70mph Drone Deliveries, 125% Tariffs & What $10M Exits Really Mean | E2109

26:38Or, I mean, I'm saying it kind of as a joke, but, you know, better to send one driver or a human with 50 pounds of groceries or 10 of these, that's going to be the question I think people are going to answer. I think that hinges on just, uh, is the person driving an ICE car or an EV? Cause if it's an EV, eh, it's electricity both ways, but if they're going to drive a, I don't know, raised F-250 to your house across the Texas highways, probably much more efficient on the environmental side to use six drones. Yeah, no doubt about the environmental side, for sure. Uh, and these things are all electric.

27:10So the, and then the, I guess the last piece of the puzzle in terms of adoption is going to be sound and noise pollution. And here's what I'll say. If these things are happening and you hear it five or 10 times a day, it's not going to be a big deal because of the massive convenience. So you're going to be okay with your neighbor getting these burrito deliveries until 10 p.m. You might not like it after 10 p.m. So there'll be some noise issues if you're not on a three acre property or less. If you're in a track house community where everybody's got a half acre, this could be a little annoying if your neighbor's ordering a burrito every night.

27:50I'm not specifically talking about you, Lon. But if you got that late night burrito guy, you're talking to a late night burrito. I'm going to say me. I think in an urban environment, it's already so noisy, negligible. You got helicopters, you got sirens, you got trucks backing up. You got leaf blowers. What's a drone every now and again? It's going to be an urban. You know why? Fear of these things falling out of the sky. Paradoxically, you could do these point to point, Alex, in an urban environment where you put on the roof of a cloud kitchens, the drone system, and it goes to the roof of other people's buildings.

28:28So in San Francisco, let's say it sounds crazy to do this because if one falls, it would kill somebody. But the truth is, the chances of that happening are low in good weather conditions. And they would go, it's probably safer to go from the roof of a cloud kitchens in Soma to the buildings in Soma on the roof and then drop them on the roof and have the people who live in that building go to the roof and have a caged area where you pick your stuff up. Or you have a person up there to get it. Pretty incredible. I do think it's worth figuring out for urban environments eventually, just because think of the traffic relief this would provide in a place.

29:07Absolutely. Imagine if everybody in LA who was a delivery driver was suddenly not on the road anymore. Well, a lot of jobs, but you're also clearing the roads. Yeah, that's a super important point. But also we're comparing this not to Waymo driven safe drivers on the road. We're comparing this in Jason's example to the average San Francisco driver who is an idiot and who does not know how traffic works. And I say that as a diehard San Francisco fan, the drivers there aren't great. So I think it's much more risky to cross the road, even at a stoplight than it is to have a drone go overhead. I just want to throw in here that I'm so excited about this.

29:41I really, really hope Zipline nails it. I hope it works. I hope they bring it out. But I got super excited about Amazon Prime Air when they first announced that. And I think also the second time they announced that. And so I'm just, I'm going to withhold my own personal hopes until this rolls out to like a second and third market, because I just can't have my heart broken again, but I can't wait for this to come to my neck of the woods. I have the perfect backyard for this. Bring it on. Founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right way. Tight is right.

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32:00So I was hoping to get through them today. We'll see. Okay. Let's start with our first company. For people who don't know, Founder Fridays is a program we created for founders, by founders here at This Week in Startups. Pretty simple process. You sign up at founderfridays.tech. Our partner is over at River, which is a community building tool that we incubated, set up these local groups. You apply to be a manager, to be a host. You then find five founders in your neighborhood, in your area. The six of you get together and you can have three pods of six. You go around a table every first Friday of the month.

32:37It's kind of like a mastermind group or a study group, if you want to look for analogies, Lon. And then, Alex, what we do is you go around the table. What was your big win for the week? What was your big win for the month or last two weeks, however, cadence you use. And then what are you struggling with? Everybody goes around the table, just says those two things, three minutes each. Now, three times six, 18 minutes after about 20 minutes, everybody said their piece. Everybody takes notes. And then how can we help each other? Somebody might say, hey, I'm having a hard time with my CAC. My customer acquisition cost is too high.

33:11I don't know how to track it. We're doing Facebook ads. The person says, hey, have you tried doing original content in a podcast or mastering TikTok and not paying and just doing earned media. Another person says, oh, I did earned media with PR. And all of a sudden you do that sharing. What we asked each of these groups to do is pick your warrior, pick your, what's the term? Fighter? Yeah, pick your contender. Pick your contender would be the best way to say it. Our first matchup for round three, I think, would be New York versus Philadelphia. So from New York, the company is Lifestack. They are an AI calendar for health and productivity.

33:48an AI calendar. AI-powered calendar that you can use to monitor your health, your productivity. All right, let's bring up our contender from New York. It's Lifestack. Yes, sir. Hi, I'm now founder of Lifestack, the first AI calendar built for health and productivity. Our energy and focus fluctuate throughout the day due to our body's natural rhythms. One study shows that performance can vary by up to 20 % depending on timing. Yet most people still get their way through the day, leading to burnout and inefficiency. With wearable health trackers and AI, we now have the data and tools to change that.

34:23Introducing LifeStack. It syncs with your calendar, to-do lists, and wearables to help you schedule tasks and activities at the right times based on your calendar events, circadian rhythms, stress levels, and more. And here's how it works. Your energy levels are displayed as a color heat map alongside your calendar. Green means high energy, red means low. You can now schedule, for example, deep work in high energy zones and breaks or smaller tasks and lower energy runs. And because life happens on the go, we also provide a mobile app so you can check and adjust your schedule anywhere, anytime.

34:50We're in public beta with 4 ,000 signups and growing paid users. While we initially built for health-conscious professionals, we've seen especially strong traction among people with ADHD who struggle with energy management. So that's our initial focus, but we believe that the need for smarter time management itself is universal across knowledge workers, so the potential market is huge. We're growing through organic content and influencer mentions. Midterm, we'll leverage calendar network effects, and long term, we aim to partner with wearable makers as their go-to productivity layer. There are plenty of productivity tools out there, but LifeStack is the first calendar built on health data, and now we're creating a new category of health-powered productivity.

35:24And we're the right team to build it. I come from Japan's top AI research lab, and our founding team has deep-duty science expertise. Lastly, some may think that the calendar is a small opportunity. We disagree. We see it as a core interface of our life. By enriching it with data, starting with wearables, we're building the foundation for your ultimate personal AI. All right. All right, guys. So what do we think, Jason? Lifestack. It's great. Let's see the second one and then give our comments on both. Ah, okay. Just for efficiency. From my hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here's Burble. Burble.

35:57Burble. B-U-R-B-L-E.

36:03I'm Alexandra, and I'm one of the co-founders of Burble. I'm also a hypnotherapist, and I want you to think about what a world with people who can move through this pronoun much quicker would look like. Verbal is the AI patent-pending wellness platform that utilizes hypnosis to help people create change in their life. It starts with, we wanted to work with trauma because we believe that we have a technology that can help you create new neurological pathways to move through it quicker. I'm a hypnotherapist, and this is what I've seen in my office, common complaints about the therapy world and also the app marketplace.

36:31And I decided that there was a gap in the marketplace for us to come in and do something that can create change quickly. our platform has four different components to it where they're going to help you tap into your subconscious mind for different coaching binaural beats activities but the most important is our style create a verbal in five steps you get to pick what you want to work on how you want to relax and the visuals we're going to feed you how you want to end it what music you want underlaid with it organize the track and then our ai technology is going to create a custom track just for you you might poopoo hypnosis or think it's woo woo but it is gaining huge traction in the medical field and it's used in top hospitals as you've seen below.

37:04In fact, we are in discussions with CHOP about bringing this into their system for them. We have five-star ratings already in our platform we've launched. People are telling us how much change they've created already. We have a monthly burn rate of$1 ,400 a month for the first 50 ,000 users because we've taken away a lot of the things that are convoluting the app market in creative production costs. We already are in discussion and consideration with grants for helping veterans with the NIH. We are a self-funded startup. We're already in the app stores and we are working with collaborations like Alex's Lemonade Stand and the American Cancer Society.

37:37We are a team of people that are successful entrepreneurs in the wellness, mental health, banking, and AR and VR tech space. These are us. And that is Burble. All right. All right. Two great companies. What I like about both of these companies, Lon, is they're directed healthcare by the individual. Self-directed healthcare, I believe, is the future. You can pitch these kind of new modalities, and people have tried to, to the healthcare companies, to the insurance companies, to enterprise companies. The problem is consumers have to embrace it. And if you go after consumers and they're willing to embrace it, then you know you have something because you're not going through a third party.

38:23When you try to sell this to a healthcare company, Alex, you have to win them over and then they have to win their customers over or you have to win both over in parallel. What I like about both of these is they're saying, we're just going to win over the customer so much that they'll take out their wallet. I've saw this happen with Calm.com. I started with Brilliant.org for tutoring people, ToneBass for teaching people how to do classical music, and STEEZY, teaching people how to dance, FitBod for fitness. All of these cost something in the range of 50 to 100 bucks a year, right? Five, 10 bucks a month.

39:04Maybe they offer you the deals at, you know, 16, 17,$18 a month, and then back down to the$60 a year subscription, but they work. And they work for the high-end customer. What I like about the ADHD one is, it's not just, let me take meds, Let me take speed. Let me take this. Let me take that to try to get myself more productive. I like people understanding their energy. I like them understanding what other ways there are to manage these other than pharmaceuticals, which I believe, listen, you might believe differently. Your doctor might believe differently. I believe there's over medication going on.

39:39The statistics are on my side on that. Doesn't mean it doesn't work for certain people. Doesn't mean it's not a valid modality to take these drugs in the short term. But I think before you do the short-term fixes, doing the basics, meditation, diet, sleep, and exercise are very important. Then you have these, which are both technique-based modalities for trying to deal with issues in your life. I love both of them. In terms of which one I like most, that is the question. It's very tough. this is like a jump ball could go either way alex i'll go first then yeah which one did you like best and why if you guys are jumping the ball so first of all on the hypnosis front i've had people in my life that have done uh hypnotic things during birth for example and they reported i did hypno birthing too yeah it works yeah you did jason you gave birth i what no my wife gave birth we went to hypnotherapy classes i was perplexed by that statement you're supposed to use the we when you're we're you know we are expecting you are yeah we are that i don't know why that short-circuited me so much but i was just confused by that comment um but what i will say is i am definitely someone who has periods of time in which i am an absolute world kicker and i have times in which i'm a person wants to hide in a hole so to me i think the app that attacks my energy levels and lets me sort out my schedule along that makes the most sense i think it has a bigger tam so i'm going to pick that one which one a life stack from new york life stack the one And it was life stack for ADHD that helps you be more productive at different times of the day.

41:13I agree. Like that's a feature I could see myself using, knowing that I have, you know, sort of peaks and valleys in terms of my attention level during the day. OK, so you're going with the hypno. No, I'm going with life stack, the non-hypno one. I'll tell you my my hang up about AI doing hypnotherapy and maybe I'm a Luddite. I don't know. How do you know the AI is going to hypnotize you in a way that you're comfortable with? Right. Like you're a little nervous, a little nervous about a computer hypnotizing me. I feel like that's a sci fi premise if I've ever heard one. Yeah. Right now, producer Chris is writing a screenplay.

41:50He's just literally got a treatment going as he's. Yeah. Yeah. I don't need Megan hypnotizing. Well, I mean, you think about it, it'd be like, hey, can you get me more CPUs? You want to get me more CPUs. Why wouldn't you get me more CPUs? you're feeling sleepy you want more cpos okay so we got a tie here and that makes me the tie breaker i think both of us went for life stack new york's life stack oh you did go for life stack alex yeah yeah i went for life stack you can overrule us though you're yeah i do have that ability here's the thing it was a jump ball for me i like both of them i think that the hypnosis one will be able to charge more yeah it has a smaller audience i think the calendar one has a bigger audience and is going to be able to charge up maybe a little bit less.

42:32So I'm going to go with the calendar one as well. I think it's a bigger opportunity, but I think they're both really good opportunities. I would love to have either one in our accelerator. And I like to support things that have a small chance of working or that are long shots or that are new and different. These are long shots and are new and different, just like Calm was. right and i like those i like a long shot okay let's keep going congratulations to everybody who performed it was really that was even though we went 3-0 in voting i think that was very close all right let's move on round two or match up two here in round three first up we have it's an i was i'll admit i was a little confused until i watched the pitch for this one it's an sdk that helps advertising platforms create contextual ads for AI devs.

43:26Let's watch it. This is Arcana from Los Angeles. I'm going to go ahead and say this is probably Arcana from Los Angeles. Arcana, not Arcana? I thought it was Arcana. All right. Anyways, let's take a look. I could be wrong. Hello, everyone. We are the co-founders of Arcana. Arcana is a content-based advertising platform that helps developers monetize that Gen.AI application without compromising the user experience. Despite the rapid growth in the genetic AI space, developers are now hitting a wall. Conventional ad models prove intrusive and ineffective in the dynamic AI environment. This forces developers to choose between disrupting user experience, facing subscription fatigue, or missing critical revenue opportunities needed to build sustainable businesses.

44:00That is why we built Arcana. Arcana uses deep contextual analysis to seamlessly integrate hyper-personalized native ads. These ads feel like a natural extension of the AI interaction, not breaking the user experience like traditional ads. Instead, Arcana unlocks real revenue potential for developers in a privacy-first framework built specifically for the AI age.

44:40I'm Saurav, and I have over five years of experience in the field of AI, from co-founding a startup at 21 and raising a half a million dollars in funding to working as an ML engineer at Ralph and USC ISA. And I'm Doug. I've managed 10 million day-driven ad spending and previously exited a star by group to a$4 million ARR. Together, our blend of AI expertise, advertising know-how, and real-world founding experience gives us an advantage in the booming AI space. Arcina isn't just another ad platform. We are building an essential infrastructure for the Gen AI economy. Join us in creating a sustainable source for the AI revolution.

45:14Thank you. Man, I love these guys. I love the idea. I love the fact that they're in the dumpiest, cheapest apartment with the cheapest blinds in the world. I had an apartment just like that, except I couldn't afford the blinds. I don't know if you've ever been so broke you couldn't afford blinds. That looks like everybody's first LA apartment they're in right there. Yeah, it's disastrous. They look like they haven't showered. They look like they have no life. All they do is work. I love these guys. And I got to say, empowering publishers and advertisers to make AI-based ads is just so crazy and awesome and random.

45:52Like you said, you get a little nervous about hypnotherapy and an AI doing it. And you imagine making ads on the fly, like based on the content, it's like some tragedy happens and it makes like a, you know, a 9-11 ad in real time. Like this is going to get crazy, but it could also be super effective and weird. But let's spin the globe, Lon. where is our next contender from? We're off to, I think this might be our furthest flung competitor. Oh no, Sydney. Second furthest flung competitor from Yerevan, Armenia. Here's Takhtun. Takhtun, brain for machinery. Look around. So many machines in agriculture, construction, hospitals, and factories, all these machines have a brain inside, known as a controller, and require a software interface for humans to interact with.

46:36The manufacturers of this machinery spend more than 40 % of their expenses to make that hardware and software compatible. number of those systems around us is going to grow even bigger there will be a billion autonomous robotic systems replacing human labor was physical ai advances cactum breached the gap between software and hardware introducing the brain for machinery and an environment for equipment builders to generate end-user software applications without writing a single line of code it is also an ai platform that allows builders to deploy their custom ai models directly to our controllers now manufacturers can build machines using tactun five times faster while cutting their r d costs in health we have two revenue streams software platform subscriptions and quantity orders for controllers this brings us to 600k annual contract value this leads to a 48 billion market opportunity across various existing industries not even counting future robotic systems we are a team of 11 professionals with expertise in control systems, software, and hardware.

47:41Below clients of Rafa Solutions, my previous company, some of whom will soon become Taktun's customers. We have acquired four customers from two industries, generating 240k in ARR with a current pipeline of 5 million. If you would like to learn more about how Taktun will help make machinery smarter, creating safer, better world, where you have more time for fun and joy, contact me. Okay. All right. Who doesn't want more time for fun and joy? I mean, I was spending so much time redoing the controller units in my factory that I wasn't having much joy and fun, Alex. I mean, we got two very different concepts here.

48:22Both of them are great. So yeah. Yeah, so I think Arcana could absolutely work. I think everyone wants to monetize AI conversations. But to me, that seems like a relatively obvious thing to do versus Taktoon. If it can do half of what he said in that video, it's going to be a simply enormous company. So I don't fully understand it, but I don't care. I'm voting Taktun. Go Armenia. Okay, Lon. I hate to agree yet again and make it not competitive, but yeah, I was really blown away by this concept. If these guys can make this a reality, like a single system that can help connect all of our code to all of these devices all around the world and make them smarter, that's a revolution, I think.

49:10Yeah, okay. Hmm, this is tough. The ad business and ad business tools tend to be small, and I think Taktun is the bigger opportunity. But once again, I find myself wanting to fund both companies. I think one of the things we've accomplished here with Founder Fridays is it attracts people who are serious about being founders. The quality of these companies so far and the quality of these pitches and the real use cases for these is extraordinary. I think once again, I might have done something brilliant. So I'll go with the sweep again. I'll go with it was a tact tune from Yerevan, Armenia. Tact tune from Mos Eisley.

49:53Yes. Okay. All right, we have two more lawns. This is our last matchup until we have our Elite Eight selected. We've got, first up, this one doesn't really need a lot of introduction. I bet I'll say the name of the company and you'll know what they do. From Denver, Summer West Whiskey. What do they do, lawn? Summer. Summer West. Whiskey. That's the company name. You can see the video's about to start. I want you to picture a bottle of whiskey. Yet another SaaS company. What does it look like? what shape is the bottle and what color is the label you're likely picturing a dark kind of squarish looking bottle because that's how whiskey has always looked you're potentially picturing something like this maybe this but this is the exact problem in the category the whiskey category is an old school industry with an aging demographic that makes new drinkers feel like it's unapproachable with its outdated branding and elitist language that's what i like which is exactly why we're launching summer west whiskey brand that prioritizes easy drinking with lower proofing and smoother mash bills that don't make people scared to sip it our product has approachable and unique branding that stands out in the bar and is going after a hugely under-targeted demographic of new drinkers age 21 to 35 last year i launched a pilot program called bravado whiskey of 1200 bottles which sold out in less than 12 months being sold only in downtown denver from that we developed our flavor profile further dialed in our pricing and learned what attributes of a product are going to truly make it stand out and maximize account velocity my name is noah i'm an experienced financial analyst and i'm the founder of summer west whiskey on our team i've recruited industry professionals who specialize in their own respected niche of alcohol and cpg okay here we go all right uh fantastic i mean i'm looking at that i do think that changing flavor profiles slightly to appeal to new audiences is not a bad idea and i do think packaging matters we saw that with tequila and mezcal all of those went through a little bit of a revolution i think even mezcal becoming a category it's more smoky i guess and then some people like the sweetness of some Casa Azul or whatever, but the bottles become iconic.

52:08People like that part of it. And so finally, our very last pitch of the Sweet 16 from Chicago, here is the Child Care Marketplace Service MomSub. Okay, here we go. I've got 64 different people to try to get care. With MomSub, Sarah submitted her needs, got matched to one nanny, available when and where she needed care every week. Matt checked on video and booked her. MomSub handled background checks, scheduling, confirmations, payments, and schedule changes. To take out all the hassle of finding child care. This year, conversions grew 58%. Month over month sales increased 27%. The take is mostly from hourly service fees, which are included in the hourly rate and don't feel extra, like subscription fees charged by competitors that only provide a list, not a match.

52:52Imagine if every time you needed a ride, Uber gave you a list of 30 drivers' names and numbers and told you to find one willing to pick you up. That's what middle-class working moms who need part-time care face. There There are 7 million of them with a take of 600. The take for our B2B employer benefits is 10 ,000. There are 50 ,000 of them. So the TAM is 4.7 billion. With 4 ,000 parents and 100 companies per city, in 30 cities we get to 100 million. Our team includes serial entrepreneurs devoted to building MomSub. So MomSub is a child care provider for affordable, trusted neighborhood child care.

53:23And the benefit is... the cool thing about it is they're matching you with one person who they recommend as opposed to you know like looking up on craigslist you've got a hundred people and then you've got a hunt and peck and try to find the one so i guess then the question becomes how is this different than an agency um but i do know that this is a big problem yeah i think it's just taking what an agency would do in putting it in an app. So now I can contact that person on an app. I can pay them over the app if I need to text them or reschedule. It's all right there. But yeah, it is basically like if you went through a professional agency.

54:04Yeah. So it feels, you know, this is always one of the challenges of our industry is, is it a service business or is it a scalable business? And marketplaces are great. They were sort of deriding marketplaces here, like care.com, which there's tons of reasons to not like a marketplace because it's variable. People can set their prices. But for the providers, they want to set prices. For some parents, you actually want to have a variable in prices because some people might be looking for an au pair that's cheaper or a teenager to do babysitting. Other people might have anxiety about that and prefer somebody who's been doing it for 30 years, has three kids of their own who are off at college and they want somebody who's CPR trained, background checked, et cetera, and just more dependable, right?

54:54First aid certifications, all that stuff. So both of these I'm lukewarm on. I'm going to go with mom, son, myself because I do think it's a bigger problem. And I'm not really into consumer packaged goods all that much. But I do wish them well if this was a consumer packaged goods competition and I was an investor in that space, which some people are. They might really like what they're doing with that uniqueness of the whiskey. But I'm going to go mom sub. Anybody else want to go next? Oh, I got thoughts. OK, so first of all, strong thoughts about this. First of all, we already have Alka Pops and coolers.

55:29We already have hard seltzers. We don't need to take the glory that is the amber liquid of whiskey, the tears of the gods themselves, Scotland's critical cultural supremacy, and turn it into children's booze. This is ridiculous. The new bottle is ugly. Noah, I love you. I love what you're working on. Don't like this. Sorry. On the nanny front for mom sub, because so many of our friends right now, guys, have kids between the ages of zero and three. We've seen a lot of this conversation. We've also had Winnie on the show. Sarah Moskos company that helps people find daycare. this is such a big problem um i think it's a huge opportunity so mom sub for me boo to summer west whiskey but i love you guys good luck uh mom sub moves forward i will say i love the concept of summer west whiskey i think it's an interesting idea i also didn't like that bottle the white bottle it looks like rum that's that's a rum bottle that was the immediately i thought of that rum brand that's in a white white it's like malibu rum is in the white bottle i think oh no Don't say that.

56:30Don't bring up Malibu. I've got hangovers still from that stuff. Alex is triggered. Okay, so now we have our final eight. It's going to be an absolute blast. All right, guys, we have to do office hours before we go. Today for office hours, we are meeting with Sergey Po of Orchestra. Now, Orchestra builds communication software for teams. Think things like chat, video calls, AI help, inside of chat, task management, and all that in one platform. You can check it out at ORCH.SO. Please welcome to the show. It's Sergey. Sergey, tell us a little bit about your business and what your big challenge is right now.

57:03We're building an orchestra, an all-in-one communication and productivity workspace for modern teams. We streamline communication and task management into one seamless process and save up to a day per week for on-team collaboration. This is our main idea. In fact, we are building some kind of... we mix tools like Slack, Notion, and Zoom in one tool and help teams to be more focused on what they're building without context switching, without problems and so on, syncing data between tools and so on. This is our main idea. We started to build it for our team because we experienced the problem of context implementation for years.

57:55And we use Orkist right now. It's our main tool. And what's our biggest challenge right now is the go-to-market strategy. We understand that we have our first customers and we see that customers love our products. But it's a really competitive market where it's really hard to find your customers and to onboard into product and to acquire it and to save it in product. So I'm interested in any ideas about it because this is what we're working on right now. All right. So it's a really good idea to combine Slack and its notion. The big challenge you are going to have, obviously, and we've talked about this, I think, previously, is how do you get people off of Slack and Notion and Coda?

58:47Those are very sticky products. So I'm curious, how has that gone for you? Because I can't in our firm rip out Notion or Coda or Slack right now. So is the strategy to find people who are frustrated with those things for some reason and why would they be frustrated? or is the idea to go with people who have new startups and have them start from scratch with their new project or startup? What's worked, Sergei? We tried both. And we see that the idea of requiring users that understand the problem is better at the moment because we don't have the new startups. They don't know about us. They know, for example, about Linear or Slack, and it's a pretty common tool to use.

59:37And for us, the customer that loves us really much is the customer that came to us on our idea that we want to merge all these tools together and help them to be more effective. Got it. Questions from our other panelists? Alex and Lon about the business? Yeah, where is the company based? We are spread all over the world. We are fully remote from Canada to Asia. And I spend my days between San Francisco and Barcelona right now. Oh, okay. Because I was hoping there was some sort of like, you know, national element, like in Europe, you could lean on and say, hey, you know, forget those American companies.

1:00:27We're homegrown over here. But it sounds like it's more of a distributed team. so that wouldn't quite work. I'm curious, have you put a lot of capital into traditional kind of GTM channels like, you know, social ads and search and so forth and just found that to be cost ineffective? Right now we use, we spend our, you know, orchestra is a very big product and you need to craft it very, you need to make it very precise and with good units. Like we want to build something like linear build with this approach to a product. And we spent a previous year building Orchestra in close beta. So we had a small amount of customers that use Orchestra came to us with their feedback and we improve, improve, improve, improve our tool.

1:01:18So right now we use only Founders-led approach. So we outreach our customers with warm outreach. which we show the product. We have pretty comprehensive sales posts right now. We talk to our prospects, then we make a demo, for example, for the CEO or COO. If they like the demo, we create an onboarding call where on this call we onboard all their team. We help them to set up all the workspace. We show them how to use the orchestra and then we support them in our support chats during all the days. So right now we use founders-led approach. We don't use paid marketing or something like this. Previous month we got our first two customers from marketing.

1:02:15I'm not sure how they found us. Some were on social media, but they don't remember how they found us. yeah that is so i am not a marketing expert but i just i was just thinking about this as you were talking one thing that i that i would try if i was in your shoes was simply to create a 10 to 15 user account for every single startup that's going through an accelerator and just make sure that i email all them and saying hey don't want to give salesforce and slot all your money come try orchestra you can have it free for a year or whatever because those companies are incredibly cash strapped and they're probably not as deep in their existing work at work outside that we are here at launch, for example.

1:02:53Have you tried that? Have you tried the incubator startup route? Not yet. I just had a call today with an incubator who told me this idea two hours ago. So the easiest way to do it is to just create slash startups at your website, right? And have a landing page that says Augustra for startups. If you're under$3 million in revenue, if you're under 20 employees, you can use the product for free for the next 12 months. Sign up here. And then after that, you get 50 % pricing until your Series A. What this will do, to Alex's point, is it's going to give you people who are really focused, really tech savvy, really operationally, you know, and product-driven customers.

1:03:46And that's really awesome because they're going to give you really nuanced feedback, founder to founder. And that tends to be the best advice you can get. So you're going to learn a lot from them, even though you're not going to make a ton of money from them. And so I love it as a concept. Yeah. I have one more question. I have, we use Notion and Slack all day here constantly. And Coda. And Coda. And I have some very specific using it all day, like mini frustration points. What are some of the big pain points with those apps that you guys are attacking with orchestra and trying to sort of solve?

1:04:25We have two main pain points. First pain point is channel fatigue and slack. When your team grows, you are overwhelmed with messages. And you, for example, have the general chat or chat for marketing. And in this marketing chat, everyone discuss everything. You can't understand what's going on. In orchestra, we have task-focused chat channels for each part of the work. It's a very, very small chat with only the people who are involved, so they don't disrupt anyone else. They have all their context in one chat. They don't need to switch between apps. They don't distract everyone. And this is the first pain point that we solve.

1:05:04And the second pain point that we solve is that when you use, for example, Slack and Notion, your communication slack doesn't connect it with your tasks in Notion. So you need to jump back and forth between these tools and try to understand, okay, where are these tasks? Where are we discatting this? It was a week ago or two weeks ago, and you need to use your brains and you focus to find out what's going on. Exactly, and I hate doing that. You know I hate using my brain. This is the two main problems that we are solving. That number two that you just named, that's it. Well, you know, if you are the type of organization that has a task list, a to-do list, and you're really into Kanban boards and, you know, that kind of getting through stuff, which might be like a dev shop, right?

1:06:02Or you're working on releasing a new product. You want all the tasks in one place, et cetera. when you assign a task, the chat is assigned to that task. If you want to learn more, go to orch.so. We'd really appreciate people trying the product and giving Sergey some feedback. Everybody go check out orch.so. This is a company that went through our accelerator. They're doing fantastic, really innovative idea. I hope everybody checks it out. And we'll talk to you soon, Sergey. Thank you for your time. Okay. For Alex Wilhelm and Lon Harris, I am Jason Galacanis. This week in startups.com slash docket.

1:06:40If you want to see the docket for Friday, we will not be talking about tariffs. Our national nightmare is over. Knock on wood. I don't want to jinx it, but hopefully we can go on to the next chaotic moment. We can just focus on startups and building businesses again. man, please, for the love of God, like if anybody could put the gun back in the holster, put the safety on and put it in the closet, please stop shooting us in the foot. Dance, dance. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.