University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups For $5000 Prize Money

By the way, you like how he was like So sharks. You wanna come take a swim in the maritime industry? This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I thought this was gonna be stupid. These are these guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented. Also, if this is like the bar if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then like uh uh you know, like I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had like short shorts and nobody could use their left hand and like it was a beach basket for a hoop. It's like oh wow, these these guys can jump. It's like we just like LeBron just learned how to lift weights. Like that's what this feels like.

Alright, what up? We got a special episode. This is Like a Shark Tank style episode. So this is the My First Million. pitch competition. We got the University of Michigan So wolverines. Or here we got

Five companies, I believe. Each company's gonna have two minutes to pitch. A five minute QA and the winner. We'll get five thousand dollars at the end, as decided by me and Sam, whoever is the best. At pitching. And little do people know this. This is how I became an entrepreneur. I was gonna be a doctor and then I entered a pitch competition at my university.

And I won that baby. For twenty five grand. And um That was what got me on the path of entrepreneurship altogether. I would have never, ever, ever done startups uh if it wasn't for that.

competition that we randomly entered. So This could be kind of for somebody out there, this could be their break too. So here we go. University of Michigan pitch competition. First up, um Who is it? Jake? So Jake from Area, is that right?

Yes. There you go. What's up? All right, two minutes is all yours. Go. Cool. So hey guys, my name's Jake, I'm the founder of Area. We're bringing e commerce abilities to in person shopping. And so as an e commerce business owner myself

We we know quite a bit about our customers, such as They are. what they're interested and how they engage with our business. And so This

This type of information informs all aspects of our operations from developing new products and then driving more sales. And so The question that comes to mind is why aren't these same necessities available to retail business owners? Why is this limited to just e commerce? And this happens because the source of the transaction, which is the bar code. Um

By area, we're making a new type of product code. That brings uh e commerce abilities to retail. So this is called one tag. It uses radio frequency identification. This is the same type of technology in contactless credit cards and garage door openers, and it recently became affordable at a mass scale. And uh one tech is super versatile, there's a lot of uses for it.

It costs pennies to manufacture. And it's printed on a sticker to attach to merchandise. Uh so by replacing the barcode with one tag. Retailers unlock new capabilities in a variety of things. I'm gonna go into one example now. So this is a traditional retail setup. You have your products and then you have barcodes and each one is individually scan.

Instead of that, let's just replace all these barcodes with one tag. So now a uh Uh Shopper can just bag all items as they shop. And then they can

Pretty much just walk. Through an antenna. Which instantly scams all of their items at once. And then payment can be done through a kiosk for quick self checkout. Or through an app.

That uses uh something called ultra wide band. Which is a new type of technology. uh that's brought to iPhone in as recent as twenty nineteen. And so um this pretty much tracks location of the Customer.

And uh shows what products they purchased and How they purchased it. And so You can pretty much walk out and then

uh payments instantly processed. As you walk out, just like Amazon go. So what this does in addition to autonomous checkout. is it brings a bunch of e commerce capabilities to retail.

So now we have an e-commerce profile for a bunch of offline purchases. And this allows us to abandon car recovery. Personalized product upsells. uh in depth shopping data and subscription reorders.

There's also loss prevention built right in. And then The location accuracy. Of RFID. Is super high. So

Inventory management is like pretty easy. Uh all you really have to do. Is uh Is put an item in its proper location. And then

If an item is ever misplaced. Area pretty much will map. the entire location of all these items and so instead of like Arduous stock checks. Um

You can pretty much just instantly know where things are misplaced and address those directly. And so yeah, that's my product. This is one tag, it's checkout, security, and inventory all in one product. And most importantly, it brings e-commerce abilities. Torito. Jake, what type of e commerce storm do you own?

Uh I own a sex chocolate brand. What is it called? It's called Tab chocolate. Yeah, we we've talked about you uh a fair bit uh on the pot, I think, right? You've got like a crazy uh Instagram or TikTok or something like that. Uh yeah, we go viral on TikTok pretty frequently. Yeah, that's cool. Wait, you're in college?

I am, I'm a sophomore now. My God. Okay. Uh cool. All right, so Sam, what do you think? Yeah, so I've talked to a few companies in this space

I know there's a few People trying to attack it. And some of'em I think are actually quite big. I the one of the most interesting so basically Jake explained it in a more sophisticated way. I'm gonna explain it in a more dumb way, which is like This little tag goes into clothing and you know the clothing's history and you could track it and things like that.

And I saw a company that was doing this with high end luxury goods. So like I don't know if this was their customer, but it basically like this would get sewn inside of a Louis Vuitton purse. And whether you know how people buy and sell used purses, you could see like where it originally came from, who originally bought it. And as a collector of like old stuff, I thought that was awesome. I thought that was great. So I it it's it's interesting technology to me. I don't really know this market that well, but I do think there's a few people doing this, right, Sean? Well I I think you

Or looking only at a little niche use case. It seems like to me what they're doing is They're trying to take the Amazon Go store. Like Amazon's like, Hey, what if there was a grocery store where you could walk in and just walk out? There's no checkout process, right? That's more efficient, it's more convenient, um, and it's lower cost because you don't have to, you know, employ all these checkout. Folks at the at the store. And um

They're trying to just provide that as a s like anybody any store should be able to have that if they want. Kind of the uh the next level of self checkout. is I think what they're trying to do. And so I think that's a cool idea. I think it ha it ticks a lot of boxes, so

Um Technology that really wasn't possible wasn't cheap enough. Until a few years ago. I like that. Like these little I I don't know if they're called I don't know if these are NFC chips or whatever, but like they're very cheap. Like pennies uh of these like um

Pennies like pennies now to to manufacture or or add these little chips to um to any kind of goods. So I think that's really great that that's now possible. It wasn't possible before. I think it's clearly Cheaper, faster for the person who's doing it. Um, but I do have some problems with your pitch, so I'm gonna give you like

Three bits of pitch feedback for you. All right, Jake, so Keep in mind though, he's doing this with like in the most like hood rat way ever right now. We've got like one person talking, another person hitting slides and there's a delay, so go a little easier on it. Yeah. And uh of course, of course. And also he's like sideways on my screen, so that doesn't help. Uh But basically the the The main things I would have said in the pitch is basically like

Uh you know you have three three major ways that you could have presented this. Number one, you could have shown a barcode. And just been like Mm-hmm. Can you believe this hasn't been upgraded in like a hundred years? Like this is the same thing we've been using for seventy five years. We got iPhones, we got all this crazy stuff, all this amazing technology, but the barcode is still the same.

And like you could have presented it from that angle. Like the barcode is is outdated. We're we're revolutionizing the barcode. And the barcode's on everything. So like that's how big this idea is gonna be. The second thing was basically like We're taking the Amazon go checkout and we're making it available to any store. Right. That that's a very simple way for me to understand what you're talking about. Um

So the the third thing is that you have a really cool backstory with with the chocolate stuff. So you could be like I'm Jake, I'm a sophomore in college. This year I sold four million dollars worth of sex chocolate. Um I'm a entrepreneur, I'm a hustler. I don't think my career's gonna you know, I don't think sex chocolate's the big idea for me, but it led me to what I think is the big idea.

And already I'd be hooked because I'm like Who is this college sophomore that sold four million dollars of sex chocolate? Like, tell me more, right? So That's my pitch feedback for you. Um on that side On the

Uh and the actual idea itself. The part I felt was lacking was The go to market. So this was this was all about technology, technology, technology. But how are you gonna get customers and are you know Are these stores gonna be willing to revamp?

Or Pro are customers gonna understand what the hell's going on? And I think that's where this technology that's where this a company like this would struggle, but you didn't really talk about that at all. So can you talk about how are you gonna go get your first, you know, ten or a hundred customers, have you done that already or how are you gonna do it? Absolutely. Yeah. I'm talking to customers right now. It would pretty much be there would really be no retrofitting for a store. Um the first MVP would be pretty much an iPad kiosk.

Uh that's self check out. So But they have to tag every product, right? They do. Yeah. But a lot of retailers, especially small retailers, don't even use like Universal product code. They have to tag.

bar code. So it's not really an increase in labor. And um The way the way I'm envisioning for the MDP is Uh customers already have to check out somehow. They go to the front desk. There's an iPad there that says instant checkout.

They put their bag there. And pay with credit cards. And then soon you could add in things like uh antennas for theft and inventory and then Ultimately it's hard to check out with a map. So who you going for? Like

Small stores, big stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, huge brands. What who are you going for? I'm thinking clothing stores and convenience stores, uh, at least initially. So convenience stores give a lot of the benefits of j like the just walk out stuff, the convenience stuff, and then clothing stores. uh prioritize the uh e commerce abilities a lot more to be able to retarget customers and

You're selling things. Jake, how old are you? I'm funny. How big's tabs? Uh It's actually less than four million. It's about two million dollars this year.

Um, got eight hundred K profit and we started A year ago today. So for how young and how impressive you are, I've got incredibly high standards because you're like You're amazing. I mean th you're you're you're you're you're a you're a certified badass with your background and how young you are. Thanks.

I am shocked at how much you are sc you are screwing this up though, like with with this pitch because first you build them up Well my standards with him are so high because like I'll I would invest in a lot of things that this guy does just'cause he's him. But uh I think if you're that young and you're this successful already, like you clearly have some type of it factor. Uh Jonathan, by the way, can you mute them? You you clearly have some type of mute factor, uh uh you have some type of it factor, sorry. And uh you're you're amazing. I think though that when Sean nailed it, when he said

I don't he didn't say it this way, but basically this isn't really a tech problem. Uh like the tech exists and you're gonna be working on that. This is a distribution and marketing problem. Can you just get this in the hands of the right people? I don't have a lot of experience selling to like uh convenience stores and things like that. I think that would be a pain in the ass unless you got like a seven eleven or something like that. But like I think going like from store to store to store is gonna be the worst. But anyway Uh I think this is like a distribution and customer acquisition problem. It's a sales problem. Yeah, sales problem and like if you're s gonna sell to a convenience store, like the dude who owns the convenience store is working there. That will tell you

How much he thinks about efficiency, right? Like he just sits there all day. And like if you're like, hey, you have four thousand SKUs on your shelves, could you just add this tab to it and then When a customer comes in, you could tell them just to walk out. He'd be like actually it's Fine. They just I actually want them to come to the front counter so they buy a five hour energy also and a lotto ticket. And like I don't want them to just walk out. That's like half the revenue. And so, you know, I think that pro that if I was you, what I would say is Who needs this the most? Well I guess if I was you, I'd probably

Actually lean on your strengths. You're like Good it. TikTok and shit like that. That's my point. It's like I'm shocked that he doesn't get the people are bad at You're doing a product that old people would be good at, which is basically enterprise sales, going to uh Kroger and showing them that with this increase in efficiency or retargeting or whatever, they're gonna get you know

It's a four percent impact to the you know, to to their to their operations and that's a huge number for them. But that takes that's like a year long roll out or whatever. I f I think the S M B sale problem is gonna be pretty tough here. So That's what I would say is the weaknesses. But Really cool idea.

And um The good the good thing is I do think this is inevitable. Like I do think this is where all retail is going. It's the how is it gonna get there. That's sort of the challenge, and um So you know, that's yeah, you know, that's that's the opportunity also.

I think it's definitely gonna be challenging to acquire the first initial customers. The way this works though is it gets easier over time. So you can build leverage with brands and Have them install the tag itself. This is obviously a long term goal. Um, but once it's you know, similar to a UP C where it's applied at checkout. the area to entry for a retailer to

Carry area or carry one tag in their store. Is Virtually the same. And uh a lot of these benefits are actually pretty relevant to um

to retailers. It's not really like This kind of archaic like old thing. Um So I think uh I think it's definitely gonna be challenging to like go door to door and pitch. And I think there definitely will need to be some sort of

investor or person that could intro me to A bigger chain they're Where we could like do next. do a roll out of this that's much more efficient, but um

Yeah, I mean you're definitely right. It's gonna take some Some legwork to to get someone on board. If if I was you there's there's a thing called Walmart Labs. You should check out. So Walmart has basically a giant innovation department. Or at least they did. I don't know if this is still around. But like

They acquired a bunch of startups. They put like millions and millions of dollars into Walmart labs where they were gonna like experiment with technology because Walmart's the biggest retailer for them one percent. Matters a lot. And um I would go talk to them and be like, Hey, here's what we're thinking about. And I think that conversation will be pretty illuminating.

Um to figure out like, you know, what's the what is the appetite, what are the concerns, what H how would they realistically, you know, how how would you realistically get this into stores? So that'd be my suggestion as a next step. And I actually think that a lot I know A I I'm currently filming this in Austin right now. H E B has uh like an innovation lab. I would ima I think uh Costco, I imagine would Sam's Club, which is also Walmart does, but I think that as a nineteen, twenty, twenty one year old person with a really successful background.

I think you actually have this massive advantage to go to some of these like executives that some of these big companies, these gray haired executives, and they would meet someone like you and they're like You're you're special. Like it's my job to like collect interesting talent and like be on the latest and greatest and and know what's happening. I uh I don't know if you're gonna pull this off, but like I wanna I wanna be in business with you and I think Like three out of twenty people who you talk to would give you a chance just because of your success and your age. And I think that you should use every advantage you have. Do you think I go to big retailers initially versus smaller? I one hundred percent with it.

I would I would go big right away. I think big retailers think about this stuff in a more Like they they need to be innovating and These efficiencies mean a lot more to them. Um And they can sort of mandate these roll outs. So so we so I think that's the that's the play. And Sam's totally right. There's gonna be an executive who's like

Love this. You're gonna be like wow, he loves the technology. He's gonna he's gonna tell you, You gotta meet my son. He needs to be more like you. And it really like the draw is gonna be he wants his 18 year old son to hang out with you so that he could be more like you. And like, you know, that actually could get you a long way. That actually happened to me several times in my like basically between 18 and 24. I got so many either investors or intro's or things like that just because People just thought it was endearing. That I was this young kid who believed in this stupid thing.

And was going for it and was clearly smart and gonna do things later. And uh they just wanted that energy around them. They wanted to like support it. They go I just want a piece of the action. I don't know what it's gonna be, but like when you see like anyone who's like at the top oftentimes they'll be like, I appreciate young hustlers who are like the gonna be the real deal. I see myself in you, whatever it is. And they build a relationship and I would one hundred percent use that because there's like this like five or six year window when you're still considered a prodigy.

And you should just like pounce on that. Right. Thanks, Jake. Thank you guys. Thanks, Jake. Um all right.

Who's next? We got Anant from Internet Activism. By the way, that guy's pitch was like a Frickin' Pixar movie or something. It was like animated in Figma. Like

Kinsey's day, they got the tools, man. I don't I don't even know how how do you do that? Did you have you ever even seen that before? No, that was all design and thick, but yeah. That was impressive. This this one looks good too. I like internet activism. I'm clicking on your deck now. I like your I like your hacker design. It's cool. All right, two minutes, it's all yours. Go. All right. My name's Anot Senha, I'm the CTO of an organization called Internet Activism.

So currently the world is online. Over sixty four percent of the world has access City Internet. In the world's poorest communities, people are more likely to have access to a cellphone than a toilet. But still the internet's potential when it comes to distributing Humanitarian software is heavily underutilized.

In response to this, internet activism is the first nonprofit that's solely dedicated to developing software in response to humanitarian disasters. So now I'm gonna walk you through a couple of examples of what this actually looks like. In March twenty twenty two, we launched a website called Ukraine Take Shelter. This is essentially like Airbnb for refugees. We connected refugees with potential hosts and Over the last year we've been

We've been able to house over a hundred thousand refugees, which has ten thousand dollars in spend. How did you track that? Like you you know for a fact you put them in their home? Yeah. Another example of a project we worked on is the world's most popular coronavirus tracking dashboard. This is Lancet launched in January twenty twenty.

before covet nineteen was officially a pandemic. It was used by over six hundred million people. It was recognized by F Doctor Fauci as an invaluable resource in distributing Covet nineteen information. We were also recognized as being able to compile coronavirus data faster in the C D C and sharing it with general public. And now moving on to what we're doing right now. We're building out an app called Hyper Local.

This essentially allows people to message each other just using Bluetooth. So if you don't have access to data or Wi Fi or cellular service, you can still message others using Bluetooth. Even if they aren't right near you, we can carry, store, and forward messages. So messages can hop between people across large distances. This app is completely decentralized.

It's censorship resistant and it's secure. And we envision this to soon be a vital part of the modern day emergency toolkit. So the central thesis for our organization is being low cost, having a quick response time and having Building with small teams. We're going to build out a s entire suite of products that we can tweak in the matter of days or hours to respond to crises around the world. And our main goal is to bridge the gap between the tech sector and humanitarian organizations.

Our leadership consists of the world's leading internet activists, exited founders, and highly talented designers and developers. We're all young, ambitious, and we build really, really fast. And when crisis occurs next we'll be Ready to respond. Move on to questions.

Wow. Wow, that was incredible. Did you who who are you? These people are fucking amazing, by the way. How old are y How old are you? Twenty one. And you're in college? Yeah.

Why? I'm asking m myself that question too. Probably gonna take like a gap semester or a permanent gap semester starting next month. This is amazing. Well done. Um

From the start, the pitch was amazing. Uh you know, the world's poorest communities are more likely to have a cell phone than access to a toilet. Um That is. Uh yeah. A great attention grabbing, you know, like you know, grabbing by the throat type of type of A hook.

And then then you backed it up. And you were like, you know, we're gonna do this thing, we're gonna basically develop soft nonprofit developing software for the humanitarian disaster. Okay, it sounds interesting. But you've actually done it. So super impressive. That you guys did this Airbnb thing and you housed a hundred thousand refugees. Um, I remember using this coronavirus tracker.

Uh you guys made. Um So that's kind of amazing as well. And it sounds like How much traffic did you say that one got? It had over six hundred million users and a peak daily active thirty six million use thirty four million daily active users. And how did it get so popular? What did you do? Did you just release it to the world and it just went, or was there any growth and marketing around it?

I believe it was because of how early it was released. This was before John Hopkins started like publicly aggregating all the data and releasing it. We just had an advantage of being like one of the first people to compile all this data and share it with everyone. Again, this was in January twenty twenty. So this was three months before like the pandemic officially began. This is just in the early stages of the pandemic. And so you said this you show this leadership team, which is three people. How many people are there total in your group or your org? That like actively do stuff.

Currently there are five people. Wow. So you're a five person team. All of you guys are like, you know, college age. Is that it? Yeah, everyone's in between the ages of nineteen and twenty one. Have you made any money from any of this? Government grants, um Donations we're at five of one C three, so we're gonna be raising over the next few months to

Okay, so our grand vision right now is We're just going full force with a nonprofit right now. So these are like a couple of cool projects, but This is small in comparison to what we're gonna do over the next few years. We wanna build out entire suite of tools so that Whenever a a crisis occurs, we can just tweak it and then quickly deploy in a matter of hours or days. If you like current nonprofits, the amount of time it takes to respond to a situation, it can be months, it can be years.

We wanna be able to do that in hours. How many nonprofits are like run by hackers? No one does this. That's why So we worked on these projects in the past and we're like Why is no one else doing this? We see how powerful the internet is in terms of distributing these solutions.

We see that can literally save lives. So If no other organization's gonna do it, we're gonna do it. But why is there an incentive for a for profit investor? This isn't for profit. This is more we're gonna be taking donations for a nonprofit organization. But is there a way Okay.

Maybe there's a philosophical reason why you're doing it. W wh which is totally co which is cool. I won't or I won't. debate you on that. But if No, no, we we can talk about that. If if we do make this a for profit company. And we're going into countries where

We're establishing a presence, we're becoming their like central means of communication. If we come across as a for profit company. People are gonna question what our main incentives are. And we're not trying to dis distribute this in like one or two countries. With the app that I was discussing before, hyper local. That okay. I'm just gonna walk you through that app real quick.

Basically it allows people to just message each other using Bluetooth. So if a government shuts down Wi-Fi access like we're seeing in Iran right now. You can still message people. close to you or across an entire city. You can bounce message across everyone in between you and that person who has their app downloaded. Even if their phone is off. So this has happened before, right? These mesh network like messaging apps, and they kinda took off, I remember when

At festivals where there was no service, and then in some like disaster zones they were using these. UI and UX. Sucks. We're gonna improve that and they don't have store and carry, so Say you're standing near me, I can message you pretty easily.

But if I want to message someone who's a mile away, my message cannot get to them. What we're doing is essentially First of all, our messages are completely encrypted, but Say I want to message someone who's on the other side of a city.

If I want to message them. Every person I come across I will They will store my message and be like I'm on is trying to message this other person. So once they

Walk across other people, they're also going to be carrying my message until it eventually reaches that person. So able to create like a virus effect and spread messages and create. entire decentralized networks and cities. What are you and your team motivated by? Why are you doing this? We wanna like have a positive impact in the world. Basically We know that there are existing solutions that can help out people around the world. We know that we can

potentially save lives or just make the world a jet Better place in general. But just to just to c reiterate. This is not a profit making thing and that is not your intention ever. You're just doing this because I imagine it's incredibly fun and because you just want to make the world better. Is that right? Yeah. Basically look if you

If you see that there's a problem in the world and you know that you have the means to create a solution for it. If you walk away from that solution, our entire team would basically be bystanders and our team isn't bystanders. Man, this was this was great. Um You're a visionary. I I mean I I think this guy's Fucking badass. Yeah, I think what you guys have done is amazing. I think that uh it's really cool to see a nonprofit that's just driven by a you know, a handful of builders, like in engineers.

Hackers for better lack of a better word. And um Not gonna lie, gonna be a hard pitch to beat. So you know uh I'm just gonna put that out there. The bar is our team is five people, but We're planning on scaling this as fast as possible. Half of our team right now is full time students.

I'm a computer science student here at University of Michigan. I have a lot of workload, but As soon as this semester ends, this is all we're gonna be working on. Why hasn't University of Michigan been like, dude? Bail. Here's money. You're good. That would be a good question for the university. Both of the first two pitches got the My First Million uh bachelor's degree of you know, you you gotta be a badass uh from our from us. You don't need to finish school. The

One thing you should do though is you should shout out if there's'cause people listen to this podcast, if there's somebody at a school right now or a young p young person who's like, dude, that's awesome. I wanna help them out. Yeah. Okay. There's a website, internetactivism.org. If you go to that, you can find our contact information and reach out to us directly. Internet action. If you're interested in working with us as a nonprofit organization or you're just philanthropic in general.

Feel free to reach out to us. We're looking for as many partners in both the tech and humanitarian space as possible. Wanna reach as many people as possible within the next few years. We get it. You're saving the world. Yeah. You're perfect. You're we we love you. But By the way. He hit him with the uh if you don't wanna sell sugar water. Exactly. Amazing. Dude, um I I I these guys are so much smarter than us.

These guys are amazing. Dude, I was picking my boogers at that age and eating Chick fil A. And now I still eat Chick fil A. I just stop picking boogers, right? Like these guys are so far ahead of where where I was in college. It's noon on a Friday. I was gearing up for the nighttime bar run for my hot dog stand. Like I was like getting I was chopping onions in my kitchen getting ready for the two AM hot dog rush. These guys are so to build a website that has six hundred million people visit it. That is outstanding. This is just these these these guys are crazy. Um I I don't get like the whole n I would I would urge him I I mean I could go either way. I would urge him to have a for profit way of doing this because I think that's doing perfectly.

What are you gonna live on grants your whole life? I mean how does w First of all like this guy There's a lot of money and government grants out there. It's not like we're gonna be starving or anything. We can still afford to like sustain ourselves. We also have people like Jake in our community. So if you want to work on side businesses, we have that opportunity on Hawk too. But

This is like, you know, when people go do Teach for America for two years, like go work for internet activism.org and uh You'll come out the other side, you know, uh in in a good spot. Don't worry about that. All right, so let's do the next one. Next one is Uh Jordan is gonna pitch us Yofy. By the way, I'm inspired. I want to quit this, enjoy that.

If I could hop in for two seconds, uh I'm Bobby and also like anyone who's watching this. We are a group of entrepreneurs is built for students, by students in my community. These people are my best friends. And if you want to like get involved with these people in any sort of way. Like feel free to reach out to me at B H O U S E L at U Mesh U M I C H dot E U. We're building communities like this across the country and we want your help if you're a college student or young person that's excited about making things. But uh I'll let the next guy go. All right, let's do it. What's up, Jason from what is it? Sea fair, seal fair. Sea fair. And from Minnesota. All right, hit it. You got two minutes.

Awesome. Ahoy Sharks. This is Sea Fair. Payroll and onboarding software for ships. Just jump right into the problem here. Paying the two million global seafares is really hard. Every ship is made up of people from more than three different nationalities.

Meaning you deal with disparate local bank accounts Currencies and regulations. That's why the current solution. Is literally paying these people in US dollars cash. And or sending slow

And often delayed swift transfers. On top of this. The documents that seafarers need to provide. And that ships need to process are arduous and painstaking to go through.

Take a look at this, Sam. I can see your face right now. You're having flashbacks to the DMV when you try to renew your license. It's an absolute disaster to go through these documents. We're talking vaccinations.

Professional certificates. Sailing history, you name it. They have to provide it. One sea fairer I talked to once had to print out seven hundred pages of documents. Just to get hired on a ship.

By the way, what's a seafair? Are we talking like uh like work ships or what? Yeah, we're talking merchant mariners, so Any ship that's out in the ocean, primarily those like transporting goods and services. But outside like leisure as well as military ships.

Yeah. Awesome. So what are my brother and I working on to address this problem? We're taking a two pronged approach to this solution. First is with the payroll solution. We're talking multi currency.

Low F X fees, direct deposit to local accounts. And a mobile first approach. That will bring this industry to the modern era. This will improve record keeping fine and financial management for these ships. And will eliminate the risk of having cash on board.

I'm sure many of you have seen the movie Captain Phillips and know this problem at hand. Second is we're working on an onboarding solution. For ships, this will be a single place where they can have a document upload. Where our software will scrape those documents to determine eligibility explorations and everything else a ship needs to know.

Saving them money. Seafarers will love it too, as it'll be a s one stop shop for them to store their documents Track their certifications. And have an employment record at hand. So sharks.

Why now? There's Two compelling reasons why this can happen right now. First is that fin tech infrastructure over the past few years Has exploded.

Never has it been easier. Faster. More efficient and more reliable. to build a cross border payments company. Second, internet adoption on ships is finally growing.

If you didn't know, lot of these ships didn't have access to internet until recently. But the drop in cost of satellite internet. And Starlink for Maritime launching in just this July. We see it really exploding. On top of this, there's a labor shortage of seafarers right now.

Which is putting pressure on shipping companies to provide internet in order to attract labor to work for them. So sharks, I'll leave you with a quote from Captain Jack Sparrow. And in the meantime, I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.

Bravo, man. You guys are all great. This is the this is way uh like we had stonks. We did this with stonks and it was like these like you know, people who have been working in the workforce for years and some of them already successful entrepreneurs. This is way better. This is way better. This is really good. Um what was your name again? Jordan? My name's Jason. Jason. Um Jason, I'd like to invest in your company.

So I don't know if you're gonna win this pitch competition or not, but I'd like to invest in your company. So All right, we'll set up a call next week. No call. I'm in. Uh the call is done. This is this was the call. And I'm in. Uh I don't know if you have an entity or a corporation, but you need to get one and send me some wiring details. Uh because I'm in on this idea. This is a Yeah, one of my best investments was a company called Deal. That's basically like a payments solution for contractors around the world. This is like a niche that

Nope. No payment company's gonna really like kinda focus on the unique Aspects of this. Um, no none of the modern companies are gonna do this, you know. I I think because there's probably a bunch of nuances that are specific here. It seems like You could go in and you know, you found a problem that most people aren't even really aware of. Like

I didn't even know what a seafarer was for the first Two minutes of the presentation. Um, you know, so I doubt most entrepreneurs are even looking at this. The question, of course, is how big can this be? So Let's just do some math here. Two million.

Two million uh what are we call I'm not calling these guys seafooders. Two million times. Yeah, so what is the how much money can you make if you get like, you know, whatever, let's say um, you know, some reasonable amount of like if you had Well a tent of that. So if you had two hundred thousand of these people using your platform, what would you be generating? Okay, yeah, so two hundred thousand, we're charging ten dollars a month.

Okay, so that's two million dollars every single month. Times twelve. Um, that's twenty four million in in ARR if we capture ten percent of the market. But you also have to realize that we're gonna be charging and sort of monetizing not just based of ten dollars per person per month.

We're also gonna be taking twenty five to fifty bips on FX. As well as getting floating interest on payroll deposits before they're sent out. So I would say that ten percent of the market that's how'd you know we like bips. Yeah.

Okay, so I think I'm clear, I'm in on this, I will invest in this company. Sam, what are your thoughts? It it is I'm I'm I'm taken away. Uh my breath is taken away. These guys are awesome, man. Uh like the reason this is great is this guy's pitching a C Fare B2B software. But at the bottom of a slide he says, Alexa, play I'm on a boat by Lonely Island. Uh like this this this this

The dichotomy here of going on of just a bunch of Dumbass shithead young kids who are fucking geniuses and incredibly successful. I'm all about it. You know, I said earlier in the first pitch

You do a good job pitching to some older executive who just wants to be around you guys. That's exactly how I feel right now. So you're Your brother says five years at AWS is this your brother who's older and out of college? Yeah. in a computer engineering degree. He's been working at AWS for five years.

And you have currently just an idea, right? You don't have a product, you don't have any customers or anything like that. Yep, idea phase. Did you work with uh Bessimer Bessemer? Yep, I worked at Bestimer Venture Partners last summer. Did you pitch them this?

No, I did not pitch them next. Why not? Uh, they primarily do series A, but I'm happy to talk to some of my partner friends there after this. Why didn't uh how did you come across this idea? Yeah, yeah. So my brother was actually born in Indonesia. He spent a lot of time there. And you might know them as like a global shipping hub.

So he actually became friends with this guy named Dennis. Long story short, is Dennis handled a lot of the payroll paperwork that has to be processed by these shipping companies. And uh he would talk to my brother basically every day about the pain points he faced. So uh we decided we should tackle this to Help alleviate some of Dennis's pain here.

Is that how you know them, Sean, Indonesia as a shipping hub? Yeah, I lived in Indonesia and I didn't pay attention to any of this shit. Um I met a guy named Poppy who was i he was importing cotton. I was like, whoa shout out to Poppy if he's listening somewhere. Uh yeah, I still remember you. So do you How will you sell this? So who do you who are you gonna go to and like Is the guy gonna have like, you know, gangrene on his knuckles and be like, What are you talking about? Apps. You know, like who who are you gonna be selling this to? And uh what makes you think you could sell it? Yeah, for sure, for sure. So I know I look pretty young here, but I do have a past life, uh doing sales at several early stage successful software companies.

Uh most notably patch.io. Join them pre seed. They're now at series B. So I've put in my thousand cold calls, put in my Hundred thousand called emails. So I'm pretty confident that I can get on the phone with someone and sell something. Um, I will say the people we're targeting, right? This is a fairly concentrated industry.

lot of the shipping companies control lots of like Market share. So it's pretty long sales cycles, enterprise B to B sales cycles. But I'd directly reach out to sort of those working in the offices of these shipping companies

Get them on the phone and sort of kick off that cycle. I'm projecting six to ten months for the average sales cycle for these bigger companies. Um, but obviously we're gonna work our way down to S and Vs later on. Jason. Jason, right? I I'm so hot and bothered when you talk to me like this.

Did someone script this for you? Why are you saying all the right things? All right. So this is great. Jason, email me, Sean at SeanPurry.com. I'm investing in this company. I can't wait. Uh this is This is really, really interesting. Uh well well done. Good pitch. Um. Next one up, we got are we going back to

Uh uh. Are we going back? By the way, you like how he was like. So sharks, you wanna come take a swim in the maritime industry? This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I thought this was gonna be stupid. These are these guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.

Also, if this is like the bar if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then like uh uh you know, like I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had like short shorts and nobody could use their left hand and like it was a beach basket for a hoop. It's like oh wow, these these guys could jump. It's like we just like LeBron just learned how to lift weights. Like that's what this feels like. I don't know what's happening. For my for my sake, I'm hoping this next one sucks. I really hope it sucks just so I feel better. This guy Jason was supposed to go last, but he just interrupted and grabbed the mic like Kanye did with Taylor Swift because he goes, Hey bro, can I take this over? I gotta run to class. Like can we just reiterate that? The if I was University of what is this University of Michigan, uh they seem like a fairly progressive school. If I like w was these guys and I heard what was happening, I would say

Bro, it was like don't go to class anymore. Here's here we we got you covered. Do this stuff. By the way, I wanna do this with like every university now. This is amazing. Uh I need to know if it's just a University of Michigan thing or if this is this like the caliber of of entrepreneurs. J uh Jonathan, what should we If if you're another university or you're somebody at a university listening to this, how do they get in touch with us to do this at their school? It is it is definitely partially a Michigan thing. And I will say like

The biggest problem is the universities don't facilitate this. It took me like two years. to meet every single one of these killers. Like we come together at bi weekly. to bring together these kinds of conversations and to build together. And who's like who's this that didn't exist? Bobby organized. This is

I'm a student as well. Yeah. This is a community of entrepreneurs. Like two hundred strong at the school. We meet bi weekly and just enjoy each other, no context of like Paying due. Like monthly membership. Like, screw that. This is not a club. This is just a group of killers that enjoy spending time together. Bob does not even got a good pitch, man. This does not exist at other schools and the schools that like

pretend like they have these crazy entrepreneurship programs like No hate on Michigan Entrepreneurship. Like there are some upside, but like they can't build this, right? Like this has only existed because I spent every like waking moment at this school. Like anytime anyone tells me they're building something. Scooter Braun, man. What the hell? Who are you? You need to come on my first million. Like I would love to help put this on other schools. Like our mission is to bring this sort of community to schools across the country, right? Like built ground up. Four students, five students. Screw the preconception having to do anything, like come and be together and like make cool shit. All right, Bob. Put uh put Joy. That was incredible. Those are just the bi weekly killers. That's a great band right there. Yeah, it's like a doo wop band from the sixties. This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the clients whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and Here's a test from three days ago I totally missed. Spot grow better. Put Yofi on. I wanna hear from Jordan Shamir.

Yeah. No, well thanks for having me. I guess I'm the senior citizen here. I'm a master's student, so Little bit older, but if we go to the next slide. One of the things we were working on in a previous life is we were all working on digital identities. How can these brands create you know, meaningful, consistent relationships with their customers.

Customers are always changing, but one of the things that we saw is that our understanding of who customers are digitally. is really complicated. We can't interact with them. We can't see them. We can't see what they like. And so one of the things that we did is we actually worked with some of the world's largest brands, right? Working in the bot mitigation teams. I don't know if y'all like sneakers. Or anything along those lines, one of the things that we saw is that

through all of our experience in e commerce, but just larger brands in general is that Everything you consume digitally is being skewed. Because everyone has multiple. Personas or multiple identities online. So whether it's intentional being bots, frauds, resellers, et cetera.

Or unintentional, right? We've all used multiple different email addresses to get ten, fifteen percent off. Discounts. And this cases a huge issue for both brands and consumers. Right, from brands, I don't know how many customers that I have are unique. I don't know which products to build because it's being skewed by these multiple personas. I overforecast inventory.

Leads to a bunch of dead stock, but Also as consumers, right, we all know what's going on with Taylor Swift, or we've all lost sneaker drop. We've all paid way too much for a concert ticket that we wanted to go to. Reason it happens it's not'cause other people are beating you, it's'cause people are programmatically beating you but And the second thing that I also, you know, that we see that's just fascinating is that

the notion of omni channels changed drastically. You're not just competing Nike versus Adidas. You're also competing Nike versus you know, D to C, Nike Dick Sporting Goods. Nike unauthorized resellers. And these unauthorized resellers are actually costing brands millions of dollars a year. Even dum Dum's lollipops like the ones that you get from

you know, the hospital or the doctor is actually being arbitraged and it's costing them millions of dollars a year. And then we kinda know about these fake profiles on Twitter and you know these social media sites that we've seen. Or even if you live in New York, Austin, LA, you know, if you try to go to your favorite restaurants. big reason why they're booked is that the moment they come online, they're taken and resold somewhere else. So what we've done is we've actually created a platform like in a digital identity platform where in real time without like interacting with the user.

We rank every order between zero and one hundred. So we kinda use this real time glass uh graph networking clustering to be able to find all these patterns of randomness and associations between individuals and we create These really nice graphs to be able to say, Okay, well these are bots, these are bad actors. These are duplicate accounts. And so we actually work with some of the largest neighborhood sneaker stores in the world. Help them prioritize, hey, I got a whole bunch of raffle entries, right? I got four hundred thousand raffle entries for fifty pairs of shoes.

How do I use this to acquire new clients or prioritize existing ones? How do I choose? Because today what they're doing is they're just randomly giving it out and people aren't actually buying'em'cause people aren't even checking the email addresses. That are going in. So we've been actually working with a lot of this from bad actors perspective, but one of the new things that we've been able to see with this, which has been really cool, is helping brands actually find

Their best. customers. So kind of through using the same clustering technology, we've been able to say who are your most influential customers. Right. How are they not just the individual lifetime value, but we're going to pause? Yeah. I think that might be over the two minutes. So um Sam, can you tell me?

Can you tell me what this guy does? Wha what is the business? Yeah, you you're missing your one liner, my friend, but Basically, uh it's a software that has a hundred and sixty features that analyze in real time the patterns of random randomness and similarities at the customer transactional product company li it's it's confusing, dude. Can you explain Jordan, can you explain it to me like this? We help Blank customer. So who who's your customer?

What type of Person or business. Oh, we help brands and retailers. More more specific, like give me one example. Like we help shoe shoe brands or something. Yeah, we help brands like Nike to prioritize their best consumers for limited release products. And also clean their data by pulling out kind of all the crap that goes in.

I don't So prioritize their top customers, you basically You tell Nike who their top customers are? We would say like for sneaker drops and limited release products, like hey, these are the new clients that you can acquire cheaply. Or here are the clients that you can actually prioritize that this is actually something meaningful.

Compared to one person putting like ten thousand or a hundred thousand entries via bots to get those products. So you just prevent bots from buying shit online. We prevent and then what we also do is we actually kinda clean the data downstream. So we flag all of those accounts. that can get pulled out of the C R M system that are kind of bloating the CRM system. So like One of the things that we see from a lot of our clients is that they way overspend on you know, the products that they use like Clavio or you know, kind of CRM products because

a lot of the entries in there aren't actually legitimate. So when I'm actually making decisions around How many products should I buy or how many products should I make? What are people buying? It's actually being skewed based off the amount of What's in there? Is actually just a bunch of duplicate versus actually unique consumers. Okay. You are not the best at explaining your own company, but that but you're not horrible. I kind of get it after you explain it a bunch. And but that that's all good. You can I think you can improve that. But do you have any um even on your website, man, I'm gonna be honest, it's it's a little challenging to understand, but I saw that you have a book demo thing.

Do you are you booking demos? Do you do you have a product? W are people buying it? Yeah, we have about twenty five customers right now. That's impressive. What's the revenue? The revenue right now, when we convert to revenue, is gonna be around fifteen K MR. But it's free now, is what you're saying. It's free right now.

Yep. Who's Any notable customers that you know like are Anybody we would know of? Um, I guess like based off the area you're in, we work with a lot of like local sneaker stores. So like in San Francisco we work on with a couple, same in Seattle, same in Canada. So mostly local sneakers.

Do they love it? And be honest. Do they love it? Do they like it? Or do they think it's just okay? They love it. I mean, right now we're providing from our cost to value. We're providing for like if we're charging them a thousand dollars one of their stores. We're providing ten thousand dollars in net new revenue that we're acquiring in for them.

A month. Okay. Okay. Um You know, honestly it's tough to give you feedback because the pitch was so confusing. Um

So it's really difficult to try to suss that out, right? Like just from the beginning, you know Like Sam said, you need your one liner or your one sentence description so that People need to have a clear picture in their head at the beginning of the presentation. What the business does. So right. So you here's your first slide. Your first slide said Yo Fi?

Keep business human. All right, cool. No idea what you do. Then I go to your second slide. It's a team side. Experts at transforming data into recommendations.

A passion is c keeping customer interactions authentic and meaningful. Still have no idea what you guys do. Then slide three. Everything is digital and you've been impacted. And it says something about ticket sellouts and fake social media and brand loyalty is harder. Okay. Still don't know what you do. And then the last one, which is prioritize and reward your best customers. We help you understand your customers and streamline every interaction.

I feel like there's fifty different ways that that could be described, like That could mean fifty different Uh solutions. And so And then the last slide is just your title again, right? So like that was the whole pitch. And so that's the That's I think the challenge here is for me at least.

I'm not able to really give you any useful feedback except for except for to say I think you gotta like flip this on its head and say We're Yofi. Uh And we help we know we help businesses figure out who their most valuable customers are. For example

This is a shoe store. The shoe store does drops every Friday. But it's having this problem, which is blah blah blah. And that's a common problem. So we give them this app. That shows them a screen like this.

And these are all the top customers. They push this button. And our app costs a thousand dollars a month. And look at this, our we have twenty five customers and on average we make them ten grand a month and additional revenue. And we also save them an additional thousand dollars a month because of the bloated CRM and like they don't actually need those contacts in there and then All these other reasons. Yeah. And then you go you know, then you could go on, and here's why you know, we even found this problem,'cause we've spent our career doing this, blah, blah, blah. Right. So I think that's how I would try to reorient this pitch if I was you. But the good news is is as you got into it and we were able to like work hard to kinda find the gold and all the dirt.

You had some good shit in there. It does actually seem like an interesting product. It's ac it's pretty impressive that your have all these people using it. You're saying they love it. I have no idea if that's true, but you're saying they love it. That's really interesting. That's hard to do with the software product when you're just working on it part time. So it seems actually fairly interesting. I think your branding's kinda cool. Um, but your messaging, um Needs a lot of work.

Yeah, that's helpful. Yeah, and that's been our hardest thing is like we kinda mature. It's like getting the messaging spot on because like we do a little bit more, right? We started with sneaker bots, now we've kind of expanded more to Digital identity. So having like a streamlined messaging of like what we do that's like a one liner is But you're I think you're making a common mistake, which is We do a bunch of things. We don't have just one customer. We have like five five different types of customers and we do we have a hundred features in our app.

So we do a bunch of things. So what you do is you try to create this giant umbrella that's a catch all like We help custom we help brands understand their customers or streamline their customer interactions and Th the problem is nobody knows what the hell that means. So instead

You should go way narrower and be like Uh, you know, whoever your most of the twenty five clients, is there one type that's like Yeah. The majority or half? Half of the customers is it shoe stores?

Seeker stores? Yeah. Right now it's uh yeah, Sneaker Storm Beauty. So I would start by saying We help stores Two X.

For example, we have twenty five customers right now and half of them are sneaker stores. Sneaker stores have this problem, blah, blah, blah. You talk about that, you say, but it's not just sneaker stores, because yeah, sneakers do drops, but so does Taylor Swift. She does drops too. And so does this brand. They do drops too, and they all have that same problem. Right. And so that's kinda how you should explain it instead of trying to do this like um umbrella thing. Um

Okay, cool. Uh Thanks so much. We got the we got one more, I believe. Yeah. We got

We got Dolan from Deal Dog that's gonna take us home. Dolan from Deal Dog. Wonderful. Awesome. So my name is Dolan and uh I created Deal Dog. So Deal Dog's an exclusive campus marketplace. We launched this semester at the University of Michigan.

Beginning with student football tickets. And since then our traction has been good. We have over two thousand verified Michigan students on the app. And those two thousand students. I processed over ninety three thousand dollars of student tickets.

Uh additionally, with some traction numbers. Two thirds of those tickets that have been listed on Deal Dog have been sold to other users. And we're growing in the next few months. So what's the core problem? Essentially the way students buy and sell things on campus now.

Is they go to Groupme or Facebook Marketplace? Those are filled with bots and scammers. Uh and basically it's just A mess. Next they need to go to a platform like Link LinkedIn or Instagram to message the other person or verify their legitimacy.

Finally they need to transact payment and there's friction between Do you use Zell, do you use Cash App? Is a chicken and the egg problem versus Who sends the item first and who pays first. And overall, it's just a complete mess.

So what makes the other dog different? First of all, we verify your Umish email so you can't get into the app unless you have a verified student email. It's a centralized place to find relevant items to students. Along with tools like filtering, sorting, and searching. So here's an example on the left of what our app looks like if you were to log in.

versus on the right. This is the the current state of the market. full of fill the scammers and et cetera. So what makes DealDog actually different?

So our app has gamified tools that Turn student pain points into fun experiences. One of which that I demonstrated here is their tool called Final Offer. Basically if you're dealing with somebody they're wishy washy, you can't reach uh you know agreement on price.

You can use our final offer tool to send them your best offer. If they reject it, the conversation's over. And if they accept it. You know, you agree to sell them that item. This is highly scalable because when we expand it to new markets

We can add tools into this toolbar. Exactly like you do with iMessage. Just help. So all those needs. So how does the scale?

There's two ways. One of which is we're gonna expand to different categories on campus. We just launched the clothing. And have great success. Oh Our approach is to build things from the ground up instead of cloning other markets.

Uh and again with our chat tools. Integrations we're thinking about or to integrate on top of the APIs of existing clothing platforms. So that for instance, if you want to find Michigan gear You can't find exactly what you're looking for on our app.

It'll redirect you to an existing platform. And although we may lose that particular sale. We wanna make that buying experience as easy. fast and safe as possible for students. So our future plans are to expand the new campuses.

Uh, we're gonna build on top of the dominant ticketing APIs that exist in the market today. And additionally, we're gonna have an ambassador program. So we can scale even faster, both at Michigan and at other schools. Does this exist now or is this just an idea?

So this exists now. Uh it's been live for about two months, just in Michigan. We wanted to really validate our hypothesis. Uh and see what works for students and what doesn't work. Did you did you think he was making up the traction numbers or what? I didn't see it. First line. He's like we have two thousand students, ninety eight thousand.

Uh M V. And that's in two months. That's pretty impressive. Uh Huh, okay.

And what was your take on that? You take ten percent. Yeah, so one of the things that we wanted to hold off on is actually implementing the payments. We've already built it. But we didn't want to implement it yet because we're so new.

Uh we thought it'd be A little Mm. it'd be a point of friction for students to be like, hey, you know, we're launching this new app. By the way, what's your credit card number? Put in your banking details.

Stuff like that. Oh, we wanted to really get the product down first before we started actually You know, taking money between the two parties. When we do, it's gonna be between five and ten percent. Of whatever the transaction is.

Okay. Uh all right, cool. Thanks. Sean, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's cool. Um I like some of the product details. Like I love the final offer thing. I think that's great. And I get it that like You know, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, these things are like

Lower trust. So having verified student IDs, I think it's just great because it creates this like trust bubble. So I really like that. Um I don't know how big this gets, so That'd be my kind of question. I don't really like These kind of like small take rate businesses where you take five or ten percent.

then you need the number to be massive on the transaction side in order for you to like make a lot of money. Um So I think that's the my only question is just like I think this is really It's a useful product. I think it's a cool project to work on.

Um, I wouldn't personally invest in this because I don't think it can be that big. You would have to basically take a Facebook path where you would say We're gonna go get every college. We're gonna dominate that college. It's gonna be like the way that you transact in a in a trusted environment. Then you say, Okay, but it's not just colleges. Now we're gonna do neighborhoods.

Because we can send postcards out and verify that you live at the address like next door does and we're gonna you know, you'd have to really believe But like Two or three more miracles are gonna happen for this to be Big. Um so I think that's my only

That's my only knock on it, which is not really like you know Absolutely massive. It's just When I invest I try to obviously slant towards things that I've got to do. It's a net in the this business involves a network. So in order for it to s be successful, everyone needs to be using it.

So my problem is not with Dolan the entrepreneur, my problem is with this market. Uh I think that Even if you are a ten out of ten entrepreneur. This is just like social apps. Even if you're a ten out of ten entrepreneur and you have ten out of ten Execution.

It's just like it's so challenging to make this work. You're going for like a four out of ten opportunity. Yeah, it's just it's just so hard because you got you're competing with Craigslist. You're competing with um Facebook Marketplace. Now you're gonna be competing with the other incumbents that I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars that are I think mostly failing. Like what was that thing called? Let me for offer up in Lego or le something like that. They bought billboards. They did everything they possibly could. I don't think it's caught on.

Uh and it's like while they P the entrepreneurs I bet were really great. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, so capital wasn't an issue. And yet they still can't beat Craigslist, which is just thirty dudes in an apartment working out which is I know this'cause I rented their apartment. It was like a crappy apartment and just thirty guys who are hippies and they're just like work it's like well You you're just not gonna beat us because everyone already uses this. So it's like it doesn't matter how great you are. Uh, and so it's really, really hard. You have so many things going against you, and I wanna invest in things that have tailwinds.

And I just don't think that no matter how great you are, you're gonna catch a tidal wave. I think you're always gonna be paddling, you know, upstream on this one. Yeah, really good points. We certainly have a lot to prove. Uh, one of the things that we wanted to do is A begin with College campuses.

The reason being is because you know at these big large state schools You got a student body of fifty, sixty thousand people competing for ten thousand tickets. And in that exact niche, you know, the math really makes sense. But I do agree in a lot of other cases it might not. Uh one of the things that we're

Expanding to working on if I may. Is A lot of these items that we're working on, whether it be tickets Second hand goods, services, subletting. The core mechanics of those

Can be distilled down. and then scale to other things. So for instance, if a campus group has a concert, they bring a DJ, whatever the case may be. They can use our app and underlying ticket technology to distribute that on campus.

And so again, it doesn't solve your core. uh issue of, you know, it's an incredibly difficult market. Dude, I think that makes it worse, actually. I think that th one of the few ways that these bus one of the few ways these businesses can work is by like being very niche. So you have Poshmark for women's clothing. You've got Um uh grail for men's streetwear. Uh you know, there's like dozens of these that are like pretty big companies. I think Poshmark is a multi billion dollar company, thread up I don't know what their niche is, but some type of like clothing for a certain genre of person. I think that when you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. And I think that in really to make this work, you'd have to select like I'm sure that there's

What's the one called for tennis or for sneakers? Stock X or something like that. Coat. Yeah. Yeah, like these are huge businesses because they just focused on one thing, and it's far easier to have a wedge where you start with a small group of people who are passionate and care about them and get them to use it versus Well, we're gonna do tickets and then we're gonna do this and then we're gonna do this. It's like no man, I think you just build a big thing, you just focus on this one thing, and so appealing to everyone, so sublets. Um So apartments, uh, and then tickets and then when you had clothing on your deck. I think that's actually, in my opinion, turns me off even more. Not again, not entirely on you. I just think that like

There's just so many things outside of your control. You know, like Seafare was gonna compete against like paper. You were gonna cov compete against Zuck. Craigslist and like hundreds billions of dollars of of invested capital into this. I just don't think it's it's it's not a safe bet. It's not a good bet.

Yeah, really good points there. And something to work on for sure. And by the way, I would say uh like when I was in college, our first idea was um It's always this. This and roommates. Well, no, I I this would have been better than my first idea. The one we did at straight out of college was like a sushi restaurant chain try to create a a A restaurant chain and like Um it was the same thing. We could be ten out of ten Um execution, ten out of ten, creativity.

Like fundamentally, like restaurants are like, you know, sort of like a two out of ten opportunity. It's like one of the worst types of businesses you can try to start. And you know, so it we had a point where a year in we were like Cool, we won this business plan competition. We hit we can do this. It's not that we can't do it. We're we're having success with our first location, but like We we gotta remember this is just our first idea. Maybe we're more entrepreneurs than we are restaurateurs.

And maybe this first idea is the one that got our wheels turning, but let's not commit More years to something if we re once we recognize that this is a two out of ten opportunity. We should just say, Oh, okay, cool. Let me just Be a college kid, let me ha have my opportunity, my time back. And let me put it on another better opportunity. And so that's what I would do if uh if I was you.

But it just FYI. Getting ninety three thousand dollars of transactional value. is super, super, super impressive. That is amazing. So maybe you can prove us wrong and be like, we're and you said two out of three are tickets. You just be like, look, we're just gonna build a different stub hub and it's gonna be better because we're marketing wizards and who knows why it's gonna be better. Maybe you're gonna prove us wrong. But ninety three thousand dollars and twenty three hundred users in a three months. Incredibly impressive. That is wildly impressive. So you're you're also a superstar. I'm just gonna I I don't know if you're gonna pull it off in this

genre but we'll see. Yeah, awesome. Thank you guys so much. Uh as a closing note, like if you have any advice on this. It seems like the other people that do use our app Um You know, they almost exclusively use it.

To sell their tickets and other things. I if you decide not to bail, I would stick with tickets and stick on that for at least one year and talk to users constantly and see what happens, but I would stick with tickets before and I wouldn't even worry about expansion. I would just figure out what makes them come back over and over and over again because I imagine if I had to look into StubHub and Seat Geek, CAC is the biggest issue. I I'm just guessing, I've not researched this. Yep. All right, Dolan, thank you so much. Um and

We pick a winner. We pick a winner now. So that is the uh My First Million Presents University of Michigan pitch competition. Super impressive caliber of entrepreneurs, like I said. Um love this community. You know, Bobby Bobby my bi weekly killer, good job putting this group together. Um we gotta pick a winner. So Sam, how do you wanna do this? I think Let's talk about uh like who's in the top three and then you and I slack with me. I I just slacked you my top two. You and I slack and and just tell me uh what you want to do and I'll tell you if I approve and I agree with your vote. But basically um let's go let's go in order. So third runner up

Uh or like maybe but maybe maybe maybe my top three, I guess. Uh I just give you give you three in uh random order. So um I liked Seafarer. Like I said, I I wanna actually invest in that. I think that that's a A really cool idea going into a boring, boring industry that's Painful, complicated, and

I think you know, not gonna be easy to sell into. But if they do, very easy to get lock in and I think they can make money doing basically Payroll for The shipping, you know, shipping industry for people who work on ships. So I I really like that idea. Um

Internet activism was super impressive. They, you know, have built a website that got six hundred million users. They uh built a Airbnb thing for Ukrainian refugees that had a hundred thousand people stay, you know, in homes, that's kind of It's just crazy. Ludicrous. T then that's a career maker just that.

I mean that and and just the idea of a non profit that's not uh driven by, you know, what nonprofits are driven by today, which is sort of like fundraising and sales and marketing. It's like We're hackers. We just build stuff that's gonna help help people. And that's what we do. And I I really kind of resonate with that. Um, I've seen the power of that.

One time um The guy who was investing in our our idea lab, he was like, Hey, I want to do this thing for this charity I support called Charity Water. Yeah, but instead of just giving money, what if we gave our talent? What if we built something? And we built a charity website that was designed to go viral. It was like could you make charity go viral?

That was the mission. We spent three months on it and I remember we got I don't know five million people to like come visit the thing and we raised I think eight hundred thousand for the cause. Um and so like I've seen how builders can help charity in a way that's kinda unique. And then um And then also Jake from Tabs Chocolate, who's doing the NFC tagging thing. I thought that was

Another good one. I think I think it cut below the other two. But A honorable mention. What what do you think? Say I agree entirely. I think Jordan just did a really big good bad job of pitching and but I actually think that that business is actually really intriguing and could be great. I think it's just a boring software company that I like. I think it could be a really great business. Uh, but he was

so bad at pitching that it ruined the fact that it's a cool company, I think. Uh and I actually think that He's got a lot he doesn't have as much traction as internet activism, but If he does actually have thirty or however however many said twenty customers using his software Pretty big deal'cause it seems kinda hard to sell into them. So um

I sent to you what I think should be the winner. It's the last thing I said. Do you agree or uh not agree? Um I don't agree. I think It should be this other one.

What do you think? Okay. So Let's just say who the top two are. Yeah. Top two we got are Seafarer.

And internet activism. So let me explore my perspective here. So Internet activism. Fucking amazing. This guy made me want to quit and join him. My issue with him

Not him. My issue with giving them the money Is They already have a great thing going. And they're kinda crushing it. It feels weird giving this money to a nonprofit.

Uh I'd rather just give them my own personal money. But He is so impressive that I was I I I this guy's gonna be uh on the cover of Fortune or Fords, I think, uh in the next five years. So I'm I would be fine giving them money. But see fair, it's an idea, man. We could just be the first money in to actually make them like build something. So that's why that's interesting. Yeah, I I I feel the same way, but I think for Cur I would put my personal money in as an investment, but I think for the prize money of this I think that if we put it into internet activism, it's gonna save lives and uh and honestly

Like He was of the bunch. He was the most Missionary? And like you could just tell like

For example, the guy's a visionary. All all these other people, I feel like If I talk to them six months from now, they could be working on something completely different. And that's totally normal and okay, especially if you're in college. I actually encourage that. But when you know, you know. This guy was like kind of aggro where where he was like, you know, um, yeah, I could go work on a CRM tool or or like a whatever, but like

You know, F that, I'm doing this. And that is something I really, really respect. I don't think he was looking for validation. I think he was trying to get the word out. And so that I respect that. Dude, I looked up one of the co founders of Internet Activism on Twitter. And um he uh his background picture was Zuck was Mark Zuck given the middle finger.

And I used to have that same background. And so I'm on board, man. Uh I agree with you. We'll give it to internet activism. I think that they are awesome. I think all the folks here are are we incredibly impressive. Dude, the one that we shit on the most, I think, was Deal Dog. The guy got$93,000 of trantional value in three months. Like no one does that. Very impressive all around.

Kudos to everybody. And I gotta say, we're not picking internet activism for the do good. Like The guy's pitch was dope. His first line where he's like you know, people in poor communities have But ha have more access to cellphones than they do to toilets, right? He his pitch was good. His traction was good. We've built things that have gotten

Hundreds of millions of visits, right? Um, his idea was a big idea of encrypted messaging app that can't be shut down. Basically, an unstoppable messaging app. That's gonna help people in in certain places, right? And I think he was the most committed founder. That's why not because Uh to charity, just give them the money.

I also think He's a shithead. I think these guys are shitheads. I think that these guys are like Uh the good type of shitheads. I think that they're the people who I'm gravitated towards. I like people who just like I and and frankly a lot of these guys had that vibe. I mean Tabs Chocolate from Jake definitely has that vibe. Um they had this like attitude of like

Screw it. I'm just gonna do this and we're just gonna see what we're gonna see what it finds out. Streak. Yeah. Yes, and I love that mentality. This guy just displayed it the best for this in this particular case, but these guys all had this like punk rock vibe that I love. So And that's guys, that's that's everybody in this room right now. Even the man had it. Yeah, even the every single one of the people is is building insane stuff. We we got twenty entrance. Um and Jonathan and and Mike when I like We're struggling to pick five. Um there we we could have had twenty pitches. He was like shitting on the traditional clubs. And like other like official organizations and he's like, No, we're the underground we're the underground real ones And I I respect that. Dude, this reminds me I mean, they were further along than us and smarter than us, but when you and I were like twenty three, twenty four, twenty five hanging out at your office at Monkey Inferno

We surrounded ourselves with these types of freaks and a lot of'em have gone on to build Literally twenty or thirty billion dollars worth of companies. You know, Jack Smith, uh your boy, um Furcon, uh like these guys have built like huge uh Ryan Hoover, all these guys have built some really huge companies and these guys remind us of this. And I think that it's actually I hope send us to University of Michigan. They're blowing it, man, by not empowering you guys. Uh so uh I think that's crazy. Send me a hood. I'm wearing a Michigan hoodie on the next pod. I'm I'm a I'm a meeting now. You know who else came from uh University of Michigan was our boy Michael uh from from Future, who's a total that has this exact same vibe of just pretty one of the one of the first members of this organization.

Whatever you want to call. And uh This is uh This is credit to these guys and gals. This is not credit to University of Michigan. This is not all these people are what makes this special. We love University of Michigan. We do and we're gonna take every single last resource until we leave this place. But until then Oh man. Alright, well

Whatever you want to describe yourself, I admire you, folks. I think you're awesome. I think the listeners uh hopefully this gets hundreds of thousands of listens. We'll see. I I think this is gonna be a hit. Um, but Uh yeah, you're awesome. So If people want to find out more, w w do you have your website? What's your website? Did did you even say that? Yeah, just again, it's internet activism.org. We're looking for donors, we're looking for engineers, we're looking for nonprofit organizations to partner with. anything. If you think you can help out or you're interested in working with us, just feel free to reach out. Again, internetactivism.org. All right. And uh the name of the club is what? Entrepreneurial power hour. My name's Bobby Hausel. Um you can feel free to reach out to me.

And help me build this across the country. All right. Thank you. Sean, you got anything to say? We're out of here. No, that's it. That's the pod. Good job, guys. Very impressive.

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