University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups | $5000 Prize Money (#396)

Student Ventures, Shark Tank Style, $5,000 Prize - December 16, 2022 (over 2 years ago) • 01:13:34

This My First Million podcast episode features a Shark Tank-style pitch competition with University of Michigan students. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri judge five student ventures, offering feedback and a $5,000 prize to the winner. The episode highlights the impressive quality of the young entrepreneurs and their innovative ideas.

Area: Jake Lewin pitches Area, a company using RFID tags to bring e-commerce capabilities to in-person retail, enabling features like autonomous checkout and personalized upsells. Sam and Shaan commend the idea's potential but question the go-to-market strategy, suggesting partnerships with large retailers like Walmart.
Internet Activism: Anand Siddha presents Internet Activism, a non-profit developing software for humanitarian crises. They highlight past projects like a Ukrainian refugee housing website and a COVID-19 tracker. Sam and Shaan praise their mission and impressive achievements with a small team.
Seafarer: Jason pitches Seafarer, payroll and onboarding software for the maritime industry, addressing the challenges of multi-national crews and complex documentation. Shaan expresses interest in investing, while Sam is impressed by Jason's understanding of the market and sales experience.
Yofei: Jordan Shamir pitches Yofei, a platform using real-time data analysis to help brands identify their best customers and mitigate bot activity. Sam and Shaan find the pitch confusing and advise Jordan to simplify their messaging and focus on a specific target customer.
DealDog: Dolan Dworak pitches DealDog, a verified student marketplace for buying and selling items like football tickets and clothing. While impressed by the traction, Sam and Shaan question the market size and scalability, suggesting a focus on niche markets.

Sam and Shaan ultimately award the $5,000 prize to Internet Activism for their impactful mission, impressive execution, and dedicated team.

Transcript:

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	The way you like how he was like, "So, sharks? You wanna come take a swim in the maritime industry?"
00:06	Hubspot	these kids are the best this is
00:08	Sam Parr	the greatest thing I've ever seen I thought this
00:10	Shaan Puri	was gonna be stupid
00:11	Sam Parr	These guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.
00:17	Shaan Puri	also if this is like the bar if this is the normal bar
00:20	Shaan Puri	Of college entrepreneurs, then like, you know, I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had short shorts and nobody could use their left hand. It was like a huge basket for a hoop. It's like, "Oh wow, these guys can jump," you know?
00:33	Sam Parr	it's like we just like lebron just learned how to lift weights like that's what this feels like
00:44	Shaan Puri	Alright, what’s up? We have a special episode. This is like a Shark Tank-style episode, so this is the My First Million pitch competition. We have the University of Michigan, so the Wolverines are here. We have five companies, I believe. Each company is going to have two minutes to pitch, followed by a five-minute Q&A. The winner will receive $5,000 at the end, as decided by me and Sam, based on who is the best at pitching. Little do people know, this is how I became an entrepreneur. I was going to be a doctor, and then I entered a pitch competition at my university and I won that baby for $25. That was what got me on the path of entrepreneurship altogether. I would have never, ever, ever done startups if it wasn't for that competition that we randomly entered. So, this could be, for somebody out there, their break too. Here we go, University of Michigan pitch competition! First up, who is it? Jake? So, Jake from Area, is that right?
01:42	Jake Lewin	yes hey guys
01:44	Shaan Puri	what's up alright 2 minutes it's all yours go
01:46	Jake Lewin	cool so hey guys my name is jake I'm the founder of area we're bringing ecommerceabilities to in person shopping and so as an ecommerce business owner myself we we know quite a bit about our customers such as who they are what they're interested and how they engage with our business and so this this type of information informs all aspects of our operations from developing new products and then driving more sales and so the question that comes to mind is why aren't these same necessities available to retail business owners why is this limited to just ecommerce and this happens because the source of the transaction which is the barcode at aria we're making a new type of product code that brings ecommerce abilities to retail so this is called onetag it uses radio frequency identification this is the same type of technology in contactless credit cards and garage door openers and it recently became affordable at a mass scale and onetag is super versatile there's a lot of uses for it it costs pennies to manufacture and it's printed on a sticker to attach your merchandise so by replacing the barcode with one tag retailers unlock new capabilities in a variety of things I'm gonna go into one example now so this is a traditional retail setup you have your products and then you have barcodes and each one is individually scanned instead of that let's just replace all of these barcodes with one tag so now a shopper can just bag all items as they shop and then they can pretty much just walk through an antenna which instantly scans all of their items at once and then payment can be done through a kiosk for quick self checkout or through an app that uses something called ultra wideband which is a new type of technology that's brought to iphone in as recent as 2019 and so this pretty much tracks location of the customer and shows what products they purchased and how they purchased it and so you could pretty much walk out and then payments instantly process as you walk out just like amazon go so what this does in addition to autonomous checkout is it brings a bunch of ecommerce capabilities to retail so now we have an ecommerce profile for a bunch of offline purchases and this allows us to abandon cart recovery personalized product upsells in-depth shopping data and subscription reorders there's also loss prevention built right in and then the location accuracy of rfid is super high so inventory management is like pretty easy all you really have to do is is put an item in its proper location and then if an item is ever misplaced area pretty much will map the entire location of all these items and so instead of like arduous stock checks you can pretty much just instantly know where things are misplaced and address those directly and so yeah that's my product this is one tag it's checkout security and inventory all in one product and most importantly it brings ecommerce abilities to retail
05:05	Sam Parr	jake what type of ecommerce storm do you own
05:09	Jake Lewin	I own a sex chocolate brand
05:12	Sam Parr	what is it called
05:13	Jake Lewin	it's called tabs chocolate
05:15	Sam Parr	Yeah, we've talked about you a fair bit on the pod, I think. You've got like a crazy Instagram or TikTok or something like that.
05:23	Jake Lewin	yeah we go viral on tiktok pretty frequently
05:25	Sam Parr	yeah that's cool wait you're in college
05:28	Jake Lewin	I am I'm a sophomore now
05:29	Sam Parr	my god okay cool
05:32	Shaan Puri	alright so sam what do you think
05:34	Sam Parr	Yeah, so I've talked to a few companies in this space. I know there are a few people trying to tackle it, and some of them I think are actually quite big. One of the most interesting concepts, so basically Jake explained it in a more sophisticated way. I'm going to explain it in a more simple way. It's like this little tag goes into clothing, and you can track the clothing's history and things like that. I saw a company that was doing this with high-end luxury goods. I don't know if this was their customer, but basically, this tag would get sewn inside of a Louis Vuitton purse. You know how people buy and sell used purses? You could see where it originally came from and who originally bought it. As a collector of old stuff, I thought that was awesome. I thought that was great. So, it's interesting technology to me. I don't really know this market that well, but I do think there are a few people doing this right, Sean.
06:27	Shaan Puri	well I I think you are looking only at a little niche use case it seems like
06:32	Sam Parr	to me what they're
06:32	Shaan Puri	Doing is they're trying to take the Amazon Go store. Amazon's like, "Hey, what if there was a grocery store where you could walk in and just walk out? There's no checkout process." Right? That's more efficient, it's more convenient, and it's lower cost because you don't have to employ all these checkout folks at the store. They're trying to provide that as a service, like any store should be able to have that if they want. It's kind of the next level of self-checkout, I think, and I think that's a cool idea. It ticks a lot of boxes. So, technology that really wasn't possible or wasn't cheap enough until a few years ago... I like that. These little, I don't know if they're called NFC chips or whatever, but the very cheap ones—like pennies—to manufacture or add these little chips to any kind of goods. I think that's really great that that's now possible. It wasn't possible before. I think it's clearly cheaper and faster for the person who's doing it. But I do have some problems with your pitch, so I'm going to give you like three bits of pitch feedback for you, alright Jake?
07:39	Sam Parr	So keep in mind, though, he's doing this in the most hood rat way ever. Right now, we've got one person talking, another person hitting slides, and there's a delay. So, go a little easier.
07:49	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, and of course, of course. Also, he's like sideways on my screen, so that doesn't help. But basically, the main things I would have said in the pitch are: 1. You have three major ways that you could have presented this. Number one, you could have shown a barcode and just been like, "Can you believe this hasn't been upgraded in like 100 years? This is the same thing we've been using for 75 years. We got iPhones, we got all this crazy stuff, all this amazing technology, but the barcode is still the same." You could have presented it from that angle: the barcode is outdated. We're revolutionizing the barcode, and the barcode's on everything. So, that's how big this idea is going to be. 2. The second thing is that we're taking the Amazon Go checkout and making it available to any store. That's a very simple way for me to understand what you're talking about. 3. The third thing is that you have a really cool backstory with the chocolate stuff. You could say, "I'm Jake, I'm a sophomore in college. This year, I sold $4,000,000 worth of sex chocolate. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a hustler. I don't think my career is going to be, you know, I don't think sex chocolate is the big idea for me, but it led me to what I think is the big idea." Already, I'd be hooked because I'm like, "Who is this college sophomore that sold $4,000,000 of sex chocolate? Tell me more!" So, that's my pitch feedback for you on that side. On the actual idea itself, the part I felt was lacking was the go-to-market strategy. This was all about technology, technology, technology, but how are you going to get customers? Are these stores going to be willing to revamp? Are customers going to understand what the hell is going on? I think that's where a company like this would struggle, but you didn't really talk about that at all. So, can you talk about how you're going to get your first, you know, 10 or 100 customers? Have you done that already, or how are you going to do it?
09:35	Jake Lewin	Absolutely! Yeah, I'm talking to customers right now. There would really be no retrofitting for a store. The first MVP would be pretty much an iPad kiosk that's self-checkout.
09:47	Shaan Puri	but they have to tag every product right
09:49	Jake Lewin	They do, yeah. But a lot of retailers, especially small retailers, don't even use a Universal Product Code (UPC). They have to tag barcodes, so it's not really an increase in labor. The way I'm envisioning the MVP is that customers already have to check out somehow. They go to the front desk, and there's an iPad there that says "Instant Checkout." They put their bag there and pay with a credit card. Then, soon, you could add in things like antennas with that inventory. Ultimately, it's hard to just check out with a map.
10:17	Shaan Puri	So, who are you going for? Like small stores, big stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, huge brands... what are you going for?
10:24	Jake Lewin	I'm thinking clothing stores and convenience stores, at least initially. So, convenience stores give a lot of the benefits of the "just walk out" stuff, the convenience aspect. Clothing stores prioritize the e-commerce abilities a lot more to be able to retarget customers and be a little bit more pointed with the way they're selling things.
10:42	Sam Parr	jake how old are you
10:43	Jake Lewin	I'm 20
10:44	Sam Parr	how big is tabs
10:46	Jake Lewin	It's actually less than $4,000,000. It's about $2,000,000 this year. We got $800,000 profit, and we started a year ago today.
10:54	Sam Parr	So, for how young and impressive you are, I've got incredibly high standards because you're amazing. I mean, you're a certified badass with your background and how young you are. Thanks! I am shocked at how much you are screwing this up though, like with this pitch because...
11:13	Shaan Puri	first you build them up then you talk to him
11:16	Sam Parr	My standards with him are so high because I would invest in a lot of things that this guy does just because he's him. I think if you're that young and you're this successful already, you clearly have some type of "it" factor. Jonathan, by the way, can you mute them? You clearly have some type of "it" factor. Sorry, and you're amazing. I think, though, that when Sean nailed it, what he said—I don't think he said it this way, but basically, this isn't really a tech problem. The tech exists, and you're going to be working on that. This is a distribution and marketing problem. Can you just get this in the hands of the right people? I don't have a lot of experience selling to convenience stores and things like that. I think that would be a pain unless you got like a 7-Eleven or something like that. But I think going from store to store is going to be the worst. Anyway, I think this is like a distribution and customer acquisition problem. It's a...
12:07	Shaan Puri	sales problem
12:08	Sam Parr	yeah and
12:08	Shaan Puri	You're problem... If you're going to sell to a convenience store, like the dude who owns the convenience store is working there. That will tell you how much he thinks about efficiency, right? He just sits there all day. If you're like, "Hey, you have 4,000 SKUs on your shelves. Could you just add this tab to it? When a customer comes in, you could tell them just to walk out," he'd be like, "Actually, it's fine. I actually want them to come to the front counter so they buy a 5-hour energy drink and a lotto ticket. I don't want them to just walk out. That's like half the revenue." So, you know, I think that... If I were you, what I would say is, "Who needs this?" Well, I guess if I were you, I'd probably actually lean on your strengths. You're good at TikTok and stuff like that.
12:49	Sam Parr	my. It's like you're good
12:50	Shaan Puri	at shit
12:51	Sam Parr	that he doesn't get this
12:52	Shaan Puri	People are bad at... you're doing a product that old people would be good at, which is basically enterprise sales. Going to Kroger and showing them that with this increase in efficiency or retargeting, or whatever, they're going to get a 4% impact to their operations. That's a huge number for them, but that takes... that's like a year-long rollout or whatever. I think the SMB sale problem is going to be pretty tough here. So that's what I would say are the weaknesses. But really cool idea! The good thing is, I do think this is inevitable. I think this is where all retail is going. It's the "how" it's going to get there that's sort of the challenge. And so, you know, that's the opportunity also.
13:32	Jake Lewin	I think it's definitely going to be challenging to acquire the first initial customers. The way this works, though, is that it gets easier over time. You could build leverage with brands and have them install the tag itself. This is obviously a long-term goal, but once it's similar to a UPC where it's applied at checkout, the barrier to entry for a retailer to carry an area or carry one tag in their store is virtually the same. A lot of these benefits are actually pretty relevant to retailers. It's not really like this kind of archaic, old thing. So, I think it's definitely going to be challenging to go door to door and pitch. I think there definitely would need to be some sort of investor or person that could introduce me to a bigger chain, where we could do a rollout of this that's much more efficient. But yeah, I mean, you're definitely right; it's going to take some legwork to get someone on board.
14:27	Shaan Puri	If I were you, there's a thing called Walmart Labs that you should check out. Walmart has basically a giant innovation department, or at least they did. I don't know if this is still around, but they acquired a bunch of startups and put millions of dollars into Walmart Labs, where they were going to experiment with technology. Since Walmart is the biggest retailer, that 1% matters a lot. I would go talk to them and say, "Hey, here's what we're thinking about." I think that conversation will be pretty illuminating to figure out, like, you know, what is the appetite, what are the concerns, and how would you realistically get this into stores? So that would be my suggestion as a next step.
15:05	Sam Parr	And I actually think that a lot. I know I'm currently filming this in Austin right now. HEB has an innovation lab. I would imagine Costco and Sam's Club, which is also Walmart, do as well. But I think that as a 19, 20, or 21-year-old person with a really successful background, you actually have this massive advantage. You can go to some of these executives at big companies—these gray-haired executives—and when they meet someone like you, they think, "You're special." It's their job to collect interesting talent and to be on the latest and greatest, to know what's happening. I don't know if you're going to pull this off, but I want to be in business with you. I think like 3 out of 20 people you talk to would give you a chance just because of your success and your age. I think you should use every advantage you have.
15:52	Shaan Puri	do you
15:52	Jake Lewin	think I go to big retailers initially versus small
15:55	Sam Parr	shops I 100% would I would I would go big right away
15:58	Shaan Puri	I think big retailers consider this stuff in a more serious way. They need to be innovating, and these efficiencies mean a lot more to them. They can sort of mandate these rollouts. So, I think that's the play. Sam's totally right; there's going to be the executive who's like, "I love this!" You're going to be like, "Wow, he loves the technology." He's going to tell you, "You gotta meet my son. He needs to be more like you." The draw is going to be that he wants his 18-year-old son to hang out with you so that he could be more like you. You know, that actually could get you a long way. That actually happened to me several times between the ages of 18 and 24. I got so many either investors or introductions just because people thought it was endearing that I was this young kid who believed in this "stupid thing" and was going for it. They saw that I was clearly smart and going to do things later. They just wanted that energy around them; they wanted to support it.
16:51	Sam Parr	They go, "I just want a piece of the action. I don't know what it's gonna be, but like when you see anyone who's at the top, oftentimes they'll be like, 'I appreciate young hustlers who are like, they're gonna be the real deal. I see myself in you,' whatever it is." And they build a relationship. I would 100% use that because there's like this 5 or 6 year window when you're still considered a prodigy, and you should just like pounce on that. Right? Thanks, Jake.
17:14	Jake Lewin	thank you guys
17:15	Shaan Puri	Thanks, Jake. Alright, who's next? We got Anant from Internet Activism. By the way, that guy's pitch was like a freaking Pixar movie or something. It was animated in Figma! Like, kids these days, they got the tools, man. I don't even know how to do that. Have you ever even seen that before?
17:33	Anand Siddha	no that was all designed in figma yeah
17:36	Shaan Puri	that was impressive
17:37	Sam Parr	This one looks good too. I like internet activism. I'm clicking on your deck now. I like your hacker design; it's cool.
17:44	Shaan Puri	alright 2 minutes it's all yours go alright
17:46	Anand Siddha	My name's Anad Sinha. I'm the CTO of an organization called Internet Activism. Currently, the world is online; over 64% of the world has access to the internet. In the world's poorest communities, people are more likely to have access to a cell phone than a toilet. However, the internet's potential when it comes to distributing humanitarian software is heavily underutilized. In response to this, Internet Activism is the first nonprofit solely dedicated to developing software in response to humanitarian disasters. Now, I'm going to walk you through a couple of examples of what this actually looks like. In March 2022, we launched a website called "Ukraine Take Shelter." This is essentially like Airbnb for refugees. We connected refugees with potential hosts, and over the last year, we've been able to house over 100,000 refugees, which has cost $10,000 in spending.
18:44	Sam Parr	how did you track that like you you know for a fact you put them in their home
18:48	Anand Siddha	Yeah, another example of a project we worked on is the world's most popular coronavirus tracking dashboard. This was launched in January 2020, before COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. It was used by over 600 million people and was recognized by Dr. Fauci as an invaluable resource in distributing COVID-19 information. We were also recognized for being able to compile coronavirus data faster than the CDC and share it with the general public. Now, moving on to what we're doing right now, we're building out an app called Hyperlocal. This essentially allows people to message each other just using Bluetooth. So, if you don't have access to data, Wi-Fi, or cellular service, you can still message others using Bluetooth, even if they aren't right near you. We can carry, store, and forward messages, so messages can hop between people across large distances. This app is completely decentralized, censorship-resistant, and secure. We envision this to soon be a vital part of the modern-day emergency toolkit. The central thesis for our organization is being low-cost, having a quick response time, and building with small teams. We're going to build out an entire suite of products that we can tweak in a matter of days or hours to respond to crises around the world. Our main goal is to bridge the gap between the tech sector and humanitarian organizations. Our leadership consists of the world's leading internet activists, exited founders, and highly talented designers and developers. We're all young, ambitious, and we build really, really fast.
20:29	Shaan Puri	yeah
20:30	Anand Siddha	And when Christ occurs next, we'll be ready to respond and move on to questions.
20:37	Shaan Puri	wow wow that was incredible
20:39	Bobby Housel	did you
20:40	Shaan Puri	yeah who who
20:41	Shaan Puri	are you
20:41	Sam Parr	these people are fucking amazing by the way how old are how old
20:44	Anand Siddha	are you 21
20:46	Sam Parr	and you're in college yeah why
20:51	Anand Siddha	I'm asking myself that question too. I'm probably going to take a gap semester, or a permanent gap semester, starting next month.
20:58	Shaan Puri	This is amazing! Well done. From the start, the pitch was incredible. You know, the world's poorest communities are more likely to have a cell phone than access to a toilet. That is a great attention-grabbing hook—something that really grabs them by the throat. Then you backed it up by saying, "We're going to do this thing. We're basically going to develop software for humanitarian disasters." Okay, sounds interesting, but you've actually done it! It's super impressive that you guys did this Airbnb thing and housed 100,000 refugees. I remember using this coronavirus tracker that...
21:37	Sam Parr	you guys made
21:39	Shaan Puri	so that's kind of amazing as well and it sounds like
21:42	Sam Parr	how much traffic did you say that one got
21:44	Anand Siddha	It had over 600 million users and a peak of 36 million daily active users, with 34 million daily active users.
21:50	Shaan Puri	And how did it get so popular? What did you do? Did you just release it to the world, or did it just go viral? Was there any growth in marketing around it?
21:58	Anand Siddha	I believe it was because of how early it was released. This was before Johns Hopkins started publicly aggregating all the data and releasing it. We just had an advantage of being one of the first people to compile all this data and share it with everyone. Again, this was in January 2020, so this was 3 months before the pandemic officially began. This was just in the early stages of the pandemic.
22:18	Shaan Puri	And so, you said this. You show this leadership team, which is three people. How many people are there total in your group or your organization that actively do stuff?
22:26	Anand Siddha	currently there are 5 people wow
22:28	Shaan Puri	so you're a 5 person team all of you guys are like you know college age is that it
22:32	Anand Siddha	yeah everyone's in between the ages of 1921
22:36	Sam Parr	have you made any money from any of us
22:38	Anand Siddha	Government grants and donations... We're a 501(c)(3), so we're going to be raising funds over the next few months. Our grand vision right now is that we're going full force with the nonprofit. These are just a couple of cool projects, but this is small in comparison to what we're going to do over the next few years. We want to build an entire suite of tools so that whenever a crisis occurs, we can just tweak it and then quickly deploy it in a matter of hours or days. If you look at current nonprofits, the amount of time it takes to respond to a situation can be months or even years. We're going to be able to do that in hours. We're going to become one of...
23:14	Shaan Puri	the many nonprofits are like run by hackers right
23:18	Anand Siddha	No one does this. That's why we worked on these projects in the past and we're like, "Why is no one else doing this?" We see how powerful the internet is in terms of distributing these solutions. We see that it can literally save lives. So if no other organization is going to do it, we're going to do it.
23:33	Sam Parr	but why is there an incentive for a for profit investor
23:37	Anand Siddha	This isn't for profit. This is more about taking donations. We're a nonprofit organization.
23:43	Sam Parr	But is there a way? Okay, maybe there's a philosophical reason why you're doing that, which is totally cool. I won't debate you on that, but if no...
23:54	Anand Siddha	No, we can talk about that. If we do make this a for-profit company and we're going into countries where we're establishing a presence, we're becoming their central means of communication. If we come across as a for-profit company, people are going to question what our main incentives are. Again, we're not trying to distribute this in just one or two countries. With the app that I was discussing before, Hyperlocal, let me walk you through that real quick. Basically, it allows people to message each other using Bluetooth. So, if a government shuts down Wi-Fi access, like we're seeing in Iran right now, you can still message people close to you or across an entire city. You can bounce messages across everyone in between you and that person who has the app downloaded, even if their phone is off. So, if we just think of...
24:38	Shaan Puri	This has happened before, right? These mesh network-like messaging apps kind of took off. I remember when they were used at festivals where there was no service, and then in some disaster zones, they were using these.
24:49	Anand Siddha	The thing is that most of these mesh networking apps, their UI and UX sucks. We're going to improve that. They don't have store and carry. So, say you're standing near me; I can message you pretty easily. But if I want to message someone who's a mile away, my message cannot get to them. What we're doing is essentially... and first of all, our messages are completely encrypted. But say I want to message someone who's on the other side of a city. If I want to message them, every person I come across will store my message and be like, "Anant is trying to message this other person." So, once they walk across other people, they're also going to be carrying my message until it eventually reaches that person. This way, you're able to create a virus effect, spread messages, and create entire decentralized networks in cities.
25:34	Sam Parr	what are you and your team motivated by why are you doing this
25:37	Anand Siddha	We want to have a positive impact on the world. Basically, we know that there are existing solutions that can help people around the world. We know that we can potentially save lives or just make the world a better place in general.
25:51	Sam Parr	But just to reiterate, this is not a profit-making thing, and that is not your intention ever. You are just doing this because I imagine it's incredibly fun and because you just want to make the world better. Is that right?
26:04	Anand Siddha	Yeah, basically look, if you see that there's a problem in the world and you know that you have the means to create a solution for it, if you walk away from that solution, our entire team would basically be bystanders. And our team isn't bystanders.
26:16	Shaan Puri	man this was this was great
26:18	Sam Parr	you're you're he you're a visionary I I mean I I think this guy's fucking badass
26:23	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think what you guys have done is amazing. I think it's really cool to see a nonprofit that's driven by, you know, a handful of builders like engineers... hackers, for lack of a better word. Not gonna lie, it's gonna be a hard pitch to beat. So, you know, I'm just gonna put that out there. The bar is gonna be high.
26:43	Anand Siddha	Our team consists of five people, but we're planning on scaling this as fast as possible. Half of our team right now is full-time students. I'm a computer science student here at the University of Michigan. I have a lot of workload, but as soon as this semester ends, this is all we're going to be working on.
26:57	Sam Parr	hasn't university of michigan been like dude bail here's money you're good
27:02	Anand Siddha	that would be a good question for the university
27:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah, both of the first two pitches got the "My First Million" bachelor's degree of, you know, you got a BA, badass from art from us. You don't need to finish school. The one thing you should do, though, is shout out if there's... because people listen to this podcast. If there's somebody at a school right now or a young person who's like, "Dude, that's awesome! I want to help them out."
27:23	Anand Siddha	Yeah, okay. There's a website: InternetActivism.org. If you go to that, you can find our contact information and reach out to us directly. Alright, if you're interested in programming for us, if you're interested in working with us at the nonprofit organization, or if you're just philanthropic in general, feel free to reach out to us. We're looking for as many partners in both the tech and humanitarian space as possible. We want to reach as many people as possible within the next few years.
27:49	Sam Parr	alright meet them down you're saving the world yeah
27:51	Hubspot	yeah yeah
27:52	Shaan Puri	Alright, good! You're perfect. We love you; you're amazing. But by the way, he hit him with the, "If you don't want to sell sugar water..."
28:00	Sam Parr	exactly while I
28:01	Shaan Puri	was drinking a coke amazing dude
28:05	Sam Parr	I I I these guys are so much smarter than us these guys are amazing
28:10	Shaan Puri	Dude, I was picking my boogers at that age and eating Chick-fil-A. Now I still eat Chick-fil-A, I just stopped picking boogers. Right? Like, these guys are so far ahead of where I was in college. That's insane.
28:21	Sam Parr	It's noon on a Friday. I was gearing up for the nighttime bar run for my hot dog stand. I was chopping onions in my kitchen, getting ready for the 2 AM hot dog rush. These guys are... to build a website that has 600,000,000 people visit it, that is outstanding. This is just... these guys are crazy.
28:40	Shaan Puri	yeah
28:41	Sam Parr	I don't get the whole thing. I would urge him... I mean, I could go either way. I would urge him to have a for-profit way of doing this because I think that's important.
28:48	Shaan Puri	no he's doing it perfectly
28:50	Hubspot	what are
28:50	Sam Parr	you gonna live on grants your whole life I mean how does like hey
28:54	Anand Siddha	first of all like
28:55	Sam Parr	jonathan mute this guy
28:57	Anand Siddha	There's a lot of money in government grants out there. It's not like we're going to be starving or anything; we can still afford to sustain ourselves. We also have people like Jake in our community, so if you want to work on side businesses, we have that opportunity on Hoch too.
29:10	Shaan Puri	But you'll be fine. This is like, you know, when people go to Teach for America for 2 years. Like, go work for InternetActivism.org and you'll come out the other side in a good spot. Don't worry about that. Alright, so let's do the next one. Next one is Jordan is gonna pitch us Yoasti.
29:28	Sam Parr	by the way I'm inspired I wanna quit this enjoy that
29:31	Bobby Housel	If I could hop in for 2 seconds... I'm Bobby, and also, like anyone who's watching this: we are a group of entrepreneurs. It's built for students by students in my community. These people are my best friends, and if you want to get involved with these people in any sort of way, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. We're building communities like this across the country, and we want your help if you're a college student or young person that's excited about making things. But I'll let the next guy go.
29:58	Shaan Puri	alright let's do it what's up jason from what is it seafair seal fair
30:02	Bobby Housel	seafair
30:03	SeaFare	and from minnesota
30:05	Shaan Puri	alright hit it you got 2 minutes
30:08	SeaFare	Awesome! Ahoy, sharks! This is Seafair, payroll and onboarding software for ships. Let's just jump right into the problem here: paying the 2,000,000 global seafarers is really hard. The average ship is made up of people from more than three different nationalities, meaning you deal with disparate local bank accounts, currencies, and regulations. That's why the current solution is literally paying these people in U.S. dollars, cash, and/or sending slow and often delayed SWIFT transfers. On top of this, the documents that seafarers need to provide and that ships need to process are arduous and painstaking to go through. Take a look at this, Sam. I can see your face right now; you're having flashbacks to the DMV when you tried to renew your license. It's an absolute disaster to go through these documents. We're talking vaccinations, professional certificates, sailing history—you name it, they have to provide it. One seafarer I talked to once had to print out 700 pages of documents just to get hired on a ship.
31:10	Sam Parr	By the way, what's a seafarer? Are we talking like working on ships or what?
31:16	SeaFare	Yeah, we're talking about merchant mariners. So, any ship that's out in the ocean, primarily those transporting goods and services, but also leisure and military ships. Awesome! So, what are my brother and I working on to address this problem? We're taking a two-pronged approach to this solution. First, we have the payroll solution. We're talking multi-currency, low FX fees, direct deposit to local accounts, and a mobile-first approach that will bring this industry to the modern era. This will improve record keeping and financial management for these ships and will eliminate the risk of having cash on board. I'm sure many of you have seen the movie Captain Phillips and know the problem at hand. Second, we're working on an onboarding solution for ships. This will be a single place where they can upload documents. Our software will scrape those documents to determine eligibility, expirations, and everything else the ship needs to know, saving them money. Seafarers will love it too, as it'll be a one-stop shop for them to store their documents, track their certifications, and have an employment record at hand. So, sharks, why now? There are two compelling reasons why this can happen right now. First, the fintech infrastructure over the past few years has exploded. Never has it been easier, faster, more efficient, and more reliable to build a cross-border payments company. Second, internet adoption on ships is finally growing. If you didn't know, lots of these ships didn't have access to the internet until recently. With the drop in cost of satellite internet and Starlink for maritime launching in just this July, we see it really exploding. On top of this, there's a labor shortage of seafarers right now, which is putting pressure on shipping companies to provide internet in order to attract labor to work for them. So, sharks, I'll leave you with a quote from Captain Jack Sparrow, and in the meantime, I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.
33:12	Sam Parr	Bravo, man! You guys are all great. This is the... this is way... like we had "stonks." We did this with "stonks," and it was like these, you know, people who have been working in the workforce for years. Some of them are already successful entrepreneurs. This is way better. This is way better!
33:26	Shaan Puri	yeah this is really good what what was your name again jordan are you jordan
33:30	SeaFare	my name is jason
33:31	Shaan Puri	Okay, Jason. I'd like to invest in your company. I don't know if you're going to win this pitch competition or not, but I'd like to invest in your company.
33:38	Hubspot	company all
33:39	SeaFare	right let's set up a call next week
33:41	Shaan Puri	No call. I'm in. The call is done. This was the call, and I'm in. I don't know if you have an entity or a corporation, but you need to get one and send me some wiring details because I'm in on this idea. This is, you know, one of my best investments was a company called Deal. That's basically like a payments solution for contractors around the world. This is a niche that no payment company is really going to focus on, considering the unique aspects of this. None of the modern companies are going to do this, you know? I think because there are probably a bunch of nuances that are specific here. It seems like you could go in and, you know, you found a problem that most people aren't even really aware of. Like, I didn't even know what a seafarer was for the first two minutes of the presentation, you know? So I doubt most entrepreneurs are even looking at this. The question, of course, is how big can this be? So let's just do some math here: $2,000,000. What do we call... I'm not calling these guys CFOs... $2,000,000,000. I can walk you through.
34:38	SeaFare	their tam calculations if you want quik
34:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so what is the... how much money can you make if you get, like, you know, whatever? Let's say, you know, some reasonable amount of... like if you had a tenth of that. So if you had 200,000 of these people using your platform, what would you be generating?
34:53	SeaFare	Okay, yeah. So 200,000... we're charging $10 a month. Okay, so that's $2,000,000 every single month. Times 12, that's $24,000,000 in ARR if we capture 10% of the market. But you also have to realize that we're gonna be charging and sort of monetizing not just based off $10 per person per month. We're also gonna be taking 25 to 50 bps [basis points] on FX [foreign exchange] as well as getting floating interest on payroll deposits before they're sent out. So I would say...
35:21	Shaan Puri	you know we like what people say miss market
35:23	SeaFare	that's probably
35:23	Shaan Puri	How'd you know? How'd you know we like BPS? Yeah, that's Sam's safe word. Okay, so I think I'm clear. I'm in on this. I will invest in this company. Sam, what are your thoughts?
35:37	Sam Parr	This... I'm... I'm... I'm taken away. My breath is taken away. These guys are awesome, man! The reason this is great is that this guy's pitching a B2B software, but at the bottom of a slide, he says, "Alexa, play 'I'm on a Boat' by Lonely Island." The dichotomy here is just a bunch of dumbass, shithead young kids who are fucking geniuses and incredibly successful. I'm all about it! You know, I said earlier in the first pitch, you do a good job pitching to some older executive who just wants to be around you guys. That's exactly how I feel right now.
36:15	Shaan Puri	your brother says 5 years at aws so is this your brother who's older and out of college
36:21	Jake Lewin	yeah
36:23	SeaFare	in a computer engineering degree he's been working at aws for 5 years
36:27	Shaan Puri	and so this is currently just an idea right you don't have a product you don't have any customers or anything like that
36:32	SeaFare	yep idea phase did you
36:34	Sam Parr	work with bessemer bessemer
36:37	SeaFare	yep I worked at bessemer venture partners last summer
36:39	Sam Parr	did you pitch them this
36:41	SeaFare	no I did not pitch them this
36:43	Sam Parr	why not
36:44	SeaFare	they primarily do series a but I'm happy to talk to some of my partner friends there after this
36:49	Sam Parr	why didn't how'd you come across this idea
36:52	SeaFare	Yeah, yeah. So my brother was actually born in Indonesia. He spent a lot of time there, and you might know them as like a global shipping hub. So he actually became friends with this guy named Dennis. Long story short, Dennis handled a lot of the payroll paperwork that has to be processed by these shipping companies. He would talk to my brother basically every day about the pain points he faced. So we decided we should tackle this to help alleviate some of Dennis' pain here.
37:17	Sam Parr	is that how you know them sean indonesia as a shipping hub
37:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I lived in Indonesia, and I didn't pay to say any of this... I met a guy named Papi who was importing cotton. I was like, "Woah!" Shout out to Papi if he's listening somewhere. I still remember you. So, how will you sell this? Who are you going to go to? And like, is the guy gonna have, you know, gangrene on his knuckles and be like, "What are you talking about? Apps?" You know? Who are you gonna be selling this to, and what makes you think you could sell?
37:47	SeaFare	It, yeah, for sure, for sure. So, I know I look pretty young here, but I do have a past life doing sales at several early-stage successful software companies, most notably Patch.io. I joined them pre-seed, and they're now at Series B. I've put in my 1,000 cold calls and my 100,000 cold emails, so I'm pretty confident that I can get on the phone with someone and sell something. I will say, the people we're targeting right now is a fairly concentrated industry. A lot of the shipping companies control a significant amount of market share, so it's pretty long sales cycles—enterprise B2B sales cycles. But I directly reach out to those working in the offices of these shipping companies, get them on the phone, and kick off that cycle. I'm projecting 6 to 10 months for the average sales cycle for these bigger companies, but obviously, we're going to work our way down to SMBs later on.
38:34	Sam Parr	Jason, you're Jason, right? Yeah, I'm so hot and bothered when you talk to me.
38:41	Shaan Puri	Like this, did someone script this for you? Why are you saying all the right things? Alright, so this is great. Jason, email me at [email protected]. I'm investing in this company. I can't wait! This is really, really interesting. Well done, good pitch. Alright, next one up, we got... are we going back to Hey Spas?
39:02	Shaan Puri	are are we going back
39:04	Shaan Puri	By the way, you like how he was like, "So, sharks? You wanna come take a swim in the maritime industry?"
39:10	Hubspot	these kids are the best this is
39:12	Sam Parr	the greatest thing I've ever seen I thought this
39:14	Shaan Puri	was gonna be stupid
39:15	Sam Parr	These guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.
39:21	Shaan Puri	also if this is like the bar if this is the normal bar
39:24	Shaan Puri	Of college entrepreneur... Then, you know, I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had like short shorts and nobody could use their left hand. It was like a beach basketball hoop. It's like, "Wow, these guys can jump," you know?
39:37	Sam Parr	it's like we just like lebron just learned how to lift weights like that's what this feels like
39:42	Shaan Puri	I don't know what's happening I
39:43	Sam Parr	for my my
39:44	Shaan Puri	sake I'm hoping this next one sucks I really hope he sucks just so I feel better
39:48	Sam Parr	This guy Jason was supposed to go last, but he just interrupted and grabbed the mic like Kanye did with Taylor Swift. He goes, "Hey bro, can I take this over? I gotta run to class." Like, can we just reiterate that... If I was University of Michigan (they seem like a fairly progressive school), if I was these guys and I heard what was happening, I would say, "Bro, don't go to class anymore. Here's... we got you covered. Do this stuff."
40:16	Shaan Puri	By the way, I want to do this with like every university now. This is amazing! I need to know if it's just the University of Michigan thing or if this is... that's like the caliber of entrepreneurs. Jonathan, what should we... if you're another university or you're somebody at a university listening to this, how do they get in touch with us to do this at their school?
40:31	Bobby Housel	It is definitely partially a Michigan thing. I will say, like, the biggest problem is the universities don't facilitate this. It took me like two years to meet every single one of these killers. We come together biweekly to bring together these kinds of conversations and to build together.
40:46	Sam Parr	and who's who's this talking about bobby bobby are you organizing
40:49	Bobby Housel	this thing I'm bobby yeah so this is I'm a student as well
40:52	Sam Parr	yeah this is a community
40:54	Bobby Housel	...of entrepreneurs, like 200 strong at this school. We meet biweekly and just enjoy each other's company. No context of paying dues or monthly membership... like, screw that. This is not a club; this is just a group of killers that enjoy spending time together. But like, this did not...
41:07	Sam Parr	dude dude dude he's got a good pitch man that's a big boss
41:11	Hubspot	this does
41:11	Bobby Housel	This doesn't exist at other schools, and the schools that pretend like they have these crazy entrepreneurship programs... Like, no hate on mission entrepreneurship, there are some upsides, but they can't build this. This has only existed because I spent every waking moment at this school. Like, anytime anyone tells me they're building something, Bob's a new scooter.
41:29	Sam Parr	braun man what yeah dude who are you
41:31	Shaan Puri	you need a couple of years
41:32	Sam Parr	I'm like 1,000,000
41:34	Bobby Housel	I would love to help put this on other schools. Like, our mission is to bring this sort of community to schools across the country, right? Built ground up for students, by students. Screw the preconception of having to do anything... Yeah, come and be together and make cool shit.
41:47	Sam Parr	alright bob put put george
41:49	SeaFare	that was incredible but those
41:51	Shaan Puri	are just the biweekly killers that's that's a great band right there
41:55	Sam Parr	yeah it's like a doo wop band from the sixties
41:59	Hubspot	this data is wrong every freaking time have you
42:02	Sam Parr	heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated
42:07	Hubspot	Woah! I can see the client's hold history, calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago that I totally missed.
42:16	Sam Parr	HubSpot, grow better. Put Yofei on; I want to hear from Jordan Shamir.
42:22	Jordan Shamir	yeah no well thanks for having me I guess I'm the senior citizen here I'm a master's student so little bit older but if we go to the next slide one of the things we are working on in a previous life is we are all working on digital identities how can these brands create you know meaningful consistent relationships with their customers customers are always changing but one of the things that we saw is that our understanding of who customers are digitally is really complicated we can't interact with them we can't see them we can't see what they like and so one of the things that we did is we actually worked with some of the world's largest brands right working in the bot mitigation teams I don't know if y'all like sneakers or anything along those lines one of the things that we saw is that through all of our experience in ecommerce but just larger brands in general is that everything you consume digitally is being skewed because everyone has multiple personas or multiple identities online so whether it's intentional being bought frauds resellers etcetera or unintentional right we've all used multiple different email addresses to get 10 15% off discounts and this creates a huge issue for both brands and consumers right from brands I don't know how many customers that I have are unique I don't know which products to build because it's being skewed by these multiple personas I over forecast inventory leads to a bunch of dead stock but also as consumers right we all know what's going on with taylor swift or we've all lost sneaker drop we've all paid way too much for a concert ticket that we wanted to go to the reason it happens it's not because other people are beating you it's because people are programmatically beating you bots and the second thing that I also you know that we see that's just fascinating is that the notion of omnichannel has changed drastically you're not just competing nike versus adidas you're also competing nike verse you know d to c nike dick's sporting goods nike unauthorized resellers and these unauthorized resellers are actually costing brands 1,000,000 of dollars a year even dum dums lollipops like the ones that you get from you know the hospital or the doctor is actually being arbitraged and it's costing them 1,000,000 of dollars a year and then we kinda know about these fake profiles on twitter and you know these social media sites that we've seen or even if you live in new york austin la you know if you try to go to your favorite restaurants big reason why they're booked is that the moment they come online they're taken and resold somewhere else so what we've done is we've actually created a platform like in a digital identity platform where in real time without like interacting with the user we rank every order between 0 and 100 so we kinda use this real time graph networking clustering to be able to find all these patterns of randomness and associations between individuals and we create these really nice graphs to be able to say okay well these are bots these are bad actors these are duplicate counts and so we actually work with some of the largest neighborhood sneaker stores in the world help them prioritize hey I got a whole bunch of raffle entries right I got 400,000 raffle entries for 50 pairs of shoes how do I use this to acquire new clients or prioritize existing ones how do I choose because today what they're doing is they're just randomly giving it out and people aren't actually buying them because people aren't even checking the email addresses that are going in so we've been actually working with a lot of this from bad actors perspective but one of the new things that we've been able to see with this which has been really cool is helping brands actually find their best customers so kind of through using the same clustering technology we've been able to say who are your most influential customers right how are they not just their individual lifetime value but what
45:30	Shaan Puri	we've talked about
45:31	Jordan Shamir	it's a slow circle yeah we paused
45:32	Shaan Puri	I think that might be over the 2 minutes. So, Sam, can you tell me what this guy does? What is the business?
45:40	Sam Parr	Yeah, you're missing your one-liner, my friend. But basically, it's a software that has 160 features that analyze, in real-time, the patterns of... randomness and similarities at the customer, transactional, product, company... It's confusing, dude.
45:55	Shaan Puri	Can you explain that, Jordan? Can you explain it to me like this: "We help [blank] customer." So, who's your customer? What type of person or business?
46:04	Jordan Shamir	oh we help brands and retailers
46:06	Shaan Puri	more specific like give me one example like we help shoe shoe brands or something
46:10	Jordan Shamir	Yeah, we help brands like Nike to prioritize their best consumers for limited release products. We also clean their data by pulling out all the unnecessary information that goes in.
46:19	Shaan Puri	I don't prioritize their top customers. You basically tell Nike who their top customers are.
46:25	Jordan Shamir	We would say, for sneaker drops and limited release products, "Hey, these are the new clients that you can acquire cheaply," or "Here are the clients that you can actually prioritize." This is actually something meaningful compared to one person putting like 10,000 or 100,000 entries via bots to get those products.
46:40	Sam Parr	so you just prevent bots from buying shit online
46:43	Jordan Shamir	We prevent... and then what we also do is we actually kind of clean the data downstream. We flag all of those accounts that can get pulled out of the CRM system that are kind of bloating the CRM system. One of the things that we see from a lot of our clients is that they way overspend on the products that they use, like Klaviyo or other CRM products, because a lot of the entries in there aren't actually legitimate. So when I'm making decisions around how many products I should buy or how many products I should make, what are people buying, it's actually being skewed based on the amount of what's in there. It's actually just a bunch of duplicates versus actually unique consumers.
47:17	Sam Parr	Okay, you are not the best at explaining your own company, but you're not horrible. I kind of get it after you explain it a bunch, and that's all good. You can improve that, I think. But even on your website... man, I'm gonna be honest, it's a little challenging to understand. But I saw that you have a "book demo" thing. Do you... are you booking demos? Do you have a product? Are people buying it?
47:38	Jordan Shamir	yeah we have about 25 customers right now
47:40	Sam Parr	that's impressive what's the revenue
47:42	Jordan Shamir	the revenue right now when we convert to revenue is gonna be around 15 k mrr
47:47	Sam Parr	but it's free now is what you're saying
47:48	Jordan Shamir	it's free right now
47:50	Shaan Puri	Yep, who are the notable customers that you know? Like, are there any that we would know of?
47:56	Jordan Shamir	I guess, based off the area you're in, we work with a lot of local sneaker stores. So, like in San Francisco, we work with a couple. The same in Seattle and the same in Canada. So, mostly local sneakers.
48:05	Sam Parr	Do they love it? And be honest. Do they love it, do they like it, or do they think it's just okay?
48:11	Jordan Shamir	They love it. I mean, right now we're providing from our cost to value... we're providing for like, if we're charging them $1,000, one of their stores we're providing $10,000 in net new revenue that we're acquiring for them a month.
48:23	Shaan Puri	Okay, gotcha. Honestly, it's tough to give you feedback because the pitch was so confusing. It's really difficult to try to suss that out. From the beginning, you know, like Sam said, you need your one-liner or your one-sentence description. People need to have a clear picture in their head at the beginning of the presentation of what the business does. Alright, so here’s your first slide. Your first slide said, "Yofi: Keep Business Human." Alright, cool, but I have no idea what you do. Then I go to your second slide, which is a team slide that says, "Experts at transforming data into recommendations. Our passion is keeping customer interactions authentic and meaningful." Still, I have no idea what you guys do. Then on slide three, it says, "Everything is digital and you've been impacted." It mentions something about ticket sellouts, fake social media, and brand loyalty being harder. Okay, still don’t know what you do. The last slide just says, "Prioritize and reward your best customers. We help you understand your customers and streamline every interaction." I feel like there are 50 different ways that could mean 50 different solutions. And then the last slide is just your title again, right? So that was the whole pitch. I think the challenge here is that, for me at least, I'm not able to really give you any useful feedback except to say I think you gotta flip this on its head. Say, "We're Yofi, and we help businesses figure out who the most valuable customers are." For example, this is a shoe store. The shoe store does drops every Friday but is having this problem, which is blah blah blah, and that's a common problem. So we give them this app that shows them a screen like this, and these are all the top customers. They push this button, and our app costs $1,000 a month. Look at this: we have 25 customers, and on average, we make them $10 a month in additional revenue.
50:09	Sam Parr	and we also save them an additional $1,000
50:10	Hubspot	a month because of the bloated crm and like they don't actually need
50:10	Sam Parr	Those contacts in there, and then all these other reasons... CRM and like, they don't actually need those contacts in there, and then all these other reasons.
50:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, and then you could go on and say, "Here's why we even found this problem. We've spent our career doing this..." blah blah blah, right? So I think that's how I would try to reorient this pitch if I was you.
50:25	Sam Parr	But the good news is, as you got into it and we were able to work hard to kind of find the gold among all the dirt, you had some good stuff in there. It does actually seem like an interesting product. It's pretty impressive that you have all these people using it. You're saying they love it; I have no idea if that's true, but you're saying they love it. That's really interesting. It's hard to do that with a software product when you're just working on it part-time, so it seems actually fairly interesting. I think your branding is kind of cool, but your messaging needs a lot of work.
50:56	Jordan Shamir	Yeah, that's helpful. That's been our hardest thing as we've matured: getting the messaging spot on. Because we do a little bit more now... we started with sneaker bots, but we've kind of expanded more to digital identity. So having a streamlined messaging of what we do, like a one-liner, is [challenging].
51:11	Shaan Puri	But you're... I think you're making a common mistake. We do a bunch of things; we don't have just one customer. We have like five different types of customers, and we have a hundred features in our app. So, what you do is try to create this giant umbrella that's a catchall, like "we help brands understand their customers" or "streamline their customer interactions." The problem is, nobody knows what the hell that means. Instead, you should go way narrower and be like, you know, for whoever your most of the 25 clients is, is there one type that's like, you know, the majority? Or half of the customers? Is it shoe stores or sneaker stores?
51:46	Jordan Shamir	yeah right now it's yeah sneaker store and beauty
51:49	Sam Parr	the difference between that
51:50	Shaan Puri	So, I would start by saying, "We help stores do X." For example, we have 25 customers right now, and half of them are sneaker stores. Sneaker stores have this problem... blah, blah, blah. You talk about that and say, "But it's not just sneaker stores." Yes, sneakers do drops, but so does Taylor Swift. She does drops too, and so does this brand; they do drops as well. They all have that same problem, right? That's kind of how you should explain it instead of trying to do this like umbrella thing. Okay, cool. Thanks so much! We got one more, I believe. Yep.
52:25	Bobby Housel	we got we got dolan from dealdog that's gonna take us home
52:30	Shaan Puri	dolan from dealdog alright wonderful
52:32	Dolan Dworak	awesome so my name is dolan and I created dealdog so dealdog's an exclusive campus marketplace we launched this semester at the university of michigan beginning with student football tickets and since then our traction has been good we have over 2,000 verified michigan students on the app and those 2,000 students have processed over $93,000 of student tickets additionally with some traction numbers 2 thirds of those tickets that have been listed on dealdog have been sold to other users and we're growing in the next few months so what's the core problem essentially the way students buy and sell things on campus now is they go to groupme or facebook marketplace those are filled with bots and scammers and basically it's just a mess next they need to go to a platform like link linkedin or instagram to message the other person or verify their legitimacy finally they need to transact payment and there's friction between do you use zelle do you use cash app there's a chicken in the egg problem versus who sends the item first and who pays first and overall it's just a complete mess so what makes dealdog different first of all we verify your umich email so you can't get into the app unless you have a verified student email it's a centralized place to find relevant items to students along with tools like filtering sorting and searching so here's an example on the left of what our app looks like if you were to log in versus on the right this is the the current state of the market full of full of scammers and etcetera so what makes dealdog actually different so our app has gamified tools that turn student pain points into fun experiences one of which that I demonstrated here is our tool called final offer basically if you're dealing with somebody they're wishy washy you can't reach you know agreement on price you can use our final offer tool to send them your best offer if they reject it the conversation's over and if they accept it you know you agree to sell them that item this is highly scalable because when we expand into new markets we can add tools into this toolbar exactly like you do with imessage to help solve those needs so how does the scale there's 2 ways one of which is we're gonna expand to different categories on campus we just launched the clothing and have great success our approach is to build things from the ground up instead of cloning other markets and again with our chat tools integrations we're thinking about are to integrate on top of the apis of existing clothing platforms so that for instance if you wanna find michigan gear you can't find exactly what you're looking for on our app it'll redirect you to an existing platform and although we may lose that particular sale we wanna make that buying experience as easy fast and safe as possible for students so our future plans are to expand to new campuses we're gonna build on top of the dominant ticketing apis that exist in the market today and additionally we're gonna have an ambassador program so we can scale even faster both at michigan and at other schools
55:36	Sam Parr	does this exist now or is this just an idea
55:39	Dolan Dworak	So, this exists now. It's been live for about two months, just at Michigan. We wanted to really validate our hypothesis and see what works with students and what doesn't work.
55:48	Shaan Puri	did you did you think he was making up the traction numbers or what
55:52	Sam Parr	I didn't see it wait I can't
55:53	Shaan Puri	1st slide, he's like, "We have 2,000 students, 98 thousand of Genvy, and that's in 2 months."
56:00	Sam Parr	That's pretty impressive. Okay, and what was your take on that? You take 10%?
56:08	Dolan Dworak	Yes, so one of the things that we wanted to hold off on is actually implementing the payments. We've already built it, but we didn't want to implement it yet because we're so new. We thought it would be a little... it would create some friction for students to be like, "Hey, you know, we're launching this new app. By the way, what's your credit card number? Put in your banking details," stuff like that. We wanted to really get the product down first before we started actually, you know, taking money between the two parties. When we do, it's going to be between 5% to 10% of whatever the transaction is.
56:36	Sam Parr	is okay alright cool thanks sean what do you think
56:41	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think it's cool. I like some of the product details, like I love the final offer thing. I think that's great. I get that, you know, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are lower trust platforms. So having verified student IDs is just great because it creates this trust bubble. I really like that. I don't know how big this can get, so that would be my kind of question. I don't really like these small take-rate businesses where you take 5 or 10%. You need the number to be massive on the transaction side in order for you to make a lot of money. So I think that's my only question. It's a really useful product, and I think it's a cool project to work on. I wouldn't personally invest in this because I don't think it can be that big. You would have to basically take a Facebook path where you say, "We're going to get every college. We're going to dominate that college. It's going to be the way that you transact in a trusted environment." Then you say, "Okay, but it's not just colleges. Now we're going to do neighborhoods because we can send postcards out and verify that you live at the address," like Nextdoor does. You'd have to really believe that two or three more miracles are going to happen for this to be big. So I think that's my only knock on it, which is not really like... you know, not every business has to be absolutely massive. It's just when I invest, I try to obviously slant towards things that I...
58:03	Sam Parr	It's a network effect. It's a net, and this business involves a network, so in order for it to be successful, everyone needs to be using it. My problem is not with Dole and the entrepreneur; my problem is with this market. I think that even if you are a 10 out of 10 entrepreneur, this is just like social apps. Even if you're a 10 out of 10 entrepreneur and you have 10 out of 10 execution, it's just... it's so challenging to make this work.
58:29	Shaan Puri	you're you're going for like a 4 out of 10 opportunity
58:32	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's just so hard because you're competing with Craigslist. You're competing with Facebook Marketplace. Now you're going to be competing with the other incumbents that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I think they are mostly failing. What was that thing called? Letgo? OfferUp? They bought billboards and did everything they possibly could, but I don't think it's caught on. It's like, well, the entrepreneurs, I bet, were really great. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, so capital wasn't an issue. Yet, they still can't beat Craigslist, which is just 30 dudes in an apartment working. I know this because I rented their apartment. It was like a crappy apartment. It's just 30 guys who are hippies, and they're just like, "We're here." It's like, well, you're just not going to beat us because everyone already uses this. So, it doesn't matter how great you are. It's really, really hard. You have so many things going against you. I want to invest in things that have tailwinds, and I just don't think that no matter how great you are, you're going to catch a tidal wave. I think you're always going to be paddling, you know, upstream on this one.
59:31	Dolan Dworak	Yeah, really good points. We certainly have a lot to prove. One of the things that we wanted to do is begin with college campuses. The reason being is because, you know, at these big large state schools, you have a student body of 50,000 to 60,000 people competing for 10,000 tickets. In that exact niche, the math really makes sense. But I do agree that in a lot of other cases, it might not. One of the things that we're expanding or working on, if I may, is a lot of these items that we're working on—whether it be tickets, secondhand goods, services, or subletting—the core mechanics of those can be distilled down and then scaled to other things. For instance, if a campus group has a concert, they bring a DJ, whatever the case may be, they can use our app and underlying ticket technology to distribute that on campus. So again, it doesn't solve your core issue of, you know, it's an incredibly difficult market. It certainly is.
01:00:22	Sam Parr	I think that makes it worse. I believe that one of the few ways these businesses can work is by being very niche. For example, you have Poshmark for women's clothing and Grailed for men's streetwear. There are dozens of these that are pretty big companies. I think Poshmark is a multibillion-dollar company. ThredUp, I don't know what their niche is, but it's some type of clothing for a certain genre of person. I think that when you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. To really make this work, you'd have to select a specific niche. I'm sure there's one called StockX for sneakers or something like that.
01:00:56	Shaan Puri	yeah coat
01:00:56	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah, like these are huge businesses because they just focused on one thing. It's far easier to have a wedge where you start with a small group of people who are passionate and care about them, and get them to use it. Versus saying, "Well, we're gonna do tickets, and then we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do that." It's like, no man, I think you could just build a big thing if you just focus on this one thing. So appealing to everyone—like sublets, apartments, and then tickets. When you add clothing to your deck, I think that actually, in my opinion, turns me off even more. Not entirely on you, I just think that there are so many things outside of your control. You know, like Cfair was gonna compete against like paper. You are gonna compete against Zuck, Craigslist, and like 100 million dollars who have invested capital into this. I just don't think it's a safe bet. It's not a good bet.
01:01:45	Dolan Dworak	yeah really good points there and something to work on for sure
01:01:48	Shaan Puri	and by the way I would say like when I was in college our first idea was
01:01:53	Sam Parr	it's always this this and roommates
01:01:55	Shaan Puri	Well, no, this would have been better than my first idea. The one we did straight out of college was like a sushi restaurant chain. We tried to create a restaurant chain, and like it was the same thing. We could be 10 out of 10 in execution and 10 out of 10 in creativity, but fundamentally, restaurants are like, you know, sort of like a 2 out of 10 opportunity. It's like one of the worst types of businesses you can try to start. So we had a moment where, a year in, we were like, "Cool, we won this business plan competition. We can do this." It's not that we can't do it; we're having success with our first location. But we gotta remember this is just our first idea. Maybe we're more entrepreneurs than we are restaurateurs. This first idea is the one that got our wheels turning, but let's not commit more years to something if we recognize that this is a 2 out of 10 opportunity. We should just say, "Oh, okay, cool. Let me just be a college kid, let me have my time back, and let me put it on another better opportunity." So that's what I would do if I were you.
01:02:55	Sam Parr	But just FYI, getting $93,000 of transactional value, of transactional volume, is super, super, super impressive. That is amazing! So maybe you could prove us wrong and be like, "We're just gonna build a different StubHub, and it's gonna be better because we're marketing wizards." Who knows why it's gonna be better? Maybe you're gonna prove us wrong. But $93,000 and 23,100 users in the 3 months? Incredibly impressive! That is wildly impressive. So you're also a superstar. I'm just gonna say, I don't know if you're gonna pull it off in this genre, but we'll see.
01:03:31	Dolan Dworak	Yeah, awesome. Thank you guys so much. As a closing note, if you have any advice on this: it seems like the people that do use our app, they almost exclusively use it to sell their tickets and other things. I...
01:03:44	Sam Parr	If you decide not to bail, I would stick with tickets and focus on that for at least one year. Talk to users constantly and see what happens. I wouldn't even worry about expansion; I would just figure out what makes them come back over and over again. Because I imagine, if I had to look into StubHub and SeatGeek, customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the biggest issue. I'm just guessing though, I haven't researched this.
01:04:03	Shaan Puri	yep alright dolan thank you so much and alright what do we gotta do
01:04:07	Sam Parr	we pick a winner
01:04:08	Shaan Puri	We pick a winner now. So that is the "My First Million Presents University of Michigan Pitch Competition." Super impressive caliber of entrepreneurs, like you said. Love this community. You know, Bobby... Bobby, my biweekly killer, good job putting this group together. We gotta pick a winner, so Sam, how do you want to do this? I think...
01:04:26	Sam Parr	Well, so let's talk about who's in the top 3. Then you and I can Slack about it. I just Slacked you my top 2. You can Slack me and tell me what you want to do, and I'll tell you if I approve and agree with your vote. But basically, let's go in order, so...
01:04:42	Shaan Puri	So, third runner-up or, you know, maybe my top three. I guess I’ll just give you three in random order. I liked Seafarer. Like I said, I want to actually invest in that. I think that’s a really cool idea going into a boring, boring industry that’s painful and complicated. I think, you know, it’s not going to be easy to sell into, but if they do, it’s very easy to get locked in. I think they can make money doing basically payroll for the shipping industry for people who work on ships. So, I really like that idea. Internet activism was super impressive. They have built a website that got 600 million users. They built an Airbnb-like platform for Ukrainian refugees that had 100,000 people stay in homes. That’s kind of crazy... ludicrous.
01:05:34	Sam Parr	that's a career maker just that I mean that number
01:05:36	Shaan Puri	And just the idea of a nonprofit that's not driven by, you know, what nonprofits are driven by today, which is sort of like fundraising and sales and marketing. It's like we're hackers; we just build stuff that's going to help people, and that's what we do. I really kind of resonate with that. I've seen the power of that. One time, the guy who was investing in our Idealab said, "Hey, I want to do this thing for this charity I support called Charity: Water. You know, but instead of just giving money, what if we gave our talent? What if we built something?" We built a charity website that was designed to go viral. The mission was, "Could you make charity go viral?" We spent three months on it, and I remember we got, I don't know, 5 million people to visit the site, and we raised, I think, $800,000 for the cause. So, I've seen how builders can help charity in a way that's kind of unique. Then there's also Jake from Tabs Chocolate, who's doing the NFC tagging thing. I thought that was another good one. I think it cut below the other two, but it's an honorable mention. What do you think? Say I...
01:06:41	Sam Parr	I agree entirely. I think Jordan just did a really bad job of pitching. However, I actually find that business to be really intriguing and it could be great. I think it's just a boring software company, but I believe it has the potential to be a really great business. Unfortunately, he was so bad at pitching that it ruined the fact that it's a cool company. I also think that he doesn't have as much traction as Internet Activism, but if he does actually have 30, or however many he said, 20 customers using his software, I think that's a fairly big deal because it seems kind of hard to sell into them. I sent you what I think should be the winner. It's the last thing I said. Do you agree or not?
01:07:24	Shaan Puri	I don't agree I think it should be this other one what do you think
01:07:29	Sam Parr	okay so let's just say who the top 2 are
01:07:32	Shaan Puri	yeah top 2 we got are seafarer and internet activism
01:07:38	Sam Parr	and so let me let me explain my
01:07:39	Shaan Puri	let me
01:07:40	Sam Parr	Really, let me explain my perspective here. Internet activism is fucking amazing. This guy made me want to quit and join him. My issue isn't with him; my issue with giving them the money is that they already have a great thing going and they're kind of crushing it. It feels weird giving this money to a nonprofit. I'd rather just give them my own personal money. But he is so impressive that I think, "This guy's gonna be on the cover of Fortune or Forbes in the next 5 years." So, I would be fine giving them money. But Seafair... it's an idea, man. We could just be the first money in to actually help them build something. So that's why that's interesting.
01:08:18	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I feel the same way, but I think for Seafair I would put my personal money in as an investment. But I think for the prize money of this, if we put it into internet activism, it's gonna save lives. And honestly, like... he was of the bunch, he was the most missionary-like. You could just tell, for example, the...
01:08:39	Sam Parr	guy's a visionary
01:08:40	Shaan Puri	All these other people, I feel like if I talk to them 6 months from now, they could be working on something completely different. That's totally normal and okay, especially if you're in college. I actually encourage that. But when you know, you know. This guy was kind of agro where he was like, "Yeah, I could go work on a CRM tool or just like whatever, but... you know, f*** that, I'm doing this." And that is something I really, really respect. I don't think he was looking for validation. I think he was trying to get the word out, and so I respect that.
01:09:09	Sam Parr	Dude, I looked up one of the co-founders of internet activism on Twitter, and his background picture was Mark Zuckerberg giving the middle finger. I used to have that same background! So, I'm on board, man. I agree with you. We'll give it to internet activism. I think they are awesome. I think all the folks here are incredibly impressive. Right? Dude, the one that we shit on the most, I think, was Deal Dawg. The guy got $93,000 of transactional value in 3 months. Like, no one does that!
01:09:43	Shaan Puri	Very impressive all around! Kudos to everybody. I gotta say, we're not picking internet activism for the do-good. The guy's pitch was dope. His first line, where he's like, "You know, people in poor communities have more access to cell phones than they do to toilets," right? His pitch was good. His traction was good. We built things that have gotten hundreds of millions of visits. His idea was a big idea: an encrypted messaging app that can't be shut down. Basically, an unstoppable messaging app that's going to help people in certain places. I think he was the most committed founder. That's why—not because of charity, just give him the money.
01:10:17	Sam Parr	I also think he's a... well, let's say a difficult person. I think these guys are difficult people. I think that these guys are like the good type of difficult people. I think that they're the people who I'm gravitated towards. I like people who just... and frankly, a lot of these guys had that vibe. I mean, Tabb's Chocolate from Jake definitely has that vibe. They have this attitude of like, "Screw it, I'm just gonna do this and we're just gonna see what happens."
01:10:40	Jake Lewin	we're gonna see who finds out
01:10:41	Shaan Puri	streak yeah
01:10:42	Sam Parr	Yes, and I love that mentality. This guy just displayed it the best in this particular case. But these guys all had this punk rock vibe that I love so much.
01:10:52	Bobby Housel	and that's guys that's that's everybody in room right now
01:10:54	Sam Parr	even the pitch man had it
01:10:56	Shaan Puri	yeah even even the the everything that people
01:10:59	Bobby Housel	Is is building insane stuff. We got 20 entrants, and Jonathan and Mike and I, like, we were struggling to take 5. We could've had 20 pitches.
01:11:09	Shaan Puri	He was... shitting on the traditional clubs and other official organizations. He's like, "No, we're the underground. We're the underground real ones." And I respect that.
01:11:19	Sam Parr	Dude, this reminds me. I mean, they were further along than us and smarter than us. But when you and I were like 23, 24, 25, hanging out at your office at Monkey Inferno, we surrounded ourselves with these types of freaks. A lot of them have gone on to build literally $20 or $30 billion worth of companies. You know, Jack Smith, your boy Furkan, like these guys have built huge companies. Ryan Hoover, all these guys have built some really big companies, and these guys remind us of this. I think that it's actually... I hope you send this to the University of Michigan. They're blowing it, man, by not empowering you guys. I think that's crazy, man.
01:11:54	Shaan Puri	send me a hoodie I'm wearing a michigan hoodie on the next pod I'm I'm a I'm
01:11:57	Sam Parr	A fan! Now, you know who else came from the University of Michigan? It was our boy Michael from Future, who has this exact same vibe of just being pretty cool.
01:12:07	Bobby Housel	One of the first members of this organization, or whatever you want to call it. This is credit to these guys and gals; this is not credit to the University of Michigan.
01:12:17	Sam Parr	this is all these people are what makes this special
01:12:20	Bobby Housel	We love the University of Michigan. We do! And we're going to take every single last resource until we leave this place. But until then...
01:12:28	Shaan Puri	oh man
01:12:29	Sam Parr	Alright, well, however you want to describe yourself... I admire you folks. I think you're awesome. I think the listeners... hopefully this gets hundreds of thousands of listens. We'll see. I think this is gonna be a hit. But yeah, you're awesome. So if people want to find out more, do you have your website? What's your website? Did you even say that?
01:12:46	Anand Siddha	Yeah, just again, it's InternetActivism.org. We're looking for: - Donors - Engineers - Nonprofit organizations to partner with Anything... if you think you can help out or you're interested in working with us, just feel free to reach out. Again, that's InternetActivism.org.
01:13:01	Sam Parr	and the name of the club is what
01:13:03	Bobby Housel	Entrepreneurial Power Hour. My name is Bobby Howsel. You can feel free to reach out to me and help me build this across the country.
01:13:10	Sam Parr	thank you sean you got anything to say
01:13:12	Shaan Puri	we're out of here no that's it
01:13:14	Sam Parr	that's the pod good job guys very impressive

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University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups | $5000 Prize Money (#396)

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