This Week in Startups - E1065 AMA: Slice CEO Ilir Sela answers questions from founders: tips on selling into scattered markets (like Mom & Pop shops), COVID’s impact on the restaurant industry, scaling Slice’s $43M Series C & more!

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Slice CEO Ilir Sela answers questions from founders: tips on selling into scattered markets (like Mom & Pop shops), COVID's impact on the restaurant industry, scaling Slice's $43M Series C & more! Join the TWiST Slack: https://launchevents.typeform.com/to/kLq5Bi Check out Slice: https://slicelife.com/ Follow Ilir: https://twitter.com/IlirSela 1:05 Knyck: You mentioned Slice being a platform to provide the technology and buying power of scaled companies to small pizza businesses. Do you think that mom and pop stores in other industries like retail or services could use a similar platform, or is this type of structure specifically fitted for the economics of the pizza industry? 3:32 Michael: How do you see the restaurant industry changing in NYC post-COVID, and where do you see the growth opportunities to create a new type of offering? 5:17 Chris: I’m building a loyalty program startup for restaurants. We’re specifically targeting non-chain ethnic restaurants and customers who may have ethnic nostalgia for cultural foods. What do you think the opportunity looks like nationwide for this demographic? Are most restaurants using mainstream food ordering apps already, or is there a large segment of ethnic restaurants who are off-grid? 9:01 Graham: Mom & pops are such a scattered customer base. Can you shed some light on how you started to get momentum in the early days as a small business yourself? Did early customers have any trust issues with something as important as payment? 14:22 Laura: What is the biggest point of friction you have with adding new pizzerias to Slice? Do you experience many/any pizzerias that don't see the benefit of joining the Slice community? If so, how do you handle these? 18:50 Henry: Have you thought of doing the same for other ethnic food restaurants like Chinese, Indian, Thai etc. and what challenges do you foresee? What would be your approach to tackle? 22:04 Matt: With all the vacant retail that's about to become available, have you thought about helping pizza brands expand into ghost kitchens or helping existing pizzerias launch virtual brands (a la Chuck E Cheese)? 24:33 Ian/Andrew (similar questions): What is this funding round helping your business and platform do for the Pizza shops and their customers? How do you plan on scaling your $43M Series C? How have your plans changed since Slice has gone mostly remote? 31:10 Charles: Please expand on the apparent disparity in pricing across platforms/instore. How can food often be cheaper through a middleman? Our family often finds the most frictionless experience for our regular pizza place is to call in as it's often a single dish. How can this be simplified further? One push pizza? 37:58 Matt: Can you speak to "why pizza” and not Chinese food? At the end of the day, are you limiting yourself by picking one category? 40:32 Mahreen: Curious to know more about Slice's marketing. What marketing channels have been most effective for your platform (in acquiring both customers/new businesses)? 42:14 Ian: What response did you get from companies to sign up, was the take up easy? Or did you have to convince them in a specific sales pitch, how did you frame it? 43:51 Presh: You seem to have a curated following list on Twitter, curious to know your favorite accounts to follow that have impacted your business thinking.. top 5 accounts you recommend following? 45:31 Presh: Where does Slice need to be in order to see an IPO? 47:31 Ian: What are your plans to develop your branding and web/mobile app

Today, on This Week in Startups, we have an Ask Me Anything featuring Slice founder and CEO, Ilyr Sela. This AMA was recorded live in our Twist Slack channel to participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 30,000 founders. Join us at this week in startups.com slash slack. This episode is brought to you ad-free. Thanks to our partners, Clavio and Dell. Thank you, everyone, for sharing all these amazing questions. And what I'll do is just kind of start at the top and work our way down. And hopefully, I can be helpful to all of you.

And there's a ton of entrepreneurs here, which is awesome. And, yeah, just even beyond this point for anyone that wants to continue to ask follow-on questions, feel free to reach out in the Slack. And yeah, away we go. I'm going to start off with a question from Nick, and I'll read it out here, which is, you mentioned Slice being a platform to provide the technology and buying power of scaled companies to small business pizza restaurants. Do you think that mom and pop stores in other industries like retail or services could use a similar platform?

Or is this type of structure specifically fitted for the economics of the pizza industry? It's a great question. If I could zoom out, I actually, I'm a strong believer in vertical platforms, vertical integration when it comes to solving the needs of small business owners. In fact, I call them micro business owners. And if you look at the pizza industry and why a solution like ours works really well is because the vast majority of the industry and the overwhelming majority of our customers are owner-operated locations with less than 10 employees. And so this one operator is in essence responsible for so many different parts of their business. the overwhelming majority went into the business because they have a passion for the craft,

but they are not necessarily experienced in marketing, technology, accounting, and finance, and all those things. And so the reason why our model works is because the vast majority of the pizza industry has that profile. And what we do is we come in and try to solve all the business problems and really allow the small business owner to operate. and focus on what they know what they know best. Do I think something similar can work in other markets?

Most likely, I would just say that those conditions, as I just mentioned, probably need to be present in that given market. And then the TAM, so the total addressable market, should be a decent size in order to merit a play-like slice. But yeah, I think there's a ton of industries and a ton of small business profiles that could probably benefit from a business in a box type of solution. Moving on to a question from Michael, how do you see the restaurant industry changing in New York City post-COVID and where do you see the growth opportunities to create a new type of offering? I think from a high level what I'm seeing is the realization that e-commerce and digital is just a critical aspect of any business at this point. And so I would say e-commerce is the overwhelming topic and theme that's top of mind for most restaurant owners.

I think if we were to fast forward a year from now, do I think a lot is going to change? It's tough to predict. And I'm trying to not necessarily create predictions for the sake of it. I think if I were to kind of place a wager, I would probably say that there will be less changes than people assume. And I think the restaurant industry over the next 12, 24, 36 months will probably return to some form that was similar to what we had pre-COVID 19, with a lot more of the workflow and a lot more of the operations being digitally enabled. And so there's opportunities, obviously, across the board to be able to solve some of those problems. But I just don't think that it'll

be a totally different world. I think it'll kind of be back to normal. I just don't know how much time it'll take. Chris asks, or states and then asks, I'm building a loyalty program startup for restaurants. We're specifically targeting non-chain ethnic restaurants and customers who may have ethnic nostalgia for cultural foods. What do you think the opportunity looks like nationally for this demographic, are most restaurants using mainstream food ordering apps already, or is there a large segment of ethnic restaurants who are off the grid? I'm going to break this answer down into two parts. I think, obviously, the restaurant industry is massive, and when it comes to local and ethnic

cuisine, it's incredibly fragmented. And so there's a lot of opportunities to help empower and solve problems for small business owners and small restaurants that focus on different ethnicities. I'm finding that those dynamics exist mostly in urban metro areas, less so in the suburbs or small towns that are more dominated by chains and sort of the pizza, Chinese food takeout. markets, but yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity. The question is, you know, do you want to go through that process in a vertical approach, similar to what slice is doing with pizza restaurants, or do you want to go more horizontal and in that case, you know, what does that look like? I haven't necessarily studied the Tam and I don't have a view into how big that world is,

but it feels to me like there is a big opportunity there. So I would say continue to execute and operate and continue to be very agile and iterate as you learn more and more things about that industry. In terms of whether a product like that should exist or not, relative to some of the large aggregators, I would say they probably solve different problems. Again, food takeout and delivery industry is massive in the U.S. and globally. I don't think it's a winner-take-all scenario. And I think each product and each solution is trying to solve for a specific problem. I would say aggregators and the apps that you're referring to are much more discussed.

focused and you're kind of asking about loyalty so I think those are two different problems so I wouldn't be deterred about you know whether third-party food delivery apps are have a lot of traction or not I would say if you're focused on the customer and you're focused on the needs of those restaurants then you should be able to succeed because again the whole goal is to solve the problem of the customer but if you're trying to come up with ways that you can fit yourself within that ecosystem without necessarily being empathetic

to the needs of the restaurant or the customer, then I think you'll have a more difficult time creating traction for yourself. So talk to your customers, talk to the restaurant owners, learn about their needs and what problems they have, and try to solve those problems, don't worry so much about the delivery apps and you'll do well.

Graham, mom and pops are such a scattered customer base. So let me rephrase this. So mom and pop locations are a very scattered customer base. Can you shed some light on how you started to get momentum in the early days as a small business yourself? Did early customers have any trust issues, especially with something as important as payment? I will make the assumption that this question is about,

the restaurant owners and the small business restaurant owners. Absolutely, the small business segment and even the micro business segment in any category is incredibly fragmented. Fragmented in terms of geographies, fragmented in terms of brands, and in a lot of ways fragmented in terms of their own workflow. One of the reasons why I love a vertical model, especially like slices that when you solve one problem, because we're so hyper-focused, it's almost a vertical of a vertical, we're so hyper-focused that when we solve one problem, the likelihood that that solution will apply to the majority of our customer base is very high. And once we really honed in on our pitch and our sales script as an example, we started getting a lot of

traction with small businesses who were willing to join the platform. But it's an uphill battle and trust is something that needs to be earned over time. And so the way we solve for that is by creating a very lightweight solution that allows us to show value to the micro business. And through that show of value, we can then graduate them to a deeper, more vertically integrated solution. So as an example, if I went forward to some pizza restaurants today and offered them our entire suite of services up front, it would be very difficult for me to be able to sell that to them

because that change in their own point of view based on the way that they've been operating for decades in some cases, that's too much change in. too much in too short of a time frame. So it's it's just very overwhelming and to be honest it would lack some empathy on our part if we went in and said look change everything that you're doing about your you know within your business and XYZ will happen. I think that's just asking for too much. So to summarize, start with something that's very simple, that's very easy to deliver on, deliver on the promise and then you'll earn that trust and be able to then again graduate that relationship

to something that's even more meaningful long term. Yeah, in terms of payments, for example, early on, and even today, it's still a huge barrier between our product and adoption from micro businesses because the perception is that you're touching their money and you are. And as an example, for Slice, we call a small business pizza restaurant. We want them to join our community and we feel confident in the solution that we provide. But this is a random person who's cold calling, who is then asking a pizzeria to make food, hand it off to random customers, and that that customer isn't going to pay for the food. In fact, they need to trust that slice will then reimburse this small business for that transaction at some point, whether it's a day later or a month later.

That's a huge ask. And so, again, it's all about early on for me, it was about showing myself at the store. I actually leased a small car, wrapped it with our brand, made sure that I parked in front of. some of these pizza restaurants so that they can see the car in a weird way. That gave me credibility. It kind of made it seem like our business was a lot more, had a lot more scale than we did. And then that credibility opened up the conversation when I walked in in person. But at least they had a face to kind of associate what we were doing and what we were asking for

in return for their trust. So there's no easy way, but I would say establish that trust. Once you create traction, then it's easier. Now we've got case studies. Now we have thousands and thousands of similar businesses that trust slice and the ability to then earn that trust from our 12,000 and one partner, that's a lot easier. But early on, you just have to do the hard work. We're going to go to Laura.

What is the biggest point of friction you have with adding new pizzerias to slice? Do you experience many or any pizzerias that don't see the benefit of joining the slice community? And how do you handle that? I would say to the question prior, trust is the biggest barrier between what we offer and adoption from the small business segment. And in fact, I will say that's consistent no matter what industry that you're in as long as you're serving, whether it's a small business or an enterprise, it's all about trust. When we have a conversation with a small business owner, the conversation is one where we're promising some value in return for some fee, some revenue. And the question for the small business owner is, you know, why would I trust you?

And how do I know that the value and the things that you're saying you're going to do are going to happen? So that's one. I would say the second barrier is the perception of change and willingness to change. So small business operators don't have the luxury of 30 or 300. or 3,000 employees. They don't have the luxury of planning and shutting down their store for a week so they can reset so they can change their workflow. Their business is active, daily, highly transactional.

And they are incredibly embedded and ingrained with their existing workflow. Any change in that workflow is a huge barrier, mental barrier, for operators who have been in business for decades. And so how can we not only offer a value, but also ask very little in return in terms of changing their workflow? So an example, I'll give you that worked really well for me super early on when we were bootstrapped. I was pretty sure because of the menus

that I would get from pizza restaurants, almost all of them had a fax number on their printed menu. And that meant that they were getting fax orders from companies nearby. So let's say nearby law offices or real estate offices, companies loved to fax in orders. And when I would call or when I would show up and say, look, we're going to solve for your business

in a way that allows you to receive online orders and bring you value for the small business owner, it feels like that's just a huge change. It feels like I need to change the way I operate. But when I change that message to, hey, do you want more fax orders? Do you want that fax machine that's sitting behind you to not just print once or twice a day,

but we'll make it print 20 times a day? That's something that they're familiar with. That's something that they were used to doing. They were used to having that component in their workflow. And so we found a way to take online orders, e-commerce orders from Slice, and convert them to fax orders for the pizza restaurant. And that barrier was really bridged as a result of not asking them

to make changes in the way they operate. Once we show value, then it's easier to move them off of the fax machine. and onto our digital platform that allows them to be even more efficient. So hopefully that example gives you a sense for some of the barriers that we face, and I imagine it's a very common problem, not just in this space, but consistently across a lot of SMBs. So figure out how to fit yourself within their existing workflow, show value, and then change them for the better. Henry asks, have you thought of doing the same for other ethnic food restaurants like

Cheneas and Indian or Thai? And what challenges do you foresee? What would your approach, what would be your approach to tackle? So this is a very common question for us. And without a doubt, there is a ton of opportunity to solve for. this to solve for the small business problems that are being faced in

other verticals, especially within the food industry, but to be honest, even outside of the food industry. When you look at barbershops, you look at salons, you look at mechanics, I mean, there's a ton of categories where micro-businesses

are at the core of the industry. But I think for us, as we think about new verticals, our goal still remains and our focus remains on the pizza industry. And what we really want to make sure that we do is that we solve for a lot more of the problems that our industry faces today and our partners face. We're nowhere near to having a complete solution for the pizza industry. And so for the next 12 or 24 months, we're going to remain hyper-focused in this category. It also happens to be massive.

So pizza is a $47 billion industry. And so if I were to compare that to the Chinese food takeout and delivery industry in the U.S., it's about one-third of pizza. And then there's a steep drop-off beyond that. So that's a long tail, but pizza still remains very dominant. I would say though for anyone who is an entrepreneur and looking to kind of go into a similar model in other verticals, do not limit your thinking to food or food industry only. This is a solution that can be applied to many verticals. In terms of challenges, not too dissimilar from the challenges that we're facing and we have faced that slice, which is change. Changing the behavior of small business operators, micro-business operators, is a very difficult challenge.

Establishing trust and then ultimately scaling. For those that may not know, I've been in this business for 10 years. I bootstrapped the business for the first six years, and we've been venture-backed for the last four. but it's it is there is no there's no shortcut to creating this scale in the small business category it takes a long time and you look at companies like Shopify I mean they've been around for 15 or close to 20 years it takes a long time so just have a lot of discipline and patience and think think for the long term Matt asks okay with all the vacant retail that's about to become available, have you thought about helping pizza

brands expand into ghost kitchens or helping existing pizzerias launch virtual brands la chucky cheese? This is a great question. I'm a huge believer in continued expansion, especially for our small business partners. In fact, every operator that I ever have a conversation with, if you ask them what are their aspirations, it's to continue to expand their microbrand. launch more locations. And so without a doubt, we see slice and we see the sort of opportunities across the board as a moment in time to help any entrepreneur who wants to expand, help them to do that in a way that's really smart and will accelerate the probability of success for that small business

owner. In terms of how, I actually think pickup and delivery and walk-ins are each one of those channels, for lack of better term, is highly important to the success of a small business pizza restaurant. So I actually do not believe in ghost kitchens when it comes to at least is vertical and I don't know enough about some of the other restaurant verticals and cuisines and the unit economics, but for pizza restaurants, it is really important to have a storefront. That's not to say that, you know, they should be going out in renting space for $20,000 a month. They don't need a big dining room, but having the ability to serve customers that want to walk in,

that want to come in and pick up and sit down for a little bit, and take out and delivery, is really critical to the success of a small business pizza restaurant. And completely agree that there's going to be a lot of opportunity for growth within our category. And I think it reflects the excitement that we have with our new funding round and with our new partner, KKR, I think we'll be able to make a lot of progress on that front and hopefully accelerate the success of our partners.

Ian slash Andrew, I think you both have very similar questions, so we'll summarize it into one. What is this funding around helping your business and platform do for the pizza shops and their customers? How do you plan on scaling your – it's actually $43 million series C. and have your plans changed since slice has gone mostly remote. Let me touch on the last question first. Yesterday we actually announced our team, and I also posted on Twitter, I believe, that we gave our team the option to work remotely

through the rest of 2020. Now, I will say that opportunity is, And that option is available to everyone at Slice, and we were able to make that call super early because our business has been somewhat distributed at the core since the beginning. We are a global team of almost 700 people across five offices globally, at least pre-COVID-19.

And our infrastructure and technology and our teams have made it incredibly efficient and possible to be able to be. able to service our customers and our restaurant partners in a way that is fully distributed and fully to remote. Now I do see and I do think that there's a lot of value in teams coming together and we want to give our teams that option but for the remainder of 2020 we may very well also be completely remote.

In terms of what that means beyond 2020, you know, I think it's, you know, I think it's To be determined, I try not to predict things that are highly uncertain and unpredictable and just embrace the uncertain nature of it and remain very agile and remain, you know, just keep our options very, very open. I think that's really important. Agility and flexibility is highly important. I think I covered this during my conversation with Jason, but I do think in the long term, performance will dictate how teams work together. If teams are finding an edge by coming together and working under one roof and being under, you know, in one location, and that's giving them an edge to outperform relative to their competition or outperform in the marketplace in just. general, then I think more companies will follow. If teams find a way to outperform and excel and there's no sort of difference in performance

if they're fully distributed and remote and can actually save on cost, then I think that will win. TBD on what will happen because there's not enough of a sample size to know which format works best. And again, it's easy to sort of claim that remote and distributed will be the way of the future because of companies like Twitter and Square who have already come out and announced that at scale, but they've earned the right to do that. They are very successful companies, and it's still too early to tell what that will mean for their performance. So again, to summarize that I like to keep our options open.

In terms of what we want to do with our capital and the fundraise, we're obviously a very growth-minded business. We're still super early in our ability to positively impact our small business partners, but also bring value to our customers on a national level. And so the goal for us is to continue to expand our network. We work with about 12,000 locations today. There's about 55,000. in small business locations in the pizza industry in the U.S. alone.

So a ton of room to grow our network. But most importantly, that vertical integration is where we're really excited to be able to come in and solve some important problems for the small business. Logistics is one of them. We don't plan on being the logistics partner in the sense that we're not going to have drivers, but we will enable and empower our partners with technology and allow them to do first-party delivery in a way that's much more efficient than what they're doing today.

80-plus percent of our small business partners have their own delivery. It just happens to be offline and inefficient still. So we want to solve for that and also do it in a way that makes the consumer experience better. Another area that we're really excited about is we hired a GM of FinTech. We are the merchant of record for all of our partners, and we see a ton of opportunity around cash flow, access to short-term capital, managing workflow and payment flow solutions

between the operator and their supplier, operator and their employees, and, you know, a lot of similar opportunities like that. But also in that sense, really excited about allowing and empowering entrepreneurs to expand their footprint to more and more locations. And we've got an awesome initiative called Project by Slice, where we come in and, in essence, behave like a really close partner to the pizzeria where we manage their phone channel, we manage their workflow,

we manage their supplies like boxes and menus and cups, and we manage their marketing. And that really accelerates performance based on our early signals from a handful of pilots in the first half. So those are the things that we're most excited about and yeah, just continuing to support our customers in general. Charles asks or comments, so please expand on the apparent disparity in pricing across platforms and in-store. So how can food often be cheaper through a middleman?

So our family often finds the most frictionless experience for our regular people, pizza place is to call it in as it's often a single dish. How can this be simplified further? One idea could be one push pizza, Charles asks. So this is a really, really, really good question. So let me just kind of take a step back and look at the different options that exist for the consumer. You have third party aggregators and delivery players that offer convenience, for the consumer in order to access their favorite local restaurants, including pizza restaurants. They have subsidized the products in a lot of ways in order to earn adoption. And so one way that the product can cost less is through subsidies.

Another way that the product can cost less, though, is through the efficiency of the small business. And so I'm going to use Domino's Pizza as the example of how the product can cost less if technology, which I think in this case you're referring to technology as the middleman. But if technology exists. Now let me also share the Domino's experience in a way that also brings in the franchise or, which in that in that case is also a middleman. So Domino's corporate is the middleman. It's a corporate franchise business. For those of you that want to dive into the Domino's economics, the franchisor, in essence, makes about 20% of total sales within the Domino's ecosystem.

The Domino's ecosystem is 99% franchisees, who are small business owner operators of the Domino's, you know, franchise system. So these stores operate and process a ton of volume. I'll use a round number like $10 billion. So they process $10 billion annually, although I think that number is more like seven, but let's use 10. on that 10 billion, Domino's corporate, Domino's franchisor, the middleman, actually earns about 20% of that, about $2 billion. How can Domino's corporate earn $2 billion while also solving the problems of their franchisees

and making sure that the franchisee is highly successful? Well, they've done it by creating economies of scale and efficiencies by leveraging technology. So if I want to open up a Domino's location, a lot of the things that I need in order to operate my business have already been solved. And the cost of those things have already come down because Domino's brings buying power. And over the years, they've solved it in a way that is much more efficient and much better than what I would do as an individual operator going at it on my own. The technology component, 70% of dominoes, is digital. What that also means for me as the franchisee is that I don't have to have five people answering the phone. So to use your phone example, it may be easier for you to place the call, but it's also more costly for the small business to then service you because somebody has to answer that phone.

And you're not the only one calling. There's also 30 other people calling almost at the same time. Mistakes are made. 22% of phone calls to small businesses, especially pizza restaurants, go unanswered because it's busy, because they put you on hold or you hang up. And 70% of those phone calls are orders. And so again, these are examples of incredible inefficiencies in, in models that are not digitized. So again, Domino's has created economies of scale,

has created a digital platform that allows a small business, their franchisees, to operate in a way that's highly efficient, eliminated mistakes, eliminated the need to have four employees answering the phone, eliminated all those customers or potential customers hanging up, and taking their business elsewhere. These efficiencies have improved the margins of the franchisee. By improving those margins, you can now afford to sell your end product to the consumer in a way that's more valuable, either through a rewards program,

through lower prices of the food, and more importantly, even through a convenient channel that is preferred by the customer. That creates an amazing virtuous cycle where Domino's corporate, quote unquote, the middleman, is very successful. The Domino's franchisee, very successful. The consumer, very happy, gets convenience, gets value, and that friction is removed completely from that experience. That's why Domino's stock has outperformed Google and net.

Netflix and all these others in the last 10 years. And that's what a lot of small businesses that are not part of franchise systems don't understand because they view technology providers as middlemen instead of partners. And so what I'm proud of is that slice, we've kind of changed that mentality through show of value over years and years of executing. So that was a little bit of a rant, but hopefully it's super valuable for all of us to really understand what's happening and why franchise companies and big chains continue to carve out market share from small businesses and the difference in how those two sides

operate. Matt asks if I can speak to why pizza and not Chinese food. At the end of the day, are we limiting ourselves by picking one category? It all depends. It all depends on the strategy. If our strategy was to be Grubhub, I would say we would be greatly limiting ourselves by picking one category. But our strategy is to create a reverse franchise model, and I mean that in a good way, the example I just use as Domino's, we need to bring that same operating system to the small business owners and the long tail fragmented pizza industry in order to make sure that Consumers continue to have that amazing relationship that they have with their local pizza restaurants and with the pizza community in general on a national and eventually global scale. We have not yet earned the right to step and repeat the same model in another category because we're still early ourselves within the pizza industry.

Now, again, if our strategy was to be more of a horizontal platform for consumers only, by aggregating restaurants, then I would say we would be limiting ourselves. Why pizza, specifically, and not Chinese or another cuisine? It happens to be an American staple. It happens to most of our partners have their own delivery. It's a very value-centric product. It's a high-frequent product. It's delicious.

It travels well. you know, operators and personally my own family is in the industry. And it happens to be a category that I know better than anyone in the world with all due respect. And so I just love, you know, solving problems that I'm very, very comfortable with solving and, you know, have a lot of knowledge about. And again, a lot of my family members are in this industry. So it kind of checks all those boxes for me. It took me about eight or nine months to study the full pizza industry before I stepped into it. And we're thrilled with the impact that we're able to make.

But we try not to get distracted by other verticals. All right, Marine, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. So curious to know more about. about Slices marketing, what marketing channels have been most effective for your platform in acquiring both customers and new businesses. It's kind of interesting. We actually don't advertise a lot. Our marketing budget is very, very small relative to the scale of our business. And I think one of those reasons is because we provide a really valuable product to our partners, which happens to be our small businesses. And then because we solve a meaningful problem and a

core problem, those businesses introduce our product to the end consumer, who already has a relationship with that small business. In terms of how we attract small business partners, for a long time it was, and it has been through an inside sales team. So we have an amazing sales team led by Scott Colonogneau that calls some. small business owners nationally and educates the owner operator on our solution. And that's been really the primary way that we've received and really formed partnerships. As we created some scale and some brand equity within the category, within the industry,

we started to see an inbound funnel, an inbound channel of restaurant owners wanting to join. And so today, about 30% of our partners come inbound. just organically and 70% are through our sales team. Okay, Ian asks, what response did you get from companies to sign up? Was the take-up easy? Or did you have to convince them in a specific sales pitch? How did you frame it? It's a good question.

We really had to test out a number of different approaches. if I were to summarize it and zoom out and just give you more of a thematic answer, try and figure out how your solution can create value in the form of either incremental business or cost savings and do it in a way that does not disrupt the workflow, the existing workflow of the small business. If you can communicate that and deliver. on that promise in a way that's really easy and simple to understand. Simplicity is really, really critical as well.

Then you'll have a successful time. So I would say simplicity, communicate value right up front. Do it in a way that means they don't have to change anything about how they work today and simplify your conversation. and then iterate on that. Be very agile. Listen to every single response, listen to every single objection, and go back to the drawing board. There's no, there's no magical formula. And I would imagine it's very different for every single industry. All right, Prash. So you seem to have curated following list on Twitter. Curious to know your favorite accounts to follow that

have impacted your business thinking, top five accounts you recommend following. I'll be honest, on Twitter, I don't have a huge following. I mean, I think it's less than 2000. You know, like any social media platform, just be authentic. I don't go on Twitter because I want a following. I just go on Twitter because I want to learn. But I also want to share my own experiences. And so, you know, other people follow accounts that give,

you know, that share value. So your following is a reflection of how helpful you are to the community. So if you look at someone like Jason who's got hundreds of thousands of followers, well Jason, someone has followed for a long time. And I've learned from, you know, his tweets and the entrepreneurs that he highlights

and so on and so forth, just one example. I learned a lot from other founders. I learned a lot from other entrepreneurs who are just, you know, going about sort of their business and facing similar challenges. I don't have specific top fives in that sense, and it's not as my approach to Twitter isn't as structured as I think it may come across. It's actually just much more organic. Hopefully that makes sense. Where does slice need to be in order to see an IPO? It's a good question. I think it's really about having a long-term vision and seeing a huge

opportunity for growth. IPO isn't an endpoint. It's a starting point. So I think so long that we are excited about growth opportunities that stretch far long, so beyond three years into five years and even further than that, then I think it's pretty easy to get to a scale where IPO can be an option for a business. But IPO is not the end game. And yeah, I would say that's critical. I would say the second one is when companies become incredibly strong at predicting their business, then an IPO and the public markets could make sense. Because at the end of the day, the public markets are a test of how well companies can predict their business on a quarterly basis, in fact, on a monthly basis, and if not on a daily basis.

So being so great at your business and so great at manufacturing, growth and scale that you can predict it on a daily basis. And then having a clear view on how you can do that in terms of vision, that's greater than five years. And I would say the last one would obviously be scale. It seems like, you know, most companies really need to be at above 100 million, 150 million revenue, annual revenue in order to kind of make it meaningful. So those are the three components, but in terms of slice, we've got some time before we can consider that. Not because of our ability to predict our business, but it's still too early in our life cycle.

and it's not a need for the business today. All right, one more question. What are your plans to develop your branding and web mobile app? I solve problems. It's a good question. I solve problems by hiring and in essence partnering with the best talent possible. One of my jobs as a CEO is to make sure that I continue to recruit world-class talent. people leads, you know, the right team, the right people lead companies to success, not the other way around.

And so I'm really, really excited that we just closed and signed our SVP of marketing, Brittany, who joins us from Jet Black. And in a very simple way, that is my plan on how we're going to solve for branding. and design and marketing. I'm thrilled for Brittany to be at Slice, and I think she's going to make a huge impact on our business and the consumer experience and shop experience as well. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

And again, for anyone that wants to reach out. On Twitter, it's at Elir Sela. Feel free to tag me or my DMs are open. Feel free to ask questions. Always happy to chat with entrepreneurs. Thanks for listening to Elir Sela's ask me anything. If you'd like to participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 30,000 founders, join us at this weekend startups.com

slash slack. Thanks again to Clavio and Dell.