This Week in Startups - AI for Investors, Publisher Rewards, Sleep Tech & More – 2024 Jam with JCal Recap | E2032

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

In this episode we look back at all the Jam with JCal sessions from 2024. This is where startups pitch their groundbreaking ideas to Jason, covering everything from AI-driven investor tools and gamified publisher rewards to sleep tech and architecture compliance software. Watch as these innovative founders get unfiltered feedback and game-changing advice! Don’t miss these exciting pitches that could be the next big thing. * Timestamps: (0:00) Alex kicks off the show, setting the stage for our "Jam with JCal" season recap, focusing on startups using .TECH domains. (0:53) Jason discusses the origins of the Jam with JCal sessions and how Travis from Uber inspired the format. (1:39) Ramsey Shaffer presents Uptrends AI, explaining how it helps financial advisors manage and stay ahead of market news. (17:24) Ana Malhotra introduces Rome, a yard-sharing service for dogs. (32:24) Tyce Herrman talks about Ullama, software for architects that analyzes 3D building models for code compliance, highlighting their journey and challenges. (44:56) Ulan Abdurazakov presents CorePod, an AI-powered device designed to help users get better sleep with personalized voice interaction (57:25) Elliot Easterling presents Bonbon, a rewards platform for publishers to boost engagement through gamification, and discusses their go-to-market strategy. * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Get your .TECH domain here: https://get.tech/ Check out Uptrends AI:https://www.uptrends-ai.tech/ Check out the Rome app: https://theromeapp.tech/ Check out Ulama: https://www.ulama.tech/ Check out CorePod: https://www.corepod.tech/ Check out Bonbon: https://bonbon.tech * Follow Ramsey: X: https://x.com/RamseyShaffer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramseyshaffer/ * Follow Ana: X: https://x.com/TheAnaMalhotra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-malhotra/ * Follow Ulan: X: https://x.com/defoemark LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulanbek-abdurazakov/ * Follow Tyce: X: https://x.com/tycecycle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyceherrman/ Follow Elliot: X: https://x.com/e_easterling LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliotteasterling * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Hey, everybody, Alex from This Weekend Startups here. Today's episode is a special one. We are going to wrap up Jam with JCal for the season. Now, if you're new to the show, Jam with JCal became a staple over the last couple of months, it's where some of the most promising startups out there, all using Dot Tech domains, had the chance to brainstorm on the show with Jason Live and tackle their biggest challenges on the road to success. The segment has been a hit, so today we're doing a recap of all the jams that have aired. If you missed one, don't worry, we got you.

Lots of Jason coming your way. Before we get started, though, I do want to say a shout out to DotTech domains for sponsoring Jam with JCal, because, you know, for any tech company out there, dot tech is a pretty reasonable domain to pursue. So please sit back, enjoy this episode, and I'll see you on the other side. All right, everybody. It's time for another jam session with JCal. This is a very simple project that I came up with.

This is my invention. No, it's not actually. You know who's an invention it is? Travis from Uber used to do something called the Jam Sesh. And it was just like a couple of founders getting together, we hang out, you know, pop up with a couple of coal ones and talk about business and jam out on ideas. Man, it was some of the best times they ever had and we're bringing it back to this week in startups.

And we have got a partner on this program. The partner is dottech domain names. and they came up with a simple idea. Hey, listen, if you got under 2 million in funding and you got a dot-tech domain name, which is a really cool domain name to have, you get to come on the program if you've got a great idea and a great company.

And so today, we're going to hear from Ramsey Schaefer, and he is the CEO and co-founder of Uptrends AI, and they are Uptrends-a-i.com. Ramsey, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, J-Cal. Excited to jam. Okay, let's jam out. Why don't you start just telling us for, you know,

two minutes about your company, run us through, show us the product, whatever you want to do. And then tell me, what's the most challenging part of your business? Three, two, go. Sweet. Okay, I've got some slides. Love to just get your raw feedback on them. And then I've got some questions that we can get into.

Feedback on the deck. I get that a lot. Feedback on the deck. You can use this deck to raise money or you just want to explain the product? To raise money. Yeah, intro call. Got it. Okay, good.

So the audience for this is seed funds, I assume. You're a seed-state startup. So great. Three, two, go. All right. I'm Ramsey. I'm the founder of, of uptrends, we help financial advisors stay ahead of the news.

So, this is Zach. He's an independent financial advisor, and a few times each day he'll get an email from a client asking him something like, you know, John Deere is up 5% today, why? Or I saw Nike fell 20% last week, what's going on? So he'll go to Google, he'll go to Twitter, he'll go to Morningstar for some headlines, but more often than not, he's left scrambling to get back with a solid answer. Now imagine, multiply this by dozens of clients, hundreds of stock. thousands of daily news events, and you can see how this becomes a huge time-consuming part

of Zach's week, and frankly, it's holding him back from being a better advisor with more clients. So we're introducing Uptrends, the AI assistant automating the news cycle for investment advisors. Uptrends monitors, thousands of news sites, filings, and financial data sources to detect, summarize, and alert Zach about the trends and events affecting the stocks that matter to him and his clients. With Uptrans, he can easily see which stocks are trending in online chatter. He can click into those stocks and get an AI summary of recent market moving events, which he can then directly send to his clients, things like John Deere's up 5% today because they got an analyst upgrade from, you know, UBS. Most importantly, he can set instant, highly customizable alerts to be notified about the next big event.

Just choose the stocks he cares about, pick the types of alerts he wants to receive from price changes to insider trading, set the frequency he wants to be notified, and we'll send him an AI summary via email about the chatter when it matters. So ultimately what used to take him hours now takes him minutes. Uptrans makes it 10 times easier to stay ahead of market moving events and find the answers he needs right away without any doom scrolling or fomo required. Uptrans operates as a premium monthly subscription. Anyone can get started for free. And then we have premium plans for more customizable higher volume alerts. We have a $15 essentials package for a DIY portfolio managers and a $50 pro package catered towards investment advisors. like SAC. Now, there are 300,000 investment advisors in the U.S. today, along with millions of

DIY portfolio managers and retail investors. So for us to get from here to 10 million in ARR, we need to get to something like 16,000 advisors on our pro plan. And to get to 100 million in ARR, we need to get to 166,000 advisors. Last but not least, our team consists of myself as CEO and my co-founder, Sam as CTO. Sam and I have 10 years experience as stock market investors. Together, we've written peer-reviewed research on the relationship between new sentiment and stock market outcomes. I've previously been a financial analyst and Sam was employee number one of a 10 million ARR startup. We're rounded out by our PhD machine learning lead Joe and our front-end developer, Hamsa. That is Up Trends AI. We're on a mission to save investment advisors from the

news to help them build better relationships with more clients by staying ahead of the chatter when it matters. Thank you. Okay. So there are great job, by the way. overall, the pitch is tight in that it explains to me what you do, who your customer is, and what the product is. So, when you do these pitches, especially in a condensed format, two or three minutes, you really have a very small number of boxes you need to check. This is not a 30-minute presentation. This is a three-minute or less presentation, which is, you know, to be honest, all an investor needs to start a conversation. Okay, the customer of this product is a financial advisor. And there are registered investment advisors, there are wealth managers, there are financial advisors. There's a lot of different categories here.

But it's for somebody who manages another person's portfolio. And it's a B2B to C type product. There's B2B, there's B2C. You're enabling a business to talk to a customer in the same way Shopify is. you would say Shopify allows somebody selling stuff on the internet to then reach customers. Fantastic. These businesses tend to be great because you're enabling of an existing business to do more business, to do business more efficiently or to save money, one of those things.

And so here you've identified a problem. Do I think you've identified a big problem? I'm not sure yet. Your advisors will tell you, but we know that these advisors get paid a lot of money, right? What does the average wealth manager make in the United States? What is the median wealth manager make? What is their compensation per year? I know each client for them is an average of $10,000 in the door.

Okay, every year. Yep. Okay. So if they have, but if they have 100 clients, that's a million dollars a year. And you know what? I see these guys and gals who are, and they come at me all the time. Silicon Valley guy. I'm a whale for them.

But, you know, they're growing after also my mom and my dad. dad, you know, there's somebody who helps them. And so, you know, people have a retirement account. They got some, you know, 401k and they got some equities, you know, but save them money, you know, and these guys make one percent of it. One percent of a million dollars, ten thousand dollars. Got it. Okay. So, and there's lots of millionaires. That's growing because equities are growing. And America has a large number of millionaires. UA.E has the most imported millionaires right now, in terms of where millionaires are flowing. So I do think, this sounds crazy.

If you want to raise money, one of the easiest places for you to raise money is to move to Abu Dhabi or Dubai and put your company there because that's like kind of the new Hong Kong or New York and you can get a golden visa and you can get them to invest 250K, 500K, out of the gate, boom.

They do that for like almost any American or European or somebody from Singapore, Australian, that Indian that comes and puts their company, there. So I'm just going to put that as a little caveat there because money is moving to Abu Dhabi specifically and then also Dubai to amazing cities. Let's put that on the side here. I think the product looks okay. I think it needs a bit of a design refresh. It's a little bit too techy and not finance. I want to just talk to you about design for a second. I actually have a

question around that. Yeah. Okay, tell me your question. So speaking of design, I'm thinking a lot about our team right now. We're a team of four getting ready to fundraise. Yeah. And you've talked a lot in the past about the importance of your founding team. But thinking about what's next, my question is like those two to three next specific job functions or hires, where should we be focusing? Well, let's talk about the four you got. I'm hoping two of them are writing code. Four of us are writing code. God, I'm in love it your company already.

You got four people writing code. How many of them are founders? How many of them are employees with stock? Two founders, two employees with stock. Perfect. That's great. So you got some redundancy there. You can basically, there's going to be two more positions you have to add at some point.

One is going to be somebody to do sales. And that person right now should be one of the founders. Why should you do founder-led sales? Because you need to know, you need to have customer zero, customer one, two, three, and you've got to be able to listen to them. So let's pause for a second here. Tell me about how many paying customers you have and how much you charge ballpark and how do you charge?

Yeah, so right now we have a few hundred paying customers. Two paid plans, a $15 a month and a $50 a month. I will say originally we were more focused on the B2B retail investor. And after feedback, we've learned a lot about focusing on the pros. You made the Cardinal sin. We did. Of all startups. But we've learned.

You tried to run two different businesses concurrently a B to C and a B2B, but you figured out that B2B is the one, great. And then you've made the next Cardinal sin, which is you are charging far too little. We just established that one customer equals $10,000. Do you believe you will get your clients, these wealth advisors, do you believe you can get them one extra customer a year? I think so. Yeah.

Okay. Do you think you could save them from churning a customer every year? Easy, yeah. Okay. What is the value of getting a new customer and not losing a customer to them? Yeah. I mean, that's my pitch right there. What is the value, though?

I'm asking you a specific question, a dollar amount. Well, if it's $10,000, 1% commission, Yep. Whatever that is. $10,000. And they would have lost one that cost them $10,000, and they would have gained one that's $10. So you've created $20,000 in value, which means the LTV. Do you know what that stands for?

Yeah, left time value. Perfect. Okay, I'm just benchmarking where you're at your startup journey. Your LTV is people will stick with this product for seven years. I'm going to guess. Maybe five on average. Let's pick five, be conservative. That means each customer you acquire is worth $100,000 to you.

That means your CAQ. What does CAQ stand for? Customer acquisition costs. Perfect. Your CAQ could be $1,000 and you would make it back very quickly. So the value you're providing, if we blowball it, you gain one, you don't lose one, you know, $20,000 a year. You're providing in five years $100,000 of value. That means you really should be charging 10% of that number, which is $10,000.

which is $2,000 a year. You're charging $50 a month, $50 a month, you know, is but $600 a year. So you probably for this product should be charging $500 a month, $400 a month, because you can really justify that first customer you save, you should get 100% of it in my mind. Okay. You should get 100% of it. So that would be $1,000 or $800 a month. So I would just get rid of all this pricing and be taken seriously by your customers. A wealth manager is spending on lunch with their client $600 or dinner. They're taking them

to a Knicks game or a MAVs game and they're sitting in the first four rows for $10,000. That's how they think. And you're coming to them asking for $600. It's like they pay more for, you know, that's what they're paying for their Gmail account. Come on. Sure. Yeah. Let's raise the price on this, right?

Signaling, yes. So the signaling is way off. Now, what this will also do for you is it's going to have you capture the high end first and then go downstream. You want to capture the high end because the high end is going to have the best advice for you. So not only by raising your price, do you increase perceived value, you have more money to hire people, and you have the ability to get the best chef's kiss best advice. So I want you laser focus, not on the number of customers. I would rather you have the 10 of these wealth advisors who make $5 million a year or $2 million a year than for you to have 200 of them that make $400,000 a year.

You want to go for the really high end here. They're going to give you great advice. So I think you've got to redesign the product at the U.S. a little better. And I think there's some virality here that you haven't thought of. And this is what a jam session is about. You identified like there's a problem. Customer says, oh, my God, I own Tesla stock, Uber stock. Oh, my God.

Uber's up like four bucks right now. I just noticed before I got on air because the Robo Taxi is being delayed in some way. Who knows what's going on? And now you got this like existential thing. I mean, this is like panic-inducing for Tesla shareholders, Lyft shareholders, Uber shareholders. If I had exposure to that, I do.

I would be like, oh my God, I'm not. But anyway, putting it on all side, be really interesting if when you shared the dashboard of the stocks with a customer, If the wealth manager got a ping, Jason just opened the website. Jason, just like a docu sign. So look at the docu sign, hey, the customer opened the contract. The customer went to page two where you send your deck to somebody and like whatever

the slide deck thing that watches. Oh, they stayed on, they went back to slide five. You know, they spent two minutes on slide five and they just zip zip fast, six, seven, and eight. Why? Oh, six, seven, eight are irrelevant to them, but they really cared about the team slide, but they didn't care about the go-to market or vice versa. So you got so much you could do here in intelligence, and people will pay for that.

Big time. If I know that my customers are typing in the ticker symbol, Uber, and then if they could write a question on that portal where they said, you know, let's say, you know, I'm the wealthy individual, you're the wealth advisor, Ramsey. And I'm on the website and I just say, like, what is this about? Why is Uber up and Tesla down if Tesla's,

is going to kill Uber, according to this story. And then you wrote back, okay, here's the Goldman Sachs report. That's a business insider story. Business Insider is sensational. They want to get you to click. Goldman Sachs has an analyst who's been covering Uber. This is the analyst's name. And I direct you to that story.

Now, the interface has the entire history of us going back and forth. And then, additionally, this all has to be mobile at some point. So getting a mobile and a designer is critical. and then I think the next piece would be to have what's called an SDR or business development rep would be very good for you to have somebody trying to figure out who wealth managers are and a viral way to get them on the phone with you. Those would be my next two or three hires if you could get the money in here. You're doing a great job.

You got a great idea. And I understand you told me you were talking to some of your customers in a group chat somewhere like a Discord or a Signal or a WhatsApp? Yeah, just I message. I message. So you got like a you have one to one discussions or do you have like a product council yet. We've got a discord for like large group and then I have like a small group of three or four advisors that I text weekly. Okay. Awesome. That's really what you want to do. Ramsey, I wish you

massive success with this idea. You jammed with JCal, rate your jam with JCal. How would you rate this in terms of helpful? Huh? Give me an honest number between one and 10. That was great. I would say 10. Yeah, for sure. Okay, there we go. I don't want to bias it in anyway, but you, you know what? You should meet our team. So you might be a good candidate to come to our accelerator because I think there's something here. And when I jam with somebody, I got to tell you, you're good to jam with because you're quick. You give really good answers. You don't filibuster. And that's what people love when they're jamming.

So that's a really good note for everybody listening to this week in startups. When you're interacting with an investor who's a know-it-all investor, who's seen it all, who's invested in hundreds of companies, you've got to be able to go back and forth quickly, right? And you got to be able to have that real intellectual discussion. And you did good with that, right? It's like kind of playing pickle bowl or ping pong or tennis. You want to have a good volley. In just 15 minutes together, we had a great volley.

I like you. I like the way you answer questions. I like the way you think. You kind of did your thing. You made yourself likable. I understand your business. You're thoughtful. You seem like you've got a chip on your shoulder and you want to be successful.

I think lean into that a little bit, like a little bit of the drive. Don't be too mellow. And congratulations, Ramsey. And we'll see you all next time on Jammit JCal. Thank you to our sponsor. With me today, Anna Molhotra. I got your last name correct, yes? Perfect.

I'm good with Indian names. I, you know, and Sri Lankan names. My friend, Chamophagalai Hopatia, I teach all of our friends how to say his last name. For some reason, I'm just good with those names. Okay, you understand the premise here, our friends at dot tech. You have a great dot tech domain name, which is the Rome app. Dottech. Everybody can go check that out.

I'm going to give you like two or three minutes to pitch me on your startup, and then you me what your challenges are, your ideas, and Ben, I'll give you some ideas and maybe we'll grind out some good ideas and strategies for you to make your Rome app even more successful. Three, two, go. Perfect. Thanks so much for having me, J-Cal. I'm Anna, co-founder and CEO of Rome, and we're working on yard-chairing built for dogs. I'm actually not going to pitch you today.

I'm going to go right to our problem, but I will start with a bit of an intro of the product. So meet Rome, the dog. He's a good boy, and he loves humans, and he's a husky. So he has a lot of energy that he needs to let out every single day, so he's not a menace to society. But because he doesn't get along with other dogs, public dog parks are just not an option for him, which is true for about 70% of dogs, even if their humans don't know it. And unfortunately, his humans live in an apartment and don't have a yard of their own to let Rome play off leash safely. And Rome's humans are part of the growing rate of apartment-dwelling pet owners.

And you probably guessed it, but Rome is mine and my co-founder's dog, and he's the inspiration behind what we're working on, which is yard sharing built for dogs. With Rome, dog owners book a yard near them and neighbors can rent out their outdoor space and earn with every booking. Simply put, we're a two-sided yardship marketplace. So the challenge we wanted to present to you today, J-Cal, is supply acquisition specifically. We knew going in that demand will come really quickly, but we knew that if they go onto the app and they don't see a yard that they like, they won't have a good experience. And so at Rome, liquidity is mostly based off of what dog owners are looking for in a yard. It comes down to three things.

first is the yard safe for their dog. Next, the yard should be close by. And finally, it's at least big enough for their dog to run around it. And so all of these things determine what makes a good yard for a guest. And so we focused on building as much of this good supply as we could before starting our demand acquisition. And so we've spent about six months of dedicated effort to grow our supply. We've had only about 20 years to show interest, but we have seven yards in Seattle. Two of them are too far.

One is too small and one honestly is just mine. We just bought a house. One, however, is a local private dog park business that we just onboarded. And we plan to lean into this a bit more. But I think to build true liquidity and give our demand the options they need, we need to scale our numbers of good yards through consumers and not just businesses. And so some of the strategies we've already tried is reaching out to personal network, posting on Craigslist and Next Door, all of those have been successful.

But direct mill door to door and reaching out to Rover sitters has not. And of course, we successfully onboarded that one business. And so before I open up to feedback and questions, JCal, I just want to put this challenge in perspective. Our supply growth is in green and you can see that it's fairly low and flat since the beginning of the year. But our demand growth in pink has more of an exponential curve coming up. And much of this is because we onboarded that local business. And as of last week, I'm finally full time on Rome.

And I think to be successful, this is a time to just be heads down on growing supply. We have all this demand coming in and we want to be able to provide at least one good yard. And we need to do that quickly. So JCal, you know, I know you have experience with marketplaces, you know, products, riders, drivers. So this is my question for you. How to get good yards. This is a great question, and it's one I'm uniquely qualified to answer because we

specialize in investing in marketplaces. We have Stone Algo, which is a marketplace of diamond sellers and buyers. We have MeowTel, which is cat sitting, which is very different than dog sitting, and obviously Uber and Thumbtack. We love a great marketplace. And building supply is really important. And you've heard you've got Airbnb here for dog runs, brilliant idea. There's a very simple way you buy the supply with minimums.

And you have this great benefit that some number of people are already Airbnb owners or VRBO. So what you're going to do is I watch, and we also have Gigster, which rent space as well. Now, they're potentially a competitor because they rent space for a lot of different uses. I have never seen Dog Parker on there. I think that's kind of niche. and there's some insurance issues or whatever, but generally speaking, I think going to an existing marketplace

and that already does Airbnb. And you go and you check out an Airbnb, and you look at the Airbnb and you say to yourself, hey, this is interesting. This Airbnb has a yard and a yard on the side. They could very easily cut out this yard, fence it in or just put a gate on it, and they can still rent their Airbnb,

and they can incrementally do this, and they know how to manage people, They know how to market. They know how to take pictures. And so you could draft on Airbnb and VRBO's existing network. That could be such a simple unlock. And when you talk to them, you could say, hey, we're a startup like Airbnb, except we're doing this. People love meeting founders and they love startups.

People love entrepreneurs. I mean, I love you. You came on here. You got a beautiful idea. And the pitch was so crisp and the design was so good. And you understand your market. The charming story of it's your. husband and your dog, love it all. And so that's what I would do. And then what Uber did was,

they cold called drivers. They went to Google. They found livery companies, Lincoln Town cars, what they used to call black cars, and they just ground it out. Boom. And sometimes I think they even took rides and said, hey, I'm with a company Uber. Here's how it works. Can I show you the app? And I think they bought that inventory. They said, hey, we'll give you a minimum of $500 a month for five rides, guaranteed, and we'll pay it to you, you know, for just having the app on. And if you keep the app on for 10 days in a row, every day we're going to send you, you have it on, we'll send you 50 bucks, whatever it is. So you can just say to them, like, listen, I want to do this for the month. I'll give you 500 bucks for the month.

And if we make above 500, you know, we'll give you some. And if we don't, we're going to take 30%, you know, we'll just eat the 500. That's the way I would do it. And I think it'll work really well. Have you thought of this strategy? And do you think it will work? So I reached out to Rover Sitters through the Rover app. And we actually got kicked off because, you know, Obviously, we weren't following their terms of service. Any suggestions on how to reach these Airbnb hosts outside of the platform? Well, two ways. Many of them have their own dedicated websites because they want to route around the fees of Airbnb.

Other ones just, they're happy to pay the Airbnb fees. But a lot of times you'll find clues in their descriptions. And they'll call it like, you know, if they were in Austin, they'll call it like, I don't know, South of Congress retreat, and you Google South of Congress retreating, you find them on Yelp, you find them in other places, right? So I think there are ways to do that.

And then you can just keep opening accounts and doing the thing where you talk to them and just say, you know, hey, I would love to talk to you. Here's my number. And then when you talk to them, you're just going to have to deal with that. The other thing to do is to go to Reddit.

And Reddit has a lot of subforums, and you could find the one, if you were in Seattle or Austin, or Brooklyn or even like Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And then you say, hey, I'm looking for a place to run my dog. And I started, and then in the details, like, you know, you kind of float the idea, start getting people talking about it. And so, you know, it's a little gray market.

You understand the concept of like there's white hat, black hat, gray, black illegal, white hat legal, gray. Yeah, you're bending the rules a little bit. You can get a little rule bending here and maybe start some conversations on forums and see if you can get, you know, inventory that way. So I think online forums are pretty good for that. Obviously, next door you tried. I bet you next door worked to a certain extent.

Maybe. It did. We just need to lean into it a little more. Lean into it. I also think dog walkers could be very interesting for you. And so getting a couple of these weirdos, you know what I'm talking about? Like, these people who love dogs, like, so much and they get on the ground with like six of them and you see them walking to the dog park with six of them.

You might be able to get a dog walker and say, hey, to the dog walker, if I had a, a dog run here and there was a staff member there and there was lemonade and it had four sections and you could put four dogs in four different sections man and this is what a jam

session is about and uh I'm thinking about this I'm wondering if you should just find a plot of land and build 10 pens in it start selling fucking coffee there let's go have some coal brew there and just sit there all day and let

people come into it and you kind of to hack it like that, right? That's another possibility for you. Absolutely. If you could do a short-term rental, what neighborhood do you do in Roman? We're in Seattle. Perfect. Is there a specific area like in Seattle? The neighborhoods we want to target is Queen Anne, if you've heard of it. I haven't. What is the average home price there? I'm wondering. One to two million. Okay, perfect. There's a really crummy house that's for rent in that area. that's a dog of a house,

some weird bathrooms and like falling apart and nobody wants to put their family in there. And they would only rent it if they really had to because they want to get their kid into the school system. And that person can't rent it. I would go to that person and say, hey, listen, I'm an entrepreneur. Here's what I'm doing.

I want to do this business. Would you mind if I rented it for three months and tried and I'll have insurance and everything and something for you to worry about? And, you know, I'm not going to damage the lawn or anything. And if I do, you know, you got my deposit, you can keep it.

And I would actually try doing this in the most central place you could rent, because what is, rent of a house there? 5K a month? 4K a month? Yeah, sounds about right. Four to five. Okay, let's say it's 5K all in. And then the backyard, you set up pens. How much

could that cost to set up a pen? 500 bucks each? With some gates you order on Amazon or something? Holy cow, you set up 20 pens there. And then you tell people, hey, I got this place for dogs. And oh, by the way, we also have an upsell. We have grooming on site, and we got an upsell

for you. Because you mentioned somebody had this as a business already, right? There was somebody doing a private for rent dog bar. Correct. So they're a bar slash dog park. Okay. So somebody else had this idea. We've taken their outdoor.

We've taken up their outdoor space for private bookings. Love it. So here now we're starting this, what a jam session's about. I like doing it. There's something here. You know this concept, third space? You ever hear about that? Third space?

I have not. Okay. There's your house. There's your work. That's one space. That's a second space. Describe for me a third space. you go today, that's not one of those two.

If you needed to not be a coffee shop, you got it, you nailed it. Starbucks isn't selling coffee in many cases. A lot of what Starbucks is selling is a third space. I don't want to be home. I've been cooped up. I hate my boss. He's a complete jerk. He makes me say yes, chef to him.

He's just overbearing. He talks to me about my career. He's annoying. Where else can I go? Well, fuck it. I can go to a third space. I get a Starbucks. Put my headphones on.

I just jam out there. It's air condition, beautiful furniture. nice room. What's another third space? The gym. You got it. Give me another third space. A private dog park where I can get coffee and drinks. Okay, now we're talking. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. So this is like a really interesting business. Also, there are lots that are available. So, you know, somebody's got a parking lot and they're making a thousand bucks a month or two thousand bucks a month on some crummy parking lot. Now, Seattle, I think's got a lot of regulations. Is that like a regulation heavy place? I believe so. But I do think I have looked at Zillow for just,

all pots of land, just put a fence up, make it a yard. But it's capital intensive. So that's been the only setback there. So, you know, have you raised money for this idea yet? We have not. We have bootstrapped so far. Okay. So one of the things about these ideas is, you know, you get into a jam session with an investor like we did here today. We start doing it. Now you can say, hey, you know what? J-Cal kind of pitched me on this. Sounds like I could do this for 5K a month. Why don't I just ask them for 10K a month? That's 125K. Guess what? That's what we give people in our accelerator is 125K. So, you know, have you put money into this business yet? Just a little bit, trickle?

Only $3,000 to $5,000, just cash here and there. Perfect, love it. So, and you're a Nepo baby, you've got a trust fund, you're independently wealthy? I am not. No, you want to be rich. You want to be powerful? Absolutely. Be a legend.

Okay, great. Come with me. So my point is, this is why accelerators exist in the world, launch accelerator, tech stars, Y Combinator, et cetera. The reason they exist is because, you know, people like you, have, you know, unbelievable amounts of energy and ideas. And, uh, this is a crazy outlier idea. Uh, and, uh, well, it, you know, like, you got to get started and learn. And so you came to me with that problem of the demand. But as we went back and forth and we, we volleyed, like playing

pickleball, ping pong tennis. I always tell people, man, you know, maybe there's a bigger idea here, which is third space. Right. Maybe where the, maybe where the Starbucks of dog runs. and the dog who's antisocial is what got us here, just like the couch surfing is what got Airbnb going, but that wedge, maybe we open that up. And maybe we'll make as much money from the concession and the secondary services dog training.

Hey man, if this dog is bad behaved and that's why you're coming here, well, maybe we have a dog trainer here who's 50 bucks an hour. Okay, man, we've got a lot we could unpack here, grooming, etc. Really great idea. really great presentation. I like the design. I like the pitch. I like everything about it.

Congratulations. Great job. Jamming with JCal. Right on a scale of 1 to 10, how helpful this was. Am I allowed to say 11? I mean, I can't tell you what to say. I think the Airbnb thing is going to work.

I really think it's going to work. So I want to give it 11. Okay. I'm going to let you give it 11. It's not for me to judge. I can't imagine coming here and talking to a legendary angel investor who could change your entire life and giving anything less that I.

a 10. But you gave 11, which I give you credit for. You know, last time I did this, the guy was like, I give it a 10. You came out and I'm like, huh? I put one more than 10, right? Now we're talking. Now we're really jamming. Great job. And you know who else does a great job? My friends at dot tech domains. Can't get a dot com. Listen, you're putting three, four, five thousand dollars into this, Rome.com. It's not built in a day. I think about Rome all the time. Roman Empire. Rome.com is a $10 million domain, five million dollar domain, four letters in the dictionary, destination, great destination. So, hey, the roam app.com.

Great domain. Fantastic. DotTech also, that signals to me that you get it. The technology does change the world. So shout out to my friends at dot tech. And we will see you all on the next jamming with JCal. Hey everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's time for our next Jam with JCal session brought to you by our friends at dot tech domain names. The way we do this is you have to have under $2 million in funding.

And so it's for early stage startups. Ulama is our first startup. And the founder is Tice Herman. And Tice, I've never heard that name, T-Y-C-E, pronounced T-I-C-E, I think, Tice. Yep. Really interesting name. I've never come across it. And your company is Ullama?

Yes. And that's U-L-A-M-A dot T-E-C-H. You got a great dot-T-T-T-T-E-H. got a great dot-tech domain name. Why don't you show me what you're working on and then just tell me what your biggest challenge is? Our software is for architects to analyze their 3D building models for code compliance before they submit their designs

to government reviewers for approval. So we like to think of ourselves as grammarly for architectural 3D building models. We have software that plugs directly into architectural design software and architects select the location that they're in and the specific codes that they want to use to analyze their 3D building model. They'll go through the sort of two-dimensional drawings of the 3D building model and assess them for specific codes. So that could be building code.

It could be accessibility, ADA code, plumbing, fire. The architect can select what they would like to use. And our plugin then runs through their entire 3D model evaluating all the geometric and parameter relationships within that. model. Once that's done, they get both text and visualization of how their model is out of compliance and suggestions on how to make updates to the model to bring it into compliance. And that's broken out by sections of the code and also building elements within the 3D model. Got it. So an architect is pulling up this floor plan. Looks like a live workspace. And then they put your plug in into their architectural software.

What's the architectural software most common one called? It's called Revit. Revit. Okay. So you're a plugin for Revit. And then it goes to their designs and then it matches them to the local rules and regulations, the codes. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. We've created a rules engine that will look at their entire 3D model. Is that using AI to do that? How is it doing it? We are assessing the 3D model within a multimodal AI model and we're also creating those rules by parsing the regulatory text with AI models. Got it. And so what jurisdictions do you work in? How long have you been doing this product?

We've been working on it about a year. And right now we're just doing codes that are broadly applicable in any municipality. So ADA federal policies or sort of vanilla off the shelf building codes. So ADA policies, Americans with Disabilities Act, I believe is what it's for what's an example of that? Is that like the width of a doorway or how bathrooms work? What's an example or the most common example? Those are both great examples. A concrete one would be a toilet has to be a certain distance from the nearest sidewall

so that someone can reach a grab bar within a easy, comfortable distance. Got it. And so it's going to check the ADA rules against what an architect made, correct? That's right. And do the architects frequently screw this up? or do they generally know all these rules and get it right? They have a decent working understanding of code, but there's so much minutia within code

that it's difficult for them to keep track of it all as they're designing. Most architects are doing what's called parametric design, so as they're making changes, other things in the model are changing downstream of that, and so things can get out of sync really quickly. Got it. And this isn't occurring in real time. You basically upload your floor plans,

and then you run this against it and then it tells you. Yeah, this, they don't even have to upload anything. This is within their design software, but they do it on demand. So it's not just constantly pinging them, hey, this is out of compliance. Right, because that would be what a co-pilot does. A co-pilot is sitting there while a person's working, let's say, like grammarly on your grammar or a co-pilot like GitHub's while you're writing code. So I'm curious why it doesn't do it while you're working.

Yeah, we talked to... hundreds of architects at this point. And a lot of the questioning was early on about how frequently do you want this sort of analysis? And most architects just want to be able to design. You turn on their design brain. And then at certain checkpoints come in and look at things like code compliance, but they don't want that constantly getting in the way of their design flow. That makes sense.

They're trying to get into a groove. They don't want to have this interrupting them. Tell me what's the biggest challenge with your business. and it seems like a very reasonable idea and a good starting point for a feature, if not a product, like an interesting wedge. What's your biggest challenge? I'm curious. Yeah. One thing that we're thinking about actually right now is we're launching a smaller version of this product

as a standalone offering. It's going to be for sale on the web. It's ready to go live tomorrow once I finish my distribution list. And it's a component of this overall technology for code compliance. It goes through and it identifies all the elements in that 3D building model and then normalizes the attribution in naming. Right now, it's not very standardized, and that makes it hard for architects to do all sorts of other activities. So what we're struggling with thinking through is how do we use this initial product launch to generate sort of interest and also make this sort of case that, hey, we know how to develop products for our customer base. This isn't our core product and our sort of main value proposition, but we're servicing this sort of customer base.

And just sort of like telling a good story around that through this initial product launch. So are you looking to launch us in the United States and Germany? Where are you looking to launch us? I'm assuming the United States. This first product that we're launching can be used internationally because all it's doing is identifying the sort of elements within the building. It's not applying any of the rules yet. Okay. Well, I know that there are hundreds of thousands of architects between the United States and Europe, right? Yes. And so they already like to spend on software. The software they use costs hundreds of dollars a year to low thousands of dollars a year, I would assume.

Yeah, the software developing for Revit is thousands of dollars a year, and that's just their sort of baseline design software. Got it. And does that software have an app store for the plugins like Shopify does or Apple? does, yeah. Autodesk, the maker of Revit has the app store. It's not commonly used yet. It doesn't have a lot of traction like an Apple store, but it's gaining momentum. So, you know, this is always the challenge with these app stores, because if you leverage the app store to try to get customers and you're very successful, you've basically given a roadmap to those platforms to incorporate you into their product without knowing Autodesk and how they were,

do they historically support a really great developer ecosystem of plugins or do they have a reputation for basically stealing those innovations and putting them into their own products? Less the reputation of just sort of like taking them and embedding them in their own products. They do a lot of acquisitions now.

They're, you know, giant company at this point. So a lot of their new development is through acquisitions. Yeah. And their developer support has been sort of lackluster in the past, but they are really renewing their focus on that. So there's a lot of momentum around the app store. Yeah, that's great. So, you know, in a lot of these cases, how the App Store features you and your relationship with Autodesk is going to be the key driver. So if you make Salesforce plugins or Shopify plugins, there's usually a developer evangelist, a vice president there.

And if you, you know, make nice with them, they might feature you and bring you 10 customers a day. And if you can work that ecosystem, that's going to be incredibly accretive to your business growing. And it also builds a dependency, but that dependency also builds an acquisition path. So, you know, there's good and bad here. The good is they could, you know, really appreciate what you're doing, not have time for it. And you could basically own this little piece of the puzzle for architects. And so, you know, and then you could have a dependency. They could decide to take you off that homepage or promote somebody else.

or buildeth themselves and all of a sudden your business goes to zero, which has happened to people who build plugins, specifically the developer community at Facebook, famously like Zenga, got absolutely demolished over time. And so you can look at those historical precedents. The more you understand your customers, the more you spend time with them,

the better off you're going to be. I would try to embed your company into, you know, wherever the most architects are, whether that's a school or, you know, a company that you can, say, hey, I know you're going to get a lot of value out of this tool. Can we, you know, have two seats at your office? And we call this the bear hug. You know, if you could find out who is a great customer for you. They've got 50 architects, 25 architects. And you say, hey, to the CEO,

some upstart and the founders, would it be possible to get two desks here and hang out? That's another way for you to get closer to the mix, to the people who are using it. So those are my two that's for you, building the developer community or bonding with the evangelist at that app store or deeply bonding with, uh, you know, an architectural firm or doing both. Yeah. And, you know, then if, you know, they decide they're going to compete with you and, you know, it's harder for them to compete with you and kill your company. If you've developed that relationship with the evangelist team, they're going to be like,

eh, let's keep supporting them. They're only charging $500 a year per architect for this plug in, we're charging $5,000 a year. You know, that seems like a good price, you know. So getting your customers to pay also critically important at this early stage. If people aren't willing to pay for it and you've put a lot of work into it and it's, you know, reliable software, you know, then that should tell you like maybe this isn't providing enough value and that's where pricing comes in. So those are my two hopes for you.

It seems like you're off to a great start and I wish you great luck with it. Any other questions for me? Yeah, I guess maybe if there's anything that you can say about, leveraging an early product launch or a second larger product launch. And how to really connect those to like this previous, hopefully success when we launched tomorrow to our major and main product that we're launching end of the year. Great question. I've seen some entrepreneurs set up little WhatsApp groups or signal groups or I message groups

or Slack rooms with say five or 10 like-minded customers who become their Product Advisory Council. And then you've got five or ten people who get early access to what you're doing and get to influence the product or your product advisory council. But then when you do launch, hey, they might tell people about it. So there's probably 50 architects who have YouTube channels. There might be 50 people on Instagram who are active architects. There might be a hundred of them on Reddit in two or three different subreddits.

And if you can just slowly collect 10 people from each of those social networks, tell them what you're building, ask them for feedback. You know, you might have this little group of highly influential people rooting for you. And I think, you know, I call this the slow embers, hot embers kind of marketing. It's not like huge numbers. It's more like really hot coals. You know, you ever have a really hot cold? You take one of those coals and you put your hand of it. Whoa, it's a little bit hot. Now you put 10 of them together. And, you know, you're about a foot back and you're like, whoa, I can feel the heat. You know, then you get like 50 of those coals in a barbecue and they all start turning red. You know, now it's like, whoa, I can't get within three feet of the barbecue.

And when I put that tomahawk on, you know, that tomahawk steak, man, it just lights right up and it's almost too hot. But each one of those is just a coal, one little simple coal. But together, 50 of those calls can burn so bright, so hot that boom, and it just explodes, right? And it's just, it's even too hot. That's really what building this fire is about. So don't forget, that each coal is, in your case, a customer, an individual, and you just have to build that relationship. Now, each of those relationships will probably take you about an hour, so it's about 50 hours of work, which you're probably like, wow, I got to push code, I got to do all this stuff. And this is why sometimes people will have an evangelist or a marketing person just slowly

build up that group. And I've done it myself. I have, you know, maybe I would host dinners for other angel investors and LPs in our funds as a venture capitalist. And I still have those those, you know, little groups of who went to dinner at different locations. I named them in Signal, you know, the name of the place. And, you know, we have a Marks off Madison group with like 12 people who came to that dinner and they talk to each other once in a while. And I get to have that like one to few relationship. And they might ask me, somebody might ask me a question and we all talk about it. So I like this like one to few kind of concept. And it could be a Zoom call. It could be a WhatsApp group. It could be an email list, whatever the jam is that you want to try. So I really think that will help

your launch. Press is nice. If there's industry press or a podcast, and podcasts, there must be a hundred architectural podcasts and they probably all get like hundreds to low thousands of people. But going on those and talking about your product and the problem you're trying to solve, people love innovation. And so I would also look at the podcast route, right? And I think in your case, small numbers are good numbers, right?

Targeted small numbers is going to be the key because you're not dealing with a consumer product like Uber, Airbnb, where you're trying to get a billion people to consider using it to get 100 million or 200 million users, you just need 10,000 paying customers and this thing becomes a $10 million a year business, and that's pretty good, you know, as a, you know, a goal for a business like this. But I wish you great luck with it and awesome start. Thank you. Really appreciate the help. All right, everybody. We're going to do another jam with J-Cal session right now. And today, I'm talking to the founder of Corpod, which you can check out at.

C-O-R-P-O-D-T-E-C-H. Welcome to the pod. O-L-L-O-L-O-L-N, how you doing? Why don't you show me your product, tell me about it, and then tell me what your biggest challenge is. Corpott, your personal sleep companion. We all have our smartphones nearby. For me, it's a great tool to connect to my family and friends, keep up to date with all the latest news.

But also is a huge source of anxiety and distraction. I always get messages, notifications, I doomscrolling at night and I have insomnia. I wish I had a digital companion I can talk to, I can voice my feelings and help me decompress before I go sleep at night. Something like this. Hi, Milo. Woo! Hi there. How can I help you today?

What's been bugging you lately? I'm having some trouble sleeping. I just can seem to fall asleep at night. It takes me more than two hours to fall asleep. Woo! Oh no, sorry to hear that. That sounds really frustrating. Can you tell me more about...

You remember Beacon, the dog at the Olympics, that helped US athletes with their mental health problems. So it's a kind of genii dog right inside a speaker. We've talked to... many therapists about mobile apps and they say the mobile app solution it doesn't work. It should be a completely separate device and we've made it as a sponsor speaker powered by Gen AI and you can talk to it like if it was your friend. Now let's talk about value.

It may seem quite expensive at first glance but it's actually a bargain. One month is cheaper than one single hour of therapy session with human expert. We can reach 10 million with just 17,000 customers with about 200 million with 1 and 70,000 users. Who are these users? People, high-pressure jobs, medium to high income and ready to invest in their mental health. Our team is passionate about building this product and we also have advisors. We've made five prototypes, recently I finished founder university cohort eight and last year I attended to Team Draper's Hero Training Program. We got funding from a high technology park of Kyrgyz Republic

and European Bank for Reconstruction Development. And now we are rising. We want to connect to smart watches like Garmin to fetch all the health data, build product-ready product, and start pre-orders. This is my context. What is your biggest challenge?

What's your challenge with this speaker with a screen that has an avatar or a virtual dog who is going to help you sleep better. What is the big challenge with Corpott? You know, J-Cal, we are BDC, and also it's very hard to build BDC, and also we are hardware. It's even two times harder to build this kind of software.

So my question is, what is the best go-to-market strategy for this sort of product, and especially that, given the fact that we are related to mental health. Okay. So you're in the tinkering phase. You're building some hardware.

You're building some software. And your idea is you want people to sleep better. Interestingly, I have two investments in this space. Last night I hit an 85 on my sleep score with my eight sleep. They're on their fourth generation. And they study your sleep, your REM, your deep sleep, all of these issues. And it's quite nice. And it really has helped me, you know, sort of

of getting to a better pattern. And we were investors incom.com, and I used sleep stories with myself and my daughters to help go to bed. And so those two things have become good investments for us, great investments, in fact. And they do tackle sleep. Other people like Woop, watch does it.

So you are not only doing hardware and software and doing a startup, you're also going up against a pretty competitive set. So this is not going to be easy. And doing hardware, as the 8Sleep team will tell you, or the KaffaX team will tell you, really, really increases the degree of difficulty. You have to be able to finance all of, you know, this hardware.

So I think what you have to do is maybe step back and ask yourself, are you making a virtual companion in a speaker format that's different than, you know, say, an app because you don't have to take your phone out and you have all the other distractions there? And is that the innovation here? Or do you want to, from first principle, say, I want to help people get to bed at night. and this is the best way to do it. And I think that's what you have to ask yourself,

because clearly you're creative and you have technical ability and you've tried these different things, but which is it? Are you passionate about hardware and creating this companion or are you passionate about sleep? Which one?

I would say that the core product is the software. So it's personalized, like your friend, which knows you, and he knows how to help you sleep better. and the hardware is just the way you interact with this software. You would think that you can use AI to be a sleep coach

and that that sleep coach requires hardware. I wonder if your sleep coach requires the hardware. I would see if you could build a sleep coach with your iPhone that actually, you know, let you put your iPhone face down and interacts with you and puts you to sleep, right? So I think a better model might be, hey, eliminate the hardware business for now.

You can always do that later. But see if you can make this first part, which is an interactive companion who I talk to and they put me to sleep, which was kind of like your dad or your mom telling you a story at night, putting you to bed and tucking you in. I kind of feel like maybe now that I've heard you respond to my question, that you believe the interactive AI assistant is kind of like a sleep coach or a parent tucking you in.

Am I correct? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I think you want to first prove that that, actually works. And you could do that through an app. You could get 100 beta users and just see if the interactive model actually puts people to sleep better than listening to a sleep story on com, because that's your competition for 50 bucks a year, or if it puts you to sleep better than, say, listening to an audio book or putting on a sound machine. I think what you're

up against is not the therapist who charges $500. I had, that was in the, the presentation like I think, um, like, um, that didn't ring true to me. I think which you're up against is the sleep stories on calm and com is up against, you know, free sleep stories and sleep meditations on YouTube. So they have to be that much better. The packaging, you know, and the tracking and all that and the beautiful interface. They have to be better than the free stuff. And then eight sleep's got to be better than just using a sleep story to go to bed and they're going into quantify itself. So you're going to have to find that market in there. And I think prove that first piece. And then hardware is so difficult, but you seem good at it. So I would just

wait on the hardware. I would just make that first piece work. And how close to you are you to proving that out? How many nights, how many users have been put to sleep by your interactive person? Yeah, we have waiting list and up to 14,000 users. Okay. So nobody has been put to sleep by this yet except for you? Yeah. Okay. So you know there's some demand because you got the wait list. what I would do is I would get 10 people and I would look for people in the subreddit on Reddit for Insomnia. So there's a Reddit for Insomnia.

And I would go to the Insomnia one, say, I'm a software developer. I'm trying to build software to help people fall asleep. And I think you can do it with an interactive person and I'm looking for a couple of test users. Here's what I think's going to work. What do y'all think?

Would anybody want to try this, DM me and see what happens if they allow you to post that? And if not, you post it on Hacker News or other places. or in a reply. Well, you could put it on Craigslist and just on Craigslist say, hey, if you have insomnia, you're reading this at 1 a.m. I'm building some software. I'm paying people a $10 gift card to try it for three nights.

If you do it as a thank you and fill out a survey and tell me what you like and don't like about the software. And I would get to, you know, let's say a hundred people trying it and filling out the survey and see what you learn. Because right now it feels like you're building, building, building, something very complex without answering a first principal question. can a language model put somebody to bed like mom and dad did when they tucked them in and read them a story? Yeah, actually it's all based on the research.

I don't know if that works, but some research that proved that LLMs, even text-based, can really help in this regard. Great. So now take what you learned in that study, take what you know about, you know, hardware and tinkering, and just prove it to the investment community and prove it to yourself. and see what you learn. Maybe it turns out asking, you know, but three questions of the user puts them to bed.

Maybe some people want to have, you know, a back and forth 20 times until they fall asleep. Who knows what the language model will come up with the technique? But I think you've got to get closer to the customer and do a little more testing

before you spend a bunch of money and raise a bunch of money. I don't think you're going to successfully raise money with a hardware company in 2024 going after this because it's very competitive and hardware is really hard. But I think you could get into an accelerator or get some seed investors if you did a small, 100 person study yourself and then had that information.

And you could literally record it. You know, you could have all the interactions from the language model and from your little URL. You don't even have to send them to build a full app or the hardware to test this out. You just send them to a URL with a little script. They open the web browser. Browser, they talk to it and see what happened. So I wish you great luck with it.

And it's a really great idea. you're passionate about it. So good luck. Yeah. Thank you, J-Cal. Awesome. Okay, everybody, welcome back. It's time for a jam with J-Cal session. Sometimes, you know what? I know where some of the bumps in the road are, and we have a dialogue about how to solve problems, which is what startups are all about. So with me today is a gentleman named Elliot Easterling. He's the CEO of a company called bonbon.com. dot tech. And that is our partner today. Dot tech is a great domain name. I use it for Founder Fridays.com. Many people out there are using dot tech domain names because they're awesome. They let people know, hey, you're a technology company. And so thanks to our friends at dot tech for

supporting this segment of the show. We pick all the companies that come on. Welcome to the show, Elliot. Thanks, J-Cal. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I just want to walk you through a little bit of the business. I'll take you through a deck, and then I'd like to jump into some questions I have about somewhere I go-to-market. Review the deck. I like reviewing the deck. Let's say how you did. Great. Awesome. Well, I'm the CEO, as you mentioned, of Bon Bon Technologies, and we are a rewards platform for publishers, allow publishers to reward anything. And that ultimately drives a lot more engagement and much higher registration rates. So let's just get started. Really, the pain that we're trying to solve is for ad-focused publishers, the 99% of publishers that are ad-focused.

And they've been really suffering from wave after wave of big tech changes. Things like cookie deprecation, which started in Safari and now is moving to Chrome. Search results pages referring less and less traffic out. Social media algorithms referring less and less traffic out. And then now AI, which is going to have a massive impact as big tech platforms. Use AI to drive more engagement on their platforms and ultimately refer less traffic out. So what we're seeing as publishers are looking right now for solutions. They're planning for a smaller user footprint, but they also want to drive a lot deeper,

more profitable customer relationships from those users that are on their platforms. And so what we built basically is a fix by rewarding engagement. So we built the first publisher rewards platform that gives consumers, relevant rewards, access to unique content, simple and transparent data and privacy controls, and ultimately a better user experience, publishers get logins, and logins reenable cookies and lost IDs.

They also allow the publisher to build direct relationships, which they're starved for in the world where they're mediated by these big tech platforms. We also give the publishers gamified engagement a points program that drives things like repeat visitors, page views, watching videos, and ultimately, that's all delivers five times more monetization per user. All right, you got me so far.

It's interesting. I find myself nodding as a publisher, just so we check in here as you run me through the deck. Yeah. Publishers do have these problems. And if their consumers are logged in and you know a little bit about them, you can monetize them better. And people like gamification.

So let's see how this works. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And you're a media maven. So I knew you'd really understand the business pretty quickly. So we've cracked the code on sculpting consumer behavior with this rewards programs. We built an optimization engine that drives outcomes like 300% higher registration rates,

100% more engagement, 200% more engagement, 200% percent. is 50% higher ad rates. And then we're finding that 54% of people after they log in will actually complete their data profiles and provide even a richer understanding to the publishers or who's visiting their site. And this is all at a moment where publishers need this most. And so let me just walk you through really quickly

kind of like a sample of the tech. Finally, I want to see the product. Okay, here we go. And so on the left you see a little icon, little tab. That's us. We control that. And that's all the user's navigation. They can access the rewards program. But on the right-hand side here,

what you see is that at any time through the process, we can allow a publisher to trigger a rewards window, either in line or as a pop like this, that essentially runs eight or nine offers simultaneously to figure out through machine learning, what do the users of that site care about most that will make them willing to register? And ultimately, this technology delivers

like a 3X higher rate from anything they've been doing prior. Okay, so for the audience that was listening, there's a little arrow on the side, like a little chip on your phone. if you were to click it, it pops up, says, hey, would you like to win this television set or whatever, some kind of sweepstakes? If you log in, if you register, you automatically get updated, yeah? Yeah, that's exactly right. You get entered into the contest. I love it.

Yep. And then after someone enters or registers when we verify their email, we actually gamify the registration process. Like we say, hey, tell us more, a little more about yourself. Give us your name. 94% of people will give us name for more points. Zip code. 91% give us zip. Gender, 89% give us gender.

and even they verify their phone number with us at 54%. And we're just getting started. The other things we do is we give people points for reading. Every article they read, they earn more points, and that drives 100% more engagement. And just high, high level, we provide them with what we call three parts of the platform. Open Identity Manager, which allows them to collect and manage first-party data,

this rewards engine, which runs hundreds of offers to try and give publishers to be able to reward anything. And then we have a bunch of front-in tools that consumers interact with that basically sort of deliver the product. And we also have an API where publishers can call it to issue the rewards on their own. Very nicely done. Have you started to deploy this with any publishers yet? Where are you out in terms of building this business?

Yeah, we are live on 27 websites. We have 60,000 bond members have actually registered. The one thing is one user logs into the publisher. They become a Bombard Awards member and also a publisher's first party data. So we've been able to build our file up to 60,000 as of last week. And we're running about 60 million monthly pages across our publisher network on it. Great. You know, publishers are looking for tools like this.

And if you can help them build their profiles and give them those gamification tools, I could see a number of them wanting to participate in this. The challenge, of course, is you're trying to solve a problem for publishers who are really struggling, which means they're not high growth. And so they might have very small budgets, right? And so that is an issue, is that they're constrained. So has that come up and how are you picking your ideal customer profiles when, hey, the publications I used to run, whether it was Engadget or Autoblog or the ones that Vox created themselves like The Verge, et cetera. A lot of those publications are having challenges these days, right?

And so how do you think about that? Because you're picking publishers, which are a group of people whose businesses might be flat, they might be contracting. and there might be slow growth and they may not have budgets. Yeah, so we offer two solutions for enterprise publishers. We have a SaaS platform where publishers can pay a SaaS fee

and we also have a free with ads version. Publishers have to have a minimum size to be able to qualify for free with ads, but we basically inject ads and all our modals and that essentially pays for the full program, including the rewards. Got it. So there's nothing to lose for those publishers

by using this tool. And on the enterprise, version, I assume I can opt out of like you owning the profiles and they're just for me if I pay you enough money? No, the whole program is a cross-publisher rewards program that's sort of backed by Bon Bon. And one of the things we do is we issue basically, we issue the rewards out across publishers. Ah, okay, that's clever. So hold on. That's an important thing to pause on there. If you're going to give away this OLED TV that costs $5,000, it, that costs, that cost of $5,000, we'll get abstracted across 10 publishers.

So it's really net, net, $500 each. Or if it was 100 publishers, it would be $50 each, which is super clever. Okay, I understand. Yes, we have the benefit of that in that we basically can amortize the cost across publisher. Number two is sort of we put the privacy guarantee, we allow the users to come into our system and opt out of any publisher they want. We know, generally speaking, consumers don't like to do that.

they just don't want to mess with the settings, but it is a really key important part of our value proposition. I mean, one of the other nice things here is, you know, the user can participate or not participate. So what I like about what you're doing is, you might have somebody like me who looks at it,

you know, as a 53-year-old now, and I'm like, I don't want anything for free. I don't want to be part of any sweepstakes. But I might want you to know a little bit more about me as a publisher because I want to get certain mailings, etc. So I have an email for just when I'm shopping that I use for my shopping websites and I don't

mind them knowing about me because I would rather get sales for men than women or you get the idea or I want tickets to Knicks games not, you know, I don't know, Miami Heat games or Chicago Bulls games. So that kind of personalization is a benefit because you don't waste my time. And And then when I was younger, I might, if I couldn't afford the OLED TV, that's $5,000, I might very much want to join that sweepstakes. Thank you very much. So I think that's a very interesting approach, too, is this data will help us personalize content for you.

And then there's, hey, this data might let you get into a sweepstakes. You didn't mention the gamification, but that one was a highlight for me as well. So do you have an example of gamification yet, or that's on the roadmap. Yeah. So one of the things we do is after people register, we sort of say, hey, and we deliver us to the email campaigns. We sort of send them a weekly email that basically says, hey, here are some articles you could read that are personalized to you that earn you extra points. And so we're essentially starting to sort of like enable gamification through our newsletter program.

And we do also offer point bonuses for doing things that go to this one publisher and play one of their games. And that will earn you 100 points. So we're early on in the gamification process, but I do think that that's going to be sort of the critical things as, and it's sort of My promise the publishers is like, hey, not only can I get you a law more registered user than you could on your own, but these users are hyper engaged because through communication, we can sort of scope traffic directing back to your site to spend time on the things that you care about, and ultimately reward them for that behavior and that activity. One thing that's tried and true is inviting a friend or a friend member bring a member kind of gamification. So you might find some interesting engagement there from publishers if you could say,

hey, I'm already a member. I think my brother should know about this content. You know, who else should know about this story? I enter somebody's email. It emails them. They click. They register. I get points.

So that's tried and true. You see that in Robin Hood where you gift a stock, you get a stock. Uber, you give a ride, you get a ride, Dropbox. You give some storage. You get some storage. So I think you got a really interesting tool-based. and network-based business here, two ways to win.

And so what's your question for me? Any challenges right now in the business? Yeah. So, you know, in today's fundraising environment, you know, ever since the market turned published, or rather VCs, sort of, they behave similarly. And the mantra now is like, I want to see revenue. And all they care about is revenue, revenue, revenue.

Now, this is a network effect business. And we win by building distribution. Right now, we're building users at zero-cac. And when you think about most rewards businesses, they're paying, you know, $5, $15 per user. We're not paying for users. And so our go-to-market really should be 100% focused on building distribution, getting more users, but at the same time, VCs and the market wants to see revenue,

revenue, revenue, me putting pressure on publishers to essentially pay us is going to slow my business down. So how would you navigate that? Yeah, sure. This is a great question. Network-based businesses do have a carve-out in our industry when it comes to monetization. So if you're a SaaS business, if you're a superhuman and you charge a dollar a day for an email product or Slack and you charge $8 to $35 a month, depending on which plan you are per user, yes, of course, people want to see the number go up. In your business, however, if you could prove that if you have these 60,000 members and if you said, hey, we're giving away the iPhone 16 and we just want you to take a survey about mobile phones. and visit these three reviews of, you know, we're going to present you with 10 pages.

Every time you visit one of these 10 pages in our network and you scroll to the bottom and, you know, click on the iPhone 16, you get entered in. Now, you'll get a bunch of sweepstakes, jerks who, you know, kind of just do this in a scammy kind of way. But you also, if it's good content, might get people to actually, who aren't interested in iPhone 16s and technology,

to visit 10 pages. That's good for the publishers, and it cost you $1,500 to set up the sweepstakes and give it away. Now, you could prove to people, if you could prove to people, that when you do that, the publishers get page views, and the cost is spread for the iPhone 16 across 30 publishers,

so it's only 50 bucks a publisher. And you just run those experiments without having the publishers tell you, I'll pay for it. You're running a $1,500 experiment. You say, look, we sent, of the 60,000 people, 3% of them, you know, when, and actually did something. Imagine if we had 6 million

people and 3% did something. Now we'd really have a business. So that's up to you to prove it to me, the investor, that you could do these little experiments, and, whoa, look at the interest that this created, and they had to click on an email to confirm they were in it.

And if they put it in their friend's email, they got 10 more entries and their friend got double the entries. So there are little experiments like that where you could show growth in the user base and the page we use your driving and be able to correlate it. So that's really up to you to run those small tests and prove to us you can grow, you know, five to 10% week over week. That would be what viral growth would look like in your business. Now for sales and for SaaS products, you show me a SaaS business growing 10% a month, I'm interested. You show me a business like yours growing 10% a month. I probably would think not very interesting. So you got to get to that 5 to 10% week over week. That's a lot of

tests to run. But you could actually do that with very low dollar amounts, yeah? Yeah, yeah. I think where you're sort of pointing as a sort of a unit economic story that we need to tell to investors like you to basically say, hey, we're getting these users for free, and then we run of these experiments that actually show that we're getting revenue tracks and the revenue traction's building or the activity traction's building. Or the activity traction's building on a per unit basis. Engagement. Yeah. Engagement is the name of the game. So you could say to me, you know, if you came to me with these 60,000 and said, okay, it cost us, you know, six months and, you know, we burned a half million, we burned $100,000 in six months getting to 60,000. So we're going

to need to spend a million dollars to get to, you know, what we think is three million, because we're getting better at it. It's a fixed cost business, whatever. But if we did this many prizes, we would get to, you know, 10 million. And then every week or every day, we're going to run an experiment with a million of those 10 million. So we don't burn them out. But every 10 days, they're going to get some sort of offer to engage them. And then we'll start charging the publishers because they'll be addicted to it. But, you know, you have to get the flywall started, right? And so getting the publishers to agree, getting the VCs to agree, all this stuff takes work. So you may have to just invest small dollar amounts to show it on a micro basis. Yeah. And then say, imagine we

add two zeros. Yeah. And here's what it costs to add two zeros to the velocity I'm showing. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense of sense. Pretty straightforward. Yeah. And that's like your investment. But the good news is I think you can show this for very small amounts of money. How many people working on the team? I'm curious how many developers should have. Yeah. So we have a product person, a couple engineers, we're really, really good, or kind of working kind of core on the product. Outst engineers or full-time employees? Offshore. Offshore, part-time. basically is what the team looks like, yeah. So you're in year one.

You're an early stage startup, I take it. We're pretty early, yeah, we're sub two years. Yeah. Okay, yeah. How much year raise? 1.4, basically. Oh, okay, wow. So you've raised a decent amount of money.

Yeah. You should be able to get that network effect going, just invest in giving away whatever the product of the moment is that aligns with this. I would also start thinking about, you know, the virality of social media and TikTok. You went after publishers, which is where at, Pension is going away. So they need your tool, obviously, they really need it, but their businesses are contracting, and you may be selling like, you know, deck chairs to the Titanic's.

Mm-hmm. Now, what business is growing? TikTok, shorts, video, podcasts, there's a bunch of things that are growing in the world. So I'd also think about these tools and say, hey, if we had 60,000 TikTokers and people making shorts and they were engaged in the network, what might this look like? Because sometimes, you know, a surfer is only as good as the waves presented to them. But when you go big wave surfing, right? Yeah. You've got these little tiny waves, three, four, five foot wounds. Okay, fine. You can surf them, but it's not like you're going to the North Shore and do it, you know, hitting a 20, 30 foot wave where,

like, whoa, it's impressive if you can catch one of those waves. So I encourage you to really think deeply about the beach you're surfing at. The beach you're surfing at, it doesn't, the tide might be going out faster than you can build a business. I love looking at, you know, and I've, I've done this myself, right? I caught the blog, I caught the magazine, Zine Wave in the 90s, I caught the blog wave. I caught the podcasting wave 14 years ago when I started still riding that wave and caught the angel and seed investing in incubator wave. Sometimes there's waves that are bigger than you and if you catch them right, man, that's why I'm doing more thinking about live and shorts, you know, TikTok shorts.

Yeah. Or, well, TikToks aren't called shorts. I think YouTube calls them shorts. But anyway, I've been thinking about other alternative formats outside of podcasting. And I've been thinking about live a whole bunch. So I encourage you to think about that as well. You have an interesting business. I mean, I would have, if you had presented this business to me to come to our accelerator,

I'd be like, yeah, let's do it. But I think you're in a weird position having raised a bunch of money, not having violent product market fit or market pull yet. So you really got to get some market pull. And I think it might be that you might need to find another beach where the waves are a little bit bigger. So I would think about that. E-commerce is another one, direct-to-consumer.

The people in direct-to-consumer were getting slaughtered, slaughtered, were trying to get Facebook to work. And Facebook worked for a long time. Then it stopped working. But the ones who went to TikTok and social media and podcast did make it work. So sometimes it's just like it's not. you, it's the environment you're applying your skill in. So you seem very talented, yeah.

Yeah, and I, we are, I can't disclose what we're doing, but I think some of the things we indicate at our areas where we're testing right now, doing some experimentation. Good, yeah, I'll leave it at that. I don't want to tip your cards. Great job. And for everybody listening who wants to learn more, give us your URL again.

I know that you're a dot tech, but remind everybody of your domain name. Yeah, bonbon. dot tech. What a great domain name. Bonbon.t. tec-h. If you would like to get one of these great dot-tech domain names, just go to get g-t.t.t.tach and get one of those great dot-tech domain names. Tell them your boy, J-Cal sent you. We'll see you all next time. I'm on Jam with J-Cal and this week in startups. Thank you for watching. I hope that was educational. The names of the companies that won the jam with J-Cal again are Corpod. UpTrens. You Lama, Rome, and Bonbon.

What do they all have in common? Well, they're all using dot-tech domains. I think these jam sessions are great for founders, insights, feedback, real-time conversation with J-Cal himself, and if you want to go out there and get your own dot-tech domain, you can. Just go to get.com. That's g-et. That's g-et. T-E-C-H.

Let us know if you want us to do more jams with J-Cal in 2025. Until then, more news coming. I'm Alex. I'll see you soon.