We Hosted A "Shark Tank" For Tech Startups | My First Million Demo Day

Episode 356: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) with the help of Stonks.com , listen to six entrepreneurs pitch their business in hopes of getting Shaan and Sam to invest. * To watch this podcast, head over to our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/OKI1X1qFgwg ----- Links: * Cherry * Pillup * Campus Ink * Terrashroom * Dealbuilder * Field Complete * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (05:35) - Luke @ Cherry (17:40) - Ankur @ Pillup (30:05) - Steven @ Campus Ink (42:45) - Jared @ Terrashroom (54:10) - Morgan @ Dealbuilder (01:04:05) - Tim @ Field Complete ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  So basically, we're gonna, it's like Shark Tank, but the viewers can invest. And I think, all right, so we're gonna have six startups. Each startup gets two minutes to pitch, and then we have up to five minutes to ask questions. And last time, I don't know if you remember this, Sean, but last time, we, the companies that pitched ended up raising like millions and millions of dollars.

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  All right, what up? Sean, do you play video games?

• 0:28Shaan Puri?

  Of course I play video games.

• 0:29Sam Parr?

  Do you really?

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  Not as much as I used to.

• 0:31Sam Parr?

  I don't really play at all, but um, I mean, I just, I don't, I'm not like a gamer. But do you know what Xbox Cloud is? I didn't know what that was.

• 0:40Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, kind of. I don't, I'm in the PS, I'm in the PlayStation universe, so I don't really use Xbox Cloud. But it's like the cloud gaming thing for them?

• 0:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but basically, I, I paid like a dollar to play Flight Sim. Do you know what Flight Sim is?

• 0:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course. You probably love that thing.

• 0:56Sam Parr?

  It's awesome. I just started doing it and like, cause me and Sarah are thinking about going to Korea. And I'm like, well, let's just go like fly to Seoul right now and see what it's like. It like, you can fly around and I paid a dollar for it and I'm playing on my computer. It's so cool. I've never like been a video gamer, but it's awesome.

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  A video gamer?

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  Just gamer.

• 1:18Sam Parr?

  Hello, fellow millennials.

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Wait, so do we not see these pitches? What's going on here?

• 1:24Sam Parr?

  So um, I see a bunch of comments. I've got a screen over here. Do you have the, the comments set up?

• 1:30Shaan Puri?

  Uh, okay, here we go.

• 1:35Sam Parr?

  And then um, I believe Courtney or someone else is gonna control it. So someone's gonna come up and they're gonna pitch for two minutes.

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. And are we, we're really investing money this time?

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  Maybe. I'm not doing it if it's, I'm only doing it if it's good.

• 1:52Shaan Puri?

  Well, yeah, only if it's good, of course. I'm not a, not gonna just throw money at something bad, but I'm ready. I got the checkbook out, so I'm ready today. I think fifty, hundred thousand dollars would be awesome to deploy if there's a great startup in here. But we shall see. What's up? I can see the chat.

• 2:07Sam Parr?

  So let's give a background here. All right. So this thing is called stonks.com. It's like a live Shark Tank type of company. I'm an investor in it. So I have like, I have some intra tier, but you're not an investor, right, Sean? This company?

• 2:22Shaan Puri?

  No, I'm just working for free right now.

• 2:24Sam Parr?

  Yes, I don't care if people use it or not, but I just wanted to disclose that. But so six companies.

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  Describe the, describe the format. It's cool. There's basically a video screen where they pitch the investors. There's right now 250 people watching live. And then there's a live chat. So people in the audience and they could tag themselves as angel investor, founder, VC, just, I don't know, normal, you know, muggle. And they can chat during the pitches. They can also express interest to invest, which will let them like connect with that founder after the fact. So it's kind of like a way, it's a way to do angel investing, no matter where you are in the world, making Shark Tank, you know, the default process for investing, which is pretty dope. And yeah, as Calvin says, no small boy stuff today. That's my only rule with these founders coming pitching, coming and pitching. They always say, what's your advice? I say it's the same as always. No small boy stuff. All right. So.

• 3:14Sam Parr?

  So basically, we're gonna, it's like Shark Tank, but the viewers can invest. And I think, all right, so we're gonna have six startups. Each startup gets two minutes to pitch, and then we have up to five minutes to ask questions. And last time, I don't know if you remember this, Sean, but last time, we, the companies that pitched ended up raising like millions and millions of dollars. So it was, it was pretty interesting. So let's see if we get that.

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  Just another life change, just another day, just another life change.

• 3:42Sam Parr?

  Well, because we, so basically, we're doing this live, and then we're gonna air on our YouTube and podcast. And I think people can still invest at that point. But so, yeah, a lot of lives have changed. But let's check it out. So let's, we're gonna go the first one. Jesse, you're gonna bring it up. There you go.

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  Two minutes, and then we do five minute Q and A.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Awesome. Hey guys, Luke from Cherry here. Hey Sam, hey Sean. So Cherry exists to ensure accommodation businesses get more direct bookings and in turn giving consumers better travel deals. So online travel agencies today like Expedia, Booking.com and Airbnb bring in around $250 billion in bookings, resulting in around $35 billion in commission fees. An average property can sometimes pay up to 30% commission on those bookings. With the market power that these guys have, it's really hard for an individual property to get direct bookings. And that's where we've come in. Meet Cherry. Cherry is a free browser extension that gives you deals when searching for accommodations. You can find it right now

• 4:44Speaker 02

  at joincherry.com. So imagine that you're searching for a property, you're looking on Booking.com, you've found one you liked and bam, Cherry's going to pop up. It's going to show you a better deal for booking directly with the property. And on clicking "Get Deal" will take you directly through to the property's direct website. We copy across the guests, the check-in, the checkout, and the promo code, allowing you to check out with these. Now Sam, imagine we did this with Marathon Ranch. On Airbnb, you could have Cherry popping up, showing a deal directly to customers, allowing them to come through to your direct guesty booking engine on your own website.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  All of our properties have a dedicated backend, allowing them to manage their deal daily, monthly, or seasonally. They've got full control. The current product works across desktop and in the future months, we'll be launching all your favourite travel deals directly from your pocket on mobile. We're highly adaptable. We work across all accommodation providers like city hotels, resorts, vacation rentals, and the future-proofing of our product is across attractions, flights, and also car hire. Within four short months, we're approaching 1,000 partner properties in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, from all the major brands you might be aware of. And by November, we'll be launching to the US with an expected 20,000 partner properties.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Where the team should get this done, we've got a mixture of great travel and tech experience, and a graded sounding advisory board across marketplaces, travel and tech as well. So what do you say? Should we get back to travelling?

• 6:15Shaan Puri?

  Oh, nice little closing. Do you work on that today?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did.

• 6:19Shaan Puri?

  That's good. Good. I like that. This is really like Shark Tank. So what do you say? Shall we fly through the sky? So, okay, so let's start off. Sam, give me your initial thoughts.

• 6:36Sam Parr?

  I don't know this space that much. So my initial thoughts are I'm trying to figure out how this is different from just like Expedia with a Chrome plugin. Or is that it? Is that like the dumbed down version?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're essentially allowing properties to get more direct bookings by having it pop up on online travel agencies, sending them direct to the property's website. So they're not having to pay the large commission fees.

• 6:58Shaan Puri?

  And there's a two-way incentive. So the buyer gets a little discount and then the hotel doesn't have to pay the referral fee to Expedia. Right? Instead, they pay a referral fee to you presumably.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, we charge on a performance base and sometimes on a subscription base.

• 7:14Shaan Puri?

  So are you cheaper than Expedia then?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, correct. So for us, we charge a performance fee of $10 a month and then we pay 79 cents a click. Whereas some of these properties are paying upwards of 30% commission on some of these bookings.

• 7:29Sam Parr?

  And the way it works is you have this Chrome plugin installed. I go to HiltonSydney.com or whatever it is. And it says, hey, or sorry, I go to Expedia or I go to some other website where there's hotels listed and it goes, hey, by the way, if you just click this little, it's like honey. So I see like a little notification on my Chrome thing. It says, if you click that, you're actually going to save $10 if you just come straight to our website. Is that right?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  So how do you get the Chrome extension users, right? That seems like the hard part. So how do you get them today? So you said you had 3,000 of them. So where do those 3,000 come from? And where do the next 10 or 30,000 come from? And how much does that cost you?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what we've done is we've been able to partner with the hotels that we're signing up, which has made it really easy for from a customer acquisition point of view. So for instance, we're launching with around 300 new properties in Canada at the moment. And they're actually rolling it out to their loyalty base of around 2 million members from an email point of view. And so we'll partner with them and that's the engaging point of view that we're going out with. And then we've got some paid media rolling out across YouTube and Reddit and those are the likes.

• 8:37Shaan Puri?

  Sorry. So I don't understand. So why does the hotel care to tell its customers to install Cherry?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're they're almost sick of paying these large commission fees that they do to the online travel agencies. So for them to be able to bring their members, incentivize them to use the Cherry product while they're searching across all of the different online travel agencies, it's a benefit for them to then not have to pay those commissions every single time.

• 9:03Sam Parr?

  Do you think that what, let's say that you're you're you're actually advising people not to invest in you because the travel industry is so hard? Like, what's like the honest truth that you would say? Because the travel industry, like, performance marketing in the travel industry seems like the most cutthroat thing there is next to like, you know, ranking for like lawyer terms like mesothelioma lawsuit. You know what I mean? Like, what else?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Definitely. Well, I guess the data that we've seen in travel over the last four months is that it's actually back and it's bigger than 2019 pre-pandemic levels that we saw. And not just that it's it's back from a Boeing perspective, but in terms of what people are spending is higher. So the average room rate of dollar value that people are spending is is going higher. So, yeah, I'm trying to tell you not to invest at this point, but from from our regard, travel is back and bigger than ever.

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  So it seemed like Honey did a great job because they they found a way to acquire users for cheap. And I think YouTubers and influencers were like one of the big strategies. It seems like you could do that with these like travel bloggers, travel tips, you know, flight deals, hotel deal type of type of bloggers, YouTubers, that sort of thing. Have you guys started doing that? And what do you see? What's the, what does the, what does it cost you to get it installed when you pay? Right? Because I don't know, I'm not really buying this this idea that hotels are just going to keep spamming their their customers to install your app. That just seemed, just because they're so fed up with Expedia? I don't know. I don't really buy that.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. So when we first started, we were noticing $10, $12 of a CPA on on Facebook and Instagram. And we realized that that was just not continually achievable. And so we switched and we pivoted very much into the reddits and the Pinterest of the world. And we were able to get down to sort of that $2, $3 mark. But YouTube is where we identified the big growth opportunity.

• 10:54Sam Parr?

  How much did you spend?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  We were spending a few thousand dollars a month. Yeah.

• 11:00Shaan Puri?

  And what's a customer worth? So what do those customers generate for you in a year?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the customers aren't necessarily the generators for us. It's the properties paying the performance and the subscription fee, but the average saving for a customer could be up to $150 a year in travel savings.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay. They're telling us we're at time. Luke, thank you.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Thanks guys.

• 11:25Shaan Puri?

  I mean, Sam will quickly debrief and then we'll move on to the next pitch.

• 11:29Sam Parr?

  So Sam, I'm out. I'm out. Not, it has nothing to do with him. It's just the industry. I'm just,

• 11:36Shaan Puri?

  it's not you. It's not me.

• 11:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So, look, I'm one of the very few, so I, there's this weird rule. I don't know if it's a law or it's a rule, but basically, have you ever heard about this where like Expedia or some other company, there's this regulation that they have to display in like the same rate across all websites if that rate is going to be publicly available? Have you ever heard of that?

• 12:02Shaan Puri?

  No, but that makes sense.

• 12:03Sam Parr?

  So there's these guys I met who bought these Instagram handles like at hotel and now they have like 50 million followers across all their things. And it says DM us for a good hotel deal. And you DM them and they have a chat bot that figures out where you want to go. And then they could actually spend, send you way more exclusive deals because they don't have to follow the law because it's not, it's a private conversation. And I think that's like an interesting take. This, that's a, that's a really intriguing take to me. This take that this guy has, Luke, I think it's also interesting. I don't think it's good enough though, to like be crazy different from all the other folks out there in an industry that's to me as somewhat uneducated, seems like it's a really, really, really, really tough to succeed in.

• 12:46Shaan Puri?

  I think the hard part here is I'm not installing this unless I'm traveling, right? Like I've not just, oh, let me just preemptively install this. So I think travel is so infrequent, it's hard to get people to install this. And I didn't love that answer you gave at the end. He's like, oh, our customers don't generate money for us. Well, they do, right? They're the ones who go book. And so you know, on average, of the people that install, 25% actually go book something. And of those 25% who book, on average, that generates $20 for us. And so I can tell you, no public math, but let me just do it anyways. That's, you know, whatever, four or five bucks that that customer's worth for me and I bought them for two. So that's your spread. There's going to be some math like that. So that's what I'm always looking for with founders is. Can you, from a bottoms up way, explain how the money machine of your business works?

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  I put a dollar in here, then it generates, you know, three dollars on the way out. And I've done that at this scale. And now the only question is, if I scale up, will that money stay the same? Right? That's, that's what I'm looking to do. So yeah, I'm out as well. Like the guy, like the name, but I think that Honey for Travel, if it was going to be a thing, Honey would do it. And if it, you know, and I also think that the, and I think the reason they don't is because as a standalone thing, it's hard to acquire users for this because travel is infrequent and expensive.

• 14:03Sam Parr?

  There's a commenter in the chat room that says, my wife says she's out. I agree with, I agree with Ben Simpson's wife.

• 14:10Shaan Puri?

  And in fact, I want to know what all of your wives feel. And if your wife's not around because she's not watching this at a 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, you know, your wife and you know, your husband. So just tell us in the chat after every single pitch, is your wife or husband in or out based on what you know about them?

• 14:25Sam Parr?

  All right, next up, yeah, I want to know too. And also ask, ask them.

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  My wife is definitely out. My wife is definitely, Sarah, is Sarah out for you?

• 14:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she's not in. And if you want to ask them what the, what your wife's opinion is on Sean and me as well as the startups, we're okay to, we'll listen to that, but only if it's a good thing. Next up.

• 14:43Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, look at this comment from Ollie. I keep my wife, my, my wife away from the show because you guys are too handsome. Look, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that.

• 14:51Sam Parr?

  You'd have like 15 cents.

• 14:53Shaan Puri?

  I'd have three nickels.

• 14:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, maybe 25 cents. Maybe a whole quarter. All right. Pillup is the next startup. What a name.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hi guys.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  Pillup. I'm. Pillup, don't be gang sign.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yo, that's why I took the name, Pillup. Cheers. Okay. Hi guys, I'm Ankur, co-founder of Pillup, and I'm here to make you millions. Let's get started. So 56% of patients in India have poor medication adherence. And guess how many are chronic patients in India? Four 30 million. So that's a big problem and a huge opportunity for us. But what are the reasons behind this poor adherence? Number one, forgetfulness. People tend to forget to eat their medication due to old age, or they're just busy with their schedule. Second one is poor medication management. People take the wrong medicines at the wrong time, double dose. It happens more often than you think. Financial constraints. The fourth one is personal beliefs.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  You know, some people in India believe if they start to take medicines, they have to take it for the lifetime. And the fifth one is unable to read doctor prescription. Presenting you the pill up solution. We pre sort your medication by time and date personalized as per your prescription. But you'll still forget to take medicines due to some reason, right? Don't worry, we got you covered. We provide mitigation reminders on your preferred platform. So you don't forget to take medicine. But in case you still do, your wife will remind you because we're going to alert her after one hour of your medication time. And lastly, we convert this beautiful doodle art of the doctor into a pillar planner, which is much easier to understand.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  We provide a one stop solution to improve your medication adherence through the app, through pre sorting pouches and our dispenser. We are a team of engineer, analyst and doctor. I'm a serial entrepreneur and a Y C alumni. Dr. Manish has nineteen years of experience. He is a cardiologist and a conscious of brains behind this whole business. To put things into perspective, even if you miss one day of medication in tuberculosis, you start again from day zero. Let this sink in. Thank you.

• 17:12Sam Parr?

  Good job. Thank you.

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  Ankur, that was, that was awesome.

• 17:18Shaan Puri?

  Let that sink in. Thank you. You started and ended with some major restaurant owner energy right there. Like you came in and said, I'm here to make you millions and you left with let that sink in. Thank you. I've never, I've actually never seen that and I don't know, I'm still a little shook. Sam, you take it away.

• 17:37Sam Parr?

  That was great. Yeah, I think you did a good job. Are you, is this an Indian company? Is this in India?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:43Sam Parr?

  And you're like in down, you're in downtown India right now. I could hear the, I could hear the, where are you at?

• 17:49Speaker 03

  I'm in the capital, New Delhi.

• 17:52Sam Parr?

  Nice.

• 17:52Shaan Puri?

  You, you're wearing a Y Combinator shirt. Make something people want. Is this a Y C company?

• 17:57Speaker 03

  No, my previous startup was a Y C company.

• 18:00Shaan Puri?

  And what was that?

• 18:02Speaker 03

  So this was in winter twenty one. So me and my partner, we pivoted and had a different vision for where to take the company. So I started on you.

• 18:13Shaan Puri?

  Is this company basically PillPack for India?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of, but the customer insights are a bit different. So PillPack was focused on medication management, pre-sorting, so that people can stay at home and spend more time with their family. While our focus is on to increase the medication adherence issue, which is reminding people to take their medication, timely intervention, and to make their life more easier and convenient. So I would say fifty to sixty percent PillPack, but there's more to it.

• 18:46Shaan Puri?

  And why doesn't PillPack focus on that? So is it that in India, the problem is different, like the people's behavior is different? Or why wouldn't you just do PillPack for India? PillPack's been quite successful. Is India itself not enough of a differentiator from there?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  No, so PillPack hasn't entered India because there has been a recent healthcare regulation change. So that makes it possible for India, the UHI change, similar to the UPI, if you're aware of the payments, change that happened and changed the whole fintech industry. Similarly, the UHI change is happening in India. Moreover, due to COVID, the e-pharmacy have been booming in the last three years with the CAGR of forty five percent. And with the online payments, it has made possible to get this technology out there.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Earlier in India, you know, online ordering of medicine wasn't a concept.

• 19:40Shaan Puri?

  You should change your shirt instead of make something people want. You should say, say, uh, make drugs people take. And that'll be, that'll be a head turner.

• 19:50Shaan Puri?

  What is the, um, what's the traction like? I feel like you gave us the high level problem and solution pretty well, but you didn't say much about traction. So.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  So we launched two months ago. Last month, our traction was thirteen hundred dollars. We, on an average, get an order value of two hundred dollars from our customers per month, and we have a high, very high retention rate, but the, as the sample size is very small. You know, it doesn't make sense to say it is ninety percent.

• 20:19Shaan Puri?

  Sure. And how are you going to get customers?

• 20:22Speaker 03

  So we have three channels. One is B to B. So today also, we made a B to B partnership with old age homes with whom there are 20 to 30 clients staying in their old age homes. Second one is we are pushing out the product by introducing it to the doctors through our sales channel. And third, we will be starting our influencer programs next month once our WhatsApp bot and all the technical side is, you know, on track.

• 20:46Sam Parr?

  And really important question, is that zero to one on your bookshelf?

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:51Sam Parr?

  Hmm, I'm in.

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Is that settlers of Qatar?

• 21:01Sam Parr?

  What are you, what have you been saying to American investors who say, dude, American healthcare is too complicated. I don't know anything about that, let alone another country that, you know, I may, maybe don't even know that much about.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  So I haven't reached out to the American, you know, investors yet. So this is my first pitch. I just wanted you guys to be my, you know, my investors because I love my first million and I've already received funding so that, you know, I can get into Y Combinator again. And, you know, I have a clear path for the next two years, the funding is secured. And for the American investors, as I said, you know, I haven't reached out to them yet.

• 21:41Shaan Puri?

  And you said that e pharmacies have been booming and that's, I think that's very true. I looked at investing in a, in India, you know, e pharmacy. Why don't they just do this, you know, as part of your offering where they, they're able to sort of?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  So their focus is very different. So e pharmacies right now have been working on two things out of the 15 problems we have identified. They are working on the delivery part. They want to do the delivery within three hours. There are three unicorns already in the space and the whole market right now is discounted. No one is working on what happens post-delivery of medicines. So that's the space we want to work in. And that's where we are finding a lot of interest from the people. And all our sales are mostly through word of mouth. So we are in the pre-launch phase. We just shared the product with 10 people and then, you know, we, they just shared further and now we have 250 people. And next month, we are doing a proper launch.

• 22:39Shaan Puri?

  And you said you're raising $200,000 at a $4 million cap. Is that right?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, okay, great.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  $200,000.

• 22:48Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. We're at time. We can, we can close it up. Thank you so much, Ankur. Thanks for coming on.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Sam.

• 22:55Sam Parr?

  Thanks. What do you think?

• 22:58Shaan Puri?

  I like it. I'm in. I would invest in this at pre-seed. Now, the, the, the questions I have, the things I would want to know is, he mentioned that his last company, which was YC21, that's not very long ago. It did not.

• 23:10Sam Parr?

  Not a red flag, but something to ask about.

• 23:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, you know, there is some red I see in the distance. I just don't know if it's a flag or like, you know.

• 23:18Sam Parr?

  It could be a red flag.

• 23:19Shaan Puri?

  Sign, yeah. So why, why did him and his co-founder disagree? What went into that? How did they handle it? So, you know, that seems kind of interesting. I'd like to know a little bit more about that. And I'd also like to talk to some of the e-pharmacy people. It'd be like, hey, why isn't there a PillPack for India? And just hear what they say.

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  Do you have, well, I guess you don't need an Indian-based person to like, tell you that, but do you have like a, like someone who's somewhat of an expert on India healthcare?

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I know a guy who runs one of the big e-pharmacies there. And then, just in general, you know, you, this is one, one DM away from getting that answer. So that would be the other contingency for me.

• 23:59Sam Parr?

  That's why I would pass is I don't have that. You know, I, I don't, I don't, like, you could tell, he could have told me anything about India's healthcare and I would have said, yeah, okay, cool.

• 24:09Shaan Puri?

  He's like, so India has now floated, it's next to China. You're like, oh, man, that's cool.

• 24:16Sam Parr?

  So like, he could have said anything and I just, it's really hard for me to, to, to know like what the truth is.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:22Sam Parr?

  So I don't know if I would do it. Also, tell me what you think about this. Do you think that it's a good pitch or not to say, we are PillPack of India. We are a blank but for this country?

• 24:31Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 24:31Sam Parr?

  Sometimes I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm okay with that. You don't, you don't have to like, you know. You don't have to sell

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Sam Parr?

  He really should. Don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain. Just tell me what it is.

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. He should have just told us what it is. He should have said, we're PillPack for India. PillPack has built a X billion dollar business and was acquired by Amazon and they don't operate in India because of that because of India specific regulations, like he said. So the PillPack for India is going to start in India and it's going to be us. Now, the things that we do that are similar to PillPack is blank, blank, blank. That's been validated. The part we're doing that's new is this. That's how I would have pitched that business in order to like fast, to make it faster for the, for the investor to understand the size of the prize.

• 25:12Sam Parr?

  Do you feel partial towards Indian startups?

• 25:16Sam Parr?

  More so than a non, more so, yeah, more so than like, I don't like a French startup or something?

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, kind of. Like, I think I know a little bit more about the market. I've been there. I've, you know, family there. I've now invested in a bunch of companies there. So it all just builds over time. But also, it's a humongous market that has just had those like, you know, what do you call those? Like inflection points or whatever? Basically, a billion people all got mobile phones with internet in the last like couple of years. And that's just like, it's a before, it's a dramatic before and after. And so, you know, serving that market and building solutions for that market is really awesome. Like now is a, it's a golden cohort of companies because they're all riding the back of this thing where one company basically gave away 4G internet. Essentially a dirt, dirt cheap, cost cheaper than in America. So a lot of people got online.

• 26:04Sam Parr?

  You know what's fucked up, though, is that big company that was that, it was a big Pakistani company that like everyone was a fan of air or something. What was it called?

• 26:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, airlift or something. It's like

• 26:13Sam Parr?

  Like all, I don't know if it was you, but a bunch of my friends were like, oh, this thing's, this thing's awesome. This thing's awesome. And I remember thinking like, I don't know anything about Pakistan, but all my smart friends say this is a good idea. And I was like really interested in it. And I think I ended up passing, but it went out of business. And whether it's good or bad, that impacts whether I want to invest in a foreign company because I don't, like, it's like, oh, I don't know, man. I don't know anything about this country. So I have mixed feelings right now on, on investing in locations that I know nothing about.

• 26:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my, some of my worst investments came from, well, all these other smart people are doing it. And I don't know why they did it. I don't know if they're actually smart. I don't know if they, you know, what their assumptions are, what their context is, what they can afford to lose. And so I've made some pretty terrible decisions like that in the past. So that's famous last words for me is like, well, those other smart people are doing it.

• 27:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, sometimes that works. So it worked once for me. All right, Steve, Campus Inc. Campus Inc. College Laundry?

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Close, close, close, close.

• 27:18Sam Parr?

  I don't know, like I got like a stain on my, or like a college tattoo parlor. I don't know.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Love it. I haven't gotten that joke before, but I appreciate it. Go ahead. All right. Hey, everyone. My name is Steven. I'm the CEO of Campus Inc. We're a D to C and B to B merch platform powered by college athletes and college students. We build licensed merch platforms for universities. So every athlete in every sport has the ability to sell merch and profit off their name, image and likeness. Meanwhile, we train students on those campuses in design, sales and marketing. So they can support the athletes and sell to other organizations like the Greek system. Last year we did four and a half million dollars in sales. This year we're on pace to do seven million. Sean, you went to Duke, so I'm going to pick on you a little bit. In another world, you're a five star recruit.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Former Coach K brings you in and introduces you to your new NIL director. You have the opportunity to sell your own branded Duke merch through Campus Inc. We're talking jerseys, custom drops, limited releases. And you're going to earn anywhere between eight to $15 per item sold. Your jerseys are going to be sold in the stadium and online. And when you go to the final four, you're even going to make money on final four apparel. When you go pro, Sean, you're going to be able to sell your Duke jersey for the rest of your life. At the University of Illinois, we made our college basketball team over $100,000 in the regular season. And Mark Cuban invested in us over a cold email. He's helping us take this to every college across the country.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  So far, we have over 600 athletes in our queue. We've signed 15 schools, including Duke, UConn, Syracuse, and most of the Big 10.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Our platform solves a few significant problems. One, we noticed that universities are desperate to show they're supporting their athletes in this new NIL space. Coaches are losing recruits because other schools are moving faster. They need a solution. We have it and we're there for them. There's also over 180,000 D1 athletes who are all micro influencers and don't have the time, resources, or skills to run their own merch platform. We're there to help them. Finally, we know that traditional D to C is throttled and at the mercy of Facebook. We'd rather reward the students. We think we have an unfair advantage in acquiring customers. When we sign schools, they connect to athletes and athletes connect with fans. And that's how we sell merch at Campus Inc.

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  All right. Wow. Wow.

• 29:52Sam Parr?

  No small boy stuff.

• 29:53Shaan Puri?

  No small boy stuff, dude. I see you put me, oh wow, you're on no small boy stuff.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Hey, actually, I got a bone to pick with Sean. Or Sam, Sam, Sam, sorry. Sam, I designed you guys a merch platform. Here, check this out.

• 30:07Sam Parr?

  Oh, I remember. Dude, nice. I remember. Okay, let me, that is awesome. And I think I replied with, send me that shirt. I want it.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Well, I said, I said we could, actually, the site is live right now. I bought the domain too.

• 30:21Sam Parr?

  What is it?

• 30:22Speaker 04

  MFMpod.shop.

• 30:24Sam Parr?

  Okay. Now, let me tell you something. I wasn't trying to be an asshole to you. I'm just an asshole to everyone who sends me those.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  That's why I'm helping Sean out with the Duke stuff.

• 30:34Sam Parr?

  So I get, I don't know about you, Sean, I bet he does, and even more so. I get like five or 10 of those a week of someone saying, I wanted to buy merch, so we just like made a store for you. And I just, I politely tell them to fuck off. And I think that's what I said to you, right?

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I forwarded that to Mark as well. That's why I didn't want to come on the pod. No, I'm just kidding.

• 30:54Sam Parr?

  So now that we're friends, I'll treat you nicer.

• 30:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're crazy. We should do swag. Okay, but let's go back to his business. Let's go back to his business. Okay, so, so I really like a bunch of things about this business, but I have some questions. Okay, so, so what do I like? I like that you're basically riding the wave of this regulatory change, the NIL change that just went into effect. And that means all the businesses that need to serve that market of college athletes finally being able to monetize their name and likeness, which is what NIL is about. That all those businesses are being created, you know, last year, this year, and it sounds like you're, you were early on that wave. Couple of quick questions. Can you use the team logos like you did there? And so, so you don't need a special license for that?

• 31:35Speaker 04

  So that is a special license, but, but we go to the university and we basically pitch to them that we have an inclusive and holistic solution. So every sport, every athlete, softball, baseball, rowing.

• 31:45Shaan Puri?

  Right, good.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  They grant us the IP and then we're able to build them a whole school platform. And so, yeah, we're able to do what's called co-licensed merchandise, which is a very specific segment of licensing. And we've got those at 15 schools.

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  You're like, we've sold tens of women's lacrosse sweaters.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Well, I'll be, I'll be honest, our biggest, one of our biggest rev generators was women's softball at like Virginia Tech. The girls just crushed it and they were in like World Series and people are buying their stuff. I mean, it's not just football and basketball.

• 32:15Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 32:16Sam Parr?

  What's Learfield? Someone was saying how Learfield owns 90% of the licensing rights. And if I know nothing about it, other than three seconds on Wikipedia, if they own it, can you also get it?

• 32:29Speaker 04

  So Learfield owns collegiate licensing. We get the license from them. So they are the license clearinghouse on behalf of the university. So when we go to Duke, for instance, we talk to Duke, pitch them, they say, okay, go apply for your license. You go log on to Learfield, apply, Duke accepts it in the backend. They're just the exchange that you use.

• 32:49Shaan Puri?

  And is Learfield incentivized to let you guys grow? Like, you know, at some point, do they see this as competitive to what they do?

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Well, so, so there's different parts of Learfield. Learfield is a licensing arm for the university. So they're there to protect the IP of the university. But when we have something that's a really unique segment, it's hard for the university to say no. So if I just wanted to sell like just Duke merch, Duke would be like, no, we've got hundreds of other people doing it. But the fact that we're in a very niche vertical, the universities are more inclined to create the best opportunities for their athletes. It'd be silly for them to say no, because he'd be taking away opportunities for them.

• 33:27Shaan Puri?

  By the way, we have 500 people watching live. I think your startup has 140,000 of total interest, which is pretty dope. People in the crowd.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  It doesn't suck. I'm 30.

• 33:36Sam Parr?

  You, uh, you got that, uh, that young 22 year old dog energy. There you go. There it is. I'm a dog. Thank you for proving my point. I have a hot dog on it. Dude, put those two shirts in, in a package and please send them to me. I'll Venmo you. Um, those are awesome.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  He's like, he's like, I have a store. Just go buy it.

• 34:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Give me that coupon. Sam 100.

• 34:02Shaan Puri?

  What about, and I like you're doing this franchise model, right? So you're basically going to get like, kind of passionate, cheap labor on the campuses. Uh, and you're going to have this set up on each campus where they do the design, the marketing.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and we already have that up until NIL came about. That was our thematic approach. We teach college students design and sales. So right now we have 150 students on 40 campuses. They're really big into the Greek system, but now that we have the Greek system and sports, it makes it so much easier for our students across the country. So.

• 34:30Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So this is kind of a pivot or.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  It's just, it's just, it's just opening our opportunity because before you couldn't do really sports. Now it's, you can do just about everything.

• 34:41Shaan Puri?

  When did you, uh, start this company? And like, how much money have you already raised?

• 34:45Speaker 04

  So I bought out a little print shop right after graduating college. I had a Brian Scalabrine design go viral when I was in school. And so I had enough money to buy this little print shop out. We've since scaled that. And so we just got Mark's investment for $250,000. Other than that, everything was bootstrapped from the ground up. So this is the first time we're actually raising capital. So we still own most of the company. And we are cash flow positive. We should be profitable this year. There is like a first movers, like we got to land grab all these schools pretty quick.

• 35:18Shaan Puri?

  Okay, you got to stop Sam's getting too excited. This is a video at a family show. We can't, we can't cross the line here. So you're saying all the right words.

• 35:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, I love you. I think I love you. I I've been and my wife is definitely a no, I'm totally interested. I think you've got a lot of charisma. You got a lot of charm. You're all the story about buying a small print shop and then getting Mark Cuban via cold email. I know that it looks like you have Light Bank on board. They seem like sharks. I don't know much about them, but they seem like if you got them.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  I mean, that's Groupon. Yeah.

• 35:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So you have a very interesting energy about you. I'm definitely interested in learning more.

• 35:57Shaan Puri?

  They're telling us it's time. I got one last question for you, which is, these ideas sound fun, and I often run away from fun ideas because, you know, a bunch of people go try to do it. Maybe the opportunity is not that big because it's it's fun and sexy. The big like YouTuber merch backend stores like Fanjoy and some of these other ones like

• 36:16Sam Parr?

  They pretty much all suck, right?

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  None of them got huge. What's the difference here?

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Okay, so.

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  Fanatics got big, but that's different.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  So you have to think about like, why we're defensible is because we're essentially enabling our athletes to do the marketing for us. Right? And so if you have 300 athletes at the University of Indiana, all pushing this store, every year, the school is going to be adding more athletes. And then they're going to be pushing those into our big funnel. So like at the University of Illinois, we're sitting on 20,000 alumni emails. And now we can step up to Fanatics and start competing with them because all of our customer acquisition is rooted in the kids that are actually playing. Does that make sense?

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:54Sam Parr?

  Okay, so what's the bring?

• 36:56Speaker 04

  So Teespring is the platform, actually Walker is one of my good friends.

• 37:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  And so like a lot of our stuff, there's a small circle of us that have are raising money in the tech space and apparel. We all talk to each other. So a lot of this is calling on a lot of each other's APIs. And using a lot of the tech that's

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  What? You print through them?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  No, we could print through, like, we have our own facility, but that doesn't scale. And so our CTO actually came from a company called Printavo. Shout out Bruce Ackerman. He got acquired recently. And so we can connect to thousands of print shops across the country. And so we have the ability to connect the same way Teespring does, customing, all the bigger guys.

• 37:36Sam Parr?

  Right. Where, where, where do you live? You live in Chicago?

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Chicago.

• 37:39Sam Parr?

  Nice, dude.

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  Sam's coming over. Yeah. All right.

• 37:44Sam Parr?

  You're talking dirty to me. Midwestern guy, dude, all this stuff. I'm, I'm very interested.

• 37:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, thanks, Steven. Great job.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Talk soon. Thanks.

• 37:51Sam Parr?

  I like him, man. That guy had some charisma. I think the business is more than mildly interesting.

• 37:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. He's a good entrepreneur. You could tell that he has like a bunch of the little like green flags that you would have to be a good entrepreneur. He's got, and I think he's got a really interesting opportunity here because of the NIL change. And that's, that answers the big why now? Question. Why? Okay. The idea of printed t-shirt swag is like, you know, the oldest solution in the book, but there's a new problem. And the new problem is that all of a sudden athletes can do this. They never could, but they don't know where to start and they're not going to want to do all this infrastructure. So being the company that partners with them, that's, I think is really strong.

• 38:32Sam Parr?

  These econ plays can be freaking tough, man. Walker Williams, who

• 38:37Shaan Puri?

  The hard part here is upside, right? Like, is this, is this a billion dollar company? Is this a 100, is this a $10 billion company? There's basically no way this is a $10 billion company. Unlikely it's even a billion dollar company. So that's the hard part. He's going to raise on like tech valuation terms, right?

• 38:52Sam Parr?

  No, well.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  10 million cap right now?

• 38:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. But what is his revenue?

• 38:56Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know yet. He didn't, he didn't say. He said seven, he said seven million this year, I think he said. I mean, it's in e-comm seven million is like, not very much.

• 39:06Sam Parr?

  Right. So, but this is none, four million last year, he said, this is, it crosses the threshold. So four million last year, seven million this year, it crosses the threshold of being interesting enough to not say no, at least for me.

• 39:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. The one thing I would want to be figuring out here is, okay, cool. You're going to raise this money at 10. Are you going to raise money again? And is your, do you look, does he think about this mentally like, oh, I'm a tech founder. I'm going to raise my seed, my series A, my series B, my series C. If so, I'd have to get off the train. But if he's basically like, hey, I'm, I'm going to fund this and value this based on the category that I'm in. Which is, you know, let's say in this case, e-commerce, I think our tech-enabled e-commerce, I think that there would be a a better conversation there. So that I think that's my only concern is how big is the, is the prize? I like, I like everything he's doing, but that part's not in his control.

• 39:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Well, I felt bad for being rude to him, so I'll, I'll, I'll look at it.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  This data is wrong every freaking time.

• 40:08Speaker 06

  Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Well, I can see the client's whole history, calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.

• 40:22Speaker 06

  HubSpot, grow better.

• 40:25Sam Parr?

  All right. Next, Terra Shroom, Jared from Terra Shroom.

• 40:30Speaker 07

  What's up, guys? How we doing?

• 40:32Shaan Puri?

  What's up? Take it away.

• 40:34Speaker 07

  All right. Sam and Sean, why do people listen to my first million podcasts? Well, it's because they want to make more money. Coincidentally, Tim Ferriss says of all the billionaires I personally know, almost without exception, use mushrooms on a regular basis. So if you want to step up the podcast to my first billion, you might be interested in what we're building. So Terra Shroom is really straightforward. It's a patent pending mushroom grow chamber that is intelligent and automated. And so that way anyone can grow mushrooms at home effortlessly. And the problem is, is while a lot of people want to grow mushrooms at home, growing mushrooms is complicated and it's an eyesore. And I've been growing mushrooms for nearly six years now, so I'm speaking from my own personal experience.

• 41:16Speaker 07

  But mushrooms, they're becoming wildly popular and the space is blowing up with billions that are spent on mushrooms annually. So let's transition a bit and let's talk about product market fit where we're at. So past about two months, we spent about $4,500 in Facebook ads. And this has resulted in nearly $65,000 worth of pre-orders. And how our business model is set up, we have subscription revenue, basically gross supplies that we send every single month. When you factor this in, we're looking at over $100,000 when you factor in this subscription LTV. And this is the team that's making it all possible. So a team is stacked with deep technical, operational, and sales experience. We have multiple exits and IPOs under our belt. And one who you might even recognize is an old friend of yours, Sam, as well as former

• 41:58Speaker 07

  guest on this podcast, Justin Mears. So what we're looking for is $500,000 at a 3.25 post-money valuation. This is going to help cover all manufacturing costs, get us slated for a Q4 launch, and ultimately shipping out in Q1 of next year. So guys, if you want to be part of building a product that's helping people become happier, healthier, and maybe even produce a few more billionaires, then we'd love your help to make this happen. Thank you.

• 42:25Sam Parr?

  Dude, that Tim Ferriss quote, ambitious. That's a very rich quote. Is that real? He said every single one of his billionaire friends takes mushrooms?

• 42:36Speaker 07

  A derivative of mushrooms, we can say, but yes.

• 42:41Sam Parr?

  Interesting. Well, good pitch. It looks good.

• 42:44Shaan Puri?

  So explain what it is. It's a homebrew kit for growing shrooms?

• 42:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. Any type of mushroom species. So let me give a little bit of backup. So there's a couple of companies that are kind of in the space right now. One is Back to the Roots. They're doing over $100 million right now in revenue per year. Okay?

• 43:01Sam Parr?

  Back to the Roots is doing 100 million in revenue?

• 43:04Speaker 07

  Yep. And then there's Mudwater, there's Four Stigmatic. Basically, when you take of some companies that are in this space, they're doing nearly a quarter billion dollars from three companies alone. What we're doing right now is we have a Trojan horse. This is a beautiful grow chamber that gets people in the app ecosystem where we have awesome upsell opportunities into other verticals. The long-term play is ultimately therapeutic. So when you think of like the, the science, the research is irrefutable, legislation is changing, it's 2022, big pharma, quite frankly, they're, they're scared. They see the science. And so we just have a really, really cheap way to basically super cheap customer acquisition costs, get people in the ecosystem. Then ultimately down the line, we can almost go down to like telehealth and a lot of like, we're basically, we're not selling atoms.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  We're ultimately selling like ones and zeros or bits and bytes.

• 43:52Shaan Puri?

  So let me pause you. So you said back to the roots does a hundred million dollars and you're like, that's a comparable. But I go to back to the roots and it's like, you know, moms and their kids and they're growing plants at home is what it looks like, not like, you know, high achievers taking mushrooms to be happy because they, the money didn't make them happy.

• 44:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. Poor moms.

• 44:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. This seems like a totally different thing.

• 44:13Speaker 07

  So, so let me talk a little bit about distinct distinction. You can grow any type of mushrooms in this gourmet medicinal, other varieties as well. This is not limited to the type that you're thinking of as well as you can even grow microgreens. I mean, this is ultimately a containerized grow environment that gives you full control over all environmental settings. So there's a lot that can happen in this. And that's the exciting part is, is we have an IOT device that's connected in the home. You guys know what's happened with SodaStream, Traeger grills, doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, exact same thing. And this is exactly where we're skating to where the puck is.

• 44:48Shaan Puri?

  And so why do you pitch it like it's the like psychedelics thing versus, hey, we're SodaStream for growing like, you know, veggies or whatever the hell, like micro veggies, whatever.

• 44:58Speaker 07

  There's, there's a couple, there's a couple of people in the whole space right now when it comes to, you know, like hydroponic grow solutions for like lettuce. And I think, you know, the truth is, is like, what we're just seeing is the green rush happened a couple of years ago, about a decade ago in California, we're seeing the exact same thing happen in mushroom space. And that is where there's going to be billions and billions of dollars to be made.

• 45:23Sam Parr?

  So you can sell, I know nothing about mushrooms. You can sell that stuff?

• 45:29Speaker 07

  So here's the thing, what we are selling, just to be clear, what we are selling is just the grow chamber. We're just selling hardware and we'll say, basically sell some raw and greens you can buy from the store or what have you. And we will also sell basically the grow supplies if you want to do gourmet varieties. Fun fact, it's not something that most people don't know. You can grow, you can order any type of mushroom spore varieties. If you catch my drift, because they do not contain the psychoactive ingredient in 47 of the 50 US states. This is a legal loophole. I've been growing them for about six years, all different types. So it's something that not many people know, but it's becoming very well established.

• 46:07Shaan Puri?

  Are you on shrooms right now?

• 46:15Shaan Puri?

  Okay, this is.

• 46:17Sam Parr?

  He didn't answer.

• 46:20Shaan Puri?

  Now he's got his wits about him. Alright, okay, so you're, so you're doing this and you think that also like you're growing through paid ads and through paid ads, you're like, okay, we're not going to get, you know, blocked by Facebook for basically saying, you know, grow your own weed at home. Like, you know, that's what they wouldn't allow that, but you're going to basically be able to show this terranium, you know, this home, you know, little terrain that you're going to be able to buy.

• 46:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So actually, you know, it's funny, talking to Justin Mears, we're doing a huge pivot away from actually the whole, like anything psychedelic. So it's actually just very much like generic. So taking it very much more down a PC route to basically just grab a much wider audience.

• 46:56Sam Parr?

  Wow. Okay. So you have some interest here. You have 40k of interest, but you've, you're raising 605,000. Is that right?

• 47:07Sam Parr?

  I'm sorry, am I reading this wrong?

• 47:08Shaan Puri?

  He's raising 250k, 250k at a 3.3 million cap. 605 is like in this whole session, how many people have been interested in funding things? He's got 40k.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  And how is this business? And what's going to happen? Like where, what do you think the exit is?

• 47:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, great question. So honestly, I've just been working on this for the past few months. Everything from the CAD modeling design, you know, literally everything you've seen done myself. So basically, we're getting ready for getting some engineering validation testing. And then ultimately, exit strategy is, I mean, extremely profitable acquisitions. I mean, it's just like, the truth is, is like, we like to make money. That's why, you know, we're on this podcast, right? But there's a lot of different ways.

• 47:52Shaan Puri?

  Give us the unit economics real quick. You can make them, you can make the device for what? Yeah. Like, basically, the COGS plus the shipping is what? And what do you sell it for?

• 48:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, perfect. So what we're looking right now is $49 and some change for manufacturing. When you factor in CAC, when you factor in 3PL, basically landed cost, you're looking at about 128. MSRP is 399, and then we have a $29 a month subscription. So basically, you're looking at total about $700 for the customer LTV based off of like about a 30 some dollar CAC.

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  All right, that's time. Thank you, dude.

• 48:30Shaan Puri?

  Thanks, Jared.

• 48:33Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's crazy, man. Valuations have changed. He's raising at a $3.3 million cap. I was thinking about like the upside here.

• 48:41Sam Parr?

  It got, Angel Dustin got far more attractive in the last three months.

• 48:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, these valuations were all extremely reasonable. And I think they're all also very early stage. So these are like pre-seed type of investments, which is great because, you know, that's where a lot of money can be made. Yeah, my wife's definitely out on this one. My wife, who has never said a curse word, never drank a drop of alcohol. I don't think she's, I don't think she's a believer that.

• 49:05Sam Parr?

  Would you ever do shrooms?

• 49:09Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, probably not. I don't, I don't know.

• 49:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, I've been trying to tell my wife to do it this year. I'm like, hey, before we have kids, you should try LSD or mushrooms or something. That'd be awesome. I'm not gonna do it.

• 49:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're like, you should.

• 49:20Sam Parr?

  I'm not gonna do it. Like, the other day, we were talking about this relationship book, like, to make our relationship better. I'm like, hey, can you read this for us?

• 49:30Sam Parr?

  That's

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  I think you just identified the problem.

• 49:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's how I feel about mushrooms. Like, hey, can you do this for us? You know, it's supposed to change, change people's lives and make them feel better and happier. Can you do it for both of us? Um, yeah, this is, I, I, I would say I'm mildly interested in this as well. I, I need to learn more. I don't know. I, his answer of is this illegal to sell is still a little

• 49:55Shaan Puri?

  No, he's saying it's legal. He's, he's basically saying all we sell is hardware and then we sell raw ingredients and in 49 of the 50, whatever states.

• 50:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but he, he used the phrase. He used the phrase, if you catch my drift.

• 50:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you never, you never want to use, if you catch my drift and it's a legal loophole during your pitch, because that just sort of says, uh, you know, you're one inch away from this business collapsing.

• 50:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah. If you catch my drift, yeah, that's like, that, that's, that's really interesting to be.

• 50:24Shaan Puri?

  More than two winks in your pitch about, you know, want to be like, yeah, you know what I mean?

• 50:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah. So I, I, I need to, uh, I need to feel, um, I need to learn a little bit more.

• 50:36Shaan Puri?

  I'm out, but not for that reason. I just, uh, hardware is hard. So if I have the choice between investing in a hardware company, a software company, I'm sort of just leaning towards software unless there's a real outlier. And then on top of that, um, I don't really know this market. I don't know how real the shrooms trend is, if it's just like a L A S F, New York type of trend, uh, for this type of thing. I don't know how big.

• 50:55Sam Parr?

  Oh, way. I, I, I think it's bigger. I, I think it's, I, I, I read a couple of books about it enough.

• 51:01Shaan Puri?

  People that are going to buy a four, a four million, a $400, uh, like, you know, Nest looking, you know, clean device versus just like, you know, pay Diego across the street for like, you know, $20 for some shrooms. Like, I, I, of course, more people take shrooms, but how many people are going to do this? Like,

• 51:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a good.

• 51:18Shaan Puri?

  This like sexy homebrew situation.

• 51:20Sam Parr?

  You ever grew, dude, I grew weed in high school in a closet. Did you ever do that?

• 51:25Shaan Puri?

  Can't say I did.

• 51:26Sam Parr?

  Well, we used to like go to Home Depot and have to like buy the bulbs and stuff and like, put a lock in the closet. So your mom doesn't come into it. These things like this plus Amazon, it's like the, it's like the easiest thing ever, like to, to grow drugs. I love it.

• 51:43Shaan Puri?

  All right, we'll go to the next pitch. So I think in that case, I was out, you were a maybe. Is that right? I'm a maybe. Okay, cool. Let's do the next one. Morgan from Deal Builder.

• 51:53Speaker 08

  Hey, guys. What's going on? All right. So, um, yeah, my name is Morgan. I'm the co-founder of Deal Builder. So Sean and Sam, have you guys heard of the Baby Boomer Tsunami? It's a bit of a ridiculous name, but it's the $10 trillion of baby boomer owned businesses that are going to need to sell by 2030. The unfortunate reality is that a majority of them will fail to sell. And the reason why is because the current marketplace is confusing. It's super expensive and it's really inefficient. How do we know this? Well, over the past decade, my co-founders and I have sold over 250 businesses and have really mastered how to sell small businesses.

• 52:33Speaker 08

  And what we've found is that we've developed a proven system for successfully selling businesses. And we found the solution was to build a tech platform so we could rapidly scale and make the process more efficient and transparent. And that's what we built, Deal Builder, an online marketplace to buy and sell businesses. So what, unlike typical listing sites, Deal Builder makes the process guided through end to end, which makes deals close faster and for a fraction of the cost. We make money by taking up to a 3% platform fee of the transaction.

• 53:08Speaker 08

  So our early traction so far, we've closed four and a half million dollars worth of GMV on the platform. We have another eight and a half million under offer. And we launched the platform at the tail end of 2021. And currently that's been a year to date revenue of about 80,000. We have another 65 million that's listed on the platform right now. And we're projected to hit a billion of GMV listed on the platform by the end of 2023. That represents another, at our current 65 million listed, about 600,000 on the platform. And to put in the context that 80,000 of year-to-date revenue, we're doing, we did 24 and a half in August,

• 53:51Speaker 08

  and we anticipate that a similar amount in September as well. So we're just getting started as those deals are starting to land. Our lead investor is friend of the pod, Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny. We've secured 450,000 of Canadian dollars in funding, and we're looking to raise another 250,000 to scale this and take on this chilling dollar problem. And we wanted to have that chilling air grindset mindset from you guys on the cap table as well.

• 54:19Sam Parr?

  What's the conversion of 450,000 Canadian dollars to real money?

• 54:23Speaker 08

  Oh, it's like you guys are paying like 20, 20 or 30 bucks, I think.

• 54:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah. I was just, I couldn't figure it out, like what Monopoly money to USD is.

• 54:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, I think that in actuality, I think that's probably like 150, I think, or maybe a little bit more US, something like that.

• 54:40Sam Parr?

  Really? Okay. Dude, this is awesome. Your site is great. I think your branding is really, is really slick and cool. It's not, you know, micro acquire, I think, maybe it's because Andrew is just being controversial on Twitter. I don't think that he's appealing to maybe all the right people. I, I think that what you're doing is incredibly intriguing. It's, this is very interesting. Why haven't you raised from, from more people? This seems like a pretty big opportunity and you only listed Andrew. He's great, but that's just one person.

• 55:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we started out bootstrapped. Like, we actually just built this for ourselves for the first little while. And then we kind of just saw, we pivoted the business model. At first, it was just like, all right, small businesses that weren't a good fit for our brokerage, you go and use this and pay like a nominal fee. And then we're like, wait, this works with bigger deals. And why not just expand this? And that's when we decided to raise. So that's, we're kind of seeing that blue ocean right now and kind of going after it.

• 55:35Sam Parr?

  Have you talked to all of our nerdy friends? Like, well, you're talking to me and Sean. Have you talked to Cody? Have you talked to Nick Huber? Have you talked to all of our buddies who are all like these influencers around this stuff?

• 55:46Speaker 08

  Not Nick Huber. I've exchanged the ends with Cody, but I haven't finalized something. But I also talked to Xavier recently as well, who's really in the space. And everybody's like, yeah, this is absolutely needed.

• 55:57Sam Parr?

  Well, like amongst our little like circle jerk group of friends who talk about buying boring businesses. I think you have, you'd have a nice little influencer, at least not like, not a game changing, but maybe a little game changing. But anyway, I would probably invest a little bit. I would like to learn more and do some due diligence, but this is really, really cool.

• 56:15Shaan Puri?

  When, how big is Buy Biz Sell?

• 56:19Speaker 08

  Yeah. So Biz Buy Sell, or whatever way you want to do it is, so it's owned by CoStar and CoStar owns LoopNet. And they're a public company. I think they did 2.1 billion of revenue, but they're just listing. They don't take any transactional fees. So our difference with Biz Buy Sell is that the, I think, Businesses for Sale is another competitor. They do 100 and they had 160,000 listings in 2019, but they don't, they probably do, you know, 5 million revenue because they don't take any piece of the transaction. So the, their value capture is so low to what they actually could be delivering on, but they're just a listing site. So they only just send buyer leads. They don't actually help guide through the acquisition.

• 57:02Sam Parr?

  Sean, why'd you ask about that versus like FE International?

• 57:06Shaan Puri?

  Because it seems like that's the closest comp, right? Business for the types of businesses you're selling. Like when I go to your site, I see like chocolate shop, IT services company. So like micro requires trying to do SaaS.

• 57:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, we untouched it.

• 57:17Shaan Puri?

  Specifically. And FE International is doing larger deals that are using basically like a, kind of like a private banker. Whereas it looks like this is kind of like how the SMBs are going to trade hands is what you're trying to do. Is that, is that accurate?

• 57:32Speaker 08

  Yeah. And FE International could be a client of ours. So we have a brokerage, like a white label side. So our brokerage now runs all of our deals through Deal Builder and pays a small percentage of every completed deal. And we do their whole back office for them. So they don't have, so with brokers, your cash flows like this because it's in between each commission. So now they're only paying when deals actually come through. So brokers have just kind of like flooded to it and asked to be on the platform, which is really cool.

• 57:57Sam Parr?

  I think more than anything, I'm invested, I'm, I'm interested in them. I mean, I think your brand is cool. You seem nice and great and competent. I think that I'm interested in the macro trend. Yeah, you're handsome, like a baby golf lundron. Yeah, like a little Ivan Drago. I think that. I think that this macro trend is really cool and I would like to take a part of that.

• 58:19Shaan Puri?

  So how do you get the crank going? So how are you going to get a bunch of buyers and sellers onto this platform? Like, what does that take? I'm sure it's a bunch of brute force at the beginning, but what you're doing to make that happen?

• 58:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the sell side is harder than the buy side. Buyers are everywhere. Like, everyone thinks buyers is the problem, but it's super easy to find them and it's free to sign up. So really low friction. Feel free to sign up watchers. And so on the seller's side, we've really grown by referrals. So accountants, other brokers, so brokers refer deals to the platform as well. And then just awareness, like people don't know that these solutions exist. So it's actually really nice from a marketing perspective. You just say, hey, you can sell your business on our platform. They're like, great. I had no idea. I thought my business wasn't worth anything. So it's really just getting awareness and getting into the right centers of influence. And I think like you're talking about with some of those influencers, I think can make a really big difference.

• 59:10Sam Parr?

  And your revenue this year is going to be a couple hundred thousand. Is that right?

• 59:13Speaker 08

  Yeah, likely. It's a little bit hard to predict when the timing of deals will close, but in our pipeline of 600,000 right now, I know a couple hundred thousand that will close for sure. And just in the quality of the businesses. And we've already done 80, 82, yeah, 80,000 this year.

• 59:30Sam Parr?

  How have you paid the bills on your team? It looks like on your website, it looks like you got a bunch of people listed.

• 59:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, the three co-founders, I'm the active operating co-founder. The other two co-founders are really kind of advisor and investor roles. So they were and help out with some of the with the actual kind of like breaking down the brokerage process. And then so there's two developers, myself and a marketing person. One of them is on Matt Leib right now. But yeah, so it's like, there's like four of us right now that are on payroll.

• 1:00:02Sam Parr?

  Sick. Well, thank you. This is awesome. I'm, I would like to learn more.

• 1:00:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, same. All right. Thanks, Morgan. Good job.

• 1:00:08Sam Parr?

  Sean, the thing you said at the end?

• 1:00:11Sam Parr?

  Little funky, little funky.

• 1:00:13Shaan Puri?

  About the team not being the team?

• 1:00:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the team not being the team. That's it. That freaks me out a little bit because in a couple of years, when things start working out well, if I'm that kid, I'm gonna say, well, what the hell, man? You're not even working here. Why do you deserve this equity? And, uh, you know, like there's anger and-

• 1:00:30Shaan Puri?

  We don't know that they have equity. Uh, we don't know how much.

• 1:00:32Sam Parr?

  They're listed as a co-founder.

• 1:00:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but that might just be like, it seems like, so if you go to their website, there's this like stock photos of like, you know, happy people holding, you know, coffees and like clipboards. And like, um, you know, it seems like maybe he just buffed up the team to be like, look, our team has tons of experience.

• 1:00:50Sam Parr?

  No big deal.

• 1:00:51Shaan Puri?

  So if it's a website marketing thing, okay, that's fine. But if it's actually on the cap table or it's in the deck and then you're in the deck and say, here's our awesome team with tons of experience. Oh, I'm the only one who actively works on this. That's when I'm like, okay, hold on. How many other things in this deck do I need to question? So I think that's a little bit of a, uh, you know.

• 1:01:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's all I'm saying. I don't think it's a red flag. I'm just saying I would want to dig in just a little bit more on that.

• 1:01:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:17Sam Parr?

  But that guy just raised $250,000, it said. It said he was raising 250 and he got 250 of interest. So good for him.

• 1:01:22Shaan Puri?

  We have crossed a million dollars of total interest for this session. So, um, when you talk about moving, moving weight, when you talk about bringing size, when you talk about really hitting the hammer.

• 1:01:37Sam Parr?

  About that?

• 1:01:38Shaan Puri?

  When you talk about those things, you're talking about us. All right, let's go to the last pitch. It is Tim from Field Complete. All right, Tim.

• 1:01:49Speaker 09

  Hey, guys. Um, Field Complete is a free app for your local plumber or electrician to run their business. Uh, they live in our app and we become their bank over time. Uh, we found a very unique wedge into this market.

• 1:02:04Speaker 09

  As you know, rentership in the U.S. is on the rise. Over 35% of all homes are rented and it's growing. It all started back in 08 when, uh, all the foreclosed homes or, or most of them were bought out by Wall Street or rented. Pair that with like the short-term rental Airbnb craze and millennials not being able to- Or wanting to own, heck, now even like VCs are buying real estate portfolios right through Adam Newman. So all these homes need to be professionally maintained by property managers and property managers use contractors and subcontractors to maintain them. And so the problem is that traditionally contractors would either focus on the residential sector with homeowners or the commercial jobs. And with property managers entering the single family rental scene, as a contractor, you're basically either forced to

• 1:02:46Speaker 09

  bootstrap your operation or seven different apps to run your business or you resort to pen and paper, which is basically eighty percent of contractors today. And actually, my co-founder experienced this problem firsthand when he transitioned his construction company. He tried the seven, seven different app route, ended up building his own. And only after the subs and the property manager started asking like, hey, what software are you using? We realized how huge this problem is. So in a nutshell, Phil Complete is a free software for your local home service contractor to run their business. And over time, we essentially become their point of sale, their bank, their credit card. Think of it like a Shopify for the home service contractor. As far as traction goes, we raised a small pre-seed to rebuild the app. We launched at the beginning of this year, have over two hundred contractors on the platform,

• 1:03:27Speaker 09

  serviced over nineteen thousand homes, over five million in GMV this year, on track to do ten million. We're only currently monetizing the actual revenue on the merchant services. So anytime a credit card is swiped, and there we're on track to do a little over a hundred K this year. We're raising a two point five million seed to integrate banking into the solution at job sharing, which basically gives us more users, pilot with a property manager and integration and hire some support reps. And this note, we know this model works well because ever since we've removed the SaaS fees, we've been getting about three to four companies signing up organically every day. So I'll open it up for questions.

• 1:04:08Sam Parr?

  Tim, you and I have interacted a bunch online, haven't we?

• 1:04:12Speaker 09

  Yes, we did.

• 1:04:14Sam Parr?

  I know your, I know your face, but we've never hung out, have we?

• 1:04:18Speaker 09

  Not yet.

• 1:04:20Sam Parr?

  Well, what's, what's going on? Nice to meet you. This is a cool, congratulations. When was the, the first raise that you did?

• 1:04:27Speaker 09

  Yeah. So the first raise was a year and a half ago, about almost two years.

• 1:04:33Shaan Puri?

  Tim, why no deck?

• 1:04:36Speaker 09

  We went with the no deck, the deck's attached to the thing, distraction.

• 1:04:42Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right, sounds good.

• 1:04:46Sam Parr?

  Are you running out of money now?

• 1:04:48Speaker 09

  No, we have enough, we have more than like seven months of runway and this round is coming together. So we have a lead for this round. It's we're basically mostly we're going to close it in the next month or two here. So we have a lead, all the investors from pre-seed basically exercise their pirata into the round. And we have some new investors coming in.

• 1:05:07Sam Parr?

  And how much is, how many people will work there and what's your spend each month roughly?

• 1:05:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, so total theme size is 18 right now. We burn about 60 to 70 K a month.

• 1:05:20Sam Parr?

  In net burn?

• 1:05:22Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Sam Parr?

  And you're raising how much?

• 1:05:25Speaker 09

  We're doing, we're raising 2.5.

• 1:05:30Speaker 09

  We can potentially oversubscribe it, but we think that's enough money for us to get to like the next stage.

• 1:05:37Sam Parr?

  And last question on that, what's the next stage?

• 1:05:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, so next stage is basically this money will get us to either default alive or raise a bigger growth round. Like we're on track, so right now the companies are signing up organically through subcontracting. And so the user base is growing on its own. We literally only have two support reps on the team right now. And that's like customer acquisition in this space is tough because it's SMB and it's fragmented, right? And so we found this wedge where through property managers, they they work with multi-trade contractors and they sub jobs to each other on our platform. And that and we get more and more users this way signing up on their own. And so therefore our CAC is not as high, like we don't spend money on CAC, basically.

• 1:06:24Speaker 09

  All the users that we currently have on the platform were organic.

• 1:06:28Shaan Puri?

  So say that again. So how many users do you currently have on the platform? And over what period of time were they acquired?

• 1:06:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, so for this year, we've had about 500 contractors sign up. Of those, basically 200 are active. And then this, like, some contractors are daily active, weekly active, monthly. We're tracking all of that. The daily active are the ones that live inside our software. The weekly and monthly are the ones that would basically use the app like to receive work and perform work from the contractor. So they're just using it to basically receive a job and do it. With the new feature that I was talking about, the job sharing that we're going to release, they're going to get a full fill complete account as well. And they'll be able to use it for all the third party work.

• 1:07:12Sam Parr?

  And right now, you're keeping 1% of the money that goes through you guys?

• 1:07:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, so merchant services were out like when we were raising our preseason, we were thinking it's going to be up to 1%. We're doing like, and the deck says 1.07, the actual is 1.26.

• 1:07:29Speaker 09

  Right now.

• 1:07:29Sam Parr?

  But with a goal of 10%.

• 1:07:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, so, yes, the answer is yes. And the way we get there is we're going to release the, in like Q1, the banking solution that's going to average out to about 2%. There's other fintech offerings we can layer on top, basically like settling invoices earlier, kind of the way Deal does it, and other fintech offerings there. And then from there, we want to pilot with a property manager, integrate with them, and give them our book of contractors to dispatch work to. And they will give their book of contractors back to us, right? And so.

• 1:08:03Shaan Puri?

  Let me ask you a question. When you internally, forget about the pitch, when you look at the health of your business, what is the number one KPI? So what is the main KPI for you?

• 1:08:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're measuring GMV across the board because that's what we can monetize. We can add layers of monetization in terms of like marketplace fees.

• 1:08:24Shaan Puri?

  So the GMV is your number one metric and GMV matters because that's what flows through your app directly?

• 1:08:30Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:08:31Shaan Puri?

  So you're saying GMV matters because I take 1% of GMV?

• 1:08:35Speaker 09

  Yes, today, yes, 1.26%. Then, and we, without increasing the user base, we can layer more offerings on top of that and increase the revenue as it scales.

• 1:08:47Shaan Puri?

  What is the math come out there? So you've basically, the last year, you've done like 70K of revenue? Something like that? 5.7 million of GMV and then you multiply that by 1.26, is that right?

• 1:08:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, so for this year, right, this past year, we did, we had about 5.7 GMV to date. We're at about 42,000 in revenue already. We will be, at the end of the year, basically at 100, over 100K.

• 1:09:15Shaan Puri?

  So I personally, I like the concept of what you're doing, which is basically the, you know, the sort of workflow slash, you know, how to run your business if you're a blue collar contractor here. I really like that concept. But what I don't like about this pitch is I'm just confused as to like how big your business is. I feel like you threw a bunch of numbers. You're like, oh, we service 19,000 homes, 5.7 million in GMV. These sound really big, but what's the reality? The reality is you have 200 active users and you made $40,000 in revenue this year, right? That's the reality of the situation and I feel like that was so buried in this that I'm like, for me personally, that's too much work to get to an understanding of your business, which tells me that the, that the business, if the business itself was super compelling, you would have just led with

• 1:10:00Shaan Puri?

  the more clear, easy to understand metrics that are like, not like, we serve 19,000 homes, which is a total of 43,000 people because four people live in the home. It's like, oh dude, like, I don't know, well, I don't know what these numbers are, but they're irrelevant to what your actual business is.

• 1:10:15Sam Parr?

  Is your growth keeping you up at night right now? What's keeping you up at, keeping you up at night? Where you think like, fuck, things are going well, which everyone at all stages of the business. So I'm not saying it for you, but just like, you're, I'm not saying you have this only, everyone has it. So what are you saying that about?

• 1:10:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, so growth has actually been very good because we're getting organic users. We're not paying anything for these users. The pie is growing on itself.

• 1:10:38Shaan Puri?

  How can you say that? You have 200 active users. How could you say growth is very good?

• 1:10:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the reason why it's good is because we spend basically no money acquiring them, right? So we're getting two to three companies.

• 1:10:48Shaan Puri?

  That's what I'm saying. I have, you know, I have, I have so many friends. I have three friends, but I don't go out, so it's no problem. You know, it's like, well.

• 1:10:55Sam Parr?

  My muscles are really good for not working out.

• 1:10:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I can do two reps, but I never work out. It's like, well, the point was to have really strong muscles. The point for you is to have a lot of customers. Maybe you should be spending to get more customers, right?

• 1:11:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, so where we're at now is like, we're onboarding customers, like I said, that are coming in. And then as far as in terms of revenue, it trickles in a bit later when it's a fintech solution, right? So that, that's, that might be a concern for an investor, but our investors are aligned with us. Like if we were to turn on SaaS fees today, right, would make like around $400,000 to $500,000 in ARR. But we're purposefully keeping them low. So when they subcontract, there's no barrier to entry. And then we monetize the financial layer. And so because of that, it's basically we're prioritizing growth over immediate revenue, right? At this moment. And so that's our strategy again, and our investors are aligned with it.

• 1:11:54Shaan Puri?

  I would argue, so you're basically saying we're not charging because we don't want to have a barrier to entry. Any business that doesn't charge is going to get that benefit. But then you should see awesome growth, right? And so that's, that's, that would be the counter argument. The counter argument would be, okay, you've sacrificed 400, 500,000 in revenue, like you're saying. And what have you gotten in return? It's some, you know, 200 active, 500 total registered users. If you had just spent, just charged and actually had 400,000 in revenue, you could go, if you spent that money on advertising, you could probably have, you know, 10 times more users. So I don't know. I guess for me, those parts don't add up personally because I, and I'm saying this too, just because, you know, on the show, there's a lot of people listening and said they want to hear the full thought process, which is,

• 1:12:41Shaan Puri?

  I think in general, you want to have a capital efficient business. It seems like you might have spent, you've raised 1.6 million to date. Is that correct? Yeah, so in this round already and yeah. Or like, okay, in the life of the company, how much money has been like burned total? Yeah, total burn is like, we've burned about 1.8 to date. Right. So what I would say is, okay, if I knew nothing else about your business, I would say here's a business that has burned 1.8 million dollars to achieve 200 customers and 50,000 of revenue this year. That's the harsh truth about like the business now. That doesn't mean you don't invest. There might be tons of other reasons why that that burn was on infrastructure, building product,

• 1:13:23Shaan Puri?

  building a brand, whatever. There are other reasons, but like just sort of objectively speaking, that would be my main issue. And I give you that feedback because maybe you can look at your model slightly, if others share that point of view, maybe they don't, maybe they do. But if others share that point of view, then you could say, all right.

• 1:13:40Shaan Puri?

  The feedback from the investor market is that I need to either have an impressive user number or an impressive revenue number. You know, and maybe I should double down on one of those areas and do things slightly differently.

• 1:13:51Sam Parr?

  The stocks guys are saying we gotta end this this particular presentation. Tim, we appreciate you a lot. Coming on. This is awesome. Thank you.

• 1:13:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Sam, Sean, thanks. Thanks, thanks. Sorry if I was too harsh, buddy.

• 1:14:02Sam Parr?

  Dude, I hate doing this because I agree with everything you say. I hate, I don't want to rip on someone, but here's the, here's the thing.

• 1:14:11Sam Parr?

  I think the business could be great. I think maybe there's a chance that he just kind of missed the pitch a little bit. But

• 1:14:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that that could totally be the case and or we misunderstood, right? Because without a deck, you're trying to follow it while you're trying to read the chat while you're trying to look for the company's metrics and you go to their website. So it's very easy to miss things during that process. So that might be on us. And the other part of it is

• 1:14:34Sam Parr?

  Some information, the the lead was buried. When the lead is buried, I get, I get a a spidey thing goes off where I'm like, I'm nervous. What am I nervous about here? Now, that doesn't mean that it's always the case or that he meant to do that. But he could have just been nervous or something because there was a lot of people watching, but there's something, the pitch, the pitch was missed.

• 1:14:54Shaan Puri?

  And I feel like, you know, on one hand, I'm like you, what you said, which is just like, dude, I hate kind of saying, you know, something not positive to an entrepreneur because I know how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and be a founder.

• 1:15:05Sam Parr?

  I don't mind doing it when it's just me and them.

• 1:15:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, especially in this, this format. But you know, if you sign up to do this, if we, us signing up to do this publicly and a founder signing up to this publicly, that's the point, right? The point of this is it's, you're putting yourself out there. There's a risk and reward with that. I think you have to know that going in. But, but I think the, you know, the best thing that can happen is if you, I don't know if I'm right, but if I was, it would be short, it would be a little pain today for a lot more, you know, benefit down the road, right? Hard today, easy later. If we just keep it easy now and say, oh, this looks really interesting. We'd love to chat more and just bounce.

• 1:15:40Sam Parr?

  No, I mean.

• 1:15:40Shaan Puri?

  You never know what, why we might not want it.

• 1:15:44Sam Parr?

  You, you, you nailed it, which was, answered the question, why it's, it was 1.5 million or eight, 1.8 million for 200 customers and 80,000 or 160,000, whatever it was in revenue. There is a good answer, or there could be a good answer to that, which is like, dude, we're building the software. It takes forever. But once these guys get on us, they like are hooked forever and they tell their friends and like, here's what, here's how we grow. And here's how the math looks like. I just think that he kind of didn't present that wonderfully, even if the truth is good.

• 1:16:15Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right. Okay. So I don't know. Are we doing anything else here?

• 1:16:19Sam Parr?

  No, that's it.

• 1:16:20Shaan Puri?

  Last pitch. Thank you to everybody who showed up. That was, that was great. I think there was at least two companies in there that I know I would, I'm going to follow up with.

• 1:16:27Sam Parr?

  Which ones?

• 1:16:29Shaan Puri?

  Campus Inc. I thought was really interesting.

• 1:16:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Shaan Puri?

  And PillPack one was really good, too. I think those are my, my top two. What about for you?

• 1:16:37Sam Parr?

  I think I like Campus Inc. And I like the business. What was the?

• 1:16:41Shaan Puri?

  Oh, Deal Builder. Deal Builder also is a good one.

• 1:16:43Sam Parr?

  Deal.

• 1:16:44Shaan Puri?

  And all of the valuations are fantastic. Deal Builder's at 4 million.

• 1:16:47Sam Parr?

  Deal Builder's interesting. Well, this last one was at 21 million. That's why I asked him when he last raised was, he raised 18 or 24 months ago when, when things were hot and.

• 1:16:58Shaan Puri?

  And if your valuation is 21 million, the bar is higher on what you need to deliver, right? The PillPack guy's like, ah, we got 2,000, you know, he said like, we've made $1,500 in revenue or something like that, but he launched two months ago and he's raising at like a three or four million dollar cap, right? So you don't push as hard on that.

• 1:17:18Sam Parr?

  Like, when I think about what I'm doing with my personal money right now, I'm like, man, like, I think some of these tech stocks, like, or just a, just a total index is just a little, like, underpriced at the moment. And I think, like, there's gonna be some upside. And then I look at, like, a $20 million company and I'm like, okay, what, this is still super high risky, and it needs to have a fairly good outcome to make the risk worth it for me. Whereas a $4 million deal with just one guy working on it, you know, it's like, you know, that could actually survive a little bit, maybe higher likelihood it could survive and it, and the return could be great. So, anyway, that's where I am. This is, I love that the chat here. These people are such, like, there's so many funny people and, like, interesting, smart people.

• 1:18:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the chat makes it a lot of fun. Like, Henry just now just goes, he's like, this, this, this, this pitch was WLD, whole lot of dogs.

• 1:18:14Sam Parr?

  I love this, man. These guys are great. So I, I almost kind of want to have, like, do a pod every once in a while. We have a live chat. This is actually quite good.

• 1:18:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, maybe we should. And thanks for coming out. If people like this, Stox, I think this is the second time we've done this live pitch. If it's cool, we'll do it again.

• 1:18:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, these guys, Stox, like, I'm biased here, but I'm impressed every time I go on their platform. It is cool, isn't it?

• 1:18:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's pretty sweet. So

• 1:18:39Sam Parr?

  That's not like such a pitch, sorry, but it's really cool.

• 1:18:43Shaan Puri?

  Where at 1.3 million of total interest was expressed. So they really did help these companies raise money. Pretty dope. 500 people were here kind of hanging out. And, all right, that's it. We're out of here.