This Week in Startups - E1009: #StartupTuneup! Startmate Founders pitch Jason: AR presentation platform, experiential marketing, wearables that help menstrual cramps, education thru e-sports & more!

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

0:58 Jason welcomes the Startmate companies to the TWiST Studio 1:36 Zac from JigSpace pitches an AR platform for educational presentations 11:56 Teresa from Brandcrush pitches an experiential marketing platform 24:57 Jimmy from Syncio pitches a 1-click Shopify inventory sync extension 37:53 Alice from Ovira pitches a wearable device that helps stop period pain 46:14 Brett from Flaktest pitches an educational gaming platform teaching school subjects thru e-sports 54:48 Gemma from WORK180 a women-oriented job site where only endorsed employers can post jobs 1:03:34 Jason sits down with Startmate's Head of Operations Michael Batko and reveals his top 3!

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by Owl Labs, a 360-degree smart video conferencing camera that's revolutionizing how companies collaborate. To get $50 off your first meeting owl, visit owllabs.com slash twist, then use offer code Twist at checkout. Upcoming launch events. The next Founder University is on January 27th and 28th in San Francisco. Applications are due on Monday, December 16th. All right, we're here on this week in starters with a bunch of crazy, all right. Australians, Ozzy, Ozzy, Oz. There's a lot of them here. I think I'm supposed to say Ozzie and you're supposed to say,

and do I say Ozzy again? And then you say, Oi. And then what happens? Then I, Ozzy, Ozzy again and you? And then what do we do? We do shots after that. And then we go to the VIP room and put $100 in the slot machine. I think that's how it goes, right?

We've got a number of startups here who have completed the StartMate Accelerator. They're going to pitch for two minutes. I'm going to ask him a couple of questions. And maybe I'll give him a little advice on whatever their biggest challenge is. First up, Zach, Zach is the CEO of Jigspace or GigSpace? Jig space. J-I-G space. And he's got the new dot-space domain. J-I-G dot space.

Two minutes on the clock, three to go. 3D knowledge is the future. For sales, for training, for education. Think about the large commercial vehicles sales rep. They go all around the country. They're selling these large vehicles, but most of the time they don't actually have the truck there with them. They do a presentation, they have printed marketing materials.

But they could have it there with them in 3D. They could place it down, they could walk around it, they could give a really compelling sales pitch. 3D knowledge is the future. But right now it's really hard. So you have to process the content. You have to develop an app. You have to deploy it.

You have to support it. it. It's complex. It's expensive. It's really time consuming. That's the problem we're solving with Jigspace. We make spatial presentations easy. You use Jig Workshop, you just bring in your file, we do all the processing for you. You create a really easy presentation step by step. It's like PowerPoint for 3D. Then with a click of a button, you can view it in AR and share it with the world. It's simple, elegant, future proof and it's going to be the standard for how we share knowledge. Our users love it. We have over 2 million downloads, 4.8 out of 5-star rating worldwide.

Companies like Apple use it. They have it installed on all the iPads in their Apple stores. In their, sorry, in their Apple stores. Companies like Hino trucks, they sell their vehicles with it, and there are students all around the world making presentations. So we're commercialising the platform with Gig Workshop Pro. This is our tool for teams and professionals. It's a monthly subscription.

It's made for companies that have big, complex, expensive products that they have to sell. Think durable manufacturing, medical technology, transportation. So we're launching this in November with our six pilots. So what comes next? Right now, we're working on nailing our growth engine. So that means user engagement and success and doing early commercialization. So that's the one in progress. And then next year, we're going to release the full thing out in the market.

You're raising a seed round right now. Big round of applause for jig.g.g. Okay. So this was one of these presentations where it was super promising, but you left out all the important information. And when a founder leaves out important information, what do you think, Zach, the investor on the other side of the table thinks? Does they think it's good news or bad news? Bad news. Correct.

And so you said you had two million downloads. You said you had an enterprise product, but I don't think you mentioned how much money you're making or how much revenue you have or how many active users you have. And those are the numbers that will use to make a decision. So my advice to you and to the person who's running the accelerator is to make sure you anticipate what investors are going to be asking and include that in the presentation. And when you do that, credibility goes up, even if it's modest. So you have two million downloads. of those 2 million downloads, how many converted into paying members or users last month in, let's say, September? So we haven't commercialized it yet, but we have...

So zero. Zero, yeah, yeah. Zero. Yes. Got it. So this would lead to a person saying why, right? So my thought would be, oh my God, please tell me they don't have 2 million downloads and nobody's ever paid. And that's exactly my fear has now been realized.

What are you thinking? Why wouldn't you charge for it? You spent all this money to build the software and you don't charge for it? No, not yet. Are they getting value from it? Yeah, they are. That was the point of your presentations, that they're getting tremendous, life-changing, world-changing value. Yet, you don't charge for it. Not for the commercial product yet. Right. So that's coming out in November. That's what we're doing this year. So here's what we think here in Silicon Valley, when a founder has enterprise software that is incredibly robust like this. This is pretty serious stuff, right? Like, this is going to save people, I don't know, hundreds of hours a year. Charge them something.

Make it real. Yeah. So we are charging. We are actually charging. Oh, how are you charging? Yeah, so we've worked with people over the last, like, two years with companies, and it's been like proving out the platform. So you've done pilots?

Yeah, about $250,000 in revenue. Okay. So you want to own that? Yeah. We've been doing it for two years. We tested various ways of charging, various business models. And we, in our tests alone, generated 250,000 revenue. You see how strong that sounds?

But your sounds so weak. And the reason it sounds so weak is because you didn't own it up front. Yep. I would say we're building up a base of users to get feedback and refine the product. We're going to have our commercial launch where we're going to charge $50 per month per user. What are you going to charge per month per user? $50. I just guessed it immediately.

$50 to $100 we're testing. Okay, great. But perfect. Now you're starting to seem credible. And in this life, we're all in a race to be credible. And where this becomes particularly acute is when you're asking people to invest money. The whole point of this is I'm raising a $1.4 million seed round. You really want to make us think that if we give you that 1.4, you're going to return 100 times that. So you're asking us to give you 1.4. You know what we want back? 140 million. Done.

Okay. 1.4 for what percent of the company do you think? 25%, yeah, it'll be about 25, yeah. Okay, so four times that, we're looking at $5.6 million evaluation or so. Yep. That means for you to return that money, you've got to build a company worth $600 million. Do you know how much revenue you need to have to have a company worth $600 million? Quite a lot. What do you take a guess?

What do you think it would be here in America? 600 million revenue. To have a $600 million value company, you would need to have one-tenth of that in revenue, I think, for software. industry. And if you had a 50% margin, that would be 20 times. So if you had 20 or 30 million dollars in profits, that would say, that would, if you extrapolated that, you'd probably have double that in costs, right, or double that in top line to have that bottom line. So you have 40 to 60 million, 20 to 30 million in profits, 20 times that, put you in that 400 to 600 million range. So you just have to be cognizant of that, and that's really what you're going at. You've got us

nodding the whole time. We believe in AR. We know that's going to be a big thing. You might be a little bit early. And the pitch is great. Yeah, we understand the tools are complicated. Making a simpler tool will be better. You're kind of like a Canva for AR. So say that. Own it. You're from Australia. And it's great when you present it like that. It's Canva, but for AR. Now, you said Apple has it on all their iPads. Big claim. Why? Why do they have it on their iPad? You never backed it up with any, and they're paying you zero. So they've got it in every store. So the company with the most capital in the world, more than any, most countries, has your software on every single iPad, and yet you make zero dollars from them. They've got the free app. Yeah. The free of your app.

Why? Because it's one of the best examples of AR. Okay. So they use it to demo AR. Yeah. Got it. Awesome. So that's good to know. Yet you make zero dollars from them. Tell me about that 250. Let's just get this as we wrap up here. Of the 250, what was the largest deal? and the most successful deal. It might be the same, it might be different. So it was $30,000 for a single jig. What does it mean to sell them a jig? Yeah, so they...

Am I missing something? Does that mean something in Australia? Oh, no, a jig is the actual presentation, a 3-day presentation. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so you did work for hire. You made it a gorgeous presentation of a 30,000, like a creative or agency might. Yeah, it took us about two weeks, yeah. Great.

So you started, you got a little services revenue in there, which is great because you can build out your product on their nickel. So that's super savvy. So own that. And just remember, like, if we're doing a presentation with investors, think about how they'll make their decision and then craft it a bit on how they're going to make that decision so that when you get to the questions, then the questions become more around when are you raising? What are the terms? And you kind of move the conversation down, past the blocking and tackling. Let's give a big round of applause.

Zach. Listen, hiring takes a lot of time and you're the founder. It's going to fall on your plate. And you know how much time it takes. And that's time you may or may not have. Likely, it's the latter. You don't have the time. So urgency is your enemy when it comes to finding the best candidates.

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and of course our marketing maven manager, Maureen. They are doing a great job, amazing team members. And we're at it, hiring again. Here's Prash. He's doing my associate, Prash is creating a job posting for our new position. He quickly selects the skills needed, writes a description, and adds additional screening questions, my favorite.

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I love when they give a cash offer. That's LinkedIn.com slash twist. To get $50 off your first job post terms and conditions, of course, apply because they're giving you a fitty. All right. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Next up is Teresa. Welcome. Where are you from? Melbourne, Sydney. From Melbourne. Melbourne. Very nice.

And your company is brand crush.com. That's it. You got two minutes on the clock. Remember, a lot of people are listening. So don't just say, like, as you can see here, you got to do a little sports casting right and describe what's on the screen. Three, two, go. Brand crash is a marketing platform for real world customer engagement.

We consumers are hard to engage. You know, we're with around 6,000 brand signals every day that are trying to get our attention. And these interactions are really finding it hard to get our attention. So what is working for brands is basically engaging people through physical interactions in the real world. So where people live, work and play. So think about a new drink that you try at a festival or a new mascara, probably not a new mascara, but a deodorant that you may have been gifted at a yoga studio. This is experiential marketing. It's a strategy that market as a youth.

using to cut through the noise. And it's a $100 billion industry, which is gaining momentum because we consumers are craving physical interactions. So I was previously the CMO of a health food startup, which I helped grow to 20 million of Rev. And during that time, I ran more than 100 experience to activations across the US, UK and Australia. And there was a number of problems with them. They're highly fragmented, undiscoverable and hard to book. They're also hard to scale because their logistics and staff intensive, and they're hard to measure. But what if brands could book and manage real-world campaigns with the same ease as booking a Google or Facebook ad?

Brand Crush makes this possible. We connect brands with a network of businesses and events for real-world customer engagement. So as an example, Green and Blacks, which is a premium chocolate brand, wanted to connect with office workers. They scaled a campaign through Brand Crush across 87 inner-city cafes to get their products into the hands of 160,000 consumers. That's 160,000 products and consumers' hands for less than the cost of a Google Click. All those cafes actually got paid, as well as delighted their customers to simply

gift a product with every product sold. And as you can see, we have monetised the platform. We've run over 760 activations across Australia, you know, reaching a number of consumers for some leading brands, including Mondalise, Uncle Toby Zimbiga. and we've also just kicked off into the US and have added the hottest wellness studios to our platform including Y7. So we're building an end-to-end experiential marketing platform

to take an offline, $100 billion industry online. Okay, well done. Let's give her a big round of applause. So the presentation needs work, but it's a really good business idea and you are the right person to do it. You spent over a minute explaining what...

Experiential marketing is. And then you went into your background and a little bit of why there's a problem with experiential marketing. You can assume a high degree of knowledge when you're going out to the investment community, one minute and 10 seconds framing the problem is probably 50 seconds too much

because we never actually saw your product. And I would say the best way to start this is, when I worked in the agency business, I did 100 activations for brands, including Tic Tacs. And this was really hard because I had to A, B, and C. If only there was a software platform that did A, B, and C, I could have saved 500 hours and $10,000 per activation. Well, I created it. Let me show you how it works.

meet Jason. Jason works for Tick-Tac. He wants to give Tick-Tac's new chocolate, mint chocolate wafers out with coffee. He goes in. He types in what his goal is. We source the locations. We confirm that it happened. And here is the engagement report. Now there's reporting. But we didn't see any of your product because you just gave us a big history lesson of how this is all going down. Well, we need to know what you, what's special about what you're doing. We know what's special about this paradigm shift. We know why it exists. Great. We already knew that. We still don't know how you do it and how you charge. But you did say 760 activations have been done. Correct. Correct. How much money did you make doing those 760 activations? So revenue 85,000 and our GMV was

330. Got it. We charge both sides of the marketplace at the moment. We take a 12 and a half percent commission from the host side and we add a fee. Got it. So you take 12 and a half percent of what? 12 and a half percent of the, basically the rate that the brand, that the business sets. So, for example, if it's Y7 and they set a rate of $100, we're taking that $12.50 commission from them, and then we're adding that $12.50. So here's your job as the entrepreneur, especially when you're doing something new like this, is to walk us through an example so that we don't have to do any work.

because what you're doing is putting us in the detective position right now. We're trying to figure out what's reality here, right? And you're making us turn into Colombo. Do you guys get Colombo down in Australia? We do get Colombo. It's a bit old. You got the Colombo? Yeah.

Okay. And, you know, you don't want to put us in the position where we're like, so you're working on the engagement marketing, experiential or engagement? What do you call it? Oh, yeah. My wife, she said she did that one time. We went to get the Manicadi on. Monday Manacottis at Tonys.

Yeah. They activated it. Yeah. But you may get me into the detective. I don't want to be a detective. Explain it. So in this case, you're taking 12, they pay the location, the cafe. Correct.

So the chocolate company pays the cafe a dollar for putting a piece of chocolate on top of a coffee. Exactly. You get 12. And a half cents every time they put a piece of chocolate on there for managing this process. We get 25 cents. 25 cents. Do you source the locations for them? Correct.

So we list all the spaces on our platform. So they're businesses that have really world customer reach. Got it. So you have in cities in Australia built up a base of locations that can activate for people. Correct. There's 1,350 at the moment. 13. And these are local businesses, cafes.

Yeah, so health and wellness businesses, hospitality like cafes, and also corporate and co-working. So you made $500 per activation approximately of the $700 and kept 25% of that for $80,000 or so. Correct. So it seems like it's a pretty good business. If it scales, you're providing the software and doing what else, the sourcing of the marketplace side of the hosts?

Correct. So we're listing the spaces on our platform and we're giving these businesses the ability to monetize the real world customer reach. And for brands, we're giving them the ability to scale a campaign, like intimate activations at scale. Intimate activations at scale. It's really good.

It's a pretty neat concept because the reason people probably don't do experiential marketing is they don't know how to. Correct. And they certainly don't know how to scale it. Actually, that is the issue, right? Anybody can go to one cafe and say, can you put these chocolates on here as a dollar? It's going out and convincing 500 cafes to do it. What's the largest deal you ever did in the most successful ones?

Probably Mondalais would be the probably largest deal. What is Mondalais? So are the green and blacks chocolate? And that would have been a $68,000 campaign. So it was a big one. So they paid you $68,000 plus they shipped all the chocolates out, or you do that for them. We coordinated that for them. Oh, very nice. So they spent $68,000 giving away how many pieces of chocolate?

It was around 160,000. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, okay. So about 30 cents per piece of chocolate? Yeah, it's actually a bit more. A bit more. And then how do you know or how did they define success?

So you get them to repeat. Absolutely. And they have repeated, which is great. So they've repeated six times with even some smaller campaigns. But what we do is have an activation report. So these businesses need to take some photography of the activations they've run themselves, some key consumer sentiments. and part of what we're in right now is phase two.

So being able to build in more of a consumer app to be able to capture that path to purchase data. Got it. Your presentation was bad. Your answers are exceptional and you're exceptional. So if you were to choose, you could fix the presentation, but you can't fix the wrong founder.

What I really like about this business is, I think this is a really challenging and difficult and maybe bad business for most founders, but I think it's a great business for this founder. And we call that founder product fit or founder market fit. But I like to say founder product because I think that you're going to really enjoy building this product out. And you're not going to have to worry about competition because it's going to be so brutally hard to make this business work. And who's going to want to do this?

It's hard, right? But you want to do it. And I think that's super important. So I'm really fascinated by what you're doing. And I think it's going to be quite successful. And repeat customers is going to be the key. and you might want to consider this being a SaaS product. We're actually working on that right now.

Yeah. I think that there, what happens, I think the path will be for you. We have a company called grin.com, I believe, is their domain. And they do this for influencer marketing. And we have another one captivate that does like kind of agency, uh, influencer marketing and experiential reminds me of this a bit in that it's filled with a lot

of friction. It's hard to do, etc. What you need to do is if you're just charging for software, the people like this chocolate company eventually would be like, you know what, they taught us how to do it. Let's build it ourselves and let's get air table or Google sheets and we'll figure it out. We'll bring it in-house. So your reward for doing this five times with the chocolate company is for that person to go to their boss and say, this is working more than anything.

We need to bring this in house. And so what you really want to do is build the software platform for them and offer the services a la carte and say, here's the platform. you can just use it yourself or if you want we can work on the campaign with you and you know we'll charge you $200 an hour for that so but if your software then they instead of them paying you just that one time and then you're having to resell them they're just paying you $10,000 a year for the software for the next 10 years and then all their data's in your system and they're going to want to see over time you know yeah that ROI every single time and that validation that it's the right thing to spend their money on yeah think about

this thing about making this an enterprise software play, because they're going to eventually bring this in-house if it is successful. Let's give her a big round of applause. Well done. Listen, if you're a founder, you're probably using a million different techniques to be better at your job. You know what the number one thing is? Getting a good night's sleep. That's how you become more efficient. That's how you become crisp and you make great decisions. That's the ultimate hack. You want to get a great night's sleep. And eight sleep is the first bed engineered to improve your sleep. I have this bed and I love it. You can set the temperature on two sides of the bed. So my wife, she likes it a little bit warmer than I do. I like it nice and cool. You can set the

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And really happy to be an investor in the company as well. Thanks for making some room on the cap table for me. All right, let's get back to this amazing episode. We're meeting some really great founders with some really interesting companies here on this week. in startups this week. It's one of the great joys of my life is to hear these pitches and then absolutely brutalize them for your entertainment and insights. Next up is Jimmy from Sinkio. Sinkio. Sinkio. Sinkio. C-I-O. C-I-O. C-I-O. Three to go. Cool. We're Sinkio.

We are creating a connected world of e-commerce for a platform that real-time sinks inventory across every online shopfront in the world. So just quickly, there's a backstory why we got into this idea. My previous startup was a fashion marketplace and we were trying to bring all brands onto our marketplace, which we built on Shopify,

quickly realized how painful it was to grab the inventory manually. They'll send us a spreadsheet and that took hours of our time uploading the products. But then once it was on our shopfront or our marketplace, the inventory changes all the time.

So we oversell constantly and start to get really scared of getting orders placed. The brands would take so long to just, you know, fulfill the orders and also get back to us if it's oversold. That's how we started. Well, actually, the brands were really, really interested in using us. We were building Sinko as an internal API. And, you know, they were just like, look, we have the same issue with our own marketplace partners. So we launched it. This is what happened.

We've grown 10 times over the past 12 months in terms of revenue. So it's about 1.5,000 USD to now 15,000 USD. So growth every month. We're now up to 2,000 brands using us across 75 countries. About 50% of them are in the US. We've synced over $300 million in gross merchandise value, and we've done it from $0 in customer acquisition costs. All of it has been through finding us on the Shopfire App Store,

or through referral from either Shopify, digital agencies, or simply brands to other brands. So we have a sort of natural network effect and a natural kind of inherent viral component to Sinkia. We work with big brands, but we also work with small independent brands as well to create sort of collaboration and cross-selling. We have a team that is...

All right, time. All right, let's give me a... big round of applause. Okay. There's something going on here really cool because you got from zero to 15,000 in revenue, but you broke one of the cardinal rules of presenting. And by cardinal rules, I mean my rules, which is you need to show us, not tell us. You put us on one slide with some words and talked for a minute and a half. You want to get right to showing the product. We never saw the product, right? Well, eventually, yeah. We got to a minute and Before maybe we would have gotten there.

So what you want to do is say, you know, in the beginning here, we don't need you to tell us a story or give you a bunch of history. Nobody cares. Yeah. Look at me. Yeah. Nobody cares about your history. Yeah. Nobody cares about your history.

Nobody cares about the history of the universe. Nobody cares in startup land. What they care about is what problem does it solve for which set of customers? How much money do you make and how quickly can get to $100 million in revenue? So you're giving us all this context. And what's going through the mind of the investment community when you're, you're going through the mind of the investment community when you, do that is, how is this going to print money? Yeah.

Who are the customers and how delighted are they? And anything that's not that is kind of the fat in this equation, right? So starting with, we have a plug-in for Shopify that allows these merchants to pay us $500 a month or $100 a month to have their inventory listed on this global directory of inventory, which then allows customers to find the products. So looking for it, let me show you how it works. Boom. So the person who purchases this is a storefront?

Yep, yep. But wait, you said it's a Shopify plugin. So are storefronts using Shopify? Oh, so online storefronts. Online storefronts. So you're getting online storefronts, but I thought do online storefronts actually inventory stuff, or do they all drop ship?

But I thought they were all drop shipping it, and they don't actually inventory. Yeah, so that's what we're actually scaling. So we enable drop-es. shipping for any online shopfront. So if you're an independent online supplier, you can now use Sinkio to distribute your product through drop shipping method to any other online shopfront in Shopify. So that's totally different.

So I have a shop where I sell pencils. You want to put my, I can let you put my pencils on your pad store. So if you got a store that sells pads and moleskins and journals, and I have Jason's pencils, and you have Jimmy's journals. Jason's pencils can make a deal with Jimmy's journals to list each other's products. And when somebody orders my pencils and your journals, they would get two packages. They would check out one time with one credit card, but then get two packages in the mail. One drop shift from you, the journals, and won my fantastic pencils.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay, so you're terrible at describing your product. Just so we're clear. Yeah. You're making me be a detective and figure this all out. What a great idea. Yeah.

I agree with that. It's a great idea. You're terrible at explaining it. Let me unlock for you and every person out there. Yeah. How to explain complex things. Yeah. Ask your customers to explain why they bought your product to you in an email or a survey.

So if you were to ask one of your customers, why did you buy Sinkio? What would they say in plain English? What do you think they would say? Why did they buy it? They started in the shop by store and they bought it. What was the reason they bought it? What would they say? Most common answer.

Save time and to make more money through collaboration. Okay. Perfect. So we help merchants save time and make more money through collaboration. Let me show you how it works. And this is the big unlock for founders. You're all sitting there trying to use some goddamn buzzwords because you think it's going to impress somebody or because you read them on TechCrunch or a product hunt or wherever. Plain English.

Just plain English. You sell X, I sell Y. And you see where I used an example that got a couple of laughs, right? If you can come over with an example that gets a couple of laughs or is a real world one that gets a couple of laughs, now you've got people emotionally engaged. And so show don't tell is one of the cardinal rules that we teach in our accelerator. And the next cardinal rule is examples matter. Yep, yeah. How much, I'm going to ask you a question.

Short answers are appreciated. How much do you charge for your software? this is how much we charge. Okay, for the people who are not watching, it's free if you have 25 products or less. Yep. So that would be skews. Yeah.

25 skews or less. 20 bucks for 100, 29 bucks for 500, 39 for 1,000. Yeah. And then this slide would be the power slide if you showed how many customers you had for each. So how many people have the $39 a month product right now? How many people are paying for that? That'll be about 10%. 10%.

10%. Okay. And you said how many total people are paying you? that $15,000 a month. Oh, yeah. If the average price is $25,000, you have $15,000. You got about, what, 5,000, 6,000 customers? We have 2,000.

Oh. So there's like two sides of the Sinkio equation. There's a supplier, I guess, like the maker, and then the retailer. Sure. That is drop shipping. So we only charge the retailer. Got it. So you have 2,000 customers.

Yeah. Paying you on average what? So 2,000 users, 550 customers. 550 retailers. 550 retailers. They've synced more than 25 products. Got it. So they're on average.

Three times five is 15 at a zero. And you're at 15,000. You're at 15,000. So on average, you're spending 30 bucks a month from you. Yeah. If you made the price, if you doubled these prices, how many of our customers would you lose? I don't think many at all. Yeah.

Okay. So we synced over $300 million in gross merchandise value. There are some that are making millions a month. Got it. If you tripled your prices. Yeah. Out of 100 customers, how many would cancel? If you tripled your prices, how many would cancel?

Again, not many. Not many. Our pricing is... So now we're going to really go for it. Hold on. If you 10xed your prices, what percentage would cancel? In your mind, estimate as the founder knowing what you know. 10x.

So the introductory price would be 190 or 290 or 390. If you 10xed and you charge that top person, 4,800 a year, 5,000 a year, What number out of 100 customers you have, people paying for the software would cancel of 100. 10, 20, 30. Out of 100? Out of 100. We're just doing some...

I would say 30. 30. Yeah. So you get 10 extra prices and lose 30%. So you go from 15,000 to 150 and you would lose 30%, which would be 45,000. So you'd be making 95,000 instead of 15,000. Correct? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so just doing the back of the envelope math, this is the number one thing I would do with a company like yours in our accelerator. I got my hands on you. Yeah. Had you in my accelerator. I'd sit down and have this discussion with you. This is so cheap.

It doesn't make sense. Yeah. How'd you come up with this pricing? Fear? Well, so like we just introduced it. We thought that products as a value metric would be, you know, something like a logical choice and we haven't and that was when we launched so we haven't changed

the pricing and we launched six months ago 12 months ago and your churn is like under 10% 110% no under 10% yep definitely yeah okay if your churn's under 10% that's probably people whose businesses are failing or credit cards expired it's not real churn it's not like a number of people are saying this doesn't work for me yeah that's de minimis in other words yeah so what i encourage you to do and all founders is when you you are thinking about pricing. Be aggressive. This is a business. Is this a nonprofit? No. Do you like money? Yeah. You trying to raise money? Possibly. Okay. Right investor. Okay. Show that you are a capitalist. You socialist by chance?

I have a Chinese origin. All right. So I'm not. Let's keep pulling the string now, okay. All right, listen, great job. Really like what you're doing. You got a 10x, at least 5X, what you're charging. Let's hear it for Jimmy. Thank you. Nicely done, Jimmy. Are you tired of dull and ineffective meetings when nothing works and you can't get anything done

and you just want to pick up your laptop and bang your head against it? That's my life before I had the meeting Al Pro. This is a 360-degree camera device with audio built-in and microphones, and it uses AI so that when a person in seat number three starts talking, it zooms in on them with the camera. So the person who's on the road in an airport lounge doesn't have to squint and say, who's talking now? I don't know who's talking. The robotic camera, boom, zooms in on them. And over 22,000 companies are now using the meeting out because they want to get stuff done. Let's be honest, you want to get it done. You don't want to waste your time setting up meetings. And the setup of this product is so elegant, so simple.

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Al. So I want you to visit Owl Labs.O-Labs.com slash twist and use the offer code twist at checkout. That's owlabs.com slash twist and use the promo code TWIST when you check out and you will get $50 off your first meeting out. And the new meeting owl 360 is out, the meeting owl pro. I have the meeting owl right here because we're using it for a year. And we're going to upgrade this to the meeting out pro, which has got even better video resolution. I think they went to 1080P, which is just ridiculous and amazing. It is so awesome. You're going to just love it. Okay. Thanks again to our friends over at Al Labs. Great product. Really well done. Okay. As described earlier, we're meeting with StartMates Accelerator's latest class here in San Francisco. They're on tour from Australia. And our next

founder is Alice. She has a company called ovira.ovira.org.O-V-I-R-A dot CO. Two minutes on the clock. Three, two, go. Jason, I have something exciting to tell you today that I never get to say. We have a tape delay. Just want to make sure. Go ahead. I love my period. But it hasn't always been this way because I'm one of the 2.3 billion women that spends nearly one out of every four weeks in pain.

Not wanting to take over 900 pills a year to manage my pain left me constantly researching and devouring literature on other pain therapies. As like 94% of women, I don't want to manage my pain with drugs. I want something better. And that's why I built o'vira. Overe is a device that stops period pain naturally and instantly. She's small and can be worn discreetly. And being rechargeable and tolerance-free makes her a partner for life. Backed by science and safety use means o'vira is CE marked, TGA-registered and FDA-approved.

making her available for sale in Europe, Australia and the US. We recently sent out 77 units for testing, which came back with an overall NPS of 82. $379 billion is spent each year on period pain relief. But as you can see, women need a Vera, period. And by driving down manufacturing costs, we are able to price Evira at just 149 for the device and just $9 a month for supplies.

It's a bloody simple decision. Okay. You cramped a lot into that. Thank you. And, yeah. But it had a great flow. The presentation flowed just perfectly. And I'll leave it at that.

You've come to the right place because we've invested in two menstrual. We, too, are big. fans of cycles, and we have an investment in Ruby Love, which creates clothing and underwear to wear during your menstrual cycle. And we also have tampon tribe, which is creating organic, plastic-free tampon. So we know this is a great space, and it is like the Dollar Shave Club, you know, has great potential. So what we didn't learn here, and this is going to be my first question, and this might have been a strategy for presenting. if it was your strategy great, which is, how does it work?

Because you never mentioned how this works. What we saw was it's a little round device about the size of, it looks like a silver dollar or something. That's an American large coin. And then it's got two pads on it that have two cables that look like they're shocking the person or doing some electrical impulse. So is that what it's doing? Is it doing like...

Yeah, yeah. So it's based on electrophotherapy. So it sends low-level electric pulses, which in turn overload the nerves and stop the pain signals from traveling to the brain. Got it. So is this specifically for cramping? Correct. Yeah. Got it. So that was thus my pun. So when you have cramps, if you shoot electrical impulses into the muscles around the stomach.

It's actually, it's more so targeting the nerves than the muscles. Targeting the nerves. Yes. The nerves then feel the electricity as opposed to sending the signal to the brain. Am I correct? Yeah. So it's picking up the vibrations instead of the pain signals. Got it. Yeah. and the brain thinks, okay, I'm just having some vibrations in my belly area.

Correct, yes. So it's based on the gate control theory, which says it vibrations and to quicker than pain. So we just got to send enough vibrations and then the pain no more. So this is like really the heart of this. Is this been something that has been around for a long time as a potential way to deal with period cramps, I guess is what people would say? Yeah, definitely. So the technology isn't new, and it is used for a variety of other uses, like in hospitals for women giving birth or like in physios for muscle recovery, like net pain. So it's used in physical therapy, but nobody's ever had this idea.

So you're taking a technology that exists. You've productized it. The pads that go on the end of the whatever sends the electricity in are disposable. So you've got to throw those away. So you're going to need to buy a dozen of those a month. if you're going to use it for six or seven days? Like one pad set should last like one period. Got it.

Okay. So you'd wear it for that entire time, but you maybe can take it off to shower and then put it back on without changing the glue. The glue will still work? Yeah, yeah. It's still work. Oh, that's great. So what you also want to be able to do is experiment.

The way your business will be judged by investors is not on the device itself. We'll just assume that you have product market fit and it's somewhere between good and great. In other words, people aren't going to send them back and be upset about them and write one-star reviews. Let's just say we assume you're going to get four out of five stars on average. We assume that you've done the product testing and you've got product market fit. Then it comes down to pricing and scaling this. And do you have the acquisition price that makes sense so that the contribution, if you spend a dollar on marketing, you make three. And if you make three, you then...

have $2 in profit minus whatever cost to send it and you wind up with 50 cents in profit, right? And that's how this business will get judged. Do you have somebody on your team who's run a direct-to-consumer product yet and done $100,000 in ad buys a month yet? No, but if you know someone's sending my way. Well, here's the thing. It's the good news is you're in no rush. It's not like you have a sick amount of overhead for this business. It's not like this was building, I don't know, like the bird scooter, which might have cost $10 million to develop the latest bird scooter or something like that. And those scooters cost $5 or $600 each.

Because you got this to market so efficiently, you have time to learn this yourself. And I encourage you as the founder to really think about learning, making great creative, and learning who your customer is and how to find them online through SEO organically and through pay channels because they do reinforce each other. If you wrote really good articles of here are the six ways to manage period cramps and pains, and you're one of them, and it's from you directly. And then you happen to rank in the top 10 for that. And then you make a video about why do you get cramps and what's the different ways to deal with cramps?

Does hot water help? Does ice help? Does electrical work? So you kind of take a bigger picture and then you embed yourself into it as kind of a high art. So if you were talking about, you know, all the different things that could come with it, like does drinking tea help, does meditating help, all the different ways to do pain management and even talking about the pain drugs and what the side effects are, you could kind of get people when they're in that journey and they have that explicit need.

So you spend, you know, some amount of money on ads, on Instagram, on YouTube, et cetera, but they float content. And then that content starts ranking for SEO. And then you get the free people who are just, you just, you know, searching and coming to your website and buying. And you got to get that flywheel going. So give yourself zero credit for the product. Give yourself zero credit for everything you've accomplished now and challenge yourself

as a founder to really own that piece of the puzzle. Because it's not enough in today's market to just create a great product. You also have to be a great marketer. So really think about what the brand stands for. You're funny. You're engaging and you've got the puns down. And, you know, like we had 20 people laughing like, you know, out loud four times during your presentation.

I say go with humor, since you seem to be comfortable with that, and you can make all the puns you want. You saw that with Dollar Shave Club, right? Yeah, definitely. They really went for it, and they got a little cheeky, and that you stand out, right?

So don't be afraid to stand out and get this product out there. Thank you. Great job. Thank you. Okay, let's give her a big round of applause. All right, I got all my Australian friends here pitching their companies, Aziazziaz, there you go. I love it.

I just love that. Okay, next up. is Brett from flak test. F-L-A-K-Test.com. Two minutes on the clock. Three, two, go. I'm Brett. I'm a teacher, ex-pro gamer, and the founder of FlackTest,

and we help kids become better learners for the games I love to play. Right now, a student's potential slips away snuffed by a static, standardized education system that will see 7,000 students drop out in the U.S. per day. And why? engagement. Student engagement is the number one issue facing schools and communities. Research shows that lessons are unable to capture the attention of young people and nor are they

relevant to their lives. So we took the very thing that is meaningful and irrelevant to their lives, video games. Flack test leverages the passions of young gamers and provides personalized lessons that meet their needs and strengths, tracking individual progress and providing prompt feedback. And we recognize the gifts and talents with young gamers through local, safe esport competitions and nationwide tournaments. On average, a school will pay $250 per month to have access to our platform to host an e-sports club at their school, without giving on-demand access to lessons that really engaged kids

in core school subjects like math, English and science. And it's helped people like Alex. Typical kid loves games but hates these lessons and suffers in literacy. But enter flak test. And Alex can't wait to do his weekly literacy exercise. a SWAT analysis for his Rocket League team. And in just five weeks of doing these exercises with flak tests, Alex has changed his grade from the D-minus to a B-plus in his English class.

And the best thing is the confidence he's gained from his Rocket League team he brings back into the classroom, which has compounding benefits day by day. Today, we are across 65 school clubs in Australia, and in the last three months have grown by 200% in MRR. And we want to provide flak tests to everyone. Indonesia has already started using flag tests and we're excited to announce it's Berkeley University

will be run an event next month with us 36 million school-age gamers represent a $4 billion market in the US alone and we want them using flak test today. Thank you. Okay, well done. Big round of applause. So you had us nodding along. There are kids who are not engaged in school but they're very engaged in Fortnite or Minecraft

that rings true, we're nodding. Then you said we're going to basically teach people math or other subjects either inside of Fortnite or around Fortnite. That was unclear. And people would pay to have a club that was a Fortnite club that maybe then taught the math. So I was thinking, is the math teacher inside of Fortnite? Is how exactly this work? And in your deck, you have all these beautiful illustrations. but you don't have the product.

And what happens when you're an investor and you've met with 5,000 companies like I have, the companies that have great products show the great product, the companies that don't, by and large, show illustrations. So when you do a bunch of illustrations here, we assume you don't have a product. Is this product exist yet or not? It does.

Okay. What does it look like? How does it work? Imagine it's like the Khan Academy for video games. Got it. Now that's a great descriptor. but instead of forcing me to be Colombo and going, oh, you're putting the Fortnite together with the,

my wife, she says, I should learn to floss dance. And we're confused as to how this actually works. So now you've got us maybe a third less confused, but we're still confused. So does the math class occur in Fortnite? It does. So it's like an educational sandwich. We have the lesson, the game, and then the reflection.

So why not show that? Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, show us. Don't make us work. We want to see how this works. Is it a YouTube video or is it a piece of software? It's a piece of software.

So there's a piece of software you load on a computer that is part of Fortnite or it loads Fortnite after. Oh, it's a software as a service platform. And basically the kid is like learning something, which then they actively learn in Fortnite and then reflect on their learning afterwards. So then they go on to this Khan Academy web browser. like learning tool, that it says, okay, pop over to Fortnite and we'll play some sort of script or movie over there? Imagine that you're all learning probability in your 7 or year 8. And so that concept is then brought into the game itself where the kids doing an exercise

with an objective and then they reflect on how they went. Got it. So you're teaching probability. So you want to teach the probability of landing in the right spot or the probability of getting a headshot or the probability of winning with this gun or that gun or that character. This is brilliant. Terrible presentation, brilliant idea. Cool. Which if you could pick, you can fix a terrible presentation, but you can't make a terrible idea brilliant.

So you're in good shape in that way. You're charging $250 for this to a school per month, which is $3,000 a year. How many kids can use it for that? Unlimited or a class? It's a class. Got it. Okay. So you're deciding to sell this to schools.

As opposed to selling it to parents. Why? Okay, so you're like the nth person who's told me that. And since I've been part of this, I was starting an accelerated program, and we're actually like really excited that we're going to actually offer it to parents very soon. Okay. Yeah. And the reason I ask this is schools take forever to make a decision.

You've learned that. Yes. You have, did you say you have some revenue already? Yeah. For 2019, what will the revenue be? Just tell me. Oh, for 2019, it was 20K. So this year you make 20K.

Oh, in the last 18 months. Last 18 months, which is based on three or four schools using. it? Or paying for it? It's around 15 schools paying for it. Got it. Awesome. And how did you acquire those schools? Word of mouth. The kids go and do it for us. Perfect. So what you want to do is just go directly to parents who will spend any amount of money to have their kids catch up in school. The idea is great. And I think you may or may

not know about Reggio Amelia. Do you know who that ring a bell? Regio, R-E-G-G-G-I-O, Regio-Milia? All right. So you've heard of Montessori teaching? Yes, I have. Okay, so there's Montessori. People have heard about that, like child-led education. Reggio Amelia's approach is an educational philosophy focused on, and I'm reading from the Wikipedia, on preschool and primary education, it's a pedagogy described as student-centered and constructivist that uses self-directed experiential learning in relationship-driven environments.

And a way to describe this is, if a child was really interested in orcas, if you wanted to teach the math, you might say, how much do you think? and orca weighs. And they guess and you tell them actually what they weigh. You say, what do you think a baby waste? The baby weighs 10% of an adult. What do you think the baby weighs if the arca weighs 2,000 pounds, a fully grown, 10% equals what?

And then they're like, well, I really want to figure that out because I love orcas and we're talking about orkers. So instead of the child daydreaming about orcas, and while they're supposed to be doing math, you combine the two things together. Exactly. So you should read up on this because it's kind of what you're doing, is saying, let's go to where the kids are and then, okay, yeah, it sucks to be at school

and doing math, but at least I'm learning probability of me getting a kill shot and being the last and a free-for-all to win. And you say, like, hey, if 30 people are doing a free-for-all, what are your chances of being the last person statistically? If there's 15 people last, now what's your chance, right? It's a really good idea, actually. And I think it's something where the Fortnite and Minecraft people

will want to get involved eventually, And parents will pay, I think, anything reasonable per month for this. And I think $5 to $19 a month billed annually would be a no-brainer for parents. So you say $10, $20 a month in the App Store subscription and let them pay for it in the App Store because that's where they are. So if you brought this to the App Store and did the lessons there, that can be very powerful. I know and let them sign up there. They can go back to their desktops or their PCs to do it. But it's a very clever idea.

And I think it's got legs. Thank you. Big round of applause. All right, welcome back. Gema is here. She's from Work 180, rocking the launch t-shirt. Wow, you know your audience. Very well done.

Two minutes on the clock. Three to go. My name's Gemma Lloyd, and I'm the CEO of Work 180, and we're getting women hired by the best employers. So I worked in the tech industry for around seven years, working mainly what I refer to now as archaic boys club environments, and really got to the end of that seven years and wanted to make a difference and change that for women.

And so Work 180 was founded in February 2015. So we have completely flipped the traditional job platform model on its head. Instead of just the job seekers sending in their CV and their credentials, we're now saying to employers, no, show us your CV and your credentials. If they've met a minimum benchmark, they can join the platform and then we then connect them with women. And it's this approach that has seen us get up to 50 times more women apply for jobs than other traditional platforms, but it's not just about overall application uplift.

it's also about quality of application. So you can see here that we've proven to get eight times the conversion from application to hire from traditional job platforms like Indeed and four times that of LinkedIn. And this particular example is for women and software engineering. This is our MRRR growth. So we're currently sitting at our $18,000, 28,000 US monthly recurring revenue. So we work on a SaaS model that's paid by employers, anything from $500 per month to $4,500 per month,

depending on organisation size and demand. These are just some of the endorsed employers that came onto the platform last year, so this year across Australia in the UK. In terms of go-to-market, we get 30 to 50 inbound inquiries from employers per month and how we get to candidates. Well, we have widgets that are streamed on women-specific audiences like She Loves Data, women in Transport, Talented Ladies Club, Pye Ladies, for example. What we do differently to any other job platform out there is the analysis and benchmarking

of over 30 data points from that employer. And we then provide continuous improvements via market insights back to those employers, which results in 60% of the endorsed employees actually improving at least one policy. So women absolutely love Work 180 because it's not just about getting a job. They know when they get a job with a Work 180 employer, that's an employer that's committed to change. Okay, well done. Let's give a big round of applause. Okay.

So, to recap, you allow only top employers on your platform, Work180.com. They have to be invited or they apply? They apply via HR health check tool. Got it. What percentage get accepted? We turn away around 10%. So 9 out of 10 people get accepted. Yes.

10% don't get accepted. Correct. get denied, what is the typical reason they've been denied? They haven't met a minimum policy benchmark around pay parental leave or flexible working or professional development, and that's all been driven from job seekers and what they want. How many, in order to be listed on the site as an employer, you have to be paid. You have to pay a fee. Correct.

Got it. So this is a subset of all. You can go right into the microphone there. This is a subset of all employers, say, in Australia. So they have to be willing to pay. If they're not willing to pay a very reasonable fee of, what is it, 500 to start? 500 to start. If you're small, up to 4,500 per month.

So the minimum is you have to be able to pay $6,000 a year. Then how do you get women onto the platform? So we know how you get the companies. You filter them. You basically are certifying them. You're giving them a good housekeeping seal of approval, an organic seal of approval in a way, the 180 seal. Yes.

How do you get women to apply to those companies? How do you get the supply side? Sure. So one of the things that we do differently, because obviously there's all the usual stuff around SEO, SCA, SM, advertising, social media, yada, yada, yada. But the one thing that's really different from any other platform is that we have widgets on very niche websites

like the She Loves Data example that we had on there. So that's just women in data science, basically. miss blockchain, women and transport. So we're able to get these companies into networks they weren't able to reach before. So you find organizations that are willing to put your widget up for free. Sometimes you're doing an affiliate or you pay them to put it up? Sometimes it's in kind. Sometimes we provide some financial support.

A lot of these organizations are volunteer-led. So they really appreciate even if we do promotions of their mental programs through to the employees on our platform. That might be like an in-kind agreement that we have with them. What about giving them a percentage of everybody who signs up? We have definitely had those discussions as well, and it might even be like a paper click that we work with them on. Yeah. I think it's a wise idea to say anybody who, if they have an affiliate link, if somebody registers, you get a dollar. If that person then interviews for a job or takes a job in the system, will give you $100. Yeah.

And then you could have this supply side coming in. And the demand side is the employer's demanding talent, right? Yes. I think is the way to look at this marketplace. I guess you could argue either side because the employees can be demanding jobs. But I think they're the supply, the supply of workers. And the demand is coming from the people who have jobs open and are willing to pay you. Yes.

What happens when the economy goes south and there's 20% unemployment again? Well, then we hopefully have a diversified enough range of industry. So it's not just, I mentioned tech quite heavily in that. But we work across tech, you know, mining, retail, hospitality, you know, and healthcare would be in discussions with quite a few hospitals at the moment. So that's an recession proof. Do you do application tracking as well, like some of the other platforms, a recruiter or other things?

Yeah, so that is difficult because big companies, have their own application tracking systems and it kind of goes out to them. However, we've just implemented something really cool that's kind of solved that problem. So we've now got a feedback loop. So a woman applies for a job and she can opt in to give us feedback on how her interview process was, whether she got the job. And then three months later, did it live up to her expectations? That's super powerful data.

Yes. So now you're getting into the glass door area. I think reviewing the interview process and then give it, if you let them write reviews of the interview process, and then if they give it less than five, let's say they give it less than three stars. So when you're on Uber, if you do one, two or three stars, they ask you why. If it's four or five,

they ask you if you want to give like some praise and they give you like, you know, excellent service, great driver, clean car, whatever. If it's bad, they say, oh, how could it be improved, right? Yes. So there could be a very interesting feedback loop for you as an upsell or just as part of the value proposition is, hey, when people apply, we ask them to candidly tell us a rating.

If it's four or five stars, we put it right on the website. If it's under three stars, we send it to you. We give them the option to share it with you at their discretion and give you a chance to maybe talk to them about how that process could be improved. So you're like an early warning system for bad reviews. So if they felt they weren't heard in the interview, if they felt the person didn't read their resume or wasn't prepared or that they applied for a certain job and there was a bait-and-switch or whatever, those employers, if they're willing to pay you, I'm assuming they really care deeply about the experience. So you could sell them, hey, you know, we're going to, we're going to be an early warning sign, a signal for you, early warning system for you to avoid the Glass Door reviews where it could get bad, right?

And I've never seen, is there a website out there? I don't know if Glass Door does it, that aggregates what it's like to interview at a place. Has anybody ever made that? On Glass Door, there is an element of that. So people do say what is entailed in that interview. But it's definitely not specific to women. And obviously the problems that women face are different. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Cool. It's a great idea. Thank you. Wow. 128,000 a month already and it's reoccurring software revenue subscription. Yes.

People pay you yearly or monthly? Month. Oh, sorry, it's a mix. And actually, we've signed up a few 24-month contracts now. Yeah. I think that's wise too. Yeah. That will reduce churn.

Yeah. All right, well done. Thank you. Thank you. Nicely done. All right. We've got a great group of Australian startups here. Ozzy,

Aziz, aye, Ozi, Ozi, Ozzie, Ozi, Ozi, Ozzi. Wow, it works. I love it. All right. Now, Michael, you are the head of operations that start making. These are your companies. Correct.

You are the mentor? Yes. Okay. I want to know. You're one of the mentors. All right. Calm down. Are you a little nervous there, Michael, on that seat?

All good. Okay, you're all good. All right. Be cool. Now, Blackbird Ventures, my friends over there, are major LP and StartMade. Correct. StartMade is a 12-week, six-week, what? 12-week.

12-week program. You put in a million dollars into each company for 1%. $75,000 for $1 million in valuation. Got it. So you get 7.5% for 75,000. Good deal. It's a good deal. deal. Now, what do you do to earn that? Because that is a below market. The market valuation

in Sydney or Australia would be for these companies typically two and a half or three. What do you think? Yeah. Well, San Francisco is a slightly different to Australia. No, no, no, but for Australia. Do you think it would be three million? Um, potentially. Two, three. Yep. Is the early stage start up valuation. So you're getting it for half price, but you provide the program. Yes. Got it. Same as anybody here, Y Combinator or. launch and what do you provide for in those 12 weeks what does the program do yeah um so far as actually all about the community so it's actually founders helping founders so actually that is everything for the start mate we do have a program as well which is an unstructured program actually

so we don't say like week one we do this week two we do this we actually ask the startup on monday hey what do you need because every single one of our cohorts is completely different Got it. So for the $75,000, for the 7.5%, you tell them to help each other. I love it. This is great. I'm starting a new accelerator. I'm accepting 100 people and you all figure it out.

But that is possible because we do have the best mental community in Australia. You do. And the Australian community is really building some large companies. Obviously, at last income's mind and Canva. Australian founders want to build global businesses. Correct? Absolutely. And it's possible to build these global businesses today fairly easily because of remote work anyway.

Absolutely. However, you have a nascent venture community. So the job typically of an accelerator is to help get the companies to raise that next round. When they graduate, you only have four venture firms in Sydney, right? There's only like four. Four of the large one, yeah. The venture community is growing, though, in Australia. It's got to grow from four to five.

It's only going up from that. But this is your biggest challenge, isn't it? I suspect, is getting these companies funded in the next stage. What are their chances of getting funded? If there's only four VC firms, and you're graduating, what, a dozen each time? Yeah, so our course are 10 to 15 startups per cohort every six months. And I'd say about half of them end up raising around a million dollars. Okay.

Do they raise from venture firms or from angels? And is there an angel community of note there? How many angels are there? Yeah. So I don't know the exact number of angels, but absolutely. Like, it's a mix of venture capital as well as angels, and the angel community is growing as well. What is the typical round size that you see for the companies that successfully raised funds coming out of, start-mate? So it's anything between like 500K to probably like a $2 million round?

Got it. And these typically occur at $3, $4, $5 million evaluations when they graduate? Yeah. What's the average? Median. Yeah, that's $4 million. $4 million. So they raise $1 million for 20%, something in that range?

So the valuations are roughly half of the United States. But is it also true that the costs of running a business in Australia are half or maybe a third or two-thirds of the cost of doing it here? Probably would say, yeah, probably a third. Salaries especially here in San Francisco are really high. And the cost of living here is incredible. What does a developer or a salesperson with, let's say a developer with five years experience and a sales executive with five years What would they cost in Australia? Ballpark.

The US dollars. 100K. 100K for a developer. And that developer in the US would probably cost 150 or 125. Yeah. Got it. So it's not free. It's not like Estonia or something where you're going to,

or Uruguay or Paraguay where you might get an amazing deal, but it's definitely a third less. So the money goes further. The valuations are a little smaller. How do you pick the companies? So we are industry agnostic. So we've got software, hardware, aerospace, sports companies, anything. But first, actually, we picked the most ambitious founders.

Founders who want to go global from day one, who actually have a huge ambition to change something big in the world. When you accept, let's say, 12 people, how many people apply in order to get to those 12? How many applications did you get for the last class? 300. 300. So if you apply, you have roughly. three or four percent chance of getting in.

So one out of every 25 or so people get in, correct? Something in that range, one at every 35 people. How do you pick, aside from they want to go global and they're passionate or they're driven, how do you really pick? Because let's face it, I looked at the companies today. They're all very similar in terms of revenue and product market fit. I'd say they all have early product market fit, and only one of them really had significant revenue,

180. So how do you pick at that early stage? Yeah, I mean, we'd love to hear your perspective on it as well. For us, I guess for me it's two things. Like one problem, is the problem actually an absolutely massive problem, a huge opportunity. And the other one is the founder. Like absolutely, it just comes back to the person. Like, does that person have the drive to build an incredible company? Got it.

Okay, so we got to see seven companies. We'll probably wind up featuring in this episode. I saw 7. and we'll probably feature five or six of them, depending on time. I'm going to give you just some candid feedback on them and then tell you my number three, two, and one through the lens of what I accepted to my accelerator and or syndicate them and invest in them, if I may. Absolutely.

You did a good job. These are all serious concerns. None of them are duds, so that's good. The presentations all need work. You heard my presentation work. Do you work with them on the presentations? Yes, we do. What I want to mention is we just at our demo days.

where the presentations were four minutes long. So they all just cut them out. You need to do a little more work on the presentations. So how long you've been doing this? Two years now. Two years. All right. You open to a little bit of advice?

Absolutely. All right. I'm going to give you a couple pieces of advice. Get to the point. Everybody's busy. You're training them to do four minutes. You're training them to run too slow. Give them three minutes.

Make them cut stuff out and get to the point quick. So rule number one, make it three minutes. Make it hard for them. If you can't explain your business in one minute, it's a bad business or you're a bad founder. That's my rule. So when I tell people they have three minutes, that's two minutes more than they need. So give them three and tell them they need to show their product within the first 15 seconds. And you have to, as the person running this, rip out anything that is superfluous, anything that's fat, and get them to the point immediately.

the number one job here is to understand the business. And in these seven that we saw, three or four of them I had to really pull out what exactly is the business. So when we looked at Sinkio, the Shopify one, it wasn't very clear exactly what they do. Airrobe, same thing. You need to teach them to say it in plain English as their folks, their customers would explain it back to them. And so that's the test. So get to the product in 15 seconds. Then examples matter.

There was very few examples here, like real-world examples. If the founder can't come up with the example, you need to tell them they're not good enough to be in the accelerator. It's their job to come up with the examples that make it crystal clear to investors what this company does. So for GigSpace, the AR platform for educational presentations, et cetera, he wasn't really showing a lot, right? It was a lot of telling, not showing.

So rule number one, get to the product, 15 seconds, two, examples matter, and show, don't tell. That's the third one. And I really want you to focus on with them. Show, don't tell. And the fourth one is we need to understand the business model. So you saw I had to tease out the pricing, tease out the traction. Just get that out there in front if it's strong. And then in terms of answering questions, they were pretty crisp.

So I give you credit, they were pretty straightforward. Going through the companies, work 180 had $128,000 in SaaS revenue. That's the number that starts to get you actually into a series A conversation. They're halfway to that. I don't know what it is in Australia. but to raise the Series A here, Silicon Valley, 3 million, which is $2.50 a month, so they're halfway there. That was pretty impressive to me. Jigspace, very hard to know how far along they are.

And this, like, I have 2 million people who downloaded it, but people aren't paying. We've done experimental. That would lead me to say, you know what, I've got to wait a little bit and see if they can actually charge for their product. Brand crush. What a great founder product fit. Really liked it. Most people hate advertising platforms, but if this were advertising network kind of, of businesses, but if that became a SaaS business and they delighted customers, you could see

that one growing. It's just going to be a little bit of a gestation period because it's a new, like influencer meeting, influencer marketing, it's very nascent. It's going to take a little while for enough people to really invest a lot of money into it and people to have that title. But now we see a lot of people having influencer marketing as a title. Sinkio, wow, charging too little, but big race to 15. So I really like Sinkio.

The founder, Jimmy, needs a little work as a presenter and getting to the point. But that's real revenue. Their air robe, I'm a little concerned about that space because I've seen this many times. But one of the things about doing these things many times, specifically the reselling of clothes, is that eventually somebody figures it out. So even if five or six or ten people have failed doing it, this might be the one that figures it out. Ovaria Overeira

Oviria The founder was dynamic and funny And that goes a long way In terms of market I could see her A dollar shave clubbing it And flack test

Didn't show the product Ugly presentation But so brilliant They're all brilliant Are you not used to this level of candidness Is this? No absolutely

That's exactly what we do I thought You're Australian Is this like You're looking at me Like you're shocked Are you okay That's exactly what we do

Okay Are you tearing up over there? Are you crying? Maybe too critical? Is he getting tearing? He's not tearing up. I just love them all so much. You love them all so much.

Yet, what really matters here is my opinion. I'm going to give my three to and now. We know that you love them. These are your kids. But I get to accept them and anoint them right now. In Silicon Valley has potentially coming to our accelerator or being syndicated by us, which would be big money. Like Silicon Valley money, right?

So, hmm, my top three, work 180s in there. That was really special. 128K. Now, O'Vira is in my top three. Based on the founder, even more than the product, I think this is a really good founder match. And then I thought, I really like this idea. that Brett has a flack test. And I hate education.

Not that I'm stupid or anything, but education is really hard to make work. But the raw idea of, and I got it out of him during the Q&A, Khan Academy, plus Fortnite, this is pretty special. I could see parents going bonkers for this.

So I put flack test in there as well. Now, I'm going to rank them. as well. So here we go. Flack test, pretty nascent. You got a lot of work to do, so I put them in third. Well, Vera, pretty good progress, but I put them in number two because it hasn't launched yet, and then 180 has the clear path to a series that I put them in first. Big round of applause for our winners. It's been great. You have any questions for me about running these accelerators? What general advice you have to all defend us? Okay.

The people of Australia are a resilient and a hardworking group, and there's no bullshit. So I do not need to lecture them about entitlement like I do in America. These are all serious founders. They're focused on revenue. They're focused on their customers. And that's usually what I have to do to, American entitled founders is try to get them focused.

So they all need to remain focused on their customers and not get distracted and figure out how to take the nascent small amounts of revenue and grow them 10% or more month over month and not get distracted because starting is easy but finishing is hard. There are too many startups today, and there are too many distracted founders running them, and there are not enough investors, and those investors do not have enough time in aggregate to mentor and meet with all of these startups. There's just too much supply of founders. So how do you break out?

The only way you break out is by showing that you can not only build a product, but you can grow it. The world does not need more people building products. It needs more people growing products and hitting scale. It's very easy, very easy to get started and build a prototype. And that's what a lot of first-time founders focus on. They focus on getting that product out there. The second time founders focus on is distribution and growth and scaling their products. That's what's important.

And that's a Justin Con quote. He said that. First-time founders working on product. on products, second time founders focus on distribution. I think that's largely correct. I would change the word distribution to growth. And that's what I hope for this cohort is that, you know, we come back and we see Sinkio, you know, raise their prices 5X and maybe O'Vira and Alice, you know, gets that video out there and learns

your cack and that's how you're going to be judged. And so give yourself no credit for your product. That's table stakes today. anybody can build a product because building a product costs 25 or 75 grand and anybody can cobble together 25 or 75 grand and it's not that hard to do or 25 to 75 grand in sweat equity it's not that hard to do but you have to give yourself credit for is that growth rate month over month and having something that stands out from the pack that's what I'm focusing on my founders

absolutely yeah 12 week program oh is it too much no too much for you Michael is it too much work. I mean, that's exactly what I tell them all the 12-week program. Oh, okay. But I've gotten to it. So, yeah. All right. They've got to... Don't make excuses for that, Michael. No, I want to see continued growth. No, it was really impressive, actually.

You know, we do a lot of these. And usually I'm trying to be ginger because there's like two or three duds. And here, I felt like I could be my authentic self and give really candid advice because, one, in the time I've spent in Australia, people appreciate candidness. Absolutely.

And being direct. And these are all real businesses. There's not a dud. So I don't have to worry about anybody crying. No crying in startups, please. No. Just growth. All right.

Listen, this has been an amazing episode. I wish you continued success. If people want to apply to Startmate, I know you don't accept Kiwis. Nobody from New Zealand is allowed in the program. They are. You do let them in? Yes.

What do you do? Do you put them in like a separate room or something? No, they're very much. deal with that. Put them in the corner? Actually, one of our teams is Kiwi. Wait, one of the seven I saw? Not the seven.

Oh, okay, another one of them. Okay, yeah. All right, so you could be from New Zealand or from Australia. Yes. Anywhere else? Just those two places. Just those two. Got it.

So you can apply and there's two cohorts a year? Yes. One in Sydney in January and one in Melbourne in July. Oh. So some difference between the two cities in terms of the character of how the programs have run to date? more fighting in the Melbourne one right more fist fights just a little colder it's in the winter

oh it's colder yeah that's it is there a difference between the founders from each city is there anything notable in your mind not particularly no no no no just great founders actually great founders really well done and if you want to apply where do you go start mate dot com dot au dot com dot a you

correct all right listen great job really appreciate you bringing everybody and to the founders very much appreciate you you sharing your visions and this was very impressive and I see a lot of companies so well done let's give them a big round of applause