Instant Teams Pitch from Veteran's Day Online Demo Day

Well, my name is Liza Rödelwald. I'm CEO and co-founder of Instant Teams. I personally have over 15 years technical experience as a software engineer and have a background in creating enterprise-level software projects and started this program, founded Instant Teams. Now currently I am a military spouse, as Ryan mentioned, and FI has been a huge help to Erica and I both at Instant Teams. So we'd like to thank you guys for for all your help and support along the way. So with that said, I'll just get in, get straight into it. So we are Instant Teams. We are a customer success service marketplace. We're powered by military talent and HR technology. Currently, customer support teams are extremely important for companies, but they are difficult to build and manage. And there's a few ways companies tend to try to solve this problem right now. One is in-house hiring, which is expensive and long, and convincing someone to work the night shift is often difficult. The other way companies solve this is offshore outsourcing, but that can create language and cultural barriers, as well as time zone issues, and they're not integrated into the in-house teams. At Instant Teams, our customer support teams function exactly like an in-house team with all the cost benefits of outsourcing. We do this with a unique talent funnel of military spouses who are skilled, qualified, US native English speakers located in every time zone, thus enabling easy 24-hour operations for companies. We have a unique 5-day turnaround and we build entire teams out through 5 days through the technology platform, Arty, that we have built that customers interact with for all the onboarding, payroll, time tracking, replacement, and remote team management. The military spouse community is a large community that sits at over 26 unemployment rate due to the frequent moves. There's over 1.1 million active duty military spouses and 4.3 million veteran spouses. Erica, my co-founder, and I are both military spouses, and we saw the problem within the community ourselves as entrepreneurs and as part of the military spouse community. The product that we've built has a built-in applicant tracking system that automatically levels all military spouses up to level 4, we call Remote Pro, that includes automated video interviews, skills assessment, and testing, and category placements. This enabled us to have pre-vetted, pre-qualified talent ready to go when companies build out their teams. We also have a customer dashboard that customers interact completely with Instant Teams through in order to request team members, replace any team members, see all their time tracking, payroll, and billing all in one spot. The customer support market itself, just the outsourcing of it, is $87 billion a year, a huge market. And our business model is 40% of each hour that's tracked and billed throughout the platform. Our current traction is $107,000 of gross MRR per month. We have over $35,000 closed in the pipeline for November, 8,600 remote workers on our platform, 45 customers, and our 2019 gross revenue projections is $1.1 million. We've also received free national media attention from Maxwell House Coffee, NPR, and Attention Media. We differentiate from the competition because we are completely team-focused and we're fast. We have online community, we have proprietary access to the military talent, we have the 5-day build-out, and we're building remote IP. In the remote workspace. Our go-to-market strategy is to build an outbound sales team focused specifically on SaaS companies to offer the customer and tech support teams. We have our targeting companies that have raised money within the last 5 years of $2 million and above. Our leadership team is strong and ready to execute. As I mentioned, I'm an enterprise software engineer. Erica McManus, my co-founder, is an expert in community growth and brand awareness. We have advisors and other team members on our team that have had successful exits and IPOs. We are raising $1.5 million to increase our sales team and go into new markets. Right now we're focused on building the support teams, but our software has the ability to do marketing teams, tech teams, and eventually encompass all remote teams for all companies. Thank you for your time today, and I'll open it up to questions.

All right, great job, Liza. So, you know, while people are putting their questions in the chat, I'll just ask a couple. So I asked this, but, but why are you doing this?

So when I moved into my first military neighborhood after marrying my husband, I was a software engineer and I built remote teams in my company. And I met spouse after spouse that was struggling with their careers. And they would ask me, hey, Liza, you know, how are you working from home? What are you doing? And I started mentoring one-on-one. And that's when I really saw the problem in the community. And I met Erica a couple of years later. And as an entrepreneur in this space as well. And so her and I, with our experience in the corporate world, building teams out for companies and then seeing the military spouse community firsthand, knew that we could really solve two big problems: companies being able to— needing to scale and have really great talent and have these remote tools, and then the military spouses being able to take their jobs with them every time they moved.

Yeah, that is fantastic. The true definition of an entrepreneur. My second question for you is, why now?

So right now, the future of work is a big space. You hear a lot of talk about it, especially on the VC side. Remote work is becoming more and more popular, and the trends are definitely moving that direction. So I think companies are now trying to figure out, okay, how do we distribute these teams? How do we manage them? How do we find good talent? How do we vet good remote talent? So now is definitely the time for this type of solution. And the customers that we're working with love the fact that it's not completely outsourcing and it's not completely hiring in-house, but it's a unique model that they haven't seen before.

Great. And I know you went over this in the pitch, but Haas and Jeff asked, does the company have any revenue or customers?

Yeah. So we have 45 customers. We have $107,000 a month recurring revenue. And this year, 2019, we'll do $1.1 million.

Great. Congratulations. Sarah asks, how do you explain your value proposition when overseas teams might be cheaper?

Yeah. So overseas teams are definitely cheaper, but companies are really struggling with being able to build those high-quality teams that are integrated into their company culture, their company software products, being able to support on like a higher level than just being able to answer a frequently asked questions type script. So companies are searching for ways to create that. And we, we add great value to that. So we were able to stand up a team for our California-based company with spouses that were in Japan, all over in every time zone because that's their daytime. So our retention is a lot higher than these other firms. So the average customer support turnover is 30%. Ours is 8%. So that's a huge value prop in saving money for companies, even though the hourly rate may be cheaper overseas.

Great. Yeah, it seems like companies are willing to pay for it since the, the churn is lower. Alexander and Carlos asked, how much are you raising and what is the use of funds?

Yeah, so we're raising $1.5 million as a Series C round, and we're using that specifically to grow our outbound sales team and our marketing efforts. So we have the operations team in place, you know, we're currently operating. So we're just using that money to kind of fuel the next stage of growth for us.

Great. And then I think we have time for probably one more question. So Eric asks, is the talent pool 100% military spouses? Any willingness or plan to expand the talent supply in the future? And who technically employs the team?

Yeah. So 94% of our talent pool is military spouses. The other 6% is made up of veterans or other individuals that come to the platform and sign up. So yes, we are predominantly military spouses. We do have plans to expand over time, but as you can see, the military spouse talent pool in itself is a large population. So it'll be a long time before we run out of talent on that side. As far as the employer of record, Instant Teams is the employer of record for every remote team member that works for our customers.

Great. And then Alexander goes on to ask, what's the average employment length here? Are the support folks really able to stay on board long term and grow with the company like a true employee?

Yes.

I can actually answer that too. I mean, I've actually been using Instant Teams for probably, I want to say like 2 and a half years now for a lot of our accounting and bookkeeping, some backend work, and it's been fantastic. But Liza, I'll let you answer.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I definitely appreciate any customer testimonials that we can have on here too. So we've enjoyed working with you, Brian, as well. But most of our commitments are long-term, although our contracts work like a SaaS-based company, so it renews every month. So it's really easy to plug and play. But most the team members that work for us, we have several customers that are celebrating well over a year with full-time and part-time team members from our remote teams.

Okay, fantastic. And one last question here. So Sarah asks, some companies are concerned about having contractors that feel like employees. How do you bypass those concerns?

So we W-2 if they need to be designated that way. So we use the IRS determination to W-2. So we take care of all of that. So the contract is definitely with Instant Teams specifically. So we take care of all the HR, we give the benefits, we do all of that. And so we help the company to be secure in those HR regulations.

And so there's no risk of misclassifying an employee as a contractor because the majority of them are actual employees of Instant Teams.

Yes, exactly.

Fantastic. Well, thank you, Liza. What's, what's the ask? How can people from the audience help you?

Two ways. One, well, three ways. If you, since this is Veterans Day and we're celebrating veterans and military spouses, if you know military spouses or veterans that are looking for remote work, please send them to our platform. We're happy to help, always looking for great talent. Instantteams.com, they can sign up, create their profiles there. Same thing for customer referrals. So if you have portfolio companies, if you know, we work mainly with tech companies in high-growth stages. So if you have intros to those building out customer success teams, would love to chat with them. My email, my phone number, Erica's email, her phone number's on the deck. So feel free to reach out. To them as well. And then the other part would be investor relations. So if you have any investors that are interested in the future workspace or in, um, the service marketplace space, I'm happy to have an intro.