This Week in Startups - Startup Pitches! LAUNCH Accelerator Demo Day | E1902
Episode Date: February 22, 2024This Week in Startups is brought to you by…Gusto is easy online payroll, benefits, and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://www.gusto....com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply.Northwest Registered Agent. Visit - http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC.*Timestamps:(0:00) Jason joins seven strong startup pitches from LAUNCH Accelerator.(1:11) Jacqui kicks off the demo day.(1:40) Introductions to the guest jugdes.(4:40) Justin pitches Melengo(10:18) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://www.gusto.com/twist(11:32) Edward ptiches PodcastAI(18:09) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(19:04) Daniel pitches Tolt(24:55) Rae pitches River(27:49) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at - http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist(34:01) Kash pitches TaxGPT(40:56) George pitches Fanfare(46:31) Jam pitches Monic.ai(52:05) Our panel of judges pick their top three pitches.*Apply to the LAUNCH Accelerator here: https://launchaccelerator.co/Just getting started? Apply to Founder.UniversitySubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow these founders and their companies:Justin Kwong & Melengohttps://www.melengo.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/justinckwong/justin@melengo.comEdward Brawer & PodcastAIhttps://podcastai.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardbrawer/ebrawer@podcastai.comDaniel Gjokaj & Tolthttps://tolt.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgj/daniel@tolt.ioRae Lambert & Riverhttps://app.getriver.iohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/raechel-lambert/rae@getriver.ioKashif Ali & TaxGPThttps://www.taxgpt.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/chkashifali/kash@taxgpt.comGeorge Lam & Fanfarehttps://fanfare.app/https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgewlam/george@fanfare.app Jam Mirzakhalov & Monic.aihttp://monic.ai/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirzakhalov/mirzakhalov@monic.ai*Thank you to our judges:Ben Narasin - Tenacity Venture Capitalhttps://twitter.com/bnarasinBlaine Davis - Outlanderhttps://twitter.com/blainerdavisMinnie Ingersoll - TenOneTenhttps://twitter.com/himinnieNicole Seah - Costanoahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-seah1/Stella Zhang - Conductive Ventureshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/xinxin-stella-zhang/*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/jasonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:18) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://www.gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025(18:09) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(27:49) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at - http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist*Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Substack: https://twistartups.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This is the greatest class we've ever had.
These startups have product velocity, great product design, multiple founders, multiple builders
on the founding team, i.e. a developer, U.X. designer, and a growth hacker.
Those are the three builders in our world.
And what you will find is teams with product velocity and who are really obsessed with
customers.
So they have three minutes to pitch.
And they give tight answers, no filibustering.
That's what I train the founders to do, is to listen to the investor questions and actually
answer them.
Let's get started.
This weekend startups is brought to you by
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LinkedIn jobs.
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Welcome everyone to the public demo day for Launch Accelerator Cohort 30.
So excited to have everyone join us today to meet these seven amazing founders and show off
with their building. It's been an absolute honor and pleasure to work with them for these
past few months and can't wait to see what's yet to come.
For those of you who knew to this format, the founders will pitch for exactly three minutes.
I will take some questions from our guest investor judges today.
At the end, I'll ask our guest investor judges here to give us their top three of the seven.
To kick us off, I would love our guest investor judges here to introduce yourself.
Thank you for that.
I'm Ben Narrison.
I runs an ass to the venture capital.
I spun out of NIA about three years ago.
It's a seed fund.
We're a $60 million fund.
We've made $18 investments in the last three years.
We have about six left to do in terms of dry powder.
Write $1 to $3 million checks, invest only in seed and sometimes pre-seed, cover tech writ large,
with the exception of I do not invest in security, med tech, or crypto.
And my thesis is finding entrepreneurs that make me say, wow.
Thanks for having me.
I'm Blaine.
I'm a partner at Outlander.
We're a generalist fund based out of New York.
We lead pre-seed and seed rounds, and checks can range from $500K to $2 million.
We're investing out of our third fund currently.
Awesome.
Thanks.
Minnie.
Hi.
Good to see you all.
I'm a partner at 10110.
We're a seed fund.
Usually our stage is kind of right coming out of launch, about the right stage for us.
I'm on a board with Jason from a launch company.
Usually someone's raising $2 to $4 million.
We like to lead a priced round, usually always B2B, sort of known as the nerdy fund in L.A.
So usually like a tech component.
Hi, everyone, excited to be here.
My name's Nicole.
I'm in the investing team at Kosoenoa.
We do pre-sede to Series A, usually leading the round.
Also focused on B2B SaaS.
Super excited to hear everyone's pitchers.
today. Awesome. And Stella, welcome. Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for having me. I work for
come back to adventures with about 450 million asset under management. Our typical check size
range from 2 to 10 minutes, depending on the run dynamic. We're super flexible. We can lead
co-lee or syndicate with other investors. Thanks to all my investor friends for coming.
This is the greatest class we've ever had. Hard times make for strong startups. And these startups have
number of the things we've gotten absurdly focused on. Product velocity, builder founders,
great product design, and multiple co-founders. Why do we care about those things? There's a list of
13 things that our 21-person team looks for when we process 20,000 applications for funding a year
now, which is absurd. At the top of that list of 13 things, multiple founders, multiple builders
on the founding team, i.e. a developer, U.X. designer, and a growth hacker. Those are the three
builders in our world. I don't think you'll meet a solo founder in our incubator or pre-accelerator
anymore. And I don't think you'll find a team without a developer, founder, co-founder.
And what you will find is teams with product velocity and who are really obsessed with customers.
So every year, we accept less companies. Every year we get more applications. Every year, the funding
bar goes up. A number of these companies have already been able to clear market. And so you
might not be able to get into one or two of them, but great to get to know them because I think
they'll be raising again in a year. And they give tight answers, no filibustering. That's what I train
the founders to do is to listen to the investor questions and actually answer them. Let's get started.
All right. Founder number one, we have Justin from Melango. Hey, everyone. My name is Justin co-founder
of Malingo.com. We're the easiest way for brands and creators to develop and scale fashion products.
Meet Daniel. He's the founder of Daniel Patrick, a fashion brand doing $5 million in revenue. He
is pretty much all hands on deck as a two or three-person team and doesn't have the time or
resources to iterate on all of his product ideas. This is leading to missed growth opportunities.
On Malingo, he uploads a sketch and says he wants to create a new line inspired by a military surplus
or he gets feedback from our co-pilot on the best material choice and gets his idea turned from
a sketch into a digital design. Next, he wants to create a sample. We're building an AI to automate
the tech pack creation process so we can send the files straight to the factory. He receives the samples in
seven days, loves the results, and when he's ready for his bulk order, Malingo gives him the best pricing,
finances his order, and wraps the product to the right factory partner. All this manual work is
handled for him so he can focus on what he does best. And because of this, he's able to launch
his new collection in six weeks and he sells out for the holiday season. Ever since then, Daniel
uses Blango to quickly test new product ideas and scale the production of his winners. It's why brands
like Under Armour and Red Bull record labels, media companies and creators like Robert Downey Jr.
are using Molango to quickly launch and scale fashion products.
As a managed marketplace, we take a tiered take rate of the purchase order and act as the seller to our buyers.
We've also built in embedded lending so that buyers can take advantage in net 90 payment terms.
Other revenue streams we're testing include subscription services for enterprise customers,
as well as referral fees on the shipping and fulfillment partner side.
We've grown to a 366,000 net revenue run rate since launching this beta in June of last year.
We have a few million GMB in the funnel.
We believe now is the perfect time to do this.
been this graveyard of fashion manufacturing startups over the last 10 years that have tried to
create this process, but couldn't automate their way to venture scale. And so for us, each factory
is using our manufacturing execution system, which breaks down the status of each project.
We're building a co-pilot that can prompt the factory for capacity updates, help them answer
questions around order quantities and coverways for every step of the process. For example,
if the factory is a question on the stitch in the pocket, we can tell it via this AI that it's
purely for aesthetic purposes. There's other venture back.
or public companies that we count as competitors, but none of them can automate the entire
manufacturing process for these custom products because they're either horizontal solutions or
unmanaged marketplaces. So our roadmap is to watch these gen AI products in Q2 of this year. We'll get
to 10 million net revenue in 2025 with 150 brands doing on average 400,000 a year in COGS with us.
Our plan is to get to 100 million revenue by 2028 through expanding product categories into more
complex fashion products. Our ultimate vision is how do we get the minimums down to one unit? I think
There's a really interesting world when people are creating the ideas in the head with AI and
we're the infrastructure of plumbing to make that happen.
We're the right team to do it because we have deep domain expertise.
I've previously bootstrapped a seven-figure fashion brand and have nine years of tech experience.
My co-founder Greg is over 20 years of experience and co-created Nike's largest textile
program.
Jason's an investor.
Sion Banniser led our pre-seed round.
We're Malingo and we make it easy for anyone to develop finance and scale fashion products.
All you have to do is dream it.
Thank you.
Justin, you may or may not know, but I started fashionball.com in 1993.
took a public in 99, so I spent a lot of time in the space. I guess my biggest concern would be
the graveyard, which you mentioned. I'm not entirely convinced there's a venture scale opportunity in
this space. So I'd like to sort of hear your view as to why I'm wrong. And then I guess when you
talked about fully automated, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me in a world of fit and fabric.
And, you know, I was a menswear manufacturer for about 10 years. And there's a lot. I mean, you know,
you're not going to automatically make my patterns because you're not going to have the ability to
click a button and tell me how it's going to fit, you know, I'm going to give you my patterns.
And then I'm not going to go to automatically pick a piece of fabric purely because I saw it
on a screen. So maybe just a little more color on how you functionally automate a extremely
high touch and tactile experience. Yeah, I'd love to hear more about the ICP. You mentioned,
you know, Robert Downey Jr. and Under Armour, those are very different. What's the sweet spot and why?
Thank you for the great questions. Ben,
And it's awesome.
You have that background in the space.
And the graveyard part on like, is this a venture scale opportunity or not?
Surely for us, based off of the number of customers that we can service on both the brand
side, as well as the emerging creator market size, tells us that there's a large number of people
that want to have products made.
How we're able to do this is we're not going to start by automating everything from the
get-go.
And that's why we're not doing jackets, dresses, everything.
We're really focusing on a four number of skews, which is hoodies, t-shirts, joggers.
and leggings, things that use the same materials, the same patterns, where we can come in and
make basically any permutation of a hoodie possible through our process. And the goal is,
as we're able to automate these smaller pieces, we can slowly expand the product categories
and automate more of those workflows. Blaine on the core ICP in the sweet spot. Right now,
we're really focused on brands that are probably doing about 500,000 to 5 million in revenue
or creators that have over 100,000 followers. For these types of customers, we're able to come in, a spin
up new product lines or even new product brands with them and really take them from, you know,
zero to a couple million pretty quickly.
And at the same time, our vision is to make it effortless for anyone to create world-class
apparel.
And so because we've automated parts of these process, someone can come in and make 50 units
of a hoodie, you know, even if they're just starting out.
So, you know, to people that are looking to start out who are maybe watching this, we have
a great referral program.
And we were happy to also hook you up with a launch special if you want to get your
samples made or, you know, some great swag for your next.
startup. So check out Malango.com. Thank you. Listen, I know myself as a founder. There are things
that I love doing. I love building products. I love hiring people. And there are things I hate.
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Next up, we have Edward from Podcast AI.
Hi, I'm Everett, CEO and co-founder of Podcast AI. We automate your podcast. So podcasting is huge.
There's just under half a billion listeners right now. And the industry is growing 30% year over year.
and it's going to reach 100 billion by 2029.
So meet Nick.
Nick, you might know, produces All In and this week in startups and now liquidity.
And he has hours of manual work to do every single week, every day, putting out these episodes,
titles, descriptions, chapters, ad reads.
And he has things that he before wanted to be able to do, but just didn't have time to do,
like manage an entire show website.
So with Podcast AI, Nick just drops in his latest episode, and he automatically generates
everything.
Those descriptions, those chapters that would previously take half an hour, it's all done in 30 seconds.
In fact, we even generate a list of the top 10 viral moments for the episode and let you
generate the social posts that go along with it for every platform.
We also automatically generate an entire website for you.
So your podcast gets turned into a website.
This is This Weekend Startups.com powered by Podcast AI right now.
And this entire website is automatically created as a byproduct of using Podcast AI.
So you see all these latest episodes laid out.
You can search.
Every single episode has its own super SEO optimized page with the speakers identified, all the
socials.
We even automatically identify the partners for the show.
And on top of letting the audience have the transcript, we actually let the audience chat
with AI versions of the hosts.
So you can actually chat with the AI besties.
In terms of traction, so we've been growing pretty fast.
We got our first paying customers in September, and we grew 90% in January.
And in fact, as of last Friday, we crossed 100K and ARR run rate.
So our business model is SaaS subscriptions.
So we have professional small business and business plans.
And we're targeting existing podcasters, people that are starting a business and right
after opening their HubSpot account, they need to start a podcast for lead gen and running
their marketing.
Small businesses, that's producers and also agencies producing podcasts.
Our go-to-market is founder-led sales via LinkedIn, podcasts and trade shows.
and a referral program to turn our customers into our marketers in a way.
The roadmap is really great.
We're launching next week.
Fully automated blog turns into a podcast in the blog author's voice,
so we're really excited about that,
generating the actual viral videos that go with those viral moments that we were talking about,
automatic publication to YouTube,
so we're automatically publishing to Apple, Spotify and YouTube,
all from one place,
and automating guest research,
which is a huge pain point.
The road to 100 million ARR takes us through 2029,
and that sees us having 14,000 podcasts using our system.
And the team consists of myself on product design engineering
and Sean Duncombe on operation sales and marketing.
So we're podcast AI and we automate your podcast.
Thank you.
Okay, I have a podcast that I run.
I've been doing for four years.
It's called LA Venture Podcast.
Two questions.
I'm going to be like Ben.
Number one is I probably get like 100 pieces of outreach on LinkedIn.
in a day of people wanting to sell me their help with my podcast.
Like podcast experts all the time, breaking through that noise.
But I think even bigger for me, so if you have to do one question is like, how big is this?
Like I pay $60 an episode to someone to just make my whole podcast.
And I use Descript and they make the transcript and that sort of thing.
So is this really a huge, Tam, is really my number one question.
Yeah.
I think that I can see how this could be really helpful for creators, small businesses who, you know,
don't have the time to manually go and create these captions, these titles, this website for this
podcast. Yeah, I think my question would be related to Minnie's question, which is, what do you see
as the core defensibility of this product? And how do you see it competing against, you know,
for example, hiring a person to do it or consultants to do it outsourcing? Where do you see the
defensibility in terms and in relation to competition? Can you tell us about the larger vision?
for the company. All right. Thank you. Those are some great questions. So,
Manny Nicole, you're talking about TAM. So the TAM is quite large. There's actual existing
podcasters that we're going after, of course, but much bigger than the existing podcasters.
You know, you saw that the market is going 30% year over year. And the reason is that when people
are, you know, small businesses, okay, well, they're going to go to HubSpot to start getting their
CRM getting going. And then they realized, well, in terms of marketing, having a podcast is a no-brainer
in terms of lead generation, right?
Even if you had 10 people listening to your podcast,
if just one of them converts into a customer,
you know, that made it all worth it.
So really, podcasting is going to become,
and is becoming step one of marketing.
So the TAM is quite large from that perspective.
And also you have this big media convergence of, you know,
all YouTubers realizing that they could be podcasters
because they're essentially doing the same thing and vice versa.
So we have a lot of YouTubers actually that are using our system
and that are, we've turned into podcasters.
So the time is quite large and getting larger constantly.
In terms of defensibility and versus outsourcing, people are spending different amounts.
We have people that are spending a few hundred dollars per episode to actually do the production
and are chaining together various tools.
Our vision is really actually making one tool that does everything, one whole pipeline,
where you don't have to chain together all these various tools.
And you always get the same consistency in terms of the production,
and especially really fast production.
So we have customers that have fired their production teams and are actually using us
because all they really needed was a simple editor to put their intro and their outro
and automatically generate a cold open.
So we're serving those people quite well.
And in terms of the larger vision, you kind of saw a hint of that with the blog to podcasting
in the author's voice.
We think not only automating the production of content, but really starting to get into
synthetic content based on real insights from those authors.
So super excited by the vision and thank you very much.
The only thing I wanted to add that there is a professional podcaster is the reason we invested in this company and we're so excited about it is we wanted to take every episode we had, transcribe it and do clips and do the show notes and have timestamps.
And we have eight people working full time on the three podcasts we do.
To do the work that Edward is doing would take like between $500 and $1,000 per episode of producer time.
So for 500 bucks a month, we two unlimited podcasts basically.
So it's been a super game changer for us.
Okay, let me cut to the chase right now because I know you're busy and everyone is hiring right now.
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LinkedIn has more than a billion users.
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This means that you're going to get access to active and passive job seekers.
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All right. Daniel, from Toll.
Hi, my name is Daniel.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Tult.
Assess platform that helps technology startups launch and grow partnership programs.
So let's get into the problem we are trying to solve.
Meet Jeremy.
Jeremy is a market lead at practice, a startup that offers mobile CRM to small business owners.
And they had users like Amanda that love the product and that really wanted to promote
it with their friends.
So Jeremy quickly set up an affiliate program for Amanda,
and he was keeping check off Amanda's referrals and payouts in a spreadsheet.
So as you can imagine, when the affiliate program actually grew,
this got extremely time consuming for Jeremy,
and it forced him to look around for a better solution,
and that's when he landed on told.
Within 15 minutes, Jeremy launched a fully automated affiliate program
with our one-click stripe integration.
And as you can see here, he got an intuitive dashboard.
He could easily keep track of all his affiliates in a single dashboard.
For example, he can also give Amanda a promo code
so she can incentivize her followers to sign up.
And he can also fully white-labeled the partner portal for partners like Amanda.
Amanda also got an intuitive dashboard.
You can see here that she can easily copy her promo code, her link, check her referrals,
and also don't want some message that Jeremy uploaded and keep check of her payouts.
When it's time to pay the partners, Jeremy can do that in a single click.
But all that wouldn't really matter if affiliate marketing doesn't actually work.
But Jeremy and practice have been withheld for nine months now,
and so far they've seen 7X return on their affiliate marketing investment.
And that also included the toll subscription that they pay.
To practice is just one of our users.
We have over 200 paid customers,
and right now are doing just over 120K in ARR.
For the last six months, we have grown on average by 27%.
And we have some amazing startups using Toll, like Replexity and Speak.
We also have a perfect five score on a review site, such as Kappa.
So I'm happy to say that our users are enjoying using TOTT.
Our business model is pretty simple.
We are a B2BCS and our price pricing is based on how much each startup earns from their affiliate programs.
So the bigger the program, the bigger the pay for us.
The reason we leave Toll is better at the competition because the competitors have been around for quite a few years now.
And so far, they have been very neglected in innovating in the space.
While Toll is trying to push as modules to innovate the future as possible,
such as integration with crypto payment providers, auto pay us, branded partner portal referral program and much, much more.
Right now, we are acquiring most of our customers organic, either through Google or to social media channels where our existing users recommended
to their followers.
A road to 100 million looks like this.
First, for us to reach the $1 million mark,
we need to launch a few more integrations with Shopify partners,
Revinicat and other crypto-pain providers.
For the $10 million mark, we need to launch a referral market solution
where startups can launch an in-app referral program
for their existing users.
And for their $100 million dollar mark,
we need to be the go-to-place for any kind of partnership program.
This is the team behind all.
We are two brothers that have worked together for a few years now,
and previously we have successfully exited two small startups.
That's told, helping set startups, launch a growth, partnership prolapse.
Thank you.
I'm curious here for your customers, how about why they don't use something like CRM or their tools
to kind of build the channel and to send, you know, for CIM, normally you can store all your current customer data or even partners data on it, why they can use that.
And second question is also about the mode of this product.
I'm curious how you can kind of protect your product in long term if anyone want to copy it.
I would love to hear more about how you're going to prevent churn and think about the mode in this space.
I feel like having seen a few companies in this space before, I think there's very low switching costs.
Yeah, thank you for the questions.
I really appreciate it.
So yeah, Stella's question, why wouldn't the startups use a CRM or something that they are using?
So the main reason for that is because we actually made.
it very easy for them to track all the referrals.
If they're using a CRM, they will still need to log into the CRM every time an affiliate
actually submits a referral.
So they are an affiliate submits a referral, they need to log into their CRM and then map that
referral with the affiliate.
But with TOTIC is actually extremely easy to just do that because we actually have an integration
with PAYNAPA and Charger and Chalkby, where we make it extremely easy to track and to
check the referrals.
how we actually plan to protect the product.
The main thing that we plan to launch is our marketplace solution.
That means that we will launch a place where partners and startups can come together and
partner up to grow together in a way.
And the reason we can do that because right now we have over 50K in affiliates in our database.
So eventually we just plan to reach out to all those affiliates and ask them if they like
to partner with some other startups on our platform.
And Blaine, how we prevent chance.
So really, the term for us is actually extremely low.
And the main reason for that is once the startups actually launches a partner program,
they only have partners signed up.
And the partners are already bringing revenue and also earning from themselves.
So if the startup actually cancels the program,
that's going to make the partners extremely upset because they're already, as I said,
earning our current revenue.
So in a way for us to prevent churn is to just help partners earn as much as possible
so that the startups would never actually cancel their subscription of the program.
Thanks.
So, we'll just answer the question.
Next up, we have Ray from River.
Hey, I'm Ray from River.
We're an in-person event and social platform turning audiences into communities.
We help orchestrate events at scale with crowdsource hosts.
I'm going to show you how the all-in pod is building community around their show.
We spend up 100 Save the Day events all around the world,
and the besties just have to tweet it out and mention it on the pod.
Fans like James see that there's an event in his city and he can either RSVP or he can apply to host to make sure the event happens.
We vet hosts to make sure that they'll be great and once they're approved, they take over limited edda access for the event.
James just has to choose locations at the time and the capacity.
He can send messages to attendees but he cannot get access to their email or their personal phone number.
When they're all at the event, they get an SMS from River reminding them to snap a pick and post it on social.
It tags the besties and they get tons of fan-generated comments.
content, that whoever's doing the admin can see that which events and which people are coming up
and need action. There's a ton of free energy in the system. Just a handful of retweets from
JCal and two mentions on the pod has resulted in 128 events with volunteer hosts and over 2,000
members. Been working closely with Brian Johnson, Don't Die. He's our most recent community. Again,
243 events have happened in less than two months with 6,800 members. Monthly active users
really started to pop off in January.
And our early traction since launching November 27th,
with just nine communities on the platform,
we've had 600 events,
1,200 volunteer hosts,
19,000 users, and 146,000 app visitors.
Currently, our beta pricing is that we charge $50 a month for self-service
and $500 a month for more white glove community management
while we automate more workflows.
We're also exploring with paid memberships,
affiliates, treasury, and sponsorships.
Pricing launched November 27th,
then we're at 1750 and MRR.
We're really excited about this market.
The creator economy is worth $250 billion, and that's growing.
In-person events globally is $1 trillion,
and 15% of consumers subscribe to some creator membership.
The purchasing power of communities is massive, but it's still on tap.
Taylor Swift could host album release parties on River.
Formula One could do watch parties and side events.
Selena Gomez, she has a rare beauty cosmetic line.
She could do product drop parties,
and political campaigns could get together with meetups and fundraiser
events on River. Our path to 100 million, we need 5,600 communities with an expected monthly
revenue of $1,500. We're starting with podcasters and thought leaders. We're also starting to
work with businesses and tech communities. And then we'll expand to streamers and influencers,
musicians and celebrities, sports teams, alumni networks, and political campaigns.
We differentiate from existing event tools in the way we manage events at scale, how we handle
crowdsource hosts, quality control, and permission layers. We're starting with events, but in the
future, powerful communities will be organized on a river.
We're going to be building out event programming, community infrastructure, and social networking.
My two technical co-founders and I worked together at SOS Labs back in 2013, and we're back by Jason, of course, and also Balaji Srinivasan from the network state.
And that's River.
We're an in-person event and social platform turning audiences into communities. Thanks.
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Minnie, you're up next.
Question for Ray.
Yeah, I love that picture of Jason, by the way.
I was wondering, you know, how many people do you have right now paying $500 a month?
And if most people are paying something closer to $50 a month,
I'm just interested in the cost to acquire paying customers.
customers. Yeah, I'd be curious about what part of the platform you feel gets the most usage other
than the event orchestration. So one part I'm excited about or interested in is the data layer where,
you know, hosts get a lot of data on how engaged their communities are, how many people are showing up.
How do they use that part of the product? And can you expand a little bit more in that?
What's fundamentally different from platforms like Meadow? Many, so most of our customers, actually
three of them are on the $500 a month plan. And like I said, we just launched
pricing November 27th, so it's pretty early, and we've been truly focused on getting some product
out the door. CAC, I would say, has been Twitter DMs. When we do things with All In and my first million,
I got a text from Rameet Seti the next day. Like, it's just kind of the big fish kind of bring in
those medium-sized communities. I think people are usually surprised that, like, we have one,
one user group super team that are part of Solana. Their audience size, you wouldn't think is that
big, but they're like super engaged, almost to the same level as Brian
Johnson. So yeah, I would say most people are actually on the 500-hour plan. Nicole, your question
about what part is most used on the platform and then that data layer. It's still really early for
us. So right now, I'd say batch events and like audience activation is the most used part.
So we'll spin up these events that are kind of saved the dates. You kind of funnel your audience
through and everyone organizing themselves in each city. So that's the most powerful.
haven't really gotten to fully like get squeeze the juice out of the data in that audience layer.
But I will say like when we did my first million, Sam and Sean, like they got a thousand new emails that I don't think they had before.
And then Ryan is on our team deep skills and data science.
We'll be able to get lots of data out of that.
And then Andy's question about differentiation from meetup.
I actually had lunch with Scott.
High from in the other day.
So meetup is like completely fragmented.
There's no central leadership from the community.
organizer or a leader. So you end up getting like people who want to hike on Saturday and then people
who want to hike on Saturday with dogs. And because there's no like centralization, things kind of
like fragment and fall apart really quickly. And then because we have this commute like connection with
the influencer, we're able to incentivize hosts. They get extra access, things like that. The thing to
really understand is that these are net new events. These aren't actually being replaced from Luma or
meetup. We're able to make more events happen that ever were possible before. All right, I'll leave it there.
Thank you so much.
It's really important for us at this week in startups and at all in to know who the top 1% of the audiences are.
And so that's really what we're trying to capture when you have a podcast or you have any community.
Understanding that 1% of your most passionate users is just really difficult to do.
But they kind of raise their hands and say, I want to host a 5 or 10 or 20 person meet up in San Carlos or Buenos Aires.
I mean, it's super powerful.
And those thousand emails are worth $100 each to us, as opposed to the other 99% or the bottom 50% which are worth a penny or 10 cents because they're not going to do anything if activated.
So we really have been trying to find a solution for this.
And TEDx in a box doesn't exist.
And for $6,000 a year, I'd say it takes half the work of a $50, $70,000 community manager.
So in other words, one community manager can now do what maybe three would do, four would do with the software here.
So yeah, we're really, really excited about it.
And the thing that I'm most excited as an investor in this is the, who's the lunatic with the Don't Die?
Brian Johnson.
And then who's the other lunatic with wanting to not have governments and?
Bologi, Strainibasson.
I always follow lunatics because lunatics are like the tip of the spear sometimes in adoption.
Like Bology and Brian are lunatics.
And they have lunatic followings.
And the fact that both of those showed up after us, you know, I expected my first million.
They copy a lot of the stuff we do.
and they're really students of the game.
But for Bologi to do this and for Brian to do it,
is that to me made me really excited as an investor.
So I think this activating communities is the future of a lot of businesses.
And a lot of products that are getting built now are using Discord and other ways to do it online.
You probably see that in your own portfolios.
Brian was using Discord before he had 10 events.
Yeah.
So doing it this way, we use Slack to do it before it didn't work.
You need much more software and structure to control this and make sure it doesn't become a sales
effort. So, you know, that's the thing we were most concerned about. We do want lawyers and accountants
and headhunters to hijack our audience. And so we only allow, you know, in our group, it's four founders,
by founders. And the service providers all want the emails in Ray and I's experience. And she doesn't
give them to them in the platform. You have to communicate through the platform. And then the people who are the
hosts, who are the founders, they don't want the emails. They're not trying to build their CRM. So anyway,
it's a lot of like interesting little discoveries there of who's the right person to manage your local meetup,
TEDx in a box.
Next up, cash from tax GPD.
Hello, everyone.
Cash here from tax GPD.
We are creating an AI co-pilot for tax professionals and accountants.
Did you know that American spent 6.5 billion hours annually on tax filing and inefficiencies
in the system cost $260 billion to the system?
Tax professionals are finding tax GPD and automating their research questions and email
generation, the tax GPD.
Let me show you how.
If someone comes to Mark with a complex tax question, he can ask that question to tax
activity, tax chip not only answer the goal instantly, but all provide gold standard sources
as compared to chatypity or all the other free tools and suggested questions.
For example, here's Mark is generating a tax memo that he needs to send it to a client
about a QSPS explanation that would have taken him 30 minutes to write, he can write it within 30
seconds.
But we're not only tax generation, we are building a firm management and client management
platform that we can see where Mark, who's a tax profession, can see all of his team members and all of
his clients. If a client ask a question, tax deputy will have a context of all of their previous
documents and all of their tax situation. So we can generate an answer before Mark can lift a finger.
And obviously, as a tax professional, he has all their control. He can add it this response
and send it to the client. We, in our product, Matt, road.
map, we are launching the client management platform this quarter, but we also have a DIY tax
filing product for individual tax filers that we launched last month. In the future, we plan to build
complete automations on the tax preparation process and even white label tax GPT. We are at 22,963
annual run rate in February, which is starting to churn our sales motions. There are Fortune 100
companies that are using tax, GPD internally on individual capacity, but we are trying to convert
them into paid pilot program and promotions.
Majority of our market, 86% of tax professionals work in under 30 people companies.
So they are mom and pop shop.
They're not building anything LLM related in-house.
Right now, we are charging only $1,000 for an annual license, but in the future it will go up
to $5,000 annual tax professionals and accountants.
that gives us a total addressable market of initial addressable market of 17 billion,
but the actual addressable market is 260 billion to increase, to decrease the inefficiencies in the system.
For in order for us to reach 10 million, we need to onboard 2,000 people and in order to reach 100 million,
we need to onboard 20,000 tax professionals by 2029. Right now, our CAQ is completely zero.
Word of mouth, searching optimization is social media. But in the first, in the future,
future we are planning right now we are partnering with cp academy national road agents of america
and we are in serious discussions with dreg software that sell their software to already
100 000 tax offices and going to the industry specific conferences um our competition is we don't
see them as a competition we do see them as a partners because they are on the tax filing side of the
business we are automating the tax preparation side of the business and embedding AI into daily workflows
to decrease the time spent on mundane task for tax professionals and accountants.
I previously worked for Dobie, so I have experienced building enterprise great software.
I personally getting a tax provider license.
Isabella previously worked for Rekyll, went to Berkeley.
She's an AI cybersecurity expert in the house.
Andrew is our founding CPA.
He previously worked with Lloyd, and we have amazing Jason as an investor.
Tax GPD is building an AI co-pilot for tax professionals.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Thanks, Cash.
Hey, I'm curious about what's your data source to train the model?
for this tax GPT.
And the second question is,
what's a long-term goal for your product?
Currently, I think you focus more on tax prep.
Would you ever consider to expand
to let tax fighting in long term?
So I've spent a bunch of time looking at GAI.
My biggest question is always the same.
How do you build a proprietary moat around something
that has an open engine, right?
Like you're going to run on the same engine as others.
And ultimately, you can claim that the data you have access to
gives you a moat, but I have not been convinced of that.
Secondly, every major player, every legacy player has to be looking at how to fold this in.
I don't love the why won't so-and-so do this, but since every major company is under threat
and is figuring out how to use GAI, I mean, it does not seem like an enormous stretch for
Intuit or whoever owns TurboTex these days to invest in an open AI license and to put in the
expertise to be able to do this and all of a sudden you're obviated as a startup that doesn't
have any value to somebody when they can use their existing legacy player.
So how do you think about the, I know you want to partner with them, but do they even need to partner with you?
They can just build it.
Thank you so much.
So answer to the question of data source, we scrap all the legal, anything that impact the tax code, like IRS tax code, all the state tax code, any tax code judgments, all of that.
We scrap that.
But also we have proprietary information.
Like we have tax professionals asking questions, close to 20,000 questions at this point.
So we gather feedback on every question and we triangulate that information and keep
building that flywheel of the data mode.
That's, you know, propriety on that.
Long-term vision in terms of tax filing is not out of the question.
I think AI has given us so much creativity.
Like previously, like WK of the world, there is a $40 billion company.
We are able to accomplish that in a very, very small team and limited amount and everything.
So tax filing, I think, can be rebuilt.
from scratch the system and it can probably build much better.
But that is more like series A, B type of probably decision that we have to make.
Then, yes, so I partially answered the question like what is the proprietary data set that we have
rather than the legal data sources.
So we are collecting the feedback on every question.
And these are tax professionals.
Like, for example, if you go to Thompson writers and Bloomberg, what is property do they have?
They have their own, you know, 20 people team that is, you know, providing the tax opinion.
They call it secondary sources that is explaining the law.
We have much better, you know, much larger tax professional, a thousand tax professionals right now that are giving us feedback that we are building our proprietary data mode.
And yes, like Intuit of the world and all the other people of the world, yes, they can build this.
But they haven't built it so far.
That's why we had full act for hire offered and we rejected it.
And, you know, there is a time for us to build it.
Thank you so much.
Happy to answer the questions later.
All right.
Thanks so much, Cass.
Next up, we have George from Fanfare.
Hi, I'm George, founder of Fanfare, the platform where creative work gets funded.
On Fanfare, anyone with a great idea for a product or game can grow a community, raise funds
and sell their product.
Here's one of our actual creators.
This is Simon.
He's an indie game designer who sells his games on Fanfare.
And this is Emma.
She's the typical buyer on Fanfare.
She loves games and she spends over $200 a month on her hobby, so she's always looking for new releases and cool things to support.
At Fanfare, we help Simon create with people like Emma.
First off, we have community tools.
Simon can give Emma free samples in return for an email sign-up.
He can share updates when a new character is coming out, and he can even accept donations from people who just really love his work.
We also have great e-commerce tools.
Simon can start pre-order campaigns to raise a certain funding goal.
He can sell memberships to his work, and he can offer exclusions.
exclusive fan perks, for example, a limited gold edition only available to his most early
loyal fans who hold a prior membership.
And we drive really high quality traffic to our creators pages.
Because we focus on specific niches like gaming, we know exactly out of all our users,
who's into chess, who's into RPG, who's into console gaming, so we're able to drive
really high value traffic to our creators pages.
And those creators don't pay anything for being on fanfare.
We want to make sure that we have the best and the most projects from the most awesome
creators all over the world.
so we didn't charge them anything to come onto the platform.
Fans, on the other hand, can upgrade to become a superfan.
For just $20 a month, a superfan gets big discounts on most projects,
exclusive products and content, and a monthly digital loot box.
When a superfan backs just one project a month, they already get their subscriptions worth
out of discounts.
$240 is the annual revenue per superfan subscription.
So when we have 400,000 super fans, we'll hit $100 million in annual revenue.
Compared to Patreon, Etsy and Kickstarter, fanfare is the only platform.
that offers advanced discovery, landing pages,
free-order campaigns, a storefront, memberships,
and is totally free to use for creators.
And this industry is really big.
Right now, we're focused on the tabletop gaming industry.
Today, it's a $25 billion industry,
and that's on trend to double in the next six years.
Next, we're going to expand into anime, manga, and comics,
and combined these are $100 billion industries,
and all of them are growing 10% year-on-year.
And speaking of growth, since we introduced our most advanced features this last January,
we've had 300% monthly user growth, and we only count a user if it's a verified account
with at least one transaction.
Myself and the team have over five years of experience in the creative economy.
We have raised over $20 million for creators as their marketing consultants, and most importantly,
creators really love working with us.
That's why we know exactly what they want to get out of a platform like fanfare, which is where
creative work gets funded.
Thank you.
Thanks, George.
Super interesting.
I have to ask it.
Obviously, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is Kickstarter and the like.
Is the biggest differentiator really the membership angle?
It sounds like that might be the approach that you're taking.
I feel like I tend to find myself trying to minimize the amount of memberships I have.
Love to hear how you're approaching that.
Yeah, I was going with the Kickstarter sort of question.
How about the other side of things, which is the people who would choose to use this
over Kickstarter.
It sounds like you have a lot of features
that Kickstarter or other platforms don't have,
but I'm interested in actually the engagement
and how you think about sort of the KPIs for
whether the users are getting more engagement
from your platform than they would on a Kickstarter
or something a little bit more generic.
Yeah, I think that as the creator economy expands,
there's going to be a lot of different types of tools
to manage different sorts of memberships.
You mentioned Patreon.
There's also pauses.
How do you feel like the product sits across the layer of all these other competitors?
All right.
Thank you so much.
Really great informed questions.
So let me start with maybe Blaine and Minnie's questions are a little bit similar.
You know, there's Kickstarter.
What's the differentiator and what's the difference in engagement?
One of the really crucial differences is Kickstarter is only used by creators for 30 days,
of their entire lifetime as a creator, right, just during the campaign.
On fanfare, you can start with a landing page if you just have an idea, you don't have
anything to sell.
People can just subscribe.
And then you build it up through memberships.
And then ultimately, you can do a full, you know, pre-order campaign Kickstarter style.
And then once you have your inventory, you can even continue selling.
So you have like a little store.
So the big differentiator is we don't want creators to really go anywhere unless they become so big
that they need to go, you know, to Shopify Plus.
And so also in terms of engagement, what we've noticed is that people,
People who engage with an idea at a very early stage tend to, you know, become super fans.
That's why we have that term.
And that engagement is much higher versus people who just come onto a page for the first time
and have to make a quick purchasing decision within 30 days.
And so, Nicole, to your point with Patreon and where this sits in the creator landscape,
you're absolutely right.
The creator economy is booming.
So there's a lot of tools out there.
A big difference for us is that we focus on creators who make products.
They can be digital products like, you know, gaming assets.
But whereas Patreon is maybe a little bit better for someone who has like a podcast or like a non-tangible thing that just goes on forever.
Fanfare is really made for people who do projects that are like a project with a beginning or an end or with a specific outcome.
So I think that's the big difference.
Thanks, George.
And for our seventh founder, we have Jam from Monica A.I.
Hi, everyone.
Jam from Monica A.
I and we're building an adaptive learning environment for exams.
Meet Kate.
She's an undergrad in health and she's taking 15 major exams this semester.
and she's Plentzotent Medical School.
Like many of your peers, she ends up using platforms like Chegg and Course Hero when
it comes to finding exam practice.
The problem is that these platforms are banned from almost every campus in the country,
and they lack personalization that she needs that leaves her uncertain in the end,
whether she's actually ready for the exams or not.
This changed when she was introduced to Monica AI.
Monica AI, she gets to create a study space for her organic chemistry class.
In the study space, she not only has a way to order to order.
organize all her materials by type and topic, but also gets the ability to turn her own class
materials, study materials, into interactive practice within seconds. As Kate interacts with the
platform, Monica AI will create a learning profile for her that automatically schedules and adapts
questions as she goes through them. And it will make sure that she focused on the things
that she's struggling the most. This makes her studying a lot more efficient and engaging,
and she loves it. And so do thousands of students who use Monica AI.
In fact, since we launched last year in February, over 85,000 people signed up on the platform,
created 5.5 million questions from 150,000 documents uploaded.
And we're currently running at 33K and ARR.
Our business model is simple.
We have a freemium model with limited generations and slower speeds and a pro model
at $10 a month with unlimited generations and higher speeds.
We're also introducing an enterprise model at 25K a year for businesses and give them more access control.
So how do we get here in the first place?
Our first thousand customers came from interactions in platforms like Reddit, and the next phase
of growth has been coming through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.
The next phase, along with the social media, will be coming through our partnerships with
college professors on campuses to bring their classrooms on demonic and through our SEO.
So why now and why us?
LLMs have really changed the way, have really made the document intelligent a commodity that
actually lets us compete with the incumbents in the area like the checks and the course here's
of the world. And why us is we have a unique and proprietary data set in terms of a learning
profile and learning habits of a user. And combined with gamification, it lets us scale into the next
space. Back to Kate again, once she's done with her college exams, she gets to take more exams
in terms of MCAT and USMLE and certifications. And this is a lifelong learning for her and for millions
of professionals like her. In fact, over 10 million exams are taken in the US every single year
outside of the high school and college system. And that takes about four weeks on average of
prep time and people spent from $100 to $5,000 per exam prep.
And that's why on our roadmap, we're bringing and integrating e-learning providers like just
typical PT onto a platform and currently running a $60k grant in a pilot program with Cyber
Florida.
Our path to $100 million error starts with getting to $200,000 subscriptions in BDC level, facilitating
3 million transactions in the marketplace and reaching 2,000 businesses.
We are a team of two engineers and a product designer and we're building an adaptive learning
environment for exams.
Thank you so much.
I'm curious. It seems like you sell both for enterprises and also individual side and also
it's a market place. How would you pivot your sell strategy here? In a long-term goal,
what's your focus here for these three tiers of the businesses? You already mentioned that a lot of
this documentation is becoming open source or freely available and commoditized. I think you need
to make a pretty strong case for how you create a moat when you are dealing with somebody else.
engine and a commoditized data set.
And I am not convinced that, well, we understand how these people learn.
And so that will create one is good enough.
But if that's the one, that's the one.
Is it a matter of time?
Craig is asking before the platform may get bans, like competitors that you mentioned.
Thank you for the questions.
So I'm going to start with the enterprise BDC in the marketplace.
And it does seem like we are kind of segmented at around.
But BDC was actually very strategic for our marketplace.
Because for a lot of the creators to come into the platform, such as the e-learning providers, like typical PT, we needed the audience in the first place to convince them to come through a platform.
So that was a very kind of a strategic move.
When it comes to enterprise, we do want to postpone it a little bit.
But the way that the enterprise model works is very similar to the way that we're going to sort of the e-learning providers.
They get to create spaces.
They get to bring people to the spaces with the same access control levels.
And then they just have the people who have access to the spaces is just not going to be public.
So it's just a matter of access control in this case.
And in this case, the only kind of proprietary data set that we are kind of banking on
is the fact that when people learn, it could be for two different reasons.
They're trying to do retention or they're trying to comprehend something.
And there's a ton of retention algorithms out there that people use.
Our algorithms on the comprehension side.
And as they engage with the platform and they get to tell us exactly what questions are
the ones that they want with questions that they don't want, that is a data set.
I think very few companies will have out there.
And also, we're moving away from the LEMs to the open source ones ourselves as well as we build these data sets.
So we can have a different conversion point from what the public has.
Craig, the world of platforms will get banned?
Absolutely not, I think, because we actually working with the professors directly
because we want to be the ethical alternative to platforms like Core Zero and check on campuses.
That's why we're bringing them into the conversation so they could be our partners in distribution, both and the users of the platform.
In fact, about 20% of our users right now on the platform are educators and instructors using it for their classrooms.
Thanks for the questions.
All right.
Well done to the founders.
Now, for investors, here comes the hard part for you.
If you could give us your top three of that seven.
Yeah, I am in reverse order from the last three pitches, the last pitch being three with Monick, two being fanfare and one being tax GPT.
I think that even though I have big challenges with how you build a moat in terms of my number one, tax GPT,
I do think it's going to be incredibly hard to create a defensive mode here.
But I like the possibility that having some sort of semi-proprietary insights from the tax
preparers that gives you sort of the ability to have a more nuanced view of what best practices
is with different returns, et cetera, could in theory give you an insight that others might not be
able to get.
And if you get there quick enough with enough of them, then maybe that's viable.
I think it still ultimately ends up being acquired into an existing legacy player,
isn't my typical focus on how to live my life, funding acquisitions. But I do think of the
companies we saw here, the biggest opportunity is there, but it's going to be a big, big,
big challenge to be the winner.
Third, I had Monick AI. In second, I had Melengo. And then first for me was River.
Know the market very well. I think it's a massive pain point out there. No one in the space
is really servicing the in-person to community angle and seems like some really exciting
early traction.
Yeah, agreed with Jason.
Best cohort.
This was great.
Hard to decide.
I went River number three, fanfare number two, Malango number one.
It's Malango's a good fit for a lot of the things I've been thinking about with like manufacturing,
onshoreing mirror-shoring.
We need a lot of automation to really be competitive.
I looked at a company topologic.
I don't know if you saw that, but really.
buy into the idea that the length of time to launch a product is too long and that there's a lot
that technology can do. And also great traction. So just really strong presentation there.
First of all, I want to say congrats to everyone who pitched today. I really appreciated all of your
pitches. And it's really exciting to see what you've all been building. So just wanted to say that
to start off. Top three, I would say number three at podcast AI, number two, Malengo, and then number one
would be River. And I think what drew me to River as the number one was this really interesting
data layer around actionability in terms of communities and creators. And I think it's really
exciting that people will be able to really figure out how to monetize and engage more effectively
with communities. Hey, thanks so much for the presentation today. And my number three is money.
dot AI. Number two is podcast AI. And my number one is tax GPT. Because previously I worked to
the related industry. I know it's the for the tax industry. Lots of tasks are repetitive.
And especially when you try to communicate with clients, it's all like back and forth. So I really
understand the pinpoint. So I like the market overall. Although I might find it's, it might be a
bit tricky to sell in this industry because this accounting industry is kind of like
manufacturing and industrial. You know their legacy solutions, but it's really hard to kind of push
them to chain. I'm just super proud of the effort. You all put in this cohort. Thank you so much
for coming. If you have great companies that you want to share with us that you think
should come to Founding University, that's typically a company that's maybe incorporated, maybe
not even incorporated, MVP, trying to figure it out. We accept about 10% of folks that
that program and invest in the top 10%, so net net 1%.
And then if you have anybody who's got 10 to 510, 20K in revenue, trying to figure it out,
wants to raise a 500K to $3 million round, that's the accelerator.
Contact us as well.
Really appreciate everybody coming today and meeting these amazing companies.
Congratulations to the companies are doing really, really well in the fundraising space.
And I think it's really hard to raise money in this kind of market.
So congratulations to everybody who started to get term sheets in and leads and a couple of people
are doing party rounds and doing pretty well.
They're passing that.
So whatever it takes to get that 500K to 1,0.5 in when you're a C company like this.
And then get back to delighting your customers.
See you all next time.
Bye-bye.
