

Okay, so here's an interesting question about the bill. Okay, I know a billion sounds like a lot, but the 8 billion is actually irrelevant to the platform value. The number of transactions is actually more interesting. Does that make sense? Because you're not probably going to charge by what's the size of the contract. So think about. That's one of those things where the tam, you're not really. You're telling me how big it is without telling me your tam. Whereas if you said there's a billion contracts signed every day and too many of them are fraught with back and forth and email, and we have a single platform for fast, secure contracts.

Anthony Ortiz.

Hi, can you guys hear me?

Yep.

Hi, Ann. Thank you, Lloyd, for holding the space. So my name is Anthony and I'm the creator of SmartPlate is the world's most accurate food tracker ever invented for elite coaches, health coaches and athletes and consumers. Essentially, we're building the world's first fitness and nutrition all in one platform to tackle the 4 billion serviceable obtainable market in the United States. We're partnered with Tony Robbins. We've raised a little over 2 million in equity and we have already sold about a thousand units since our soft launch on November 19, 2020. We have a team of repeat entrepreneurs and one of the world's leading AI lead researchers who got his PhD under the auspices of Andrew Wang at Stanford. Thank you.

Great. So the thing that pops and this may be, there's again, no right answer. Very clear presentation, a good energy in your presentation and stuff which is important is the backing is good but the results are stellar. Who said some things like we're the world leading, world's first whatever. Like, part of those I dismiss as like, how are we qualifying that? But we are doing X and since launch in November, we've sold a thousand units. We've inspired the confidence of Tony Robbins and X and Y, like, think of it more as like, here's what we're offering and here's the reasons to believe versus here's some claims that we're making. But I'm not sure what the sizzle is because you have a lot of sizzle, which is you've got a thousand people. And then the next question, which would be super to add is adoption is one thing, but retention or usage or virality are really key these days because a lot of people can get a concept out there, but they have a leaky bucket. So if you could say you've sold a thousand with strong X monthly engagement or repeat or something like that, might be really good. If you have it again, maybe too early.

Yes, we do have it. I'm saving that for a second meeting.

It's interesting, but I don't think so. Since you have a product in market, you may want to lead with big vision and demonstrated traction. And again, if you have acquisition as well as repeater or engagement, sell it.

Fantastic. That's awesome advice. Thank you so much.

No, no, great work, Annabelle.

Yunus, can you.

Hey, it's Annabelle. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay. Mobile gaming revenue accounted for $85 billion in 2020. And mobile developers are focused on driving more conversions from their online data to improve their revenue. Our solution uncovers the hidden opportunities in their customer data to improve their user acquisition ROI. For the past 10 years, we've been driving conversions for the world's largest record labels. And now we're ready to take our technology to mobile gaming.

Very strong, good articulation of the scale of the problem, what you're doing and reasons to believe your team can go do it. So I think that's a really well done thing. I wouldn't really add anything and the only thing. I think that's great. I think it's really strong.

Thank you. It's funny because we've been doing it for 10 years and I honestly feel like it takes that long to figure out in some ways that exactly what you're doing. You know what I mean?

Yep.

It's like you said at the beginning, you've pivoted so many times and adjusted your product based on market feedback. So thank you. I really appreciate that.

Well done.

Thanks so much, Ann. I enjoyed it.

Thanks, Lloyd. And thanks, everybody.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find all the information mentioned in today's episode at tractioncough IO that's T R A C T C I O N C O N F dot IO.