Reviewing Mass Décor Production, Research Test-Subject Marketplace, UAV RFID-tagging, and more Start

Welcome to our 9th episode of Unfiltered on the Founder Insights Podcast. I'm Rachel Shepherd, Director of Global Marketing at Founder Institute, and I'm joined today on the line by Mike Supravici, Managing Director of Portfolio Success at FI, Dustin Betz, FI Content Editor, and Ryan Micheletti, Head of FI Global Operations. Mike, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Hello everyone. As Rachel mentioned, my name is Mike and I lead the Alumni Success Group here at the Founder Institute. And our role is to help the Founder Institute alumni scale their business. And we try to do that in any way that we can. Sometimes we do that via like one-on-one hands-on advice, other times we do it by running various programs such as Funding Lab to help raise your first round of financing or your second. And basically, we do anything we can in our power to help alumni companies succeed. Hey, my name is Dustin Bepp.

I am the content editor at the Foundry Institute. We help founders tell their stories and get them out there and get some earned media. Ryan? Awesome. Hey everyone, my name is Ryan Micheletti, head of operations for FI. I basically work with all the different director teams around the world that run our programs for us. So we have a program that runs 14 weeks in 180 cities around the world. And our job is to help you build enduring global companies.

Awesome. Well, if you're interested in learning more about Founder Institute, we're currently enrolling across 6 continents. You can find out more at fi.co/join/podcast. And today we're going to run through a few of the startup ideas we've received in the inbox at fi.co/ideas. Thank you to everyone who has sent in their startup ideas. Keep those submissions coming. And we're going to deliver our raw, honest feedback. A warning up front, as always, this feedback is going to be blunt, direct, and unfiltered. Let's get started. So, Savo from Cape Town says, my company Dappleshades wants to make paper-based sculptures as functional decor to help students and young couples enhance their living and working spaces by bringing in patterns inspired by nature at affordable prices. We use waterjet cutting to mass-produce existing hand-cut designs at low cost.

So with companies like this, there's basically two ways you can go, right? Like, you can go by continuing to, like, develop your own sculptures and hope that people get those, or you kind of become, like, the tool or the platform that inspires others to basically build on top of that. And this is more like a philosophical question for you, not what's right and what's wrong. And the question is really like, how big do you want this to get? And for how long do you wanna run this company? If you're gonna be basically building sculptures and try to sell sculptures or try to get other folks to basically use them in like an educational environment, that's probably not as large of an opportunity. And that's perfectly okay. It could be like a very nice, comfortable, like potentially a comfortable small business. If you have enough customers. If you want to try to make this into a very large business that, you know, has lots of customers all over the world, can generate lots of revenue and things like that, I encourage you to think about how you can potentially scale this to basically enable more mass adoption versus kind of like a niche, like educational background. Now, in order for you to do that, there's several ways you can do it. I mentioned previously the idea of a kind of a potential like a platform However, even for a platform to work, you need some sort of a killer application. So if this is the use case in the educational environment that becomes kind of like the killer application for this product, then that's terrific. And hopefully that, that inspires others to go ahead and use your tools and product to be able to deliver these at scale. Or, you know, you can partner with some other type of organization that already has several things that need to be basically mass-produced at scale, and they essentially kind of develop the killer application for you, which attracts more people to launch things onto your product. But at the end of the day, it's kind of like a fundamental question, you know, how big do you want this to get? And that's going to determine where you take this.

Yeah, very well said, Mike. This is Ryan. My first impression of this always comes down to scale, right? And if you decide you want this to be a large, globally scalable company and you want this to be a platform, then that's great, right? But, you know, you could certainly also make, uh, good business and make money running this as kind of like a custom sculpture business online. So again, there's no right or wrong way. It really just comes down to whatever it is that you want to do and your vision for this. Since Mike already spoke about that, I'd like to just kind of dive into the pitch a little bit. I think it's kind of interesting using paper-based sculptures as functional decor. There is some dissonance that I found in the pitch, which made me think, okay, who is this for? What is a paper-based sculpture and who's going to care about it? So for example, you start going off on paper-based functional decor, helping students and young people. So right there, I kind of get the sense of, okay, this is for someone who's looking for something affordable, which later on you go on to say that you can mass produce these at a low cost. And so the question then in my mind became, is this like a high-quality sculpture where it's like, you know, could I reproduce like some famous sculptures in my living room but doing it through paper? In a way that's still very classy and beautiful art, but it's also cheap to do instead of going out and getting a marble statue. Is this really a supplement or are you creating something that's a new piece of art? Me, I'm not that well-versed in the sculpture community and trends in it, but I do think that by being able to massively scale this through some of the production methods that you mentioned, It does seem like this could become something that's very large. The potential is there, maybe, and maybe it's just through the innovation of your mass production and manufacturing processes. And so I would like that to come out a little bit more in the forefront of the pitch. Is it just a cheaper version that's better and you're kind of democratizing it, allowing people to kind of make more sculptures but still have it be as beautiful as other things? Or is this just kind of something else where it's you know, it's a nice piece of art, but it's just less fun, it's less of a premium product, and therefore it's also lower. So, you know, kind of why paper, like who really would find this valuable, is something that I'd be curious to ask. But overall, I think this is something kind of interesting and unique. I haven't seen a lot of paper-based sculpture companies, and we see a lot of companies.

Fantastic, awesome. And next up is going to be Henry from Fort Lauderdale. Henry says, my company, Bython, is crowdsourcing and gamifying the tagging and removal of invasive species. We're making a remotely controlled quadcopter tagging service that approved users can pilot from a desktop computer, just like playing a video game, to tag invasive animals with RFID trackers. Our customers are animal control and ecological stewardship orgs, and our trained users play in our gamified system by controlling the quadcopter our drones remotely to tag invasive species in difficult terrain, helping expedite their removal by local biologists. Our first target species is pythons in the Florida Everglades, thus the name Python.

All right, well, that was a very long pitch, and just as a word of advice, it'd be really good if you can get that into like a couple sentences. Now I understand kind of why you want to say more stuff because that helps you get more information out, but sometimes it's just not necessary, right? So if I were you, I would just like try to basically like cut out like half of that pitch. You know, in regards to like the business, a lot of these kind of custom archetypes that you have right now, at least slated, seem to be very challenging to acquire. Sometimes they're kind of like run by like governments, other times they're like, you know, private organizations as well. And so if you are going after like government type product or you're trying to sell your product to like a government agency, you know, you're looking at like a year-long sales cycle, RFP process potentially, and things like that. So just something to think about. That means that your cost of customer acquisition is going to be extremely high, which means that your pricing has to be very high. If you're going after kind of like the local wildlife removal service person on Yelp, which is essentially like a small business, then your pricing is going to change for that, right? Because obviously they can't afford something like that. But the problem with that is that it's gonna still be very difficult to acquire them, right? Because you still need to like call them potentially to close them and things like that. Especially if you're trying to do like a drone, unless you're like renting out the drone, which is a whole other thing, right? And so it's probably gonna be a subset of those, honestly, that are gonna wanna do that. They're gonna be like the techie people that have like a business, And you really should kind of like focus on that and larger organizations, maybe all the way up to like, I don't know, like the Terminix or whatever the wildlife removal service may be. So just think about that when you do it. If it was possible for you to expand this out somehow and go into like high production farms that have these kinds of issues or something like that to where it's like an even bigger application of the drone, like based like technology. Then this could be possibly a very large business. Otherwise, it might be hard for you to find enough customers for something like this to basically generate like enough revenue on a consistent basis for you to basically build a very big business. Again, there's nothing wrong, just like the first caller, of you building like a smaller business. It's just that remember, it's going to take just as much time for you to build a small business as it takes for you to build a big business. And the risk-reward ratio is actually not that different because If you think about it, at the end of the day, all of businesses is a collection of people and contracts, and people are unpredictable. So, you know, a lot of people think that, oh, if I'm running a small business, it's a little bit less risky and that's a little bit safer. It really is not that much safer than you trying to go for broke and build like a very large business. Because again, there's just so many variables, it's just you're counting on people. And so the probability of you lose, you know, the business going out of business is very high irrespective of how big you go after it. So Oftentimes it just makes sense to just go after a very big opportunity. So I challenge you to try to think bigger with this type of idea because the technology certainly has the potential to scale in a very wide array of markets.

Yeah, for me, I mean, it's unclear like what the business model is here. There's a lot of pretty big assumptions in the pitch and in what you're doing, and I'm not entirely sure that the problem and the solution are really aligned. Like, is there a problem with pythons, you know, in the Everglades? Yes, there is, undoubtedly. The solution you're making is to basically identify more of these animals that are invasive, you know, assuming that people are somehow financially motivated to control these quadcopters and spend time tracking and using RFID tags to find them. That's sort of debatable. You probably have to pay someone to do that, which makes this more expensive and also less scalable. But the bigger question I have is like, is the problem that these, you know, I'm just going to call them forest rangers or biologists, right? The ones who are like trying to remove them. Is the problem really that there's not enough of these animals to remove? Or is the problem that they don't have enough funding to do it at scale? Because what you're essentially doing is you're going to the biologist and you're saying, hey, here's like 1,000 more pythons that we've been able to tag for you. Like, now you can go and remove them. And I would imagine that they're probably, like some government agencies are, overextended, underfunded, undermanned for the project that's in front of them, where it's like their issue might not be that they need to find more pythons. Their issue is that they might not have enough of a budget to deal with the existing amount of pythons that they already have to try and remove. So I would dive in a little bit deeper, and I agree with Mike. I don't think that the biologist is really your customer archetype here, but the problem is this, right? This is definitely something where it's like you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, you know, especially like with the Florida Everglades and the pythons, right? That, you know, if you were to pivot to say like getting rid of mongoose on pineapple farms in Hawaii, right? If let's just assume that that's like a more profitable business and they're willing to pay you to do that, you might not care about mongoose in Hawaii and pineapple farms, right? You probably care about the Florida Everglades. And so you should never pivot on the purpose of your life and what you want to do. And so you got to ask yourself, are you going to pivot the business so you focus on an area that, that could potentially make money? Or are you still going to focus on the same area, you're just going to pivot on the type of solution that you're bringing to market? And so So that's really just a question for you to answer.

Couldn't agree more with your comments, Ryan, as well as echoing something earlier that Mike said, basically.

I mean, I really think that the use case for this business here, it's going after invasive animals to tag them. I definitely think looking at an agricultural sector where there's an animal pest could be the paying customer that would actually support the technology that we're talking about here.

Awesome. All right, great feedback. Cecile from Oslo says, my company Lingal is disrupting language learning with an AI chatbot for beginner to intermediate language learners. Our chatbot fills a gap left open by apps that focus too heavily on remote memorization thanks to our bot's conversationality and its ability to easily shift between multiple languages when the user is stuck.

This is a pretty tough space. I would like to know that you've been able to somehow verify that the AI is that good, that it can actually have an entire conversation with you in a different language and interpret things, right? You know, generally right now it seems like, and again, I could be proven wrong, that the AI itself is just not as good. So you essentially almost have to kind of script a lot of this stuff. So you kind of have to kind of create like some very canned responses that the person can have. And you have to kind of interpret what they type in unless you essentially give them like these 3 options and then you kind of have this conversation that way, right? In which case the experience might not be as good. And so language learning is, is an important market. Duolingo is obviously doing pretty decent in it, but it's a really hard one to kind of get right because after a certain point, a lot of these tools struggle until you get to like kind of like the conversation piece. So in your pitch, I think it's imperative that you basically go in and talk about what's your kind of like a little bit of your secret sauce here so that people automatically don't bucket you in with like Duolingo and all the other like apps that are in the App Store that are doing pretty good, but not necessarily all of them are breaking out with the exception of maybe Duolingo, right? And so The going in between languages, it kind of threw me off because when someone's learning a language, like maybe they're not trying to like learn another one, but it could have meant just you are trying to like translate from one language to another. So just be very specific with that when it comes to your pitch.

Yeah, you know, I would definitely start with one language because, you know, do I think throwing AI at this could help, right? From a chatbot perspective, yeah, it certainly could, right? But like It's just such a buzzword these days that you really gotta explain why, right? Why does using AI matter and how does it make a difference? And then the other thing too is like, how do you know that a chatbot is really the best solution, right? Or is better than what's out there already, right? 'Cause you're comparing it to rote memorization. And I think that to a certain extent, that's been the standard because maybe it's effective. And like what you need to go out and prove and what users will pay you for is that We're 25% better, or we'll help you learn the language like 50% faster, right? And more effective because of our innovative chatbot. The assumption isn't whether or not AI would make it better. It's more about like, is an AI chatbot really the best method and the fastest method? So I think people are just looking for the fastest and easiest way to learn a language. And although like AI chatbot sounds like it could be a good solution, you're going to want to prove that it's a better, a much better solution to get people to pay you for it.

Yeah, this is a great opportunity to basically start either creating your own studies, working with researchers on these studies, or citing various different studies and just talk about that, right? Like it increases this type of learning by 25%, like Ryan said, and then you need kind of like a why now and Now, because of the advances in machine learning combined with XYZ other thing plus the adoption of premium paid apps or whatever, the time is now to basically build this, right? And make this happen.

Fantastic. Okay, next up is John from St. Louis. He says, my company Air Refueling Tanker Transport, or ART2, fills a gap in the DOD's air-to-air refueling tanker fleet. Sought after by global militaries, our commercial AAR supports military tankers and crews during peacetime. As the nation's only commercial AAR outlet, we deliver civilian-to-military capability support and training needs in excess of 200,000 hours annually. Our secret sauce is our 9 aircraft, 90K hours, and 250 years of AAR know-how.

So I'm gonna default to Ryan because of his military background on the actual technology, but for me, like on the pitch, it's really unclear kind of what exactly you do. Are you like a refueling service essentially that you're kind of like selling to the military where essentially you own the planes and then you kind of like refuel them midair or something like that? Is this like autonomous refueling? What is it exactly that you do is really, really important, right? To basically talk about it. It's like, and also kind of like why that's better right now than what's currently available, right? Like it saves this much time, this much money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you really gotta kind of talk a little bit more about what the actual solution is. I mean, 'cause it could very well be like basically just like a service business where essentially you have like planes, you're kind of renting out time and paying for that, or you have like an actual product that basically refuels planes better than anybody else. So just a thought on that. So Ryan, what are your thoughts?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I really love the concept here and it sounds like you've been doing this for a while. So I think just kind of like retooling the pitch a little bit can make it a little bit more clear. I mean, the privatization of the military is a real thing, right? So I think you're actually riding a good trend here. Which is that, you know, as the military expands to more of a contractor model, right, they're going to need solutions that can interface with these private companies and private organizations, right? And so I definitely see this as a big opportunity. It sounds like you've got kind of like some defensibility in the sense that you've got experience doing this, you're already doing this as well. You know, the question, does you become like the Amerigas for, for, you know, military and private contractors where you can just go and refill, or is this something where like you can create more of a product around it? This is definitely something I would recommend going and trying to get like a grant through the government. There's lots of different grant opportunities through like AFWERX and things like that. I'd also be interested in learning a little bit more about this, you know. So if you have a deck, email it to me. My email is ryan@fi.co, and I'll see if I can stack some resources on top of this.

Yeah, the key here though is whether it's in your pitch or just in general, you know, do you want to be like a product business or do you want to be like a service business? With a product business, it can scale much faster because there's no relationship between the amount of people that you have and the amount of customers that you have. So for example, like Google, right? There's no relationship between the amount of engineers that are at Google and and the amount of people that use Google, right? Whereas if you're like a service business, there's essentially a direct relationship between the number of employees that you have and the number of customers that you have. So, I don't know, let's use real estate as an example, right? A real estate broker can only manage 30 or 40 clients, let's say, a year, right? And so in order for that brokerage firm to scale, they need to add more real estate brokers. But that, the ratio of 1 to 40, basically stays the same, right? And so when you're looking at this, so it's much more difficult to scale essentially, right? Because the people and the overhead kind of go up with time. And so there's the margin, essentially, even though you can optimize it around the edges, it's going to stay kind of the same. Whereas if it's like a product-based business, right, that can scale, then there's no relationship there. And therefore it can be infinitely more profitable and could, you know, reach more people and less support and all that, right? And so those are two things that you probably want to just like think through as you kind of think about this offering.

Fantastic. All right, next up is Clement from Montreal. My company Tester is building an online marketplace to help clinical researchers find test subjects for trials. Currently, test subjects struggle to find research projects which are too often listed on isolated university websites or even Craigslist. While researchers don't attract enough applicants to actually be selective, we give researchers a central hub to list their trial opportunities and a test subjects a central place to find them.

This is actually pretty interesting. My mind immediately goes to how big is this market? You know, I like how you kind of talk about like the universities and websites. Obviously that alludes to a large market, but there's probably some data out there. I would put that in the pitch. Because I don't know if this is like something where it's like, okay, you can generate like $5 million a year doing this, or if this is like a $50 million a year type of opportunity. And that's really the difference between something that's like venture scalable that investors would be interested in, or just something that, you know, could become a really nice business for you and your friends and family. So again, I think that if there is information out there, you definitely want to talk about the market size. And that's the main thing I thought was missing.

Yeah, also think about the frequency of this use case and how that would work, right? It's okay for it to be low frequency. Airbnb is technically low frequency, but how many researchers, how often are they putting out requests for testers on a regular basis, and what are the criteria for those testers and being able to kind of like match them and do they have to be close to that location? Is there like a location component to this as well that's like important? Like really thinking through like the dynamics of like the marketplace is really, really important. I would take a look at that, kind of like what does the quality of the transaction look like, right? Like how much margin could there be in the transaction like this, right? I know that researchers have several like budgets, but those budgets are capped, so it's unclear to me how much you can actually charge on their budget to basically make this happen. And so what does that look like, right? Like, what do the unit economics kind of look like that? And for a marketplace, you kind of have to talk a little bit about that. I know this is like a pitch that's like a 1-minute pitch or whatever, but you kind of want to talk about like how you've thought through like the unit economics of the transactions in something like this. So that people can see that, back to Ryan's point, just how big of an opportunity this is, right? Like, it can make a case that the transaction quality is extremely high here, and there's a lot of people that want this, and it can go like scalable, blah blah blah, it can be a very large business, then it's very, very interesting.

I think an interesting, you know, UVP might be on the actual tester side, so the subject side, maybe thinking about like what are the criteria that these researchers, so the other side of the market, need from their test subjects. Because yeah, there might be really specific ways, maybe certain fields, ways to kind of filter people that your kind of unique offering would be for these test subjects who could be hard to find. Through your platform, you're going to be able to have access to those people in some way.

Awesome. And our last one for the day is going to be from Rhoda. Rhoda from St. Paul says, my company peaked Always is launching a geofencing app for young tech-savvy shoppers that solve the issue of lost purchasing opportunities via our sales alert system. For example, when an app user walks by a Target store, a notification will pop up on their phone informing them about any ongoing sales.

So there are several companies that are doing this, right? And they're looking at this. So in your case, because the market is relatively like saturated, I think you need to kind of like mention some folks and kind of mention a little bit of a differentiation. In this. Also, is this basically like an SDK that goes into like the mobile app of— or a library or whatever that goes into like the local, like, like a Macy's mobile app or Gap's mobile app or something like that? Or is this kind of like a central app where people just go and shop and they also have this kind of like location-based component to it as well? So I think that that's really important to kind of think through when you positioned this, right? So is this essentially like a consumer play where you're trying to get like as many people as you can to this app and then getting the stores on board to basically advertise on it essentially, which is like just very highly targeted? Or is this basically a SaaS B2B play where you basically sell this as like an SDK, you put this into like the, you know, the store's mobile app and then you're able to provide them with like some form of analytics and they pay you for it? And so that's really important. And you probably want to play along this kind of like death of retail right now and just say, look, this actually helps drive people to the store because it lets them know things and blah, blah, blah. And I think that's also kind of important to think about. But the key here is just really like hone your pitch around like who the actual customer is for something like this. Because, you know, the mall operator is fundamentally different than like the store operator, i.e., Gap versus like it being like a consumer. Superplace. So really like, like specialize on which one.

Yeah. So one of my very first startups was very similar to this, except that it had— it dealt with restaurants rather than retail. And there was a couple issues, right? One was around like the go-to-market. Obviously it's a little bit different going to a Target than a local restaurant, but I'll just give you some kind of tips to help you avoid some pitfalls. So one, is this is something where, because the market is saturated and because you really, in order to stand out, you kind of need to prove a bunch of assumptions and actually make significant traction before you could really convince anyone to give you money, whether it's a customer or an investor, you're gonna need someone on the team that's technical that can code something to get you to the point where you can actually prove this through traction. You don't necessarily need to have a tech solution to prove some of these assumptions. I think that there's ways to do it without building tech, but the problem is like even if you were to prove them out, investors are still going to want to put money behind something that's a little bit more proven, and so you actually have to get further along than other companies arguably in order to convince an investor to invest in this space. Which by the way has a ton of dead bodies and landmines ridden throughout it, right? And so I would also go back and I would look at probably the 1,000+ companies, and I'm not even kidding you, most of them probably you won't be able to find their story online, but I guarantee you as a person who has gone down this path, there are many of them. You want to find out what didn't work and what you can do that's better. And I think to something that we talked about a little bit earlier with a different company, Maybe there's some kind of timing you can make, like why now? You kind of mentioned a little bit like tech-savvy shoppers or for young people. Could you make the TikTok of retail sales apps versus like back in my day when we used to do this, we did it through Facebook? I think there could be something to that, like market timing and new technology. But at the end of the day, this is something that you're going to really have to get some breakthrough traction. To leave the fears that investors have of investing in this space.

Fantastic. Awesome. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted ideas for today. We really appreciate it, and we'll see you next time.

All right, everyone. Goodbye.