This Week in Startups - Final Boss Sour’s James Hicks + River’s Rae Lambert | E1993

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Todays show: Jason sits down with James Hicks to discuss the unique aspects of Final Boss Sour's products and marketing (3:25), the future of commerce, influencers, and retailers' adaptations (23:12), followed by a discussion with Rae Lambert about River's software platform and community management best practices (46:16), high-end memberships, landing lighthouse customers, and influencer engagement (1:04:35) . * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off today’s show with guests James Hicks and Rae Lambert. (3:25) Discussing the appeal and unique aspects of Final Boss Sour's products (7:25) Better-for-you products and social media strategies (9:40) .Tech Domains - Apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at https://jamwithjcal.tech (10:50) Potential of TikTok for social shopping and influencer monetization (21:04) DevSquad - Get an entire product team for the cost of one US developer plus 10% off at http://devsquad.com/twist (23:12) Future of commerce, influencers, and retailers' adaptations (30:00) Video game tie-ins and product development logistics (37:22) Experiential retail and pop-up concepts (38:36) Washington Post - TWiST listeners can subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year at https://www.washingtonpost.com/twist (40:04) Ray Lambert and community building with River (46:16) River's software platform and community management best practices (52:16) Business models, monetization strategies, and paid events (1:00:00) Community roles, expansion and engaging with fans (1:03:19) Audience questions, community engagement insights, and hiring attempts (1:04:35) High-end memberships, landing lighthouse customers, and influencer engagement * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/ Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out Final Boss Sour: https://finalbosssour.com/ Check out Final Boss Sour TikTok Shop: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/tiktok-shop-final-boss Check out Science: https://www.science-inc.com/ Check out River: https://www.getriver.io/ Check out Rae’s blog: https://www.raelambert.com/ Check our Founder Fridays: https://www.founderfridays.tech/ * Follow James: X: https://x.com/jamesghicks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-hicks-43957512/ * Follow Rae: X: https://x.com/raechellambert LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raechel-lambert/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (9:40) .Tech Domains - Apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at https://jamwithjcal.tech (21:04) DevSquad - Get an entire product team for the cost of one US developer plus 10% off at http://devsquad.com/twist (38:36) Washington Post - TWiST listeners can subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year at https://www.washingtonpost.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

So this is a box of our 12 packs. These are the level three strawberries. On the packaging, there's a design of full video game level that we created. This is a 12 pack. So this is a single serve. The idea was like, this is what I stick in my kids lunchbox every day. A lot of investors or customers like, well, where do I find hosts? I'm like, nope.

The other problem is how do you let hosts down nicely who aren't the right fit? Because I get like hate mail once a week from someone who's been rejected. I think that was my insight was, you know, when you were doing it. the all-in meetups, I was like, I don't want weirdos using meetups as a way to get customers or clients for their consulting business. Totally try to do that. I don't want my brands hijacked to do their BD. This week in startups is brought to you by dot tech domains. Don't miss our Jam with JCal contest. To apply and get more details, go to jam withjCal.Tech. Brought to you by dot tech domains. Dev Squad. Dev agencies only offer developers. Why? Because product management is hard.

Get an entire product team for the cost of one U.S. developer plus 10% off at devsquod.com slash twist. And Washington Post. Stay informed with trusted journalism from the Washington Post. Right now, Twist listeners can subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year at Washington Post.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. What do I do? I invest in about 100 companies a year with a team of 20 at launch. And we have a couple of different programs. One's called Founder University, where we work with teams that generally are two or three people working on a side hustle. Maybe they're not incorporated yet, and they're thinking about building a startup. And we'll give those companies

maybe $25,000 or $125,000 to kind of see if the experiment works. Then sometimes we will have somebody come to our accelerator. They've got a company in market. They're making $10,000. a month. They want to learn how to raise around and grow their product from 10K to 50K. And, you know, we work with them on that small set of tasks. And sometimes we do direct investments in companies that are cooking with oil. And today we have a really great company called Final Boss Sour. And James Hicks is the CEO and co-founder of this company. You can go to their website right now, Finalboss Sour.com. And this is a company that our firm is investing in in a direct investment, the third way we invest. So we have free launch companies. At Founder University, we have an accelerator, companies that have a small amount of revenue, and then we have, you know, the more robust companies a little bit further along in their journey that we do a direct investment in. And the reason I wanted to invest in this company is because my friends over at Science, Inc., which is a startup studio, I've done some really great companies. You've heard of Dollar Shave Club famously and Liquid Death, which has done extraordinary.

And I've been working with Mike Jones and Peter Fam over there for 20 years. And I said, hey, next time you have something interesting, let's talk. And we started looking at a couple projects to work together on. And final boss Sauer was the one that I selected that I really wanted to invest in because I was really taken by the entire concept, the adjunty, the theater of it. And most of all, watching my own children, my three daughters, engage in it and other friends of the family and just how excited they were and watching the TikTok presence now. Direct consumer is incredibly hard. So James, welcome to the program. And let's talk about modern day. direct-to-consumer and just consumer packaged goods. This typically is not something that venture capitalists want to invest in, but this venture capital is this investor thinks that, you know, maybe the top one or two percent of this category could have venture-like returns.

And so we wanted to engage with you and your company. So welcome to the program. Thanks, Jason. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing and the state of consumer packaged goods today and how it's different than, let's say, it was 10 and even 30 years ago. Some of the biggest changes in CPG have really derived out of like the younger generations and their mistrust of legacy brands. So people grew up, you know, eating Kellogg's and, you know, P&G products. And they've come aware that some of the ingredients used in these products are just generally not good for you.

You know, I'm talking about dyes, preservatives. the science is out there, people are starting to realize it. So there's a general mistrust. And so there's, with that mistrust, there's an openness to new brands and new brands that are come off as authentic and new brands that come off as telling a really interesting story online through social. Got it. And it's that world in which, you know, Final Boss Sauer is, you know, was created and is inhibiting and is growing. Got it. And so when I looked at this brand, I noticed a couple of things immediately. One, sour candies, not for everybody, but for people who do like them, they are quite addicted to them. They have a passion for them. So it's a weird category, maybe like dark chocolate

in that way. It's not for everybody, but people who do like it, they can't get enough of it, and it's their go-to. Second, I saw Final Boss, and I thought, okay, final boss, that's a video game nomenclature, and that means like when you get to the end of a level, there's the final boss, the strongest one. Then I looked at the packaging, and the packaging was really interesting in terms of its iconography and, you know, being very evocative of maybe video games. And then it had a structure to it, almost like a game. When you buy this product, you have level one, two and three, and you have different flavors. Okay, wow. So there's a lot more to this than Sour Patch Kids. Now, Sour Patch Kids were in my day and age.

I remember when those came out probably in the 90s, I would guess. You'll correct me if I'm wrong. Was it the 90s when Sour Patch Kids came out? Yeah. So it was kind of like not my generation as the next, but it was like a very interesting thing because you had gummy bears and, you know, this kind of played off of the cabbage patch kids, Sour Patch Kids. It was kind of like these like, you know, alternative, you know, dolls or kids.

But it was still one dimensional. Here you have this also like the Hot Ones series on YouTube, a challenge. Hot Ones on YouTube, if you haven't seen it, is that show where you eat a series of chicken wings for the audience and they are increasingly hot and celebrities go on there like Conan O'Brien or, you know, Sidney Sweetney or whoever is like the icon of the moment selling a new movie or TV show and you watch them burn their lips and just try to deal with these five lampires. So too with Final Boss, right? You have this increasing sour event where you see how far you can take it. And if you can take this incredible level of sour, which is quite interactive, creates to a lot of discussion. And it comes in this beautiful box.

You open it up. You get a whole bunch of different packets. And when I brought that box home to the kids, man, they lost their minds. And this became like, almost like entertainment combined with this enjoyment of flavors, et cetera. And then just the little cherry on top. and this is why I was so, you know, enamored with the product design. Hey, pretty natural, you know, is real fruit.

So this is more like tapping into that real fruit market. And I don't know if fruit roll-ups are all real fruit, but I know a lot of them market themselves, like fruit roll-ups as fruit. So I've set a whole bunch in terms of the product design. But take me into how you create a product like that. Did I accurately describe these like five different vectors for the product? You did. You did. You nailed it. So I'll tell you how it came up.

So I am in this segment that you alluded to that loves sour. And not just sour candy, you know, pickles, anything that's like kind of sour taste, really, really interesting. And I too saw the Hot Ones podcast, the One Chip Challenge, saw that like spicy was really having a moment on social and sour wasn't. And I attributed that to the fact that really sour candy has not changed since Sour Patch Kids came about. It's all just been some derivation of gelatin.

and sour dust. And so I figured there must be a way like spicy did with unlocking peppers. There must be something to do to unlock in sourness. And I found that in fruit. So if you start with something that is naturally sour, like a dried cranberry or a dry blueberry, and you treat that like a gummy bear, like a sour patch kid, you can together unlock this much deeper, this much like full-bodied sour experience that is more natural and is just better for you and better taste.

And so that's how it came up with the product. Around the brand, when we were testing it around with other people, we found that everyone had a different tolerance level for sourness. And so we started testing it in different levels of sourness. And it all just kind of felt like a video game. And so we went really deep into the video game concept. We built out as if we were building a kind of classic 90s running man video game. We built a legend, built an enemy, we built heroes, we built a level system.

We built MIDI bosses for each individual level that became the mascot of the products. We really went fully into that storytelling with the idea that like our product is essentially a game, right? And that's playing out on TikTok. It's playing out on social where people are challenging each other to go up levels and see if they can make a face. And it's all kind of playing out kind of as you laid it out. Founders, I recently introduced Ramsey Schaefer, and he is from Uptrans AI. You know me, I love putting on a trade. So when I saw Uptrans build AI News search for stocks, I was like, wow, this is a great idea.

And even better, my friends at Uptrans AI use a dot tech domain name. And you know what? If you want to come on the podcast and you want to be a guest on this week in startups, and you have under $2 million in funding, and you got one of those amazing dot tech domain names, you can join our new program. It's called Jam with J-Cal. You come on the pod, we talk for 10-15 minutes, I give you advice, you ask me questions,

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and you got a dot-tech domain name, apply a jam with j-cel. That's the product design part, which is, hey, how can you innovate on the flavor profile? And there is this new category, I don't know how to describe it,

but since you're in the industry, you probably would, where there's junk food. And then there's clean eating. right, just eating the blueberries. And then not only eating the blueberries, but eating the organic blueberries, the pesticide-free of blueberries, you know, maybe even the farmer's market or the ones you grow in your backyard. So, okay, let's say we have those two end of the spectrums. There's fake, I'm trying to think of a candy, but, you know, some incredibly fake high-fructose blueberry garbage on the left, all the way on the right you have. You grew your own blueberries sustainably, you know, with no pesticides. But in the middle, you know, maybe we want something that is convenient. Maybe it's. Maybe it's. is a little bit sweeter, but we don't want all the chemicals. But we also want it packaged so it's shelf stable, so we want some amount of convenience, and we don't want to do work. What is this new area called that's like not junk food,

but slightly better than, you know, or let's say dramatically better than junk food, but not quite as arduous as, you know, sourcing the fresh berries and, you know, the cost of that. What is that category called? We call it better for you. Another term could be like permissible indulgence. where you know, you're enjoying something. It's got all the flavor. It's got all the excitement. But it doesn't have all of the harmful ingredients.

I like BFU. Better for you. Better for you, yep. BFU. That's what we'll call BFU on the pod. Yeah. Sure. So BFU is becoming a category.

Am I correct? That there's, or that's a swim lane that's opening? Absolutely. Because like on the, on one end, you've got basically diet boots, right? You know, get foods that are using artificial sugar. and they may look like the Sour Patch Kids, but they taste nothing like it. There's all kinds of issues with it.

But in the middle where we're playing, it's a compromise, right? We're removing all the bad. You know, there's still sugar. There's still, you're not going to lose weight eating our product. No. But you're not going to ingest a bunch of, you know,

chemicals and preservatives. And you'll feel better about yourself. And more importantly, you'll feel better about giving it to your kids. Right. Because it's all natural stuff. Yeah. I think that is when it's,

comes to kids, you know, the thing we're all kind of as parents wondering about, which is, you know, yeah, kids' childhood should have some candy or ice cream. It's not the end of the world. They should see some funny movies, but maybe we don't want them on TikTok for eight hours a day and we don't want them eating just, you know, Sourbatch Kids or, you know, whatever. And so I kind of really like that aspect of it. Let's talk about packaging for a second. Sure. I notice there's like, you know, bags that you would normally just put on your shelf or you could put into a, I suppose, a kid's lunch pal and they can bring it to school and maybe have a little interaction during lunch. But there's like some other packaging you've designed. Explain the packaging and what the

goals are there. Yeah. I've got some here. So this is a box of our 12 packs. These are the level three strawberries. And so, you know, on the packaging, there's a designed of full video game level that we created. This is a 12 patch. So this is a single serve. The idea was like, this is what I stick in my kids lunchbox every day. Yeah. Right? It's a simple. It's about an ounce of strawberries.

There's probably about a dozen actual strawberries in here. So there's tons of vitamins and antioxidants and stuff associated with it. That was our hero product. And then we created the sampler box. That's become our most popular product, which is like, we designed it so that it's got, it's almost like a board gate where each level is in its own compartment. And so people can work their way up the levels of blueberries, up the levels of strawberries, and have like a really engaging experience. And then our third, this is actually a new form factor we just launched a couple of weeks ago.

This is a three and a half ounce bag of mangoes. This is what we're calling our mango dippers. So in this one, we've got dried mangoes on one end. And then we've got this sour, natural sour, blue raspberry dust that you lick the mango, you dip it in. Yes, there was a, when I was a kid, there was like a stick. That was a sugar. What was it called? Fun dip.

Yeah. Fund dip was our inspiration for it. Yeah, yeah. Fun dip was the most disgusting stunt candy as when we were kids, I think, next to Big League chew. Yep. Which was designed to look like chewing tobacco for kids. I don't know if they still permit that one. They do.

You would take this dipping stick, you lick it, and you put it in pure sugar. And my mom, who's a nurse, uh, him mom, was absolutely. flabbergasted that like this even existed in the market that you could dip a sugar stick into sugar and chemicals. But here, this is great. A nice mango slice and you put in something, I feel fine with that. That's like if I'm going to have my kids get a little sugar, that seems like the best way to do it. Totally. All right. So we got packaging. We got coming up with original recipes, making them BFU better for you. All this fascinating to me. Most fascinating, though, however is watching my friend Jimmy who does Feastables, which are all over my house because I have

daughters who like Mr. Bees. Jimmy is challenging existing chocolate companies and I think doing quite well. And I think the key piece of this is he has free distribution. He can talk about feastables and not pay for advertising. And because of the stunt nature of what you created brilliantly here with the different levels and people interacting and buying the box and parents feeling good about it being BFU, hey, people like to record themselves doing these things and emulating, say, hot ones, or the one chip challenge, which famously you can watch the video, Shaquille O'Neill, eat it, I guess, on NBA TNT. And like, I mean, I did it with Phil Helm, you with the poker player. You can look that one off online where he ate it and then, like, chase me around the studio. And he was like, really had a hard time with it. Let's talk about how you get a social media trend starting and how to do that authentically, et cetera. Or not authentically. using paid or you influence your partners to get it going. So we, our social strategy is basically kind of twofold. One, so early days I brought on a co-founder of this guy named London Lazarson, who is a

creator, he's a director. And he and I basically write and then he produces like a one page script, like a one minute long narrative, probably three or four per month, that we post out onto socials. And these are like, some of these learnings we got. from Liquid Death, but it's like, we want to control the narrative and create really engaging content. And some of that stuff takes off. So like probably one out of four videos goes viral. You've got ones that have had like 40 million views organic on YouTube. The one we released a week or two ago is up at 9 million views. So that's like our kind of controlled storytelling

aspect. Got it. The other piece is basically just, you know, getting our product out there and letting people do their own version of the One Chip Challenge or the Hot Ons podcast. And that's playing out on TikTok right now, leveraging TikTok shop, which has been like a big driver of growth for us over the last couple months. Okay. So TikTok shop, I notice you have like people you subscribe to. You have your 4U page where they give you algorithms. And in between there's a shop.

Once in a while, I'll swipe by one of somebody I'm subscribed to or just a random video showing. and the person's talking about my favorite brand of electronics, Anchor, and KER, which makes like battery packs and my plugs, I buy everything they do. And I guess the algorithm knows I like that. And I'll just see some influence for talking about how much they love some anchor product. And it says that they get paid in the partnership. So explain to people who have never experienced this. How is this different than buying ads on Google, buying ads on Amazon, which is a big, you know,

shopping cart place to buy ads and different than affiliate marketing? What is this new stores combined with TikToks and influencers? Yeah, I mean, of those that you mentioned, the closest is affiliate marketing. Okay. So we call these individuals, I think TikTok calls them affiliates. Okay. And so we build a little momentum organically on our own channel. We get people reaching out because our product is interesting, right?

It creates interesting kind of branded product content. They reach out to us. We approve them. We send them samples. they make their video, and oftentimes their video will go viral, and then they get a commission on all sales from their video. So their videos linked to a product at the bottom. You'll see on your feed, there'll be a little product,

a buy button at the bottom. Right. So that drives it. Is it working? Are people buying on TikTok? It's working for us, yes. Oh, wow. It's been working incredibly well for us.

Yeah. So this concept of social shopping, people were anticipating this for a long time. Yes. And it never really happened. I remember I was on the board of this next and they were doing social shopping and then you had, of course, Pinterest, which had a social shopping element to it where you could pin something and then buy it. Lots of house, I guess, for housing, you know, for interior decorating, had a bit of this.

But it never really worked. Is it working today? Yeah. It's working. I think TikTok finally cracked it. And I agree with you. I've followed all these. I got excited about all of them.

For years we've heard, you know, this is a big thing in Asia. this live selling, video selling, never arrived here. TikTok, I think, cracked the code. And I think it has something to do with their algorithm and also just the fact that the other stuff on TikTok is so engaging. So people are going on TikTok, they're seeing the entertainment, and they're working in these videos, these shoppable videos. And in our case, those videos are arguably as entertaining as some of the other kind

of TikTok videos. And it's working in the shopping experience in a very slick, organic way. It's only a couple taps of your phone and you've got the product kind of coming to you. I'm really bullish on the way that TikTok has done it. I think the other networks will follow that kind of format. Like Instagram, YouTube, you know, Twitter perhaps. Yeah, they could have some of this kind of functionality. I know Instagram had shops.

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If we call this Home Shopping Network 2.0 where, you know, is. Is that what it is? Yeah. Yeah. Who is the person who used to do that? There were a couple of celebrities who just were known for doing, oh, you know what? It was Joan Rivers, I think, was known for doing Home Shopping Club. And the new show Hacks, which is about a female comedian who, you know, kind of came up in the 60s or 50, 60, 70s, 70s kind of time period.

She is known for on the show. Have you seen the show HACs on HBO? No, I haven't. Wonderful show. Just two female leads, a young comedian who's like a millennial or Gen Z and then like a boomer. And, you know, one's writing jokes for the other and she's trying to make a comeback. But she's kind of Joan Rivens-esque and she goes on to sell her jewelry on home shopping network. And that's how she's fabulously wealthy.

So she took this comedian career, but then turned it into a juggernaut. So I suppose this is what could happen on social media as people could turn these things into juggernauts. And it would be really super interesting. Yeah. So what's the most money, just ballpark, without picking particular creators, I'm sure there's tiers of people who make a, you know, a trickle and it's just some, you know, Uber eats money in their pocket or some Uber money in their pocket. Then you got some mid tier that maybe it's a car payment. And then you might have people who are the whales in the system who, hey, this is like a mortgage payment, you know, or a salary. So tell me about, you know, those last two groups, the people who are making a car payment based on it. And then people who may be, are, you know, making a salary from this or more. Does that exist or no? It totally exists. I mean, it has to.

Like, some of our top affiliates, I feel like we've paid them maybe $10,000 even. Like, when their video goes viral, you know, they collect. Could be thousands of dollars from one video. Exactly. Exactly. And it's a... And affiliates fees tend to be 5 or 10%, something in that range? In the food space, yeah, about 10% probably.

Yeah. it. Okay. And so we have a decent margin on this business, I think, and these are direct sales. So it's not like it's going through Walmart or Target or Amazon. So let's, you know, turn over the next card here. What do you think the future of commerce here is, you know, being at Target, being on Amazon and having them take, I think, a more sizable cut or influencers, basically playing the role of Target or Amazon? Yeah. I mean, the latter is actually, you know, super interesting, obviously, right? Because you love to pay the people who are direct selling. I think that, you know, at some point in our category of sour candy or sour snacks or overall healthy snacking, I think retail is

going to play a role. But right now we are exclusively online and we're growing exclusively online. We want to stay there until we hit this like kind of swell of awareness that we think, you know, will then support our growth to be a little more on me channel. But yeah, I mean, I'm very bullish on on live selling and this kind of affiliate video, video selling. So correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm understanding or reading into the strategy a bit here, is you get some loyal fan base. If you were talking about politicians, it would be their base. People they know are going to come out and vote for them.

This is your like hardcore base. Trump's got a hardcore base, you know, the left, Kamala, the Democrats, they have a hardcore base. Then there's like everybody else who's, you know, maybe not paying attention, you know, as acutely to what's going on here. You build some, you know, really hot coals with that base. you get to, I don't know, a million people consuming this product. Then somebody like a Walmart or Target, when you have a discussion with them, it's a different discussion.

They're asking you to be on the shelves as opposed to you saying, put us on the shelves. Am I correct in the strategy here? Yeah, that's it. I mean, I think there's twofold. There's the hardcore fans who, you know, day one, once we're in Walmart or Target, we could send an email and say, hey, go to the store today and blow this up, right? And that's that's their holy rail because then we're actually bringing them shoppers. Oh, wow, because you have their email addresses and you have their addresses.

You could put something in there, hey, we're going to be here. And then they were rally to support you, which I think happened with feastables, right? Like, there were fans going there, like, cleaning up the aisle where it was and like reorganizing the candy. So it looked better in addition to buying 10 bars because Jimmy told them, hey, you know, support me. Absolutely. And then the second tier is just like this kind of swell of awareness that comes with that kind of scale. so that when someone is walking through the aisles of Walmart or Target and they see our product, they're like, oh, yeah, that's the TikTok challenge.

Like, I'm going to add that, right? So you want to bring both those elements so you really nail a retail launch. Tell me about retailers. Today, I was talking to Peter Fam and I was talking to Mike Jones. Mike Jones spoke in my last conference, the Liquidity Summit up in Napa. And he was, you know, talking a little bit about how, you know, the retailers were looking in many different categories for some excitement and like, like, you know, maybe things had maybe gotten a little bit stale. Are you too exciting and too complex for them to grok? He was joking that like the big innovation in cereal,

for example, was instead of buying like an extra large box or two boxes taped together, they're like using dog food bags to put cereal in. And people were going now to Walmart and buying a dog food bag size, like, you know, like a 50 pound bag of rice size, uh, a frosted flakes or something. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Like, I guess, like 10 boxes of cereal in one. Okay, it's really terrible for you, but it's just turns of sugar in your system, probably not a good idea. But okay, do they understand what you're doing and talk maybe a little bit about retail and how retail is changing or not changing or, you know, experiential stuff in retail? How do you think about it? Yeah.

So I think that we are probably ahead to your point of like the level of innovation, right? So we do a lot of storytelling online. You can't do that much storytelling in retail. But if we start building this awareness through social, people will get kind of glimmers of the story and then they'll kind of finish their journey in retail, right? So that's how we view it. I don't think anyone is going to stop in their tracks with their shopping cart at Walmart, you know, open our box, read the whole story and discover, you know, go through the whole funnel

of acquisition in the retail store. Right. We got to do that storytelling on our end. And we got to generate that awareness. So then the store just becomes like the bottom of the funnel, the last kind of place of distribution. Got it. So there's not like super innovation going on there. You're just basically trying to be more interesting than everything else on either side of the aisle. And maybe you bring customers to the table, which is, you know, maybe the opposite how most CPG interacts with Walmart, which is there in just some back room trying to strike a deal based on. economics as opposed to striking a deal based on, hey, we're bringing you, we're going to bring people into the store. And that's a much different conversation, you know, it's like, I'm going to

have a conference in Vegas. Like, I know we're, we're going to do an all-in poker series to months, you know, been planning, he's talked about it a little bit. And like, if you bring a thousand poker players or 10,000 poker players or even more, well, you're bringing those people into, you know, whatever casino it is, whatever hotel, you know, there's going to be some splashy, cashy, you know, they're going to buy other things when they're there. So if you do bring the Sour Boss, you know, Final Boss Sour there, you know, that's going to be... Totally. They might buy some other things while they're there. A stupid question. You used a video game metaphor. Are you to make a casual video game that's somehow related to this? We had this like incredible

moment in time in our childhood where, you know, Dungeons and Dragons was a board game, became a serial, became a cartoon, and this thing. Forget about Omni Channel, but Omni Media. And obviously, Star Wars being the best example of a media company making their money off toys and then eventually video games and all kinds of spin-off. So, you're going to make a video game and how do you think about, you know, IP development, if at all? It's possible. I mean, all of our IP is

original and owned. So I worked, so to create this brand, I worked with a video game design company out of Eastern Europe. Interesting. So didn't work with any CPG designers, went out of the box to find

them. Oh, how clever. They also develop games and so it is our intention that at some point we'll do something. We're starting with a little, like a little casual game that's going to involve scanning a QR code that you get from a TikTok box and, you know,

so we'll start small with these little pieces. But yeah, I mean, we built the brand as if it were like a full kind of Super Mario Brothers type game. I don't know if we'll ever get there. Well, I have an idea there. Like, what if when, if you, to play the game, if you take a

picture of level one, two, and three, you unlock levels one, two, and three in the game. Yep. Then if you beat levels one, two, and three, you unlock level four and level, but you have to beat the video game in order to order level four sour. Totally. That could be super interesting. Totally. You could get people working for level four, as it were.

Absolutely. Because level four doesn't exist right now, right? Like, level four is in the laboratory somewhere? Level four is in the laboratory. Level four and the final boss level are both, are both being worked on. I think this would be like a very interesting competition TV show, like actually to do a straight up Hot One style, you know, YouTube challenge where you bring 10 kids and family members together to just see who taps out level four, five or six. Is there like a level of sour that people cannot handle like there is with peppers and like the ghost pepper and everything? A little bit. I mean, if you go too deep, like, you know, one of our employees was doing a TikTok live and everyone was just daring him to eat more and more. product. And so he ate like, he took down like 20 bags. And so a little bit of tongue burn

afterwards last day or so. It's nothing serious that, you know, a little milk in a couple days of rest won't, won't cure for you. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's very personal. People have different tolerance levels. I can handle pretty, pretty heavy. I think Jelly Belly did a really interesting job. Every time my daughters go to the Jelly Belly factory, which is outside of San San Francisco, you can actually tour it and everything. They have a series of disgusting flavors. I can't remember what they are, but it's so rancid that my daughters think they're a little pranksters now, my eight-year-olds, and they will take the really disgusting ones and put it in the fruity ones I like and give me them and pretend it's green apple and then I'm eating something that's like dead cockroach flavor. And it's just absolutely, and they get a real kick out of it. So there's so many brand extensions you could do here.

And I like the side quest for the dips. So you can really start figuring out and be innovative. In terms of making all this stuff, it's much easier with like, what do they call, copackers or something? There's like a whole infrastructure level that we could equate to like, say Amazon Web Services in terms of

you figure out the formula in your laboratory and then the copackers do it? Do the copacters have the laboratories where they can pop up like an experiment from you? Explain that level of the infrastructure that I think probably most of us don't understand. Yeah, so in general CPG, you work with a third party formulator

and a third party co-packer. I've been, in my experience, kind of burned with that setup because you end up with a product that you don't really like, you don't really control the negotiation. And so when we started, we started doing it ourselves. So for the first month or two, we launched about a year ago in last October, we were in a shared kitchen in L.A. Building the product ourselves, tinkering with the recipes. We really kind of nailed the product ourselves. Then when we got too big, we then worked with a co-packer, but we, at that point, you know, knew exactly what we were doing.

We knew exactly how we wanted it built. We were the formulators. It felt much more natural. And we found a great copaccapper to produce for us. So right now, how it works is we have a copacor in North Carolina who does all our products for us. We still do all the formulating. We still do all the product design ourselves. Which is like the IP, you probably don't want other people, you know, for higher labs doing it.

because then once they formulated and they get insights, now they can go sell it to a competitor or a knockoff brand. Yes. Which I think exists in CPG as well. So it's kind of like making electronics. I watch that happen in electronics all the time. You hire somebody in Chen to make something unique for you like a smoke detector, and all of a sudden there's four knockoffs that their cousins are making.

Yep. And there's always a legal discussion, who owns what? And yeah, it's, it's troubling. So you just get you pop up a ghost kitchen and you just literally get in the laboratory and make cool stuff. I'm super excited to go on this journey with your team. Yeah, we're super excited to have you. I'm hoping I can like get into this. I want to do some of these with my kids online and,

I want to do some TikToks. And so I'll put it on my TikTok and maybe I, you know, I got one of the nut groups that makes nuts, this great macadamia nut group made like all in spicy nuts. Oh, nice. Yeah, based on the all in crew. And just think it's like really interesting how brands can like incorporate great influencers.

So you could literally, if you had one of these influences do really well as a partner and affiliate, you could literally make a short run thousand collectible based on, you know, J-CALs, sour, you know, whatever I'm, you know, into Kiwi, whatever. And it could be like, that's just mine. It's J-Cow's Kiwis and it's super sour Kiwi. We're going to sell a thousand of them and whatever. They're collectible. I just love that.

Have you ever thought about putting prices into Captain Jacking? What was it, Captain? Crunch. No. No, no, no. Cracker Jack. Cracker Jack. Everything about Cracker Jack.

And when I was a kid, I was enamored of getting like tattoos and, you know, little airplanes and, you know, it was literally a 10-cent thing inside of there. But I didn't notice that there was no, you know, action figure as it were. Have you thought about that? A little prize in there? We've thought about it. Right now we're thinking about it more from a digital perspective. So like the key, like I said, the QR code to the game is the prize.

But yeah. And then we thought about like, you know, kind of golden ticket kind of raffle aspects to which are super fun. I think that these things, you know, two of the great, if you look at all the studios, I was speaking to somebody

who worked at one of the studios, I won't say who, but it was like, hey, what's the difference between like Paramount Studios and this studio and Disney and Universal?

And I was like, IP and he's like close. And I'm like, theme parks, he's like, yep. And so it turns out, like,

experiencing things in person is really interesting for people. I think there's like, something called Milk Bar. Is that the candy experience? you go to where they make candy and stuff like that. Maybe.

Yeah. There's like, anyway, there, I noticed like when I was at Universal, there was like a candy store that was kind of experiential. Have you thought about that? Like, the in-person experiential thing, like, they're testing a pop-up where people come and make their own fruits in a lab with their own sour profiles or something. I know my kids, if you had like a little pop-up store somewhere, it would be a destination for them, like the Jelly Belly factories.

So have you thought about that retail and pop-ups and experiences? Totally. I mean, like, whenever we could do like a trade show. or if we do it in-person event, it really becomes like kind of part game show, part kind of experience where people are challenging each other to go across the levels. And like that kind of experience when you've done that,

or really, to your point, like, unlocks a different level of loyalty to the brand. So yeah, we do that stuff all the time. And as we grow, I think we'll formalize a better plan around it. Yeah, I think like doing an interesting pop-up at like, you know, there's this thing, VidCon, which is like for all the YouTube, and stuff like that, doing a Final Boss Sour pop up outside of that.

Like, even if you did, went, you know, punk rock and just had like a food truck or something like in the area and people could come up and challenge themselves or if you even did it, like, in the place where people were challenging each other and sitting across from each other, wow, it could be really interesting. So continue success. I think it's really awesome what you're doing. And just type Final Boss Sour into TikTok and just go check out all the excitement around the brand. And I'm guessing there's a website as well.

yeah, people can go to. Yep, FinalBossera.com. Just buy it for your kids. It's like really interesting. They'll get a lot of fun out of it. And it's, it's BFU. Better for you. Absolutely.

All right. We'll see you all next time on this weekend starts. Bye-bye. All right. Listen, you remember FTCX to fail crypto exchange? It has to pay out $12.7 billion to users who lost their shirts when it folded. I learned all about FTF paying people back thanks to my subscription to the Washington Post. It's an amazing publication.

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Washington Post.com slash twist. Go ahead and support them for supporting this week in startups and get all that great content in your email box, on your phone. Subscribe 50 cents per week, Washington Post.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Really excited to have our next guest on. Ray Lambert is the CEO and co-founder of River.

That's a great origin story, which you'll hear about today, because she became a fan, where I did, of the All-In podcast. and she started doing meetups with fans. And when we had our first All In Summit in Miami, she said, hey, I'm doing like a meetup with 10 folks, all the women coming to the event,

we're having a brunch. Would you like to swing by? And I was like, okay, that's across the street from my hotel. So you're stalking me. Of course, I will stop by. And that's how this all got started. We have been using the River Platform, which has essentially product,

these all-in meetups to do our Founder Friday meetups. Founder Fridays.Tech is the domain for that. And, you know, the concept is there's a lot of digital communities or digital products that have communities forming, but there's no way for them to get together. So Ray and her team's vision is to build that platform. It's called River.

And they attended the launch accelerator's 30th class. We made a small investment in the first. firm and you know we're going to continue investing and pulling the string and see where this takes us welcome to the program ray lambert thanks for having me so tell us the um sort of insight you had into community um and how you know this has manifested itself into a product so how do you take this organic you know hey we're doing some meetups we got a mailing list we got a form online and, you know, we got a location and, you know, we tweeted it. And then making that into a product that a bunch of brands like This Weekend Startups

all in, I believe the Blueprint guy, I think Bology and his nation state is using it. And I know my first million really cool podcast, they have been using it. So tell us how you take this like weird energy that exists in the world and then productize it. Yeah. My initial first reason for doing all-in meetups, I had moved to Miami. was kind of disappointed with the tech scene. There's just huge rager parties that just didn't feel productive.

I wasn't really meeting builders. And I had been to the summit, loved everyone I met there. I'm like, let me try to meet more of those people. And it turns out just generic meetups, they're just, you don't have enough kind of in common when you go to a typical tech meetup or some other like generic event. And so when people come to an all-in meetup or they come to a twist event, they just, they like finally have met their people. And so there's this kind of magic like cut.

heartic experience that people have. And like kind of like the weirder, more lunaticy, the topic, the better. You know, when I hosted a Brian Johnson, Don't Die event in Boston, the 30 people who showed over like, oh my God, I did not know there were 30 veg who go to bed at 9 p.m. in this town. So that was kind of like one feeling, one insight. And then another one was that people were totally willing to step up and host and make it happen in their city. A lot of investors or customers like, well, where do I find hosts? And I'm like, nope. The other problem is how do you let hosts down nicely, who aren't the right fit? Because I get like hate mail once a week from someone who's been rejected.

I think that was my insight was, you know, when you were doing the all-in meetups, I was like, I don't want weirdos using meetups as a way to siphon off the community, the all-in community to get customers or clients for their consulting business. No offense to lawyers, accountants, or recruiters, and all these great people. Totally try to do that. But I don't want my brands hijacked to do their BD because, by the way, we have sponsorships and we have advertising on this weekend startups. There is a channel for that. I don't want some law firm subverting my partnership with Wilson Sucini in order to do some local meetup with founders and then get their next 10 clients because I have a product that does that with Wilson Sassini.

Yeah. And the great hosts who just actually want to just build a community in their city, like they don't care. They're not trying to do business development. You know, it's always the service provider who's pissed at me. Because I'm like, wait, I don't get the emails. I'm like, no, you do not. Well, and this was the key thing. You know, I said to you, I want to invest in building this community for this week in startups and for all in.

And, you know, I want to have a purpose. So there is a really good book on community, the purpose driven church by Rick Warren. and he had done a TED talk at some point. He said, listen, each church needs to have one thing they do, not 10 things they do. There has to be some purpose for this. And once you have a purpose, you know, people can buy into it or not buy into it.

And the purpose for FounderFriidays.com, which you can go see, and you can find it on the river platform as well, was I wanted founders to meet with other founders and help each other, you know, with their business challenges. That's it. Pretty simple. You know, founders helping founders, four founders, by founders, I think is the way I framed it. Yeah. And, you know, anything that's not that distracts from the mission and distracts from the purpose in Rick Warren's sort of goal. I actually read that book. It's a book from 1995. And I think it's, you know, if you get past the religious overtones, if you're not into that, you can kind of see the brilliance of focus.

Religions are so good at getting together community. They have real estate that they go to. They have consistency. where they get together at least once a week. They have common rituals that they can all, like, get to know and understand. They're very good at community. I mean, the Catholic Church is like, they're like geniuses. All right. So that's the purpose-driven church, the purpose-driven life. Tell me about the software platform.

What does it do today? And then what are the components that are not software that need to be done manually in building a community? And then we'll get into community best practices. but you had a, I think, an acute list of problems or challenges that brands, you know, and this is kind of like TEDx in a way, in a box is one of the ways I said it to you at some point. But, you know, running these meetups, God, there's so many challenges and you have to prioritize them. So walk us through, like, what are the three or four most important things that you've solved for with technology? Yeah.

And I tried all the event platforms when I was growing all in meetups to 50 cities around the world. and it just like instantly feel the pain. So one thing we do really well is you just create an event template. And then you can duplicate that across every city around the world. Just a couple of clicks instantly. And it will snap it to the location, the right time zone. It'll bring in the title of the city into the event and the image of the city. And so as opposed to creating one individual event across 50 cities,

just do that in a few clicks. Like people might do that on an event bright or something. So now they've got 50 events in 50 cities, maybe they have 50 logins. You had to duplicate 50 times, yeah. And then we also have batch editing. So it's like an event campaign series. So you can say, hey, every event that has this word in the title or is in this date range or has this tag, I decided I'm going to rename them all.

And instead of going into every event, you can just batch edit. And then the events, once it get listed on your community page like this weekend start up on a river community page, the events are geolocated. So the nearest event to their IP address shows up on top. And so instead of having to promote, you know, hey, here's the Singapore meetup. And then in another tweet, here's the London meetup. You just say, hey, go to the community page on River. The thing that's on top is the one nearest to you.

And you can just go to that. Once you click on an event, you can either RSVP and then it's just like a normal event app or you can apply to host. And this is where the kind of real power of river comes in. If you apply to host, you get dropped into a lightweight applicant tracking system, almost kind of like when you apply for a job, much lighter weight than that. And community manager can look, who is this person, what are the vibes? You click on their social, have they hosted past events, so they have a good host rating. And you can approve, reject, once you approve them, they take over limited edaccess for the event.

And so they can say, hey, this is the venue, this is how much room there is. Actually, I'm going to have it at 630. They can send messages to attendees, but they can't get access to their email or phone numbers. So they really have everything they need to make a great event happen under your banner and your brand without being able to take attendee data or delete critical information. Got it. And when you think about community and this distributed community, I saw you did something for Tim Ferriss's. His 10th anniversary. His 10th anniversary of his podcast.

So there is some manual work that needs to be done here by a human like, vetting the hosts or answering questions or customer support. So tell me about the best practices that you've learned in the past year on community. Yeah, so every community is different. And this is why it's been a little hard to automate. I mean, one of my co-founders is a fantastic data scientist and we will bring in more machine learning over time, but each community is different. So we have Solana and Super Team community, Web3 communities.

They don't want their name or their headshots in their bio. They're very like Annon accounts, whereas the Tim Ferriss community is just like, a lot, a slightly older crowd, like more kind of web 2.0 the way you expect. So we usually do either us, we'll do it for our clients or customers or they will that post themselves. Honestly, you can kind of thinslice it and make a pretty good decision in 30 to 60 seconds. We, each community you can require, okay, I really want this person to include their LinkedIn or I need a headshot or I need a bio. So for founder Fridays, for example, like if it's not explicit that if it doesn't seem like they're actually building a startup right now, then they don't get approved.

So each community is kind of different, and that's where that's where a lot of manual work comes in now. The nice thing is, is once we've activated a community, it gets much faster. So, you know, they host their first event. They get feedback, a rating. Okay, now they're a great host. They can become a pre-approved host, and that just happens a lot faster. So it is kind of like front-end work. And then the other thing, just on the manual side, a lot of people have never done any kind of events like this is very different. Like when Tim Ferriss did his 10th anniversary meetups, did 150 events around the world and all simultaneously. And so it's, it's less about a big conference or a one day huge

attendee and it's more about organic 10, 20, 30 person events. And this just like designing the programming for this or like setting the intention, setting the vibe is just something that our clients like need help with. So we usually just design partner with them. Like many great startups, you know, you're I think creating a new category. There are things that are analogous. YPO young president's organization has chapters. There are multi-level marketing companies that do like local, smarmy kind of, you know,

things where they pressure each other and just buying from each other and, you know, how multi-level marketing works. You have TEDX, which was really interesting. Hey,

not everybody can come to TED. It's super elite. It's super expensive. 10, 15K a year, 20K a year, depending on what package you're on. But you could do something locally in your community.

Plus, there's all kinds of problems because somebody will come and say something stupid at a local event and then it blows back to TED and they have to like work on it. But let's put all that aside.

This is a new category. And then, of course, you know, the motivations and can it be a business eventually emerges when you get to year two or three of this. So like eBay, it was, or Craigslist, you know, it's just a passion, right? Like, I, I'm into Pez dispensers. I'm into Bob Dylan memorabilia. I want to get the set list from a Bob Dylan concert. This isn't really about commerce, but then, or Etsy, the way it started.

But then all of a sudden, like, people become professional at Airbnb. I feel like that's starting to happen here. in, I think we're in year two of River or in that sort of time frame. And I know I'm thinking about it as what is the, is there a business here? Is there monetization or a business model here that would accelerate it or is it just a passion project? So walk me through what you're discovering in terms of emergent behavior from your partners who are paying, you know, a small amount of money for the platform. I think it's a couple hundred bucks a month.

It's not super expensive. 500 a month. So it's not super expensive. And it solves so many problems that the 500 a month is really easily worth it for me to not have to do the duplication and all that stuff you're talking about. But what's the big picture here? Has somebody figured out like this is going to become YPO yet or their sponsorship ability or it grows a mailing list to the point in which you can sell them and up, sell them

other things? What's happening in emergent behavior in the ecosystem? Yeah, so we have the beginnings of a sponsorship marketplace, and this is really interesting, like, found money for a community. So when Salana Foundation did their kickoff for their meetups, just like you could apply to host, they'll apply to sponsor button. And 30 out of 50, so 60% of events got a sponsor. Now, this is like time. This takes so much time. And it's so, you know, most marketers or big brands know.

that events have a really high torque on being like a great channel. 80% of brands do event marketing of some kind, just extremely labor-intensive and not easy to scale. But then you have, you know, like this weekend startups, I'm sure your ad reads are pretty expensive, and maybe someone can't afford that, but they'd love to host the local Austin this weekend startup round our Fridays meetup. So this is kind of like easy found money there.

And then for a lot of our communities, they don't have an email list. They don't have an email strategy. I mean, for All In, you guys aren't doing email. So the 9,000 emails you have are from people attending events. And so now you have this email strategy and this data strategy, the sponsorship marketplace. And then eventually I think Rivers can become like an ad network where just like

someone saying, hey, you know, like a Google ad, I want to spend $1,000 a week on this type of ICP. They could say, I want to spend $1,000 a week to support meetups. under these certain communities, and that could just be automated on the platform, so we'll be doing that. So I could turn that on right now for Founder Fridays, the sponsorship piece?

You could turn on the Apply to Sponsor, and then we kind of sneaker feature it. I would say we're about three weeks away from really releasing, like, then in-app purchase. You know, because we want to be like Uber, where you can just purchase it, and then, you know, some brands,

they need to be approved by this weekend startups because you don't want to associate with lunatics, but once they're approved, they can just enab-buy. I would do that. I would just say $500, you could sponsor it. And I would give, I don't know, 70% of that to the local hosts

to buy food and drinks and then 30% to the mothership for, you know, our time managing the program because we actually hired somebody half-time, as you know, to manage. Yeah, and so we have a community manager now and I'm making that investment just because I want to meet the host

and we did our first host meetup, I think you were there, where I got on a Zoom call, and I was like, this is amazing. You know, this is working for me on so many different levels. And I hate to even talk about it because I don't want to give other people

this, like, secret weapon I'm building. But for me to know, who are the people in each city who opted in to host an event with our brand, who are founders, means those are really good founders. Those are savvy founders that I might want to invest in.

And when they started telling me about their companies, I was like, whoa, this is like premium deal flow. And then if they are monitoring, they're almost like scouts for me, like the Skoya Scouts program where I started my investment career, they're kind of scouting the local market. They could tell me, hey, this founder's legit. They're doing interesting stuff.

So now I'm looking at like, wait a second, deal flow here. And I like the idea of like a little bit of splashy cashy money going back to them for what I'll call Uber money, like pocket change, you know, take their Uber or, you know, pay for their $50 Uber, to and from the event and pay for the first round of drinks or some chicken wings. So I'm kind of, and I would be okay with your team taking a percentage as well. So if you told us,

you know, to turn on the sponsor feature, it's, you know, part of your $500 a month. If we, and we take 10%, but if you pay $1,000 a month,

we take just the 3% processing fee or whatever. You know, there's some model there where I would be okay with you actually, having an ad network. And if you sold Tim Ferriss's, my first million, and this week in startups in a bundle for $500 in event

or $1,000 or event or $50 per person coming to the event, I would be like, yeah, I don't care. It's not the reason I'm doing it exactly. So I'm really, really interesting is a live model based on them.

And then they could opt into when they go to the event getting more information from that sponsor. Yep, that one's working. And then another one where you have a design partner for is, paid events where, and I don't want to release too much because they haven't fully launched yet, but they're doing their own paid events in New York City. It's a total vibe going viral.

People are doing it a lot in New York and they want to expand to other cities, but they want to control the revenue line and they want to control the brand. And so they're going to be rolling out with River and the host, just like we were talking about, we'll get a revenue share from the paid event. So instead of a sponsor, it's just a a paid event. And that's going to help them scale 10 times faster than if they had to go interview and source the host themselves. Yeah.

See, for the founder Friday events, I like this small intimacy, but I was thinking there's a lot of people who want to come. So maybe we do like a two-tier thing where when you have a founder Friday, you have people who are members who come to that small eight-person, six-person pods and talk about their business. And then it opens up to a generalized cocktail party. And then you could just sell tickets to the. cocktail party, anybody can come.

A lawyer, an accountant, whatever. And those are just 50-buck tickets. Anybody can come. And then we just tell a local host, you take 25 bucks. We take 25 bucks. Call it a day. Love that. Yep.

Super interesting. So what do you think ultimately, you know, with all this learning, the business becomes, what do you think, you're thinking ad network or there's just, it's kind of like a marketplace, like Etsy or something? What's the analogy here? because it doesn't fit into a box. I wish it did. It would make my financial modeling much easier.

Yeah. Yeah, we started with B2B SaaS, like pricing subscription model, because that's just the easiest. Rolling out the sponsorship marketplace, but we're also rolling out, like, other contribution marketplaces. So people want to apply to speak, or they want to be a photographer, or they want to help check in.

And so right now we kind of orient everything around the role of the host, but the host would be able to drag and drop and say, hey, here's some other roles I want people to sign up for. Oh, that's brilliant. So I could say, we have the hosts. There's three co-hosts in the city. We don't have an official social media photographer, and we don't have a front desk person, volunteer for those two roles.

Yeah. Oh, that's so brilliant. And then same for speakers. Everyone's always looking for, if they're hosting a more programmed event, they're looking for speakers. And so then it's really just pulled from your own personal network, where, you know, we sent out like a test email to a thousand of our users to see how many people are interested in speaking. And like 100 people are like me, I want to speak, which is crazy.

And so you could have like a speaker profile basically on a river with speaker ratings, you know, okay, this person's really good at talking about this topic and AI. This person can talk about fundraising. And then you can start kind of getting notified of when events are coming up. So really we want to be, you know, there's lots of event listing platform. you know, tools that are just like, hey, list your event. But we really want to help you, you know, find a sponsor, find a venue, find a programming, and just like pull off a really great event without really having to do much work at all.

So it'll be a real marketplace. Yeah. Yeah. I have a feeling, you know, what you have here is a powder keg. And just watching the impact it's having on my two brands all in getting to 9,000 emails, those emails are worth conservatively $10 each. So I would say $90,000 in value has been created. If it goes to $20,000, you know, now you get $200,000 in value.

Because if but 1% of those people buys the, you know, all in tequila that Sachs is working on or 1% buy a ticket to the Allens Summit, you know, these are high ticket value items. So, wow. You know, those, the top, I would say the top 10% actually are probably well healed, like seriously well healed, like CEO. who could buy a $7,500 ticket, yeah, for that brand. And so, you know, you look at that, you know, that's, you know,

900 people who can afford, you know, a $10,000 ticket or something. Like, now you're talking about real value. Now that's $10 million in ticket sales that could be potentially unlocked. And then on the, this weekend startup side, well, we find the next Uber, Robin Hood, Com in that mix. But one time in 10 years, and if we invest 50,000 a year, you know, over 10 years, that's $500,000. If we were to hit another Uber brand, you know, pick a company, you know,

these things can be worth $50, $250 million in returns for the fund. So, you know, these investments are really easy for us to make, I think. Yeah. For sure, for how we do this. I also think like for other creators, you know, because not everyone's selling an expensive conference ticket or investing in startups, but, you know, with generative AI, there's just so much content has become commodity. There's so much crap that's being created. And I think, I call them cold creators,

people who just like put content online and then they don't engage in any way. You know, as consumers, like, how many podcasts are we listening to? How many newsletters are we listening to? So it's a really interesting way to like engage with your top true fans and like inspire more loyalty. Like, I hear people all the time when they come to an all-in meetup. They're like, oh, I had to make sure I listen to an episode before I came in case someone said something and I didn't. Somebody asked me a question and what's my opinion, right? Which Bessie? Do I agree with? with, disagree with. Yeah, so brilliant. Exactly. Yeah, so it's almost like if you're a brand and you don't have this, you're not really connecting with that top one to 10% of your audience. I think that's

super brilliant. Listen, continued success with this. I'm super excited that you decided to do this. I know you had a vibrant consulting business. I tried to hire you. I was like, this is going to be huge. And then I had the inability to hire you because you're so independent and strong that I said, well, can I just give you $100,000 to see if this crazy idea works out. And here we are. Well, I mean, amazing how you have gotten the Tim Ferriss is My First Million. And I know the My First Million team did something called Hamilton or something. What's the name of their?

Hampton is their founder group. They have a founder group called Hampton. And one of my founders joined it, it's like $7,500 a year or something or $5,000 or $10,000. I can't remember what the number was. It was a lot of money. And I think he's got hundreds of people, maybe a thousand people in this now. So if it's $10,000, he's got a thousand people doing. It's a $10 million a year community like YPO.

And so, you know, there's something there where I think people like Soho House, kind of high-end memberships would want to do this. So I'm also looking at that really fascinated as to what that could become. For sure. Yeah. Awesome. Continued success. I'm so proud of you and the team.

Thank you, J-CAL. So hard. And my lord, you know, when I, every time I talk to your team and, you know, we're in the founder Slack and I see the next high profile community that you engage with. It's just amazing. And, you know, I see that with podcast AI as well. There are something about the, yeah, the companies that can land the lighthouse customers so, I don't want to say easily, but who can land them.

And it's hard to land them because they're busy. Yes. I get so much inbound that like a Tim Ferriss is notorious for, and he's a friend of mine. Like, you know, he's a less is more guy. Like, I don't want any distraction in my life. I'm just doing like something really essential and then taking back all my time. To actually get someone like that to engage is incredibly hard. And that's what's most impressive about you as an executive is your ability to, you know, get that.

Yeah, you know, you get someone like Brian Johnson. You get Tim Ferriss. It's just so hard to do. So, you know, I think it's your superpower as an executive and continued success. And we'll see you all next time on the swing starves. Thank you.