Founder Institute Online Demo Day - July 2020 - Portfolio Startups Growing Fast Amidst COVID-19

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute Demo Day. My name is Jonathan Grecian, I am a co-founder of the Founder Institute. We are expecting a very large event today. We actually had over 1,000 people registered and I know this is going to be a fairly international audience, so if you are there, let us know where you're from in the chat. Wow, we're already almost up to 200 participants. Let us know where you are in the chat specifically Usually these Demo Days that we do in the mornings Pacific time, California time, tend to get a ton of people from all of the Americas and most of EMEA as well. So already Mexico, Toronto, Pakistan, Pamplona, Sunnyvale, Philadelphia, Germany. So welcome, everybody, to this webinar. It's great to have you here. So for everybody that's already starting to put stuff into the chat, virtual high five to you. We want this event to be pretty interactive. Okay, so here's how this is going to work. Just really quick, the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We've helped close to now, I believe, 4,400 companies launch and build their startups, and these companies have raised almost $1 billion in funding. And today we're going to be showcasing 4 very fast-growing companies during COVID And at any time, if you have any questions for the presenters, they're going to— I'm going to bring them on one by one. They're going to do about 3-4 minute presentation, and then we're going to get to your questions in the audience. So if at any time you have any questions about these companies for the founders, throw them into the chat and we'll queue them up. And just so everybody knows, we're also going to be putting their contact information in there. And after this webinar, you will receive a video recording. I believe it comes in 48 hours on the dot after the webinar ends, where you'll also have all the contact information if you want to reach out to the founders. Okay, so with all that being said, the reason why we brought this webinar together today is that obviously our world's been going through a ton of different changes these last couple of months. It's— my whole sense of time and space has just been totally warped. The world has changed in the last 4 months, and that has caused a lot of problems for a lot of businesses around the world, but it's also caused a lot of opportunities for businesses around the world and for the companies that you're going to see today are ones that are in that, in that second camp. They're the ones that have been growing super quickly. They were growing quickly before COVID and now the changes in the world have helped propel these businesses even further. And it's a wide range of businesses. We're gonna be talking about things like hiring, fintech, prop tech, and online media. And we have a pretty decent geographical representation as well. We're going to be going from Texas to London to Miami/New York and back to London again. So with that being said, why don't we start to get to the presentations? And once again, any questions that you have for the presenters, throw them into the chat and we'll queue them up. So the first person that we're going to have presenting today is Ashley Connell. She's coming to us from Austin, Texas, here in the United States. And Ashley, we've been exchanging some emails the last couple of days. She's doing some really cool stuff on the hiring front technology-wise, and obviously the whole business of hiring has changed, but she's also doing something that's doing some good in the world as well, and she's helping a lot of stay-at-home moms get back into the workforce. So Ashley, you there?

Yes.

Can you see me?

All right. See you. All right. So I'm going to, I'm going to hide my face and mute my audio here. And Ashley, you can take it away.

Fantastic.

Hi everyone.

I'm Ashley Connell, CEO and founder of Prowess. A year and a half ago, we set out to make work work for everyone and We've done it. We all know hiring is hard. COVID-19 made it even harder. Pre-COVID, a bad hire cost companies up to $240,000, which is a $1 trillion cost to US companies annually. Post-COVID brought even additional hiring barriers to assess culture and values fit. Mandated remote work, countless applications, a focus on diverse talent, and Prowess is uniquely positioned to penetrate 4.7 billion of that. Prowess helps employers find diverse remote talent. Our emotional intelligence-based job matching ensures a better fit for all. So how do we do it? Here's a traditional hiring funnel. They look at education and your skills, and they're just starting to look at tech expertise, but it stops there. Until now. Our solution, Prowess, further qualifies talent by behavior style, EQ skills, and values to ensure alignment, building a candidate shortlist for you, saving employers time, money, and headaches. For our talent pool, we're starting with women returning to the workforce. 43% of women leave work to raise their children. So we went out and asked hundreds what were their barriers to reentry. What we heard was they need confidence, a network, upskilling, and a job pool all in one place. And that didn't exist. With Prowess, it does. From one free Facebook post, we received 60 applicants in 2 days. And interest has quadrupled since COVID-19. We're developing tools to automate the matching process. Our talent masters training, is matched with roles, and is hired, all while Prowess is conducting a 52-point EQ evaluation. Employers, they input their needs, their role needs, and instantly get a shortlist of ideal candidates. They interview, and make the hire. Today we are profitable and growing with recurring revenue and have happy customers lamenting ever going back to LinkedIn to source candidates. But now they don't have to. Prowess makes money by charging a percentage of the placement. It's working so well that customers are begging to pay us a subscription for our candidate shortlist technology to use for all their roles. In late Q3, we're piloting a subscription offering to help us expand within these accounts. And we are the team to scale it. I'm a second-time entrepreneur and a gender equality activist. Our COO has 20+ years in psychology and operations, and our advisors have 25 years of experience in operations, finance, and technology. So our ask for you today is to send us employers, talent, and early-stage investors, because with Prowess, work works for everyone. Thank you.

All right, that was awesome. Thank you, Ashley. And for everybody in the chat— and this is what usually happens during these, these online demo days, people are a little bit shy in the beginning, so don't be shy, throw your questions into the chat. We're gonna go through a couple minutes now of Q&A, and I'll start with some of some of my own questions here. So I guess the first question that I'll say, and this is kind of related to what you were talking about, the team, right? So this is a common question that any investor will ask. It's, you know, why are you and your team like the right people to build this kind of company?

You know, I love this question. So most entrepreneurs, founders, they start their company because of a problem that they have. And what's interesting about Prowess is I say I'm solving my future problem. So I don't have kids yet, but I have been in tech marketing for startups and my own tech marketing company for 15 years now. And I was taking a step back and just thinking about my, my career. And I realized I had this ongoing anxiety about what having children would do to all the progress I've made. So the nerd in me went out and started looking at statistics. And according to Harvard Business Review, if a woman is out of the workforce for just 3 years, she loses 37% of her total compensation power for the rest of her life. She cannot get it back. And that absolutely shocked me. And so I'm there and this is, This is a stat that I'm just becoming obsessed with. And I realized that I was working with one of our partners, his wife was helping us with operations at our marketing consultancy. So I started talking to her and she told me the same story. So she, foreshadowing, this is our COO, she has experience in psychology, she has experience in operations, took 3 years off and was in her second year of trying to get back in and could only get unpaid internships. And so from there, we, we teamed up. I saw the data behind it and a real-life story, and we decided we're going to be the people who change this. And because hiring has been frustrating from the top of— from the beginning of my career, we're the right people.

Yeah, and I think it's a unique problem, definitely for women re-entering the workforce. But if anything, also with the changes of COVID A lot of people are going to need reskilling. A lot of people are going to, uh, yeah, it's just going to change the entire kind of look and flow of the, uh, of the applicant pools for companies. So, uh, going on to the, the side of, you know, kind of having the psychology, uh, background on your team and that kind of stuff. So Dan has a question. Um, how do you ensure that bias is not built in, um, into the EQ that you guys are doing?

I love this. So we are actively working on that, and one thing, the way that we do this is when we are assessing, we're looking at two, well, many different things. It's a 52-point EQ evaluation, but we're looking at a mix between existing personality indicator tests as well as objective and subjective subjective evaluations. And so what that allows us to do is we're not just getting information on how people say that they work, but we're actually watching it too, and then cross-reference it with several other people's opinion. So we're working really hard on that.

We're at—

we have about 3 partners that we're talking to who will be reviewing all of our data to ensure that we're doing the absolute best we can there.

Nice. And as you get more data, you could do a better job, right? Absolutely. Sort of how that works. So Max had a question on the employer side. So can you tell me, and this is what Max's words, could you tell me more about the types of employers that you're working with? Are they based in specific industries, specific headcounts? You know, who are sort of, who are the employers that are, that love your product the most? Like who have been your sort of super users on the employer side in these early stages?

Great question. So we have been around for a year and a half. And so we've seen an organic growth in 3 different segments. First, it would be consulting companies or marketing slash development agencies. They always need remote and flexible talent as they get more or less projects. Also, we're seeing an increase in tech startups about Series B, Series C. Reason being is they are in high-scale growth and want to make sure that they have the correct expertise to grow. And then lastly, what's been really interesting is we've— because more and more companies are giving 4, 6, 12 months of parental leave, We're having them come to us saying, hey, can you help us fill that bandwidth gap while someone is out? And because of our shortlist ability, we're able to hire someone quickly with them to ensure a best fit. And we're proven that our talent ramps up in half the time as a typical hire.

Right. And yeah, again, like This is a compounding problem, right? Cultural hiring is hard enough in person, and these things are going to become even harder. So just related to what you were just saying and sort of filling like some of these gaps, which is certainly a problem for a lot of different reasons, Boris asks, you know, do you prefer long or short-term contracts for your customers? It sounds like you're offering a lot of different options, right?

Yes.

We are.

And really, when you take a step back, our mission is to remove barriers for women in the workforce. That's, that's at the heart of the business. And so when we went out and we're asking women what they want, 97% of them said they would return to the workforce if they had flexible roles. So of course, from the business standpoint, I want long contracts, right? However, some of these women want short project-based. And so we've made it super easy for them to decide what works for them and what works for the employer. And our technology is making that even more seamless.

Makes sense. Okay. So I'm just going to do a last question here, and then we're going to move on to the next presenter. So for everybody in the chat, Virginia, if you want to throw in— well, actually, it's on the screen here. So you can reach Ashley at ashley@prouse.com. Project.com. We'll be sending out these videos in, in exactly 48 hours. But a last question, Ashley, is just where is this available? Are you doing— is this, is this purely US-based right now? Is it international? Like, where are you in the state of the business, uh, you know, geography-wise?

Great question. So today we are US-based. However, we hope to expand as soon as possible. The way to help us do that is send us more interest. The more interest we have, the more people we can get signed up, the more likely we'll expand even quicker.

Awesome, spoken like a true marketer, Ashley. All right, well, thank you, Ashley, for the first one, and thank you everybody for the great questions. Keep them coming. All right, so we're now going to fly from deep in the heart of Texas across the pond, so to speak, and we're going to go to London, and we have Rupert is coming on here. Hey Rupert, how are you?

I'm very good, how are you doing today?

Good. So Rupert is the co-founder of PYNK, it's P-Y-N-K dot I-O, London alumni, and we were just speaking leading up to this. They just, they killed it, almost 400% funded on a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs. Just Google Pink and Cedars, and you'll see the campaign. And they're doing some really cool stuff on the fintech side and combining things like AI, crowd wisdom into helping people make better investment decisions.

100%.

Well, hopefully that was a nice warm intro for you, Rupert.

And yeah, it couldn't have been better. Thank you very much, Jonathan. I really super appreciate it.

All right, so everybody in the chat, Keep the questions coming into the chat. I'm going to hand it off to Rupert. So Rupert, take it away.

Sure. Well, look, thank you very much everybody for having me here today. We really appreciate it. As Jonathan has already alluded, I'm Rupert and I'd love to talk to you about the multi-award-winning company that is Pink. We're a zero-fee wealth management app. And before I go into too much detail about what Pink is, is I want to dispel any thoughts you might have about what an investment app actually is and does, because with our unique technology and our unique business model, we've created an entirely new category of social investing, enabling people to work, learn, and earn together. So the problem that we're trying to solve is really very simple. On the whole, retail investors are pretty much usually getting screwed. Meanwhile, professional Fund managers only really perform 3, maybe 5 years, and then implode. And so when we were putting together Pink, we thought that there must be a better idea. Well, that's of course where we come in. So our portfolio is controlled by tens of thousands of fund managers, our users, who all contribute to our proprietary AI. And that then seeks out the experts with inside our community on a specified time, on a specified asset. And we do all of that whilst providing access to this global portfolio for free to anyone, anywhere. Now, you might have heard about the wisdom of crowds, and John actually alluded to it at the beginning there, but our technology is kind of inspired by this, and it builds on its bias reduction techniques and proven forecasting methodologies. Our AI then dives into this to continually seek out either individuals or small groups with inside that global community that are consistently accurate. That's really important to remember. Now, we then use that data to decide who we listen to and who not to, and then we rebalance our portfolio for best performance based on that data. Now, we've been running our proof of concept portfolio since February 2019, and we returned 15% by February this year. And throughout COVID, we've already done an 11% return year to date. So we're pretty stoked about how well it's going to perform for the rest of this year. Our unique business model means that we can be free for anyone, any everyday investor that participates with inside our community. We use that data to drive and produce reports for tier 1 institutions, as well as managing capital for family offices, generating significant recurring scalable income. And on the note of everyday people, that's where Pink shines. We're growing at about 9.7% a week at the moment. We've grown to over 33,000 users on zero marketing budget, and that's because people buy into Pink— invest better together. That is what they like. They want to work together to make one portfolio work the best for the whole world. So we're neither a place where you can go and trade your money into oblivion, nor are we a place where you could just stick your money and forget about it. We're right in the middle. We give you an alternative where you can participate without the overbearing responsibility of being correct on every trade. Now, this wouldn't have been possible without the amazing team behind Pink. There you got myself. I've been in startups for some time, and I've exited out of paper and ad tech in 2016. And then I've been supported by Seth, who's created a Crowd Wisdom product before and sold that in 2017, and our amazing Mark Borwick and Louis Stephan, who come from major financial institutions. Right now we're raising about £2 million on the convertible notes, and as John already said, we've raised a big chunk of that on our massively overfunded Seedrs crowdfunding campaign. And in August we're opening up on Crowdcube which allows US accredited investors to invest directly into the product. But obviously we'd be happy to talk to you if you'd like to learn a little bit more right now, head over to deck.pink.io and have a look at our deck on there. But in the meantime, I'd love to take any questions you've got.

All right. That was great. That was great, Rupert. So a lot of questions coming in here in the chat, keep them coming. So Really quick, Rupert, and one of the first questions here is from David. You know, a simple sort of— it's why does this product have a 0% fee, right? I think I know what the answer to the question is, but do you want to talk about why you guys designed the business with that model?

All right. So it's super simple. We require data to outperform and we get our data from people. So how do we give back to them? We give them a zero-fee product, and we use that same product for people who want to pay a fee, who don't want to give data, and that's typically institutional or family offices or that sort of stuff.

Yep, makes sense. And how are you guys— and this is a question for me, and keep the questions coming in the chat— how are you guys, you know, reaching these, these family offices and some of those organizations to get them onto the platform? I mean, you guys are obviously showing really good returns, but how are you acquiring those customers?

So that's actually the second part of our business model. So we start by delivering data. So we give them feeds of either our AI or our raw predictions. It's all anonymized. We never give any actual user data out, but we give them feeds about what the market might be doing. So, for example, we know that Predictors in Sweden are very good at predicting the price of gold. So we sell that as a feed. What that allows us to do is to create a stronger bond and relationship, especially with the tier 1 institutional banks, so that they can see our performance and how good our data is and how well we're performing over time. And so once we've got that track record, which we're really expecting kind of year 2, year 3, to be able to have a long enough track record that they are comfortable putting larger checks. And those checks in our world look like about $100 to $200 million.

Nice. And did I get this right, that you guys, uh, year to date this year are at 11% on the return?

Correct. Yeah. So that's in our main thesis product. So that's the one that everybody can invest into as a retail investor, but also as an institutional. And then we've got some other individual products. And I think Jonathan, I was talking to Adeo a few weeks back. Um, one of our products at the beginning of this year is actually currently running at a 40% year-to-date return. That's based off the crash of COVID and we were able to forecast that, and we got on the right side of those trades.

Interesting. All right, so, and this was sort of a follow-up to this. So Mike is asking, you know, results in down markets versus performance in up markets. So if I could rephrase that question, I guess maybe it's like, you know, but by using your methodology Right. And I think we can all agree that the markets are going to be a little crazy for the foreseeable future. Your unique methodology sort of can handle that, forecast that, you know, why would you like, why, right? How could you guys do that?

So, you know, being absolutely totally open and honest about it, we're better at predicting bigger swings than we are smaller ones. So if the market's moving sideways at a 1 or 2%, We tend to take an out-of-market position on trades. And this refers to some of our individual products that we sell to institutionals as opposed to our global thesis product. That's done the 11%. And so, yeah, we tend to take an out-of-market position until we know for certain that something's coming up that we should get into a position for. And that benefits us because it means that we're trading less. It means that we're losing less fees, which is a big problem in kind of trading in general. And it means that we're in the right position as and when those big opportunities come up. So a tumultuous time like now is actually great for us. Yeah, but we've been through the quiet period as well. So the quiet period for us was 2019. So in 2019, we were only able to achieve only a 15% return. But if we hit that on a, on a quiet period, then we are super, super happy, of course.

Yeah. And, um, Hugh here is asking a question, kind of diving a little bit into, into the algorithms and the methodologies here. Like, do you guys weight different users or opinions, you know, as you're getting in? And, and how, how do you do that? And sort of what's the thinking behind how you guys do that? Sure.

So best way to, to explain this is with a user example. So, John, you would come onto the product and you would forecast the price of gold. And every Tuesday, your price of gold predictions are particularly accurate when the gold is in a bear market and it happens to be the summertime and some other factors that we'll look at that correlate. So when those factors all correlate, We know that your prediction is much more accurate than other users and we're going to weight your prediction much higher. Now, that also works in the inverse. So we might find out that every Tuesday you are the worst predictor, but you're the worst—

That's probably closer to the reality.

But you're the worst in the right proportion that we need. So we will invert your answer in those days. So what's not good for us is people that are middle and we kind of discount all those people generally, but there's always a correlation where someone is better on a specific asset in a specific time set in a specific market condition.

Makes sense. Okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to wrap up here with the final question for Rupert. But, but once again, Rupert's contact information is in here as well. You're going to receive a video, reach out to Rupert. They're doing some really cool stuff. His campaign was just funded almost 400%, got some new campaigns coming up as well. But yeah, I guess what I would say, Rupert, is, you know, and I think this is a lot of— this is a question that at least on the consumer side, a lot of people are going to have, right? Like, the markets are getting a little crazy. Over these next couple of years, you know, what do you think is going to give you guys a competitive advantage over, you know, a lot of these other fintech products, a lot of these other places that are trying to say, hey, put your money here, we're safer, like that kind of thing? Kind of stuff?

Yeah, I mean, what we've always been focused on, and we've been focused on this from the start, John, is that the end of crazy valuations for fintechs and that the being able to just raise money on no product is over. Yeah, we have the best product in the industry, we have the knowledge and the team behind it, but moreover, we have a sustainable business model. Whereby we're not reliant on just AUM figures. Our data is driving our— the value of part of our business. And then the other part of our value is our very, very sticky application where users don't only just come in and dump money, they come in and they are there every single day checking, being part of the community, being connected, and that's what's driving part of our valuation, backed up with our strong business model. And so that's what's gonna drive us forward, and being a global platform, we'll easily hit unicorn status in the next 5 years.

All right, it's great optimism, I love it.

Not optimism, plan.

There you go.

All right, well, thank you so much, Rupert. And once again, everybody, his contact info is in there. We've also thrown it into the chat and you'll get it over email as well. All right. So coming back to the States here, I'm gonna welcome on Alex Norman. Hey, Alex, you there? How are you? All right, great. So Alex is joining us from New York, alumni of the Miami Founder Institute and doing some really cool stuff in PropTech. And I think, Alex, genesis of the company came from, was it Hurricane Sandy or Superstorm Sandy?

Yeah, absolutely. I'll talk about that in a few minutes.

All right, awesome. So I'm going to hide my screen here and take it away, Alex.

Great. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Alex Norman. I'm the founder of MyCoop. We're the communication and cooperation hub for small multifamily buildings. We provide simple and effective communication and data management for buildings owners, managers, and residents. We launched in 2018 with a small experienced team. I myself have spent the last 18 years in marketing tech, and my co-founder Christy has spent over 20 years experience in property management. And as a team, we all came together on a simple mission to make building life simpler, more connected, and more pleasant for everyone. It all started when I was living in New York, as it was mentioned, during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when rising tides flooded half the city and left 800,000 people in the dark, during which time all of us were wondering about our status of our homes and how we're going to rebuild. It was at that time that I realized the harsh truth that critical communications in residential buildings was broken, and not just in times of crisis or pandemics, but for, but for everything. In the US alone, there are 4 million multifamily buildings, the majority of which are still in the dark, with less than 0.1% having modern communication systems of any of any kind. And if you live in the 3.9 million buildings that are considered small, well, good luck, because communication sort of feels like this. And there's a very good reason, because managing communication in buildings is difficult. It's difficult because buildings have many stakeholders—owners, managers, boards, residents—who still need to collaborate. It's difficult because buildings need—have different types of information needs to be shared—documents, requests, notifications—and they need better content management. And lastly, it's difficult because there are so many types of buildings around the US and the world, and there aren't enough good solutions. And we're seeing that now during the pandemic. So we decided to create a solution, and that is to centralize all communication for multifamily buildings into a simple platform that's collaborative, integrated, and scalable, that starts with better messaging at its core. We currently are live in buildings and have seen over a 70% increase in messaging effectiveness compared to basic communication like email. We have grown consistently during the current pandemic and recently surpassed 1,000 buildings with over 181,000 total units under management. Our business model is pretty simple. You know, we offer a freemium of up to $480 per building per year, all you can eat. We hope to generate additional revenue from advertising, commerce, and third-party integrations to $3 million AAR. Our core target are homeowners associations, building managers, and owners. Currently, our growth has been organic, but we're starting to engage large portfolio owners, universities, and governments to get ourselves to scale. Our market potential is huge. In the US alone, we have an addressable market of 3 billion. We have an attainable market of roughly 273 million, which includes primarily homeowners associations, which is our core target in the US alone. We have competitors, but there are no dominant players in the market, and we continue to differentiate ourselves on our ability to scale and provide collaborative solutions, particularly focused on the small building market. We are in fundraising round. We're looking to raise $500,000 to help us to get to the $3 million ARR by the end of 2021. And we are MyCoop, making building life simpler, more connected, and more pleasant for everyone. And please find us at mycoop.com.

Awesome. Thank you, Alex. All right. So a couple of questions here in the chat as well. One of these was a question that I sort of had too. Like, do you guys have a sweet spot in terms of building size, you know, number of dwellings, number of residents?

Yeah. So our target is— our sweet spot is small buildings, and small buildings are classified as under 50 units. And our sweet spot are anywhere between 25 and 50.

Okay. And you said that a lot of your growth, and it's impressive growth, is coming organically, right? So, does this mean that like the HOAs, like they're— is it management companies? Are they sort of talking to each other? Or like, how have you guys seen that dynamic work?

Yeah, primarily resident activists, and some of them include board members. So, homeowners associations, members of the board, we like to refer to them, if for those that are Seinfeld fans, there are Jerry's and Kramers. We love the Kramers, the guys and gals who are particularly interested in the well-being and community of their buildings and are looking for a better way to connect, and they go and find us on Google and search for us. So we've been very fortunate to have a fairly decent SEO, and so people that are looking for better communication, more simple communication, ultimately find us through And for the HOAs or these resident activists, what is sort of like the—

what would you say is sort of the hook or the biggest problem that, you know, that it's solving for them?

Yeah, so it's collaboration. Usually, pre-pandemic, we were seeing it around— I usually say either things happen are really good in your building or really bad in your building. Really good things are when you first move in, they're looking for resources, looking for services, laundromats, daycare. And the bad things that happen are things like leaks, floods, fires. And so pre-pandemic, those were the reasons why people engage and we're looking for a way to say, look, we want— we have a problem, or we have an opportunity and we need to solve it with everyone engaged. And email simply doesn't do that. Writing paper or notes Putting it in building walls and foyers and common areas doesn't do that. And having an online collaboration tool that engages everyone around topics and content is a way to do that. Of course, we do that in our day-to-day businesses, in our jobs, and it makes sense to have that, to have those tools available for people in their buildings. At the same time, you know, we're also seeing during the pandemic the crisis and the bad stuff are happening real time all the time. And so when people are looking to know whether or not their common areas are going to be open to everyone in the building, whether or not the building staff has access or going to be available to clean and sanitize the building, all these questions that people have, they need to have answers. The people who have those answers need to find an efficient way of distributing them, and having a central hub for all that content and communication is the right way to do it.

Got it. A couple people asking here, you know, sort of on the competitive advantage side, right? I mean, I think Nextdoor is out there, but Nextdoor is for neighborhoods, right? So, um, you know, pretty, pretty clearly. And honestly, it's, it's not a great product either for anybody that's used it. But, um, you know, how would you guys— there are other options out there, right? Maybe even somebody, and I don't see a landlord or somebody doing this, but there could be like a Facebook group or something like that. Like, how do you guys see yourself, you know, really differentiating from some of the other— I wouldn't say competitors, maybe you might refer to them as like substitutes or something like that.

Sure. I'll break it up. I'll be quick with this answer. And I'll break it up into a few different categories. On the very low end, so small buildings or midsize, small to midsize buildings, we compete with paper and pencil. Paper and pencil, right? And email.

Sort of that, it was, I love the picture, right? It reminded me of Seinfeld again, but it was the bulletin board in the lobby, right?

Right, right. Yeah. And so that's what exists currently in most small buildings. So we compete with paper and pencil and it's not really, it's not, there's no argument there on how a digital solution is better. Part 2 with the Nextdoor, we are now being referred to as the that next door for buildings, because what happens down the street is not as relevant that what happens in your basement or down your hall, particularly for multifamily buildings. And then the third category is the property management software business, which are large, clunky, complicated software systems that primarily work on operations and back-of-house solutions, rent control, maintenance management, and all these types of things that are very, very important. They're very important for large buildings. So buildings that are 100, 200, 500, 1,000 units, but not necessarily just too much for buildings that are under 100 units. And so, which just so happened to be 99.9% of the multifamily building market in the United States and the world. And just think about in Europe, you know, the majority of the market is 4-story walk-ups. So for us, we see there being an enormous opportunity in white space, in which requires a lightweight, fast-moving, simple solution that handles communication elegantly and it's available at a low cost.

Awesome. All right, and then the last question here, and then we'll move on to the final speaker here today. The last question, similar to some of the previous questions before, is You know, is this, is this US-specific? Are you, um, currently just in, in New York, or where, where are you geographically?

Yeah, geographically we're kind of spread out all over the place. We're in 171 countries and 39 cities. Oh wow, okay. Well, yeah, and, uh, sorry, 171 cities and 39 countries. Um, and, but the challenge for us, um, is language. We're only in, in English language, so our, our second largest market outside the United States happens to be Australia. And that really exploded during the fires last year. So Melbourne, Sydney, and all that are on our platform. We have been asked for— and so our penetration outside of the US has been typically geographically and demographically higher educated, higher income users in buildings who speak English. But we have been asked to add new languages like Spanish as a second language. Being in Miami, it helps. Also, Latin America is enormous in areas particularly like Bogotá, where there's a large amount of multifamily and not a lot of management oversight. So, we are available. You can sign up to us anywhere. And we are, and if you do, and looking for additional language, let us know and we'll we'll do what we can to prioritize that.

Awesome. All right, thank you, Alex. So, all right, and thank you everybody for the questions. Keep them coming. Again, we threw Alex's contact information there into the chat, and we'll be sending out some videos shortly as well. All right, so last but not certainly not least, we're bringing on Holly here, going back over across the pond to London. Hey, Holly, you there? I am.

Can you hear me okay, Jonathan?

I can. All right. And I see the presentation as well. So Holly's doing some very cool stuff on the online media side. And if you— you probably have seen Founder Institute, we run a lot of these webinars and you'll probably see some transcriptions on a lot of our webinars. And that is done through Subly. Through the company that you're about to learn about. Incredibly easy to use, and, you know, something that's certainly made our life a hell of a lot easier. So with that being said, Holly, I'm going to hide my face, mute my screen.

I'll let you take it away. Awesome. So great to be here, everyone, and thank you so much for the glowing introduction, Jonathan. So hi everyone, I'm Holly Stevens. And I'm the founder of Subly, and I'm going to tell you exactly why LinkedIn and over 7,000 users have decided to use us within 6 months of us launching and why they need us for their content. So online video consumption has quadrupled during COVID-19. Viewers from watching their content at home, from YouTube to Instagram, to learning in their home environments for their work. But creators and businesses aren't seeing more views on their content. And I know this as I've worked and struggled myself as a senior position in Google and Xerox and been on Sky News. And I've even had my own YouTube channel. I struggled to get more views. Why aren't they getting more views? Well, it's actually because they're probably not having subtitles on these. 63% of videos on LinkedIn are watched without sound. It's even more than that for Facebook. It's around 83%. And if you don't add subtitles, you're missing out on a huge global audience. When you add subtitles, it increases the watch rate by 80%. Now, creators like I and companies don't add subtitles because it looks like a bit of a process like this. It's convoluted, it's complicated, and if you don't have the skills in order to do it, it can just be a bit of a nightmare. You don't want to spend all that time doing it. Well, Subly cuts those 17 steps all the way down to 4. It's an easy way for anyone anywhere to easily translate transcribe and add subtitles onto any video in any language for any platform, and it's ready to share. It's so easy to use. You simply take a video, you upload it into Subly, it transcribes it automatically. You can edit it like a Word document, and then you download it to any platform that you want to kind of put it out to. That could be LinkedIn, or you could even download the text file to put into Adobe if you need something a little bit towards the video editing suite. We're building for enterprise, so we want this area to really be suited towards that enterprise consumer who wants an easy way to really add subtitles onto video content, translate, and collaborate with their teams all around the world. We're different to the competitors as we offer these enterprise solutions that the customers need, and we've profiled hundreds of customers who need them. They want a product that's easy to use, offers translation, team features, and focused on video and audio. And that's really where we sit. And it's no longer a nice-to-have for organizations. They must have subtitling features. They need it because they have diversity and inclusion quotas, legislation requires them to do it, and they need it also just for day-to-day use as well. Now you'll see YouTube crossed out on here. The reason for that is because from all our customers that we speak to, they don't use YouTube in a company environment. It's not secure enough for internal comms. It's not secure enough for product videos that don't want to be released yet. And there's multiple teams that need to be involved with it. So YouTube's not even something that they would use. Our secret sauce at Subly is that we're using speech-to-text technology. So we make it really quick to subtitle any piece of content, combined with the ease of use of the platform. And it's also from the community perspective as well, which you'll see across all our social media of how much people love us. We know that businesses need us, they use us already, from everything from internal communications for their senior leadership team, to job advertisements, and even for just social media posts. That's what they use it for. You'll see some brilliant names on here that I just want to mention, from everything from Canon, who use it for their events team, to LinkedIn who sell it into their, into their companies, and they have purchased licenses for their enterprise customers, to Bloomberg, to Endemol Shine. The list just goes on of enterprise that use us, as well as also creators. Now we're suited to, from everyone to a social media strategist who may start on Subly Pro, all the way to someone who's in the marketing team and have multiple people that they need to communicate with. For Subly for Business. So we have a simple subscription that's billed on a per-month basis, and we've already had within just 2 days 250 customers sign up, which is just incredible. We also have Subly for Business that has been purchased by LinkedIn. They purchase licenses for their enterprise customers, and they have it as a value-added service to them. We've seen incredible growth It's just been crazy within the last 6 months. Now we have over 7,000 users on our platform. We have 250 paying customers. We only launched pricing yesterday, and that's, that's within the last 2 days. And we predict revenue of $1.6 million in just 12 months. And that's just from the figures currently. That's not even projecting the amount of, from the amount of investment that we hope to receive in the next few months. There's a huge opportunity here for us to kind of globally dominate the translation subtitling piece. And we want to be a category leader in this space. No one's leading it, and that's where we want to be. We've even been crowned the Canva of translation and subtitling. Where we really want to be is that we do want to be achieving that 300% growth year on year in the next 3 years. And we're on track to do that. We've already seen what we've achieved, even with just the investment we've received. We did this to date with just bootstrapping the company. And we want to further increase that growth and more features for enterprise with more investment. We're the team to make it happen. We've built and scaled businesses across the UK and Australia. I've had 2 previous startups and 1 exit. I have a fantastic co-founder on board, and we have some brilliant advisors from everyone who's had C-level positions at Clear Channel all the way to Vodafone too. It's your opportunity now to be part of Subly. You can either invest in this round, and we're closing our seed round. We've already just completed the pre-seed. And you can become a founding member yourself if you want to get in quick on this deal that we've offered for 250 people already. Then you can do that too. Happy to take any questions that you have. And thank you for your time.

All right. That was awesome. Thank you, Holly. And yeah, once again, for— one of the questions that I liked in the chat right off the bat was, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. All he wrote was, "Too good to be true." We use it at FI, so it's a great product. I'll just throw that out there. But what would you say to the kind of "too good to be true" comment, Holly?

I would say that it's an honor to actually receive that comment. It'll be interesting to know what they think is too good to be true from that, that kind of area. I think that we have achieved exceptional growth. It's really a great time in the market because everyone has gone online, so we have seen that exceptional growth. I think it's also from the team perspective, like we've been very good at bootstrapping it today, testing a lot. Before we even launched anything, we had 1,000 people that wanted Subly, and we were just we were just doing interviews after interviews. And as you know from Founder Institute, you have to interview a hell of a lot of customers before you even launch. And so that's where we really had this product-market fit. So we went to launch. And when we did say we're now billing, we'd already built a number of customers that wanted us. So thank you very much for the comment. I kind of take it as an honor to receive it. Yeah, it's just part of kind of the team and the way things we've done it. Subtle in just testing the market before we launched and spent heaps of money before we even knew what the product market fit would be.

Sure. And this is something I've seen a couple, a couple questions about this, but, you know, going after the enterprise, right? And it sort of gets down to the question, like, why? Like, how is your team kind of equipped to do those enterprise sales? And how have you gotten them so far? I mean, you were listing some pretty big names in there. Canon, LinkedIn, etc. Right. I don't, I don't, I don't think you guys have much of a marketing budget. So how, how have you been getting those and how do you think you're positioned to continue to get those in the future?

Yeah, really good question. So actually, we— and back to your point, we actually haven't spent anything on marketing pretty much, just a tiny bit on SEO, and that is it. The way that we've really done it is that when we originally presented at Founder Institute and we completed this in February, so it's only a few months ago. Our positioning was that we will go after creators first and we'll build the funnel and we'll understand all the different customers that we need and then we'll go after enterprise in the second half of the year. What happened, the enterprises found out about us. One of our main channels, one of my main channels is LinkedIn and we chose to go for enterprise as well and leave it to that end of the year because we knew that we would need a sales team or a partnerships team to get to them. What did happen is that enterprise just found out found out about us organically, and they started to recommend within their teams. So we did start to see the marketing team, the internal comms team, the L&D team, the video production team of their agency. They just started to recommend it. And that's one of the reasons why we've gone after enterprise is because there is such an opportunity for them to become a sticky user, for them to keep using within the product. And so to your question, enterprise was not something that we went towards initially. But it's where the biggest market opportunity is for us. And when it comes to the team and suited to enterprise, myself and my co-founder and the team have all worked within enterprise teams. I've worked in kind of Google for a number of years, from Xerox, as well as my co-founder working at big media companies. And also our advisors on board as well, kind of, they are geared towards enterprise. That's why we do have the CEO of Clear Channel Media and head of media of Vodafone previous as well. So our team is really suited and we have the right team around us as well to really make sure that we are either going through a channel route to enterprise or a direct sales route. And as I said, we weren't ever gearing towards enterprise straight away, but when we do our— this next seed round, the funding will be used to heavily target those enterprise and go towards a sale route and really gear up the channel route as well.

Got it. So a couple questions coming in here sort of about the technology and how that works. And so I guess first question, what are the languages that you guys are currently covering right now?

Yeah, I could list them all, but it's probably easier to say there's 31 languages we cover now. 31? 31. So if you go to our website—

Maybe don't list them all.

Yeah, it would take me the entire call. So yeah, 31 languages. So you've got kind of English, French, German, everything that you want. There are some that we, that we still want to do. To your technology question as well, we do use solutions out there on the market. So things like Amazon or Google, we do put those together and we do use those, that technology. It just allows us to keep our costs super, super low and use their technology solutions so we can really scale as quickly as possible without any of that cost ourselves. So yeah, that's how we're building it out and we will be just supporting more languages as we grow.

Nice. OK. And let's see some other questions here. Keep the questions coming. We'll take a few more and then we'll close things out here. But what do you think gives you guys sort of your competitive advantage right now? I mean, there, there certainly are some other options on the market for this right now. As a user of Subly, I can tell you that Subly just makes it a lot easier. But, you know, what do you guys think are some of your competitive advantages as you start to grow?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question, and we get this quite a lot from investors as well. It's really towards, as you said, Jonathan, it's the ease of use. And like, we do speak to our customers on a daily basis, so we are learning from them more. We've built out a roadmap for enterprise, not just creators. And so where we see ourselves is that we will be— we want to be a category leader. That's our differentiating point, is that we're really user-friendly. You can see that from our presentation. You can see it from the product. Ease of use is what we pride ourselves on, and that's how we want to kind of win over the market. So I would say that's one of the biggest piece. It is also plugging in the speech-to-text technology so we can do more languages. We can get to a global market quicker, as we've seen, like some of our top markets. Yes, it's UK and US, Australia, France, the Netherlands are big regions for us, Italy. We are seeing that them coming up the ranks of the top regions at the moment. So we're already on a global scale at the moment. In terms of else from our competitors, it is that we are building out solutions that we know enterprise need as well. So there are those team collaboration features. It is a marketplace for longer, longer form videos where they may need to use someone who is local. So if you want to go from something in English and you want to translate into French, but also we've done the translation automatically in Subly, but you want to use some local on the ground that could check it through for you, we will have that in there as well. There's gonna be a lot of marketplace features that we also build out and around Subly. And that's why in the presentation I've already said kind of the community is the biggest thing about Subly. Everyone loves us. Everyone uses us and they don't leave. And the community that we've built around it.

Sure. All right. So just to wrap things up here, do you want to talk quickly about this, the founding member program that you guys are releasing?

Sure. So as I mentioned, we, we just switched on pricing for Subly. And we're offering $6 for 6 months for Subly Pro, which allows you— when we get to September, all the features will be free. From September, you will have all Subly Pro features, whereas everyone else will be billed on $10 a month minimum cost. So you can come in now. We've only got 6 days left. There's only 500 spaces. There's already 250 signups, so you've only got a few days left. You just go to the link, getsubly.com/foundingmembers. You join there and you can start using Subly for yourself. Awesome.

All right, well, thank you so much, Holly. But thank you, everybody, for joining this online Demo Day. Once again, you are going to receive an email with all of these amazing founders' contact information. Reach out to them with questions, reach out to them with checks, reach out to them with anything. And yeah, thank you, Holly. Thank you, Ashley. Alex and Rupert. And, and yeah, thank you everybody for joining. Hope you all have a good afternoon, morning, or evening wherever you are.