6 College Students Pitch Us Their Startups | MFM Shark Tank

Yeah. Um so just to preface here, I'm Tommy. Uh Tommy Potter, student at UMish. Um really excited to be bringing you startups today. uh just to illustrate the community we're power hour, which is the CIA for college entrepreneurship. And what I mean by that is that you don't know like who we are. You don't know where we meet. We are this underground society of hand Picked killered founders.

Wow, hold on, hold on. If you're building the impossible, we got Tommy like Tommy Potter like Harry Potter. And then there's no there's no meeting place, there's no information, there's no way in, and there's no way out of this club. It's a tap on the shoulder just like the CIA. We let you know individually where we're gonna be meeting. Dude, Sam, they're speaking your language already. This is some real skull and bone shit. I feel like I carous Well I know. be what I want to

And I I I wanna preface this is live audience if if Sam and Sean you don't know. I'll pan the room. We got like sixty five people here. Uh ready for you, Messian. That's a noise. The ecosystem is out here today. I know the same is going on down at UIUC.

They got a massive room. How many of you got in that room there, Austin? Yeah, I'll I'll pan the camera too real quick. Um Uh Oh wow.

Yeah. So but yeah we've They don't want all points that time beside. I basically H get all the amazing founders as well as entrepreneurs, content creators, everybody that's doing awesome stuff.

In the same room down here at UI C. Um so we're we're we're super pumped on both sides. And UI U C is that Illinois Carbondale. Urbana. University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne, the big eye. So all right, so that's the way. So we got Tommy, we got Austin.

The club is called Happy Hour? Is that what you said? No, we're we're power hour. Oh power hour. Power hour. Exactly. An hour full of power.

And and it's all student run, there's no faculty, nobody who's uh who's making this happen. Is this a like Has it been around for ten years or did you just invent this on Thursday? What's going on? Do you remember Bobby Bobby Firehouse, which was on this this podcast about two years ago? I may never forget Bobby. So the Bobby started all of this? Bobby started this. Bobby started this, and it's kind of been planting around and and UIUC as their community. We're very like deep in our partnership there as well. This is so this is fantastic. So to give the the listener background, two years ago we had this guy named on Bobby. Bobby, I think was in Michigan. Bobby

Um Gathered like this like Group of maybe fifteen entrepreneurs and like four of them pitched us and they were awesome. And apparently Bobby has fight club this thing and gone out from university to university to like Convince you guys to join on. And this sounds awesome. And so today I think six of you, so three each are gonna pitch us. Is that right?

Totally correct. Yeah, there's a lot of school pride on the line in terms of which school is gonna come out on top in this competition. So we're laying it all on the line for you. We have, you know, tons of creators in the audience. It was tough to get it down to three. Three startups, but we're giving you our best Um, so can't wait. We're ready to we're ready to roll. So this is college shark tank style.

Two schools. Pitching from both. We're gonna have a winner. Um, we're gonna maybe have a uh A a few other awards that we come up with. I invested in one of these last time, Sam, out of uh out of Michigan. So I've been going. Company already failed. So we're not gonna

We're not gonna hold that against y'all. You win some, you lose some. And we lost that one pretty hard, pretty quick. Uh, but that's all right. All right, but let's see if you guys can beat Michigan. So the first one that we're gonna hear from is Meet Your Class. And I think is University of Michigan are you guys doing three in a row? And then it's gonna be

We're gonna go back and forth. We just need to step aside and let this kid MC this. He's got the natural of a host. See, I'm using college words. Is it let it bake or let'em cook? Which one is it? Whatever. Which let it we're gonna let'em bake.

Mm. All right. The first one um is the folk that um Uh uh Michigan. Okay. Hello, my name is Jonah and I'm the COO of Meeker Class.

Two years ago, my co founders and I created a platform for prospective college students to meet each other before coming to campus. And Major class quickly grew in popularity. Largely because the communities we built actually extended beyond our own platform. and integrated with the social media apps.

than nearly every high schooler uses on a daily basis. Within two years This system has scaled to over four hundred thousand account creations. And even generated over six hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Through a freemium business model.

Well, this was a great success. An even larger opportunity emerged. When we were approached by a university called the Christ College. which was struggling with enrollment. Basically they were having issues filling seats. And they were not alone. This is a really big issue.

Recent polls have found that over two thirds of university CFOs Are deeply concerned about declining enrollment. A really big factor in this that the Christ College and Really, the majority of universities across the country struggle with. Is a phenomenon known as summer melt.

Summer melt refers to when a prospect gets all the way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel. Just to at the last second reneg on their deposit. renege on their commitment and decide they no longer want to go to college. At the Christ College, believe it or not.

This was happening with every one in three students. Which eventually was leading to a thirty three percent vacancy rate at the school. The Christ College believed a meeter class could help Decrease the summer melt.

Because our platform had gained a reputation. as being able to build up excitement for prospective students. And also to give them a support network. Furthermore, we also found through discovery That meeter class data was very valuable for universities.

In helping them to allocate their limited time and resources. towards students who needed the extra attention and help. And we're very excited to say that this works. At the Christ College, students who used meer class last year experienced a sixty one percent reduction in summer melt. Which is expected to add one point seven million dollars back to their top line.

And we're so excited by these results. Because at a minimum. This summer melt issue. is calculated to cost the higher education system. over eleven billion dollars per year.

And It's of course gonna take more than one case study to really go after this market. But luckily we now have scaled to eight partners for the upcoming admission cycle. And amazingly, that same B to C business. that I described at the start is

Helping us and empowering us to create a product. That's industry leading, loved by students and administrators. It also got us admitted to tech stars and has allowed us to bootstrap our way into a much larger much more qualified team ready to take the higher ed market by storm.

Yeah. Wow. All right. That was great. We do you have a ending for us? So sharks. Who's ready to You know, blah blah blah. And are are you raising are you actually raising money or not not not raising money right now?

We're planning to potentially open a seed round when we graduate in the spring. Okay, that is awesome. That is awesome. Uh, by the way, of the six hundred thousand dollars in revenue, uh how many people are working there? What's your profit? Do you have any profit? Um yeah, so Us as initial co founders.

have not paid ourselves a dime and we reinvest every single penny back into the team. Um So I don't know the exact profitability off the top of my head. You know, we try to Keep the bank account enough to stay alive, but we we reinvest every penny back into growing the team and getting to more university partnerships.

And we're trying to get fifty by the end of this upcoming admission cycle. Of the of the six hundred thousand, how much is in your business account right now? I Think around three hundred thousand. Uh we've we got a hundred and twenty thousand from Techstars and then have also won some pitch competitions. Okay. Okay, cool. And Blake, uh your name's Blake, right?

My name's Jonah. Blake is my amazing co founder. Okay, great. So Jonah, uh great first great pitch. Uh really cool business. At first when you were talking about it. I thought, well You know, you sort of create a Facebook twenty years too late, you're trying to help college kids connect. But then what the story got really interesting when you started talking about how

Colleges are struggling to fill enrollment and they have vacancies just like a hotel has vacancies. A college has vacancies. And that maybe your tools actually could help them decrease that and then

then they would be your customer, right? You'd be charging them. Did you charge that first college? And what are you charging those other eight colleges who you said are partners with you on this? Yeah, so our initial partners are heavily discounted relative to like the market rate for a solution like this. Because we're trying to get more logos, more case studies. currently those partners are at under ten thousand dollars, but

There's a very clear path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name. But you said market rate. Who else is doing something like this and what are they doing? We do have a handful of competitors, so this initial

It's called like mid funnel conversion. It's basically getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel. And then trying to convert them. Um There's a few competitors listed in that second column.

Where we really stand out from them is our integrations with social media. Because We're able to get a large organic user base. at the earliest and latest stages of the enrollment funnel. So

A lot of our competitors are like third party apps where The university basically emails all their students, says, Hey, download this and kind of forces them to use it. And the reason they do that It's because these communities

so much valuable data and they have a lot more control over it. On And social media standalone really doesn't do this for them. Because it's not a tailor made higher tool higher ed tool. So we're basically retrofitting these social media platforms and bringing all the data that they

So Jonah. If you were charging them what you think you can charge them. Have you had any conversations about how much they would be we be willing to pay either as a percentage of sort of saved students or as a flat fee. What's your sense of how much each college can pay you? So initially just for this mid funnel conversion tool.

We believe that it should be pretty reasonable. Of course, like colleges vary in size, but we've seen these At the lowest for the smallest schools around twenty thousand dollars. And then we've seen them scale. Past two hundred thousand.

On This Is Of course, just like one small part of the enrollment funnel. There's many more issues that we believe we're primed to solve. That's just a generally like

I almost I almost wanna say a commoditized rate that university's like comfortable paying with with. Is this the biggest Problem or is there a bigger problem? Th this is one of the biggest problems. Um As I mentioned for the Christ College.

one in three students were melting. So When we were so it's just like kind of like the lowest hanging fruit to initially go after. Because these are kids who arguably should be going to college. They got very Got way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel.

And then we Then converted more of them. On But they obviously want to just get more Boxing sees throughout the entire process.

Jonah, how's this um Well you know, I always ask how the story ends. Uh is there a vision for where you where you're gonna be in ten years with this? Um, we're still trying to figure that out. We are very motivated Bye. Genuinely improving the

student experience and making it so College is worthwhile, so In the long run. We want to put power back in the students' hands. A lot of students don't know that they have negotiation power.

And the tuition price and a lot of them also And uh At places that are sub optimal, so we kind of want to in the long run. become the go to place that students come to.

And they figure out where they're going to be the most successful Two, four, ten years down the line. Did you just say that you can negotiate tuition prices? I had no idea that. It is possible. Um

I I personally didn't do it. On Some members of my team could speak to it a lot more, but Students have a lot more power than they realize. Univers.

In order to stay in business. The majority of schools Um Not the University of Michigan, but the majority of schools are Tuition dependent for revenue.

Tuition in Michigan is like a very small percentage of revenue. So If you ask for decreased tuition here, that likely We're not peeing out because

They're not really struggling with any financial situations. But at the end of the day, colleges need to act like a business, otherwise they're gonna go under. I was just Googling some of these companies. Sean, have you heard of Unibuddy? Were you did you Google any of those community apps? I had no idea this stuff existed. Some of them are actually quite large. How big?

Uh Unibudy I think raised thirty million dollars. They raised it during Covid, so there's you know, TBD if it's legit, but uh it seems like it's a business that does many tens of millions in revenue. Yeah, Jonah, my quick take on this. I think you actually have a real business here. Um one of the biggest investments I missed on was the very first guy who ever pitched me as an angel investor. He had a

idea for uh something called apply board and what he was doing was helping international students get into He was helping s like kind of these small colleges get more international students'cause international students Just didn't know their name I d I had never heard of

Christ College until you just said it. And um he was charging about two to three thous he's charging the university two to three thousand dollars per student. that actually got admitted um and enrolled there. And so he was making You know, tons of money. So that that company really took off. So I think you

I think you have a real business here. The Only thing I would say, I guess to to wrap up is I don't think you should ever raise money for this. I think you should bootstrap this thing. And if you actually just stuck with this idea. And you bootstrapped it.

You know. in four or five years you would be sitting on probably twenty million dollars, which would be a phenomenal place for you to be exiting this business. And um I think the biggest risk for you is not a business risk. It's a we raise money because we pitch investors that this could take over the world because we thought

That's what we're supposed to do. We thought You have an idea, you pitch investors, you raise round one, round two, round three, and suddenly We're looking at you saying, How are you gonna be a billion dollar company? And The reality is this might be a phenomenal fifth dollar fifty million dollar company. But no chance at a billion dollar company. So my my advice to you would be don't raise, but great pitch overall. Sam, any last thoughts? I completely agree.

Completely agree. All right, Jonah, thank you. Big round of applause. All right, so where are we going now? Illinois? Yeah, we've got uh Our guy out in uh San Francisco right now, Shrikard.

So Going on, guys. Nice to meet you. All right, I love it. You drop out? What you're you're not even in college? What's going on? No, I'm actually uh on a gap semester. Hey, Sean, I'm in Founders Inc., I know you know Stefan. Oh no. So I just met him yesterday.

A couple me and my couple of my buddies are I'm just visiting San Francisco here, seeing if this is the right place for us, but Yeah. All right. Well Gapier, I like I like the sound of that already. About a year ago. Me and my co-founder are watching the Spanish TV show Money Heist on Netflix.

Unfortunately, neither of us know Spanish very well, so we had to watch the English dub. Anyone who's ever watched a dub movie knows that there's a bunch of issues. The lips are Not synchronized with the audio, the voice actors sound nothing like the actual actors. There's one scene. Or two voice actors had the same actor making everything extremely confusing.

Yeah. We looked in this issue a bit further and found that it is extremely technically complex, expensive at hundred to fifteen hundred dollars per minute. Time consuming and low quality to dub a video nowadays. With all this? Dubbing is a sixty billion dollar market in twenty twenty two, and there's been no clear solution for this.

We started by translating content. For creators like Mr. Beast and Mr. Nightmare. and found that the essential use case is within education. Imagine the millions of Uh people trying to get an education in their second language. Where the content is not meant for them.

So we created Metaphrasa. An automated authentic and affordable translation solution for educators. All the user has to do is input a video into our solution. Press a input and output language, press submit.

And within minutes. Get a lip sync, voice clone, and text on screen translated video. Just like this one that we translated for our client, U I U C and Geese and Core Zero. Utilitarianism suggests that an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good For the greatest number of people.

L'utilitarisme suggère qu'un choix éthique conduira au plus grand bien pour le plus grand nombre. So as you can see, Professor's voice is perfectly cloned from English to Spanish to French. His lips are synchronized, and our key differentiator is any text on screen. Is translated with the same font. Text and color as well.

For our enterprise clients, we have a human in the loop process. Where we translate videos. With Industry specific terminology, keywords, idioms Not that Google Translate

Um issues. We also have the most languages and cheapest Product on the market. Right now we're at six thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue translating videos. For University of Illinois.

And corporations like Velcro Corporation. We actually are in talks with Corsair for potential integration in quarter one of twenty twenty five as well. Just to look at one of our potential deals after our paid pilot with keys. Just one degree. Looks like thirty thousand minutes in five languages, generating one point three five million dollars in revenue for our company.

This actually saves the university ninety one percent in actual cost and curating the course as well. Our team it combines business and technology with myself taking a gap year to focus on this, and our machine learning team of five machine learning engineers having thirty seven years of experience in computer vision. Hi, my name's Shrikala Calla and my purpose is to break language barriers. Thank you guys very much. Ha All right. That's awesome. Great pitch, great pitch.

I think that. Uh and leave some of the slides up so we might need to go back to'em. So first of all, the demo was great. Can you just tell us a little bit about that the magic there? So you said Uh translates the voice. makes the lips match, which I've never seen anyone do that. Did you see Dana White do that, Sean? You didn't see Dana White do that for uh the uh uh Mexican independent day UFC? It was great.

No, I didn't see that. Uh so h what are you doing to make the lips Is it or is it superimposed on top of of their lips? Yeah, so essentially we take Uh one of my buddies. uh Y C model. We take any original video or any original audio and we got

Are allowed to synchronize ellipses. Based on the input. of video and audio on our back end system. We then Curate that. He's a model. So you're saying there's an off the shelf library, basically a lot off the shelf model that does this already. You guys are just integrating that. Yeah, exactly. That's true. That's true.

Okay. And another question, you said something like If they did this just one course for one university, that's like a million in revenue for you. Are they currently Are you convincing them, hey, you should dub this, or they're already dubbing it just at ten times the cost?

Yeah, so right now they're um translating videos automatedly Um They're translating courses, like imagine quizzes, tests, and just like reading papers. But they're not translating the videos. So a Spanish user has to go on Coursera.

And You know, take the course in Spanish, but have to read the subtitles. On an English video. uh for these videos that th th these courses that they're creating right now. Um we're basically providing the solution that

Standardizes the actual viewing experience for the end user. So they are doing this right now. Just without You said that. You said I I think in twenty two or twenty three or something like that, that dubbing was a seventy or sixty billion dollar. What what is that number? Tell me about that number. That's ridiculous. Um, just looking at traditional dubbing, this means in film education.

um marketing, just translation in general. Huge market, bunch of different uh positions that we could put ourselves in. Was trying to tell Um you guys that

We also translated for content creators like Mr Beast Mr Nightmare, but found that The niche was in education for us just because of the central need. Um think about The applications of translation for people that have life changing opportunities strip for them because they can't take a course and

And they're Preferred language. Or they're not able to understand the professor. In a classroom. So that's where we got that number. Right.

Well a key key distinction, you said they're already doing this, but but actually the way you said it was They're translating the tests and the quizzes. They're just not tran they're not doing the videos today. And so For them to agree to do this, this would be a new cost of a of a million dollars to them. That they're not currently spending.

So Uh good in in terms of translating a video in general, they're trying to translate these videos, but For them for like a person to translate a video, just like For a ten minute video, it takes four hours. Yeah, it's a curate.

New slides. Have a new professor go in. You know, speak in a new language they have to contract these people. This would cost them three million dollars to edit these videos.

Um you know go over edit the screen text and there's a big distinction basically. Let's say I'm sitting at this university and I look like I am with this vest on right now. And I I'm sitting there and I've got my budget. But T what I'm asking you is today they don't already spend in this. You're not saving them money. from something they're already spending. They're currently not spending because it would be too expensive to do it, too slow, too expensive.

And so you're gonna be a new cost to them. Right. So that's gonna be a big point of friction because they're not going to make more money necessarily off this. You might be able to convince them that if you do this, you might be able to get more customers, but Day one, it's gonna be just extra cost with no extra revenue. Is that correct? Uh that is true. However they are going in the direction of uh putting these courses online digital

Um translation is a thing that they're already doing. This would just be an added cost for them at the end of the day, but it would provide A better solution. Potentially being a marketing point for international students to come to the university as well, but to answer your question, yeah. What are you doing for Velcro? First of all, I didn't I didn't know Velcro was a brand. I thought Velcro was like clean exertition. You know, I thought it was a thing. That's pretty wild. But what are you doing for them and how did you close those guys?'Cause they look like a

Big old old sluggish company. Yeah, uh we had a personal connection to one of the higher ups of the company. We do internal communications for them. So Um every month there's a ninety minute internal town hall where the CEO basically speaks. In English, she's an Italian woman. Um she

Had a bunch of issues with When she's speaking English, she lacks emotion. She Kind of Um Doesn't feel like herself.

And we were able to provide them a solution where she was b able to provide the company with updates In her true persona in the new language, by speaking in Italian. for ninety minutes into our camera, we'd put that into our solution. Within three hours we're able to curate A translated video that she's able to send all the plants.

at vocal corporation in ten different languages. And we provide that solution to them today. But it sounds like you're you're not doubling down as much on enterprise. You want to go for this university education niche. Is that right? So we want to go into um the education niche. This is universities, this can mean educational content creation. This can mean um corporate trainings as well. We understand that these educational sales cycles are extremely long.

Which is why uh going to these translation agencies agencies for educational content as well. Can help us. Kind of uh applies like a geometric approach to our sales cycle as well.

Um just uh speed everything up faster, having having us get more traction to And then the university brand itself. Creates a Stands where People say, Hey, University of Illinois uses this. I'm an educational content creator. I trust them. I'm gonna trust this company as well.

Right. Well, I think you have a solid pitch and I think you have a really great product. But I think this is a product in search. Um, I think you're gonna run into a lot of trouble because you're gonna go to these universities and you're gonna say, Hey, we're great. And they're gonna say, Yeah, that's awesome.

But they have no budget. They they won't have the budget for it, or mm it's just gonna be seen as an extra cost without a clear extra payoff uh or sort of ROI attached to it. Um And so I think that's gonna hurt the sales cycle. Uh what's already a slow sales cycle is university sales. I think it's gonna get harder because you're costing the money rather than saving the money. Um But one thing to consider

Is If the if there's already a big market for dubbing out there and they're doing it manually. This is actually could look like a private equity play where you go buy existing dubbing services that have existing books of business. And then you just Fire all the people and replace it with the AI, that's gonna do it better and faster and cheaper than they're currently doing. You said it cost like a hundred dollars a minute or whatever to to dub.

With w with humans doing it. And so what you could do is you could go buy companies and then rip out the cost structure by replacing it with AI. And that might be actually be a better way to go to go into this market. And uh again, this is something that you don't really hear a lot. You're in San Francisco now. a lot of people don't talk about this, but there is a whole other avenue of business, you know, roll ups and private equity.

Where Um, they're looking for this. They buy something at a fair price and then they cut slash the cost in half by using technology to make things more efficient. You could do that here. Understood. And um we actually are trying to do that right now. I'm partnering with the translation agency to understand exactly Um how they

Derive their clients. um how they are going through these sales cycles with Um, like refugees, people that are going through different educational content. Um, the one thing about universities is that I do seeing this

being globalized in um systems and in learning management systems like Coursero. So We just had a meeting yesterday with Core Sarah the Essentially say at the University of Illinois pilot goes well. They're willing to give us a shot at integration. for translation for a couple of courses there.

Um that would You know, allow us to dub From going like a thousand minutes for every two week to maybe a thousand hours for every two weeks. Um just uh just to show you the kind of stance they were taking. um in terms of universities. We're going for the learning management systems, not the individual university.

Hey, Sean, I don't pay attention to this world too much, but um How That video that we saw, how impressive was that? I mean, it's definitely impressive. And I think they're doing a couple of other things that are specific, like changing the text on the screen. Uh, so I think you know, that that makes the whole solution work because than the actual course works. So it's it's definitely impressive, but I you know

There's gotta be ten other companies that could do this today or you know there's nothing like of scientific breakthrough with what they're doing. So this is really gonna be a question of who builds the best business around this new technology. The technology and anyone's gonna be able to build a business around this. So it's really gonna be about who figures out the right market, the right go to market strategy, the right pricing model. to actually build a business out of this. What do your parents think about you taking a gap here?

We got into We got into Techstars in June ended up declining that. My parents are South Indian. Um, they Kind of are driven by you know, percentages, like prestige was able to show them that hey, maybe I'm like top one percent.

of pre seed companies by getting this accelerator. I'm sure them that they let me take this gap semester and then Um, can have to show them some KPIs so keep on Uh take take the time off of school, but I'm loving it right now.

I listen to this. Kids or parents Y the your kid's amazing. This is he's gonna it's gonna it's gonna turn out all right. It's gonna turn out more than all right, I think. There's a kid at F Inc, where you're at right now, that office you're at right now. There's a kid there. Uh it's not a kid anymore. His name's Johnny Dallas. Um And he was

In eighth grade when he started working with us and he started in the summer. And then he started working every day after school. And then I think in eleventh grade or so It was pretty clear this guy's awesome and he should just work here full time and we made him an offer and his mom was freaking out, couldn't I can't, but my son's gonna be a high school dropout. This is crazy. No, no, no, he's gonna test out, he's gonna graduate, he's gonna get his GD.

And um what I convinced her of was he's not dropping out, he's going pro. The same way LeBron James went pro because he had Incredible skills. And that reframe I gotta tell you, that was some of my best work with that mom on a bench in a park.

Convincing her that he's going pro, he's not dropping out. And then we got him to got him to go full time with us. Got you, got you. Dude, congratulations on your success. Good job. And thank you for letting us listen and uh uh you're the man. Um all right, what do we have next? I'm Nathan Schatz, co founder of Milieu, and we are creating personalized skincare that's built for your microbiome. My journey with microbiology began when I was eight. After I had a life threatening encounter with a flesh eating bacteria.

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Thank you for the up. I'm gonna try it. Go for it. There you go. This is pretty cool. When I thought microbiome

Sean, what did you immediately think? I thought it was Yeah, I thought it was gut and poop. I was like, Do I gotta I gotta poop at a thing and you're gonna give me a thing to help my skin? But that's I didn't know that skin microbiome was a thing. That's pretty baller. How's your skincare routine? Uh you know Body wash that goes on my armpits also goes on my face. It's not very good. But I'm I'm bought into the idea that it is important and I ha I I I do want to get better. So this is interesting to me. Do you have any revenue at all?

No revenue. We're currently in development. We're doing beta testing. Okay, gotcha. And uh really smooth pitch, by the way. You are a uh talker that was really well done. Um Okay, so let's give some thoughts on this. So I by the way, his deck, Sean, was great. Those those cartoons, they told the story wonderfully. Yeah, who made who made all that? You made that?

The the deck in the story? Yeah. No one made it. That's just my story. Well the graphics are cool. Oh, the deck, yeah. Uh my my co founder Ron and I worked on it. And then we also workshopped it with like a bunch of other students in the community. So Gotcha.

Okay. Um you know, one thing I think that would help you is um This type of story, I think, would go viral on TikTok. Like basically what you told us if you were like Um I used to think skincare routine, well I I used to think, you know, I uh whatever, I didn't care about my skin. And then I got a flesh eating bacteria. This is me after my trip to Costa Rica, and you show a picture, you're like,

Um, so here's what I did to get rid of this. And while never look at any of these skincare products, the same again, knock over a bunch of bottles on a table, right? You do something like that, you're gonna get like two million views on a TikTok. You can actually include that in this, which is gonna be like We know how to tell our story and get out there. And that that story resonates with people, that people are looking for something that's more personalized, that's actually science based, and not just.

You know, a fancy brand. Um And we're gonna use content to our advantage, and that's how we're gonna have much cheaper customer acquisition, right? The smart brands in the D to C space. are basically content first right now. They know how to tell their story on

TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. And that's where they're getting just like a a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody else who just doing very basic static ads on Facebook type of thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we observe that many of our competitors sunk a ton of their initial revenue into advertising. And so we're looking at sort of a different go to market strategy. We want to please fifty people in our beta testing. We want to work like very closely with a smaller group of people to make sure that our product and our algorithm is really working the way that it's supposed to before we go like mass market. Um, but I like the idea of doing short form content'cause I know that definitely hits with uh with the younger audience, which is

Target market. Yeah. Who's your competitors? So are there other people doing this? Well, there's no one that's doing exactly what we're doing. There are skincare companies that do microbiome testing and there are also personalized skincare companies. Um, the biggest skin microbiome company currently is Parallel Health. And they offer a two hundred a month uh protocol where they do sequencing on your skin microbiome. Super high market, high end product.

Um, there's a a company that's successful. They've been in business for seven years now called Proven Health. They were actually or sorry, Par or No, it's proven skincare. They were on they were on Shar Tank. Um And they do personalized skincare that's based off of a quiz only. So we we have a quiz and we have microbiome testing. So we're sort of the baby between those two ideas. A lot of times with health stuff, uh health health stuff or skin anything involving your body, that's very it's very controversial because there's always there's a bunch of people who love something typically, and then there's uh an equal or more amount of haters, which doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. It's just

health is very controversial. Um What would the haters say about this? Like would they say like Dude, microbiome stuff, it's not actually important. If you just use these three things, it's gonna do most of the job. You don't need to worry about this other stuff. Like what are the haters gonna say about you? I I'd say the biggest like viability there is that the the skin microbiome field is actually very nascent. So The

Basically, we're testing a hypothesis. We believe that skincare that's precisely tailored to your microbiome is better than the traditional methods out there. I think people would likely continue to hold on to this societal idea that all bacteria is bad, or like we need to stay in this sort of sanitized mindset. Like people really like to feel clean. And so I think that that's the biggest objection to this is like we love germs. We want to harness the power of the germs that are on your face. And we believe they hold a lot of potential. So people might be like, Oh, it's gross, but You know, it's just science. Science grossing. Well, I I I like uh I think the criticism uh I'm an idiot, but I pay attention to health stuff. I think the criticism is like uh

You know, that's like Uh I'll That that thing will just move the needle by one percent. Whereas if you do these other things, it's mostly gonna get you there and be perfect. Do you know what I mean you know I'm saying, Sean? Yeah, a hundred percent it's like in health stuff. You can listen to Huberman for ninety two hours and suddenly you're or Brian Johnson or whatever, and you're trying to take forty two supplements a day.

But Eighty to ninety percent of the gains are gonna come from like, you know, good sleep. Drink water. eat clean whole foods. And if you just do those things you and you're not you're probably not already doing those things, that'll get you the bulk of it. The rest is really like you know, on the edge optimizations. And I think you're right, Sam, that you know, a sort of a smart skeptic would probably

Um, have that thought, but I don't think that's what's gonna drive success or failure in this case. So I I think actually one thing you were missing from your pitch. is to convince me that people care about Hyper personalization. And that that's where the puck is going. And really what you want in a pitch It's for this to feel like an inevitable outcome of what's go what's happening here, of what's happening in this space. Whether it's you or somebody else, that's sort of secondary, but you really want to convince investors of two things. One,

Inevitably this is where the puck is going. And that inevitably we are gonna be the ones who take advantage score when that puck gets there, right? So you kind of need to make two cases when you make a pitch. And so for example I know that in hair care and kind of beauty products, makeup products There's a lot of this already. The trend has gone in this direction where

Isn't it like pe you they you do quizzes and you figure out, Oh, I have curly hair and my problem is that it's uh dry, and then for that you're gonna get a certain product. And I think what you would want to show is that the companies that came out in the last wave for beauty products That went the personalization route. have outperformed, have had all these really great exits, but nobody's done it for skincare yet, but they will. And here's what they're do here's what's gonna happen in skincare. The same thing that just happened in makeup and hair is gonna happen for skin.

Right. Same thing that just happened in vitamins, it's gonna happen for and that makes it sort of feel inevitable. Oh my God, he's right. They're the next wave of successful skincare companies are gonna use this kind of science based hyperpersonalized um thing. That I think was missing from your pitch. So that's kind of my feedback for you. Thank you that's good that's very good feedback. I thought you did a great job telling the story. I'm still what I'm still trying to understand what

Yeah, I already asked that question, but like the other answers could have been like Uh, everyone agrees that this is right, but the the question that we're trying to figure out is can we or anyone even figure this out? Like I wanted to figure out like what's gonna be What does this all hinge on? Because if you're talking like on a beta, like what's What is this? What are you having to convince the world that that that needs to happen in order for this to be a massive breakthrough?

Let me ask you a very simple question. Do you believe it let's assume it works. Do you believe that it's gonna be vi uh visually different result. Meaning if I just showed you two pictures, one person who's using your thing and one person who's just using off the shelf stuff. Honest question, do you think it's gonna be where I could just point and go, Yeah, that's clearly better. 'Cause if it is, then all your marketing is gonna work that way. And if it's not, then y the whole the science kind of actually in the world of supplements and and vitamins and s and creams. Let's be honest.

Nobody has a clue if any of this ship actually works. Um, and so then it's all just a branding game. It's all a marketing game. It's all who can convince the consumer that what that if you buy this product, you'll be more beautiful and everyone will love you and thing will you know, if things will go well for you in life, right? And so I think we're kind of Unless it's literally visual where you can see the difference and it's gonna be inarguable. Then it's just a question of are you gonna be a great marketer? Are L'Oreal. Why is L'Oreal

successful. We know that their s their product product scientifically is better than anybody else's products because they're better marketers. That's the reality of the situation. Yeah, we we certainly recognize that. Um, we definitely want to sort of latch into the the trend towards clean and sustainable beauty, which is why we made a box that you can plant in the ground and it grows flowers. We think it's really like the beauty's in the details here. So I absolutely agree with you. Before and after pictures are like one of the best things that we can get and the the results of our beta testing are currently looking very promising, but

uh before I start to make claims and put those pictures on the website, I wanna do like really really thorough analysis of How the products are working, how the algorithms working. To make sure that we have something that is It's really solid. All right, brother. We appreciate you. Congratulations on this and and and solid pitch. We gotta go to the next one. Great job.

Thank you. Is the brother Brother Nuts, is that is that who's up next? It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name's Austin Majors. I'm the co-founder of Brother's Nuts. Here, Brothers Nuts, our mission is to kick the fake food to the curb.

And revolutionalize healthy snacking with organic sprouted nut and seed snacks. So first off, my family found that half of the stacks out there We weren't actually healthy. In the other half? Tasted like garbage.

But first off Why do we create this business? Well, our business started back in twenty ten, actually. When my father was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. He was given seven weeks to live.

And through the changes in diet and lifestyle. Turn that seven weeks into seven years. But one of the biggest issues him and my family had was finding a stack that was as healthy as it was tasty. And so our

Current day CFO. AK Chief Flavor Officer. A K mom being the amazing mom that she is Went into work and created what is now known as the crackled cheesy almonds. Now my family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were flavorful.

But also very crunchy. And that's what makes us very different. All of our nuts and seeds are sprouted. But How's it gone over the last seven years? So I started this company I was thirteen years old when my father passed away with my older brother who was fifteen.

And over the last seven years we've done over a million dollars in sales. We've sold over a million dollars worth of nuts. We're currently available in two hundred retail locations. In the future is very promising. We have a clear path forward over the next four years. to take this business to ten million dollars in sales and be a national brand.

How are we going to do that? Really do that by doing the hard work. That no one else wants to do. And I know no one else wants to do it because I speak to these stores and no one else is doing it. So what is that?

First of all, it's expanding and making more money from our current clients. Clients like fresh time. Mom's gathering market. Fresh market. But it's also expanding distribution and getting new grocery stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, H E B

She accounts. How we gonna how are we gonna grow within those stores? So we're gonna continue shaking hands. Doing what I just did for you guys, telling my story, having people try the product. And letting people know that there's something out there like this. And last, we're gonna continue innovating through our product.

Right now we're developing a clean chocolate almond. And we also have a We're developing a high protein variant of our Most popular flavors. Something that's never been done in this space.

Now, kind of more grand scale. I mean, there's sixty two thousand grocery stores. The nut market's selling ten million dollars this year. I look at the biggest companies out there and we can absolutely get there. But what's really cool is we are on the up and up. Seed oil free, we're that.

Sprouted, gluten free, God friendly. We check All the boxes. Finally, something that my dad did in twenty ten is now mainstream. And we are on the cutting edge of it. In the last period over period.

S products labeled sprouted. grew thirty four percent in their velocities and sales. We are on the up and up. But let's remember why we're doing this. Look, the reason why we're able to have the success, why we're able to land these retailers, get through these to these gatekeepers.

Because we're doing this. In every sale that we're making in milestone. It's contributing to Continuing my father's legacy. Everything we're doing is to grow his legacy.

It's create my own along with my brothers. 'Cause we know that by changing what people snack on every single day. Well lead them to live longer, better, healthier lives with their families. And so if you're ready to join us. They kick the fake food through the curb, it's evolve the way you stack.

I'd love to talk to you. All right. Dude, that was That was great, man. I got goosebumps. Uh what an amazing story. Good good for you, dude. I I'm I'm really happy to he to hear about this.

This and I just placed a fifty two dollar order. I'm gonna try the cheesy ones, the garlic ones, and the spicy basil pumpkin seeds. So let's see what you're about. We'll throw some extra stuff in there for you. This is great. So you um you're in some stores today. Can you just give us the the basic rundown? So how many stores are you currently in and is that one chain or multiple? What what's going on? Yeah, so it's multiple chains. Our very first store that gave us our shot was Fresh Time Market. There are about seventy stores across the Midwest. I mean the story with that is my brother Cold called the CEO, got a cold got a call back and The lunchroom of the senior of high school.

You sat down with the team. Got three stores, proved ourselves in three stores, they gave us thirty. We proved ourselves again, they gave us seventy. stores only give you those that that many allow you to expand if you're selling well. So after we had that success story, we went out and we targeted smaller chains.

Like mom's organic market on the east coast. The fresh market, which we're starting off small with. And with that data, we've we're now going to new stores. Like we met with Whole Foods. We got a yes from them. We got pushback. We're fighting in a bigger and better yes. And we have a huge meeting with Sprouts tomorrow, actually.

Wow. Uh and so and what was the re what's the revenue so far? Yeah, so Since inception over the last seven years, we've sold over a million dollars worth of nuts. This year alone we'll do four hundred thousand. Last year two hundred thousand.

And next year with some of the launches that we're planning, we'll do probably closer to two million. And what do the retailers tell you? So that that fresh time that that you're in s you're sorry, you're in seventy stores with them or they have seventy stores. No, we're in all seventy of their stores. We're in total two hundred retail stores across the country from Some of those bigger players and some just smaller one off stores, health food stores, golf courses. And like, you know, the way that retail works is they need to see the velocity of Yeah, how how much you're selling on the shelf uh at their stores for you to get into more stores.

And so what data do you have and is that currently a strength, is it a weakness? Wha w what's going on with the current uh cycle t cycle rate or whatever they call it for retail. Consumption. Yeah. So the velocities and the data is is the biggest thing. So our product is incredibly unique in that we are one of the only ones who offer a product like ours.

We have very few competitors. I can name them. And so What we have to do is of course first demonstrate a gap on the shelf. Hey, you are not You don't have any nut flavor, nut options that are organic, sprouted, and then contain no seed oils. So first we have to do that and then we just show share the data.

I mean Our velocities, if they were bad, and if that was an issue. But Fresh Time would not have let us go from three to thirty to seventy stores. They came to us. We didn't have to approach them on that. We were just killing it so much. Okay. Okay. Uh fair fair enough. Um I feel like you answered a question that should be in answered in numbers with letters. Uh but that's okay. Um all right. So

Here's the problem that I have with this business. I like I like your name. I like your story. I really want to try your nuts. All right. But here's the problem. Um When I go to your

Tic tack. I see fifty followers. And When you're young You have a lot of disadvantages. You're not going to have the same level of experience. You're not going to have the same amount of funding and resources. You're not going to have the supply chain experience that you're going to that your competitors all have.

Um But you do have a story. And what you should be is amazing at social media. Um, there you should be telling your story on social media. You should be getting people excited about this and taking that to the retailers and saying, look, we're this young, exciting brand that consumers really care about and consumers are excited about. And

You don't have an option like that. You're you're the the nut shelf for you guys is stale. It's just blue diamond and it's the same old brands that do the same old thing and they're not. They're not on on trend. They're not CDOL free. They're not whatever, right? You have that story, but you you need the social side to be kick ass because social just takes creativity. It doesn't take money. And You're part of the generation that should be better at this than Whoever the CEO of Blue Diamond is, they their, you know, their social strategy is obviously gonna be pretty boring. And so I think that's where you're dropping the ball and that's what you're gonna need to get into retail because I've talked to retailers.

And What they care about is they need to they need to believe Uh that you are gonna help drive traffic to the store, or that customers care about your brand and that they're they're adding young hot brands to the shelf. Um That's what that's what you need as your story. So I think that's what's missing for me right now. Absolutely. Yeah.

Who uh with the family business like this, do you and your brother are you the two owners or is your mother involved? Who who owns the company? Yeah, so my brother and I are fifty fifty owners. Um, we do have my mom, who is our chief flavor officer. She's in charge of making sure the nuts taste as good as they do. I mean, she's the original person who created these recipes and we just took them and started selling them. Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. I um I'm bought in with Sean as well on the story. The story was very good. I saw your about page. I saw the personality. I was like, All right, this is definitely gonna be something interesting. I'm now a customer. I'm very eager to try it, but this is pretty badass. Uh Sam, do do you remember the name of that nuts brand that um he's kinda like on Twitter. He might be a Nutty Nerds.

Is that it? It's like a peanut butter brand, right? Yeah, they do. Uh Many eight figures a year in revenue. Many eight figures. So tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Yeah. Um, have you s have you looked at these guys, uh Yeah, I'm familiar with them. And I think they just got popular on social media.

Um, and their shtick is different than yours. Theirs is like Yeah. The opposite of of yeah, it's like indulge versus what you're trying to do. But you do have Like I've invested in a bunch of these like uh seed oil Or uh uh

seed oil free companies. Um, I think T B D if it's gonna be mainstream yet, but it definitely seems like it might be. Uh, but this is like super fascinating. You have a lot of tailwinds uh uh to help you out here for sure. I think you want to include that in your pitch, by the way. So um You know, an investor doesn't really know how big uh nuts brand can be. And your numbers while

Yeah. I'm not saying that they're bad. They are on the small side for like an e commerce company, right? So You if you're you know, we've done a million dollars across seven years, okay, that's not That's not huge. I think you gotta paint a picture that this can actually be really big.

I look up Blue Diamonds, by the way. Blue Diamonds does about uh one point eight billion a year on Revenue. Correct. So y I would show uh the nut category is huge. And you know, you have Blue Diamond does one point eight billion in sales a year. The next one does this, next one does this. And We we use this phrase on MFM that there's a sea of sameness. You walk down that aisle and it's all old brands. There's not one challenger brand. And all of them have the same problem that they're they're lacking XYZ. Um we have

fresh packaging, we're a challenger brand. We have the we have a better story. We're hot on social media. So I think you need that part of the story. And I would include others like Nerdy Nuts, and I would show examples of others who have come into this category and are doing very well, and how you're the next in line. Again, it's that sort of air of inevitability that you want to paint. And so when you don't have the traction that shows that your own trajectory is inevitable. You want to show the inevitability of a category of a change. Um Some of the things you talked about about You know

uh sprouted products are growing thirty four percent year over year in these stores. You know, that's kind of like you want slides there because it feels like Every category now has a sprouted product and the sprouted products are overperforming. Guess what? Nuts doesn't have a sprouted product. We are that that sprouted nut, right? And so you want to paint that picture for for the investor, but Really good overall and Honestly, I actually think Of all the business we heard today.

I think this is probably the one that could be the biggest. Yeah. But I don't think you're using your strengths. And I think uh If you keep going on the same path you're going, it won't be huge. But you're still young and you you have time to change, if you actually like take some of the feedback to do it, I think this could actually be a lot bigger.

Uh Thank you so much, yeah. Uh thank you, man. You're the best. Um awesome majors. Thank you very much. All right. We have the last one from University of Michigan, right? All right. Hi Sam, Sean, M FM fam. We are tour the AI Power Salesperson for property managers.

Today, only four percent of apartment prospects that ever land on an apartment website actually end up taking the in person tour. And it's no surprise that the in person tour is the highest converting part of the apartment sales process. I mean there's nothing like someone giving you a guided experience of something you're about to buy. But when ninety-six percent of the potential prospects that hit your digital storefront never get the chance to experience your tour, the highest converting sales moment in the apartment process. Well

Please get missed. Yeah, these leads get smithed and these apartments are left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of missed opportunities and unleashed vacancies that could have been filled if these prospects took a tour. That is until the apartment installs tour. Uh tour helps apartments like Arbor Apartments scale Mariana, their digital salesperson. Now Mariana doesn't have enough time to tour every single prospect that l visits the property in person, much less the all all the prospects that visit the property online. But what if we could recreate Mariana's best in person tour and replicate up that on the website? So that Mariana is on the website for all prospects twenty four seven.

A property manager just paste a link to an apartment website, we scrape the website, and generate video scripts that help Mariana with the infrastructure to record the tour. And scrape combine it all together with a knowledge base into a smart virtual leasing agent. Once the tour is ready, all the company has to do is paste a little piece of code on the website and now Mariana is on the website twenty four seven. And when an apart when a prospect goes on the website and starts to browse, we're actually learning about that prospect. through l small digital micro interactions. And Mariana can pop out of the right hand corner of the website at the perfect time and ask them if they'd like to take a tour.

Once in the tour, Mariana can teach them about the apartment and even offer to give them a tour of like a specific floor plan or a specific amenity that we deem appropriate for them. Mariana can also ask for qualifying questions for that prospect, such as would you like to take an in-person tour or would you like to schedule a call back? All while driving engagement and increasing appointments booked. Now, replicating that in person tour for these apartments can drive nearly three X the engagement and create more qualified leads for the apartment. We know this because we're working with some of the largest property batteries in the nation.

And the spirit of the podcast. We delivered our first million tours. And help drive over thirty million dollars worth of leases for the apartment. Additionally This has helped us get to reach

Over a million dollars in revenue. And that's not all guys. Do you remember those videos that we recorded of Mariana earlier? Well now those are one of the biggest assets for the apartments. Tour automatically repurposes those videos to follow up with leads and automatically run TikTok, Meta, and Google ad campaigns. Look, Shopify has set the experience and with the advent of Shopify, online shopping for everyday commodities is compelling visual video first.

But larger purchases like shopping for an apartment online, otherwise known as leasing, still remain stuck with static photos, manual scheduling, and follow ups. But that And Today with Tor. That's right.

This shopping online for apartments is nearly two X larger than all sho all other forms of e commerce combined. That's right, guys. This is the two point five trillion dollar industry in which property managers rely on their tour to close over eighty percent of their sales. We're a passionate driven team. who has designed and delivered some of the best experiences.

best companies in the world, including Growth at Ramp and Google Shopping. We start on campus to solve our own problems in our own shopping journey. We got into Y C and are just getting started with solving it for millions of more with Tor, the AI sales person for Poppy Matt. Alright, alright, alright, alright. That's pretty great. So you've raised money already or what?

Yeah, we've we've raised about three hundred and fifty to four hundred K. So far. But largely been boost dropped. We've we we've had many interesting moments throughout the journey. Um, but you know, we're we're we're we've been really focused on getting the product experience as good for our customers as possible. Can I tell you I used to work in this industry a long time ago. Can I tell you like the three reasons why I think this could fail and you could re you could

Tell me w how I'm wrong. Uh the first. I think that there was this thing called Matterport that existed for a long time. I know Airbnb tested it on their website and I used to be an Airbnb owner and when they had these Air Mat Matterport made these like realistic models of what your apartment uh look like basically. Yeah, similar to the this. And they found that it decreased Uh Conversion. And the main thing being is that a lot of apartments for rent

Our shit. And like it's like dude, just like I just need to get someone in the door and once they're in the door I can like like do some salesmanship to sell them. But like Online it looks pretty shitty in a three D way. The the other one being that uh there's Like Right now

I don't know, do apartments need to be filled at the moment. Like it seems like uh a lot of these folks are like, dude, I'm killing it right now. My vacancy's quite low. Why d why should I spend money or do this work? Um And the last one being is a lot of apartments

That you need I would imagine to do sales on The apartments are kind of shitty and I don't want someone to see them online. I need them to see them in real life so I can sell you on it. And You know it's

You you know what I mean? It's like I don't want like a user video of like a nineteen ninety four Honda Civic, but if I get you here and you're like, dude, I got a thousand dollars, I'm like this shit box is for you and I don't need a video for that. You know what I mean? And so can you like refute some of those points? Yeah, I mean I think you're absolutely right. Mataport is one of our comps, you know, they're doing five hundred they're still doing five hundred forty million dollars per year. They are a public comp But the big thing that they do that's different, um, or that we do that's different is where You're telling me that Matterport does five hundred million in revenue? Yes.

Yes. Um now with the the big thing that is to put it in perspective, the big thing that we do that's different is two things. The first thing is We are an fundamentally an active experience that's partnered with the apartment to funnel funnel someone down the whole sales funnel. From the first moment they meet them to following up on email. following up targeting. Now it allows us to hit a large market much larger market than Matterport even does today.

And then the other thing that I think you talked about, which is like the nature of most of these apartments, you know, fundamentally being not necessarily like maybe old drab experiences. I think the first thing is look. Things change. Apartments are becoming one of the largest purchases we make. It is one of the largest purchases we make we make. And like these are becoming more commoditized, they're becoming more amenitized. I mean, the whole future is is going into with the experience economy. And I think the experience is gonna be a very important part of our our generic. Or even millennial shop.

So I think that experience is a very important part. We see that because A lot of our tours we we've delivered over many tours. Many of them are international, out of state. And these are important decisions that people are on the edge on which different shops uh you know different shops that they or different different apartments they might want to work with. Now for example

one apartment might want to have a virtual leasing advantage compared to others. And that's why we help fun fundamentally become the part of that virtually advantage. And then the last element I know Kishan you want to say something, is just that we're also Augmenting the sales force. Right. So There's a frontline sales in most of these businesses.

are fundamentally high churn. There's people leaving the building all the time. If we can help augment their sales team. We have a much larger staying power with the actual property, not just a one off virtual tour. And one thing I like to add is that Matterport, yeah, their like essential goal is to communicate the like physical establishment to the customer. And obviously we do that.

But what we're trying to do is to augment the website to better communicate that as well as segment leads so that they know how to allocate the resources best to the highest intent leads. So that's another area where they save money by better allocating resources. And The tour uh the tour that you give, sorry, I might have missed this during the thing or like I don't know, maybe you have a demo. Is it just a girl talking? And photos, or is it like a walking tour that you generate, or do you go film it first? Like what what is the actual thing? Okay, here's the video.

Yeah, we go and film it. And so we have two elements. We either have a video pro network that can help film it, or we're building more and more scripts that you can easily start start filming it from your phone. My phone 16 that is like rivals like Sony cameras. And then once we have gotcha. So so this is not AI generated. This is like a video you guys make. Yes. Yes. And then we Take the knowledge base as well as that median. Supply that throughout the whole sales process. Got it.

Okay, cool. So you guys uh go film a video when an apartment starts to work with you and then you have the AI wrapper around it where it's chat, it's Q and A, it's scheduling appointment, it's following up with a target ad. It's things like that. That's what you guys do after that. Yeah exactly. Okay, cool. And the four hundred fifty uh K of ARR that you have right now. That's from how many uh customers? That's from 130 property managers.

Uh usually around the price point of three hundred dollars, some are two fifty, some are paying more. And how'd you get the 100 whatever property managers? So the cool thing is we have a land and expand motion. So once we're inside a property manager, usually they manage many properties, large apartment buildings. What we do is we demonstrate our results and most of our other property management companies start expanding within the property managers. So

They the one property manager in a kind side of company refers us to some of her additional properties in her portfolio or some of the other original property managers. So how will you go from a a hundred something properties today to you know a thousand or ten thousand in the next year. What are you gonna do? So one of the big things we've been trying recently is automatically generating tours so that we can demonstrate value to apartments before we even have to like go in person because obviously that's a large cost of like videotaping the actual apartment. So we can immediately just scrape the website, pull some images, use Flux to kind of turn the images into a somewhat of a mock video, pull some information from their website. and generate a tour that can act to segment leads on the website and then they can kinda see the value of it. Oh, a tour lead came in. This is a high intent lead. Let's follow up on it. And then from there, if they're pleased by the value, then we can actually go out and record that video, making the tour even better.

Okay. auto generate these videos as a prototype, as a sample, and then you're gonna cold email them and say, Hey, we could do this for you guys. Cold email were for all yep. Okay. And then what um do you guys run an A B test? So do you on any of your your uh apartment websites do you show.

If you have us installed versus if you don't have us installed, what's the difference in revenue? Yeah, absolutely. So what we notice is when it comes to the actual properties, like the amount of value we generate for the properties, it usually an additional three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars. In leases. Now, specifically, we do three things really importantly that leads that leads to like these fundamental items. The first thing is we deliver four times number of tours. Prospects who are on the website get three times engagement. And also the leads that we end up capturing just obviously are going to be more qualified.

Right. And so those leases convert at a higher rate. Okay, gotcha. That's pretty convincing. If you told me, hey Um, however many tours you're giving per week right now, I could forex that if you add this thing to your website. That's a pretty compelling

Uh Proposition, don't you think, Sam? Yes. I still think that there's a bunch of

I think there's a bunch of other questions related to the things that I said, but that is compelling. I think that I just I think I'm scarred from this industry of like selling to these companies and how hard it is and how old school some of these like have you guys noticed that about how old school your customers are and it's Like The two customers that we've had in this presentation. Or in this uh section have been um

Campuses Or colleges. And apartment buildings. And I'm like, Oh my God, those are like both really, really, really hard. Um, have you guys noticed that when you're selling to these apartment uh companies that they're a pain in the ass to work with? It it definitely is an old guard.

And and you know, things change. You know, every so often. But I think they're realizing how important it is, like particularly when they're looking at like e commerce and how things are evolving, that's important for them to be extremely competitively advantaged. And so just the nature of competition has really been trying to somewhat push the They're just slow. They're really slow. Yeah.

Yeah, I do think though, again, back to that idea of like you want to make this feel inevitable, I think It is there's a clear line you could draw where you say Look. If you were a Apartment building.

And back, you know, fifteen years ago You might have been able to get away without having a website, but about fifteen years ago you now had to have a website. Okay. You had to have a website, you had to be findable on Google. That became mandatory table stakes. And then after that you had to have photos. If you didn't have photos

You were you were not even competitive, right? You're non viable. And then you had to have videos. And you had to have videos Then after that you had to have a booking thing where somebody could schedule a tour without having to call you. That became table stakes, but now ninety eight percent of Apartment sites all have a b a way to book a tour online. Well, guess what the next one is? The next one is an AI agent that's helping you book those appointments.

by either answering questions, upselling you, or you know uh putting uh putting together a higher quality in a pitch to get in front of you. And that's the next wave of this. Like All websites had to go through this and when the tech made it where it was possible It just became um Too competitive. If you didn't have it, you were left in the dust. And that's what's going to happen in this space. All websites are now going to have.

An AI agent that helps them sell. Agreed. Yeah. I love that shot. And you guys have done great with your matching zip ups that are uh

Nicely merchandised. Congratulations. That's that's step one to being a startup. So you've nailed that one. Uh You've also nailed the revenue thing, too. So congratulations to you guys. The million tours is also pretty good. And thirty million dollars of leases that came through your appointments. That's that's also That's okay as well.

But really the jackets are fantastic. All right. Uh thank you guys. You guys are badass. Well done. Yes. We kinda grave them on a curve. It's like uh If you're already in YC And you already have like, you know

A million tours done, then I kind of feel like these are unfair, uh uh to be honest. I feel like if you are in YC or taking a gap, you're in San Francisco. Uh Those I don't know, the gap year that's fine. That's like you even go to college if you're at Y C Well that's what I was saying, th those guys put up a team slide and it was like I've experienced at Google, at Yelp, at like all these companies like, dude, I thought you're supposed to be like nineteen years old. What's going on? I are these even college kids? All right, I think we have one more left, the final pitch.

Coming in from Illinois, who do we got? Hello, my name is Adva Gotha. I'm the CEO and founder of Patlet. It's really nice to meet you guys today. What's up, brother. All right.

Until a month ago, we were working on a no code engine that helped businesses automate their daily tasks with AI. And it was going really well. We were working with extremely large enterprises like the big four, and had more than a million dollars in B C money to accelerate our growth. But the more we work with enterprises, the more we realise that are most valuable automations for them.

ended up being email related. They wanted help managing their cluttered inboxes. That looked something like this. A fun story. Our lead investor once told us that she went for a week long break.

And had eight thousand unred emails. And a business owner that we were working with told us his employees were spending more time on emails alone than the job they were actually hired to do. And these stories are not one offs. According to McKinsey, The average employee processes

More than six hundred emails per week. Wasting thirteen hours and thousands of business dollars. Despite it being an essential part of our lives. Email has become a burden and we find it hard to keep track of even the most important emails in our inbox, often losing them.

But according to Industry Select. Eighty six percent of business professionals still prefer using emails for some reason. So clearly we can't get rid of emails. So what can we do? Well, to solve this exact problem.

We are currently building a virtual executive assistant or secretary that handles your emails for you. What if, just like a real secretary It could learn from you and respond to emails on your behalf. What if, just like a real secretary, it tells you what the most important emails in your inbox are every single morning. And what if, just like a real secretary, it could automatically respond to emails that you don't care about?

Well You can have that secretary because our mobile app does all of that. And we are launching on the App Store next week. And no, we're not joking. We have been actively working with a big four customer.

netting us six figures in annual revenue. And are starting a pilot with the largest children's enrichment franchise in the world next week. Not only that, but we have also been working with five global financial institutions and completed an oversubscribed seven figure raise. We were also fortunate enough to win first place in one of Midwest's largest startup pitch competitions. My name is Adva, and together with my co-founder Mark, we collectively bring more than a decade of experience in AI and building companies.

My entire teenage years have been spent building and scaling numerous online security businesses to millions of users, and Mark has tons of AI research and startup experience under his belt. We're now working together to change the way you interact with email today. So join us in helping to reclaim the biggest part of your daily work day. Thank you. So

Hold on. You the first five set words of your pitch was pretty funny. You said until last month. We were doing this thing. So let me answer some questions. And then but then you have a uh a six figure enterprise contract and you've raised a million dollars. I I don't understand

Can you like briefly tell me the They had a product. They're pivoting. They raise money. They had a customer, but it wasn't the thing. So they're pivoting. Is that right? Is that Yes, for sure. So I can answer that question. Oh so essentially we have it's it's the same business. So we have a We worked on the generative engine um generative AI engine that we started just this February.

So All the contracts that we have are now converting to the email client. Essentially We were using our technology to develop email automations for all these businesses. And we had raised money On that

But now we simply change the user interface from a workflow builder that looked kind of like Zapier, et cetera, to more off. An assistant e email client interface that we found that it works better with enterprise um customers. Got it. All right.

Because your website. Doesn't tell that story, but um then if you click uh you have this uh folder up top it says new. exclamation point our email client, which is pretty cool. Uh, that tells that story a little bit better.

Can I give us a PSA about the uh our team has decades of experience. Oh my gosh. I didn't want to get on that, but yeah. I guess gotta say'cause a couple of a couple of the pitches have had that. Um I don't think you should do that. Uh it It seems You know, what you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor That wait a minute.

I think this is even bigger. than what they're saying. So there's a subtle art where you're you're desperately trying to convince them that this is gonna be big and awesome and it's gonna work. But you cannot appear to be Um overselling it. You have to feel like you're underselling it. And then they feel like they're finding some diamond in the rough. And

So you know, how old are you? I'm twenty. You're twenty, right? So to be like we have, you know, a combined twelve years of experience I think that's a bit of a tell. I started coding when I was eight. And by the time I was twelve, I had already built blah blah blah. And when I was fourteen, I hacked into my school's thing and changed my grades. And now I've figured out, you know, the you know, for the last few years I've really been

Uph obsessing folks with the AI. And like that's a more believable and exciting story for me is like, Oh, this is one of those boy geniuses, right? Like, oh, you're one of those like hacker types that started early. I can pattern match and say, Yeah. A lot of the best performing founders I know have that same story. And that story works better versus when you tell me

Yeah, me and my co founder who are, you know, eighteen years old, we've got decades of experience. It's like, no, you don't, right? Okay. Now what else can't I believe out of this? Even if it's technically true, the whole like cumulative years of experience of your team is not a real metric that most people put in their pitch deck. So I would I would get rid of that. Yes, you're right. Having said that, all right, that's public service announcement. I do have a question. It seems like you've done a great job of selling into people that are really hard to sell into. So How did you go get a enterprise contract from a big four consulting company worth You know, over a hundred thousand dollars. I I'm curious to hear

What you did there. What's the short story? Yeah, very good question. So um short story was that I was working as a consultant. Um on campus as part of a university organization. And Thanks to my opportunity there, I was able to connect to

A very high level business executive within a big four enterprise. Um, through my mentor, who happened to also be the director of The Consulting org?

So long story short, it was very network driven. Um They were looking for A solution to fit certain problems that they had within an enterprise.

and what I was building as a personal project. Happen to solve those exact problems. So once I had that, we essentially made it a company. And what do they say when you're pivoting? I mean, did you pivot because of them? They are partly the reason we pivoted, but it was also when we started engaging with more and more prospects.

So our initial generative AI Workflow engine was essentially You couldn't. Take AI and plug it into any legacy systems to automate. Any complex day to day task.

For example, if you're a V C and you receive a lot of pitch deck every day via email, we could create an automation for you where you would automatically um process those pitch deck. analyze them against your investment thesis, portfolio companies, et cetera. And then also send out replies saying, Hey We love this, we would love to have a meeting, or no, for the following reasons.

And what you're describing is that sorry, I I want you to finish, but is what you're describing similar to Lindy dot AI? Yes, so Lindy.ai was definitely a competitor of Ours in that space. Um But then

As I was saying earlier, the more we engaged with customers and prospects we found that Our product was explicitly being used for email automations. And a big problem with products like our previous one and Lindy AI. is that the barrier to entry for a lot of non technical users is quite high.

You have to almost be a developer to actually use even these no code tools. And that is why we decided to change the interface into a much easier to understand Virtual assistant or secretary. Gotcha. I think the challenge with this business, because you seem really smart and uh, you know, I think whatever you work on will be, you know, interesting. I think the challenge here is you're going into the most competitive space. So I do feel undoubtedly that

email inboxes are gonna start to have AI in them and the AI is gonna help you process, categorize. um summarize your emails in a in a way and and respon help you with the responses. The problem is Do I really believe that you are gonna be able to get people off of Outlook, off of Gmail? And on to your service.

Or in addition, you know, they're also gonna be doing that, right? Google Google's definitely gonna be adding AI into this and so is superhuman and so is Microsoft, right? They own open AI, basically. And so I do think that this is gonna be just an absolute bloodbath category. And so I think From an investment point of view, that would be my problem with this, which is even if I like you and even if I agree with the idea. It's kind of that second inevitability I talked about. One is where's is the puck going this way? There's yes, of course it's going this way. The second is are you gonna be the team who captures that opportunity? And it just seems highly unlikely.

that you would be the team that captures that opportunity given People don't want to switch email clients. And that all of the email clients are already aware of this. uh, you know, capability and our you know, highly incentivized to add AI to it.

How did you say how much you raised so far? You said a million? Yes, we have raised a little more than a million. Are you still in school or are you in living in San Francisco? Um, currently we're on a gap semester. Like I'm on a gap semester, everyone else on the Uh Mark's also on a gap semester has one class left, but everyone else is full time. We have four people. Dude, I think like that first company, Meet Your Class.

Uh it's not middle funnel things that that's the issue. All these kids, all these smart kids are bailing on university. That's amazing that you guys are all just like picking gaps. Um So well I just told you that Uh You're probably gonna fail. Tell me why I'm wrong and I should kick rock. Yeah, for sure. Um

So businesses switching to Our email client is definitely a very big hurdle that we were also trying to navigate. But what we found is um by verticalizing in a lot of businesses with our own kind of information management secretary. Um a lot of businesses prefer us over They're standard email clients like Gmail and Outlook.

For example, um currently as I said we're starting a pilot with the largest children's enrich enrichment franchise, they entirely run over Gmail. But they're still willing to switch to us. Simply because Some of the features that we provide.

is something Gmail and Outlook just can never do because they have to cater to large groups of audiences. And they cannot fit specific niches of uh certain requirements that a lot of customers have. Okay. Uh all right, fair enough. Um Sam, what else you got?

Before we wrap up. I don't think I have much. I I think that um I think that it's so early, it's hard to ask questions because I'm on your website and it looks like it's very much beta. So it's hard for me to fully understand. I think Sean, you were asking about replacing Gmail. According to the website, it's in integration. It's not replacing Gmail. It's hard to it fulfill because you're so new. Do you that right? Do you do you just keep using Gmail and this is overlaid or Um is this a new client you download and you're supposed to go here instead of gmail.com. Yes. So essentially you just log in with your Gmail. So one way we're beating that barrier to adoption is by not saying that you need a new

TLD and a new domain ID. You simply log in with your Gmail, we get all your emails, and then you start using our interface rather than Gmails. Yeah, it's like superhuman, right? So you you keep your email address. But fundamentally you're not supposed to you know, you're not supposed to go to Gmail every day, you're supposed to go to superhuman and and open up your email and use your use that for all your email. Yes, that is correct. All right. Um

Good pitch. Thank you. G best of luck. You uh I think I think this is a huge idea. I think it's gonna be super competitive. And if you did it, that would be amazing. This is a this is a multi billion dollar win if you can actually do it. That's the good news. Yeah, thank you. All right.

Round of applause. Thanks, brother. All right, to wrap it. Can we just name I think Do you guys want to do the winning school that we thought brought the he brought the heat? Um

Secondly, our favorite pitch, the best pitch, meaning the one we would be most likely to put our money into. And then the um I think we should maybe do a audience choice as well, which is uh, you know let the crow react and see which one they they think is best. What do you think, Sam? All right. So let's start with school. I have a winner.

But let's recap real quick. Michigan did meet your class. Um, which was helping Universities with the summer melt when students don't enroll. Yeah, middle final for university. Milieu, which is the personalized skincare microbiome stuff, and Tour, which was the AI apartment tours. And then U I U C was basically Meet Fr Metafraso, which is the dubbing company, Brothers Nuts, which is the sprouted nuts company, and Pathlet, that one we just heard about email, uh the AI email client. So

Those are the schools. Sam, what's your pick? Illinois all the way. Uh I I think that Michigan's an incredibly impressive school, but I think that Um I thought that uh I thought it I thought it was incredibly impressive that the Metafraso guy was at um Uh was that founders or what's it called? The the

Um the way this this young guy who just went, the way that he had already raised a little bit of money Um and was taking a gap year. And then Brothers Nuts already has a business that has is doing like four hundred a year in revenue. I just thought it was more impressive that a midwestern school their people are like going to the coast. And I think that's a really good thing. Do you agree or no? I would disagree. I would have gone Michigan. I think that Traction wise, I mean four

To speak the case here. Tour had the most traction, right? Uh half a million dollars in ARR, a million tour served. Uh I think Tour and they're NYC. I think Tour was doing the best. Uh, I think Meet Your Class has a real business. I think he stumbled into kind of a actually like a cool business where half a million people have used this thing and now he found a business model that might actually work. So I thought that um

Michigan had had the better businesses overall. All right, good. They each they each agree they each get a vote, but we disagree. And it's a tie. Um, all right, so let's do our favorite business. out of these, if you were gonna invest your money into one of these, Sam, which one would you have invested your money into? The business that I don't

one to invest in, but I wish I owned. And I think the people should uh the people who own this one might get the richest uh the fastest of all these businesses is Brother nuts. I think Austin Major Brother Nuts

I don't think they should raise money. I don't want to invest in them, but I would love to own that company. I think it could be a family business that makes hundreds or uh hundreds of millions or even more throughout the next handful of decades. Okay. My head tells me my business. My head tells me it's either meet your class or tour. But my heart is with brothers nuts. And I'm gonna go with both nuts as well.

I think that they are one Uh you know, one step away from actually making this like a real a legit business that you're gonna see on the shelves. in every grocery store, I think they're not far away from doing that. And I actually think it's a It's I would act I would actually invest in this business because I think you could actually make it happen. It's not a It's

It's not theoretical here. I think that all the most of the companies had an AI element and I applaud that. I think that's where that's where the puck's going. But It's hard to stick out, man. Like we get I There's just so much going on. We pick the one with an almond element. Yeah. An almond element. Uh I don't know, man, right? Doesn't it seem ki it kinda seems like it's T B D as to like who's gonna be the winners.

It seems really hard to to to pick a winner at the moment. Yeah, it's sort of a tra a trade off of like more competition, but maybe more upside. Well, you you said it well. You said um You said, um, this is definitely what's gonna happen, but it's gonna be a bloodbath. Yeah. And that's how I feel. All right. So now the crowd's choice. So can you guys unmute? I'm gonna say the name of the uh of the business.

Crowd reaction is gonna dictate who wins the the audience choice. Let's see if this works. I this might be crazy with with the audio situation here. Our producers freaking out. Yeah, turn turn the laptops. I want to see the crowd, actually. Okay, so we got the crowd. Yeah. All right. We're gonna start off from Michigan.

Meet your class. Okay. Yeah. From U I U C Not a father.

Right. They might just be closer to the microphone. We'll give you credit for that. Uh from Michigan, we have the skin microbiome company Milieu. Yeah. Uh

We can see is definitely putting its mouth next to the mic. Um we're gonna go from UIUC we have Catholic. Lukewarm, lukewarm. I'm gonna call it what it was.

Um From Michigan, we have Tour. All right, so from Michigan it looks like milieu was the loudest. And now from UIUC last one, we have Brothers Nuts.

Sean I'm not sure. I I think I know who won that one. I think it was the Metapraso. Metaphraso, I think had it. I think they had it. Yeah. We miss you, bro. We miss you. All right, all right. Okay, wonderful. Guys, great job. Uh everybody. This is really impressive. You guys are way ahead of where I was in college. I think Sam Probably the same for you. You guys are ahead of the curve.

I hope our feedback is helpful. Even the people we shit on, like if we ask hard questions or or give you a hard time, I you Ever of all the six people who presented the six companies You you're gonna be in the one percent of the one percent. You already are in the one percent of the one percent, and what you're doing is badass. By being active, you're badass. And It's a sign of respect. If we are willing to ki keep it real with you, that's because we actually

Think that you can win. If we just wanted to be nice and say, Oh, congratul the participation. I'm so, you know, so happy for you. Um, you know, that wouldn't have been helpful to you, but it also would be actually You know, not a sign of respect. We we we respect all of you for doing this. And I just want to say like I would not

Have become an entrepreneur had I not had a class like this. uh where s a speaker came in and just got me hyped about the idea of doing a startup. I did not know what to do. My first idea was terrible. My execution was absolutely horrendous. But It got me on that path. It just seemed like more fun. And so if you're listening to this or you're at one of these schools right now, Um

If it seems like something that you would want to do and it seems like the lifestyle like Go for it. No, no uh, you know, don't let that hold you back. This could be a tipping point moment for you just like it was for me. And it's the the the uh you are currently in the phase of life where it will never get easier to do these things. the than where you are right now. Uh for the next like you have like a four year window where it's like you have nothing really big to worry about except for this. And also Uh, I think it's Austin and Tommy.

Give these guys a shout out. Uh you guys are the man Okay. Um It's really hard to organize this type of stuff. And I think that uh Getting it.

uh getting this type of energy in one room like you guys have done, it's contagious. S you think what I'm thinking? I got two words for you. I got two words for you. Nationwide. We're taking the power hour nationwide. Uh and then the second the second two words for you. Pizza Party sponsored by MFM. I think we should give these guys some money. Let them uh host some events and have some fun. Uh so we we will we will we'll connect with you, Tommy, after this and we'll we'll give you guys some cash so that we can

uh, you know, it encourage you to throw more events and get more people excited about this. And I like that it's underground. I like that it's off the books. I like that this is not. The entrepreneurship club of the school. This is um, you know, just the people who actually, you know, care about building stuff and want to do cool things and want to get off the conventional career track. Um I I I'm for that. Thank you all for doing this. We appreciate you. Have a wonderful Wednesday. And uh if you're listening on M FM, you gotta go and give all these guys uh a little bit of love on the on their websites and and check out their products. All right, thank you guys. That's it, that's the pod.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be But I want to I put my law in it like So on the road less travel, never looking back

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