AI for Investors, Publisher Rewards, Sleep Tech & More – 2024 Jam with JCal Recap | E2032

0:00Hey everybody, Alex from This Week in Startups here. Today's episode is a special one. We are going to wrap up Jam with J. Cal for the season. Now, if you're new to the show Jam with J. Cal for the season. and tackle their biggest challenges on the road to success. This segment has been a hit, so today we're doing a recap of all the jams that have aired. If you missed one, don't worry, we gotcha. Lots of Jason coming your way. Before we get started though, I do want to say a shout out to.tech domains for sponsoring Jam with Jcal, because, you know, for any tech company out there,.tech is a pretty reasonable domain to pursue.

0:49So please sit back, enjoy this episode, and I'll see you on the other side. All right, everybody, it's time for another jam session with Jcal. This is a very simple project that I came up with. This is my invention. No, it's not actually. You know whose invention it is? Travis from Uber used to do something called the jam sesh. And it was just like a couple of founders getting together, we hang out, you know, pop open a couple of cold ones and talk about business and jam out on ideas. Man, it was some of the best times I ever had. And we're bringing it back to this week in startups. and we have got a partner on this program the partner is dot tech domain names uh and they came up with a simple idea hey listen if you got under two million in funding and you got a dot tech domain name which is a really cool domain name to have you get to come on the program if you've got a great idea and a great company and so today we're going to hear from ramsey shaffer and he is the ceo and co-founder of uptrends ai and they are uptrends-ai.tech ramsey welcome to the show Thanks for having me, J.

1:50Cal. Excited to jam. Okay, let's jam out. Why don't you start just telling us for two minutes about your company, run us through it, show us the product, whatever you want to do. And then tell me, what's the most challenging part of your business? Three, two, go. Sweet. Okay, I've got some slides. Love to just get your raw feedback on them. And then I've got some questions that we can get into. Feedback on the deck. I get that a lot. Feedback on the deck. You're going to use this deck to raise money or you just want to explain the product? To raise money, yeah. Intro call. Got it. Okay, good. So the audience for this is seed funds.

2:21I assume you're a seed stage startup. So great. Three, two, go. All right. I'm Ramsey. I'm the founder of Uptrends. We help financial advisors stay ahead of the news. So this is Zach. He's an independent financial advisor. And a few times each day, he'll get an email from a client asking him something like, you know, John Deere is up 5 % today. Why? Or I saw Nike fell 20 % last week. What's going on? So he'll go to Google. He'll go to Twitter, he'll go to Morningstar for some headlines, but more often than not, he's left scrambling to get back with a solid answer. Now imagine, multiply this by dozens of clients, hundreds of stocks, thousands of daily news events, and you can see how this becomes a huge time-consuming part of Zach's week.

3:04And frankly, it's holding him back from being a better advisor with more clients. So we're introducing Uptrends, the AI assistant automating the news cycle for investment advisors. uptrends monitors thousands of news sites filings and financial data sources to detect summarize and alert zach about the trends and events affecting the stocks that matter to him and his clients with uptrends he can easily see which stocks are trending in online chatter he can click into those stocks and get an ai summary of recent market moving events which he can then directly send to his clients things like john deere's up five percent today because they got an analyst upgrade from you know ubs most importantly he can set instant highly customizable of alerts to be notified about the next big event.

3:44Just choose the stocks he cares about, pick the types of alerts he wants to receive from price changes to insider trading, set the frequency he wants to be notified, and we'll send him an AI summary via email about the chatter when it matters. So ultimately, what used to take him hours now takes him minutes. Uptrends makes it 10 times easier to stay ahead of market moving events and find the answers he needs right away without any doom scrolling or FOMO required. Uptrends operates as a freemium monthly subscription. Anyone can get started for free. And then we have premium plans for more customizable, higher volume alerts.

4:18We have a$15 essentials package for DIY portfolio managers and a$50 pro package catered towards investment advisors like Zach. Now, there are 300 ,000 investment advisors in the US today, along with millions of DIY portfolio managers and retail investors. So for us to get from here to 10 million in ARR, we need to get to something like 16 ,000 advisors on our pro plan. And to get to 100 million in ARR, we need to get to 166 ,000 advisors. Last but not least, our team consists of myself as CEO and my co-founder Sam as CTO. Sam and I have 10 years experience as stock market investors. Together, we've written peer-reviewed research on the relationship between new sentiment and stock market outcomes.

4:59I've previously been a financial analyst and Sam was employee number one of a 10 million ARR startup. We're rounded out by our PhD machine learning lead, Joe, and our front-end developer, Hamza. That is Uptrends AI. We're on a mission to save investment advisors from the news to help them build better relationships with more clients by staying ahead of the chatter when it matters. Thank you. Okay. So there are... Great job, by the way. Overall, the pitch is tight in that it explains to me what you do, who your customer is, and what the product is. So when you do these pitches, especially in a condensed format, two or three minutes, you really have a very small number of boxes you need to check.

5:40This is not a 30 minute presentation. This is a three minute or less presentation, which is, you know, to be honest, all an investor needs to start a conversation. Okay, the customer of this product is a financial advisor. And there are registered investment advisors, there are wealth managers, there are financial advisors, there's a lot of different categories here but it's for somebody who manages another person's portfolio and it's a b2b to c type product there's b2b there's b2c you're enabling a business to talk to a customer in the same way shopify is you would say shopify allows somebody selling stuff on the internet to then reach customers fantastic these businesses tend to be great because you're enabling an existing business to do more business, to do business more efficiently, or to save money.

6:34One of those things. And so here you've identified a problem. Do I think you've identified a big problem? I'm not sure yet. Your advisors will tell you, but we know that these advisors get paid a lot of money, right? What does the average wealth manager make in the United States? What does the median wealth manager make? What is their compensation per year? I know each client for them is an average of ten thousand dollars in the door okay every year yep okay so they have but uh if they have a hundred clients that's a million dollars a year and you know what i see these uh guys and gals uh who are and they come at me all the time silicon valley guy i'm a whale uh for them but you know they're going after also my mom and my dad uh you know there's somebody who helps them and so you know people have a retirement account they got some you know 401k and they got some equities, you know, to save the money, you know, and these guys make 1 % of it, 1 % of a million dollars,$10 ,000.

7:32Got it. Okay. So, and there's lots of millionaires that's growing because equities are growing and America has a large number of millionaires. UAE has the most imported millionaires right now in terms of where millionaires are flowing. So I do think, this sounds crazy, if you want to raise money, one of the easiest places for you to raise money is to move to Abu Dhabi or Dubai and put your company there because that's like kind of the new Hong Kong or New York and you can get a golden visa and you can get them to invest 250K, 500K out of the gate, boom. They do that for like almost any American or European or somebody from Singapore, Australian, Indian that comes and puts their company there.

8:15So I'm just gonna put that as a little caveat there because money is moving to Abu Dhabi specifically and then also Dubai. Two amazing cities. Let's put that on the side here. I think the product looks okay. I think it needs a bit of a design refresh. It's a little bit too techie and not finance. I want to just talk to you about design for a second. I actually have a question around that. Yeah. Okay. Tell me your question. Sure. So speaking of design, I'm thinking a lot about our team right now. We're a team of four getting ready to fundraise. Yeah. And you've talked a lot in the past about the importance of your founding team, But thinking about what's next, my question is like those two to three next specific job functions or hires, where should we be focusing?

8:57Well, let's talk about the four you got. I'm hoping two of them are writing code. Four of us are writing code. God, I'm in love with your company already. You got four people writing code. How many of them are founders? How many of them are employees with? Two founders, two employees with stock. Perfect. That's great. So you got some redundancy there. you can basically there's going to be two more positions you have to add at some point one is going to be somebody to do sales and that person right now should be one of the founders why should you do founder-led sales because you need to know you need to have customer zero customer one two three and you got to be able to listen to them so let's pause for a second here tell me about how many paying customers you have and how much you charge ballpark and how do you charge yeah so right now we have a few hundred paying customers two paid plans a 15 a month and a 50 a month i will say originally we were more focused on the b2b retail investor and after feedback we've learned a lot about you've made the cardinal sin made the cardinal sin we did of all startups but we've learned you tried to run two different businesses concurrently a b2c and a b2b but you figured out that b2b is the one great and then you've made the next cardinal sin which is uh you are charging far too little we just established that one customer equals ten thousand dollars do you believe you will keep you will get your clients these wealth advisors do you believe you can get them one extra customer a year i think so yeah okay do you think you could save them from churning a customer every year easy yeah okay what is the value of getting a new customer and not losing a customer to them yeah i mean that's my pitch right there what is the value though i'm asking you a specific question a dollar amount well if it's ten thousand dollars one percent commission yep whatever that is ten thousand dollars and they would have lost one that cost them 10 and they would have gained one that's 10 so you've created twenty thousand dollars in value which means the uh ltv do you know what that stands for ltv lifetime value perfect okay i'm just benchmarking where you're at in your startup journey your ltv is people will stick with this product for seven years i'm gonna guess maybe five on average let's pick five and be conservative that means each customer you acquire is worth one hundred thousand dollars to you that means your cac what does cac stand for customer acquisition costs perfect your cac could be a thousand dollars and you would make it back very quickly so the value you're providing if we blow ball it you gain one you don't lose one you know twenty thousand a year you're providing in five years 100 000 of value that means you really should be charging 10 of that number which is ten thousand dollars which is two thousand dollars a year you're charging fifty dollars a month fifty dollars a month you know is but six hundred dollars a year so you probably for this product should be charging 500 a month 400 a month because you can really justify it that first customer you save you should get a hundred percent of it in my mind okay you should get a hundred percent of it so that would be a thousand or eight hundred a month so i would just get rid of all this pricing and be taken seriously by your customers a wealth manager is spending on lunch with their client six hundred dollars or dinner they're taking them to a knicks game or a mavs game and they're sitting in the first four rows for ten thousand dollars that's how they think and you're coming to the masking for six hundred bucks you it's like they pay more for you know they they're that's what they're paying for their gmail account come on sure yeah let's raise the price on this right signaling yes so signaling is way off now what this will also do for you is it's gonna have you capture the high end first and then go downstream you want to capture the high end because the high end is going to have the best advice for you so not only by raising your price do you increase perceived value you have more money to hire people and you have the ability to get the best chef's kiss best advice so i want you laser focus not on the number of customers i would rather you have the 10 of these uh wealth advisors who make five million dollars a year or two million dollars a year than for you to have 200 of them that make 400 000 a year you want to go for the really high end here and they're going to give you great advice so i think you got to redesign the product at the ux a little better and i think there's some virality here that you haven't thought of and this is what a jam session is about you identified like there's a problem customer says oh my god i own tesla stock uber stock uh oh my god uber's up like four bucks right now i just noticed before i got on air because uh the robo taxi is being delayed in some way who knows what's going on and now you got this like existential thing i mean this is like panic inducing for tesla shareholders lyft shareholders uber shareholders if i had exposure to that i do i would be like oh my god i'm not but anyway putting on all side be really interesting if when you share the dashboard of the stocks with a customer if the wealth manager got a ping jason just opened the website jason just like a docusign so look at the docusign hey the customer opened the contract the customer went to page two where you send your deck to somebody and like whatever the slide deck thing that watches oh they stayed on they went back to slide five you know they spent two minutes on slide five and they just zip zip past six seven and eight why oh six seven eight are irrelevant to them but they really cared about the team slide but they didn't care about the go-to market or vice versa so you got so much you could do here in intelligence and people will pay for that big time if i know that my customers are typing in the ticker symbol uber and then if they could write a question on that portal where they said you know let's say you know i'm the i'm the i'm the wealthy individual you're the the wealth advisor ramsey and i'm on the website and i just say like what what is this about why is uber up and tesla down if tesla is going to kill uber according to this story and then you wrote back okay here's the goldman sachs report that's a business insider story business insider is sensational they want want to get you to click goldman sachs has an analyst who's been covering uber this is the analyst name and i direct you to that story now the interface has the entire history of us going back and forth and then additionally this all has to be mobile at some point so getting a mobile and a designer is critical and then i think the next piece would be to have what's called an sdr or business development rep would be very good for you to have somebody trying to figure out who wealth managers are and a viral way to get them on the phone with you those would be my next two or three hires if you could get the money in here uh you're doing a great job you got a great idea um and i understand you told me uh you were talking to some of your customers in a group chat somewhere like a discord or a signal or a whatsapp yeah just i message i message so you got like a you have one to one discussions or do you have like a product council yet we've got a discord for like large group and then i have like a small group of three or four advisors that i I text weekly.

16:04Okay, awesome. That's really what you want to do. Ramsey, I wish you massive success with this idea. You jammed with JCal. Rate your jam with JCal. How would you rate this in terms of helpful? Give me an honest number between one and 10. That was great. I would say 10. Yeah, for sure. Okay, here we go. I don't want to bias it in any way, but you know what? You should meet our team. So you might be a good candidate to come to our accelerator because I think there's something here. And when I jam with somebody, I got to tell you, you're good to jam with because you're quick. you give really good answers.

16:34You don't filibuster. And that's what people love when they're jamming. So that's a really good note for everybody listening to this week in startups. When you're interacting with an investor, who's a know it all investor who's seen it all who's invested in hundreds of companies, you got to be able to go back and forth quickly, right? And you got to be able to have that real intellectual discussion. And you did good with that, right? It's like kind of playing pickleball or ping pong or tennis, you want to have a good volley in just 15 minutes together, we had a great volley, I like you, I like the way you answer questions, I like the way you think you kind of did your thing you made yourself likable i understand your business you're thoughtful you seem like you're uh you got a chip on your shoulder and you want to be successful i think lean into that a little bit like a little bit of the drive don't be too mellow and congratulations ramsey and we'll see you all next time on jam with jcal thank you to our sponsor.tech with me today anna malhotra i got your last name correct yes perfect i'm good with indian names i you know and sri lankan names my friend jamal palihapiti i i teach all of our friends how to say his last name for some reason i'm just good with those names uh okay you understand the premise here our friends at dot tech you have a great dot tech domain name which is the rome app dot tech everybody can go check that out i'm gonna give you like two or three minutes to pitch me on your startup and then you tell me what your challenges are your ideas and And then I'll give you some ideas and maybe we'll grind out some good ideas and strategies for you to make your Roam app even more successful.

18:04Three, two, go. Perfect. Thanks so much for having me, J. Cal. I'm Ana, co-founder and CEO of Roam, and we're working on yard sharing built for dogs. I'm actually not going to pitch you today. I'm going to go right to our problem, but I will start with a bit of an intro of the product. So meet Roam, the dog. He's a good boy and he loves humans and he's a husky. So he has a lot of energy that he needs to let out every single day. So he's not a menace to society. But because he doesn't get along with other dogs, public dog parks are just not an option for him. Which is true for about 70 % of dogs, even if the humans don't know it.

18:35And unfortunately, his humans live in an apartment and don't have a yard of their own to let Rome play off leash safely. And Rome's humans are part of the growing rate of apartment dwelling pet owners. And you probably guessed it, but Rome is mine and my co-founder's dog. And he's the inspiration behind what we're working on, which is yard sharing built for dogs. with Roam dog owners book a yard near them and neighbors can rent out their outdoor space and earn with every booking simply put we're a two-sided yard trip marketplace so the challenge we wanted to present to you today J. Cal is supply acquisition specifically we knew going in that demand will come really quickly but we knew that if they go onto the app and they don't see a yard that they like they won't have a good experience and so at Roam liquidity is mostly based off of what dog owners are looking for in a yard it comes down to three things first is the yard safe for their dog.

19:20Next, the yard should be close by. And finally, it's at least big enough for their dog to run around it. And so all of these things determine what makes a good yard for a guest. And so we focused on building as much of this good supply as we could before starting our demand acquisition. And so we've spent about six months of dedicated effort to grow our supply. We've had only about 20 years to show interest, but we have seven yards in Seattle. Two of them are too far. One is too small and one honestly is just mine. We just bought a house. One, however, is a local private dog park business that we just onboarded.

19:51And we plan to lean into this a bit more. But I think to build true liquidity and give our demand the options they need, we need to scale our numbers of good yards through consumers and not just businesses. And so some of the strategies we've already tried is reaching out to personal network, posting on Craigslist and Nextdoor. All of those have been successful, but direct mail door to door and reaching out to rover sitters has not. And of course, we successfully onboarded that one business. And so before I open up to feedback and questions, J. Cal. I just want to put this challenge in perspective.

20:19Our supply growth is in green and you can see that it's fairly low and flat since the beginning of the year. But our demand growth in pink has more of an exponential curve coming up. And much of this is because we onboarded that local business. And as of last week, I'm finally full-time on Roam. And I think to be successful, this is a time to just be heads down on growing supply. We have all this demand coming in and we want to be able to provide at least one good yard. And we need to do that quickly. So J. Cal, you know, I know you have experience with marketplaces, you know products writers drivers so this is my question for you how to get good yards this is a great question and it's one i'm uniquely qualified to answer because we uh specialize in investing in uh marketplaces we have stone algo which is a marketplace of diamond sellers and buyers we have uh meow tell which is a cat sitting which is very different than dog sitting and obviously uber and thumbtack we love a great marketplace and uh building supply is really important and you've heard you've got airbnb here for dog runs brilliant idea there's a very simple way you buy the supply with minimums and you have this great benefit that uh some number of people are already airbnb owners uh or vrbo so what you're going to do is uh i want and we also have gigster which rents space as well now they're potentially a competitor because they rent space for a lot of different uses i have never seen dog parker on there i think that's kind of niche and there's some insurance issues or whatever but generally speaking i think going to an existing marketplace and that already does airbnb and you go and you check out an airbnb and you look at the airbnb and you say to yourself hey this is interesting uh this airbnb has a yard and a yard on the side, they could very easily cut out this yard, fence it in or just put a gate on it, and they could still rent their Airbnb and they could incrementally do this and they know how to manage people.

22:13They know how to market. They know how to take pictures. And so you could draft on Airbnb and VRBO's existing network. That could be such a simple unlock. And when you talk to them, you could say, hey, we're a startup like Airbnb, except we're doing this. People love meeting founders and they love startups people love entrepreneurs i mean i love you you came on here you got a beautiful idea and the pitch was so crisp and the design was so good and you understand your market the charming story of it's your husband and your your dog love it all and so that's what i would do and then what uber did was they cold called drivers they went to google they found livery companies lincoln town cars what they used to call black cars and they just ground it out boom and sometimes i think they even took rides and said hey i'm with the company uber here's how it works can i show you the app and i think they bought that inventory they said hey we'll give you a minimum of five hundred dollars a month for five rides guaranteed and we'll pay it to you you know for just having the app on and if you keep the app on for 10 days in a row every day we're going to send you you have it on we'll send you 50 bucks whatever it is so you can just say to them like listen i want to do this for the month i'll give you 500 bucks for the month and And if we make above 500, you know, we'll give you some.

23:26And if we don't, we're going to take 30%, you know, we'll just eat the 500. That's the way I would do it. Got it. And I think it'll work really well. Have you thought of this strategy? And do you think it will work? So I reached out to Rover sitters through the Rover app, and we actually got kicked off because, you know, obviously we weren't following their terms of service. Any suggestions on how to reach these Airbnb hosts outside of the platform? Well, two ways. many of them have their own dedicated websites because they want to route around the fees of airbnb other ones just they're happy to pay the airbnb fees but a lot of times you'll find clues in their descriptions and they'll call it like you know if they were in austin they'll call it like i don't know south of congress retreat and you google south congress retreat and you find them on yelp you find them in other places right so i think there are ways to do that and then uh you can just keep opening accounts and doing the thing where you talk to them and uh just say you know um hey i would love to talk to you here's my number and then when you talk to them you're just gonna have to deal with that the other thing to do is to go to reddit and reddit has a lot of sub forums and you could find the one if you're in seattle or austin or brooklyn or even like bay ridge brooklyn and then you say hey uh i'm looking for a place to run my dog and i started and then in the details like you know you kind of float the idea start getting people talking about it and so yeah it's a little gray market you understand the concept of like there's white hat black hat gray black illegal white hat legal gray yeah you're bending the rules a little bit uh you can do a little rule bending here and maybe start some conversations on forums and see if you can get you know inventory that way so i think online forums are pretty good for that obviously next door you tried i bet you next door worked to a certain extent maybe it did we just need to lean into it a little more lean into it i also think dog walkers could be very interesting for you and so getting a couple of these weirdos uh you know i'm talking about like there's people who love dogs like so much and they get on the ground with like six of them and you see them walking to the dog park with six of them you might be able to get a dog walker and say hey to the dog walker if i had a a dog run here and there was a staff member there and there was lemonade and it had four sections and you could put four dogs in four different sections man and this is what a jam session is about and uh i'm thinking about this i'm wondering if it you should just find a plot of land and build 10 pens in it start selling coffee there let's go have some cold brew there and just sit there all day and let people come into it and you kind of hack it like that right that's another possibility for you absolutely you could air if you could do a short-term rental what what neighborhood you do in roman uh we're in seattle perfect yep is there a specific area like in seattle uh the neighborhoods we want to target is queen anne if you've heard of it i haven't what is the average home price there i'm wondering one to two million okay perfect there's a really crummy house that's for rent in that area that's a dog of a house got weird bathrooms and like falling apart and nobody wants to put their family in there and they would only rent it if they really had to because they want to get their kid into the school system and that person can't rent it i would go to that person say hey listen i'm an entrepreneur here's what i'm doing i want to do this business would you mind if i rented it for three months and tried and i'll have insurance and everything it's nothing for you to worry about and you know i'm not going to damage the lawn or anything and if i do uh you know you got my deposit you can keep it and i would actually try doing this in the most central place you could rent because what is rent of a house there 5k a month 4k a month uh yeah sounds about right or to five okay let's say it's 5k all in and then the backyard you set up pens how much could that cost to set up a pen 500 bucks each with some gates you order on amazon or something holy cow you set up 20 pens there and then you tell people hey i got this place for dogs and oh by the way we also have an upsell uh we have grooming on site and we got an upsell for you because you mentioned somebody had this as a business already right there was somebody doing a private for rent dog park correct so they're a bar slash dog park okay so somebody else had this we've taken the outdoor we've taken up their outdoor space for private bookings love it so here now see now we're starting this is what a jam session's about i like doing it there's something here you know this concept third space you ever hear about that third space i have not okay there's your house there's your work that's one space that's a second space describe for me a third space you could go today that's not one of those two if you needed to not be in a coffee shop you got it you nailed it starbucks isn't selling coffee in many cases a lot of what starbucks is selling is a third space i don't want to be home i've been cooped up i i hate my boss he's a complete jerk he makes me say yes chef to him he's just overbearing he talks to me about my career he's annoying where else can i go well it i can go to a third space i get a starbucks put my headphones on i just jam out there it's air conditioned beautiful furniture it's nice room what's another third space the gym gym you got it give me another third space a private dog park where i can get coffee and drinks and now we're talking now we're talking so this is like a really interesting business also there are lots that are available so you know somebody's got a parking lot and they're making a thousand bucks a month or two thousand bucks a month on some crummy parking lot now seattle i think it's got a lot of regulations is that like a regulation heavy place i i believe so but i do think i have looked at zillow for just small pots of land just put a fence up make it a yard uh but it's capital intensive so that's been the only setback there so you know have you raised money for this idea yet we have not we have bootstrapped so far okay so one of the things about these ideas is you know you get into a jam session with an investor like we did here today we start doing it now you can say hey you know what jacal kind of pitched me on this sounds like i could do this for 5k a month why don't i just ask him for 10k a month that's 125k guess what that's what we give people in our accelerators 125k so you know have you put money into this business yet um just a little bit only three to five thousand dollars just cash here and there perfect love it so and you know you're a nepo baby you've got a trust fund you're independently wealthy i am not no you want to be rich you want to be powerful you want to be a legend okay great come with me so my point is um this is why accelerators exist in the world launch accelerator tech stars y combinator etc reason they exist is because you know people like you have you know unbelievable amounts of energy and ideas and this is a crazy outlier idea uh and uh well it you know like you got to get started and learn and so you came to me with that problem of the demand but as we went back and forth and we we volleyed like playing pickleball ping pong tennis i always tell people man you know maybe there's a bigger idea here which is third space right maybe where the maybe where the starbucks of dog runs and the dog who's anti-social is what got us here just like the couch surfing is what got airbnb going but that wedge maybe we open that up and maybe we'll make as much money from the concession and the secondary services dog training hey man if this dog is bad behaved and that's why you're coming here well maybe we have a dog trainer here who's 50 bucks an hour okay man we got a lot we can unpack here grooming etc really great idea really great presentation i like the design i like the pitch i like everything about it uh congratulations great job jamming with jcal right on a scale of one to ten how helpful this was am i allowed to say 11 here i mean i i can't tell you what to say i think the thing is gonna work i really think it's gonna work so i want to give it 11.

31:26okay i'm gonna let you give it 11 it's not for me to judge i can't imagine coming here and talking to a legendary angel investor who could change your entire life and giving anything less than a 10 uh but you gave 11 which i give you credit for you know last time i did this the guy was like i give it a 10 you came out i put one more than 10 right now we're talking now we're really jamming great job and you know who else does a great job my friends at dot tech domains can't get a dot com listen you're putting three four five thousand dollars into this rome.com it's not built in a day i think about rome all the time roman empire rome.com is a 10 million dollar domain five million dollar domain four letters in the dictionary destination great destination so hey the roam app.tech's great domain fantastic.

32:12.tech also that signals to me that you get it the technology does change the world so shout out to my friends at.tech and we will see you all on the next jamming with jcal hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups it's time for our next jam with jcal session brought to you by our friends at dot pack domain names the way we do this is you have to have under two million in funding and so it's for early stage startups ulama is our first startup and the founder is tice herman and tice i've never heard that name t-y-c-e pronounced t-i-c-e i think tice yep really interesting named i've never come across it And your company is Ulama?

32:57Yes. And that's U-L-A-M-A dot T-E-C-H. You got a great.tech domain name. Why don't you show me what you're working on and then just tell me what your biggest challenge is. Our software is for architects to analyze their 3D building models for code compliance before they submit their designs to government reviewers for approval. So we like to think of ourselves as Grammarly or architectural 3D building models. We have software that plugs directly into architectural design software, and architects select the location that they're in and the specific codes that they want to use to analyze their 3D building model.

33:35They'll go through the sort of two-dimensional drawings of the 3D building model and assess them for specific codes. So that could be building code, it could be accessibility, ADA code, plumbing, fire. The architect can select what they would like to use. And our plugin then runs through their entire 3D model, evaluating all the geometric and parameter relationships within that model. Once that's done, they get both text and visualization of how their model is out of compliance and suggestions on how to make updates to the model to bring it into compliance. And that's broken out by sections of the code and also building elements within the 3D model.

34:17Got it. So an architect is pulling up this floor plan looks like a live workspace. And then they put your plugin into their architectural software. What's the architectural software most common one called? It's called Revit. Revit. Okay, so you're a plugin for Revit. And then it goes to their designs, and then it matches them to the local rules and regulations, the codes. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. We've created a rules engine that will look at their entire 3D model. Is that using AI to do that? How is it doing that? We are assessing the 3D model within multimodal AI model. And we're also creating those rules by parsing the regulatory text with AI models.

35:01Got it. And so what jurisdictions do you work in? In how long have you been doing this product? We've been working on it about a year. And right now we're just doing codes that are broadly applicable in any municipality. So ADA, federal policies, or sort of vanilla off the shelf building codes. So ADA policies, Americans with Disabilities Act, I believe is what it stands for. What's an example of that? Is that like the width of a doorway or how bathrooms work? What's an example or the most common example? Those are both great examples. A concrete one would be a toilet has to be a certain distance from the nearest sidewall so that someone can reach a grab bar within an easy, comfortable distance.

35:44Got it. And so it's going to check the ADA rules against what an architect made, correct? That's right. And do the architects frequently screw this up or do they generally know all these rules and get it right? Right. They have a decent working understanding of code, but there's so much minutia within code that it's difficult for them to keep track of it all as they're designing. Most architects are doing what's called parametric design. So as they're making changes, other things in the model are changing downstream of that. And so things can get out of sync really quickly. Got it. And this isn't occurring in real time.

36:20You basically upload your floor plans and then and you run this against it and then it tells you yeah this they don't even have to upload anything this is within their design software but they but they do it on demand so it's not just constantly pinging them hey this is out of compliance right because that would be what a copilot does a copilot is sitting there while a person's working let's say like grammarly on your grammar or a copilot like githubs while you're writing code so i'm curious why it doesn't do it while you're working. Yeah, we talked to hundreds of architects at this point. And a lot of the questioning was early on about how frequently do you want this sort of analysis?

37:01And most architects just want to be able to design, you turn on their design brain, and then at certain checkpoints, come in and look at things like code compliance. But they don't want that constantly getting in the way of their design flow. That makes sense. They're trying to get into a groove they don't want to have this interrupting them uh tell me what's the biggest challenge with your business and it's like seems like a very reasonable idea and a good starting point for a feature if not a product like an interesting wedge uh what's your biggest challenge i'm curious yeah one thing that we're thinking about actually right now is um we're launching a smaller version of this product as a standalone offering it's going to be our it's going to be for sale on the web.

37:43It's ready to go live tomorrow once I finish my distribution list. And it's a component of this overall technology for code compliance. It goes through and it identifies all the elements in that 3D building model and then normalizes the attribution and naming. Right now, it's not very standardized and that makes it hard for architects to do all sorts of other activities. So what we're struggling with thinking through is how do we use this initial product launch to generate sort of interest and also make this sort of case that, hey, we know how to develop products for our customer base. This isn't our core product and our sort of main value proposition, but, you know, we're servicing this sort of customer base and just sort of like telling a good story around that through this initial product launch.

38:32So are you looking to launch this in the United States and Germany? Where are you looking to launch this? I'm assuming the United States. uh this first product that we're launching can be used internationally because all it's doing is um identifying the sort of elements within the building it's not it's not applying any of the rules yet okay well i i know that there are hundreds of thousands of architects between the united states and europe right um and so they already like to spend on software the software they use costs hundreds of dollars a year to low thousands of dollars a year i would assume Yeah, the software developing for Revit is thousands of dollars a year, and that's just their sort of baseline design software.

39:10Got it. And does that software have an app store for the plugins like Shopify does or Apple does? Yeah. Autodesk, the maker of Revit, has the app store. It's not commonly used yet. It doesn't have a lot of traction like an Apple store, but it's gaining momentum. So, you know, this is always the challenge with these app stores, because if you leverage the app store to try to get customers and you're very successful, you've basically given a roadmap to those platforms to incorporate you into their product. without knowing autodesk and how they were do they historically support a really great developer ecosystem of plugins or do they have a reputation for you know basically stealing those innovations and putting them into their own products uh less less the reputation of just sort of like taking them and embedding them in their own products they do a lot of acquisitions now they're you know giant company at this point so a lot of their new development is through acquisitions yeah uh and their developer support has been sort of lackluster in the past, but they are really renewing their focus on that.

40:19So there's a lot of momentum around the app store. Yeah, that's great. So, you know, in a lot of these cases, how the app store features you and your relationship with Autodesk is going to be the key driver. So if you make Salesforce plugins or Shopify plugins, there's usually a developer evangelist, a vice president there. And if you, you know, make nice with them, they might feature you and bring you 10 customers a day and if you can work that ecosystem that's going to be incredibly accretive to your business growing and it also builds a dependency but that dependency also builds an acquisition path so you know there's good and bad here the good is they could you know really appreciate what you're doing not have time for it and you could basically own this little piece of the puzzle for architects and so you know and then you could have a dependency they could decide to take you off that homepage or promote somebody else or build it themselves and all of a sudden your business goes to zero which has happened to people who build plugins specifically the developer community at facebook famously like zynga got absolutely demolished uh over time and so you can look at those historical precedents the more you understand your customers the more you spend time with them the better off you're going to be i would try to embed your company into you know wherever the most architects are whether that's a school or you know a company that you can say hey i know you're going to get a lot of value out of this tool can we you know have two seats at your office and we call this the bear hug you know if you could find out who is a great customer for you they've got 50 architects 25 architects you say hey to the ceo some upstart the founders would be possible to get desks here and hang out that's another way for you to get closer to the mix to the people who are using it so those are my two paths for you building the developer community or bonding with the the evangelist at that app store or deeply bonding with uh you know an architectural firm or doing both yeah and you know then if you know they decide they're going to compete with you and you know it's harder for them to compete with you and kill your company if you've developed that relationship with the evangelist team they're going to be like let's keep supporting them they're only charging five hundred dollars a year per architect for this plugin we're charging five thousand a year you know that seems like a good price you know uh so and getting your customers to pay also critically important at this early stage if people aren't willing to pay for it and you've put a lot of work into it and it's you know reliable software you know then that should tell you like maybe this isn't providing enough value and that's where pricing comes in so those are my two hopes for you it seems like you're off to a great start and i wish you great luck with it any other questions for me uh yeah i guess maybe if there's anything that you can say about um leveraging an early product launch or a second uh larger product launch and like how how to really like connect those to like this you know previous hopefully success when we launch tomorrow to our major and main product that we're launching end of the year great question i've seen some entrepreneurs set up little whatsapp groups or signal groups or i message groups or slack rooms with say five or ten like-minded customers who become their product advisory council and then you've got five or ten people who get early access to what you're doing and get to influence the product or your product advisory council but then when you do launch hey they might tell people about it so there's probably 50 architects who have youtube channels there might be 50 people on instagram who are active architects there might be a hundred of them on reddit in you know two or three different subreddits and if you can just slowly collect 10 people from each of those social networks tell them what you're building ask them for feedback you know you might have this little group of highly influential people rooting for you and i think you know i call this the slow embers hot embers kind of marketing it's not like huge numbers it's more like really hot coals you know you ever have a really hot coal you take one of those coals and you put your hand up it whoa it's a little bit hot now you put 10 of them together and you know you're about a foot back and you're like whoa i can feel the heat you know then you get like 50 of those coals in a barbecue and they all start turning red you know now it's like whoa i can't get within three feet of the barbecue and when i put that tomahawk on you know that tomahawk steak man it just lights right up and it's almost too hot but each one of those is just a coal one little simple coal but together 50 of those calls can burn so bright so hot that boom and it just explodes right and it's just it's even too hot that's really what building this fire is about so don't forget each coal is in your case a customer an individual and you just have to build that relationship now each of those relationships will probably take you about an hour so it's about 50 hours of work which you're probably like wow i gotta push code i gotta do all this stuff and this is why sometimes people will have an evangelist or a marketing person just slowly build up that group and i've done it myself i have you know maybe i would host dinners for other angel investors and lps in our funds as a venture capitalist and i still have those you know little groups of who went to dinner at different locations i named them in signal you know the name of the place and uh you know we have a mark soft madison group with like 12 people who came to that dinner and they talk to each other once in a while and i get to have that like one to few relationship and they might ask me somebody might ask me a question and we all talk about it so i like this like one to few kind of concept and it could be a zoom call it could be a whatsapp group it could be an email list whatever the jam is that you want to try so i really think that will help your launch press is nice if there's industry press or a podcast and podcasts there must be a hundred architectural podcasts and they probably all get like hundreds to low thousands of people but going on those and talking about your product and the problem you're trying to solve people love innovation and so i would also look at the podcast route right and i think in your case small numbers are good numbers right targeted small numbers is going to be the key because you're not dealing with a consumer product like uber airbnb where you're trying to get a billion people to consider using it to get 100 million or 200 million users, you just need 10 ,000 paying customers.

46:43And this thing becomes a$10 million a year business. And that's pretty good, you know, as a, you know, a goal for a business like this, but I wish you great luck with it. And awesome start. Thank you really appreciate the help. All right, everybody, we're going to do another jam with JCal session right now. And today, I'm talking to the founder of CorePod, which you can check out at C-O-R-P-O-D.T-E-C-H. welcome to the pod ulan how you doing uh why don't you show me your product tell me about it and then uh tell me what your biggest challenge is core part your personal sleep companion we all have our smartphones nearby for me is a great tool to connect to my family and friends and keep up to date with all the latest news but also is a huge source of anxiety and distraction I always get messages, notifications, I doom scrolling at night and I have insomnia.

47:38I wish I had a digital companion I can talk to, I can voice my feelings and help me decompress before I go to sleep at night. Something like this. Hi Milo. Woof, woof. Hi there. How can I help you today? What's been bugging you lately? I'm having some trouble sleeping. I just can't seem to fall asleep at night. It takes me more than two hours to fall asleep.

48:14Oh no, sorry to hear that. That sounds really frustrating. Can you tell me more about... You remember Beacon, the dog at the Olympics that helped US athletes with their mental health problems. So it's a kind of Gen AI dog right inside your speaker. We've talked to many therapists about mobile apps and they say the mobile app solution doesn't work, it should be a completely separate device. And we've made it, a sponsor speaker powered by Gen AI. and you can talk to it like if it was your friend. Now let's talk about value. It may seem quite expensive at first glance but it's actually a bargain.

48:57One month is cheaper than one single hour of therapy session with a human expert. We can reach 10 million with just 17 000 customers with about 200 million with 170 000 users. Who are these users? People with high pressure jobs, medium to high income and ready to invest in their mental health our team is passionate about building this product and we also have advisors we've made five prototypes recently i finished founder university cohort eight and last year i attended to team draper's hero training program we got funding from a high technology park of kyrgyz republic and european bank for reconstruction development and now we are rising we want to connect to smart watches like garmin to fetch all the health data build product ready product and start pre-orders this is my context what is your biggest challenge what are you what's your challenge with this speaker with the screen that has an avatar or a virtual dog who is going to help you sleep better what is the big challenge with core pod uh you know jay cal uh we are b2c and also it's it's very hard to build b2c and also we are hardware it's even high even two times uh harder to build this kind of software so my question is what is the best go-to-market strategy for this sort of product and especially that given the fact that we are related to mental health okay so you're in the tinkering phase you're building some hardware you're building some software and your idea is you want people to sleep better interestingly i have two investments in this space last night i hit an 85 on my sleep score with my eight sleep they're on their fourth generation and they study your sleep your rem your deep sleep all of these issues and it's quite nice and it really has helped me you know sort of get into a better pattern and i uh we're we were investors in com.com and i use sleep stories with myself and my daughters to help go to bed.

51:08And so those two things have become good investments for us, great investments, in fact, and they do tackle sleep. Other people like Whoop, Watch does it. So you are not only doing hardware and software and doing a startup, you're also going up against a pretty competitive set. So this is not going to be easy. And doing hardware, as the 8Sleep team will tell you, or the CafeX team will tell you, really, really increases the degree of difficulty. You have to be able to finance all of, you know, know this hardware so i think what you have to do is maybe step back and ask yourself are you making a virtual companion in a speaker format that's different than you know say an app because you don't have to take your phone out and you have all the other distractions there and is that the innovation here or do you want to from first principle say i want to help people get to bed at night and this is the best way to do it and i think that's what you have to ask yourself because clearly you're creative and you have technical ability and you've tried these different things but which is it are you are you passionate about hardware and creating this companion or are you passionate about sleep which one i would say that the core product is the software so it's personalized uh like your friend which knows you and he knows how to help you sleep better and the hardware is just the way you interact with with this software you would think that you can use ai to be a sleep coach and that that sleep coach requires hardware i wonder if your sleep coach requires the hardware i would see if you could build a sleep coach with your iphone that actually uh you know lets you put your iphone face down and interacts with you and put you to sleep, right?