Startup Pitches! LAUNCH Accelerator Demo Day | E1902

SPEAKER_14: 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, UX 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. It's what I train the founders to do is to listen to the investor questions and actually answer them.Let's get started. SPEAKER_01: This 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 gusto.com slash twist.LinkedIn Jobs.A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters.Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist. And Northwest Registered Agent will form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account and more.Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC. SPEAKER_05: 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 what they're 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 are new 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 yourselves. SPEAKER_13: Thank you for that.I'm Ben Neris and I run Tenacity Venture Capital.I spun out of NEA 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 one 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. SPEAKER_12: 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. SPEAKER_02: Awesome.Thanks.Minnie, hi.Good to see you all.I'm a partner at 10.1.10.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 LA. So usually like a tech component. SPEAKER_03: Hi, everyone.Excited to be here.My name is Nicole.I'm in the investing team at Costanoa.We do pre-seed to Series A, usually leading the round.Also focused on B2B SaaS.Super excited to hear everyone's pitches today.Awesome.And Stella, welcome. SPEAKER_04: Hi, everyone.Thanks so much for having me.I work for Combative Ventures with about 450 million assets under management. Our typical check size range from two to 10 minutes, depending on the run dynamic.We're super flexible.We can lead, collate, or syndicate with other investors. SPEAKER_14: 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 a 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, UX 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. SPEAKER_05: All right.Founder number one, we have Justin from Malengo. SPEAKER_09: Hey, everyone.My name is Justin, co-founder of Malengo.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 sword.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 file straight to the factory. He receives the samples in seven days, loves the results, and when he's ready for his bulk order, Moingo gives him the best pricing, finances his order, and routes 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 Malengo 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 Malengo 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 of 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.There's 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 copilot that can prompt the factory for capacity updates, help them answer questions around order quantities and cover ways. For every step of the process, for example, if the factory has 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-backed 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 launch 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 their head with AI and we're the infrastructure or 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, has over 20 years of experience and co-created Nike's largest textile program. Jason's an investor.Cyan Bannister 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. SPEAKER_13: Justin, you may or may not know, but I started FashionMall.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 I was a menswear manufacturer for about 10 years and there's a lot.I mean, 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.I'm going to give you my patterns and then I'm not going to be able 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 uh you mentioned you know robert downey jr and under armor those are very different what's what's the sweet spot and why thank you for the great questions um ben it's awesome you have that background in the space and SPEAKER_09: The graveyard part on is this a venture-scale opportunity or not, purely 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 core number of SKUs, 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. playing 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, spin up new product lines or even new product brands with them, and really take them from 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 this process, someone can come in and make 50 units of a hoodie, even if they're just starting out.So 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 some great swag for your next startup.So check out Mlingo.com.Thank you. SPEAKER_14: 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.Payroll, HR.So I use Gusto.Gusto is the best.Gusto's payroll and HR services make running a small business much easier because it was specifically designed for you, the small business owner.And payroll is something you definitely do not want to mess up. Don't I know it.Gusto will automatically... calculate your paychecks do your payroll taxes set up open enrollment and that's not all gusto also handles onboarding health insurance the 401k time tracking commuter benefits hey people going back to work offer letters you want to get those right and they even give you access to their hr experts gusto will let you focus on the most important stuff in your business like getting product market fit or bear hugging your customers and making sure they're happy It's super easy to set up and get started.And if you're moving from another provider, Gusto can transfer all your data for you.Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, folks.So here's the best part.Because you're a Twist listener, you get three months free.Yes, that's right.Not one, not two. Three free months.All you have to do is go to gusto.com slash twist.G-U-S-T-O dot com slash twist.You must go to Gusto.Again, that's gusto.com slash twist. SPEAKER_05: Next up, we have Edward from Podcast AI. SPEAKER_10: Hi, I'm Edward, 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 thisweekinstartups.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 transcripts, 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 in 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. SPEAKER_02: Okay.I have a podcast that I run that 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 a hundred pieces of outreach on LinkedIn 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. SPEAKER_03: 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 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? SPEAKER_10: All right.Thank you.Those are some great questions.So many, 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 small businesses, okay, well, they're going to go to HubSpot to start getting their CRM going.And then they realize, well, in terms of marketing, having a podcast is a no-brainer in terms of lead generation.Even if you had 10 people listening to your podcast, if just one of them converts into a customer, 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 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 we've turned into podcasters.So the TAM 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. SPEAKER_14: The only thing I want to add 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 a thousand dollars per episode of producer time.So for 500 bucks a month, We Too Unlimited podcast, 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.And you know, it's a lot of competition for the best candidates, right?Every position counts.Market's starting to come back.You need to get the perfect person. You want a bar raiser in your organization, somebody who will raise the bar for the entire team. And LinkedIn is giving you your first job posting for free to go find that bar raiser.LinkedIn.com slash twist.And if you want to build a great company, you're going to need a great team.It's as simple as that.LinkedIn Jobs is here to make it quick and easy to hire these elite team members. And I know it's crazy, right?LinkedIn has more than a billion users.We all watch this happen when it was tens of millions, then hundreds of millions, and now a billion people using the service.This means that you're going to get access to active and passive job seekers. Active job seekers, they're out there looking.Passive job seekers, they got a job. but it's not as good as the job you're offering them.So you want to get in front of both of those people.Maybe somebody got laid off, wasn't their fault, and they're an ideal candidate.Get that active job seeker.And LinkedIn also knows that small businesses are wearing so many hats right now, and you might not have the time or resources to devote to hiring.So let LinkedIn make it automatic for you.Go post an open job role.You get that purple hiring ring on your profile. You start posting interesting content.You watch the qualified candidates.They just roll in.And guess what?First one's on us.Call to action. Very simple, linkedin.com slash T-W-I-S-T, linkedin.com slash twist.That'll get you your first job posting for free on your boy J-Cal.Terms and conditions do apply.All right, Daniel from Tolk. SPEAKER_00: Hi, my name is Daniel.I'm the co-founder and CEO of Tolt, a SaaS platform that helps technology startups launch and grow partnership programs.So let's get to the problem we are trying to solve.Meet Jeremy.Jeremy is a market leader at Practice, a startup that offers mobile CRM to small business owners.And they had users like Amanda that loved 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 track of 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 Tolt.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 can 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 label the 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 download some messages that Jeremy uploaded and keep track 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 with Tolt for nine months now, and so far they've seen 7x return on their affiliate marketing investment.And that also included the Tolt subscription that they pay. 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%.We have some amazing startups using Tolt like Perplexity and Speak. We also have a perfect five score on reviews such as Capera.So I'm happy to say that our users are enjoying using TALT.Our business model is pretty simple.We are a B2B SaaS, and our pricing is based on how much each startup earns from their affiliate program.So the bigger the program, the bigger they pay for us. The reason we believe TOLT is better than the competition is because the competitors have been around for quite a few years now, and so far they have been very neglected in innovating in this space, while TOLT is trying to push as much as innovative features as possible, such as integration with crypto payment providers, autopayouts, branded partner portal referral programs, and much, much more. Right now, we are acquiring most of our customers organically, either through Google or through social media channels where our existing users recommend us to their followers. Our 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, Reunicat, and other crypto payment providers.For the $10 million mark, we need to launch a referral marketing solution where startups can launch an in-app referral program for their existing users.And for the $100 million mark, we need to be the go-to place for any kind of partnership program. This is the team behind Toll.We are two brothers that have worked together for a few years now.And previously, we have successfully exited two small startups.That's Toll.Helping side startups launch and grow partnership programs. Thank you. SPEAKER_04: I'm curious here for your customers.How about why they don't use something like CRM or other 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 partner's data on it, why they can use that.And second question is also about the mode of this product.I'm curious there, how you can kind of protect your product in long term if anyone want to copy it. SPEAKER_12: 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. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you for the question.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 make it very easy for them to track all their referrals.So if they're using a CRM, they will still need to log into the CRM every time an affiliate actually submits a referral.So an affiliate submits a referral, then they need to log into their CRM and then map that referral with the affiliate.But with Tolt, it's actually extremely easy to just do that because we actually have an integration with payment providers like Stripe, Paddle, and Chargebee, where we make it extremely easy to to track and to check the referrals.And how we actually plan to protect the product, like 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 grow 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 churn.So really, the churn for us is actually extremely low.And the main reason for that is once a startup actually launches a partner program, they already 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 recurring 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 to the program.Thanks for this answer to your question. SPEAKER_06: 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 spin up 100 save-the-date 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 edit access for the event.James just has to choose locations, set 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 pic and post it on social.It tags the besties and they get tons of fan-generated content.Whoever's doing the admin can see 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, and we're at $1,750 in 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 untapped.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 Sauce Labs back in 2013.And we're backed 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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SPEAKER_02: Minnie, you're up next.Question for Ray.Yeah, I love that picture of Jason, by the way.I was wondering, 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. SPEAKER_03: 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 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 on that? SPEAKER_06: What's fundamentally different from platforms like Meetup?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 Ramit Sethi the next day.It's just kind of the big fish kind of bring in those medium-sized communities.And I think people are usually surprised that Like we have 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 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 audience activation is the most used part.So we'll spin up these events that are kind of save the dates.You kind of funnel your audience through and everyone organizes themselves in each city.So that's the most powerful.Haven't really gotten to fully squeeze the juice out of the data and that audience layer.But I will say like... When we did My First Million, Sam and Sean, they got a thousand new emails that I don't think they had before.And then Ryan is on our team, deep skills in 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 Heiferman the other day.So meetup is completely fragmented.There's no central leadership from the community organizer or a leader. So you end up getting people who want to hike on Saturday and then people who want to hike on Saturday with dogs.And because there's no centralization, things kind of fragment and fall apart really quickly.And then because we have this 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 than ever were possible before.All right, I'll leave it there.Thank you so much. SPEAKER_14: 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, which is really difficult to do, but they kind of raise their hands and say, I want to host a 5 or 10 or 20 person meetup in San Carlos or Buenos Aires.I mean, it's super powerful.And Those 1,000 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 $50,000, $60,000, $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.Yeah. Yeah, we're really, really excited about it.And the thing that I'm most excited about as an investor in this is the... Who's the lunatic with the Don't Die? SPEAKER_06: Brian Johnson. SPEAKER_14: And then who's the other lunatic with wanting to not have governments?And... I always follow lunatics. Cause 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 Bology to do this and for Brian to do it is that to me, it made me really excited as an investor.So. I think this like 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, but Brian was using discord before he had 10 events. 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 didn't want lawyers and accountants and headhunters to hijack our audience.And so we only allow, you know, in our group, it's for 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. SPEAKER_05: Next up, Cash from TaxGPT. SPEAKER_08: Hello everyone, Cash here from TaxGPT.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 TaxGPT and automating their research questions and email generation with TaxGPT.Let me show you how.If someone comes to Mark with a complex tax question, he can ask that question to TaxGPT.TaxGPT not only answers the goal instantly, but also provides gold standard sources as compared to ChatGPT or all the other free tools and suggested questions. um for example here's uh 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 uh mark who's a tax person can see all of his team members and all of his clients if a client asks a question TaxGPD 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 the control.He can edit this response and send it to the client. In our product roadmap, 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 GPT 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're mom and pop shop.They're not building anything LLM related in house. Right now, we are charging only $1,000 for annual license, but in the future, it will go up to $5,000 annual license. There are 3.4 million tax professionals and accountants that give us a total initial addressable market of $17 billion, but the actual addressable market is $260 billion to decrease the inefficiencies in the system. 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 CAC is completely zero. word of mouth, search engine optimization, and social media.But in the future, we are planning, right now, we are partnering with CPA Academy, National Road Agents of America.And we are in serious discussions with Drake Software that sell their software to already 100,000 tax offices. and going to the industry-specific conferences.Our competition is, we don't see them as a competition, we do see them as partners because they are on the tax filing side of the business.We are automating the tax provision side of the business and embedding AI into daily workflows to decrease the time spent on mundane tasks for tax professionals and accountants. I previously worked for Adobe, so I have experience building enterprise-grade software.I'm personally getting a taxpayer license.Isabella previously worked for Oracle, went to Berkeley.She's an AI cybersecurity expert in-house.Andrew is our founding CPA.He previously worked with Lloyd, and we have amazing experience as an investor.TaxGPT is building an AI co-pilot for tax professionals.Thank you so much. SPEAKER_04: All right.Thanks, Cash.Hey, I'm curious about what's your data source to train a model for this tax GPT?And the second question is, what's the long-term goal for your product?Currently, I think you focus more on tax prep.Would you ever consider to expand to a tax filing in long-term? SPEAKER_13: 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 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 TurboTax 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, 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. SPEAKER_08: 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 scrapped that.But also we have proprietary information.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 proprietary in that.Long-term vision in terms of tax filing, it's not out of the question.I think AI has... given us so much creativity, like previously, like WK of the world, that is $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 be built 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 other 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 Thomson Writers and Bloomberg, What is propriety do they have?They have their own 20 people team that is providing the tax opinion.They call it secondary sources that is explaining the law.We have much better, 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, 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 4x4Hire offered and we rejected it.And there is time for us to build it.Thank you so much.Happy to answer the questions later. SPEAKER_05: All right, thanks so much, Cash.Next up, we have George from Fanfare. SPEAKER_11: 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 signup.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 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 don'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 subscription's worth out of discounts.$240 is the annual revenue per superfan subscription, so when we have 400,000 superfans, will hit $100 million in annual revenue.Compared to Patreon, Etsy, and Kickstarter, Fanfare is the only platform that offers advanced discovery, landing pages, pre-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. SPEAKER_12: 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. SPEAKER_02: 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 people, the users are getting more engagement from your platform than they would on a Kickstarter or something a little bit more generic. SPEAKER_03: 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? SPEAKER_11: All right.Thank you all 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 out 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. Then ultimately, you can do a full 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 to Shopify Plus.And so also in terms of engagement, what we've noticed is that people who engage with an idea at a very early stage tend to 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 gaming assets, whereas Patreon is maybe a little bit better for someone who has a podcast or 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. SPEAKER_05: Thanks, George.And for our seventh founder, we have Jam from Monarch AI. SPEAKER_07: Hi, everyone.Jam from Monarch AI, 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 plans to attend medical school.Like many of your peers, she ends up using platforms like Check 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 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 focuses 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 Monarch 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 in 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.Now 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 to Monarch and through our SEO.So why now and why us?LLMs have really made the document intelligent a commodity that actually lets us compete with the incumbents in the area like the Cheggs and the Coursiers 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 phase.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 U.S.every single year outside of the high school and college system.And that takes about four weeks on average of prep time.And people spend from $100,000 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 the platform and currently running a $60,000 grant and a pilot program with Cyber Florida. Our path to 100 million ARR starts with getting to 200,000 subscriptions in B2C 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. SPEAKER_04: Hey, I'm curious.It seems like you sell both for enterprises and also individual side and also its marketplace.How would you pivot your sales strategy here in the long-term goal?What's your focus here for these three tiers of the businesses? SPEAKER_13: 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's 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. SPEAKER_05: Is it a matter of time?Craig is asking before the platform may get banned, like competitors that you mentioned. SPEAKER_07: Thank you for the questions.So I'm going to start with the enterprise B2C and marketplace.And it does seem like we are kind of segmented around, but B2C 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 to the 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. It's 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 can 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 algorithm is 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 dataset I think very few companies will have out there.And also we're moving away from the LMS to the open source ones ourselves as well as we build these datasets.So we can have a different conversion point from what the public has. Craig, will the platforms will get banned? Absolutely not, I think, because we're actually working with the professors directly because we want to be the ethical alternative to platforms like Course Hero and Check On Campuses.And that's why we're bringing them into the conversation so they could be our partners in distribution, both and 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. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I am in reverse order from the last three pitches.The last pitch being three with Monarch, two being Fanfare and one being TaxGPT. 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 gonna be incredibly hard to create a defensible moat 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, which 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. SPEAKER_12: In third, I had Monarch AI.In second, I had Malengo.And then first for me was River.I 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 it seems like some really exciting early traction. SPEAKER_02: Yeah.Agreed with Jason.Best cohort.This was great.Hard to decide.I went River number three, Fanfare number two, Malengo number one.Malengo is a good fit for a lot of the things I've been thinking about with manufacturing, onshoring, mirrorshoring.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. SPEAKER_03: First of all, I want to say congrats to everyone who pitched today.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, Malingo, 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. SPEAKER_04: Hey, thanks so much for the presentation today.And my number three is money.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 pain point. So I like the market overall. Although I might find it might be a little 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 change. SPEAKER_14: 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 Foundry 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 to that program and invest in the top 10%, so net at 1%.And then if you have anybody who's got 10% to... 5, 10, 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.They're 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 who are doing partying. rounds and doing pretty well they're passing that so whatever it takes to get that 500k to million five in when you're a c company like this um and then get back to delighting your customers see y'all next time bye