SPEAKER_06: Today, I'm gonna have four seed stage startups pitch me their products and then decide which one of them to give a friends and family $25,000 check to right here on the show.
SPEAKER_04:
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SPEAKER_06: All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We've got a special episode for you today. I'm gonna have four seed stage startups pitch me their products and then decide which one of them to give a friends and family $25,000 check to right here on the show. So with me today is Kelly Shricker. Kelly runs the founder university, which we do at my investment firm launch. What is founder university? Well, it's a 12 week course. It occurs Monday and Thursday nights at 6pm Pacific. And we have a curriculum and we teach founders how to start a company. About half the companies who come to founder university are not yet incorporated. They're side hustles projects. You know, they're in the ideation phase. Maybe they've got two or three co-founders and they're building. Kelly, we're starting our seventh cohort. Can you believe it?
SPEAKER_03: I cannot, but I am so excited.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And so if people want to apply, what's the perfect stage of a company to come to founder university and where can they apply?
SPEAKER_03: If you have an idea, you're still working on the MVP. Even if you have a few early customers and maybe you're still feeling really new at this, those are all great stages to apply. We really focus in the program on getting through those early days. A lot of founders talk about not only the accountability and the content, but also having a community. It can be really lonely being an early stage founder and not knowing who to turn to. And in this case, you get a group of, you know, 250 ish other companies that are all in the same stage as you.
SPEAKER_06: And this all occurs online and on Zoom. And so every Monday we do the curriculum and on every Thursday, explain what we do on Thursday.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so Thursday is a continuation of whatever we cover on Monday, or if we're hearing a lot of questions from the cohort on something specifically, we'll do a special topic there. And really it's meant to be a chance for everybody to get to co-work together, to dig in, to ask each other questions, push each other to be a little bit better. And then Presh and I always stay in the main room and keep open office hours. So for all of the other things that you might need to talk through and have a sounding board for.
SPEAKER_06: And so you just mentioned there, there's a main room, but on Zoom, we can do these breakout rooms. So explain how the breakouts work as we skipped over that.
SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, so with the breakout room, so what we actually do is we have everybody come in. We start with small wins, which is a good way to get everybody engaged and talking. And also you can hear if somebody else landed the first Facebook customer or customer through Facebook. Explain what small wins is.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay, perfect.
SPEAKER_06: Because we have a lot of nomenclature inside the company, like our own language, every company does. So explain what small wins are.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so small wins for early stage companies, sometimes it's, hey, I fixed a bug that was really driving me nuts. Sometimes it's I launched or I got my first customer. They're really usually not that small of a win, but it's all the things that you're facing and that feel like a big milestone and you wanna share. And again, it creates a really great opportunity as you share those things for other founders to say, hey, I heard you did this thing really well and I've been struggling with it, or I can't figure out how to do the Facebook ad thing. And then it creates those moments for them to either go into breakout rooms or take the conversation offline and really build that relationship fabric between other founders that again are in the same stage and facing a lot of the same things you are every day. Okay, so a bunch of founders come into a Zoom room.
SPEAKER_06: We hit the breakout rooms. You say how many people you want per breakout room. Everybody automatically or randomly gets assigned to breakout rooms, is that correct? Yep. And then you ask them, hey, have a conversation. Is it typically four people, six people?
SPEAKER_03: It depends on what we're working on, but we try to keep them really small, somewhere between probably five and 12 per breakout room. Got it.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And then you ask, hey, go around the table. Everybody talk about their top two or three small wins for the past week. Maybe you got a new developer. Maybe you raised a 25K angel tech check, whatever it happens to be. It's a great icebreaker. And then people can work on other things. And the curriculum is in modules. What are some of the most popular modules that we try to teach founders at this early stage? Which ones do they get the most value from in terms of your feedback you get?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think a few of the big ones we hear are around how much to charge and when to charge. And one of the things that I hear a lot, maybe actually from some folks in this group, was the takeaway of charge early and often. You don't want to wait too long to get that first paying customer because you waste a lot of time in between here and there. And so the earlier you can do that, the earlier you can kind of learn from those people and what they value, and then hopefully grow those customers fast.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, the dark art, the alchemy of pricing. How much value does your product provide? And should it be 10 bucks a month or 1,000 bucks a month? You really have to drill in there. Most founders either don't charge at the early stage or they charge too little, and then they leave a lot of money on the table and maybe they don't need to raise funding. Maybe they can charge $1,000 a month and get to 20 customers really quick. And then, hey, you don't have to dilute your cap table. You can push funding down the road. So that is a great module. And when we write these modules, they're organic. So we're constantly updating them every cohort. We do four cohorts a year. We'll have a couple of thousand people apply. I think last cohort, it was over 2,000 and we accepted 220 teams or something. I think this cohort, maybe we'll hit 3,000 applications and accept 300 or so companies. I know we have offers out to over 200 right now. And so if you want to apply, you just go to founder.university.
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. And our next cohort kicks off the first and second week of January, but there's still time. We still have spots open. So please do submit that application. We will be reading it as fast as we can and get back to you pretty quickly. And you're working over the holidays.
SPEAKER_06: I saw that. Yes. I had a special dispensation. I tried to shut the company down for a week and you insisted on working. All right, that's fine. But Kelly will be working and getting your applications in. I like the commitment. So let's get started here today. You've got four great companies for me. They're going to pitch me for three minutes each or two minutes each. Two minutes each. Two minutes. I'm going to take notes. I'll be off camera. And we're just going to have the founders pitch for two minutes, and then you will interrupt them at the end of the two minutes and say, okay, time's up. Correct. Founders will keep going. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_03:
All right. First up, we're going to have Golf Golf.
SPEAKER_02: Hey Jason, it's Abe with Golf Golf and we're putting a personal sports coach in your pocket. Meet Brian, a Golf Golf customer. Brian sucks too much at golf. He's too embarrassed to even show up at the course. He's like one of the 15 million range-bound league players in the US and one of 3 million new golfers in the US every year. Luckily, Brian hears about Golf Golf. Within a couple of weeks, he's comfortable enough to actually go to the course with his buddies. Let's check out one of the products that Brian used.
Brian's going to simply upload a photo of his driver stance and the AI is going to instantly tell him how he can improve his stance and swing more like the pros. It'll even roast him if he sucks. This product has been a success. We've had over a thousand users for the free version and 28 paid customers for the full report resulting in $950 in sales. As we zoom out, our primary business model is B2C with bottoms up B2B packages for country clubs and for guys for driving ranges. Ultimately, the main way we're going to reach the consumer is through our subscription app. Let's take a look at the design. Our UX is going to be the market leader. Unlike our competitors who offer mere tools, we take golfers on a journey with personalized goal-oriented programming that actually rewards them for getting better. This includes customer lessons and LOM feedback based on the players' needs.
We have a clear path to 100 million ARR on just the consumer side alone, and we've worked on 200,000 golfers to reach that goal.
We have a team of avid golfers who can bring a golf tech product to market. We have multiple engineers, designers, and I'm also a celebrity golf caddy. Check out this photo of me and Travis Kelsey.
We already have A-list golfers and celebrities using the product. We've had George Lopez as a user, Max Beasley from Suits as a user, and golfers from some of the best country clubs in the world using our products. The sport of golf and golf content is crushing it right now. On TikTok alone, there's been 27 billion views. We're gonna be the best and most fun way to learn how to golf. Our early products have been a success. We'll be pushing our mobile app for review in the coming weeks. And as we look to 2024, we're gonna have real-time in-the-ear LOM coaching. We're gonna be partnering with the 6,000 dry rages in the US to put our technology in every stall. Thank you. Okay, well done.
SPEAKER_06: And when we do these, if you're listening to the podcast, you can always go to youtube.com slash thisweekend to find the episode on the video's channel. When you're presenting, if you're ever on a podcast as a founder, make sure you describe, we call it sports casting, what they're seeing on the screen. This is great. We've invested in, as a firm, many coaching companies, executive coaching, sports coaching, tutoring, lifestyle and health coaching, weight coaching, all this kind of stuff. And the problem with coaches is they're expensive and maybe they're real time, maybe they're not real time. And then a lot of people feel anxious and can't either they can't afford to have a coach or they're anxious about it or it's inconvenient. And what's great about AI coming into this is you can just start using it immediately. You don't have to book a time. It's lightweight, it's gonna be cheaper, so it's available to everybody. And business model wise, let's talk about your pricing. How do you think about pricing this product?
SPEAKER_02: We believe that we can hit both the main golfer with a $15 a month subscription product, but also the premium golfer that won some of that human touch with a $100 plus a month subscription product. So currently-
SPEAKER_06: What would be the difference between those two? So what I get, I mean, I know what I get in the $15 one, but what would I get in the $100 with an actual real golf coat?
SPEAKER_02: Instead of just the AI tools, we'll be having professionals looking at the videos that you upload, the modules that you complete and actually giving feedback. And then also we're gonna be rewarding people with rare tee times in exchange for some of their completion of modules and lessons, and so making sure that people get legitimate in real life rewards for their progress.
SPEAKER_06: So AI coaching is gonna be a thing, I believe that. Some hybrid model is fine. Every time an AI coach gives feedback, Kelly, on one of these, it could go into the language model or whatever the AI model and do some learning. I'm not sure if that's gonna happen immediately, but that obviously will happen down the road. And so, yeah, this feels like something that could become addicting. We have a lot of subscription products, consumer subscription products, Fitbod, doing wonderfully for people who work out, STEEZY doing wonderfully for people who dance, and Calm, of course, for meditation, Tonebase for classical music instruction, and then we also have Musician for music instruction, and we've had some language ones as well. So tons of great companies in that space. We believe in this model. I see you have Builder Founders, so there's three founders in the company? That's correct. And two of them are writing code, is that correct? That's right. Perfect.
SPEAKER_02: One ML engineer, me and my buddy are also iOS engineers, and we have a designer.
SPEAKER_06: Perfect. But there are three founders, not four. Correct.
SPEAKER_02: We have a couple people part-time, but you have three core founders. And when we define founders,
SPEAKER_06: we define them as over 10% ownership in terms of equity each, yeah? Correct. Okay, perfect. So this is all important details if you're an angel investor or seed fund listening, a lot of those listen to the pod. We always prefer and we accept into the program that people with three or more founders first, then we go to two or more founders, and we very rarely even get to solo founders. Why? If you want to go far, go together. If you want to go fast, go alone. We're looking for people who want to go far. And so Builder Founders, critically important. And we ask the question very specifically, are they writing code or not? Because we don't want somebody who used to write code in the 80s or 90s or 2000s. We want people who are actually building code now. And you got some early traction that's very attractive to our firm as well. And your business model, consumer, consumer subscription, that's in our top five categories as a firm. Kelly, the team at GOLF GOLF also had product velocity, yes?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they were wonderful on their updates during the program. So it was easy to follow along their journey and they are rapidly improving the product. Every time I have an interaction with Abe and the team, it seems like it's light years ahead of where it was the last conversation. Listen, selling software is hard enough right now, man.
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Explain to the audience why product velocity is important in what we do in selecting companies.
SPEAKER_03: In early stage companies, you know, there's a lot you don't know, and everything is about testing and iterating and trying to figure out the things that are going to delight your customers and get them to pay and pay more and to refer it to all their friends. And there's no way to do that if you're stagnant, right? So you have to go out, you have to test a lot of things. You have to keep pushing updates. You know, the idea that investors, you know, when we offer a company money, we want them to put it to use, right? We don't want it to sit in a bank for two or three years and just sit there. We want you to be putting it out into the world and making a product that your customers absolutely love.
SPEAKER_06: Great. Product velocity, name of the game. Great job. Okay, let's meet our next company.
SPEAKER_03: All right, next up, we're gonna have Cicada.
SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Mircha, CEO of Cicada. So it's really hard to make money from music, but did you know that US musicians, on average, earn only $20,000 per year? Cicada helps musicians make more money from live gigs. Meet Stefan, he's an above average earning musician, but he still only makes 15K from live music. So he signs up for Cicada, he gets a beautiful personalized QR code that he can put up at all of his gigs, and this lets him monetize people's well-documented state of euphoria at live music events. Through Cicada, he starts accepting tips and offering paid services, but also he creates custom merch for every single event. He puts up his set list and shows people real-time lyrics and song info for all the pieces that he plays. So through tips, merch, and new bookings, he earns over $10,000 extra per year, and this actually increases his live music earnings by 68%. These are real numbers, by the way, extrapolated to a year from our first six months of service. At the moment, we are focused on the top 5% of professional musicians. We charge them $30 per month as a subscription, and we also take 10% of each transaction. But we plan to also offer a free tier below that, and this will enable us to service the bottom 94% of artists who are just entirely unserved by existing tools. And that's because most creator platforms, like the Patreons and YouTubes of the world, these focus on monetizing content, not performance. But playing music and creating content are totally different jobs. At the moment, we have 32 customers, just got a new one. Our QR codes have been scanned over 600 times in 11 countries. Last month, we more than doubled our revenue, and we've added a few new customer types, orchestras and artist managers. The founders have decades of experience in music, engineering, and business. I'm actually the world's most highly awarded classical guitarist. I founded my first startup at 19, and I've previously led content at Tonebase, your Jason Calacanis portfolio company. And CTO Mark Hiersner is a full-stack engineer and a jazz bassist.
SPEAKER_06: Awesome, well done. So to recap what the company does is you help musicians host live streams and performances with their fan base, who will then pay a fee to come and watch them perform live.
SPEAKER_00: That is possible to do on the app, but primarily we help musicians bring beautiful QR codes to their actual in-person concerts. And there, they make more money by allowing people to buy stuff from their store or services right at the concert, song dedications. So we're mostly focused on in-person events, but there is definitely a potential for hybrid and fully online events as well.
SPEAKER_06: So I go to a live event. Do you sell the tickets to the live event as well? Or they do that? We have a full on ticketing capability,
SPEAKER_00: you know, built into the platform. So some people do. Some people do.
SPEAKER_06: So if I am an established musician, I have a gig, I sell my tickets through Eventbrite or something else, or maybe, you know, Ticketmaster, whoever owns the venue. I put up your QR code and they're able to order from that QR code, merch or other items.
SPEAKER_00: They are able to do that exactly and much more. They can see real-time lyrics. They can, you know, make song requests if the artist enabled that or buy specific services. So it's both interactive media that they get to see on their phone and also financial transactions that are enabled through it. Can I pay to play a cover song?
SPEAKER_06: Like, could it give me like, this band knows a hundred cover songs and like a jukebox, I could say, I want to pay 10 bucks to hear Freebird and, or somebody else pays 15 and it moves up higher on the list?
SPEAKER_00:
We don't have that model yet, the auction model. We want to do that in the future, but we do have the possibility of adding a song request that is paid. And I use that at my own performances. If I'm not playing a solo concert where the program is decided in advance, if I'm just playing background music, I'm a musician. I use this in my own concerts. Then I, you know, I let people request songs and that's totally doable.
SPEAKER_06: Got it, awesome. So this doesn't exist other places in the world or it exists in different components in different places?
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it exists in this shape. So there's a lot of music products that help musicians sell more tickets. There's a lot of products for lead generation, for finding gigs, but I don't think there is anything that really helps the ordinary musician make more money at the gigs that they do play.
SPEAKER_06: And when I pull up that QR code, does it let me sign up for the mailing list as well?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, by default, there's a pop-up that asks you and musicians can choose to let you close that pop-up without giving an email or they can force you to put in the email or they can also choose to disable the mailing list if they desire, but we encourage them not to do that. What about phone numbers?
SPEAKER_06: Can I do mailing list or phone numbers?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, the default is just the email, but musicians can decide to choose to also require phone numbers instead.
SPEAKER_06: My understanding is building your mailing list is the name of the game as a touring musician. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_00: That is correct. And your understanding puts you ahead of 98% of musicians who haven't understood that, but yes, it's true.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so even in the musician category, I mean, let's be honest, musicians are artists and typically they spend their time on their art and probably very little. So a platform like this makes a lot of sense. All right, you got a co-founder, so there's two of you. Your co-founder is the CTO, you're the artist. You got a little bit of traction. You got a thousand dollars, $2,000 a month in monthly reoccurring revenue, I understand.
SPEAKER_00: A bit less than that at the moment. We did hit 1,001 months, but at the moment we're at about just over 500, but we have enabled about a thousand dollars in transactions and a number of gigs that I received from using the app myself that were booked by people who are delighted because they saw these extra things about me. So all these features that you've built,
SPEAKER_06: is there one that's breaking out and that people can't live without?
And if so, which one is it? I think at the moment it's kind of silly,
SPEAKER_00: but I think the shop is the main one, just the simple shop. Well, the merch and the other stuff that people can sell, some people sell fingerings or PDFs or other things. And it's kind of unexpected to us because there's many shops in the world that exist already. For us, it was almost the secondary thing to build this. But I think because of a combination of the fact that musicians are not technical and that we enable people to really just access it at the concert, this really taps into something primal and it helps people make more money. So I think the shop is the main feature right now.
SPEAKER_06:
Yeah, I think you may have hit on something with the QR code to then give people something to do on their phone during a show. Now, some artists may not like that, they don't like the phones being on, but let's face it, consumers want to use their phone constantly. This gives them something to do. In sports games, people like to bet and do FanDuel. And so at a music event, I think it's very interesting. Okay, we're back with another segment of Pitch It to JCal. Yes, .techdomains is giving Twist listeners the chance to show off their startups on This Week in Startups. I want you to go to startups.tech, startups.tech slash Jason to apply. There's only one rule, you need to have one of those gorgeous, iconic .tech domain names to get featured. And kitex.tech, like SpaceX, KiteX is building the world's lightest and most cost effective wind turbines. It's a portable off the grid solution inspired by the efficiency of, you guessed it, kites. It's also a cost effective power source for travelers, small business, or consumers who just want to be off the grid. What an amazing idea, and this is a cool product. Go check it out at kitex.tech. I mean, this is revolutionary, very cool startup here. KiteX.tech is all about making sustainable energy more accessible, and of course, they're building on a .tech domain name. So here's your call to action. Get featured just like kitex.tech did by going to startups.tech slash Jason and applying today. Startups.tech slash Jason to fill out the form and apply today. God, I love these .tech domains. I also love the idea of dedicating a song. So I think, you know, doing dedications and saying, hey, here's the set list, buy the dedication. And if you could buy the dedication for 20 bucks and you're playing 20 songs, what does an average show? 20 songs, 10 songs?
SPEAKER_00: Something like that, depends on the show.
SPEAKER_06: Well, obviously I know it depends. I'm asking you, you're the expert. Always answer the question with a definitive number. This is an important line. Well, my personal show is I'm a classical musician
SPEAKER_00: and it's usually less than that. It's more like eight to 10.
SPEAKER_06: That's a better answer. So when you're talking to investors, always try to give them, it depends is the worst answer in the world. You know what happens when you say it depends? Your credibility goes down. I know it depends. I could always say it depends. So when you're talking to investors, that's a chance for you to seem smart. So does that make sense? Kelly should have taught you this in the training. So this is Kelly's fault, but let's try one more time and think about, I'm gonna ask you the question again and think about a way to sound super credible by giving me three data points here, but do it in 10 seconds or 15 seconds, three, two. So tell me how many songs are there in the average show, 10 to 20?
SPEAKER_00:
My shows usually have eight to 10. Pop musicians tend to play more like 20.
SPEAKER_06: Now your new answer makes you seem so credible and then I can work with that answer. Okay, so at a classical, you do 10, but a pop does 20. If a pop musician does 20 and they got $20 per song to dedicate to as a dedication, that's 400 incremental dollars. How much does a pop musician get paid to play a gig?
SPEAKER_00: Often nothing. Many musicians start out their careers with no payment. They are just happy to perform and they will perform for free. And that's this very significant use case for our product.
SPEAKER_06: Now you're learning, you're real time on the show. When I asked you the second question, you gave me a piece of information I hadn't even considered.
I never even came into mind that they're doing this for free to for exposure. So if they're doing it for exposure and they get 400 bucks from dedications and they get another 200 bucks from requests, holy cow. Now all of a sudden they're making 600 and that costs the venue nothing. And the venue doesn't care. That's just tips. Genius is tipping in there too. Can I just give a tip through the QR code?
SPEAKER_00:
Tipping was one of the first features we built. It's in there. And right now you can only give a one-time tip, but as of next week, most likely we'll have recurring tips as well.
SPEAKER_06: Ha, so you can subscribe to the person and give them a little bit extra. That's amazing. That's also- Because here's the thing.
SPEAKER_00:
Oh, sorry, sorry. I'm just excited about this. No, no, you're excited.
SPEAKER_06: Go ahead.
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you the space. Okay, here's the thing. Patreon and stuff exists, but it's for content. People expect regular video updates, regular something, content that they can consume at home. Musicians are not always content creators. It's different jobs. Some people are both, but you need this for live performing musicians too. Maybe they shout out the names of the subscribers at the beginning of the concert, or maybe they get a meet and greet, or maybe something else. But it's basically that. It's like Patreon, but for in-person performers, not content creators.
SPEAKER_06:
All right, great. And so just to tick off the reasons we like this company, Rapid Fire Kelly, you know, through our framework of investing.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so few things we like about this company. We've got two founders. One is technical. We have early traction, which actually doubled during the program. As we got to know Mircha and the team, they had incredible product velocity and really, again, growing the businesses in the time that we've gotten to know them. Great.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's a challenge. Vertical music, we don't usually like, but I put this into real world experiences. I could see this working for comedians as well. I could see it working for spoken word or improv shows. So there's a lot of possibilities here. I can see people being very creative with the QR code to live interaction model. Well done. Let's meet our next company.
SPEAKER_03: All right, thank you. We're going to move over to DotFlow next.
SPEAKER_05: Hi, my name is Spencer Tate and I'm one of the co-founders at DotFlow. You're an AI agent for personalized prospect research and outreach. Meet James. James is an e-commerce owner. He just bought a list of a thousand prospects with their first, last name, and where they work. He then has to go find personalized points on the internet to craft a perfect email to get the conversion. There's 26.5 million other e-commerce owners, just like James. So let's see how DotFlow can help James. So right off the bat, this is a little bit different than the use case. So this is how Niamh and I are using it. So this is a list of people who we're going to reach out for fundraising. We put in specific criteria for our AI agent to find news articles, sources, and then search the web.
SPEAKER_05: From there, we can say, I want a LinkedIn message, one-liner.
Now you can enrich those credits.
So what we just did is we found sources on the internet for each one of our prospects. So instead of me looking personally for where Jason worked in this example, our agent does that for us. From there, you can then shoot off a message right in DotFlow, and you can do this in a very quick manner, saving a lot of time and effort rather than going through the manual research process. So why James loves our product? He can buy credits or he can have the fullistic package where he can have a management system where he pays $100 with 250 credits. We differentiate from our competition because we automate the research process. There's competitors that automate the outreach, but we make everything personalized. So every outbound is personalized at scale. It's a large market, and we're focused on e-commerce as we see this as an underdeveloped area.
We pivoted in October during the cohort, and we already have two paying customers who bought credits. We have two people signed up for our L.I., which is our next release next week, and we have 15 businesses onboard.
Why take a bet on us? I'm a senior in college right now, while my co-founder who's in this call is a CS grad.
SPEAKER_06: So the product is very interesting. It's super compelling. The pitch is terrible. We've got to work with you on your pitch, so I always tell you to be straight. And the reason the pitch is terrible is because you are telling us this is for e-commerce, but then you're using an example for founders and investors, and the story and the examples don't make a lot of sense. So I think the audience is going to be confused by what you're doing. But let me try to pitch your company here in real time. Hey, I'm Jason from .flow. I'm the co-founder of the company. We take the job of prospecting for customers, and we automate it using AI. Let me show you how it works. Meet Kelly. Kelly works for a SaaS company, and they're looking for chief financial officers and controllers, people who work in accounting, to sell their product to. How does she do this? She spends hours and hours a day reading news stories, searching LinkedIn, and looking on the web for people to sell her product to. So what we do in .flow is, number one, put in the news sources she's looking for in the keywords. Two, we ask her for examples of profiles from Crunchbase, LinkedIn, AngelList, and other websites of people who have bought her product before. Then our AI goes to work and gives suggestions as to other people she could contact, and we allow her to then email them and write copy to try to set up a meeting. This saves her approximately 30 minutes per contact, and she is now finding, she's told us, contacts that she never considered. This is making her overall twice as effective at her job, and we charge $500 a month on average for her to use this product, $6,000. We compete with places like Zoom Info. Now I, off the top of my head, gave a much better pitch than you. So why is that? How can I do that, right? The reason is I'm not attached to all the trials and tribulations, Spencer, of your startup.
You are pivoting, you're charging, you're trying different pricing, you're doing something with a tool that's different than somebody else's, and so what you've made is a Frankenpitch. Like Frankenstein, you bolted a bunch of stuff together here in order to tell your story. You don't need to do that.
You just want to tell the story with a perfect example of who your ideal customer is. Now, if your ideal customer is an e-commerce website, great, do that, but keep that story and flow through it. I think this is a very powerful tool. I know this space well. We have an investment in a company called LeadIQ, which helps people do prospecting. We know about Zoom Info. I have a friend who works at a hedge fund that I think bought one of those or maybe bought that one, and so I understand there's LeadGen and we have SDRs here. Even this week in startups to, and at my other company inside, to go find prospects. So it's a great idea for a company. It's really interesting. I see that you have builder founders. There's two of you or three of you? Yes, two of us. Two of you, two builder founders. Do you both write code and submit code or what are your roles? So yeah, Spencer works more on the business
SPEAKER_03: and go to market and product. I work more on the code, technology and design, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, welcome to the program. Are you still using your personal number for business? Well, stop. Such a common mistake that founders make, but you never have to make that mistake again because of OpenPhone. OpenPhone has rethought every single detail of what a modern business phone should look like. OpenPhone makes it super easy to get a business phone number, not only for you, but for your entire team. And here's the magic. It works through a gorgeous app that works on your phone and your desktop. I can tell you OpenPhone is amazing because all of our sales team and ops teams use it every day. Why? I don't want people using their personal number. Then they leave the company and they're still getting phone calls from our customers, clients and partners. No, I want all of that to be professional and OpenPhone is the number one rated business phone on G2 for customer satisfaction because it's so professional and easy to use. Here's a feature I love. You can create a shared phone number with multiple employees fielding calls and texts from that number. So we want to reply to our founders, to our partners really quickly. And we don't want to miss a call. We don't want to miss a text. And that's why we use OpenPhone. And it's already affordable starting at just $13 per user per month. But Twist listeners get an extra 20% off for the first six months at openphone.com slash twist. If you got existing numbers and you're paying through the nose for some insane service, you can port those right over to OpenPhone at no extra cost. So here again is the offer. Go to openphone.com slash twist and get this all organized. Get the 20% off as well. Openphone.com slash T W I S T.
Fantastic job. Well done. And I understand according to my sources, product velocity has been really good. So nice job. Anything to add here for this company, Kelly?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think the big interesting takeaway for our audience is I've been really impressed with the .flow team in the early days of testing, which goes back to the conversation we started earlier. They started with an ICP that wasn't going to be able to move fast, wasn't going to be able to have the budgets. And they learned that really quickly. They threw it to the wind and found a new customer that will pay. And now they have a few of those and they can keep going and hopefully find a lot more of them by dogfooding their own tool.
SPEAKER_06: All right, well done. And now let's meet our fourth company.
SPEAKER_03: Clinic Assist, come on up.
SPEAKER_01: Hey Jason, my name is Shrey Srin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Clinic Assist. We help practitioners spend less time on paperwork and more in front of their patients. I'd like to meet Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee is a primary care practitioner who's overburdened by documentation. Today he spends about 35% of his time during and after appointments on charting and related tasks, coming up to almost 20 hours a week on administrative work. That's exactly where we come in with Clinic Assist. Our platform is able to use contextual conversations to create structured medical notes in real time. Additionally, we've tailored our workforce specifically for the primary care use case and letting doctors and our practitioners get up and running with our platform within the same day through a lightweight integration. And what this means for Dr. Lee is he's able to see medical charts, create suggested billing codes, draft referral letters, and even fill out insurance forms, simplifying his workflow. This means that he can cut documentation time by 25%, save five hours a week on charting, and help his practice regenerate $20,000 in lost revenue. We operate on a SaaS model with a cost per practitioner of $120 per month, as well as an API pay-per-use offering of 18 cents per note capture. We have a growing market opportunity with a TAM of more than $1.7 billion and a sum of 5,000 primary care practitioners that we're looking to capture in the next 12 to 18 months. Today, we already have more than 35 early adopters that are growing, and we have planned integrations with Docere Health as our first telemedicine partner, as well as under three EHR and telemedicine companies in our pipeline.
We have a clear path of $10 million in ARR over the next two years, starting off with our primary care beachhead and a focus on clinics in high patient volume zones. From there, we're gonna expand to capture independent and small to medium-sized clinic groups, launch our API, and expand our wider offerings. This lets us partner with clinician communities, have affiliate programs with key opinion leaders, and scale forward from there. Our team comes from health sciences, engineering, and statistics, as well as a wealth of key advisors to help us take this forward. Thank you for your time. We're Clinic Assist, and look forward to any questions you might have.
SPEAKER_06: All right, this is clearly the future, being able to take notes with voice, transcribe it, correct it, and do it in a narrow vertical works really well because you can learn over time the names of medicine and all their acronyms, et cetera. So I believe this, and in fact, when you used to buy something like Dragon Dictate, they had a legal module, they had one for doctors, et cetera. And so this makes a lot of sense to me. Looking at the founders, I see you have two technical co-founders who both went to Waterloo for CompSci, yeah? Then they're true co-founders. Yeah, computer engineering and statistics, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: True co-founders, they own over 10% equity. Right, right. Perfect. Having a very strong team. Now, this is gonna be a crowded field. I had somebody on the pod who was doing this in a venture-backed company. I forgot the name of the company. Did you know that? A bridge. Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess, tell me about how you think about competition in this space because everybody is gonna want to make doctors faster. Doctors are gonna wanna talk into their phone and have this stuff transcribed and have it be really accurate and get it into the electronic health records platform. You've got a great technical team, but there's gonna be a lot of competition here.
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, great question. So something we noticed earlier on was that the primary care workforce, specifically for these independent smaller clinics, is massively underserved. There's a lot of tech being built out for larger hospitals, these bigger kind of institutions, but we've really seen that it's those walk-in clinics, those independent practices, those small to medium-sized connect groups where they're not really getting a tailored workflow that really suits their needs. And we saw that wedge, we saw that gap, and we knew that it could be a more nuanced solution to better fit that use case. So that's where we've really tried to focus in right now and differentiate ourselves and just continue to tailor some of those processing points from there. So apart from just notes, based on feedback earlier on, we saw there were some related function sets like billing codes, insurance forms that really added those pain points. And it was a natural progression for us. So we've really tried to focus on the key use case there.
SPEAKER_06: Awesome. This is really well done. We like to bet on technical teams, yeah, Kelly. And if it's a crowded space, there's always room for innovation. You can beat other competitors based on price. You can beat them based on functionality, simplicity, verticalizing this, going after very tight verticals. So it's probably the first or second inning here. So there will be a couple of players here and hopefully you'll be one of the winners. Okay, any feedback on our last company, Kelly, in terms of how they did in the program?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so again, a really great team. We were very impressed, although they are working in a kind of challenged vertical, the fact that they would have been able, with their experience and their own networks, to get the traction that they did during the cohort, it really stood out to us.
SPEAKER_06: And you've heard Kelly and I talk about challenge verticals. What are the challenge verticals here in the US market? Healthcare, always challenged, education, and the music industry. These are three highly challenged industries. Why are they challenged? In the music industry, it's because there are a small number of rights holders who don't play nice with technology companies and startup companies. You can see that with Spotify, the only really at scale music startup company that survived. And even then, people really wonder like how much of a business can Spotify have if they have to keep renegotiating with these music labels.
Then you look at healthcare and education. Why do people worry about those? They tend to be very slow in adopting technologies. Their sales cycles are incredibly long, and there's a lot of liability and regulation in those industries. So also really hard to get going in them. Now, if you do figure it out, the great news is like Spotify, hey, if you can get escape velocity, now the music industry has to deal with Spotify. If you're in healthcare and you become the electronic records of choice, great. If you are in education and you get some sort of franchise in there, there's a bunch of different education management systems out there that have lock-in. Yeah, maybe you can build a good business, but what we found is going directly to the customers. Calm went directly to customers with their healthcare app, and education wise, brilliant.org went directly to customers. And so those things you can route around the slog. So four great companies.
We had GolfGolf, which I loved, yes. AI, great coaching. I think AI unlocks a lot of these challenges with coaching. I do like the fact that you could have a professional help. Not a bad idea. Cicada, great idea. Feels like an outlier, like a weird thing, right? And we like outliers or product outliers. This feels like that to me. It's quixotic, it's weird. Etsy was really weird. Airbnb was really weird. Patreon was weird. So you get these weird moments, but if you help people make money, Kelly, and you help them build a business, like Etsy, like eBay, Airbnb, or other odd companies, you know, Patreon, you could build a serious business. And sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But we do like product outliers. DotFlow, this was the worst pitch and maybe the best business in my mind, because finding leads, nurturing leads, people will pay for that. Why will they pay for it? Very simple, Kelly. When you have a piece of software, if you can help the sales team make more money, you say, well, how much does it cost per year? Oh, it's gonna cost 5,000 per salesperson. Okay, what's our average sale price? Okay, our average SaaS product sale is 20,000 per year. Okay, so if one in four of our salespeople, and we have eight of them, if we sell two, but two new clients a year across the eight salespeople with this tool, it pays for itself, and the third one is a creative, awesome. So you can get the ROI really, really quickly on something like that. And Clinic Assist, man, you gotta love a team with a bunch of Waterloo Comp Sci folks. That's fantastic. So put these four together, really hard to pick a winner. If you were to take me through the four, take me through which two you think would have the greatest return for our LPs in one.
SPEAKER_03: All right, so I will go number two first, which is DotFlow for all the reasons you just mentioned. I love anything in the sales tool world because if it makes salespeople sell better, faster, easier, people are gonna pay for it. My number one is definitely GolfGolf for this group. The reason here, I know we didn't go through it much today, but the bottom-up TAM here makes a lot of sense. With 0.1% of the market, they don't have to have a ton of the folks that are out there golfing. It doesn't have to be the best golfers in the world. It can be really anybody that's in that space. And so I really love the bottom-up TAM here and that's what sold me on GolfGolf. Awesome, okay.
SPEAKER_06: So just to make this easier, I gotta give the 25K to somebody. But I've got the ability to do all four, so let's just give 25K to all four and we'll see what happens. So congratulations to everybody. You each got a 25K check. I'm now your friends and family check. And let's see if we can get to the next level. If you are a seed investor, you're running Accelerator. If you like any of these companies, just contact them. And early-stage investing's a team sport. So attending my friends who run seed funds or Accelerators, go ahead and meet them. Ask Kelly for an introduction. She's kellyatlaunch.co. And I'm jasonatlaunch.co. You can email us anytime. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups.
