This Week in Startups - E1091: LAUNCH Accelerator Cohort 17 founders reflect on their journeys throughout the program: Nude Barre (DTC hosiery made for women of all shades), Techmate (On-demand tech support for remote & satellite employees) & Solo (Trucking-as-a-Service)

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Check out Nude Barre: https://nudebarre.com Check out Techmate: https://www.techmate.com Check out Solo: https://solotrucking.com Thanks to our partners: Squarespace - save 10% by using code TWIST at checkout https://www.squarespace.com Trends, by The Hustle - start your two-week trial for $1 at https://trends.co/twist Modloft - 15% off and free shipping at https://www.modloft.com/twist Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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at modloff.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. It's your boy. J-Cal here. In the summer of pandemic, it's, uh, it's 2020. And, uh, we're taping this on, I think July 27th. We'll probably release it in the first week of August when you're listening to this. And it's a bit crazy. And one of the thing that's been, uh, one of the things that's

been really interesting is that our accelerator, the launch accelerator, where we invite seven companies, we give them 100K each. And they would come to San Francisco for 12 weeks. And they would come to San Francisco for 12 weeks and meet all the investment community here had to switch gears. And we had to go 100% remote. Now, just like colleges, you have good and bad things with remote learning. The good thing with remote learning is you don't have to commute. The bad thing is you're not in the room, so you don't get that high touch experience. The certain people do well in remote situations for learning. Others might not, different learning styles. But for an accelerator, some magical things happened.

We had two, three times the number of investors show up every week because we weren't limited to just investors in the Bay Area. And we were able to run the program without having to have a physical space, which we would beg borrow and steal and rent in order to host it. Sometimes we'd host it at Neighborly. Sometimes we'd host it at Femwick and West, a law firm here who was gracious enough to host us. Originally, IBM used to host it for us. So we had all these great friends who would host for us and allow us to use their spaces.

And I was actually in the process of securing a 10,000 square foot space. And I was looking in November, December, and January at spaces and ready to pull the trigger. And then the pandemic happened. Thank God I didn't because I'd be sitting on that space. And nobody can get on play. And so what we found was two, three times the number of qualified companies started applying for the accelerator when we went fully remote. we extended the program four weeks and we got three or four times

the number of investors coming and the companies who are coming were closing funding faster and that really is the goal of an accelerator like most people are like what do you get an accelerator most people would say advice well that's kind of a commodity

it's you got medium you got this podcast you got books I mean there's a lot of information out there clever people can find it so advice introductions that's valid anointing that's super valid when you go through a sorting process

be it tech star launch accelerator or Y Combinator, the investment community knows, well, those teams are pretty smart and they sorted this big influx of applications down to the 1%, 2% that they were going to select. And so that anointing does count to downstream investors. They look at it and go, hmm, if Jason and his team sorted this down and they put money in, they got skin in the game, they don't want to have egg on their face, they don't want to pick companies that are weak, They want to pick the strongest companies. Obviously, they're trying to get a return on their dollar.

And they don't want their name associated with anything weak. They're going to work hard. So we worked really hard in the Accelerator. Long story short, we're doing them every month now. They're going great. They're going better than when we were in person. And we're having more companies who can participate because not face it, not everybody could get on a plane.

Some people were located in Australia or other countries. Other people had families or commitments that meant they couldn't make the trip. Or they simply didn't want to. and who can blame them. San Francisco is a mess. But we have a very interesting approach in our accelerator. One of the things we do is every week we say to the investors who come, tell us your number three, you're number two and your number one startup in the mind of an investor and take us through while you pick that number one company. Now, this creates a little bit of tension, but it's a healthy tension in that nobody wants to get no votes and people really want to get

votes and they want to win because people are competitive or you wouldn't be a founder to begin with. Third place gets you half a point. Second place gets you a point. The first place vote gets you two points. And so it's very dramatic when we go around the horn and 15 investors give their three, two, and one. And typically, you know, everybody gets votes, but they're become some winners. And today we're going to talk to the launch accelerators 17th class, which I belief started in person and then for three, two or three weeks and then went remote. So they were the transition class. We're going to talk to the top three vote getters because we look at that and we chart it over

the 12 to 14 weeks, now 16 weeks, we do the accelerator. So people can see who's got the most cumulative points. Does that correlate with success in the future? We're going to find out over time. But it doesn't exactly correlate with fundraising. We've seen people who are number three or four be the top fundraising. We've seen people who are number one or number two be the lowest in terms of of revenue or towards the bottom in terms of revenue. So it really is not a perfect metric,

but it does allow us to say to the investors, hey, I want you to really think about which one of these are the most fundable. First up in this cohort, number three, in terms of scoring, not that that means anything of seven, is Erin Carpenter, and she's with a company called N-U-D-B-A-R-R-E, and they're in the direct-to-consumer space, which we find a very interesting category. Challenging, but we look for companies in D2C that are very strong in terms of the founder and product fit. In other words, the founder really, really cares deeply about the product. Now, that's true in all startups. But we also look for a product that's very unique and an audience that maybe is either underserviced or is super passionate about the product. So welcome to the pod,

Aaron Carpenter from Newbar. How are you? Hey, I'm doing well, Jason. How about yourself? I'm losing my mind in quarantine, obviously. I hear you. I'm a super social. But now you're in New York City or the area? I'm in New York City, Upper Manhattan. Upper Manhattan, Harlem, USA to the exact.

Exactly. Anybody who's from New York, you have to give the specific neighborhood you're in. It's kind of, the borough is not enough detail level for any New Yorker. So what's it? Everybody's safe and sound, I take it. And New York has gone back to some form of normalcy? Sort of. stores are open, things of that sort, but it's still pretty quiet. And a lot of people have left

the city. So it's kind of, you know, ghost townish. Yeah, which, you know, it's typically the case in August and late July anyway. So you might see people come back, but it seems like a lot of people are moving out. Do you see the moving trucks and that phenomenon? And do you hear stories? People are moving out. Most of my friends that have children have left the city there. They're done. They're not, they were just looking for an excuse and they're just like pulled the rip cord. Yep, they're not coming back. They're not coming back. Very interesting.

You know, there is a phenomenon when you have kids like, maybe I want a backyard and then when you're stuck in your house in a pandemic, that backyard comes in handy. Well, that's great that everybody's okay. And then you've got the city to yourself. It's going to be very easy to get a reservation. That's why I love dogs in the cities. I could just walk into any restaurant get a reservation.

So what is nude bar? Why did you start it? Yeah, nude bar is a line of intimates and hosier. and I made it to represent the diverse world that we live in because historically when you go into stores and you ask for nude underwear, tides, panties, bras, and so forth, they usually come in shades of beige and I'm clearly not beige. So as a dancer and a young woman, I would have to dye my undergarments and my tides to match my skin to be in the perfect nude. Right. And you were a Nick City dancer. from my Knicks, and you were given these beige tights, and you had to dye them yourself. That was your pitch to me as, look, I had to dye these tights.

And now I make them. And something happened with your company when you made this very personal product. You put it online, and a number of high-profile women embraced the product. Tell us a little bit about that, because everybody has this dream of celebrity investors and endorsers, and yours became reality when the company was very young. Yeah, so I literally first sent some product to Wendy Williams. She was our first celebrity customer. And I essentially did this just on a whim.

I found her a studio address on her website and sent her some products. And then a couple weeks later, her wardrobe assistant called and said, oh, my gosh, Wendy loves your tight. She's been wearing them every day on the show. We wanted to let you know that an hour when the show is down airing, we want to call you and place an order. And so she purchased my stock for that year that I had, which was really a big, you know, pivot point for us. And what's amazing about Wendy is that she posts on social media every day tagging the brands that she's wearing from head to toe. And then on her website, she posts every brand that she's wearing literally linking them. So she wears like our caramel fishnets.

And it would say Wendy wore nude bar caramel fishnets with a link directly to the caramel fishnets on our website. And so other celebrities started reaching out. to us saying, oh my gosh, we saw Wendy and your fishnets. We love your products. Can you send them to Tyra Banks? And the list went on and on. And so from there, we just started getting these anonymous shoppers that would buy our product. And so one of them happened to be Serena Williams in 2018. And she was wearing them in Wimbledon in the U.S. Open and, you know, her whole Tennessee. That is mind-blowing. Yeah. And so what ended up happening, is that she was ordering them pretty regularly, and we ended up selling out of her skew.

And so the team reached out saying, hey, when are you going to restock these tights? And I let them know that, hey, listen, I'm fundraising to scale the company. Do you think that Serena would be interested in this? And here we go. Wow. And you got Serena Williams as an investor. Yes. Tremendous.

Investor and customer, yes. That's amazing. When celebrities order stuff, do they order from a pseudonym? or do you once in a while just see like a name come up and you're like, I wonder if that's blank, actually the person? Yeah. So it'll be a combination of ways. Sometimes it'll be a wardrobe stylist that'll reach out, just email us, you know, cold or blind.

And so there's that or someone may just anonymously shop on the website. Sometimes it'll have the email address of that person. Like, yeah, I wonder if this is really the person. Yeah. Or sometimes it'll be assistant's name or someone's name at whatever they're, you know, URL is or their website. And similarly, you're like, does this person just work there? Is this for that celebrity? And so we're constantly, you know, just looking at who are these new customers. Yeah. I've had a good experience with that. Once in a while, somebody recognizes my name. And they're like,

hey, do you really like this product? I'm like, I just ordered like eight of them. Like, I really like it. So like, would you like some for free? I'm like, don't take free products, but thank you. It's kind of not, it's not creepy. I don't find it creepy at all. Like, if I, if I did, I wouldn't use my real name, right? But like I would just, it's very easy to get a pseudonym or to have like an assistant buy it and just order it to your office and avoid all that. So as a D to C company, it's a bit of a struggle. What are the hardest things about running a direct-to-consumer company? A few things.

One would be, you know, the defensibility side of it. I would say the one thing that's really unique to Nudebar is that we are, you know, targeting this specific pain point. And so women either have the reaction to a story like mine where I had to dye my tights and they're like, oh my gosh, I had to do that as well. I wish this existed years ago or a long time ago and I wasn't dying my tights or they have the reaction of anger and frustration that I even had to do that to make something match my skin tone and they want to support it even more. So we were able to build this, I don't want to say cult like, but tribal like following of people. that just really believed in what we're doing and believed in our messaging of empowering and, you know, allowing women to find their skin tone or that representation matters. And representation through your skin tone was important. And you had some fun with the marketing. Explain that within terms of like the color bar and how you work that. Yeah. So for the color matching side of it,

we do color matching in a few ways, but the most interesting and unique way is that we use color matching technology called the nude meter where you answer some quiz questions, you upload a selfie, and then the algorithm tells you one to two shades that match you based on seasonality. So maybe winter season versus summer season when you're more tan in the summer. And so this is really unique to our brand. It's a game changer for customers that typically rely on going into stores to match your skin tone. So nude bar is very similar to buying makeup foundation for women. And women usually feel like they need to go into a store, get their shade match, try on, and test a few shades. And we're taking that process out of the equation through

our technology. How did fundraising and the accelerator go for you? How were you referred to us? How is your experience in the accelerator and how do fundraising go? Because that's the reason most people come to our accelerator. Yeah. So the referral was actually, I felt really random. So I was introduced to a lawyer who a friend was following my story on, you know, fundraising and was really excited about Serena coming on as an investor. And actually at the time, it was Serena and the Bumble fund. So Whitney Wolf heard they both were my first two checks in. Jason, you were my third check-in. Kind of like Uber. Yeah. It was really interesting how that happened. Was I third or fourth? I can't remember. You know, you're my third check-in. Yeah. Wow. And so they were my first

and I was getting some press around that as they were announcing their new portfolio companies. And so I was then introduced to Crystal a teen from Ruby Love. Yes, who went through our accelerator. Yeah, she went through the accelerator. I helped on a call with her. And initially the conversation was, I said, Crystal, how did you raise $15 million and how did you scale your company? Like, tell me everything.

And so she said, actually, I went to this accelerator called Launch with Jason Kalicanas. and I'd never heard of this accelerator before. And I actually hadn't heard of you either, which I was pretty surprised by I felt like I had, you know, dug in and researched so many investors. And so she was like, you know, if you want an introduction, I'm happy to introduce you. Why don't you do your own research first?

So then I took a week and like binge-watched this week in startups. The podcast always helpful. Yeah, like to the point where I'd be like on my computer listening and my husband'd be like, is it Jason again? So anyway. I get that a lot. So I binge-washed. I just really fell in love with just like your stance on, you know, founders and your belief in founders.

And I pinged Crystal and was like, hey, I want to meet this guy. So she made the introduction. Then you guys invited me to founder university. Right. And my, yeah, so my main goal, I found a university, was like, I have to pitch Jason. I have to get in front of him. And the structure, I wasn't really sure how that was going to go in terms of how we would pitch and how that would work. But I didn't get to pitch the first day.

And I was like getting nervous. like, oh, no, I came all the way out here to San Francisco. Like, I got to get in front of Jason. So you had like a mixer or something in the evening. Yep. And I came up to you. I found you solo and I cornered you. And told you about a bar.

Yeah, yeah, ping pong. Yeah. And so I, you know, told you my spiel. Yeah. And you were like, let's have you pitch tomorrow. Yeah. There we go. And you know what?

I'll save the fundraising question for our fourth segment. But spoiler alert, it went well. Okay, when we get back, we're going to hear from the second place finisher in the launch accelerator 17 class. Hey, everybody. Are you ready to turn your amazing idea into a website? I know you are. Well, the best way to do that, the absolute best way to do that is how I do it, which is using Squarespace, whether you want to blog or publish content, maybe you want to sell products or your services. All of that is possible with Squarespace. And it's so easy and it's so affordable. But most important for me is that it's beautiful. They have amazing customizable templates. And they've added that powerful e-commerce function. a couple of years ago. So you get the best of both worlds. You get that great e-commerce combined with the beautiful templates that work and they're responsive. If you're on a phone, if you're an iPad, if you're on a desktop, if you're on a small monitor, a big monitor, you can even buy your domains there in choosing from over 200 extensions. You get search engine optimization as well. You get

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Great job, Squarespace. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Next up in our second place for the launch accelerator, 17th class, was Nicobiel. and she is the co-founder, along with David Brock of TechMate. And most of the people who come to our accelerator have two or three co-founders. We invite one of them to come on the pod.

And next up is Nicole. Tell everybody, Nicole, what is TechMete? Okay. Yeah, so TechMate is good to see you again. Yeah, it's been a while. I know. Well, we started in person and then switched to remote, actually about three weeks in. that was crazy yeah what was that week tell everybody what that week was like where we're trying to make the

decision do you remember it yeah it was so crazy just because so much was happening and you know it was like it was just kind of starting where people were you know starting to question and i think that that last week in person actually we kind of did a bit of a hybrid situation that people could either be there or be remote uh and so we had i think half were in person in your studio actually and then half actually didn't fly in. So, yeah, it was a very interesting time. And I have to say for us, you know, I think we were really concerned when it switched to a fully remote program just because we had it so much in our head, you know, that we were going

to be meeting investors in person and just didn't know what that process was going to be like if it was going to change, you know, the success of our fundraise. And I have to say that, you know, in the end, I can't imagine having. done it in person. You know, there were our, there were days we were doing it, you know, we were fundraising 12 to 14 hours a day and, you know, we were just on Zoom calls morning tonight. And I think in the end, you know, just the number of investors that we got put in front of and the diversity of those investors really it ended up being a huge, much bigger win for us. And I can get more into that.

Yeah, well, I think we made the decision early on, Jackie. Deegan, who runs the accelerator for us, our managing director and I made the decision, hey, if we're going to make this remote, let's try to double or triple the value of it, because they're going to lose the value of meeting with founders in person or meeting with investors in person. So let's try to just either add more sessions. So I think we added four sessions, maybe. So that's 25% more sessions.

That felt good as a founder that we added that? Absolutely. I mean, there were a couple weeks that we were doing three pitchers. sessions per week as opposed to just one. And then in the end, it was really interesting because, so I am in New York and David's in New York. Typically, I went home to quarantine in Kansas City with my family. And through just, you know, having the remote sessions, we were able to connect with an investor fund actually in the Midwest. And they focused primarily on companies in the Midwest. and now we had this whole other channel that, you know,

we're actually now hiring in the Midwest because we can hire anywhere because we're all remote anyway. And so it opened up a huge door for us that probably we wouldn't have been introduced to this fund, you know, had we just been doing in-person, you know, pitches in San Francisco. So they were actually the first investor that came on for us and opened the door to a lot of other introductions and really, you know, led our round for us.

And so it was really, really amazing, you know, just being able to make that connection. Okay, so tell everybody what is tech mate. Yes. So we are on-demand tech support for remote and satellite employees. Got it. And so you didn't start this during COVID, but a pandemic, when you go from 5% of employees work from home, maybe, 10 at big companies?

What is the statistic? Yeah, actually before COVID-19, about 5% of,000. 50% of employees were already working in remote in satellite offices. So for us, including satellite offices, yeah. Exactly. So it was really interesting for us because we had already kind of started going down this road. Actually, when we first started TechMate a couple years ago, we were focusing primarily on small businesses.

And what happened is we were finding that the people that were getting in touch with us, they were operating like small businesses, but they were actually remote and satellite employees that were just kind of like their hair was on fire, and they had an IT department that was on the other side of the country, and they didn't know how to solve their IT issues. And so we were getting introduced then to the headquarters of those companies. And so we actually saw this trend that was happening. And so we actually started focusing on this early on with these bigger companies.

And then when COVID hit, it was just like a mass acceleration of the distributed work. force and everything that we had kind of been saying was going to happen more slowly, all of a sudden was happening all the while. How do you make money? Who are your customers? Yeah. So our customers are primarily, we call them Enterprise Light companies. And so they're companies that have 100 to 5,000 employees. Our sweet spot is around 2 to 3,000 employees. And they have two or more satellite offices. And these companies are, they're typically, they have small IT companies, for instance, One of our customers, they have 1,800 employees spread across the U.S. But they have a very small IT department of six people in Florham Park, New Jersey,

that are trying to support all of these employees. So 300 employees each. And, of course, if the employees in the building, they're going to get done first because they can come and complain. And they know that person, but the person who's in Boise, Idaho, who's got a computer that crashes, you know, in some random basis and their printers jammed. they would normally just get a new computer setup sent to them and have to box it all up and waste all that time, right? Yeah, or, you know, sometimes the companies were actually flying a technician, one of their technicians, across the country for just like an overnight fix. Or they were contracting a different company or a different technician in every single city.

So you can imagine that's a logistical nightmare of hundreds of phone calls and emails just coordinating all of this. So that's really what we set out to focus on. Most people would say, hey, this sounds like Geek Squad, which I think Best Buy bought at some point. That was something that consumers used. How is this different than Best Buy? Was it Circuit City or Best Buy that bought Geese? So how is it different than Geek Squad? And do you, are these IT specialists around the country, they work for you full-time or they're

contractors? Yeah, so they're contractors. We have a network of around 7,000 technicians that we've built just from being our team has about 40 years of experience in IT consulting and recruiting. So we've built a pretty vast network across the U.S. over that time. Of that network, we have around 250 that are already active. We've actually, we only accept about 5% of those who apply. So the goal is to really keep that quality level high and to grow along. with our demand. And it's interesting that you bring up Geek Squad. So the market is super fragmented.

So if you're looking at like the competitive landscape, the top three players, Geek Squad being one of them in terms of outsourced IT, they only make up five percent, less than five percent of the market. So the other 95 percent are these like small local IT consulting companies who don't have network, don't have the technology to support this workforce. Also with Best Buy, you know, they're very B to C focused. We're 100% B2B focused. And they're also much more, you know, in store focused. They're doing a lot of, you know, lower level types of jobs.

It's like the genius bar stuff, right. Yeah. They're not going to be doing VPNs into the corporate servers, you know, with people in the accounting department or the sales team, stuff like that. It's like. Yeah. And for us, you know, our goal has never just been to be a labor arbitrage. It's really been to build.

So we're a SaaS-enabled marketplace. So our goal has been to build, you know, this business tool that allows an IT manager or an IT director to really support all of their, you know, their distributed workforce. So, you know, we have a platform that employees log into. A IT manager can see everything that happens across all of their locations and can gather data. That's a big part of our dashboard as well. They're gathering data on most common issues, you know, IT expense by location. you know, anything that issue by user type.

So, you know, we think that's another way that it really sets us apart from, you know, the other IT companies, maybe like a geek squad. And are people now starting to set up home offices and Zoom studios? Is that becoming the big ask? And have you seen any anecdotally companies say, hey, we're going to give a budget for a home office or home studio now that a number of people are going to be worked from home on a more permanent basis, or at least extended, are companies budgeting for that? And what's the best practice now? Yeah, for sure. I mean, we, yeah, we've actually had members, we had just had a member

sign up a couple weeks ago. They said, you know, we are, we've released our employees to work from home indefinitely, like for sure through the end of the year. And even then we don't know if we're going to be bringing them back to the office. So we're seeing a huge shift. And, you know, so a lot of what we're doing is helping to provision these new employees or just help them make that transition to home. In the beginning, we were doing a lot of that. So getting computers ready, getting everything, you know, basically loaded on the computers and basically so all they have to do is just like unbox and kind of plug and play. So a lot of that. And then, you know, Zoom, obviously, but then for our kind of sweet spot of companies, they are also doing a lot of, I guess, more advanced.

audio video setups. So Crestron and things like that. Yeah, those are, yeah, it's more than just popping up Zoom. They might have Cisco or some other vendor and it's a little more complicated with firewalls and whatnot. Exactly. How did you wind up finding out about our accelerator? And in terms of the voting, which you did very well, how much of it do you feel was based on maybe getting a little boost since you're one of those companies, that is, uh, benefits? fitting from the, from the pandemic. Did you get a lot of that? We, we did. Yeah. So in terms of how we found out about launch, actually my co-founder, David Brock, he's good friends with Mike Savino. Oh, one of our venture partners, yeah. Yes, yes. And Mike was great, actually. We talked at our Christmas party,

actually, we had him. And he actually invited us to his office and did like a two-hour, just really drilled us on our pitch and we did the deck kind of like what you did the first day. So I felt like we were a little bit more prepared because he said a lot of the things that you would have said. So yeah, we got introduced that way. And the program honestly was like for us, it was like such a numbers game. We knew from the beginning that we just wanted to get in front of as many investors as possible. And so I think, you know, of course we would never want to take advantage. or people to feel like we were taking advantage of this terrible situation. No, of course not, yeah.

We found ourselves in. But it was definitely interesting just to see, you know, since we already had this business model before, and then there was just like this huge accelerated need for it. I think the investors that we met tuned into that very quickly. Yep. And, you know, our goal from the beginning was always not to necessarily get a yes from investors, but to get to a certain amount of noes.

We wanted to get to 60 knows. That's an interesting strategy. Why? We felt that as long as we were learning from every single meeting and from every single no, that eventually that would get us to a yes. But if we were just kind of focused on, okay, they said no, like move on to the next one and just trying to get to that yes, then there's less opportunity for learning. And so we thought if we can at least just get to 60 knows and never even get to a yes,

the learnings that we'll get if we really focus on why, you know, why we're getting the nose and if we can really dig into that. What was the number one reason people said no? I think, you know, one, yeah, I think a big question is the future of IT. And, you know, everything's going to the cloud and everything is going remote and how do we fit into that? And so it's kind of, it's funny because, my co-founder, David, he had this epiphany because we were kind of getting the same feedback and the same questions over and over.

And he had this epiphany that it was kind of like Eminem at the last scene of eight mile where he gets up there and he's like, he already knows everything that, you know, they're going to say against his opponents are going to say against him. And so, and he just calls it all out. And so we actually started doing that. You started framing it. You say, hey, here's the reasons why people. you know, wouldn't invest in the company or these are the challenges to a company like this. And there's something charming about being self-aware about that. And also, it's not only charming.

It's just like a level of maturity for a founder to be like, yeah, this is not a fit if you don't like these type of businesses. But if you believe this is just labor arbitrage, here's why it's not. And you can kind of unpack those issues and kind of meet people and head them off at the past, as it were. Exactly. All right. When we get back from this quick break, we're going to meet the number one vote getter in the launch accelerator 17th class. Stick with us. All right, everybody, I want to tell you about an exciting new online community that I just joined. It's called Trends, and you can go visit it at trends.com

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notes. That guy, Sam, smart cat, visit trends.com slash twist. T-R-E-N-D-S dot CO slash twist. And you'll get in for two weeks for just one dollar. And I'll see you in there. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to this week in startups. We're talking to the three top vote getters at launch accelerators. Uh, 17th class. We've done 17 of these. It's always seven. Seven founders. And third place was Nudbar, Aaron Carpenter we met with, and that was 94.5 points. She scored cumulatively in the accelerator.

And then we met Nicole Beals with TechMate, and she had a cumulative 125 points in voting, which put her in second place. And in first place, we had Armando Perez. He is the co-founder of Solo Trucking, S-O-L-Trucking.com. And they came in first with a whopping 159.5 points. So a spread of 60 points between the third and first place. And about, yeah, about 30 points equally. Armando, congratulations on coming in first.

But it, of course, means nothing. Ultimately, it's just that kind of fun thing we do each week. Tell everybody, because ultimately you have to build up just a large, sustainable business. That's the goal not to win a prize here. we're not playing for trophies, we're paying for revenue and building an at-scale business. But tell everybody what solo trucking does. Yeah, absolutely. And Jason, so good being here and seeing you again.

Yeah. It's been a while. Yeah. So it's been a minute, as the kids say. It has. It has. Well, interesting times, right? So, yeah. So solo, it's pretty simple. We help truck drivers become independent so that they can finally legally work with customers like, Uber freight, Pepsi, FedEx, and thousands more. And so you are an actual trucking company. You make software. You're a marketplace. How do you describe the business model?

Yeah. Now, that's a great question, especially just, you know, given how really confusing trucking can be because there's just so many nuances to it. You know, saying trucking company is saying like technology company. Right. That landscape is enormous. Yep, exactly. So what we do specifically is you could think of us as almost Shopify for trucking.

So if you're a truck driver and you want to start your own trucking company, which is what you need to do to actually be able to legally work with, you know, folks like Uber Freight, Pepsi, basically any direct customer, it's typically a nightmare. So it's a long process. You know, it takes a ton of money. We make it super simple like Shopify does to start an e-commerce store. It's a one-stop shop. You can get all the services that you might need, depending on your type of driving style or the type of cargo, you might need a haul as a truck driver.

And like I said, it's all in one, you know, we make it super simple in one location to be able to do that instead of piecemealing it. And then, you know, after that, we connect you to about half a million shipments on a daily basis so that you're always busy as a truck driver, no matter where you're at in the continental 48 states. So they outsource basically everything but the driving of the truck to you? That is correct. And why would they do this? It's just it's painless.

It's reducing pain for them. Yeah. So typically from a truck driver's perspective, this is kind of their career goal. So if you look at a truck driver and their and their typical career trajectory, you know, what what is more or less what they're gunning for is to one day become independent and own their own trucking company. And so, like I said, if you look at a driver's career trajectory, it follows a very similar path that you typically see in different industries, such as, you know, an accounting student. They typically will join a big four whenever they graduate, and then they'll typically work their way up from there and typically jumps ship to somewhere else that's not going to work him to death. Same thing for a truck driver. They're going to start off typically as a direct employee, but, you know, over time, they're going to try to take baby steps towards becoming an independent truck driver.

And that includes purchasing their own truck, you know, joining a more boutique trucking company that gives them a little bit more independence and then finally taking that final step of starting their own trucking company. But like I said, that final step is a really big step. There's huge cash flow issues that typically come with it. So they typically have to put down anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 before ever moving shipment. So before any revenue comes in, they have to invest that money in front. And it typically takes three to six months. And so what we do is make it super simple for them to come on with no money down, and we can have you them on the road in about a week. And you took the top prize during this accelerator class. What do you attribute it to?

Why did people tell you they were voting you as number one? Because we actually record, even before it was on Zoom, where it's easy to record. We actually had cameras there. We would set up a whole AV setup on location, which was a lot of expense and time, to be totally frank, that's now gone. for us, which is really weird. We used to lug all the equipment every week and set it all up, break it all down. And that's why we're looking for a permanent home, which we're not going to get now, apparently. So what was it that the investors told you was the reason they picked you as number one? Yeah.

So really quickly, just on the whole equipment thing that you brought up, it's super helpful to obviously just be able to review. just any time that we go through the weekly pitches and just kind of study what we did right and did wrong. And that kind of leads me into answering your primary question, which is whenever we first started, we weren't super great at telling a compelling story. And this is something that you really learn, you know, obviously through the program, that it's so important to tell a compelling and motivating story to investors so that they can really see beyond the technicalities, why this is super important. And you know what?

It could really become. And so, you know, going through the program, being able to watch ourselves, you know, week over week and be able to craft that story in a way that really resonated with the right investors, I think that's what we would attribute it to. And how did, what else did you learn during this process? Obviously, learning how to tell the story is critically important, but we only pick people who have launched businesses with actual customers. that's one of the things that's unique about our accelerator, our Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold is too hot,

you've raised a series A, or you have five term sheets and you're just picking which series A to go with from top venture firms. That's too hot. Too cold is you have an idea or a mock-up or a prototype, but no customers, you haven't launched it.

For us, the sweet spot is, hey, maybe you've got 2,000, 20,000, 100,000 in marketplace revenue, whatever it is. And you've got three, four,

five people on the company. you've raised two, three, four hundred thousand, eh, from friends and family or pre-seed or whatever you want to call that round. And you got 10 customers we can talk to. So what else, storytelling is a lot easier when you actually have customers because you can just have them tell you why they love your company. That's always the true nut star. What else did you learn?

What would the takeaways for you in the accelerator? Yeah, absolutely. So this would have been much more difficult to tell a story if, you know, if our revenue's numbers looked very different. But I think, you know, something else that we really, or at least I personally got a lot better at as a founder, especially given my technical background as an engineer, was how to be succinct with answers and really step away from trying to teach almost from a first principal standpoint and much more focus on making sure they understand what I'm explaining in as short of a time as possible. So answering questions concisely for investors when you say they,

you're talking about investor questions. So if an investor I ask you, we'll do a role play right now, how many drivers do you have on the platform?

You would say? 20. And we're hoping to add five next month. Perfect. So you gave me the answer to the question I needed, which wanted to get an idea

of ballparking where this company's at. And you gave me even a little bit of extra information that took an extra two seconds to say, and adding five this month. So I get an idea of how you're growing up.

and that's 25% growth month over month. That's pretty great. Before you came to the program, how would you have answered that question? Or how are you answering questions? We probably would have talked about that for at least five minutes. Or I would have rambled about that for at least five minutes. Why is that a mistake?

The rambling five-minute answer. It's a tension span, right? And it also makes you look a lot less polished as a founder. So it makes it look like you really don't know what's going on. you know and sometimes that's not the case you just want to give a very thorough answer but it's just optics so you really you really want to make sure that your answers are succinct to polish and to the point all right when we get back uh we'll talk to nicole erin and armando uh as we wrap up here on speaking service i love modern furniture i am a modern furniture snob and what i love most about modern

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Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, we met three great startups here today. Techmate, nude bar and solo trucking. And now we're just going to a little roundtable discussion with the founders about what they learned during the accelerator and about being entrepreneurs and what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the time of COVID. Aaron, maybe you could talk a little bit about fundraising and what you learned. You heard Nicole talk a little bit about getting to 60 knows so they could learn and iterate. What was your strategy in terms of raising money? Yeah. So, well, initially, my biggest challenge was answering the questions very concise and quickly. That was a weak point that I felt that I needed to work on throughout the entire, you know, process of the accelerator. But my strategy, Nicole and I actually talked a lot, and I really loved her theory on getting to the nose.

But I just took a lot of notes. I loved how you guys really were like an accountability partner in that there was this funnel idea of, you know, stage one, stage two and so forth of where we were with investors and actually keeping up with the updates. I really tried to be diligent about updating investors, which got me further along in all of my conversations. So to explain, we have a funnel process that we created inside of the launch accelerator that I came up with a couple of years ago. And when I came up with this idea, I was like, I want to track, like a sales process, how each company is doing. And I demanded that every week we do a pipeline review, just like a sales team might do a

pipeline review, because I found founders, we tell them to email investors and that it was a numbers game. You needed to get to at least 100 meetings in order to have any chance of knowing how fundable your company was. And then people would like, they would do it in spurts. But they wouldn't follow up with investors. So the two things that we changed there was we created a point system for finding targets to go after, emailing them, following up with them.

And then, of course, we're sharing intelligence with each other about different investors and how interested they are in investing in different companies. But you found this discipline and this process particularly compelling, Aaron. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It made a big difference. And then I would say also the point system of every week of the investors voting there are three, two, and one was extremely helpful.

because then I would just focus on those people that voted for me versus, you know, I don't want to say wasting my time, but spending less time on the people that didn't vote that didn't seem interested, which made the meetings a lot more efficient when, you know, I've sent out that initial email. And I felt that the investor seemed to respect the conversations a lot more than if I were to reach out to someone a little more cold or not an introduction through you, Jason. Yeah. So yeah, that definitely helps on the margins. If we do an introduction, people take it a little bit more seriously, or at least they get back to you on a higher percentage than when you were emailing. Correctly. Yeah. What percentage of people we introduced you to got back to you after one email, would you say, if you had to ballpark it? I would say more than 50% for sure. And then what was your best practice? I've explained to you by my team about how often to go back to a founder. I'll go back to an investor. Investor? Yeah, so we would pretty much do it monthly. So as we would be sending in the monthly updates to you guys,

we would also submit a monthly update to the investor saying, hey, here's an update on where our company is. If you didn't hear back from that investor, then you can say, hey, didn't hear from you. But hey, here's some exciting updates on our company, which usually you would get a response after that. So you have a monthly update you send on a discipline basis to your existing investors.

Yes. But then you would create an edited version of that. I would take it a shorter version or a different version to investors you met with or wanted to meet with potential investors. Yep. So an edited version, you know, either high level, you know, positive updates or just press. Like, hey, there's this recent article that came out about my business, if you want to learn more about what we're doing or about me as a founder.

Any investors upset that you sent them an update on their business? Absolutely not. At least none that told me to my face. So I mean, I think this is a very instructive lesson for people is that founders don't take the time to update their existing investors. And they don't take the time to perhaps update the investors who didn't say yes or didn't follow up with them when in fact there is no cost to doing that. And what people don't realize is the investors are getting free information, which investors love. And it's a free option to make up for a mistake if they passed on investing. So bottom line, Erin, in terms of funding, how'd you do, ballpark, you know, as best as you can say? Yeah, we are closing out our round soon, and I was able to bring on...

Yeah, it's New York. It's okay. We get a siren once in a while. It's no problem. Sorry. You get sirens in New York, and then you get just very loud people wrestling and fighting with each other in the streets here in San Francisco. We literally had somebody screaming in the streets here. It's been them. I've been like muting diligently in between the sirens. It's a new world now. Sirens, crazy people yelling and scream. It's all good.

But yeah, so we're closing out our seed round, which I'm really excited about. We've brought on some amazing investors. One of the investors that I did regular updates with was Katrina Lake. And she came in as an investor, which is extremely exciting. So Katrina Lake is the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix. Wow. I would say, you know, she's an expert in the D-to-Cy. category, which is huge.

Yeah. Kind of define the category. Sure. Absolutely. So yeah, so bringing her on was extremely exciting. And honestly, I think sending those monthly updates made a big difference. Yeah. And we make it a requirement if we're going to be investors in a company that they agree to send monthly updates. And we will email a founder if we don't get one for two months in a row and say, hey, everything okay? Did we miss it?

and we don't expect perfection, but, you know, if we can get even half the number of updates just six a year, at least we know what's going on with the investment so we can help. Absolutely. Nicole, maybe we could switch to your fundraising. We talked about it a little bit, but overall, how did you wind up? And where was that versus your expectation? Yeah, well, in the beginning of the accelerator, you know, we were probably meeting before the accelerator, actually, we were.

were probably meeting with one investor every couple of weeks. So it was this huge daunting task. I honestly did not know how we were going to do it just because I had never been, you know, both of me and my co-founder were, you know, first time startup founders. So it was just felt like this big mountain to climb. And so one thing that was really helpful was just to be kind of taken, you know, piece by piece or step by step through that process and have it broken down. And so we actually, our goal was 750,000. And we actually just closed out our round at 1.3 million. Wow. So you doubled your goal, yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Congratulations on that. And now the hard work begins you. Yeah. That's enough runway for you guys to go

18, 24 months, I take it. Absolutely. And now you've got to do what with that money? Triple revenue, quadruple revenue. What is the goal for, after you deploy $1.3 million, what will the company TechMate, which you can see at TechMate.com, look like? Yes, thank you. Yeah, so actually right now, so we just launched our memberships at the beginning of this year. And so right now we have 15 memberships.

Our goal is to get that to 200 memberships. Right now we're getting about one membership sign up a week. So we're really tripling down. we have a sales model that works, but we're really tripling down on the hiring. So that's going to be the first part is bringing on a sales lead and then really building out that sales team to hit those milestones. And then that'll get us to about $3 million in ARR. And from there, the next year, our goal would be to hit a thousand memberships, which would take us to more around 10 million ARR. And, you know, at the accelerator, we always look at it as a product. I look at it as a product

and as a product manager, we always think about, hey, what can we add? And maybe a couple of classes in, I created the pipeline process. And then I said, I want to also create a process of doing a back-of-the-envelope plan, a yearly plan, because the teams with plans seem to perform better than teams without a plan. Tell everybody a little bit about that, if you remember it, when I went over your yearly plan with you. And the goal of that, of course, is so that you can speak credibly in a very, back of the envelope off the top of your head about your goals, like you just did perfectly and confidently, so that investors say, hey, if I deploy this money, they're not just going to

build a bunch of features. They're actually going to change the profile of this business on a revenue basis in terms of the team composure, et cetera. So we did that, what I called, I guess, yearly planning process. Tell us, share with the audience what that was like. Yeah. Yeah, that was super helpful because basically, What it did is it took our numbers from where we were at that point. And then you have a formula

that shows, you know, month over month growth. So it's broken down into, you know, if you're doing 5% month over month growth or 10% or 25%, it shows you then where you can plug those numbers and you can plug in the starting number. And then it automatically updates through all of those formulas and shows you, you know, if you're just hitting 5% month over month, here's where you're going to in a year versus 25, you know, so you can really play around with those numbers a little bit more, and it just made it much more real because I feel like in the startup world, these numbers are so ambiguous. You know, you're just, you're telling investors, yeah, we're going to do this and we're going to do that, but, and you're kind of saying what you think that investors want to hear,

but when you actually are working with, you know, formulas and spreadsheets and, you know, an actual plan, those numbers, like, become very contextual in your mind, like you, it gives it, you know, it gives you something to kind of sink your teeth into. So it makes it really helpful. It gives you that framework and then you communicate that to the team, right? You can say, hey, if we grow 7% a month, we're going to double revenue in 10 months, that's not enough to make investors interested. But if we grow 10% a month, which we can do, right?

As a team, we can go 10% a month. That doesn't seem impossible. We can double our revenue every seven months, maybe even get towards tripling it every year. year over year. If we work hard, that would be game-changing in terms of raising capital. And you realize it's just a very small difference between 5, 10, and 15% growth. When you have 15% growth month over month consistently, people freak out in Silicon Valley and investors freak out. When you have 5%, they're intrigued and 10% they're engaging, right? You get this very predictable engagement level. Was that your experience when you showed growth? You got people on the horn?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, and we kind of took that framework and really built it out into a whole financial model that showed, you know, I think three years, three years out. And so, and I think that also helped just to be able, you know, when we were talking, it just gave us more confidence. When you can really talk about the numbers of your business, I just felt much more confident. I'm sure that, you know, David would say the same thing. Like, it just, it just, it just, just it makes you feel like you're on a different level communicating as opposed to just kind of talking more in ambiguous terms. It's like you really understand you can, you know, give very specific answers. Yeah. And Armando, tell us a little bit about your goals for fundraising. You had a business that I think was profitable or break even when you came into the accelerator, correct?

Or close? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we were definitely cash flow positive. We had to be. So we didn't have the luxury.

we had raised no outside capital to date. So we were your first investors launch? That is correct. Okay, wow. Yep, yep. They were the first. Great. Good to know.

Yes. So, yeah, yeah. A good first one. Yeah. Good omen. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. So whenever we came in, you know, we had, we definitely had some goals because we had been

strategic about, you know, about when we were going to approach our raise. We wanted to make sure we had some good traction, give us a little bit of, obviously, a little bit of validation whenever we were in conversations with investors. Then obviously COVID happened in the middle of it. So we took a little bit of a pause and actually, you know, coming out of that pause, we actually had a biggest contract renewal with our, I'm sorry, with one of our most important business partners. So we really went, we really went pretty focused on that during, probably during a two-month portion that we would have been like, we would have liked to be, have been raising. But luckily, while we did that, our profitability started skyrocketing it again

during, actually during, during, during COVID. So, you know, essential goods need to be moved. So at this point, you know, we're still, we're still in the process of potentially looking into raising here in the next months, next few months. But it's, it was, it was such an amazing experience just being able to have these conversations with investors. And you had a lot of interest, correct? we still do. Still do. So you're trying to figure out when to pull the trigger on this. It's a timing thing for you.

That's more of the question for us. It's more of a timing thing for us. You feel you could have raised, right? You had potential offers and people at the table? Oh, absolutely. So we definitely had a few investors that were very, very, or are still very, very stoked on what we're doing. And we're staying in very close contact with them.

And like, you know, like has been said, you're just giving them those consistent updates, being in strong communication with them. That's really what makes a difference. So because you were cash flow positive, break-even, profitable, depending on the month, and growing, and growing, you had the option to take money or not.

So I am the only outside owner of shares in your company at this point, and you're on the route to be like a Pegasus, which means you can skip rounds of funding. And this is one of the amazing things. And probably one of the reasons you got voted, number one was people saw the strength of the business at the end of the day. The strength of the core business is going to determine how interested investors are at the end of the day in my mind.

Yeah, absolutely. We heard it over and over again. They loved the United Economics. So it just made money. Okay, so going around the horn here, and I just want to apologize to all the white guys listening who are probably wondering, like, where are all the white guys and, you know, your top three here, there were white guys in the accelerator. I promise you, they just didn't score on the top three or four. And that's just the nature of it. It is a competition. And, you know, there's nothing I can do.

I would sandbag it for all the underperforming white guys in the cohort. But it is nice that we have great diversity in the, and that's a testament to the founder of university program we created because we have those just for women and just for underrepresented and underestimated founders, as my friend Arlen would say. Aaron, during the, if you're open to talking about it, because I know we have, during the pandemic, or shortly after the pandemic started, we had the anti-racism protests, which I think is the most accurate way to describe them, right? Protests against racism.

And you're an African-American black founder with a product for people of color. how in any way did that increase the interest in your company and then how did that make you feel to have increased awareness of female black business owners happened suddenly, you know, while those protests were occurring? Yeah. So there's been this huge turning point for nude bar from the investor side of it to the actual consumer side and then press. From the investor side, you know, there have been investors that felt that they needed to step up and invest more in underestimated or underrepresented founders because

the stats are so low, especially for women of color. It's less than a percent of black women get venture funding. And then, you know, when you think of raising over a million, it's a really, really small number. So under 50 women, black women have raised over a million in venture funding, to be generous, I'll say, under 50. Really? Because we have two. I think we have two of them from the accelerator already. Yeah.

I think that puts us at 4% of the black female founders. That's pretty good track, right? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of wild. But other than that, you know, from the consumer aspect, we were getting an overwhelming response of, you know, influencers, everyday customers, everyone just tagging us on social media to support black-owned businesses.

So we were getting like something between 20 to 30 tags an hour over a two-week period, which was extremely overwhelming. Our website traffic increased over 200%. So, yeah, and then our sales increased a lot as well. And, you know, with that. And as far as press, we were getting tons of, you know, pretty big press reach out to us and wanting to feature us, tell our story. So we've been featured recently in Vogue.

We've been featured in Elle magazine, Cosmo, ABC, and NBC. I'm doing an event with NBC this week. So, yeah, it's been pretty incredible. And yeah, so I've been able to close my round, you know, gain some new customers and just really get that, you know, press that is really hard to get. I mean, we don't even, I don't have a PR person that works for us. Right. A lot of this is inbound press, correct?

They're calling you and saying, we need. They're literally emailing us. They're like, we need to have a black female founder on this show in this magazine because we have not covered them. we had been slow and covering. For sure. The awesome thing about nude bar is that because we're such an inclusive brand, it's a brand that speaks to everyone.

So I think with the increase in sales, it's a product that any and everyone can shop, whether you're a white woman and Latino woman, a black woman, that we have the full spectrum of skin tones. So that's also really huge for us in terms of people wanting to, you know, with it kind of matching the times of inclusion being real and being tangible. Did you ever feel, and then I'll move on from the subject, but I'm just curious as a founder, did you ever feel bias when meeting with investors against you as a black female founder? That's a good question.

So I would say definitely yes. I'm trying to think of how I can explain that in a very clear way. You know, there's- How does it manifest itself? Like, because we don't know. And like, it's a very hard topic to talk. about, right? And so I appreciate you talking about it because I think part of the change happens when we talk about it, right?

Yeah, I would say a few things. You know, no one comes out and says, I'm not investing in women or I'm not investing in black people. I would just say there's, you know, the typical pattern matching that people are used to investing in people that look like them. And if I don't look like you or you don't have diverse friends, you don't have a diverse portfolio, then I'm kind of this foreign person. So I would say ultimately, for me, it's been a lot harder to get meetings and for investors just to take my business serious. I would say, you know, in the earlier stages of me fundraising, so many investors would just be like, well, I don't know if this market is big enough. I don't know if, you know, that many people of color are shopping for something like

this. But, you know, the dollar for women of color is actually really strong. And it, and, it really was just this ignorance of, is this a product that's actually needed? Is it a product that could be a big enough business? It's a really strange thing in terms of the ignorance in that people don't realize that in our lifetime, the majority of people in our country, America, are going to be people of color. How does that not, it's so weird that an investor who's supposedly being paid to be a capital allocator does not see the opportunity here, that the majority of the country isn't going to be non-white in a very short period of time. The demographics are very clear. Yeah. That's been very confusing and frustrating. I would say also as a black

female founder, it always felt that I had to be further ahead in terms of, you know, the traction. And it no matter what, it's like, well, let's talk to you at this stage or let's talk to you at this stage. And so it felt like the bar was being moved constantly. And it was really hard to raise capital, which for my business, that's a chicken or the egg effect for us, you know, if we don't have the capital to invest in the marketing and the supply chain and, you know, the structure, the infrastructure, how can we grow? Yeah. It is, it is a chicken and egg and it is and the, as easy as it is to get into the industry, actually making progress in getting the check written, that's hard. So like, you can meet people.

in the industry, but getting the check written, that always, to me, seems like the harder part. And that you really have to show growth. And to have growth, you need to have capital. And therein lies the chick and the egg, unless you can bootstrap it, which is what you did, right? What was the secret to the bootstrapping you did early on? So bootstrapping, I was a crazy person. I ran the business during the day and I taught bar fitness classes at night that paid me really well and I would use that capital to grow my business. So you suffered? Oh, yeah.

It was painful and you worked two jobs essentially. You worked 100 hours a week. Maybe three jobs. Maybe three jobs. And being a mom. Sorry, I left that part out. Yeah. So being a parent, teaching fitness, exhausting fitness classes, which overpaid you, which is great,

but physically exhausting. And we all know kids are not in any way exhausting mentally or physically. That's just a walk in the park. Nicole, when you look back at the program, what would you tell people who are considering to apply, who should apply? And how do you get the most out of an accelerator, ours or others? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, I think what you guys describe as your Goldilocks zone, that was really helpful for us just because I think a lot of the more

fundamental things in terms of our business model, we had already nailed down by the time we came into the accelerator. Actually, we had done another accelerator previously in New York. And, you know, and at that point, it's like we were still really trying to figure out who our target market was. As I said before, we were selling to a completely different target market. We hadn't, you know, our pricing was different. Our model was different. We hadn't launched our membership yet. And so I think by the time we got to launch, we had figured out some of those key, you know, business model components. And we could really just run full speed ahead with fundraising. And I will say with all of the other things that launch gave us, you know, in terms of fundamentals.

And you guys did help with, you know, a lot of those other pieces of the business model. But I would say the thing that we got the most was just being able to run full speed ahead with fundraising. being put in front of so many investors. And also, you know, before, it was like when you're not meeting with that many investors, you also aren't understanding a lot of what the unasked questions are. And so getting all of those, like in one week just having, you know, a hundred questions asked by so many investors, you know, we actually started a spreadsheet and that was color-coded.

So every week, which another thing that was so helpful was that launch records all of those sessions. And so we could actually go back afterwards, look through all of the questions. And we send you a transcript, which is kind of interesting, too. I don't know if you ever looked at them or not, but you did. So you color-coded. It is painful to watch your ums and ahs and stumbling through stuff, but it is through that pain that you become great. Greatness requires pain, as we just heard Aaron talk about her.

three jobs. Like, if you want to have any kind of success in life, there will be some level of pain and suffering. You color-coded in your Google sheet the categories of types of questions. Did you see that change over time? Because I'm assuming you took the feedback that you got in the early weeks and questions. And then, like we talked about earlier, you incorporated them into the pitch, yeah? Absolutely. Yeah. So in the beginning, it was a lot, you know, we would put them in categories like competition, business model, use of funds. And then it was really helpful just to be able to, on a snapshot, kind of look and see, oh, okay, we're getting a lot of like blue, the blue category. And so then we would start incorporating that more into our pitch. So in the beginning,

it was a lot about our business model, not really understanding, you know, like the difference between like remote and on-site support. And so we started incorporating that. And we found that over time, The questions got a lot more, I guess, sophisticated, too, because we were telling a better story. And so we didn't have to keep going over, like, the basics over and over again just to get them to understand, you know, like our basic business model or our pricing or, you know, how we were making money. So I would say that, you know, the tools that you guys give, first of all, just the vast network, but then also those tools that you guys give, we really took that. And we didn't just use those, but we really built on them and took them further. And so I would say, you know, that was the best thing that we could have done. If it was 100% remote, would you have still done it?

Because you agreed to come to the in-person one, looking back on it now being our first hybrid class. Would you have done it fully remote? It's an interesting question. I don't know with my mindset back then, but I would tell anybody coming into the program now that for us, remote was 10,000 times better. 10,000 times better, got it. The amount that we were able to actually get done without, because, you know, being in New York, you know, my co-founder and I were flying back and forth weekly.

And so, yeah, just to be able to really just hunker down and focus full time on the fundraise. And, you know, as I said, just doing Zoom calls one after another all day, every day. I think it, I would say it really helped. again, just the diversity of the investors that you're meeting that way. It's really helped us because there were investors in the middle of America or in Europe or Asia or Australia who now want to come and they stay up late or get up early in the middle of the night come to the accelerator here. Armando, as we wrap up, what's the big takeaway for you from the program and then your advice to people who are considering it?

Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway from the program was something that I kind of touched on earlier, which is it's just so important to have, you know, a moving story, a compelling story and be able to convey that in a concise and short amount of time. So I think I can't understate how important that was for us because, you know, on paper, we might have looked good from a unit economic standpoint. We had some great revenue, but we were really falling on our first. face, you know, the first few weeks. And then on top of that, whenever we would get into the first, you know, the first follow-up meeting with an investor, we would really slip up because we didn't have that. We didn't have that lockdown the way we should have. And just honestly, learning from, honestly, the two co-founders that are on right now, Aaron, Nicole, and some of the co-founders that were in the cohort and being able to pull from them by the way they interact and the way they

handled the Q&A and the way they tell the story. I was able to get so much from that. And that's something we didn't talk about is you're not doing this alone. You're with six other companies and they're being voted on. So the weeks that they were coming in first or second and you were coming in third, fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh, you could look at them and say, hey, what did they do right there? And what's great? And so it is a healthy competition and everybody's kind of learning together. It's almost like being part of a pack of runners and you're all running a marathon together. You stay together for the first 15 miles or so, and then, hey, at some point, people

break out if they can. But it's explicitly constructed like that. Now, Post, tell everybody a little bit about being in the Slack community that we've set up and overall the alumni network now, which is over 100 companies. Yeah, no, that I'm super excited about taking more advantage of that. It's honestly, the support you get from the long. Launch Accelerator Network is, yeah, is bar none. There's been plenty of times that I've seen someone post something.

We haven't been super active ourselves lately just because we've been so heads down in the weeds right now. But, yeah, it is absolutely amazing just the support you get from founders. And honestly, how much they're willing, you know, to really go out of their way to really help you or jump on, you know, jump on a phone call afterwards or, you know, or a Zoom meeting and really cover in detail what you were asking about. All right. Listen, this has been great.

Thanks for coming on the pod. Everybody, if you want to help a startup, the best thing you can do is try their product or help them, you know, find an employee or invest in them. Those are the three things that founders find the most important. So if you want to check out Aaron's company, it's N-U-D-E-R-E-R-E, and you can follow them on Twitter. You can go to their website.

and Instagram is also a big channel for them. Thanks for coming on the pod, Erin. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. And if your company needs tech support, and I know they do, go to TechMate.com and buy some hours or get a membership.

And thanks for being on the pod, Nicole. Thank you so much. It was great. And finally, if you're a trucker trying to build a business, you know what to do. Go to the Shopify of Trucking at Solo Trucking.com. Thanks for coming on the pod, Armando. Jason, so good being on.

And if you would like to come to the Launch Accelerator, just go to launch.com slash apply, launch.com slash apply. And you know how to get me. I'm Jason on Twitter and Instagram. You can always reach out to me if you have questions. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.