This Week in Startups - E1024: #StartupTuneup @ Founder.University: 6 founders pitch to Jason & Dave Samuel of Freestyle Capital on merging communication networks, athlete performance tracking, DTC women’s clothing, smart tabletop gaming systems & more!

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

1:31 Bryan pitches Project OWL (smart communications platform) 3:46 Erin pitches Nude Barre (DTC eco-friendly hosiery) 6:02 Mike pitches STACT (Athlete performance tracking) 8:05 Feedback & questions for Cohort 1 16:53 Rankings for Cohort 1 19:53 Jonathan pitches Move38 (smart tabletop gaming) 22:04 Brandon pitches ReplyBuy (text messaging support for sports, entertainment & higher education) 24:20 Stella pitches Stella Carakasi DTC (Size-inclusive & affordable luxury clothing for women) 28:22 Feedback & questions for Cohort 2 37:55 Rankings for Cohort 2

This week in startups is brought to you by Fiverr. Find the perfect freelance services for your business. Go to Fiverr.com and use code twist to receive 10% off your first order. That's FI-V-E-R-R.com and use promo code twist and Monday.com. Manage all your core business activities in one place. Start your 14-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist. So today we'll see companies three at a time. We'll vote our one, two, and then we'll do a super round at the end where we take our number one votes and then kind of talk about our favorite two out of all of our number ones. First up is Brian. He's from Project Al, which does affordable mesh networking for first responders, the energy industry, and the military. Interesting idea. Haven't heard about mesh networking in a wild. We'll put two minutes on the clock. You see your clock there. When there's 10 seconds left, you're going to hear the following sound. Not very enthusiastic. Let's try one more time. You can hear the following sound. There's 10 seconds left.

You kind of did it over me. So let's try one more time. You're going to hear the following sound when there is 10 seconds left. Work on it after. So still room for improvement. It's a standard dad joke. I do it every time to them.

They love it. Look at the smiles over there from the tech team. They just love it. Okay, Brian. Three to go. Hi. I'm Brian Canauss. co-founder and CEO of Project Owl.

And our team is very frustrated that communications and sensor networks are expensive and complicated to use, particularly in developing communities, but also in developed communities like California after natural disaster strike. And we solve this with network infrastructure that is easy to use and cost effective. We do this with the Ducklink device. You may notice our network on your Wi-Fi settings in your phone. And we also do this with the OWL cloud-based data management system. And we can drop a bunch of these duck links in what of course we call the Cluster Duck Network.

All of these ducks share data up to the cloud to our owl data management system that provides visualization and management for your data. You can also grab that data out through our easy-to-use APIs to put in your own systems. Our model is straightforward, $10 per month per duck, $20 per user per month for access to our cloud DMS. We've done $235,000 in hackathon winnings from IBM, Lockheed Martin, and the National Security Technology Accelerator. Last year, we did 150K in enterprise revenue, and we've been very fortunate that media organizations around the world have picked up and amplified our mission. Our road to 100 million starts in a beachhead market. We're focused on the oil and gas industry domestically here in America. we want to duck up 900,000 oil wells to do two particular things.

Improve bottom line efficiency for oil companies pumping oil out of the ground, but also increase awareness and communication of methane emissions or carbon emissions into our atmosphere. And while we're really excited about our deployments on Earth, I'm most excited about our recent deployment off it. This is Space Duck 1. This is what we believe is a first stepping stone to provide. providing communications around the world and to others in the future. Thank you very much.

Okay, well done. Next up is Erin. Aaron is from nude bar or bear, new bear. Bar, got it, nude bar. And we're both Nick fans, unfortunately. Brutal. Yes. Three, two, go.

So, Aaron, I'm the founder of nude bar. Nude Bar is a line of intimates and hosiery made in 12 beautiful shades of nude to represent the diverse world that we live in. And I started a nude bar based on a series of frustrating and embarrassing moments where I used to be a professional dancer and a commercial actress. I was always required to have nude or flesh tone undergarments as a part of my uniform. But when you go to a store and you ask for nude, like in the picture here, you're going to get beige options and I'm not beige. So I always had to dye my tights and underwear to match my skin to be in uniform on a weekly basis. This was a big time suck for me and very expensive.

So here's the solution. Nude Bar, we go from fair, medium, and deeper, or darker skin tones. We also go from children's to adult plus size to about 300 pounds. We're inclusive in terms of skin tones as well as sizing. So we're really about empowering women to love their skin and love their body that they are in. So the market size is about $250 billion for lingerie and intimates globally. Just as a reference point, Spanx, Capizio, they're about $250 million, $100 million brand. So we easily feel that nude bar can get up to.

meet up with them. So our current products are fishnets, opaque tights, seamless songs, and seamless bras that we're launching soon. And one of the ways that customers are really finding us is through direct-to-consumer. That's about 70% of our business. And the other percentage are through retail stores like lingerie stores, brafitting stores. We also sell to artists and performers and Broadway shows. We provide the tights for the Rockettes and so on. So when you come to our site, you want to find your shade, right? So it's like buying makeup foundation. When you're buying your shade. You could use our technology where you take a photo of your skin. Right now we're testing selfies. The algorithm tells you one to two shades that would match you throughout the

season depending on how tan you are in a year. So summer season versus winter season. Here are some of our customers, Serena Williams, Tyra Banks, Wendy Williams. Serena Williams became a customer in 2018 and she became an investor in 2019. Thank you. Well done. Next up is Mike from Stacked. An app that helps. track training results and interact with their fans. In two minutes, three, right into that microphone, two, go. Good morning, everyone. All right.

If I ask you about your professional experience, you're all going to share your LinkedIn profile where I can see your resume on it. But what if you were a great soccer player when you were young and you want to share the world how good you were? You can't until now, solution is stacked. So we partner with scoring softwares and sports league to acquire all the scores and video content, and we build athlete profiles.

The athletes can claim their profile, customize everything there, and then they can have all their results in one place. We generate in-depth statistics for them, and they have all their video content that they can share and watch again. And their family, parents, friends, and fans can use the same app to actually see in real time

the games happening with live video, live scores, live stats, and they can also do some scouting reports. Business model, it's free to see the basic scores, but fans and athletes can purchase a subscription, monthly subscription, to have more features and more content. And because we also work with the leagues directly, we let them sell or add inventory directly to their sponsors.

We just launched the subscription model two weeks ago, so it's brand new. And so far, we just have like 13 events generating about 600 athletes and about 1,000,000,000, 300 installs and users in the app and generating almost 400 bucks coming from these 13 events. And we are currently integrating a major soccer organization in the US, which is going to bring us around 36,000 games a year. With the same numbers that we just released last two weeks ago, it could potentially generate about a million dollar by the end of the year. And with a market

size of about 100 million games that we could potentially reach. that could be a profitable business. We believe in a world where any athletes can have a full record of their stats and video, and the solution is stacked. Okay, well done. Big round of applause for stacked. Okay, now we'll bring up all three founders, and I'll ask you, Dave, to ask each one a question.

You can feel free to give your trademark enthusiastic, inspiring feedback. First of all, wow, I think you guys all did great with your pitches. I'll go with Project Owl. You were showing the duck, and I didn't exactly know what different things this duck is monitoring. Yeah. So what the ducks do is they create like a really fundamental network. You can use it for communications, but we can also pop on sensors like Lego blocks. So in the oil and gas example, we can throw on methane sensors to help detect methane as it's coming out of the ground at an oil well.

Okay. So this network that's created, if the internet goes down, down. Yes. Everybody knows on the oil rig to connect to this network, to drop their Wi-Fi network and go on this network in order and then all of a sudden SMS works again or chat apps work again. How does that work? Let me clarify.

We're doing kind of what you've explained in Puerto Rico currently. So we provide communications networks down there. But this same fundamental network architecture enables us to put autonomous sensor networks that run on their own without people involved to stream data up to the, cloud so that the executives of British Petroleum, who are all located in Houston, can watch data streaming in real-time 24-7 from an oil field in the middle of Wyoming. So instead of in this oil field having Wi-Fi reach thousands of acres, you put a mesh network, it communicates with each other.

Each one hops, and that provides Internet to everybody in the field, or it just pulls the data back. In that particular deployment, it's just a sensor network to monitor methane, so you don't actually need people out there. Right. Got it. But it's not for providing internet. Are deployments in Puerto Rico? It is.

It's a basic internet. In the oil and gas example, we just leverage it to provide a sensor network. Why would somebody do that over like the regular internet, I guess is the question then. Why deploy a mesh network as opposed to just deploying a bunch of Wi-Fi routers? In the oil and gas example. Any example? Yeah, in oil and gas, because right now it's very hard, it's complicated, and you can't monitor methane real time.

So there aren't networks there that are actually doing this on the ground. Got it. Okay. More questions for other founders? Are you, oh, for other founders? I'll go with other founders. Aaron, congratulations with having the rockets, you know, wearing your product and the other celebrities that you had.

If you could just talk a little bit about the profit margins, like what it costs you to to make these and what you're selling them at. Yeah, so it costs us anywhere between $3 and $50 per pair to $6, depending on what country we're making them in and the product. And then our best-selling product, which are our fish nets that I'm wearing now, and most of the celebrities you saw that I mentioned are wearing them, that costs about $33 a pair. So it's a premium product, durable enough for the active woman,

fashionable, comfortable for everyday style. And I think you mentioned your go-to-market has been mostly business-to-consumer. you in retail stores or are you just doing? So 70% it's direct to consumer and then about 30% it's retail stores. So lingerie stores, brafitting stores, fashion stores, dance stores and so forth, theatrical stores. Yeah, I think in the first two presentations I really liked the cluster duck and having a little personality there. And I also liked in yours a little bit of personality. People may not have noticed it, but each of the tones are named in a fun way, mock and joy, etc. I think like they're having a little joy and fun in your product. It really gets people

excited and you saw the celebrity thing also gets people excited. And the way I judge these businesses now, since we've invested in, I think, in five, six, seven direct to consumer ones is not just making a great product because that seems to be something that a lot of people can do. People just know how to make a great product. There's a lot of data out there on how to do it and monitor NPS scores. Making a great product isn't enough to get it done in the DTC world with so much competition in Amazon. And that's really where I think in these presentations, when you have a direct-to-consumer product, really focusing in on your go-to-market strategy, I too wrote GTM. That's what all investors are trying to figure out is if you have that second half of the puzzle

of how to let people know about this and just absolutely flood them the right people, your ideal customer profile, which you know really well. and so I think that's really where you need to focus is that go-to market strategy. Have you learned how to sustainably find your customer and just tell me in a sentence who the ICP is, the ideal customer profile? Yeah, so we actually have two ideal customer profiles. One is the entertainer athlete and then the other is your everyday woman. And so for those two customer profiles, we gather them or get them two different ways. So one would be influencer marketing.

So just, you know, your typical influencer to celebrity and then your usual paid ads, which costs us about $33 to acquire a customer right now. Awesome. All right. Well done. And then next up is Mike from Stacked, which is providing profiles of athletes who are not professional athletes. Is that correct? That's correct. Awesome.

Go ahead. I guess the first question was, is which sports were you focused on initially? I don't think I saw surfing in the pictures, but where's your initial focus? So we originally started in surfing. That's where we came from. And we're kind of like moving now to soccer, mainly soccer. But potentially the technology can be used for any sport. And what is your main competition today?

So the main competition we have, so we had two sides of the business before, because there's the scoring side, how you get the data. And so we were working on the scoring side to then provide a live experience. and the athlete profile. And so we had a lot of competition on the scoring side. And that's why we're kind of like pivoting right now to focus solely on the consumer side. And instead of having competitor,

we're now going to partner with the existing scoring to just get their data and their events into our app to be able to scale faster. And would you say it's LinkedIn for athletes or Patreon for athletes? And then if consumers are paying, does any of that money go to the athletes? Not today, but that's definitely on the roadmap.

Is a Patreon-like functionality? It could be, yeah, because it's kind of like Twitch, you know, when you're watching, like somebody playing and you can kind of like, you know, give him some money or this kind of things. Yeah. We could do exactly the same when parents and the grandma is looking at little Johnny soccer game. She could potentially click a button and give him 10 bucks. Great.

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duck. But clearly that guy doesn't give a duck. And then Aaron with nude, thank you, with nude bar, thank you. I keep saying new bear, but bar. And then Mike with Stacked, kind of a Patreon, LinkedIn for athletes. Who's your number three? Some of this is because they don't really know the market very well, but I'm going with Stacked for number three. Same for me. I felt the same way. It's early days. And I'm interested to see what the business model winds up being. Your number two. Number two, Project Owl. Same for me. And what was your thinking there?

I think that sometimes we didn't even talk about whether you build that hardware. I believe that you're probably not and you're mostly a software play. And so it's just the additional complexity of being both the hardware or software play. And also in area I don't have a lot of familiarity with like oil rigs. Yeah. So you have to do a deeper dive there and basically talk to the customers, I think. And hardware as a service is becoming a thing. We have an investment in density and obviously CafeX.

It really does become much more complex when you're building the hardware and the software, much more capital intensive. So we both picked Nudebar as our number one. What was your thinking there? I think, Aaron, you seem to be a good spokesperson for your company. And it obviously shows with your ability to get some of these celebrities with your product. You know, once again, I don't really know a lot about this market, but I like the margins we were talking about, selling it for 33 and making it for $3.

And so I think there's something there. Yeah, it's another one of these, you know, businesses that's high margin. And if you can make a product and get to those, that level of people, it's a real credibility. I think we both reacted to that credibility of how did she get Serena Williams, how did she get Wendy Williams, et cetera. Like when you get those celebrities, it's usually not by accident, especially if they put in money. That's like a whole different thing. And that Serena's not just a customer.

She's an investor. That says a lot. Hard to get to those people. And they really are considered when they think about every investment because they know you're going to do what you just did, which is show them as an investor. So they really are thinking about it. And they're actually very discerning in that way. And they don't want to put their name associated with anything. So very impressive there.

Let's give them a big round of applause. Next up is Jonathan for Move 38. He's got a smart tabletop game system and tools for creativity. Jonathan, we have two minutes on the clock in three, two, and right into that microphone, please, go. Hi, the toys and tools we play with, they shape the way we think. We need a new kind of toy company. My name is Jonathan Bobro, and I'm the founder and CEO of Move 38. The world of gaming is exploding.

However, unexpectedly, the world of tabletop gaming is growing even faster. 25% year over year. Move 38 just released the world's first smart tabletop game system. It's played with these intelligent game pieces. Each one of them responds to touch, communicates with its neighbors, and knows a single game, and can teach all of the other pieces how to play that game. We launched this on Kickstarter last year to raise over 200% of our goal. Kickstarter in the past five years has raised over a bill

billion on independent tabletop games. Blinks is at the intersection of this smart toy and tabletop gaming movement. We've got traction. We've won awards from Core 77 to South by Southwest. LA Times noted us as one of the top things at E3 last year. I mentioned our traction on Kickstarter, but what I didn't mention is that of our first thousand customers, one in the first one in five of them said they don't even, they don't just want to play our games, they want to make their own games too.

They doubled down on that by purchasing developer kits. The Blinks ecosystem is selling these smart tabletop games. This year we released the first 12 games. Next year, this year we'll be releasing the next 12. Four of our initial 12 games came from our community. We're going to be selling the games that our community are making back to the community. The cogs on a set is about $40, and we sell them for $99, and the combo set is $169. We're just closing a...

All right, let's hear it for Move 38. Well done. Next up is Brandon from Reply Buy. Text messaging support for sports, entertainment, and higher education. Three to go. Hello, my name is Brandon O'Hallern, and I'm the CEO at Replyby, the leader in conversational commerce. Let me ask a quick question to the audience. of hands, who here is driven a 40% response rate on a sales or marketing campaign before?

I'm not talking to opens, I'm not talking click-throughs, I'm talking to actual response rates. I didn't think so. That's what we do for our customers. We allow businesses to collect payments with a simple text and power one-to-one conversations at scale. Let me show you exactly how right now. Thank you. Have you ever bought something before and just thought, wow, that took way too many steps. it should have been much easier. That's exactly what we saw in the ticketing industry and why we introduced our conversational commerce platform here first. What you just saw was a consumer replying to a text

to purchase tickets to an event with a simple response. So many businesses today are relying on tired, played out methods of outreach like cold calls and emails, playing the same game that everyone else is and it's falling on deaf ears. It's time to play a new game. This is an example of the Arizona Diamondbacks using our platform to engage their audience

even when they're at the doctor's office. What do you think? Does this seem like a platform that could help you generate more conversations? Build better relationships and increase conversion rates. Our aim is to be the easiest way for a business to start a conversation and then close the deal. Wondering if somebody would even buy something through text, that's exactly what the Houston Rockets thought before they ran their first campaign that generated $25,000 in five minutes. We partner with 100 plus brands across the pro sports. and entertainment industry and generate over $10 million in revenue to prove this exact thing out in this space. How do we make money, a combination of SaaS-based revenue and taking a portion of each transaction?

We introduced SaaS revenue late last year. We've got that upwards of 29,000 in MRR today, growing 15% month over month, on track to be over a million, an ARR by the end of the year with a 92% gross margin. All right, big round of applause for reply by. Nicely done. Next up is Stella from Stella Caracazi. It's a Greek name. Caracazi.

Caracasi. All right. Three to go. Hello, my name is Stella. I'm a clothing designer. The director-to-consumer Stella Caracassi brand was launched 13 months ago. We set out to create a new normal for women that actually feel excluded because of their age, size, or body shape. According to Pew Research that accounts for 40% out of the women in the United States,

United States that are excluded out of the fashion conversation and up to 70% of women over the age of 55 feel completely invisible. We are known for our thoughtful design approach and our excellent quality at affordable mid-range prices. Our materials are eco-friendly and our manufacturing practices are sustainable because it is a must these days. What our customer feels is as if we design with their needs in mind. Our clothing is size-inclusive for a diverse female demographic that actually wants to express under understated individuality. We target women 45 and older because this is currently the largest growing demographic in the United States, but only 5% of marketing dollars is aimed at this group.

Not only do these women have disposable income, but they're a lot more focused on authenticity, and that's where we come in. We offer them a unique design alternative that actually meets their needs. This opportunity in the market we're currently trying to fill. We design everything in house, we produce overseas, we're impasse, we implement. we advertise our customer orders online and we deliver everything from our warehouse in the US. Our main traffic primarily comes to us via social media and direct searches. In our first year of operation, we managed to sell $1.18 million, which is our market validation

and with a consistent ad spend, that is. We aim to finish this year a little over $2 million in sales. And based on our first year data, we could potentially reach $100 million in sales by the end of 24 if we managed to maintain a 10% month of a month's sales growth. Thank you so much. Okay, well done. Big round of applause. If you're running a business like I am and the 200 startups we've invested in are, you've probably got 30, 40, 50 projects going at any given point in time. But you as the founder and CEO or a vice president, you may not know where all those projects are at. Right. And how nice would it be to centralize all of those projects and feeds into

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press, even more efficient. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Okay. So questions. Who would you like to start with? Well, we'll just go in order. Jonathan with Move 38. Sure.

Let's see. So I think I saw you had 137,000 that you raised with. Kickstarter. And you have products in market. I think you were going to show the timeline, but just tell me a little bit about where your product is. Do you have customers playing with your product today? Yeah. So we started shipping for the holidays of 2019, and the reviews have been coming in unsolicited since literally Christmas. So we've shipped the first 1,500 units. We have 1,000 more going out this next month. When we started shipping, we had within two weeks an additional 500 orders.

Wonderful. And just one other question is, is you sell the product. Do you see an additional revenue stream, I guess, when you have the ability for people to possibly buy additional games, like that was part of the model? Yeah. So the number one thing customers are telling us is they want more games. So they're going to be buying more games. When you buy more games, your set grows, which means the capabilities of the smart tabletop

game system increases. So the more pieces you have, the more game compliance. His question was more around the business model, so I would lean into that. It takes 30%, you take 70%, you take 50%, how many have you had, when will you have the app store and market? Think about why the investor is asking the question as opposed to what you want to talk about. Go ahead, try again. Yes.

So right now we're making our money on the hardware specifically. In 2021, we'll release a smart tabletop blink that communicates with your phone. Then we go to an app store model. So the first 30 blinks in people's hands, we're making the money on the hardware, and then we're making our money on the software. Better. We can workshop it. I would say we're going to copy Apple's model. We're taking 30%. There have been 60 games have been produced. They're currently free, but we believe the average game will go for $30, which means we'll make $9 a game. If we get to a base of 100,000 blocks that are active and a game becomes a bestseller and 30 or 40% of people

use it, that could generate more money than we've sold in blocks together. And it's pure profit because running the asteroid is going to be simple. So like a little more robust of an answer, thinking about the business model. So what happens when you're a product person, which you clearly are, is you lean into products so much that you then signal you're not a business person. And you don't care about the business side and the go-to-market side. So just be cognizant of that for our product people in the room. If you're really a great product person, add to your skill set an obsession with go-to market and how it will grow, which was the piece missing, I think, from a lot of what you were talking about. Let's bring up reply by. You have

Big Rounder Plus. Are we correct that you have $29,000 in reoccurring revenue for a reply-by? Monthly revenue? Correct. How many customers is that based on? 83. 83. So the average customer is spending per month?

About $350. How did you acquire those $83? Do you have an outbound sales team? Do you do email marketing? Do you use your own product to do SMS discussions? Yeah. So we introduced the ticketing commerce-based product first as, basically proofcase. So we have about 60 customers on that. We did 1.5 million on that product last

year with a 17% margin. And then we introduced SaaS-based revenue about 13 months ago is to unlock that next layer of growth. And so it's really been cross-selling into some of the current customers that we had. And I've probably closed 70, 75% of our deals. How many full-time employees? 10. And how much money have your raised to date? A little over 3 million. Over 3 million. Oh, wow. Great. questions for you. What would be your main competitor that does the, I want to buy process via texting? Because I did think that that was a great part of the feature. I got to believe there's some competition out there. Are you guys really the only ones doing it right now? Yeah, so we're the only

ones doing it in the ticketing space. There's a company called PostScript that's doing it in the Shopify stores in a somewhat similar fashion. They don't have the ability to buy through text, like a simple response. We have a patent around that capability. It's more texting links and stuff, which a lot of people do. So that's what sets us apart, makes us unique there. Okay, well done.

Let's bring up Karakasi. So again, direct to consumer. My best advice is to add to your presentation, your unique go-to-market strategy and how you capture folks. Okay. Because all we see all day long is people who are obsessed, rightfully so, with their product. But what we also see is,

is our investments in companies that are not equally obsessed with getting that product to customers is failure. And so tell us your go-to market strategy. We advertise on Google, Instagram, Facebook, and we have about 25% direct searches that come to us. Great. That's like a level one answer, like level two or three would be we have these keywords that we rank for. These are 40% of our sales. and then we've experimented with these three platforms. The winning platform, Google, for search. There are a couple of keywords that people are looking for fashion, 50s, fashion in your 60s.

And we capture those. We get them for 60 cents a click. Those every 100 clicks converts into a customer. Our average ticket, our average checkout size is $400. So we've got an LTV of whatever. So start aspiring to have that level of dexterity. If you want to close money and be a part of the venture game. Very good.

from you, Dave. And that's what I would work with you on in the accelerator, by the way. Thank you. Your product looks great. Congrats with $1.2 million in sales last year. Thank you. Have you raised capital to date to allow you to get the $1.2 million? We raised only $35,000 via regulation CF earlier about a year ago, and I think we were too early.

Wow. Okay. Well, congrats with what you're doing. And I think... Wait, you raised $35,000 and made a million. we raised 35,000 but it was a great experience going through the process

but you made a million dollars in sales yeah we were we are self-funded we put a lot of money into it oh you personally put money into it as well yeah yeah yeah okay I was I'd say

it's a capital efficiency rate that we rarely see but you are Greek and you know the Greeks did create entrepreneurship and commerce well our margins of 74% so yeah this is my joke

my daughter anything she brought brings up, she's like, dad, did the Greeks invent coffee? And I'm like, it's interesting. You bring that up. Coffee comes from Kali offi, which means, I do that all the time. They hate me for it. The darkest of the beans. And it turns out the Greeks did invent. And she's like, you're lying. I'm like, nope, you can look it up. I literally do it for everything. She's like, what about like Peking duck? Did they invent Peking duck? It's interesting you say that. They did not invent Peking duck, but they were the first to roast the duck

because Peking means roasting. And she's like, that's not true. I'm like, you're Greek, you're going to have to get used to this London. It's another great dad joke. It's a great bit. They love it. Kids love it. Especially when she has their friends over.

I love it. One thing I was looking at, you know, you said this is for, if I read correctly. 45 and plus. Women over 50? 45 and over. 45 and older. Yes. I didn't know that was old.

Dave and I are a little offended. It's not. You said older people. 45 to me seems young, but okay. It is. Fine. All right. Over 45.

And then larger sizes as well, but not necessarily larger sizes. Not necessarily larger sizes. And I couldn't help but notice some of the models seemed younger and incredibly fit. But some of them also seem like your demographic is. Can you explain that piece of it? With the exception of one, all the women that I have featured are anywhere from their early to mid-fifish. days. Okay, so they're just stunningly.

And the most successful ads I'm running are testimonial ads. I ask my customers if they would be willing to allow me to run their ads. So with some of those your customers? Yes. So that is awesome, but we would never know that. And so what I would do is I think you should lean into that. Okay. Because when I saw it, I kind of got a little turned off.

I was like, oh, this is great. Yeah, this group. And then I saw this person and I was like, is that Chrissy Turlington? Or is it like a supermodel is like the main spokesperson? And I don't know if that one was actually a customer, but she looks like a serious model. And then the other ones look like customers. And I think it's like, the best thing is look at our customers. Here's what our customers say.

And that's so powerful, whether it's enterprise software or clothing, you know, or a game, any of those things. When the customers speak, we've been adding that in the accelerator, getting those customer testimonials and putting one per slide and really slowing down on those. You may have seen it because Dave comes to every accelerator class. And in fact, in one of your 12 investments for last year or so was one of the companies that was going through the accelerators doing really well. So just well done overall. Thank you. A big round of applause for our three. Okay.

Now we have to do the hard work here and pick our one, two, and three. We had Move 38 making tabletop games. We had reply by doing enterprise software and Karakasi. doing clothes for the forgotten females over 45. Or in Leonardo Caprio's world, women over 25. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, literally he won't date women over 25.

It's unbelievable, right? He's missing out. Okay. Dave, who's your number? Oh, I didn't put mine down. Hold on. Okay, go ahead. Who's your three?

the Move 38's piece of hardware looked beautiful but I'm going with that one as my number three just because I'm just feeling it to be difficult to get a lot of that product out there with the cost basis and the complexity of the product. Fantastic. I put replyby as my number three because I've seen so many people going after this exact market. I feel like it's super crowded.

There are some very well-funded competitors in there, and I feel like it's going to be very hard to display some of those top people, and I think it's a feature set that will be incorporated more and more into existing offerings out there, so it's going to be hard to compete. It may be easy to compete now because it's, you know, the first inning, but I think it's going to be one of these things that gets productized and is free inside of every Salesforce, Zendesk, everything is going to have it built in for free. So my number two is Karakasi.

I think there's something there. And if you were to really understand and build a team around the second piece that I keep talking about, the go-to market and capturing that, there could be something here. Because I do love when people go after a market, that's, you know, forgotten or, you know, maybe not addressed because unlike Reply Buy, which is going after a very crowded market, you're going after a market that. there's nobody competing against you. I don't know who your competitors are, but there should be very few, right, who explicitly do this, which means, you know,

if you do connect with those consumers, it could be a very deep and loyal and lasting connection. And people are living longer and people are living their best lives in their 50s and 60s from what I see now. Like, people are going crazy. I mean, I was a Burning Man. I saw people who are 60 years old, I know,

and they're having a good time. And I'm like, really? You're 67, and you're at Burning Man? And you're wearing less clothes than me and I don't know how much human growth warmer and testosterone you're taking, but you look like a quarterback. You know what I'm talking about? You've been to the burning man. Yes. Once or twice. Yeah. I brought my grandmother this year. That's my point. How old's grandma? And she would love wearing some Stella clothing. Stella Caracasi. How old is mom?

Well, she's technically my step grandmother, but she's 76. And, um, and she... Okay. The latest night. How late did she stay up? Well, I had her up all night. night on the small high yeah on my our car till sunrise she saw sunset and i managed to keep her up till sunrise you know my next three of her questions but i can't ask you in this forum all right i hope she had a transcendent time it was an amazing experience grandma mushrooms okay um it's possible i don't know crazy things happen at burning men um wow so my okay so my number two is uh reply by okay i think that i appreciate it is at credit market, so I'm agreeing with Jason and, you know, feature versus product. That's

a kind of a question that many VCs ask. And I do love the process of you texting saying you're going to buy, but I'm going with that one for number two. Yeah. And, you know, in this format with two minutes, without talking to the customers, we can be completely wrong. And so this is just a way for us to give feedback on our initial reaction. So you can learn about that initial reaction, which is a valid thing for you to understand as a founder, you need to get through that first two-minute pitch, the elevator pitch in the hall at a conference, and refine that in order to get the longer pitch typically. And so you need to nail both the short, medium, and long pitches, you know, whether

it's whether you have one minute with an investor, 15, or, you know, an hour, which then leads number one for me was move 38. And again, I love underservice markets. I love passionate founders. and it's very clear that if you can do the 137K from a Kickstarter and you have that demand that there's something there, very hard to fake. We talked about that yesterday.

You can't fake delighted customers. So if there are actually developers who are getting into this and can make a living from it, that would be a huge unlock. And I think that would be the piece I would be most interested in taking a deeper dive into Jonathan is, who are your developers? And I think that's how you'll be judged.

So again, I like to tell founders what to give themselves zero credit for so they can really focus on the things that they haven't accomplished yet. Because really that's how humbling entrepreneurship is. Give yourself zero credit for getting the game out there and the kickstarted. That's the review mirror. What I want you to do is look forward to what would get Dave Samuel to invest. It would be, you know, talking to three or four developers who said, this is what I'm choosing to make. not my own game, not a VR game, not an iPhone game, not a Steam game. I'm choosing this.

And here's why I think it's an opportunity. So you'll be judged by those developers. Who's your number one and why? I'm going with Stella Caracasi. And I think I was just impressed with your sales to date and I think your product looks great. I'm not that certain of, you know, the competitive landscape of who else is

targeting this area. But, yeah, I like kind of what you've built to date. So that was my number one. All right. Well done. Let's give me a big round of applause.