Unveiling AI Box: Join Our $1.2M Crowdfunding Round for Cutting-Edge Innovation

0:00To give you a bit of background on myself and the project, at the beginning of this year, Jillian Schaefer and myself were sitting there. We'd successfully for the last few years run, launched and scaled a startup called SelfPause. It's the number one AI life coach. And, you know, we scaled this to over 120 ,000 users. We were super excited and we really caught the vision of AI and kind of what it could do. And we got to a point where we were literally thinking of 10 new AI products every single day. And we were, you know, I was calling up Ben Pearson, who is our CTO now on AI box and pretty much harassing him every day with all of these different AI companies and ideas that we'd come up with, asking about the tech side, asking him about the viability, asking him how we would implement it and pull it off and launch these different things.

0:45And it got so overwhelming that, you know, eventually we came to the realization with Ben that there was no way we could launch all of these hundreds of AI projects and ideas we had. we really needed to build a platform that allowed people, anyone in the world with no coding experience to drag and drop, put together these AI applications, put in their custom prompts and develop these AI platforms. And it was actually last year, end of last year, we're kind of thinking of these and we're specifically, it was, you know, before ChatGPT had launched and we were seeing a lot of like use cases in images.

1:19Dolly was out, Midjourney was out, and we were kind of looking at like the way you could use prompts to create these really customized images. When ChatGPT launched, it was the catalyst and we, you know, expanded our vision. We're like, oh my gosh, this goes so much further beyond images. This now all of a sudden you're integrating text. And I had already done a bunch of work with, you know, audio AI last year. And so all of a sudden we're realizing all the pieces of the puzzle are coming together. And that's kind of where AI Box was born. We realized we needed to build a no code drag and drop app builder platform and a marketplace so people could actually monetize these AI tools and workflows that they would build.

1:57For myself, we quickly contacted a number of companies asking them what they'd be interested in. We built out a bunch of different design tools and quickly started iterating and working on this project. Really, the mission of this whole project is that we are hoping to enable global access to AI by empowering everyone to be able to use, easily build and monetize AI apps. And then after, you know, they built these powerful apps and workflows to then have a marketplace that facilitates, you know, them being able to share those tools, people to be able to discover them and enable everyone to kind of benefit from the technology.

2:35But the two biggest problems that we were seeing when we were at the get-go was there was a ton of creators, especially after ChatGPT launched, I think in the first few months, They had 100 million users that were using ChatGPT. And they were from all different niches, all different backgrounds, all different jobs. And they came up with these really powerful use cases for their personal jobs or personal careers. But there was no way for them to, you know, these people do not have the resources to get developers and create apps and monetize their ideas. and also protect their system prompts, their quote-unquote intellectual property, which is kind of like their workflow and the prompts that they use to get a job done.

3:16Now, there was a couple of websites that we looked at early on. There's one specific one called PromptBase, which essentially allows you to upload. If you come up with a really creative prompt, let's say you found a way to make a really impressive image on MidJourney, you can upload your prompt and people can buy it. But the problem is if you do something like that, selling a prompt, you have no control over your IP. you have no control of your prompt is let's say you you come up you spend a few days come up with a really cool prompt um to make something useful a really useful image that people can replicate for different things you sell it for three bucks as soon as it's sold now everyone knows what the prompt is they could that person could post it they give it away to their friends for free they could post it online um for everyone to have for free so you essentially lose that you lose what you've created there and at the same time the other problem we're seeing was that you know there was no easy way for the average corporation and business to, and, you know, business professionals to everyone to really discover and evaluate and access all of the AI use cases in their industry, right?

4:13So 100 million people are using this, they're coming out with incredible prompts, but there's no way for you to find, you know, the top 10 use cases in for an electrician or a plumber or a lawyer that, you know, your peers were using, you had to try to figure that stuff out yourself and spend hours on these different AI tools and companies. And so it was really a big hassle. And So that's where we decided to really solve that problem with AI Box. We have kind of two sides of it, like I mentioned, which is the app builder side. So we have a no-code drag-and-drop app builder. Essentially, you can chain together multiple prompts or multiple AI models, right?

4:45So you could use, I'll give you an example. Early on, we had Cheap.Travel as a design customer. They were creating articles for their blog post, and they were using different AI tools for this, but they wanted to be able to make this faster. So essentially we would have something like chat GPT. All they had to do is type in the keyword for a blog post. We'd chain that prompt on chat GPT to kind of come up with the title of the blog post. We'd chain it to another one on chat GPT that would actually write the blog. We'd chain that output, which is that blog post to 11 labs to create an audio file recording, right?

5:20You know, when you're on the New York times, they have like, you could listen to the article. So they were able to generate an audio file to listen to the article. they would chain the original article title to dolly to create a number of images within that article that they could put in there they'd chain it over to a couple other chat gbt modules one to create all the seo metadata and another one that could go create a bunch of faq questions that they could embed faq schema is really good for seo and so they could embed that in the article as well so all that they would have to do is go on to their ai box that they built type in the keyword of the article they want to generate and it would generate all of these assets instantly for them.

5:57And so it's just, it became really, really powerful. And honestly, that's a simple example. You can get these things to have like 20 or 30 different AI models chained together, doing all sorts of different things and creating really impressive outputs and products. And this takes a lot of time. And so we knew that we needed to pair this with a marketplace where number one, you can, you can post it and actually receive a royalty for anytime anyone in the community uses your tool. But number two, this is incredible for corporations and businesses to be able to discover and harness industry specific AI apps.

6:27They could go to their, you know, their niche, their industry and find all the top uses that people are using. So we began working on this with the vision really to kind of become the app store for AI tools. I think Apple last year processed$1.1 trillion on their app store. And we believe that these centralized app stores are becoming incredibly popular. Of course, like the AI market was, you know, looking at it was impressive. It's not, I mean, something, I think everyone understands how fast it's growing. It's, you know, over$400 billion. People are projecting it to reach$1.3 trillion by 2029.

7:00And these stats came out, you know, a year ago. So I believe that's going to be way higher than before. Up until now, you know, at the beginning of the year, we raised a small angel round and kind of got started and built out a working demo of the platform. So we currently have a fully working demo of this AI box app builder. So, you know, I go on there and I, you know, for design customers or whatever, I can build these little apps and chain together all these different AI models, put in custom prompts and build these tools. What we're currently finishing on from the development side is building out the backend, you know, to be able to host multiple users and building out all of the, you know, all the backend infrastructure and then building out the marketplace side of it where you can actually monetize your tools.

7:43So that's why we're actually launching this round of this crowdfunding round on republic is to expedite the development of that um and then to you know launch with a you know a campaign to kind of do some go-to-market strategies so this is uh you know it's obviously been incredibly exciting um really the the model on this is that a user on the marketplace um will have a subscription to ai box so you know subscriptions will probably start if you don't have a ton of usage um 10 15 20 bucks and if you're you know using different tools and you'll be able to essentially the more you use it you'll be able to go up to higher subscription levels so when you get a subscription it's going to come with a certain amount of tokens to the platform and you'll just be able to use those on any different ai tools that you want this is similar to how like a company like jasper ai for example um functions where essentially you can get a subscription and they let you like generate a certain amount of words um on their article generating ai platform and I remember when I first discovered Jasper last summer I was using it you know for a bunch of different stuff I was like blown away by how good it was I was up to the$800 a month tier on Jasper I had like two virtual assistants on my account 24-7 just generating articles and it was like the greatest thing I was thrilled to pay that because of how much content and how much value I was getting out of it I see AI Box in the same way where there'll be a lot of people a lot of power users that are using this for a ton of different things within their company there'll be people on 800, 1000,$2 ,000 a month subscription tiers, probably more of a, you know, the corporate side of things, but there's going to be a lot of people that just want to use this for a few different, you know, apps they found.

9:21And so there'll be, there'll be smaller tiers for that as well. And then of course, the idea is that every time an app is used, the creator is going to get a royalty same with same way, you know, on Spotify, they pay out royalties for every stream or the same way that when you create a YouTube video, YouTube will pay you, you know, for, you know, sharing the ad revenue, essentially. As far as like the competitive landscape, what it's looking like today. There are a number of other tools that are, there's another, a number of other software glue layer tools. There's of course, prompt, but prompt base that I mentioned that just sells the prompt.

9:53They don't generate it. They don't have a marketplace that are, you know, for, for kind of these tools. So it, that one's, that one's a bit different. More similar, you might see things like Zapier, which has a$5 billion valuation bubble with a$1 billion valuation and make.com with about$2.5 billion valuation. The main difference here is that those are just essentially software glue layer tools. So they help you with, you know, integrations and software. None of them have the dedicated marketplace that we're building. And none of them more importantly, have all of the AI specific features that are required to really cater to the AI niche.

10:29They're really for software tools. You know, I think Zapier might've added like chat GPT in, but they're not catering to all of the different AI use cases and tools. So we're really building out a very complex, robust toolkit for AI creators with all the AI platforms that we really can help people to monetize their workflows and build those together for AI specific use cases. As far as the founding team, I mentioned Jillian and myself. Jillian, she has a background in computer science. She is our chief product officer. and she was the chief product officer and kind of visionary behind self-pause, like I mentioned, help scale to 120 ,000 users.

11:07My background is, well, you probably know me from this podcast that I've been running for the last year. I'm one of the top AI podcasters in the world. Over a million listens on this podcast, but I have a number of other podcasts in the AI space. I'm sure you've launched recently. And in addition to that, I've done a number of different software companies, a number of different online companies in the past. My background really is in digital marketing. I was an advanced digital marketing instructor at university. Right after I graduated, I went and worked in corporate doing digital marketing. And then I began working on software projects and this podcast.

11:46But really my passion, what I'm excited about and where I really thrive is in the entire marketing, go-to-market strategy, growing, growth hacks. You've seen it here on the podcast and I've talked about it a ton, but you know, this is really my realm. So what gets me excited is that this is such an awesome product. Now I finally, you know, I'm able to tell the story and grow it and build it. So, and then Ben, of course, Ben Pearson is our CTO and co-founder and he is a experienced full stack developer. He's got over a decade of experience. He's done some really impressive projects, deploying, maintaining a bunch of intricate technological infrastructures and solutions.

12:24He's very focus driven. And honestly, like I would call him a very prolific developer, very smart guy, very forward thinking. He's come up with a lot of the vision of AI box and really setting us apart and setting us on long term sustainable, you know, tech side. So as far as you know, where we see this going in our forecasting, we're forecasting over the next, you know, 12 months to reach about$3.3 million in revenue after after we raise around and 12 months after we launch our forecasting is to hit about 20 million dollars in revenue this is you know kind of similar to what you'll have seen from jasper um i believe their first year was somewhere around 20 million their second year was uh between 40 and 50 million um of course this is a completely different business than jasper they were an ai writing tool this is a you know you have ai writing apps you have apps for every single industry and niche on here so i think this can grow 10x or more the size of that company.

13:23I see a lot of potential in here for that. So what we're doing now is essentially earlier, a number of months ago, I announced to people that we were interested in doing a round of funding for this. And we got a ton of inbound from podcast listeners that were interested in investing. And the problem was there was so many people like putting, you know, hundreds of people on a cap table is not very realistic. And so what we ended up doing was partnering with Republic. Republic helps companies to do crowdfunding rounds. And they essentially manage all of the investors and it just shows up on our cap table as Republic one person and they manage everyone's equity and they, you know, help collect funds and do everything.

14:10So it has been over the last two months or three months we've been working with Republic to put this together because of kind of that big initial interest we got. So you can actually go to republic.com slash AI dot dash box. I'll throw a link in the description of that. You could probably just Google Republic AI box. And today is the official day that our offering goes live. We can raise up to one point two four million dollars on this current crowd funding thing. But anything over fifty thousand dollars we can keep on this. So to looking at the looking at the campaign today, we have about$160 ,000 so far, which is been invested or reserved over, I think we have 200 reservations and investments at the moment.

14:57And so we are going to be, this is now launching soon, but the thing that I wanted to do, especially for any podcast listeners or kind of everyone that is early here to this, because in the next week or two, I'm going to be reaching out to a bunch of different investors. I have, you know, meeting lined up with some investors from big firms that are interested in getting on this once they've kind of seen some of the traction that we've had. But for anyone that is getting in early, what I wanted to do is I worked out a deal with Republic where our valuation, we have essentially a discount on our valuation for the first$250 ,000 invested.

15:32So the valuation will be$8.5 million for the first$250 ,000. And then after that, the valuation goes up to$10 million kind of for the rest. So my goal and my hope is that for AI chat listeners, for anyone listening to the podcast, that if you are interested in investing in AI companies or kind of in this space, I think minimum investment on this is like$150, so not a ton. But if you're interested in investing in this space, I want you, because you've been a loyal listener, you've been around for a long time, I want you to be able to get in at this discounted valuation. And then, you know, so there's just a small allocation for that.

16:07And then after that, it goes up to the normal valuation, which we'll, you know, finish off the working towards raising the$1.2 million on that. So really, really excited. A couple of things that I want to mention though here is, like I mentioned, minimum investments,$150. If you're not an accredited investor, which I think is many people that listen, you are maxed out at$2 ,500 that you can invest. So just so you know, there is that constraint. If you're an accredited investor, you can invest, I think, up to$124 ,000. so the other thing that I wanted to mention is the fact that there are a bunch of different bonus perks so depending on how much you invest you can get a bunch of you know different perks and for the platform you can go check all of this out on the on the AI box listing on Republic and you can kind of see all that in addition we've made a bunch of really cool videos and graphics and all sorts of cool content that kind of explain what we're doing what we're building where we're at with everything.

17:08You can also find a lot of this information on AIbox.ai. I've updated the website so you can get all of the information now on what we're building and where we're at with this, see our videos. And yeah, really, really excited about this project. I think the market is huge. This podcast is an awesome way that we are going to be able to share and help grow the platform. So far, as far as traction goes, we have some really solid interest. We have over 2 ,500 corporations and professionals that are currently on the AI box waitlist. And this is including companies like, you know, people at companies like Google, Atlassian, Ally Bank, a bunch of other big companies are on the waitlist right now.

17:48Of course, we have a really strong community. We have 35 ,000 members in our different AI box creators, social media groups, Facebook and Discord. And then of course, our newsletter, we are we have our AI box newsletter that is read by some of the top minds in AI, people from Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Cisco. And then really, I think that this is just such a hot industry. There's a bunch of billion-dollar merger and acquisition activity in the space recently. You've been seeing, I covered all the time, the investments that are going into this. I really see this as being a rapidly growing, very exciting industry.

18:24So if this is anything that is interesting to you, I will leave a link in the show notes to go to republic.com slash ai dash box to go check out the full um listing and to you know see what we're doing see what we're up to i'm you know thrilled to answer any questions you have over there uh you can ask questions there's a discussion board um i post updates and yeah um if you're interested just make sure that you go and do your reservation fairly soon like i mentioned, the discounted rate is only for the first$250 ,000 and we're already over$160 ,000 and we're launching today. So I just want to make sure that you get it.

19:04You guys are the first to know, just so you know, this podcast is the first place that I'm telling you guys and I'm going to be reaching out to a lot of different people, companies and organizations over the next month about this. But I wanted you guys to be the first people in if you're interested. So I will leave the link in the show notes and I would be thrilled to have you on the journey, part of the AI Box community.