LUHU presentation from the Prepare 4 VC demo day

Yeah, now we can. Perfect.

All right. Hey guys. Hey everyone. Jason, thanks again for this opportunity to present Luhu. I'm greatly appreciated for the fact, for the opportunity. Hey everyone, my name is Zwede Hewitt. My camera doesn't work because I have a gaming laptop, so you guys have to look at, I guess, my handsome picture or this presentation, right? So I am the CEO and founder at LuHu. What LuHu is, it's a high-impact tech startup, and we are tackling a multi-billion-dollar market size through the shared economy. LuHu means let us help you. It's a resource— what we, what we are is a unique networking and resource sharing platform, essentially, to where you can connect to people in your network for offers and favors, but also pay it forward through helping others. Our aim is to sort of streamline communication along the lines of resources, and the psychology behind it is that being asked for favors strengthens connections. However, through the use of technology over the years, it has become, become pretty awkward, especially when asking for favors or offers on social media. Typically, for example, this leads to our problem. Asking for favors is really time-consuming with a lot of roadblocks when using technology. A typical example would be if you go back on Facebook and you look back, let's say, 15, 20 years, or 10 years to a friend who you haven't spoken to in a long time, but you guys were maybe good friends way back, and you ask them for a simple favor, there is a possible chance that they might receive this message and be like, hey, I haven't spoken to Jason in 15 years. Why is he hitting me up now? Only because he wants something. And that is some of the roadblocks that you encounter now using social media when asking for favors through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and they— and that is sort of like the transition into the sharing economy. So what our solution is essentially to streamline the process by matchmaking through connecting persons with resources in an existing network. And resources can be anything from, um, your car, which is similar to rideshare, um, your home, so accommodation. Even now, um, in the post-COVID and digital age, there has been a huge shift towards even, um, a transfer of knowledge and mentorship, um, through digital platforms. There are applications where you can connect for services such as babysitting, um, and child care. um, car washes, mobile car washes, you name it. What we aim to provide is essentially an offers platform, um, and the value is now that users can essentially connect with an existing network and share resources. And in the process, we aim to accomplish organic reconnection of individuals. So now we bypass that awkward barrier of you asking for a favor for someone who may be a friend of old, You know, our essential point and differentiator factor between us and the traditional models is the level of trust that we aim to incorporate in our platform through leveraging friends and families and in-network connections and seeing how you are connected to individuals for these particular resources is one step forward in terms of the trust factor that is currently there within the shared economy. networking system and, and, and platforms. But also from a networking standpoint, we plan to put a step forward with regards to our, our security in terms that we plan to have, of course, maybe, um, digital IDs or ID— government-issued IDs for signs up. So everyone on this platform are going to be who they say they are. So it's not going to be like Instagram where you can create like a fake account and all of that. We are starting along the— oh, I'll move on essentially now to the team. So here's our great team. I am the co-founder. I'm a former national athlete and sort of serial entrepreneur. I have tried and failed in different industries. Most recently, I was involved in the event space. where we were doing events locally. I'm also a former national athlete. Most recently, our latest acquisition was Kenroy George. He's our CEO, our CTO, and co-founder. He's a full-stack developer and also entrepreneur who is in the space of digital ID on blockchain technology. Our lead advisor, great guy, David Metzler. So an interesting part of this entire story is during the entire sort of entrepreneurial journey, what I've been able to do is essentially leverage connections to get to individuals who may have been of value to moving forward on this project. So given that I was not necessarily a technical co-founder, I seeked essentially getting good advisors and strategic partnerships to help us grow and scale. Our first contact was with Jason Kraus, who's actually our startup advisor. We connected about 2 years ago. Cool connection. I was just maybe— I was searching for opportunities in the United States because I was at the time in Trinidad and Tobago to essentially help us move forward with this idea. I connected to Jason. We had a good working relationship eventually to where he came on board. Marcus Boyd, he was a former world junior 400-meter champion, NCAA Division 1 champion. And now he's a full-stack developer and coder. He was my best man in my wedding. And another part about this story was essentially when I got to Baylor my freshman year, Marcus used to give me rides to practice every day because the stadium was pretty far away from campus. So essentially there would be hiccups to where some days he may be sleeping or he may have practiced earlier and I'm there frantically because this is in 2009. I am frantically trying to text message everyone in my network who is going to track practice at that time. Hey, can I get a ride? Hey, can I get a ride? But the, the interesting fact was that the network was big. We had guys who were on the cross-country team. I was in the sprint section. There were guys who I didn't have their phone number, but they were going to practice too, but I didn't necessarily have a way to connect with them efficiently. So essentially, being in the same network and connecting for the similar purpose is where some of these early ideas of Lu came as well. Well, yeah, the, the early inception ideas of when that— of how we, we came about with this, this new venture. And essentially, I've been— well, we've been able to build a team of leveraging in network connections to help us move forward with this project. We have a great team essentially to help us get to market but also scale, scale to to a couple early rounds. Now we can dive into the product. So the main, uh, how we describe Louie essentially is a— it's an algorithm-based matchmaking system that connects people with resources of interest, offerings, and ratings, um, that they're interested in. But our also— our major differentiating factor is that we aim to leverage a utility token that unlocks tiers of connections that are outside of your direct network. So now you can connect to friends of friends and second-degree connections and third-degree connections for a particular purpose. We have been able to do some prototyping, some early testing as well. We have our designs on Figma, but we also have approximately about 75% of the mobile app already completed. We are building on React Native with Firebase on the backend. But as you can see here, some slides of essentially the app is going to work. It's going to be a similar— a simple sign-up login picture. You input the resources that you're interested in, in, in finding on the platform, and then also you get essentially a Loo coin. The Loo coin is what is going to connect you out of your network for the purpose to have a conversation with someone for the particular offering that you are seeking. So we have chosen a pretty sleek and sort of relatable UI/UX with the up and down swipe, up and down as opposed to swipe left and right like the models of Tinder and Bumble. So we are up and down where you are seeing offerings that you're looking for, and you can simply have the ease of access to click at a button and it takes you to have a potential chat with someone. For the offering. The, the choice behind this model was, was based off of a lot of research and data that has proven that billions of dollars worth of transactions takes place off of non-transactional platforms such as WhatsApp, where it's essentially just a communication-based platform. So what we are essentially doing is expanding on that model by streamlining the communication. However, we even plan to incorporate a sort of viral feature um, simple chitchat to where now you can connect or reconnect with individuals just for the purpose of chitchat, um, or have a— just to find out how someone is going. And this can be turned on and off at the switch of a button. And this solves a problem for WhatsApp, which has become sort of invasive as people use it for different purposes. Um, our competition, um, we have some stiff competition in, um, the incumbents like Facebook Marketplace, Airbnb, Ubers, and stuff like that. But we really believe that we are incorporating not only a design, but updated technology and app that is relevant to the current social climate. So we definitely think that we are one step ahead in terms of our product. So we essentially have a pretty good shot at, in terms of our our exit strategy. We are potentially looking for a 3 to 5 year acquisition by one of those similar incumbents, and that will give us the opportunity and the capacity as well to scale globally. Our total available market is a— it's a $2 trillion market when you think of, um, the transport industries and all of that. But Lou is tapping into its own, its own segment of, uh, of the shared economy, which has now grown to over $350 billion market size. We are aiming to launch in the emerging market of Trinidad and Tobago, scaling to the Caribbean and outwards to other emerging markets of the world. And right now, interestingly, due to COVID-19, the United States of America is actually sort of like an emerging market status with high rates of unemployment. So we definitely think that this application could be a solution to providing another option within the gig economy, but also providing a a real solution for outreach of services and trades, and which could as well fuel small and medium enterprises and also help stabilize the economy. So we think that our timing is really, really good. We have been incorporated since 2018, so we have— we are planning to go to market in October. Thus far, we have been able to build a really strong team, but also acquire or make some partnerships with some high-value organizations. Our founding team recently graduated from the Draper University Entrepreneurial Program as a top 10 startup, where we had the opportunity to pitch to Tim Draper himself, and we are now proceeding with positive engagements not only with Luhu but also to foster development and resources towards entrepreneurs within the Caribbean region. We have been working with Jason and Prepare4VC for quite some time now, about 2 years. We were featured twice at Startup and Grind, most recently February 2020, where we were one of the top 300 exhibiting companies. And we've also been able to— been featured on a regional investment TV show called Planting Seeds Caribbean, That is a Shark Tank similar style show. We were able to raise offers equaling $250K via convertible note. COVID sort of pushed back some of our timelines. However, we have been able to receive a letter of interest confirming us progressing with closing on that $250K round. Thus far, we have been technically sort of bootstrapped. We raised $10K via friends and family. And that was essentially just to show capacity to raise funding, but also to get us some early traction and help us with some of our developments thus far. So we have a traction timeline from ideation in August 2019. You can see clearly some of the steps we have made moving forward. We took a couple of trips across to Startup and Grind. We also traveled to New York and Boston and California. Where we attended several conferences, speaking engagements, but also network with high-value individuals to connect, essentially to help us with fundraise capacity, but also talent and strategic partnerships moving forward pre- and post-launch. We have been able to connect with some very high-value guys outside of just not only Tim Draper, David Metzler, Jason Calacanis, and these are all guys that have been giving positive feedback We have been in touch with some of the top-tier VCs in the world, such as General Catalyst, and they have all shown interest. So we are aiming to head to market in October of this year. We have been able to form strategic partnerships with a couple of state organizations locally and also high-value organizations, including the top business hotel, the Hyatt Regency in Trinidad, to facilitate a soft launch, essentially, um, to build on, uh, to develop an early user base of executives and early adopters. And we are going to use that as our testing, essentially, then as we scale outwards to the wider Trinidad and Tobago, then towards the Caribbean and beyond. So that is essentially what we have been up to. Again, here's my contact information. We are still raising our early round funding. So maybe there's an opportunity to match our first $50K round and we raise a $500K round. So the options are available. We love to hear from you guys. What are your thoughts and feedback and any opportunity to mutually progress?

Sounds good. Yeah, great job, Zwede. And yeah, great presentation. We have a couple of questions in so far. Again, any additional ones, feel free to submit them. And yeah, I'll ask them accordingly. So I guess to start out here, have you considered creating a cryptocurrency based on these favors? And is that part of the system?

Yes. So essentially how we're starting is cryptocurrency is still a sort of taboo, especially in this this region. So we are going to have the capacity for you to transfer the utility tokens between accounts, and that would be our entry point. And our strategy is if cryptocurrency becomes a norm or, or mass adoptable, then we shift into a crypto. So it is part of our, our potential pillars as we scale.

Okay. And then, yeah, as far as being in several different markets, so, you know, US, the Caribbean, other areas, what do you have to localize versus what is sort of the same throughout the platform?

Okay, so have you considered—

Yeah, I mean, currency, other methods, um, you know, what has to be specific to your region versus the same throughout the platform?

Well, from a starting point, this is why we are incorporating the capacity to transfer tokens between accounts, and that would facilitate sort of like to offset, um, areas of low cash reserves, you know. Um, so that is one of our solutions to, to that issue. And again, That gives us also the capacity to scale into cryptocurrency, which solves the problems of areas that do have low cash reserves or low access to cash and banking systems.

Okay. Yeah, and then let's see. So, and as far as juicy users, yeah, a couple other direct Do you see users being both providers and users of the favors, or do you see people signing up for one side or the other? How do you see this platform being used?

How do I see it? Well, essentially, we are putting it— we are pushing it as an offerings platform. So based off of psychology, people are going to sign up on the platform to see what they can receive. However, we have a reward system in place to incentivize you to offer on the platform as well. So the more offerings that you make, you build up points that essentially translate into maybe tokens or or the opportunity to get access to something that you are— you may be interested in. So it's going to be— you are going to be rewarded for providing favors, and that incentivizes users to place offerings on it. So that is essentially our solution to have that, that balance between what you're looking for but also receiving.

Yeah. Sounds good. Yeah, and then the last question here is just around in terms of— yeah, what was it? Oh, can you also offer business services on the platform as well, or is it more peer-to-peer resources?

No, no. So it's gonna be Our launching pillars are going to be offers, services. So services are considered sort of like what can be paid for. And this is where we are utilizing the models taken from even WhatsApp to where a lot of individuals offer their services through these communication platforms. So yeah, so you are going to be able to offer— if you're a plumber, input, um, your services as a plumber, and in your description it would be a paid service, you know. And payment can be in the early stage, it can be taken off platform, whether it be cash, PayPal. But we, however, do plan to expand into having, um, payment systems in our application to where you can pay directly, um, funds to the individual for their services. Perfect.

All right, yeah, great, great job overall. And yeah, again, I'll send a connection email after this with follow-ups. We have another 15 minutes or so if you guys want to connect with each other in more of the networking lounge. You can just click on one of the tables and join a video chat there. And yeah, thanks everyone for joining.