Palantir's Fellowship, Coco Robots & Startup Office Hours | E2110

Today's show: We dive into the latest tech and startup news — including Palantir's bold new fellowship program that challenges the traditional college path, and DoorDash's rollout of burrito-delivering Coco robots in LA and Chicago. We debut our new segment "Tips from the Trenches," focused on how to land your first customers, and wrap up with two great Office Hours: BRX.ai (self-healing AI agents) and InviteJet (calendar-based marketing). Plus, one founder's wild story about a fake investor using an AI deepfake on Zoom. Don't miss Jason's tactical GTM advice and a reminder that if no one complains about your pricing, you're probably too cheap. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off the show! (2:01) Palantir's new fellowship program and alternative education paths (9:12) Digg's Groundbreakers program and paid community model (10:33) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (13:21) DoorDash's partnership with Coco robotics for deliveries and the future of robotic deliveries (20:26) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (21:56) Tips from the Trenches "Your First Customers" (22:31) Strategies for acquiring first customers from Y Combinator founders (30:35) AdQuick - For TWiST listeners - AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. Visit https://www.adquick.com/twist (32:00) Office Hours with Jake and Daniel from BRX about their product and growth strategy (41:05) Feedback on BRX's website clarity and branding strategies (46:45) Office Hours with Brian Watson from InviteJet (49:00) Challenges faced by InviteJet and dealing with fraudulent investors (56:43) InviteJet's churn rates, ideal customer profiles, and future plans (1:01:43) Discussing Invitejet's pricing strategies, customer loyalty, and marketing tactics * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Links from the show: BRX AI: https://brx.ai/ InviteJet: https://www.invitejet.com/ * Follow BRX: X: https://x.com/BRXinc * Follow InviteJet:X: https://x.com/InviteJet * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:33) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (20:26) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (30:35) AdQuick - For TWiST listeners - AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. Visit https://www.adquick.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Small tangent for just a sec.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Tangents to the best part.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  This one's hilarious. There's a long story to it, but the long and the short is basically there was one investor who offered to invest in us. I met him through Telegram. I used to work in crypto, so I know a lot of,

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  you know, people in crypto. And so he offered to invest in us, asked us to come to Amsterdam to meet him because he doesn't do business without a handshake deal first and seeing you face to face. So I went back door and started looking this guy up. Looked like he was a great guy. Looked like he was investing through family offices and things like that. However, it turned out the man I was talking to on a Zoom meeting was actually not who he said he was. He was using some sort of AI filter to filter his face and pretend to be this person.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  And try to get me to come to Amsterdam. So always do your research.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Glad you still have both kidneys. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people. Every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And AdQuick. Easily plan, deploy, and measure out-of-home campaigns as easily as digital ads. Visit AdQuick.com/twist to learn more. And just for Twist listeners, they're waiving their fee on your first campaign.

• 1:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis. He's Alon Harris. And with us from Providence, Rhode Island, our boy Alex Wilhelm. We have a huge, huge docket today. I want to just get right to work. We got some news. Then I want to do some tips from the trenches. We've got a really good segment we're starting today. Tips from the trenches. We're going to talk about how people get their first customer. This is super important. Getting your first customer, hardest customer. So we'll get into that. And then we're going to have an office hours with people from our portfolio.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  Alex, what's in the news?

• 2:03Speaker 03

  All right, Jason, to start off today, I have a story that I think you are going to absolutely love over from Palantir, a new fellowship program that's going to replace some children going to college, at least temporarily. I'm going to go ahead and bring up the image here and read it to everybody. But if you have been a fan of the Teal Fellowship, you can consider this to be an echo or a reprise. Here is what Palantir says. College is broken. Admissions are based on flawed criteria. Meritocracy and excellence are no longer the pursuits of educational institutions. And chaos has ensued on university campuses. Starting today, Palantir is launching a fall fellowship for the best and brightest. Based solely on merit and academic excellence, students will be invited for interviews, and then later on, select applicants will receive an internship offer. And then if

• 2:47Speaker 03

  they complete that, they may be offered a full-time role at the company. Jason, there's some rules to this. You have to have an SAT score of 1460 or an ACT of 33+. Pretty high numbers, but this does, I think, fit into the Gen Bet thing we've been talking about for a long time, taking a wager on a non-traditional path.

• 3:04Jason Calacanis?

  So this is skip college. Don't go 250K into debt.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:10Jason Calacanis?

  And I was talking to somebody, they said college, private schools are now getting closer to 100,000 than they are 50.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16Jason Calacanis?

  All in. And so maybe really the bogey is 400,000. Obviously, state school, city college, you're down at 10 to 50K a year. So maybe you get out of it with housing, depends on the region you're in, for 25 to, I don't know, 75K a year.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  I went to grad school at USC, my alma mater. It's now 73,000 a year, annual tuition to USC.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I think Tufts is 100, and you can spend 70K.

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  Is that where you want?

• 3:43Speaker 03

  No, I went to University of Chicago, which is, I don't know, 90. But I mean, you can spend 70K on like sixth grade now. So education costs have gotten so nuts, something had to break eventually. So I'm not shocked to see this model. I, this is definitely, I think, Jason, too niche, too high-end, too selective to be called a trend. But I think we're going to see other companies do this because why not grab the smartest folks right out of high school, train them on the job, and then just keep them?

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  I think the only thing I don't like about this is that they pay you. I think parents Pay $5,000 a month to send their kids to this for 10 months. I am literally not joking. I think they should lower the SAT requirement to 1,200. In other words, you're still way above average.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  I think the average is probably 8, 900 or something like that.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Around 1,000 or 1,600 point scale, yeah.

• 4:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so I would put it at 1,200. So you gotta be 20% better. You pay 5,000 a month, you pay 50,000 or 25,000 dollars a year. And then you could give scholarships as well. Putting all that aside, you know, if a child of mine came to me and said, here's my options. Go 300,000 into debt, spend this number of years on a campus. Or go to Palantir? I would be like, and get paid? Oh, my God. This is a no brainer. It is niche. I hope we see more of these. In fact, we have one of these here at our venture firm. We weren't finding, Alex, the sort of work ethic that we wanted to see in a finance company. In a finance company, when you go to Wall Street, you know, working 50, 60, 70 hours a week is table stakes.

• 5:13Jason Calacanis?

  Like, the idea of coming in on a Saturday or Sunday and putting in eight hours or four hours over the weekend to catch up, to compete against people, not a big deal. The idea of, you know, getting in at 8, 9, 10 a.m. and working until dinnertime and ordering dinner at 8 or 9 o'clock and then going home and sleeping and not watching Netflix all night? That was not considered a big deal in the finance space. But in venture, they were hiring kids out of Ivy League schools only, exclusively.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:37Jason Calacanis?

  You had to go to Stanford, you had to have an MBA. And they got paid incredibly high salaries because those schools are incredibly expensive. And they didn't have a work ethic. So they, they, when I told folks, hey, I want you to do five meetings, six meetings a day with founders for 20 minutes, write coverage for an hour, you know, it's a 10 hour day, whatever it is. People looked at me like I was crazy. They were like, this is too much work. I'm like, I do twice that amount of work. So we started our own program. We call it the RAP program now. Researcher, Analyst, Associate, Principal. Those are the four levels. You start out, very similar salaries to these, in fact, almost exactly. And you go 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, whatever. And you can have a job in venture.

• 6:16Jason Calacanis?

  And over five, six, seven years, we are getting people to really learn the craft of venture as I see it. Not as Stanford Business School or Wharton sees it. Those are all fine, but I'm trying to do something very early stage, more gritty, closer. It's not as pretty, but it's a lot more gritty. Closer to the actual experience that founders go through.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  Not the ivory tower experience. This is great. Everybody should be doing this and we should see every company offer something similar to this.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  I think that's the key is like it is a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma sort of thing like if you go to Palantir instead of college, you're counting on, you know, your next job and the next job after that, those companies will have a similar sort of philosophy of like, no degree is okay because you've got this incredible.

• 7:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you have a Palantir degree.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Right. So it's like, you kind of need the whole industry to convert to this way of thinking. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of like people in their late twenties, early thirties, who have trouble moving to their next gig because they don't have that bachelor's degree.

• 7:18Jason Calacanis?

  You buy that, Alex, or if you worked at Palantir for eight years, would you be easily employable? If you made it eight years at Palantir?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I think you'd be incredibly easily employable after eight years, but I think Lon's probably more talking about the kids that might apply for this and get in, but then not get the full-time job offer. Are you then stuck? Uh, here's my thought.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Take a nine-month gap year and go to college the next year and you'll have Palantir on your resume. So to me, that risk isn't quite so large, but I think we're looking at this in too narrow of a way. I think instead of having VC firms hire associates with this type of model or a couple of companies, VC firms should grab the most intelligent high school students and turn them into founders more quickly and just save a lot of time, just short-circuit the whole process and get them into their, uh, their flow early. Kind of like Founder University, Jason, but for 19-year-olds.

• 8:01Jason Calacanis?

  Well, funny you say that. Founder University, we now have high school kids applying and coming. So it's actually what you predicted there and what you're saying is actually the game on the field. We have many young kids coming in, uh, going to the program. We had a kid who was under 16 or 17 and my team came to me a couple of years ago and was like, hey, can we invest in a 15-year-old? I'm like, can a 15-year-old start a company in Delaware? I don't think so. And we had to go through this whole rigmarole and I just told somebody who works for me, you know, I was like, Heidi, call the parents.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:33Jason Calacanis?

  Do a Zoom with the parents. Are the parents on board? If the parents are on board, we'll do it. And then I literally said, make a permission slip. And they said, so do I call our law firm? I said, no, go on the internet, find a permission slip and cross out going to Great Adventure and put working at.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Right, working at Insta.

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  And go to Founder University. Who cares? This is awesome. What a great trend. And this shows when you squeeze too hard, when your offering sucks.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  People will find another way. More of this full on F the industrial academic certification industry.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:12Jason Calacanis?

  What else is in the news? I saw there's something going on with DIG.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:15Jason Calacanis?

  Ken Rose and Alex Ohanian.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got an email from DIG inviting me to join a new thing called the Groundbreakers Program. Jason, we talked about the return of DIG. I think you were actually kind of an MC for the DIG Nation rollout event. Well, the good news for folks who want DIG to come back and save the internet is that it's making progress. So I went ahead and clicked on the link, Jason, and then guess what? They demanded that I give them $5. And I thought to myself, actually, I love that because it means that everyone who shows up is going to be, I mean, in the smallest sense, skin in the game, but like, we're opting in with a couple of bucks. So I think that's a good test.

• 9:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  And when I checked on the, there is a company called Circle to have kind of a social backend as they test new ideas. There were already 17,000 people who had signed up and paid, I presume, the $5, up from 3K the morning before. So quite a lot of momentum there. But if you did sign up, check your email, you might have an invite. This is the image that we have. This is clearly a mock-up of sorts. But Jason, as you can kind of imagine, there's a leaderboard, individual people, communities, one focused on DIG Nation, and this is a return of the classic, the classic DIG button makes me so happy. I don't know exactly what DIG is going to look like when it's done, but I guarantee you this, I'm going to be a day one, minute one user, and I love to see some internet OGs trying to bring back some of the old joy of the pre-algorithm internet.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  I think we need it, Jason.

• 10:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, founders, let's talk about your website. Yes, I know it's embarrassing. Yes, I know you're too busy to upgrade it. Well, if you're going to launch something new, or you need to give your brand a refresh, which I know you do, you need Squarespace. It's the all-in-one platform that makes building a stunning professional website ridiculously easy. Whether you're selling products, offering services, or showcasing your portfolio, like I'm going to do with one of my kids, they want to go and do artistic things in the world, so I'm going to make them a nice, beautiful Squarespace site when they apply to college. Squarespace gives you everything you need to grow. And you know what? Obviously, you've heard me talk about how beautiful Squarespace's templates are, but now you can get a full Customized website in minutes with their AI tool called Blueprint. Here's how it works. You just answer a few questions and then you get a beautiful bespoke

• 11:19Jason Calacanis?

  website in minutes. Personalized layouts, visuals that are going to stun your customers. And voila, you're done. Want more control? Choose from award-winning templates and use intuitive drag and drop tools so you can make it your own. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. You get to do it the way you want to do it. So here's your call to action. Just fall in love with Squarespace like I did. Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's Squarespace.com/twist, the longest-running partner for this week in startups because they were a startup and they still build their product with the enthusiasm and the cutting-edge technology of a startup founder. We love you, Squarespace.

• 12:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. If you look at the design, it's a little bit Notion-esque, a little superhuman-esque in terms of cleanliness and crispness, combined with the classic dig logo and the classic dig button. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Love it. And I love the idea of a $5 gate because what that does is you're going to keep the trolls out. Yes. Trolls, almost universally, do not want to take out their wallet for two reasons. One, they're so not committed to their trolling that even $5 is not worth it. And they don't want to reveal who they really are because once you put your credit card in, you generally know who you are. I know this because I went to a paid community for my replies

• 12:45Jason Calacanis?

  on X, formerly known as Twitter, just because, you know, there's just so much trolling and there are, I think there are three people who troll me on it and I allow them to troll me because they're giving $3 a month to charity. So there it is. This is a great way, if they are charging $5 and they have 15,000 paid signups already, then they'll clearly get to 50,000. If they get to 50,000 and it's $5 a month, that would be $3 million a year in revenue. Yeah. Out of the gate, that's going to pay for 10 developers and five other, you know, business people, whatever, to work on it. It's all good. All right. Let's keep going here. What else do we got in the news?

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Something I'm pretty excited about, Jason, you and I have talked about Serv Robotics on the show any number of times. Well, there's another company out there called Coco and one of your favorite companies, DoorDash, is teaming up with Coco and their little delivery bots to bring food around LA and Chicago. Now, DoorDash has previously worked with Coco in Helsinki via its Wolt, I believe, sub-brand that they own. But in this case, we're seeing really just more robotic transportation, more self-driving, albeit in a small sense. And I really do think that we have been right to be bullish on this for a long time, though I'm curious why we're still seeing Coco and Serv Robotics remain independent when they really do appear to be a feature in a food delivery platform, if you will. But they're still independent, they're still landing deals. But I just want to see Uber

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Eats and DoorDash snap up these companies and go to real war versus these kind of tiny little partnerships. Like, to me, it feels timid when they should be being more aggressive.

• 14:14Jason Calacanis?

  These, I believe, are going to be a sleeper hit. Why? The majority of deliveries, you know, for Uber Eats, for DoorDash, occur in cities. And once people get used to these things zipping around, they are going to embrace them in a major way. They're doing them in, I think what they call the infill area. So between a dense city and then the suburbs is infill.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:39Jason Calacanis?

  So this would be, I guess, an area might be like Santa Monica.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  Hollywood has these as well.

• 14:45Jason Calacanis?

  And Hollywood has them.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  It's the same company. Their previous model is called Samo Serv Robotics, and they're all over LA to the point that John Mulaney has integrated them into his LA chat show now because you see them everywhere around Hollywood when you're walking around.

• 14:58Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the great news about these. If you have sidewalks and this thing's going down the street, the chances of it hitting anybody are extremely low.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:06Jason Calacanis?

  The chances of it hitting somebody and doing damage are miniscule. They're going, I think the max they can go is about 10 miles an hour, but I think that's about it. So they would be like a runner going, a sprinting person. And I don't even think they go sprinting level. They're probably like...

• 15:22Speaker 04

  They're pretty slow and they have, they're very aware of people. So if there's a person walking near them, they just stop.

• 15:28Jason Calacanis?

  They'd stop and they'll let you pass because it's a burrito. Not like it's gonna go terrible. If I get these burritos get better in the

• 15:34Speaker 04

  They're very focused on not disturbing pedestrians. That's obviously a big priority.

• 15:40Jason Calacanis?

  Now, compare it to, go ahead.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Five miles an hour on the sidewalks and 15 miles per hour on shoulders of roadways and on roads, according to LA in 2021.

• 15:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, perfect, which is a 12-minute mile, which is a brisk walk. It's not even a run. It might be like the slowest version of jogging you can do. So, these are going to absolutely change everything. And the reason they're gonna change everything is because in New York City, the bike culture of electric bikes is so goddamn dangerous. I was in New York and I'm a New Yorker. I know how to cross the street. I mean, I could literally cross Broadway at 42nd Street, you know, catty corner.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 16:21Jason Calacanis?

  No problem. I could do it at 1 a.m. I could do it at, you know, 8 a.m. And nobody would have to slow down. I'm like Frogger going through there. Now, when I go there, I don't even try. I, I was staying five feet back from the curb with my daughter because of electric bikes.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:41Jason Calacanis?

  They have the limiters taken off of them. So I have a couple of electric bikes and I saw online you can undo the limiter and go up to like 35 miles an hour. These guys have them going 50 miles an hour. To your question, Alex.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:55Jason Calacanis?

  Why haven't they been bought and fully deployed?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:57Jason Calacanis?

  If there was some defensible technology here, then they would get bought. There have been like 10 of these companies. There's really, I hate to say it, not much defensibility to this. The defensibility is having 100 million, 200 million people on your app.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:16Jason Calacanis?

  And having a million restaurants using your software. That's the defensibility is the network. These are going to be created en masse in China. Right now, they're bespoke and created here. These things are gonna, they're gonna make a million of these a day in factories in Vietnam, China, India. And these will be the predominant delivery method along with zip line. Uh, and regulation is the reason these aren't more broadly available. As long as nobody's kid gets, the, the, a kid getting hit or a dog would make these, you know, have a problem, but these are all watched as well. So when they have an intervention, there are people watching these in real time and they have a joystick or a, a Xbox controller. So if there is a problem.

• 18:00Jason Calacanis?

  You could easily have the, what is Waymo called there? There's a term that Cruise and Waymo had for the, the guides, the Sherpas, the backup pilots, the remote monitors of these. Those remote monitors are ready to take over at any time. And so the safety record of these, I'm sure is spectacular. I doubt there has been one person injured and taken to a hospital by these. That's not like, did it on purpose to, to get a.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  I'm seeing fleet response. That's what Waymo calls their remote monitoring system. That's fleet response.

• 18:32Jason Calacanis?

  They don't want to call it remote monitoring. They're very specific about this.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  I have a clip here of Lily Shaw, who is a cocoa pilot. That's what they call them. Here's an image or, sorry, video of her using a Xbox controller to drive one of these cocos, presumably at the point of media intervention. That looks like a fun video game.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it looks cool. It's like you're driving, you're driving a Mario Kart through real life.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  People play games like Euro Truck Simulator 2024. Why don't we just have people play, drive a cocoa and get a dollar?

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's brilliant.

• 19:03Jason Calacanis?

  Let me also tell you something. You know how much that real world data is worth to Nvidia and to Optimus and Tesla?

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:10Jason Calacanis?

  Like, these things are seeing the real world all day long. They know that there's like four guys who hang out on a certain street corner, slinging whatever they're slinging, telling jokes. Maybe they're a bebop band. I don't know what they're doing on the corner. You know, singing.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  A lot going on on the boulevard.

• 19:27Jason Calacanis?

  A lot going on on the boulevard. These things are also going to have a secondary use, which is something bad happens in real world. These things are going to pick it up with their video.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  They've got all that 3D data, yeah.

• 19:38Jason Calacanis?

  All this is, training is occurring. 10 years ago, when these things started in San Francisco, the way they started was there was somebody walking behind them with a joystick. So people were 10 feet behind them, using them like a little RV. Uh, what do they call it? Radio cars?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  RC cars.

• 19:55Jason Calacanis?

  RC cars, thank you, Alex. Uh, so these are like RC cars. Then they went remote. Now they're AI with backup remote. Eventually, these things are going to be able to go pretty fast in the streets. And that will be shocking to people. Imagine one of these in the roadway, going 65 miles an hour, 35 miles an hour, and being able to navigate and not cause an accident or get in an accident. That's another possibility here. Great job. This is going to be the majority of deliveries by 2030. All right, we all know if you're a founder, or even if you're a small business, you're thinking about your company 24/7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder.

• 20:37Jason Calacanis?

  This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's of course LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are 1 billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people, whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor, don't take my word for it.

• 21:20Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you should, I know what I'm talking about is where I find my great people. But just understand that 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring. So here's your call to action. Post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free, F R E E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com/TWIST. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com/TWIST to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  All right, Lon, let's go to the trenches. We have a couple of clips we want to get to.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Sure. So Jason asked us to put this new segment together. The idea is we're taking a topic. We're looking at a bunch of different thoughts and ideas about that topic from all across the web that we can find. So for today's topic, getting your first customer.

• 22:14Jason Calacanis?

  This is a topic that comes up all the time.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  Or not at all. And when it comes up, it's great because there are so many ways to get those first customers. But when it doesn't come up, that's when you really have to be concerned because it means somebody's building a product in a vacuum. They're not even thinking about customers. You should be doing customer interviews before you start building. You should be doing listening labs. You can look up a listening lab, basically where you present a product to a customer and you ask them to try it and they move on to the next phase. And you gently say, your friend sent you this, tell me what you're doing. But you don't direct them too much. And then there's directed listening lab. There's all kinds of modalities here.

• 22:58Jason Calacanis?

  What I like about the talk we gave yesterday at Founder University, this came up because they created an exercise, because one of the things founders reported to us in a survey, which they didn't say, this is why surveys are really good when you're running something, is to constantly do surveying and don't worry about survey burnout. Don't worry about your customers feeling like you sent them too many surveys. They don't have to do them.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:22Jason Calacanis?

  They're not forced to do them. So, survey early and often, and then you want to double click on the survey. In our survey, you know, how to raise money comes up, how to hire, but also, people may not vocalize it, but they did check it off of a list, how to get my first customers.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:40Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of the ways people used to do it, SEO maybe don't work as well, or they're super competitive, but I see that Y Combinator made like a supercut of a video of 50 founders and share how they got their first customers. Maybe we play that and then talk about it on the other side.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  I've got a minute clip here from that, that's just an overview of a bunch of different founders telling their first customer stories.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  So, we made a mock-up of our dream personal finance product, made a website for it with a little waitlist, and we posted it on our Reddit group. And within 24 hours, there was like close to 1,000 people that had signed up for the waitlist. It really resonated with a lot of people that were having the same like financial pain points as us. We launched our closed beta and started onboarding those customers.

• 24:20Speaker 06

  For us, it was a bit of a wild week in which we launched on Twitter and suddenly a few days later, I went from 50 followers to like 10,000. We had 20,000 stars on GitHub. We had 150,000 unique visitors a day. And so we're really fortunate to have the lightning in the bottle and have all these customers come to us.

• 24:33Speaker 07

  You're asking a great time. We actually got our first customer paying this morning. How'd you find that first customer? So we launched. We shared what we were doing about two and a half weeks ago on just our LinkedIn's and shared with our friends. And a lot of people came inbound. People were really curious about what we were building here. Got a great waitlist and this customer came through that waitlist, which was really exciting. We don't really have any customers yet, but we've got like one really good advisor who sort of made some introductions to folks at a couple of the big ag tech companies. So sort of networking our way in really.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Pretty good overview of a bunch of the different sort of techniques that come up producing discoverable content. We heard people talking about embedding themselves authentically within the community. So going to Hacker News, going to Reddit, going to places where potential customers already work. And then influencer marketing or PR and like get introductions through friends of friends of friends. And starting to sort of zeroing in on people there. So we also found a blogger named Ali Abulata surveyed 120 different public companies and analyzed all of their go to market strategies and produced these two flow charts based on whether you're looking for high intent or low intent customers. And so we've got those pulled in as well. Maybe you want to talk about high intent versus low intent and what?

• 25:41Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, and we could pull this up maybe and we could take a look at it as we discuss it. High intent, they need something right now. You know, they're, they need a car, they need a bicycle, they go to the bicycle store, they search. So just take yourself through a person who has a really acute need.

• 26:03Jason Calacanis?

  I need a bicycle because I'm starting my Uber Eats DoorDash job on Monday in Manhattan. So what do they do? That person might do a Google search. They might go to Facebook Marketplace. They might type in, you know, electric bikes and wind up on a Reddit page. They might talk to their friends. They might go to a Facebook group of DoorDashers in New York. These are small niche communities. And the way you do it is by imagining you're the person. So here in this go to motion flow chart, you have high intent customers, no viable alternatives. So if there's no viable alternatives, you're making the product. That's crazy, right?

• 26:45Jason Calacanis?

  Like, so there's no DoorDash in the country. So you create zip line to bring it to people, right? Like, there's no way to get delivery when you're far out there. They have a competitive space, opportunity cost. Does the competitor have lock-in? So if it was, um, say, uh, broadband and you live in a neighborhood that's only has Comcast. Well, obviously they're locked in.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jason Calacanis?

  You have to then do something like cold outreach, as they point out here. If they're not locked in.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Like if people have options, you have Spectrums available, Google Fiber is also available.

• 27:23Jason Calacanis?

  Then you have to figure out, well, how do you compete with them?

• 27:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:26Jason Calacanis?

  And then that's where maybe making an offer, et cetera. So these are, this is all really a good discussion. What you heard in the previous Y Combinator company that made the landing page. Landing pages are so beautiful because you can make one in a lean startup movement. So, uh, Steve Blank and Eric Ries created this methodology called Lean Startup. He's an entrepreneur and he's just really awesome. And he created this methodology along with Eric Ries. Eric Ries wrote the book Lean Startup. And you want to create a hypothesis and run an experiment. And then you can iterate on that with subsequent product releases. So what they did was they made a landing page, they sent people to the landing page and you find out.

• 28:08Jason Calacanis?

  What's amazing today is you can create landing pages in 15 Minutes that look extraordinary using AI. You can create ads that look extraordinary in 15 minutes using AI. And then you still have to do the glue of sending them out there. Talking to people and networking and cold outreach also works. So literally finding 15 CFOs in your town and writing them a short email. Hi, I'm building this for CFOs. I'm a former CFO. I wonder if you had this issue. Would love to get coffee with you or I, you know, at this link, you can see a little bit more about the product. And then you know if they clicked on it. Right? So there's all those signals. So there you go. Some tales from the trenches. We had another one, one of our startups.

• 28:52Jason Calacanis?

  And this was in the presentation we gave last night at Founder University. There was a company that was doing gardening AI. So you would share, you could share a picture of it. And when you share the picture of your, you know, absolutely sad backyard, the AI will make you some choices based on, you know, where you're located and tell you, um, here's the plants that would work well in Austin versus New England. They went on to a subreddit where somebody had posted and said, how do I, the same exact problem? What should I do with my garden here? And the person created a simple landing page and said, oh, I, I made some mockups for you and sent it there. And then the landing page just had, um, you know, use this tool or try this tool.

• 29:35Jason Calacanis?

  They got 500 customers from this. Yeah, it's a neighbor bright is the name of the company. Yeah. So here is the Reddit post. First time backyard owner says, hey, I need help with landscaping this hill. My wife and I sold our condo, yada, yada. And then here's how they replied. They did something very savvy in the replies. That's worth pointing out predictably rational, who works at neighbor. I said, yes, definitely a retaining wall. Here are some ideas with the retaining wall by the fence, which will require leveling out the rest or keeping the slope, but building a terrorist garden with a link. And on the next slide, it sent them to a landing page for neighbor bright with these four gorgeous images and said, ready to try with your own yard. Try it for free. Simple call to action.

• 30:16Jason Calacanis?

  What you notice here is they put the promotion on the landing page after giving value. So this is key. Whenever you're in a community, the communities, the vibrant ones are very attuned to people coming in and spamming or marketing the community. So what you want to do is help participate in the community without spamming. Founders, let's talk about building your brand here in the real world. We know digital ads are amazing, but if you want to stand out in 2025, maybe you need to think a little bit bigger. And a great way to do that is out of home advertising. Yes, you know, those really impressive billboards you see everywhere, or even the beautiful murals that everybody loves. This is how you build a brand. And Adquick makes out of home advertising

• 31:01Jason Calacanis?

  easy, measurable, and fast. They've taken the headaches out of OOH. You've probably heard OOH, out of home, by combining ad tech precision with real world impact. So now, planning, deploying, and tracking your campaign is as easy as running digital ads. With Adquick, they're going to hyper target your campaign in minutes. Then they're going to use their data and technology to ensure your ads reach the right audience every single time. Plus, they're going to give you real time insights to measure performance and optimize your spend. So whether you're building brand awareness or looking to drive customer action, right? You want to acquire customers. You can see why Adquick is trusted by everyone from the fastest growing startups to the S and P 500. Take your brand to the next level with Adquick,

• 31:45Jason Calacanis?

  the smarter way to do OOH. And just for Twist listeners, Adquick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. That's an amazing offer. Get started today, adquick.com/twist. That's A D Q U I C K dot com slash twist.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so today for office hours, we're going to start by talking to Jake and Daniel from BRX. They are building a tool for developers that allows developers to build model agnostic AI tools quickly. Given how many companies out there today, Law and Jason want to use AI, it's certainly taking on a very large market. You can check it out at BRX.ai. Please welcome to the show. It's Jake and Daniel.

• 32:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, gentlemen, maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about what you're building. And then maybe you could ask me, you know, what are the challenges right now?

• 32:30Speaker 08

  So BRICKS is an orchestration in a runtime environment to build autonomous software. We combine the expressiveness of L M's and then the control of precision code of action to enable a really powerful environment to build these production-grade A I systems. But the biggest thing is this enables our users to generate self-healing and autonomous like products from this same product.

• 32:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. So who are your customers? Let's kind of drill down a little bit. And do we have any customers yet, or is it we're still building the product?

• 32:53Speaker 08

  Yeah, so so our main customers, we we target software developers for the most part that are working on building agentic operations and agentic processes. That are building multiple, multiple systems that have the need for like better indexing. Ends up being a problem for a lot of people when it comes to L M's. The capability to index and then use those same pieces of of engineering as composites becomes a big issue. And yes.

• 33:13Jason Calacanis?

  Give us a real world example, if you can.

• 33:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, so when it comes to real world examples, we currently, we currently have people that are using the platform to build systems across. One, one of our bigger customers right now is building a system that can take in information about stories. And then generate from that same story, audio and video files that then cross-play to build a whole schema from that. So they're using research that they did to then determine what makes a person kick or what makes a user kick when it comes to some of the models. And then using that same pieces of data inside of the model to then process a story and generate a timeline to rebuild and reconstruct the story.

• 33:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, still confusing.

• 33:47Jason Calacanis?

  Let's try to talk, when the way you said it would be like, um, what kind of story are we talking about here? Give an actual real world example so the audience actually understands it.

• 33:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, so they're working with studios, so developing stories that are going to be like little commercials or little ads or little, little like conservative pieces that they're going to be running over. And that's, that's where they get most of the value out. And it's about making sure that the story stays consistent across, because the biggest problem even with that, if you try to just make an A I just auto generate the whole thing. It'll get lost at certain steps, keep and miss the plot line, other things will happen. So it's a lot about the coordination and orchestration of all those little pieces that need to happen. And then letting those all compile back.

• 34:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So now we're starting to get it. If I was a giant ad agency and I have customer A, customer A is a beer company. They have a certain feeling that they like to invoke. It's, you know, a New England beer company versus one in the South. Or vice versa, they want to tell stories and they want to get it right. So they want to make sure they're using the right customers. For some people, that might be Dylan, uh, who is the woman from the Bud Light?

• 34:52Speaker 04

  Oh, Mulvaney.

• 34:53Jason Calacanis?

  That might be Dylan Mulvaney if it was in San Francisco and New York. That might not fly, you know, in New Orleans or in Texas, as we've seen. So they might need to consistently think about how they pitch that product. The L L M might just go off to the races and not understand the context. Am I, am I getting it correct?

• 35:13Speaker 08

  Hundred percent. Yeah. And the, the biggest thing that we, we push on is control and precision in those events. And we've been building around that same idea of when you have a really specific operation or process that you need the L M to do, taking control and taking the reins in those parts and then leaving off the parts that you need, that like stochastic version that just runs out, you need a little bit of randomness, a fan to go get the data, vice versa. And then coming back to a really controllable system that you've moderated.

• 35:34Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So this is very hard to do if you were using an off the shelf. If you were using Grok, Chat G P T or Claude, you would have a hard time doing this. So you need, if I'm correct, you need to use something more specific.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  I think it's the consistency, right? It's like those, they could make five different things, but the, it won't, it won't align with all of the other things it's created.

• 35:58Speaker 08

  Hundred percent. Yeah.

• 35:59Jason Calacanis?

  What are your customers using in terms of an L L M? Are you giving them DeepSeek and then customizing that? Or trying to customize Chat G P T? How does that work or they get to pick?

• 36:09Speaker 08

  Yeah. So, so we let them pick completely. We keep all the leading foundational models from Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, some of the DeepSeek models as well as L M models when they all come out. So that you have that choice in play. The biggest, the biggest thing, and this is maybe a deeper aspect into the, the L M's and the architecture, is they all do different things better. So every, let's say OpenAI currently is leading in some kind of thinking or Anthropic is better at coding or Google has a bigger context window. And it's allowing those users when they're building those pipelines. And this is one of the reasons why we say we have more precision. It's at any point in the chain of events, since we built the compiler and the engine, we can allow you to plug and play different pieces of the L M's together.

• 36:43Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Amazing. So what's the challenge here? What, where are you at? Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 09

  So I'll tackle this one, Jake. So we've been in development phase for about six months. And by development phase, I mean, we've been building a product to really gain an initial wedge in the market. What this product essentially is, is it's a compiler-grade infrastructure, turns any natural language or code request into functional self-healing autonomous systems. So what we're going here is a PLG motion. We're trying to get this into market. And the biggest effect that we're trying to have on people is there's a company that hit the market. I'd say beginning of 2025, I'm sure you all are familiar with Lovable. They've had this tremendous effect with giving this magical feel of AI, with generating UI and UX. This is actually a product that we developed months before they hit the market and timing just didn't work out.

• 37:29Speaker 09

  So we reflected backwards and thought about how do we take UI UX generation thing to the next step? And it's much more than just the front end. It's generating the back end, the AI calls, functional systems. So I'll offer anybody to drop a project into it. So think of this like an SOP, a workflow, a application that you want to create.

• 37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So you take a scope of work or, uh, yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 09

  Correct. And so just drop it right in and let our system take care of the rest. We'll build out your backend, your frontend, all the AI calls. And it's actually a containerized agent in the fact of it's healing itself, it's monitoring itself, it's set it and forget it. So it's an extremely powerful tool that we're trying to bring to market. And we're trying to have that same effect of getting the magic from AI. But our question is leveraging this to direct audience. So with that PLG push, we're curious if it's got so many applied use cases and so many different aspects of the world can use it. Where would you hone in on for this drastic kind of PLG effective motion that we're trying to roll out in the next few months?

• 38:31Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So product-led growth is what you mean by PLG?

• 38:34Speaker 09

  Correct.

• 38:35Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and some products kind of sell themselves. So Lovable, it's, it's a really interesting product. You say, hey, I want to build and I put in there annotated.com, my concept of had bought the domain name annotated.com. And I signed up, I paid for it because you have to pay for it. And I said, build me, uh, this thing, a Chrome extension, and it went to work and it made the output was a gorgeous webpage that looked very similar to like Notion or some other design things. And it told me who it was going to be inspired by for that. And it creates this magical experience, but there's no publish to the web. And get it up and running. So what you're talking about is maybe finishing the work that they've started. Am I correct?

• 39:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, I also wouldn't put it as finishing the work they started. I think it's just giving a much deeper, more robust experience. A lot of people, we talked to one of our advisors about this a while ago, a funny use case. His fund was in algebra, in algebra in high school, and he used Claude artifacts to generate this sort of artifact for himself. UI UX, he played with it in Claude, it was great, but he wanted to share it. He wanted to like bring it to his classmate Johnny. He wanted to publish it on web, like you're saying. And there was no tool for this. He wasn't a developer. He had no way to then publish this, monitor it, maintain the backend and have this as a functional application. So this all stemmed from this conversation that we had of how do you take these little artifacts, these little like, hate to call them trinkets, but trinkets on the web that people can have fun with? And bring them in to have real effect on the world, to build really powerful systems that basically anybody can generate.

• 39:59Speaker 09

  So I'm a data analyst and I want to bring my SOP and generate an agent to be able to do that. There's currently no system right now where I as a, you know, no code local producer can just have that generated and actually work in a production grade environment.

• 40:12Jason Calacanis?

  So you are in the Canva zone, which is Canva was a design tool for non-designers. So you have this really challenging moment where it's like, how do I find the vibe coders? How do I find the people who want to design, who don't know they want to design and they would normally hire a designer, right? This is a challenging moment in time for you to try to figure out. And you did point out like kind of the answer, which is the wow factor of lovable pulled a bunch of people in. The wow factor of Canva in a bunch of tiny use cases, making an invite probably was the one that was the biggest, right? Like everybody has to make a birthday party invite.

• 40:54Jason Calacanis?

  So what's the equivalent of mom or dad need to make an invite for grandma's 80th birthday or for their five year old's birthday, but in this realm?

• 41:05Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 41:05Jason Calacanis?

  And so. I don't think there's an easy answer other than iterating and trying. And we just had a segment on finding your first customers to do this kind of thing. I bet you Canva found a bunch of moms and dads who were doing birthday parties and said, here's a way to make a birthday party invite faster, quicker, easier. And if you want to also make banners and birthday cards and other things, you can do that as well. And over time, what I like about what Lovable did, but that there is a critique of is they're getting everybody to pay for it. But does it actually do something in the real world? Or is it like a toy that people are paying for, which would then make people concerned, Lon and Alex, about the quality of the revenue?

• 41:48Jason Calacanis?

  Are people just gonna go try it? Say that was interesting, but I didn't actually get value. I'm gonna unsubscribe. And Canva, I think, is worth studying, because Canva, yeah, I'm sure a bunch of people went in there and said, oh, I can make an invite, but I don't actually have that many invites to make. I don't do that many parties. But the people who did make parties, they upsold them on the next thing, the next thing. Would you like to make a T-shirt? Would you like to make a mug? And then there's somebody in your friend group, like if you go to your group friend chat, who is the one who coordinates the trip to New Orleans, who makes the T-shirts and then says, everybody's got to wear this T-shirt out when we go to Bourbon Street or whatever. You gotta find that person who maybe wants to build the app and send it to their friends, make the Chrome extension, and share it in

• 42:30Jason Calacanis?

  their office. So it's gonna be a lot of fun to kind of, I think, figure that out, and you will. It'll be fail fast. Yeah, I try a lot of things. Exactly. Lots of experiments.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  I prepped our section in the notes about your company today, and I spent, I think I read every single word on your site twice, and I got what you do wrong. So I say that with nothing but love. And when I go to Lovable's website, we actually had the founder on the show, it's shockingly clear what I can do with it. And so I would just say-

• 43:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's a great piece of feedback.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Self-healing, autonomous, AI, just all of that makes me want to die inside, and I'm a nerd. So that's my two cents. I love you both. But like, I did not get all the way there. So if you're gonna go PLG, go out into the market, it's gotta be dumb, or at least, or at least easy to understand.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  I like this advice. And you could make a landing page that's different than your corporate page. So the landing page could be- BuildMyApp.com or, you know, vibe code an app. You know, you just try that as an experiment.

• 43:32Speaker 09

  I think that's a great idea with with a separate landing page. And it actually goes along with something we did not too long ago. We we scooped up the domain myagent.ai. So I think branding everything underneath that and allowing for people to just build my agent and build their projects might be a really strong lever.

• 43:47Jason Calacanis?

  So when you say my agent, that would mean to me more enterprisey, just so you know.

• 43:52Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 43:53Jason Calacanis?

  Because I don't think consumers are going to build agents, you know, to do these tasks. But I do know enterprises want to build them. So I might very much want to build an agent that goes out, listens to the top 10 podcasts or goes to the top 100 podcasts and pulls the advertisers from them and puts that advertiser into my CRM. That's what I think of when you say an agent. What is somebody, you know, what is my Athena assistant doing that the Athena assistant could make into an agent and do, which is totally viable? And that would feel more like Zapier and be for more of a workflow nerd. I have a couple of those workflow nerds in our company, Lucas, Bianca, I got a whole

• 44:34Jason Calacanis?

  group of them who like to make like workflows using Zapier and Notion and Coda and Slack, and they're going wild on this stuff. So I would think about there's apps, there's websites, there's agents. These are actually different things. So maybe why don't we try to come up with three great domain names and run three experiments? And, you know, once every three months, we release one of these and see what the reaction is. Or once a month, we release them and see which one gets the most interest.

• 45:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that'd be really interesting.

• 45:03Jason Calacanis?

  Chrome extensions are another very interesting world. I don't know if AI can make great Chrome extensions and publish them. But if you master that loop, man, there's a whole extension culture that is, you know, I would say billions of dollars of revenue, billions of users who are on their desktops using browsers and they want a Chrome extension that, you know, does what SDR, sales development reps do or, you know, pulls, like I was talking about, like doing lead gen, right? Always comes up as like a manual crumbly task. I need to find all of the journalists who cover Chrome extensions, right? Or who cover apps. Okay, I'm going to start doing Google searches.

• 45:48Jason Calacanis?

  I want to have the Chrome extension. I want to catalog all that and then be able to do outreach to them. I think you get the idea. So many different opportunities for you, but Alex, I think, gets the win here for closing the loop between your customers and your presentation to them. Let's create a honeypot for those customers, right?

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:06Jason Calacanis?

  And like really sticky delicious honey. Like go with like, what is the most insane thing? You know, you can promise them and deliver on in the most narrow focus that it becomes number one on Product Hunt. And if you want to post it on Product Hunt, I got, I'm like one of the top 10 users apparently. And so I don't do this for just anybody, but since you're a portfolio company, just email my team. And you know, Jackie, Kelly, whoever you're working with, and we will, if you make something really good, I'll hunt it for you. And let's see if we can, we can hunt something. Okay, here we go.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 46:43Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Good job, boys.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Next up, we are going to talk to Brian Watson from InviteJet. InviteJet is building calendar marketing tools.

• 46:52Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Not marketing calendar tools, flip it around, essentially allowing brands and companies to place ads and marketing material inside of prospect calendars. You can find out more at invitejet.com. Brian, welcome to the show.

• 47:03Jason Calacanis?

  So how's the business going? You went through the accelerator and I know you got some very interesting feedback. What was the feedback in the accelerator? We introduce you to dozens of investors and you've met probably or been exposed to hundreds during the program. What was the feedback? Did they get it? Did you present it well in the beginning? Did you get better at presenting it? I know it's a polarizing concept sometime to some, for some people.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely polarizing. Absolutely. It was for me too, when it was first presented to me as a, as an idea, as the technical co-founder. I came into it with a little bit of like ick, but that very quickly went away. But yeah, the accelerator was great. You know, we were in LA 33, we pitched, you know, hundreds of investors. And we had one-on-one meetings with, I think my list is 136 meetings now. Yeah. So it's been. It's been a journey. But yeah, the accelerator was wonderful for the exposure, the intros. Your team was wonderful. They were, you know, it was, there were moments of surprise and delight, for sure.

• 48:04Jason Calacanis?

  I like that. That's great.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 48:06Jason Calacanis?

  Trying to increase those, trying to increase those. I'm trying to get back to in person. You didn't do much in person, right? You went to see Sequoia.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:14Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, that was great.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  That was amazing. Yep.

• 48:16Jason Calacanis?

  What do we, and then did you have, uh, do we have a kickoff for the accelerator?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Uh, no, we had the one in-person event. We've spent a week in SF. Uh, that was a great time. But yeah, we got to go out to Sequoia and pitch them and, you know, get some really good feedback. Uh, roll off was a great sport that day.

• 48:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Very interested in, in, in the calendar invite. Um, you know, Hangle. So.

• 48:41Jason Calacanis?

  So if we did more in person, you'd be into it. I'm taking.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I would be on a plane in a heartbeat.

• 48:48Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. Okay. Good to know. That's, I'm, I'm talking to my team about, you know, doing more in-person stuff. Uh, what's your challenge right now, Brian? Any challenges with the business or things you're frustrated with or trying to get done?

• 49:00Speaker 00

  We just had a lead back out of a term sheet, which was, uh, which is a unique challenge in of itself.

• 49:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, so there's, there's that that's going on right now. That's like the, the hair on fire problem that we're trying to solve right now. Where do we pick up the pieces and go from here? We, we've luckily had a really positive um, spin of things, re-engaging firms that were already interested, you know, before the term sheet was signed. Um, so.

• 49:23Jason Calacanis?

  So you had a signed term sheet.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:24Jason Calacanis?

  And it didn't happen.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:26Jason Calacanis?

  You signed it, you went to due diligence and then they gave you a reason for, you know, backing out. Sometimes, I'll be honest, they, uh, will tell you a reason that's not the truth.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I, that's the advice I've been getting a lot lately too, is, is that's probably not true.

• 49:43Jason Calacanis?

  And I don't want to mention the firm here. I don't want to.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Absolutely not.

• 49:47Jason Calacanis?

  But I do think this is very brave of you to talk about because I've been in the situation myself with my own companies and had somebody back out. A lot of times, people will make an investment and then maybe they don't have the credibility in their firm to get it through the other partners because there's some partnership dynamic going on. So if Alex, Lon and I were partners in a VC firm.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:08Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, Lon's last two deals didn't work out. Alex is pissed off at Lon. Lon comes to us with a third deal. We're like, hey, this is the same movie over and over again. You want to do consumer packaged goods. We know it doesn't work. And then Lon kinda was a hot shot and sent the term sheet before we approved it. And we have a rule, two out of three, he can't get consensus. That happens. It could be.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Just not a team player.

• 50:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, things can happen. Or, you know, they could see something like a lawsuit, which isn't the case here, but there could be a legal action. They say, oh, you didn't tell us about that. Or your accounting could have been off, which wasn't the case here. I think it was for you, the customers in your pipeline and the customer references were good, but maybe not there. They, they had some maybe higher benchmarks. They were looking to see in this, what I'll call your company is a nascent company. You're a year, one or two company. Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Six months in. Yeah. So, but you know, we've been on average growing 50% month over month.

• 51:04Jason Calacanis?

  Um, great.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  And so, you know, things are, things are going gangbusters. And so it was a little bit, a little bit offsetting, a little bit off putting, but you know, we're putting the pieces back together. It's, it's totally fine. I mean, you only get hurt on a roller coaster if you get off in the middle, right?

• 51:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I like that. That's actually very true. Keep the seatbelt on.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  What I'll also say is, did you diligence this firm before you went into it? Did you talk to other founders? You can be totally honest about this because not everybody has the time. Did you talk to two other founders who accepted money from them?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So it was our intention to, however, when we asked the, you know, how wires get crossed and sometimes things get left out, you know?

• 51:44Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Um, so I, I assume that's what happened. I don't think that they were intentionally dodging us or anything like that. But you know, we asked for a couple of founders that we could talk to, but were never given those actual references that we could go talk to. However, so, you know, it's not like we were pounding on the door asking for those things though. So we, we did ask once and, and you know, Not delivered.

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  So that could be the reason this happened is you ask for references. Maybe they don't have great references. This is why I love the backdoor reference. What's a backdoor reference? That's when you or a dark reference, you go find the references and you go do it yourself. Right? You don't have to take their references. And here's, if you want to get really, you know, dark arts, I have some dark arts. These things exist between the light and the dark side. It's a little Ashoka kind of situation. You know, you could look at their list of investments on Crunchbase.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 52:38Jason Calacanis?

  Which they can't take things on and off of Crunchbase that easily. Or another service, there's other ones out there, or you could look at press, tech crunch stories, whatever, of funding announcements. Then you look at their profile page of their portfolio and then you look for which ones are not on there.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So there are two, two founders in the history of our firm that I did not see eye to eye with. I'll make it a allegation here. I felt like there were things occurring that were not on the up and up to be graceful about it. I'm not going to say like, but these were pretty gnarly situations where I had to say to the founder in one case, this isn't a fit. How about you give us our money back? We rip up the term sheet. The founder immediately folded and gave us our money back and we ripped up the term sheet. And in another case, I had to threaten to sue a founder because they did things that I thought could get our firm, other investors, other employees, board members, et cetera, into legal trouble.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  That's.

• 53:35Jason Calacanis?

  And I spent $90,000 on legal bills and said, hey, if you don't give us our money back and, you know, we resolve this, then I'm going to file this lawsuit in Delaware. I never thought I would ever have to say that, but you know, in that case, I felt like this was securities fraud that was occurring and I didn't want anything to do with it.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:55Jason Calacanis?

  They, in that case, they folded as well. You're not going to find those two people on our profile pages.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 54:01Jason Calacanis?

  You might find them in Crunchbase. I don't know. Somebody might be doing that right now.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:05Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and trying to figure that out. So that's like a dark arts thing.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 54:09Jason Calacanis?

  And you know what? Not all VCs and founders are going to get along. Newsflash. People who are capital allocators, unique group of people in the world, often former founders, founders, very unique people in the world. You put them two together, they're not always going to get along.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Small tangent for, for just a sec, but yeah, we've, we've done the.

• 54:30Jason Calacanis?

  Tangents are the best.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  This one's hilarious. There's a long story to it, but the long and the short is basically there was one investor who offered to invest in us. I met him through Telegram. I used to work in crypto. So I know a lot of, you know, people in crypto. And so he offered to invest in us, asked us to come to Amsterdam to meet him because he doesn't do business without a handshake deal first and seeing you face to face. And then, so I went back door and started looking this guy up. Looked like he was a great guy. Looked like he was investing through family offices and things like that. However, it turned out the man I was talking to on a Zoom meeting was actually not who he said he was.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  He was using some sort of AI filter to filter his face and pretend to be this person.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  And try to get me to come to Amsterdam. So always do your research. That's, that's the moral of this story.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Amsterdam, like kidnapping, throwing you in a canal?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  No. They were gonna do it. Very pushy about it. Yeah.

• 55:33Jason Calacanis?

  You're following your instinct is a good idea. If you get that tingly feeling, it's.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  Glad you've sold both kidneys.

• 55:41Jason Calacanis?

  If anybody in Amsterdam offers to take you out on their like homemade submarines, don't go.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  You're about to get taken. Don't, don't get taken. So true. Like I said, things have been going pretty gangbusters. We've got, there, there has been a little bit of churn. It's not anything to like, you know, turn your nose up at or anything like that. Three to 5%, you know, pretty, pretty standard stuff.

• 56:02Jason Calacanis?

  But that's monthly, every month.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  And so I engage these people that, that churn and I always ask them, you know, I'm product obsessed. So I want that, I want their experience to be great. They say, hey, so it's great product. Obviously it works or we wouldn't have used it. It's really churned up revenue for us, which is great. But we don't see ourselves using it every single month. And so that's why we churned this month is because we don't see ourselves paying the 500 buck a month subscription or a hundred and fifty dollars a month subscription for this month. And so we churned this month, but we may be back in three months. So we've started thinking of ways to, we, we've got an idea of a way to do, to. Combat that, but I'd love to hear your opinion.

• 56:43Jason Calacanis?

  So this is what happens with experimental software often.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:47Jason Calacanis?

  And so, you know, people will, investors, look at the churn rate, you'll look at it. You know, when something comes out like MailChimp, right? When it first came out, I gotta do a mailing, I've got this mailing list, I have to send some emails. People would sign up for the trial, send the email, shut the account down. And I had this issue too with like a, you know, where you're looking at the SaaS software and going, is it, why is this so expensive and I don't get enough utilization out? And I loved MailChimp for a long time, they were advertisers here on the program for many years. But they changed their pricing model and the pricing model was based on how many emails we had. And I tried to explain this to them over and over again after they got sold. We have a half million emails because we do these events, but we email people twice a year.

• 57:31Jason Calacanis?

  You're charging us as if we're, and it's like unlimited sending. So we're getting charged with this model of unlimited sending, but we don't need unlimited sending. But you're charging us like a dollar, not a dollar a year, like 10 cents a year per user. So you want $50,000 a year. Many of these emails are dead, so now I gotta clean the emails off the list. Or I have to take these five mailing lists for these events, take them down, then re-upload them, lose the records, and they're like, you're not our typical customer, Jason. We're working with the gap, the gap sending an email, you know, seven times a day. So I think it really has to do with the ideal customer profile. For $6,000, most people are not going to care.

• 58:15Jason Calacanis?

  If you're a professional marketer, they're gonna just care, does that $6,000 result in more than $6,000 in income coming in?

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:22Jason Calacanis?

  So I think you have to look at the category of customer. If I described a publication, you know, they may be very budget conscious and we know it's not a huge business. How about we give it to you for this rate, 500 a year? And then if you have customers like this record company, Warner Records, will sell into Warner Records alongside you to do their stuff. See, I think you have to parse who the customers are and the feedback you're getting. As an event producer, I was just not a good customer for MailChimp. They wanted big marketing agencies, people who are monetizing, you know, these mailing lists and using them regularly. I moved everything to Substack. I'm a terrible customer for Substack because I don't have subscriptions turned on. So there's no 10% of the revenue.

• 59:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm using them as a free mail service.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  They're not interested in that.

• 59:09Jason Calacanis?

  But they're like, okay, it's good for them because they want to build the records in their system and they're playing a flat rate. So I want to ask you, who are the, as you're six months into this journey, who do you think your ideal customer profile is?

• 59:23Speaker 00

  So I'll say this, the top of the mountain for us looks like InviteJet is the Twilio or SendGrid of calendar invites, right?

• 59:30Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  You know, and so those, those businesses, when I look at those businesses, they are both marketing as well as transactional, right? SendGrid hit it big with the, with the transactional side of things. And so we're thinking about that transactional side as well as marketing. Actually, this weekend, we're, we're doing a soft launch of our third-party API and Zapier integration so that people can, you know, automate, automate this, these calendar invites into their flow. So you can think of like a restaurant reservation system using calendar invites.

• 59:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, that's powerful. So if this French restaurant is doing Castole Sundays.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  That's great. Yeah.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  So the ideal customer profile right now has been an e-commerce brand, right? Six to nine figures, analytics savvy. They want to use it for the marketing use case, right?

• 1:00:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  Which has been great. And so for, for them, it makes sense to have this pay-as-you-play sort of get an allocation of, of invites to send every month. You know, you're, you're, you're basically buying an allowance of, of invites.

• 1:00:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah. Consumption-based.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So, but however, with, if we shift this model a little bit to include the transactional side of things, I think it, I think it helps with those folks that churn from the e-commerce side of things, if we go to more of a usage-based pricing, in terms of like do a low platform fee so that we do have MRR, but also do a usage-based fee, you know? Is it $2 per 1,000 invites you send or whatever it may be? So that people can, you know, justify the $99 or the $300 platform fee that they're spending every month. And then they, you know, can spend more on top of that if they're actually using the

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  service, which we've seen up into the right numbers in terms of our monthly active users each month and how much they're using it.

• 1:01:19Jason Calacanis?

  You know, at this stage, I think. Charging a fee that is robust enough for you to keep growing and investing in the product cycle and keep building these adjacencies and features and the speed and reliability of the service, you know, while giving them so much value that they think you're stupid. Gotcha. So this is the line, right? So like, I would look at something like Beehive is so inexpensive for us that I'm like, Beehive's a great deal. Squarespace is an incredible deal. I can't believe I'm paying hundreds of dollars a year to get that much value when I would think I should be paying hundreds a month, like for Squarespace, it's beautiful, it's got all these features. That's true.

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  But if you told me it was 500 a month or 500 a year, I'd be like, I would pay either. So that's why I become loyal to them. You know, something like Notion, Coda and Slack at eight to 15 dollars per person per year, per month, I don't even think about that price. Yeah. Like, it's so low, eight, 15 or 30 is so low, I'm not even really considering it because I get so much value. And that's the Tim O'Reilly, give so much more. Yeah. That people don't even think about it. And I wouldn't overindex on, you seem to be so thoughtful that you might be, respectfully, Brian, over indexing on the cheap people. Yeah. If a third of your customers are not saying it's too expensive, then you're charging too little.

• 1:02:46Jason Calacanis?

  So both of these things can be true that we're talking about here in terms of pricing. What I would be more interested in is what's the next adjacency, a bold adjacency you can add to this that, you know, really makes it impossible not to use this tool. So I am a fan of Kith, K I T H, which makes, you know, does drop. Yeah. Or Nix Gear sometimes, they do New Balance, there's a really incredible designer, I'm sure you've heard of them. Sure. And I would just pay, I told them, like, can you just charge me 100 or 500 bucks a year to be part of a VIP program? Mm-hmm. And I kind of rolled my own VIP with them through DMs, but I was like, just let me pay you 100 dollars a year, you put... The drops for VIPs a day, two days before the regular drop, let us buy what we want.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  And then you would have a subscription fee. So I was wondering, have you thought

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  about charging to be part of a VIP program to get the calendar invites?

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  I got you.

• 1:03:39Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, making it a revenue stream.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's an interesting, interesting idea. That's, that is exactly how some people have used the product. So we've got plenty of e-commerce brands that have these sort of VIP lists,

• 1:03:51Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  uh, if you will. Um, and you know, we integrate with MailChimp.

• 1:03:54Jason Calacanis?

  Do VIP members pay though to be part of that?

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  I, I assume they do. I'm not entirely sure, um, what their, what their business model is.

• 1:04:02Jason Calacanis?

  Cutts has a, the Cutts Clothing Company that makes like black t-shirts I like. Cutts has, uh, and I think maybe Rone is the other one I like that makes black t-shirts. Um, both of them, I think, have a hundred dollar a year program where you get 20% off each order. So when you hit $500, it pays for itself and you get free shipping. It's kind of like their own Amazon Prime.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Jason Calacanis?

  I think like helping people build that. I also like your affiliate link idea.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:26Jason Calacanis?

  Integrating with the affiliate systems. That's a big business. We have an investment in a company called Genius Link. That produces like those smart links that if somebody clicks on it in France, it goes to the right place to buy a piece of clothing in France. If they click it in Canada, it sends them to the right place all by IP, right?

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:04:43Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and then people can use those to, to make affiliates. I like affiliates. I like the idea of you maybe adding Klavio-like email features.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:51Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder if some of your customers can't afford Klavio and Klavio's, you know, um, margin is your opportunity to like make a freer version of, you know, some of the Klavio features. I don't know how they charge per record or HubSpot. So, you know, that, that's the other possibility with the business. I think when investors hear about your business, they're kind of like, oh, icky.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh no, genius.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Exactly.

• 1:05:15Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, what can we add to it?

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  It literally happens every time. Yeah.

• 1:05:18Jason Calacanis?

  It's like this very interesting journey.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, that I went through as well. And it was interesting, even in our own venture firm, people were like, I don't want that.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to be marketed to on my calendar. And it's, if you switch it to membership like I did in our discussion.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Jason Calacanis?

  It changes everybody's.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  I think the transactional side of things does that as well. Well, so you can think like if I'm making a booking appointment at a nail salon or a tattoo parlor or a restaurant reservation or a flight or hotel, that stuff should be on my calendar, right? But it's not right now. We're just getting email and SMS reminders of those things. And so, you know, you can think of those highly personal transactions where you're making a booking. That that should be on my calendar and I would totally like a thousand percent welcome that, right? And so that's a, we, we know that that's a big business and we, that's, that's something that we want to go after.

• 1:06:08Jason Calacanis?

  So many great ideas. The API is going to be a great long-term thing for you to do.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Jason Calacanis?

  I'm in love with your business. How can people find out more and become a customer or try the product?

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  They can go to invitejet.com. And if you want to contact me, I'm [email protected]. My co-founder, [email protected]. We are, you know, very, very open and personable. So give us a shout.

• 1:06:29Jason Calacanis?

  Can we run a test to my Founder University team? Let's get all the Founder University emails.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Good.

• 1:06:35Jason Calacanis?

  Let's ask them if they want to be invited to sessions like this, like office hour sessions.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:42Jason Calacanis?

  And

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Great idea.

• 1:06:43Jason Calacanis?

  We'll test like just sending an office hour session to them and putting it on their calendar. You know, for content, it could be interesting, like for our portfolio, etc. Like, hey, if you want to come, it's optional. Do people do it with their mailing list without asking for permission first? Like if I had like 400 founders and I invited them to something, I don't think they would get upset.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  No, like it depends. Like we're not, we, we, we have a bunch of spam blocks in place, right? We've got stuff in place so that if you're using it for a B2B purpose and you're just booking time on people's calendars, we're going to know, we're going to stop you from that. But we do have, but if it's an intimate list, like the one you were talking about, we've actually got a fund here in town, Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo, shout out, CEO of Spiffy.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  He uses it for his fund to send events and, and get, you know, round up all these CEOs for, for events and investors and LPs in his fund for these events. He says, you know, it's an amazing tool because it ends up right on their calendar. I don't have to send them an email with a button that says Add to calendar and then they have to, you know, go through this flow.

• 1:07:47Jason Calacanis?

  So he doesn't mind doing it.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  And then people say yes or no. And then somebody on his team looks at that or looks at your backend and understands.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  He said the uptick in attendance has been great because of, uh, because of the use.

• 1:07:59Jason Calacanis?

  I'm all in. All right. Listen, continued success. Awesome. Keep the growth going. Sales solves everything. So you get that chart that's growing but 10% a month, you will be fundable indefinitely in your entrepreneurial career. You get between 10 and 20% month over month growth, you'll be fine. You got the three, four, five percent churn. That's normal. And so if you can just grow the, the number, uh, the revenue number.

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  I mean, it's.

• 1:08:21Jason Calacanis?

  10% month over month, you'll be in great shape.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  But 50% is our number right now. And yeah, we, we hope to keep it there.

• 1:08:28Jason Calacanis?

  It will be less lumpy when it's bigger numbers.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:31Jason Calacanis?

  And you know, the, that you figure out your pricing.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:08:33Jason Calacanis?

  Great job. All right, everybody. This has been another incredible episode of This Week in Startups. For Lon Harris, for Alex Wilhelm, I'm Jason Calacanis. You can follow the docket thisweekinstartups.com/docket. And we will see you all next time on Monday. Bye bye.