This Week in Startups - Startup pitch competition: Jason invests $25K | E1725

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Jason hosts another pitch competition featuring two startups from our Founder University program! Apply for Founder University: https://course.founder.university⁠ (0:00) Jason kicks off the show (3:35) Jason and Presh describe who Founder University is for (8:35) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at ⁠https://vanta.com/twist (9:52) Alexandra Bellensweig pitches HumHum (22:15) Presh's thoughts on HumHum (26:47) CacheFly - Get 10 terabytes free by signing up at https://twist.cachefly.com (28:13) Russell Palmer pitches Cyberfilm (37:41) QuickNode - Get one month free by using code TWIST at https://go.quicknode.com/twist (38:56) Creating fantastic branding (47:41) Deliberations (59:43) Jason picks a company (50:43) Q&A with Jason and Presh FOLLOW Presh: ⁠https://twitter.com/preshdkumar FOLLOW Jason: ⁠https://linktr.ee/calacanis⁠ Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1 FOUNDERS! Subscribe to the Founder University podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/founder-university/id1648407190

Hey, everybody, hey everybody, welcome to another episode of this week in startups. We've got another great Founder University showcase for you today. What happens during this podcast is very simple. A couple of people pitch me their idea and they show me their product. I use my Spidey Sense, my unique ability to look into the soul of founders and find out they're going to succeed and then to think about my LPs and if we should place a bet on this founder at this time. And so we've done this three times. This is the fourth episode. And today I'm going to see two pitches.

And these are people who went to Founder University. Founder University is a 12-week program we host. And at the end of the program, sometimes during it, I'll just invest $25,000 into a company. This is sort of like what we call in the industry of the friends and family around. Not everybody's got rich friends and family. I certainly did not.

And the truth is, a great founder can come from anywhere. They don't necessarily have rich aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, brothers, or friends who can drop $25,000 into their crazy idea. But you know what? I got a money. I got a fund. I got $25,000 laying around. In fact, I got a couple of bricks sitting right here. So why not make some early bets?

My whole career, Uber, Robin Hood, Com, it was based on placing tiny bets on incredible founders. And I am back to my roots and I am absolutely loving it. The most exciting part about all of this is I have decided that I'm losing my mind working from home. If you love working from home, no judgments. I do like to ski during the season, but put outside of going skiing, I really want to see more people.

So I'm getting a storefront in San Mateo area, the Bay area. If you see one, take a picture of it and send it to me. But I'm looking for a 2,000 to 10,000 square foot space where I can sit and I can hang out with my founding university founders meet new people and start placing small bets at a very high clip. And then I'm going to document it here on this week in startups. So you can learn how venture capitalist links and you can meet these companies in year zero.

A lot of times we write this 25K check and people can't even cash the check because they don't have a bank account and they're not incorporated. And so I say, great, get the bank account, get incorporated, get the bank account, and then we'll ship you the 25. All right, after the founding university showcase here where somebody's going to get 25K, I'll do a couple of ask jasons with these founders because I'm sure they got some questions for me, the world's greatest angel investor, and of course, the world's greatest moderator. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business.

Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta.com slash twist. Cashfly is a pure play CVN provider that makes CDN simple, effective, and secure. Deliver content faster than your competitors and get 10 terabytes free forever if you sign up at twist. com.com. That's twist. com.c-c-h-e-f-l-com. And QuickNode gives Block.

chain developers unparalleled reliability and speed with access to unlimited endpoints across 18 chains and 35 networks. Get one month free by using code twist at go.com.com slash twist. All right. Presh is here with me today. Presh came to work for me because he was a fan of this very podcast. And then he started following me around to all my events when he was, what were you, 19 or 20 years old at the time? 20. Yeah. And I said, Presh, you seem like a really smart guy. If I give you a job, will you stop following me around and emailing me?

And he said, yes. And then he came to work for me. And one of the great joys in my life is to have pressure on my team and to watch him grow into an incredible executive. He's incredibly hardworking. And anytime I ask him to get something done, it gets done before I finish my sentence. And one of the things Presh is working on is running Founding University. me. Kelly is the other person who runs it with him.

And so let's just start with just a general overview of where we're at with founding university. I understand we're starting our fifth cohort. I've had hundreds of people apply. And we've kind of tried to refine who should come to founding university. Maybe you'd describe the type of individuals and teams we're looking for it. Yeah. So thanks, Jason. We're on our fifth cohort kicks off next week, actually.

Just crazy. So we are looking for a couple things. So everyone is early in their startup and founder journey. So we're really looking for builders. So this can be you've built a product before. You've tinkered on some sort of project on the side. It doesn't have to be a startup idea. It can literally be maybe you built landing pages for your friend's company or a family member.

So you've built something. You've put it out in the world. And now you want to experiment. You have your own idea or an MVP. and you want to build a company and create massive value in the world. So that's what this 12-week program, you get to meet with, you know, builders of, you know, builders that have created, you know, value of over $100 million,

you know, different speakers. We also have a live session on Thursday. This is where you can connect with other peers in the program. So you can see what else, what everyone else is working on and just connect. from there. And that's really inspiring. If you are with a group of people who are all building, it's kind of like being a musician or a painter or a filmmaker. Filmmakers go to Sundance. Painters might go to some painting community where they have all their art studios together. And the energy

builds. When you hang out with other people trying to build products, you say, oh, wow, this person really made a great advance between weeks three and five of the program. And you contact them and say, hey, how do you get your design leveled up or how are you doing your growth? And you just, you're part of a community. And now that community sticks together on a piece of software we're using called Circle. Very nice, slick piece of software

that kind of combines wikis and message boards and Slack together. And so there's a thousand people in there who've gone to the previous cohorts and everybody's sharing what they're working on and building. It's just wonderful to be part of a community. And then people also tell us the accountability of coming twice a week

For an hour, you only have to come to Monday, but most people come to Monday and Thursday. For one hour, it's after work. It's typically six o'clock Pacific time. Is that right? What time is it again? Six o'clock Pacific. Six o'clock Pacific, so six o'clock Pacific, so you got to stay up late. But a lot of people have jobs already.

You know, they might be working on Google or Apple or Facebook or wherever. Morgan Stanley, and that's okay. We don't mind if you're working somewhere else and doing this at night. And maybe we can help you make the jump into entrepreneurship. So today, a long way of saying we like to back. builders, designers, UX, developers, obviously, builders who can build product.

If you can't build a product, you're just an IBA person. You've got to go find some builders and say, hey, will you join me at Founder University? Go to Founder. University to apply. I think, is Founder,

are we closed now for five and people will be applying for six? Yeah, we still have some rolling applications, so you can apply. If this comes out this week, you can apply, we might let a few of you in. Okay, yeah, the main next one is July, end of July.

Perfect. And we're doing it four times a year. We're going to do a quarterly this 12-week program. Don't forget to apply Founder.com. We'll also have the Founder University podcast where we do tactical talks, search your podcast player for Founder University. Okay, that's enough of the plugs and explaining what Founder University is, but I am so excited about it. I think we'll do 100 or so of these Founder University 25K check per year. And in each of our funds, we're on Launch Fund 4 right now, which you can participate in if you want to be an LP at launch.com slash 4.

we'll probably get two or three hundred of these companies hopefully into that fund which would be five to seven point five million dollars of but I think we'll wind up being a fifty two hundred million dollar fund and these are really great bets for us to make because we can keep investing in these companies and grow our position from but 2.5% maybe to 10% in the winning companies maybe even more all right founders if you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud you need to be sock to compliant from third point parties in order to close big deals. And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly and

easily. Vanta makes it so easy for you to get and renew your SOC2. On average Vanta customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three to five months without Vanta. Well, they partner with over two dozen audit firms and they have been trained to file those SOC2 reports directly within Vanta. It's a total no-brainer for you. You're going to basically make it easier for your sales team to sell those big clients who need that SOC2 compliance in order to engage with your product. Tons of my portfolio founders use and love Vanta. They all report back that they had an amazing experience. And that one major customer, right? That lighthouse customer, that well in your system, listen, bottom line, you can't afford to lose sales for something silly like not having your sock

too. Vanta also helps with GDPR compliance. And, you know, that's a big one. You got to get your GDPR in order because they take it pretty seriously over there. Here's the best part. Vanta wants to give you a thousand. All right, that's 10 hundies. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com.com slash twist. That's Vanda.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock, too. So who do we have first, brush? All right, we've got Alexandra from Hum Hum. Alexander, how are you doing? Doing great. How are you? Good to see you again. I am well. So I'll give you two or three minutes on the clock. What are we doing? Two minutes, producer, Nick? Or three? Two minutes. Okay.

All right, I'm Alexander. BalanceWag, I'm the founder and CEO of HumHung. Dating today is broken and studies show that people using dating apps are more likely to be distressed, anxious, or depressed. Seventy-eight percent of people experience emotional fatigue or burnout from dating. We saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between mental wellness and dating by making dating intrinsically rewarding, focusing on skill building, well-being, and connection. Meet Hum Hum, a community and dating app offering mindful guided dates, group events, and coaching online. Here's a glimpse inside a customer's date with Hum Hum. It was easy to sign up and book a date, and her date felt energizing for a few reasons.

One, she felt connected to herself through the breath and the meditation that the facilitator guided. Plumum created a clear and kind container that reduced anxiety about the unknown. She and her date agreed to practice presence, curiosity, and kindness. About 10 minutes in, the facilitator left and they were offered a guided prompt, which invited them to explore their surrounding space. They were then sent timing cues for a really easeful and flowing conversation. And it just led to a more playful and meaningful experience. And after the date, both people decided that they wanted to stay connected. And so we put them in touch. And following the date, she booked a coaching

session to help her integrate her experience. We make money by charging a subscription fee for dates and offering coaching and date add-ons. We ran a paid pilot experience to test group dates, one-on-one dates, and coaching. And people have been paying us and are returning before we've had technology built. We've grown a community of 7,000, the top 5% of our customers that purchased 10 out of 12 months in 2022. We've been generating an average of 1,500 monthly revenue for the last nine months, and 370 people are pre-registered for the beta app launching this month. We've grown our existing community through referrals, affiliate marketing, content and performance marketing, and we're doubling down on what's worked. The bottoms up opportunity to serve unpartnered, available people who are

also into wellness in the U.S. is a $500 million market, and in 2030, Hummum is in $100 million. our top line business that scales from a tech-enabled service to a SaaS platform. We've an incredible founding team across product design, wellness, and engineering. And we're raising two and a half million for an 18-month runway to operate and refine our beta, bring our team on board and scale and fuel our go-to-market. And thank you very much. All right, this is excellent. What a great pitch.

And I remember meeting you during the program. Tell me, what was the inspiration for you to create this more structured, thoughtful approach to a first date and dating. What was the inspiration here? What do you know that none of us now that led you to want to make this product? I was, I created this based on my own lived experience and also just from talking to a lot of people in my universe. And what I realized is that people could be dating in and out for decades. And so the process itself needs to feel generative. And in fact, right now, it's just burning people out. And so I wanted to create something that instead of putting all the emphasis on the outcome of what happens, which leads to the burnout,

we put the emphasis on the process so that people feel like it's a good use of their time, no matter what actually happens on the date. So how do we make it more fueled with well-being? And that really came from my own lived experience dating. It's very interesting. I've been married and with my wife for 20 years now. It's amazing, over 20, just over 20. So I missed this whole wave of swipe right dating. It does seem like, and correct me if I'm wrong here, we've accelerated the ability to sort through potential partners, but now we've lost thoughtfulness.

And am I correct that this has become, dating has become too transactional, not thoughtful in some way, and that people are, as you're saying, burnt out from just this, just keep swiping. left and right, left and right, left and right, and then hookup culture, I guess, is kind of inherent in that. So there's not as much, you know, I don't know if I would use the word serendipity, but there's not as much, it's just too, the velocity is too great. Am I correct in assessing this that the velocity of these apps is part of the problem?

Yes, and I would say that with the velocity, it's like, it's actually nudging people to be like, more impatient, more transactional, more frustrated. It's fueling the parts of themselves that actually make them feel worse about themselves versus when you're actually practicing curiosity. You feel good. That's actually supportive of connection. When you're practicing patience, you feel good about yourself. So like giving people an opportunity to like themselves in the process of dating versus

doing the stuff that they don't like about themselves, like ghosting or, you know, chit-chatting and then dropping off. Like, people feel better when they like who they are, which then also gives you. them a better dating experience and also better success in making more meaningful connections. So you're totally right. Yeah, E-Harmony was a company that tried to be thoughtful about dating, but it took a lot of upfront work. I think it had to fill out like a lot of questionnaires.

It was also very expensive, but my understanding was it led to longer-term matches. And I'm sure E-Harmony is still there. It seemed like E-Harmony, if you're looking for a spouse or to get married, was their pitch, long-term relationships. And then, of course, there's the Tinder and grinders and what I would maybe put into the hookup culture. Is this meant to sit somewhere between the two? If you were to think about the competitive landscape?

Yeah. Yeah. What I've seen so far is that the people that are coming to hum-hum are either looking for a long-term relationship or in this space of what they're calling just open to what's unfolding. They don't have a strong of an agenda. that's the agenda is what's leading to some of that burnout and transactionality. So it's like

coming to it with the intention of, yes, I'd like to have a relationship. And we've seen this actually shift since the pandemic that more people are wanting long-term commitment or just some form of relational consistency versus the hookup culture, which is not as satisfying. But there are apps that are, you know, centered on that. The role of the moderator, this facilitator, you called them. What is their qualification? Are they therapists, social workers, just really intuitive people? And who succeeds in that role? A lot of our facilitators have a background in meditation or yoga. Some of them do have like a social work background. But we distinguish between facilitators who run the dates. And it's really someone who can just hold a thoughtful container

and be kind of tuned in to the two people there and just take some training. And then we have coaches who are actually working with people one on one. Those people all have some kind of psych degree or social work degree. That's fascinating. Do you have a playbook that you've developed in terms of training folks? Because it would seem to me that the secret sauce here is that facilitator and those coaches. But that, if I'm thinking about it, honestly, I don't know that a great coach. for dating and relationships necessarily is a social worker or a therapist.

My own experience, lived experience, went back to that term, is, you know, I've had friends in life who said, you know, like, hey, here's how you treat a partner and it's pretty good advice. And, you know, I've wound up subsequently giving advice to people on how to maintain a positive relationship with somebody long term. So I wonder if you started to develop your own proprietary playbook of what is working with this ice breaking moment and what you tell people to coach. And maybe you could share one or two points of both what works in a facilitated environment with the other person and then what works in a coaching environment. Like what are the top one or two things that keep coming up that you have to coach people on or that work in the ice breaking

facilitated date? Yeah. We actually have a whole, for facilitation, we have more of a playbook for the coaching or trusting the expertise and the skill of the coach. But in coaching, some big themes are, um, am I ready to date? So this sense of readiness, people grappling with like, is it the right time for me? Maybe they came out of a divorce or a breakup or they're just not sure about themselves. So that's a big one. Another is just like confidence building, which is kind of in that same theme. So that's, those are two big ones for coaching. Um, and then also like communication, like how to tell people if you're interested or where you stand and how to have hard conversations. Those are topics that come up in coaching a lot.

And then in the facilitation, we do have a very tight script pretty much that people stay on. So we have an icebreaker and we give people a roster. And usually from the ice breakers, it's something that probes people into something a little bit more meaningful. But isn't too hard to recall. So you wouldn't want to like ask them something that took a while to think about. So, for example, we could say, like, what's one thing you're feeling grateful for in your day, which gives kind of a positive spin, but it's easy enough to think about. And then for the qualities that we look for in a facilitator, it's just a calm, like kind of a calm presence, an ability to be mindful about the cadence of their speech, the ability to kind of read the room and get a sense of how, like, do people seem okay? did they need anything.

But we do have a pretty timed structure, so it doesn't leave a lot of room for error. And when we screen people and kind of interview, we have them do like a mock meditation, a mock icebreaker, so they run through the whole flow so we can kind of feel out. How does it take? How does it go?

You charge 35 bucks for a couple of dates a month, 100 for maybe four dates and some coaching. Of the people who sign up for this, how many people say that's too expensive? How many people just instantly sign up? It's kind of a mix. A lot of people say we're undercharging, and then some people say it's the sweet spot. So right now for the beta, we're doing a three-month trial for the beta, and we're charging $33 a month.

So it's $99 for the three months. And that seems to be working for people. No-brainer pricing. Would that fall into no-brainer? Yeah, that would fall into no-brainer. Some people say they pay up to $200-something for a couple dates a month. It would seem to me that you're undercharging for the level. of customization here and you're going to lose money

if you have to pay these facilitators. So I wonder if you're charging like Uber pool prices for what is really like Uber black service. This feels like a very premium service. And it should be maybe a $500 commitment or a $299 commitment. So when are you going to raise the prices, do you think? Or are you?

I'm going to see how this beta continues to go. I think the good news is that our market margins are really healthy because of the tech that we've built. The facilitator only needs to be there for 15 minutes. And then they go into the date so they can host four dates an hour and we pay them hourly. And so they're good with our rates and the users are good paying. So we have a really healthy margin even now. Still feels too low. The good news is you can raise the prices. I think two out of three people have to say this is too expensive for you to hit the right price. And if the if you don't, If you're not willing to spend $100 a month on this, then maybe you're not serious enough for it. And it would actually increase signaling that people have made this commitment because going on, it dates $100. Just having dinner or a couple of drinks in a major city is $100. So I don't do it to be exclusionary.

But I do think you need to have really healthy margins. So you can invest in the business. But really well done. Any questions or thoughts here on, you know, having watched this company evolve, where there are things that when you saw it evolving, you said, hey,

this is really going well and brought her here today to be on the podcast. Yeah. Great job, Alexander on's presentation. So something that stood out is, you know, charging for customers this early on, which you typically don't see in the Founder University program.

And it's something we want to encourage, of course, because that's kind of the clearest indicator if someone wants to use the product. And so Alexander's ability to put out the product at a very early stage and, you know, everything was manual at the start. But her ability to still connect and actually get paying customers was impressive and stood out. So I think, you know, goodest to you getting the product out and actually getting paying customers. Yeah, this is something Paul Graham says, do things that don't scale at the start because you want to learn. And something that I say all the time, Paul Graham, of course, or what comment in your fame.

you know, something I always think about is how fearful founders are of charging for their product but then how much better the feedback becomes when you do charge from the product. And even Founder University we came up with a little clever device and Alexander I'm curious

of your feedback for this. We said, hey, it's $500 to come to this 12-week program. Now, we don't need $500 from founders and I've been very clear my whole career. We don't make money off founders. I find it personally offensive. But we said, hey, if you, come to all 12 sessions,

which is just the Monday sessions, we'll give you the $500 back. And it was an experiment, but we saw over 90, what you tell me, I've seen numbers, 92%, 96%, I don't know where we're running right now in terms of completion, presch,

but what do we do in the last one? Yeah, 90% last one. Yeah, like 90% flat. The other ones, just natural drop off. Yeah. So we get over 9% people complete the program. We keep the, you know, for the, for the 10 people to 20 people who

don't, we, we make $10,000, which is nothing for us. And if, to be totally honest, if somebody was like, hey, it's not for me, I didn't get a good experience. I obviously would be given their 500 bucks back. We just wanted people to complete the program because accountability is, you know, one of the things that leads to success in life, whether it's dating, your weight, your business, whatever it is, school education. So how did you take that price that when you saw it, was it a turnoff? Was it intriguing? Was it a no-brainer?

It could be super candid, please. It made a lot of sense to me. It was like it's just putting skin in the game to actually commit to the program. So it made a lot of sense. And we've actually thought about doing that for events that we need people to actually commit to going to for the headcount and like to run a successful event. We've thought about doing something like that. So it resonated. Oh, so if you do an in-person event, it's $100.

and if you come to the event and you complete the event we'll give you your, we'll charge your $100 back in the end. You just have to fill out a survey card. Yeah, exactly. We haven't actually done it, but we've thought about doing it.

I say do it. And apologies to Stripe for all these charge. But, you know, it's, I think it's like a very interesting device. I wish my gym, I don't belong to a gym, but if there was a gym that charged you $500 a month, but if you came for, four times. They charged you back 400 and you only paid 100 for the gym. So let's say

some gym costs 100 bucks a month. But they charge you 500. If you do four workouts a month, you get $100 every time you do a workout. This would be the gym I would join because I'd be like, oh, great. I actually made it worthwhile. And in fact, having a trainer increases accountability because if you cancel, they still charge you, right? And so I love these sort of concepts. Great job. Very, very intrigued. I think you figured something out. It's a old thing. Most people are going to hate your idea. They're going to criticize it. They're going to tell you it's too complex. It's not going to scale. All this nonsense. But what I will tell you is you have an intriguing idea and you understand your customers better than the people who

are going to throw criticism at you. So when you get that criticism, write it down in a book and then turn the page and then do an interview with somebody who had a successful experience and found a long-term partner and write 10 pages of notes about that person, Alexandra, Really well done. Listen, everybody, when it comes to the blocking and tackling of running your startup, you don't need to reinvent the wheels. CDNs, aka content delivery networks, are the place where startups can really overcomplicate things. You don't need custom authentications or custom codes.

Nope. If you're a startup, you need to just check out cash fly. It's a pure play CDN. And CDNs are literally all they do. So they're the best in the world at it. They've been doing it for over two decades. That's 20 years. Cashfly makes CDN simple, effective, and secure.

Let me say that one more time. Simple, secure, effective. Effective, secure, simple. Simple, effective, secure. You eventually are going to outgrow the smaller ones that are trying to give you too many discounts. You want the best of breed. So don't burn your startup credits using a CDN at one of those larger players. Let Cashfly handle it all for you.

They will help you deliver your content faster than your competitors. You have to be fast if you want. to compete, whether it's videos, your mobile app, games, content, sass, the faster you go with your delivery, the more people will use your product. So go check out Cashfly. And Twist listeners are going to get 10 terabytes free forever when you sign up at twist.c.cvashfly.com. That's twist.com. That's twist.c-c-h-f-l-y.com. Ten terabytes are waiting for you for free. Stop what you're doing. Pause the podcast. Go to twist.cashfly.com and get your 10 terabytes for free. Forever.

All right. Next up, we've got Russell. from Cyberfilm AI. All right. Russell, three, two, go. Okay, hi, I'm Russell, the founder of Cyberfilm, and we build AI-powered tools to help filmmakers create movies. Today, it's impossible for a single person to make a great movie on their own. There's just too much tech and money and skill sets required,

but how else you're going to build a portfolio and get discovered? To get our users started, we can generate clever titles for their premise or anything they're stuck on, helping them make their best work hundreds of times faster. But it's not just text. Once you're done writing your script, you can generate all the storyboards too. It's thousands of times faster and cheaper, especially for writers that can't draw. And not just any storyboards, bold, beautiful, cinematography, driven by you with help from cyberfilm.

Our app is like film school in a box without the tuition fee, letting you combine classic story archetypes in ways that's easy for AI to help plot out. You enter what you know, and our custom AI helps for ideas with what you don't. Ask our users. They love and are already using many of the ideas in real scripts. We launched last week with over 70 new users signing up already and rave reviews from demo sessions with customers. We charge $40 as software as a service

with charges for going over the allotted monthly credits. Now, there's a wide landscape of generative AI tools, many of which do text, image, and video. But we'll win because the ideas from our app are custom tailored by professional screenwriters. tuning the AI and producing the best quality for the movie industry. We're going to market with a beachhead strategy, starting with text and images for movies, but adding video generation and TV episode formats later this year.

We're already working on the next features for creating scene dialogue, comic books, and extensions for popular screenwriting software, and we think we can capture a third of the professional writers and video creators for over $500 million ARR in a few years. Our team is perfect for this with a combined AI product manager and a Hollywood screenwriter and assistant director. We've been making movies together using the latest technology for over 30 years and we're brothers. So again, I'm Russell, the founder of Cyberfilm and we build AI powered tools to help filmmakers create movies. Oh, wow. This is absolutely fantastic.

You have so many different components to putting together a film. people buy books on how to write a screenplay. People go to webinars and seminars to learn about dialogue and characters. And then, of course, people hire storyboarders and people to make storyboards. I think the storyboard is the most fascinating part for me, because that is something that's a really significant blocker. I find this fascinating because anybody can use the English language now. they don't need to understand three act plays.

They don't need to understand storyboards. They don't understand arcs and beats and all the stuff. It's an educational tool, but also a practical tool. There's such a wide group of people and you're charging 40 bucks a month. So let me ask this. Is the tool complete yet?

How complete is it? Because you're trying to tackle a lot of different pieces, is storyboarding, dialogue, you know, characters, all the stuff. So what's complete, what's not? Yeah. So this is the, The MVP, we consider it, but it's complete enough that people love and already pay for it.

So it helps with something called a one-pager. It's kind of like the elevator pitch in movie land. And also all the acts and the character sheets and what's called a beat sheet, which is, you know, 10 things that happen per act. The next big thing we need to do and want to do is the actual dialogue for the scripts. But that is much more detailed and user-in-fall. and can be up to 100 pages. But so we definitely want to add that next.

And then the storyboards is something we're really proud of. And we'd love to add new templates so people could have, I'd like to make my own comic book or graphic novel. And maybe it's anime, studio Ghibli style or Marvel golden era style. So lots of things that we can do this year. What is the strongest, most appealing aspect of this range of features and products that people respond to today? I think you're not know yet.

It's okay if you don't know. No, no, I've done tests with 20 people from Hollywood. I think everybody come, everyone we talk to says, you know, I don't need a movie idea generator. I'm a screenwriter. I've had six or seven ideas. I've been sort of tumbling around, workshopping for years. But I need help with, you know, I know the main character and act one, how it starts, how it ends. I'm really blocked on a villain to compliment the hero or act.

to midpoint to connect Act 1 and 3. So I think what people really respond to is connecting parts of the acts that are hard and coming up with complementary characters to the one they already had in mind for villains and actually love interest. So one thing we found is it's kind of a stereotype, but some men are bad at writing women. I'm sure the reverse is true. And so this helps people write more. Lived experience, of course.

Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. So what's interesting about this? That's interesting. So I was looking at it thinking which feature we get people to sign up. So they see a feature, they sign up. What you gave me the answer to was what actually helps people in the industry, which is the blocker.

So there is a story blocker that you fix for people. So they hit a rut. There's some blocker to completing. And so I hate the name of your company. but I wanted to workshop with you live here. I felt the storyboarding part was the most interesting one. Now, I'm clearly wrong,

but I wonder if when you get people to sign up, if seeing the storyboards makes people click the most, if the storyboard feature is really great, and when you move it to the comic book and people are doing panels, if that pulls people in. But you told me something else. You told me it was like these blocking moments.

Yeah. And I think revving on the name a little bit, I was thinking a better name would just be Storyboarder. And if you just called it Storyborder, then people would say, use Storyborder, not CyberSep. So actually, it's an interesting point. In cohort for a founder university, we applied and went through it as simplyboard.a.i.

and so we have that domain. You can actually go to the website and check it out. Forget about domains. I'm just thinking of a word like Uber, which was originally called Uber Taxi. It's like, I can you drop the taxi or people called it the Facebook, not Facebook? I think, you know, don't worry about domains

because you can always find a, you know, way to get storyboard or storyboarder.com or storyboarder.com or storyboarder.com or storyboarder.com. Just think about people saying it to each other. And if it's story and we were to, to look at story unblocker or story finisher or completer, there might be something in completing your screenplayed. So story finisher, completing,

and you can just use a thesaurus to think about completing your film. So complete films or something in that range. If we were to think about finishing fin, is a term used in the movie industry. There's some play on words here. So finish thesaurus. Let me just pull the word finish. Complete and conclude, consummate, finalize, story finalizer.

And ending completion, conclusion, close, closing, final. Termination we don't like. But there's something there in what you said. So I think keep revving on the name. Cyberfilm feels like, 1980s, Blade Runner, which is my favorite genre. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, I love the word cyber.

My handle online used to be Cyber Surfer. I'll play on Silver Surfer. But I think there's something more professional and a logo and a design that could level this up. So you have all the ideas. You have the tech. You have the domain expertise. I think everything's dialed in. Branding matters and the look and feel matters.

So I feel your MVP is still like a four out of ten in terms of design. You got to clean that up, make it a seven or eight out of ten. seven and a half would be fine when you go into the seed stage funding sort of schedule, you know, process for your startup and you get there. So you got up the design, which is going to cost you somewhere between $500 and $5,000 of hiring a designer

for $50 an hour to just take certain screens and just make them look world class. And you don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Make it world class as compared to the screenplay writing software that exists. And there's a bunch of screenplay writing software. I know that people pay $199, $299 for collaborative software, etc. And so just make it better than that and make it look as good as modern SaaS software. You know all the complaints about building apps on the blockchain. It's slow.

It's less reliable. There's no support if things go wrong. Listen, it's an emerging technology. We all know that. Well, here's the good news. QuickNode has solved all of this. QuickNode gives blockchain developers unparalleled reliability and speed with access to unlimited endpoints across 18 chains and 35 networks. Quicknote provides amazing response time and

dedicated 24-7 customer support. They offer so much consistent performance at any scale, lightning-fast API responses that are 2.5 times faster on average than competitors, and the most sophisticated and globally balanced cloud and bare metal Web3 architecture. Listen, this is like the AWS or Azure of Web3. This is where you need to go if you're building DAPs, decentralized apps. You need to use. QuickNode. So here's your call to action. Find out why companies like Twitter, Adobe, Coinbase, and

OpenC-U's QuickNode, and get one month free by using the code Twist at go.com.com slash twist. Once again, that URL, write it down now, is go.com, Q-U-I-C-N-O-D-E.com slash T-W-I-S-T. And make sure you use that promo code Twist so they know we sent you.

Then there's the name. And I think doing a branding session around the name, forget about trying to get the domain, just worry about an incredible word that when used in a sentence, people could say, did you build this in story border? Did you take an Uber? Did you tweet that?

Something people can say in a sentence. Yeah, I mean, we were thinking like story boost or bored buddy or simply bored. Yeah, this is not, by the way, this is not your skill set. Yeah. And that's okay. It happens to be my skill set. I'm really good branding and other people but you know I'm not a developer or whatever so it's okay for people to

everybody has your skills but you can start this process of learning and do we have a module on this and found university on branding and name creation of a company uh pressure creation specifically that's a good so i'd like you to put that on your to do list um and then i'll we can do a little session and maybe make a found a universal tactical talk of how to come up with a name and one of the things that we want to do is train people of what this looks like on a t-shirt a mug a pen. That's how I think about logo creation. How does it look on a jacket,

a polo shirt, a business card, was the old thing you would think about. But we're putting the logo, and we've done this before, you and I press, when we did the Founding University logo or the launch logo or whatever logo we're doing, how does it look in the world natively?

But then there's, how do people use it in conversation over a phone call? If you have to say the name three times over a phone call, and if people don't memorize it, then you failed in your branding exercise. So just are going to give you three top level things that we can start to put into this document press.

Number one, can people use it as a verb? Can they use it in common language and a conversation and everybody knows what it is? Number two, is it easy to spell? It's it easy to understand over the phone when it's windy, right? And then using the thesaurus and using rhyming and the sort of length of it

is another sort of thing. People like cadence and people don't like three word names. People don't like two word names, one word names. Apple, Facebook, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Twitter. I could go on and on. But when you say cyber film, you failed branding school. Name a brand that when you say it, you have to say two words.

Anybody have a leading brand? We say, is it the Nike? Salesforce is two words and Facebook. Well, Facebook is actually one word because there are, there is a concept of a Facebook as a physical device in schools that you could get the Facebook and roll through it. So while it is a compound word, I guess is the technical term. It is in common usage one word. So yes, Salesforce is a two word name. And I would argue sales force is not a great.

brand name. It's a great company to spike the brand name. Microsoft. Xbox. Right? There's Firefox. Chrome. Android. Com. Robin Hood. I could keep going. Lift. Door death. Doors. So it can happen. I just went through off the top of my head 20 names. And we found two that have the compound word. So if you can avoid a compound word, I think it's great. But well done. I really think that you're onto something. I like the focus of it.

And what's great about it is you're not going to put one AI tool into this. You're going to have 20 different tools you could leverage here. And there are going to be prompts and there are going to be things that you can customize here that nobody else will know what you're doing behind the hood. You could say, hey, you know, it turns out Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, these characters, are just archetypal villains. Here's what they had in common, and here's how they spoke. And if you need dialogue,

being able to train it on Doth Freda on Hannibal Lecter, on iconic folks, and then thinking about that language versus Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Decker, you know, whatever character is a protagonist, right?

And then you also have genres of filmmakers. You have the Tarantino versus Frankenheimer versus, you know, Ridley Scott. And obviously the dialogue from the Facebook movie, the social manner. You got Sorkin dialogue. You could literally put filters on it and say, make it more, make it more illustrative. Or make it more insider or make it more accessible. Right. And if you look at succession or you look at billions or shows like that, they're very insider. They use a lot of internal language. And that stuff you could just program into the AI that people would see in the background. You just have a slider that says, this dialogue make it simpler. This dialogue make it more flowery and make it more intense. Just really interesting. That's a use case people are responding to. So we're building an iPad companion app. And they said, I'd love to have this on set. And then,

and click on a paragraph in the script and say, make this funnier, you know, rewrite this. Sure. And so that's great. Yep. But punch it up how?

Punch it up in a stoner film kind of a way, in a get-em to the Greek, tropical thunder, inappropriate humor way, in a Woody Allen, clever, you know, New Yorker style.

Like, This is where my lord, you know, every day this product can get a little better. And chat cheap VET4, sure, people could go in there and try to do it, but they don't have their storyboard there. They don't have their screenplay in there. They don't have their characters in there. So what I like about the stickiness of this is people being able to just put many concepts in here, many projects, and say, I have an idea for a TV show. It's kind of like Colombo, but it's modern era. I have an idea for a short film.

It is like this horror film saw, but it has a sense of humor. Like, you know, you know, the 40-year-old virgin or some irrevering comedy, right? And that equal screen, whatever it is, you know. You can really have a lot of fun here. And this is when you can tell Prash,

you've got a great idea. So just training Prash up here. When investors hear an idea and they either start criticizing all the problems in it or they start thinking about all the features. Those two things can actually be signals. And we saw that in both companies here, Prash, there's something here.

There's something here. It's irritating people. It's creating a little bit of irritation inside the oyster that a pearl could come out of. And the irritation of the first one is like, oh, that's really manual. and the irritation on this one might be like, oh, it takes the magic out of the creativity or whatever.

And anybody who has written screenplays or worked there, they're constantly looking for ideas. They're going to the mall. They're trying to overhear conversations. They're reading source material from the 60s, 70s, 50s. They're reading articles from old magazines, just trying to find something to be inspired by, right? And I think that this tool just creates more inspiration.

and when people start coming up with the feature train for you, that is another incredible tell, Russell, that you're onto something. And I get the sense when you show this to people, they come up with 10 ideas and they throw them out of you? A lot of people say, like, wow, I'm actually kind of jealous. I didn't think of this first. Can I really use this? Is it going to take a writing credit from me?

Or we say, we don't even tell people you use the app. Like, we want to be very artist-friendly. It's your idea. It's your movie. We're just, actually, the pandemic, we built our prototype, and a lot of people were locked out of writers' rooms and coffee shops. So they said, this is a fun way to bounce ideas off someone that I can trust. And they've read every book ever, seen every movie ever, like the AI has. So it's really resourceful.

Okay. Awesome. Well done. Prush lets you and I deliberate here for a moment. If, Prash, if you look at these two companies. Yeah. I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I want you to give me very quick answers.

I want you to, I want you to get reaction. Which company has more product velocity? Hum, hum, hum. Okay. Which product has more revenue potential? Hum, hum, okay. Actually. Interesting, I might switch that revenue potential to...

Explain why. Explain why? So, give me your thinking. Yeah. Okay. So, initially, I said hum-hum, because I was just thinking of dating apps and, you know, market cap of like Tinder, which is under Match and Bumble, which is like a couple billion dollars.

So there's already that existing market that is there. But we can realize those market caps because we see them. We see those existing products in the marketplace. And so Hum Hum is a product that is almost like an alternate, but would really just take market share away from those existing companies. Which one will have more competition? More competition. Hum, I believe.

Obviously. There's many choices there. There's no choices for, I mean, your choices, like I guess you've chat GPT4 or, you know, one of these other genera,

as nobody's really put it together like this one. And so, uh, I like both the companies. But as we've said, only pick one here. So let me bring both the founders back. Thank you.

Welcome back. fresh. Which one is going to return the most money to our LPs ultimately, if you had to rank them? Which one is going to return the most money to our LPs? Okay. I would pick cyber film. Okay.

To return the most money. Got it, okay. Which one do you most want to? No, I don't need an explanation. I can refer why. They have less competition, it's a subscription of business. Which one?

do you most want to invest in personally? Which one do you feel is the best bet for you? Yeah, cyberfilm. Okay, great. So I look at both of these, and it's a pretty easy choice for me. Both the founders have a secret. They got something they figured out.

Both have product velocity. Both have very clever ideas. Both are very committed to their ideas. I have a deep personal connection to the ideas. That's enough for me to place a 25K bet on both companies. Congratulations to both of you. We're going to send you 25K each. Thank you.

Okay. Any questions for me? As we wrap up here, we always have a little bit of time for some questions about startups. If you have a question about your startup specifically, startups in general, the next phase of your company. I'm excited to be in business with both of you and get on the cap table and be your first investors. or amongst the first investors, I assume. Questions for me? Or pressure?

Yeah, my question was just around like different fundraising benchmarks. Like I've seen kind of a range for going at like a seed round or a series A. Like what are the revenue benchmarks? I've seen it from like, you know, for series A like 200K to a million annual recurring. I'm curious your thoughts on that. Classically, series A investors were looking for one to three million dollars in revenue to do a series A or a founding team that is so exceptional,

has done it before, they've sold a company before, they've raised venture capital before they have some personal affinity to them, and they'll do like the preemptive series A. It's rare that that happens. So you want to take your fundraising, it's a great question, by the way, you want your fundraising process to be really based upon a reality,

not things that happen that are obscured, your edge events. So people look at FTX and like he had no board and he raised billions of dollars and he was a criminal and all this stuff. Like FTX or there are noes. These are not things for us to say are the average or to aspire towards. You really have to look at what typically happens in the milestone based venture capital investing system in Silicon Valley. And the milestone based system is what you inferred in your question. Hey, how much revenue I do you have for a seed round? you need to have promised product velocity, a killer team, a great presentation,

a large Tam, angels, and seed funds will make investments based on those kind of things. And if they see but $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month, and it's increasing double digits, 20% a month, month over month, and they can talk to one or two customers who can't shut up about it, and they see that product velocity,

that could be enough for somebody to write the 500K seed check, even a million or 250, something in that range. If you go to a great accelerator, launch accelerator, tech stars, or Y Combinator or the three that, you know, most people, I'm including ours in there, so it's a little bit self-serving.

But those three tend to be incredible signals. They get to the next 100K or so. You put a little more, and you really start a formal fundraising process of meeting 200 investors, let's say, a couple hundred at a demo day, and then trying to do between 100 and 200 actual meetings over 16 weeks.

It seems like a lot, if you can do five or ten meetings a week, get one or two a day with angels, seed funds. That's really what it takes in today's market, what's what it took in 2009, 2010. But you both have real products that are real promising. And there is this concept of social proof. So having somebody like me, this is not meant to be narcissistic in any way, but people know my track record. They know that I'm thoughtful and they see the questions I'm asking you here and they understand Founder University and Launch Accelerator or serious programs. They understand

Y Combinator and TechStars are serious programs. They understand Ron Conway as an investor or Paul Graham as an investor, Sion Bannister, Pairr, VC, all these kind of early stage investors. If you get those folks, they're just a signal of quality. So I consider them like little stamps in your passport. And so there's a lot of different strategies on the margins. At the end of the day, startups are based upon a team building a product that delights a customer. If you focus on that, everything works out. Now, there are fundraising tactics and strategies and they change depending on the market. The market right now

is looking for proof. They're looking for revenue. They're looking for customers as opposed to stories, as opposed to momentum, which is what we saw for five years or so from 2017 to the end of 2021. Yeah, those five years were based on momentum

and, you know, how sexy the space was and the promise and the sizzle. It was really based on the steak. It's based on the sizz, right? And we're back to what's on the plate is what I would say is a great way to think about it. So it's a long answer. But I would say you're doing everything right by just obsessing one of those customers.

When I see a founder like you obsessing over the customers and obsessing over the product, I didn't go too deep into teams here because we already know that information. But you alluded to it, I think, in your slides, you have some domain expertise. You got some logos that people have worked out previously. So the team, the process. the customers is what will make your company successful. And the right investors are going to ask you a lot of questions about those things. So come prepared.

Russell, do you have a question for me as we wrap here? Yeah. And first, just thank you so much for the investment and to the whole team. And I really enjoyed Founder University. I got a ton out of it. So I want to come to the accelerator next and the two-day intensive in May. My question is, I follow your podcast. And a little while ago, when Chat, GPD came out and image generators, you had some great episodes on generative AI.

But then there were some ethical issues in the world. Stability.a.I used watermarked images and started drawing pictures with that. And so we want to be an artist-friendly company. As you're thinking of all that, at one point you called it degenerate AI, if you're sort of ripping off artists. But do you think we could do it in a way that actually benefits artists? and makes them happy to use our product. Yeah, so this is complicated. I had mentioned, hey, the style of Quentin Tarantino,

the, you know, the look and feel of Blade Runner. Some, if you are, how this is executed is going to be super important. And so I think being thoughtful about, you know, how would Aaron Sorkin write the same dialogue? Aaron Sorkin might want to create his own generative AI product, like Bloomberg has. And so I think in the short term, there's a way to do this

without trying to leverage their brands. So how would you describe Aaron Sorkin's dialogue and then other people who are like Aaron Sorkin? Yep. How would you describe that? Fast-paced, quippy, clever, smart, sexy, exciting. Yeah, all these words. So instead of saying Alan Sorkin,

and leveraging his IP and brand, maybe you have snappy. Because certainly he was inspired by some screenplay writers, right? Or some dialogue writers. So there's a way to do it without literally doing an M&M song and releasing it.

Or like this week we had the weekend and the Drake song, which is just literally infringing on their IP and their names. Now, if you said, I want a song, that's a fast rap song with a lot of rhymes in it,

that moves at this specific cadence and you had a speed of one to five and wouldn't take a genius to say, well, you know, Biggie is a two and Jay Z's a three and Eminem's a five and Little Wayne's a four, whatever the proper speed is. So I would encourage you to do that. And then if people wanted to upload a screenplay

and say, these, that would be on them. And that wouldn't be you creating a product based on all of, you know, Quentin Tarantino screenplays, which would feel unfair to me. So I like to use, does this feel fair, fair or unfair? So you could say to somebody in our tool, you can upload other screenplays of, you know, upload a screenplay and use this as a way to educate my chat GPT, you know, instance to educate my film.

And, you know, that would be a much better way to do it, you know, I would say. That's a great answer. And that's what we're looking at doing is, you know, you can say this style meets this or this movie meets this, but you can't put it, we're going to filter some names of famous people to try to set that trend of, you know, don't, don't copy them. And same for storyboards. We're going to use our own version of stable diffusion because it's open source with our own opt-in paid image data sets.

And that way we're going to generate artist-friendly images and actually pay royalties out to them as well. That feels directionally really good. So you could say superhero films. Yes, exactly. But if you wanted to say Marvel, or if you wanted to say Zach Snyder, or you wanted to say...

Stanley, yep, whatever. Yeah, or Nolan, you know, is Batman. That feels unfair. And so, you know, there's a way to do it. Like, I want to have a dark film. I want to have a light. comic book film. So I think that would be the way to do it without infringing on people's IP. So I think you got the right approach there for sure. And then people can upload stuff.

And, you know, if you had a search interface, and there are plenty of search interfaces out there where you said, search for things on the open web that you want to add to your storyboard collection or upload them, you know, if I am doing something with stable diffusion on my local end or your tool on the local end and I uploaded, you know, Doth Vader and, you know, my favorite 10 supervillains and some of their dialogue,

that's on me as the individual. And that's no different than the individual reading those screenplays and kind of creating some inspiration for them. It's not you wholesale ripping it off. So yeah, I think you have exactly the right approach. Kudos to you on doing that.

Thank you. And you could go to you know, Disney and say, By the way, we're obviously not going to release this, but we made a prototype here for you to see of just every Star Wars, we took the Wikipedia and we ingested the Wikipedia and you can write Star Wars films with us. Is this something you might want to license for your writer's room where it has every Wikipedia reference and you can add to the IP of it?

And so when the writers are trying to figure out what to do in Mandalorian season 72, they could say, hey, generate some ideas. What are some characters we haven't used yet? And it's like, oh, by the way, you don't have Grito. Why don't we tell the story of Grito? So, yeah. And we are in conversation with Disney Pixar, NBC Universal, and a few other companies. They're all going to love to have this internal version that keeps the history of it and lets them play multiplayer mode.

And so, you know, when they buy it, they want multiplayer mode. They want the archive of everything that every writer's ever done on the system. and they're going to want the history. Just like when you have Slack or Gmail or office, if somebody working at the company leaves, you still own the IP and you can still see their Google Docs or the emails they had with, you know, potential customers and clients.

So you have some continuation because that IP, obviously, whether it's Gmail, Slack's documents or storyboards is owned by the company paying your salary. So well done. Great job. And we will see everybody next time on. this week in startups. Bye-bye.