Palantir's Fellowship, Coco Robots & Startup Office Hours | E2110

24:14It really resonated with a lot of people that were having the same like financial pain points as us. We launched our closed beta and started onboarding those customers. For us it was a bit of a wild week in which we launched on Twitter and suddenly a few days later I went from 50 followers to like 10 ,000. We had 20 ,000 stars on GitHub, we had 150 ,000 unique visitors a day and so we're really fortunate to have the lightning in the bottle and have all these customers come to us. You're asking a great time. We actually got our first customer paying this morning. How'd you find that first customer?

24:37So we launched. We shared what we were doing about two and a half weeks ago on just our LinkedIn and shared with our friends. And a lot of people came inbound. People were really curious about what we were building here. Got a great wait list. And this customer came through that wait list, which was really exciting. We don't really have any customers yet, but we've got like one really good advisor who sort of made some introductions to folks at a couple of the big ag tech companies. So sort of networking our way in really. Pretty good overview of a bunch of the different sort of techniques that come up producing discoverable content.

25:04We heard people talking about embedding themselves authentically within the community. So going to Hacker News, going to Reddit, going to places where potential customers already work. And then influencer marketing or PR and like get introductions through friends of friends of friends and trying to sort of zeroing in on people there. So we also found a blogger named Ali Abulata surveyed 120 different public companies and analyzed all of their go-to-market strategies and produced these two flowcharts based on whether you're looking for high intent or low intent customers. And so we've got those pulled in as well.

25:39Maybe you want to talk about high intent versus low intent? Sure. And we can pull this up maybe and we can take a look at it as we discuss it. High intent, they need something right now. You know, they need a car. They need a bicycle. They go to the bicycle store. They search. So just take yourself through a person who has a really acute need. I need a bicycle because I'm starting my Uber Eats DoorDash job on Monday in Manhattan. So what do they do? That person might do a Google search. They might go to Facebook Marketplace. They might type in electric bikes and wind up on a Reddit page. They might talk to their friends.

26:24They might go to a Facebook group of door dashers in New York. These are small niche communities. And the way you do it is by imagining you're the person. So here in this go-to motion flow chart, you have high intent customers, no viable alternatives. So if there's no viable alternatives, you're making the product. That's crazy, right? So there's no DoorDash in the country, so you create Zipline to bring it to people. There's no way to get delivery when you're far out there. Then you have a competitive space, opportunity cost. Does the competitor have lock-in? So if it was, say, broadband, and you live in a neighborhood that only has Comcast, well, obviously they're locked in.

27:09And you have to then do something like cold outreach, as they point out here, if they're not locked in. Like if people have options, you know, Spectrum's available, Google Fiverr's also available. Then you have to figure out, well, how do you compete with them? Right. And then that's where maybe making an offer, et cetera. So these are, this is all really a good discussion. What you heard in the previous Y Combinator company that made the landing page, landing pages are so beautiful because you can make one in a lean startup movement. So Steve Blank and Eric Ries created this methodology called Lean Startup.

27:47He's an entrepreneur and he's just really awesome. And he created this methodology along with Eric Ries. Eric Ries wrote the book, Lean Startup. And you want to create a hypothesis and run an experiment. And then you can iterate on that with subsequent product releases. So what they did was they made a landing page. They sent people to the landing page and you find out. What's amazing today is you can create landing pages in 15 minutes that look extraordinary using AI. You can create ads that look extraordinary in 15 minutes using AI. And then you still have to do the glue of sending them out there.

28:22Talking to people and networking and cold outreach also works. So literally finding 15 CFOs in your and writing them a short email, hi, I'm building this for CFOs. I'm a former CFO. I wonder if you had this issue. Would love to get coffee with you. Or at this link, you can see a little bit more about the product. And then you know if they clicked on it. So there's all those signals. So there you go. Some tales from the trenches. We had another one, one of our startups, and this is in the presentation we gave last night at Foundry University. There was a company that was doing gardening AI. So you can share a picture of it.

29:03And when you share the picture of your absolutely sad backyard, the AI will make you some choices based on where you're located and tell you, here's the plants that would work well in Austin versus New England. They went on to a subreddit where somebody had posted and said, how do I, the same exact problem, what should I do with my garden here? And the person created a simple landing page and said, oh, I made some mock-ups for you and sent it there. And then the landing page just had, you know, use this tool or try this tool. They got 500 customers from this. Yeah, it's Neighborbrite is the name of the company.

29:41Yeah, so here is the Reddit post. First time backyard owner says, hey, I need help with landscaping this hill. My wife and I sold our condo, yada yada. And then here's how they replied. They did something very savvy in the replies that's worth pointing out. Predictably Rational, who works at Neighborbrite, said, yes, definitely a retaining wall. Here are some ideas with the retaining wall by the fence, which will require leveling out the rest or keeping the slope of building a terraced garden with a link. And on the next slide, it sent them to a landing page for Neighbor Bright with these four gorgeous images and said, ready to try with your own yard, try it for free.

30:15Simple call to action. What you notice here is they put the promotion on the landing page after giving value. So this is key. Whenever you're in a community, the communities, the vibrant ones, are very attuned to people coming in and spamming or marketing the community. So what you want to do is help participate in the community without spamming. Founders, let's talk about building your brand here in the real world. We know digital ads are amazing, but if you want to stand out in 2025, maybe you need to think a little bit bigger. And a great way to do that is out-of-home advertising. Yes, you know, those really impressive billboards you see everywhere, or even the beautiful murals that everybody loves, this is how you build a brand.

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31:35You want to acquire customers. You can see why AdQuick is trusted by everyone from the fastest growing startups to the S &P 500. Take your brand to the next level with AdQuick, the smarter way to do OOH. And just for Twist listeners, AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. That's an amazing offer. Get started today, adquick.com slash twist. That's A-D-Q-U-I-C-K dot com slash twist. Okay, so today for office hours, we are going to start by talking to Jake and Daniel from BRX. They are building a tool for developers that allows developers to build model agnostic AI tools quickly. Given how many companies out there today, Lon and Jason, want to use AI, it's certainly taking on a very large market.

32:17You can check it out at brx.ai. Please welcome to the show. It's Jake and Daniel. Okay, gentlemen, maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about what you're building, and then maybe you could ask me, you know, what are the challenges right now? So Bricks is an orchestration in a runtime environment to build autonomous software. We combine the expressiveness of LMs and then the control of precision code of action to enable a really powerful environment to build these production-grade AI systems. But the biggest thing is this enables our users to generate self-healing and autonomous products from this same product.

32:46Okay, great. So who are your customers? Let's kind of drill down a little bit. And do we have any customers yet or is it we're still building the product? Yeah. So our main customers, we target software developers for the most part that are working on building agentic operations and agentic processes that are building multiple systems that have the need for better indexing. Ends up being a problem for a lot of people when it comes to LMs. the capability to index and then use those same pieces of of engineering as composables becomes a big issue and yes give us a real world example if you can yeah so when it comes to real world examples we currently we currently have people that are using the platform to build systems across one one of our bigger customers right now is building a system that can take in information about stories and then generate from that same story audio and media files that then cross play to build a whole schema from that so they're using research that they did to then determine what makes a person kick or what makes a user kick when it comes to some of the models.

33:37And then using that same pieces of data inside of the model to then process a story and generate a timeline to rebuild and reconstruct the story. Okay. Still confusing. Let's try to talk, the way you said it would be like, what kind of story are we talking about here? Give an actual real world example so the audience actually understands it. Yeah. So they're working with studios. So developing stories that are going to be like little commercials or little ads or little little like transformative pieces that they're going to be running over. And that's where they get most of the value out. And it's about making sure that the story stays consistent across.

34:09Because the biggest problem even with that, if you try to just make an AI just auto-generate the whole thing, it'll get lost at certain steps, miss the plot line, other things will happen. So it's a lot about the coordination and orchestration of all those little pieces that need to happen and then letting those all compile back and move. Yeah. So now we're starting to get it. If I was a giant ad agency and I have customer A, Customer A is a beer company. They have a certain feeling that they like to invoke. It's a New England beer company versus one in the South or vice versa. They want to tell stories and they want to get it right.

34:45So they want to make sure they're using the right customers. For some people, that might be Dylan. Who is the woman from the Bud Light? Oh, Mulvaney. That might be Dylan Mulvaney if it was in San Francisco and New York. that might not fly, you know, in New Orleans or in Texas, as we've seen. So they might need to consistently think about how they pitch that product. The LLM might just go off to the races and not understand the context. Am I getting it correct? A hundred percent. Yeah. And the biggest thing that we push on is control and precision in those events. And we've been building around that same idea of when you have a really specific operation or process that you need the LLM to do, taking control and taking the reins on those parts and then leaving off the parts that you need, that like stochastic version that just runs out.

35:29You need a little bit of randomness, a fan to go get the data, vice versa. And then coming back to a really controllable system that you've moderated. Got it. So this is very hard to do if you were using an off the shelf, if you were using Grok, ChatGPT, or Claude, you would have a hard time doing this. So you need, if I'm correct, you need to use something more specific. I think it's the consistency, right? It's like those, they could make five different things, but it won't align with all of the other things it's created. 100%, yeah. What are your customers using in terms of an LLM? Are you giving them DeepSeek and then customizing that or trying to customize ChatGPT?

36:07How does that work where they get to pick? Yeah, so we let them pick completely. We keep all the leading foundational models from Google, Gemini, OpenAI, and Profic, some of the DeepSeek models, as well as the LLM models when they all come out so that you have that choice in play. The biggest thing, and this is maybe a deeper aspect into the LLMs and the architecture, is they all do different things better. So every, let's say, OpenAI currently is leading in some kind of thinking or Anthropik is better at coding or Google has a bigger context window. And it's allowing those users when they're building those pipelines.

36:34And this is one of the reasons why we say we have more precision. It's at any point in the chain of events, since we built the compiler and the engine, we can allow you to plug and play different pieces of the LMs together. Got it. Amazing. So what's the challenge here? Where are you at? Yeah. So I'll tackle this one, Jake. So we've been in development phase for about six months. And by development phase, I mean, we've been building a product to really gain an initial wedge in the market. What this product essentially is, is it's a compiler-grade infrastructure, turns any natural language or code requests into functional self-healing autonomous systems.

37:06So what we're going here is a PLG motion. We're trying to get this into market. And the biggest effect that we're trying to have on people is there's a company that hit the market, I'd say, beginning of 2025. I'm sure you're all familiar with Lovable. They've had this tremendous effect with giving this magical feel of AI, with generating UI and UX. This is actually a product that we developed months before they hit the market and timing just didn't work out. So we reflected backwards and thought about how do we take UI, UX generation to take it to the next step? And it's much more than just the front end.

37:36It's generating the back end, the AI calls functional systems. So for anybody to drop a project into it, just think of this like an SOP, a workflow, a application that you want to create. Yeah. So you take a scope of work or, yeah. And so just drop it right in and let our system take care of the rest. We'll build out your backend, your front end, all EA calls. And it's actually a containerized agent in the fact of it's healing itself. It's monitoring itself. It's set it and forget it. So it's an extremely powerful tool that we're trying to bring to market. And we're trying to have that same effect of getting the magic from AI.

38:12But our question is leveraging this to direct audience. So with that PLG push, we're curious if it's got so many applied use cases and so many different aspects of the world can use it, where would you hone in on for this drastic kind of PLG effective motion that we're trying to roll out in the next few months? Got it. So product-led growth is what you mean by PLG? Correct. And some products kind of sell themselves. So lovable, it's a really interesting product, you say, hey, I want to build. And I put in there annotated.com, my concept of had bought the domain name annotated.com. And I signed up, I paid for it because you have to pay for it.

38:50And I said, build me this thing, a Chrome extension, and it went to work and it made the output was a gorgeous web page that looked very similar to like notion or some other designs. And it told me who it was going to be inspired by for that. And it creates this magical experience, But there's no publish to the web and get it up and running. So what you're talking about is maybe finishing the work that they've started. Am I correct? Yeah. And I also wouldn't put it as finishing the work they started. I think it's just giving a much deeper, more robust experience. A lot of people, we talked to one of our advisors about this a while ago, a funny use case.

39:25His phone was in algebra in high school, and he used Claude artifacts to generate this sort of artifact for himself. UI, UX, he played with it in Claude. It was great, but he wanted to share it. He wanted to bring it to his classmate, Johnny. He wanted to publish it on web, like you're saying. And there was no tool for this. He wasn't a developer. He had no way to then publish this, monitor it, maintain the backend, and have this as a functional application. So this all stemmed from this conversation that we had of how do you take these little artifacts, these little like, hate to call them trinkets, but trinkets on the web that people can have fun with and bring them in to have real effect on the world, to build really powerful systems that basically anybody can generate.

39:59So I'm a data analyst and I want to bring my SOP and generate an agent to be able to do that. There's currently no system right now where I, as a no-code-lo-code user, can just have that generated and actually work in a production-grade environment. So you are in the Canva zone, which is Canva was a design tool for non-designers. So you have this really challenging moment where it's like, how do I find the vibe coders? How do I find the people who want to design who don't know they want to design and they would normally hire a designer, right? This is a challenging moment in time for you to try to figure out.

40:36And you did point out the answer, which is the wow factor of lovable, pulled a bunch of people in. The wow factor of Canva in a bunch of tiny use cases, making an invite probably was the one that was the biggest, everybody has to make a birthday party invite. So what's the equivalent of mom or dad need to make an invite for grandma's 80th birthday or for their five-year-old's birthday, but in this realm. And so I don't think there's an easy answer other than iterating and trying. And we just had a segment on finding your first customers to do this kind of thing. I bet you Canva found a bunch of moms and dads who were doing birthday parties and said, here's a way to make a birthday party invite faster, quicker, easier.

41:24And if you want to also make banners and birthday cards and other things, you can do that as well. And over time, what I like about what lovable did, but that there is a critique of is they're getting everybody to pay for it. But does it actually do something in the real world? Or is it like a toy that people are paying for, which would then make people concerned, Lon and Alex, about the quality of the revenue? Are people just going to go try it? say that was interesting, but I didn't actually get value, I'm going to unsubscribe. And Canva, I think, is worth studying. Because Canva, yeah, I'm sure a bunch of people went in there and said, oh, I can make an invite, but I don't actually have that many invites to make.

42:03I don't do that many parties. But the people who did make parties, they upsold them on the next thing, the next thing. Would you like to make a t-shirt? Would you like to make a mug? And then there's somebody in your friend group, like if you go to your group friend chat, who is the one who coordinates the trip to New Orleans, who makes the t-shirts and then says, Everybody's got to wear this t-shirt out when we go to Bourbon Street or whatever. You got to find that person who maybe wants to build the app and send it to their friends, make the Chrome extension and share it in their office. So it's going to be a lot of fun to kind of, I think, figure that out.

42:34And you will. It'll be Phil fast. Yeah. Try a lot of things. Exactly. Lots of experiments. I prepped our section in the notes about your company today. And I spent, I think I read every single word on your site twice and I got what you do wrong. so I say that with nothing but love and when I go to Lovable's website we actually had the founder on the show it's shockingly clear what I can do with it and so I would just say that's a great piece of feedback self-healing, autonomous all of that makes me want to die inside and I'm a nerd so that's my two cents I love you both but like I did not get all the way there so if you're going to go PLG go out into the market it's got to be dumb or at least easy to understand.

43:18I like this advice. And you could make a landing page that's different than your corporate page. So the landing page could be buildmyapp.com or, you know, vibe code and app. You know, you just try that as an experiment. I think that's a great idea with a separate landing page. And it actually goes along with something we did not too long ago. We scooped up the domain myagent.ai. So I think branding everything underneath that and allowing for people to just build my agent and build their projects might be a really strong lever. So when you say my agent, that would mean to me more enterprise-y, just so you know.

43:52Okay. Because I don't think consumers are going to build agents, you know, to do these tasks. But I do know enterprises want to build them. So I might very much want to build an agent that goes out, listens to the top 10 podcasts or goes to the top 100 podcasts and pulls the advertisers from them and puts that advertiser into my CRM. That's what I think of when you say an agent. What is my Athena assistant doing that the Athena assistant could make into an agent and do? Which is totally viable. And that would feel more like Zapier and be for more of a workflow nerd. I have a couple of those workflow nerds in our company, Lucas, Bianca.

44:33I got a whole group of them who like to make workflows using Zapier and Notion and Coda and Slack. And they're going wild on this stuff. So I would think about there's apps, there's websites, there's agents. These are actually different things. So maybe why don't we try to come up with three great domain names and run three experiments. And, you know, once every three months, we release one of these and see what the reaction is. Or once a month, we release them and see which one gets the most interest. Yeah, I think that'd be really interesting. Chrome extensions are another very interesting world.

45:07I don't know if AI can make great Chrome extensions and publish them. But if you master that loop, man, there's a whole extension culture that is, you know, I would say billions of dollars of revenue, billions of users who are on their desktops using browsers, and they want a Chrome extension that, you know, does what SDR, sales development reps do. or pulls, like I was talking about, like doing lead gen, right? That always comes up as like a manual crummy task. I need to find all of the journalists who cover Chrome extensions, right? Or who cover apps. Okay, I'm going to start doing Google searches.

45:48I want to have the Chrome extension. I want to catalog all that and then be able to do outreach to them. I think you get the idea. So many different opportunities for you, but Alex, I think, gets the win here for closing the loop between your customers and your presentation to them. Let's create a honeypot for those customers, right? Yeah. And like really sticky, delicious honey. Like go with like, what is the most insane thing, you know, you can promise them and deliver on in the most narrow focus that it becomes number one on product hunt. And if you want to post it on product hunt, I'm like one of the top 10 users apparently.

46:24and so I don't do this for just anybody, but since you're a portfolio company, just email my team, Jackie, Kelly, whoever you're working with, and we will, if you make something really good, I'll hunt it for you. And let's see if we can hunt something, okay? Here we go. Cool, sounds good. All right, good job, boys. Thank you, guys. Next up, we are going to talk to Brian Watson from InviteJet. InviteJet is building calendar marketing tools, not marketing calendar tools, flip it around, essentially allowing brands and companies to place ads and marketing material inside of prospect calendars. You can find out more at invitejet.com.

47:02Brian, welcome to the show. So how's the business going? You went through the accelerator and I know you got some very interesting feedback. What was the feedback in the accelerator? We introduced you to dozens of investors and you've met probably or been exposed to hundreds during the program. What was the feedback? Did they get it? Did you present it well in the beginning? Did you get better at presenting it. I know it's a polarizing concept sometimes for some people. Yeah, definitely polarizing. Absolutely. It was for me too, when it was first presented to me as an idea, as the technical co-founder.

47:33I came into it with a little bit of like ick, but that very quickly went away. But yeah, the accelerator was great. We were in LA 33, we pitched to hundreds of investors and we had one-on-one meetings with, I think my list is 136 readings now. Yeah. So it's been, it's been a journey. Um, but yeah, the, the, the accelerator was wonderful for the exposure, the intros, your team was wonderful. They were, um, you know, it, it was, there were moments of surprise and delight for sure. I like that. That's great. Absolutely. Trying to increase those, trying to increase those. I try to get back to in person.

48:10You, you didn't do much in person, right? You went to see Sequoia. Yep. Uh, that was great. That was amazing. Yep. Great feedback. And then did you have, do we have a kickoff for the accelerator? No, we had the one in-person event. We spent a week in SF. That was a great time. But yeah, we got to go out to Sequoia and pitch them and, you know, get some really good feedback. Roloff was a great sport that day. Yeah. I was very interested in the calendar invite, you know, angle. So if we did more in person, you'd be into it. I'm taking it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would be on a plane in a heartbeat.

48:48I love it. Okay, good to know. I'm talking to my team about doing more in-person stuff. What's your challenge right now, Brian? Any challenges with the business or things you're frustrated with or trying to get done? We just had a lead back out of a term sheet, which is a unique challenge in of itself. So there's that that's going on right now. That's like the hair on fire problem that we're trying to solve right now. Where do we pick up the pieces and go from here. We've luckily had a really positive spin of things, re-engaging firms that were already interested, you know, before the term sheet was signed.

49:22So you had a signed term sheet. Yeah. And it didn't happen. You signed it, you went to due diligence, and then they gave you a reason for, you know, backing out. Sometimes, I'll be honest, they will tell you a reason that's not the truth. Yeah, that's the advice I've been getting a lot lately too, is that's probably not true. And I don't want to mention the firm here. I don't want to. Absolutely not. But I do think this is very brave of you to talk about because I've been in this situation myself with my own companies and had somebody back out. A lot of times people will make an investment and then maybe they don't have the credibility in their firm to get it through the other partners because there's some partnership dynamic going on.

50:04So if Alex, Lon and I were partners in a VC firm, Lon's last two deals didn't work out. Alex is pissed off at Lon. Lon comes to us with a third deal. We're like, hey, this is the same movie over and over again. You want to do consumer packaged goods. We know it doesn't work. And then Lon kind of was a hot shot and sent the term sheet before we approved it. And we have a rule, two out of three. He can't get consensus. That happens. It could be - Just not a team player. Well, things can happen. Or, you know, they could see something like a lawsuit, which isn't the case here, but there could be a legal action.

50:36And they say, oh, you didn't tell us about that. Or your accounting could have been off. which wasn't the case here. I think it was for you, the customers in your pipeline and the customer references were good, but maybe not. They had some maybe higher benchmarks they were looking to see in this, what I'll call your company as a nascent company or a year one or two company. Yeah. Six months in. Yeah. So, but we've been on average growing 50 % month over month. And so, you know, things are going gangbusters. And so it was a little bit offsetting, a little bit off-putting, but you know, we're putting the pieces back together.

51:13It's totally fine. I mean, you only get hurt on a roller coaster if you get off in the middle, right? Yeah. I like that. That's actually very true. Keep the seatbelt on. What I'll also say is, did you diligence this firm before you went into it? Did you talk to other founders? You can be totally honest about this because not everybody has the time. Did you talk to two other founders who accepted money from them? Absolutely. So it was our intention to. However, when we asked how wires get crossed and sometimes things get left out. So I assume that's what happened. I don't think that they were intentionally dodging us or anything like that.

51:49But we asked for a couple of founders that we could talk to, but we're never given those actual references that we could go talk to. However, so it's not like we were pounding on the door asking for those things though. So we did ask once and, and, you know, it was not deliberate. So that could be the reason this happened is you asked for references. Maybe they don't have great references. This is why I love the backdoor reference. What's the backdoor reference. That's when you or a dark reference, you go find the references and you go do it yourself, right? You don't have to take their references.

52:23And here's, if you want to get really, you know, dark arts, I have some dark arts. These things exist between the light and the dark sides, It's a little Ashoka kind of situation. You know, you could look at their list of investments on Crunchbase. Yeah, right. Which they can't take things on and off of Crunchbase that easily. Or another service. There's other ones out there. Or you can look at press, TechCrunch stories, whatever, of funding announcements. Then you look at their profile page of their portfolio. And then you look for which ones are not on there. Yeah. Yeah. So there are two founders in the history of our firm that I did not see eye to eye with.

53:03I'll make an amalgamation here. I felt like there were things occurring that were not on the up and up to be graceful about it. I'm not going to say like, but these were pretty gnarly situations where I had to say to the founder, in one case, this isn't a fit. How about you give us our money back? We rip up the term sheet. The founder immediately folded and gave us our money back and we ripped up the term sheet. In another case, I had to threaten to sue a founder because they did things that I thought could get our firm, other investors, other employees, board members, et cetera, into legal trouble.

53:35And I spent$90 ,000 on legal bills and said, hey, if you don't give us our money back and we resolve this, then I'm going to file this lawsuit in Delaware. I never thought I would ever have to say that. But in that case, I felt like this was securities fraud that was occurring and I didn't want anything to do with it. Yeah. In that case, they fold it as well. You're not going to find those two people on our profile pages. Sure. You might find them in Crunchbase. I don't know. Somebody might be doing that right now. Yeah. You know, and trying to figure that out. So that's like a dark arts thing.

54:09Sure. And you know what? Not all VCs and founders are going to get along. Newsflash. People who are capital allocators, unique group of people in the world, often former founders. Founders, very unique people in the world. you put them two together, they're not always going to get along. Small tangent for just a sec, but yeah, we've done the - Tangents are the best part. This one's hilarious. There's a long story to it, but the long and the short is basically, there was one investor who offered to invest in us. I met him through Telegram. I used to work in crypto, so I know a lot of people in crypto.

54:46And so he offered to invest in us, asked us to come to Amsterdam to meet him because he doesn't do business without a handshake deal first and seeing you face to face. And then, so I went back door and started looking this guy up. Looked like he was a great guy. Looked like he was investing through family offices and things like that. However, it turned out the man I was talking to on a Zoom meeting was actually not who he said he was. he was using some sort of AI filter to filter his face and pretend to be this person and try to get me to come to Amsterdam. Always do your research. That's the moral of this story.

55:27What was the plane in Amsterdam? Like kidnapping you? I don't know. They were very pushy about it. Following your instinct is a good idea. You don't want to get taken. If you get that tingly feeling. Glad you've still both kidneys. If anybody in Amsterdam offers to take you out on their like homemade submarines. Yeah, you're about to get taken. Don't get taken. So true. Like I said, things have been going pretty gangbusters. We've got, there has been a little bit of churn. It's not anything to like, you know, turn your nose up at or anything like that. Three to 5%, you know, pretty standard stuff.

56:02That's monthly, every month. And so I engage these people that churn and I always ask them, you know, I'm product obsessed. So I want their experience to be great. They say, hey, so it's a great product. Obviously, it works or we wouldn't have used it. It's really churned up revenue for us, which is great, but we don't see ourselves using it every single month. And so that's why we churned this month is because we don't see ourselves paying the 500 buck a month subscription or$150 a month subscription for this month. And so we churned this month, but we may be back in three months. So we've started thinking of ways to, we've got an idea of a way to do, to combat that, but I'd love to hear your opinion.

56:43So this is what happens with experimental software often. Yeah. And so, you know, people will, investors look at the churn rate, you'll look at it. You know, when something comes out like MailChimp, right? When it first came out, I got to do a mailing. I've got this mailing list. I have to send some emails. people would sign up for the trial, send the email, shut the account down. And I had this issue too, where you're looking at the SaaS software and going, why is it so expensive and I don't get enough utilization out of it? And I loved MailChimp for a long time. There were advertisers here on the program for many years, but they changed their pricing model.

57:19And the pricing model was based on how many emails we had. And I tried to explain this to them over and over again after they got sold. We have a half million emails because we do these events, but we email people twice a year. You're charging us as if we're, and it's like unlimited sending. So we're getting charged with this model of unlimited sending, but we don't need unlimited sending, but you're charging us like a dollar, not a dollar a year, like 10 cents a year per user. So you want$50 ,000 a year. Many of these emails are dead. So now I've got to clean the emails off the list or I have to take these five mailing lists for these events, take them down, then re-upload them, lose the records.

57:58and they're like, you're not our typical customer, Jason. We're working with the gap, the gap sending an email seven times a day. So I think it really has to do with the ideal customer profile. For$6 ,000, most people are not going to care. If you're a professional marketer, they're going to just care, does that$6 ,000 result in more than$6 ,000 in income coming in? So I think you have to look at the category of customer. If I described a publication, they may be very budget conscious, and we know it's not a huge business. How about we give it to you for this rate,$500 a year, and then if you have customers like this record company, Warner Records, will sell into Warner Records alongside you to do their stuff.

58:47See, I think you have to parse who the customers are and the feedback you're getting. As an event producer, I was just not a good customer from MailChimp. They wanted big marketing agencies, people who are monetizing these mailing lists and using them regularly. I moved everything to Substack. I'm a terrible customer for Substack because I don't have subscriptions turned on, so there's no 10 % of the revenue. I'm using them as a free mail service. They're not interested in that. But they're like, okay, it's good for them because they want to build the records in their system and they're playing a flat rate.

59:16So I want to ask you, who are the, as you're six months into this journey, who do you think your ideal customer profile is? So I'll say this, the top of the mountain for us looks like invite jet is the Twilio or send grid of calendar invites, right? You know, and so those, those businesses, when I look at those businesses, they are both marketing as well as transactional, right? Send grid hit it big with the, with the transactional side of things. And so we're thinking about that transactional side as well as marketing. actually this weekend, we're doing a soft launch of our third-party API and Zapier integration so that people can automate these calendar invites into their flow.

59:53So you can think of like a restaurant reservation system using calendar invites. Oh, that's powerful. So if this restaurant is doing cassoulet Sundays, that's great. Yeah. So the ideal customer profile right now has been an e-commerce brand, right? Six to nine figures, analytics savvy um they want to use it for the marketing use case right yes which has been great and so for for them it makes sense to have this pay as you play sort of get an allocation of of invites to send every month you know you're you're you're basically buying an allowance of of invites yeah yeah assumption based yeah exactly so but however with if we shift this model a little bit to include the transactional side of things.

1:00:37I think it helps with those folks that churned from the e-commerce side of things if we go to more of a usage-based pricing in terms of like, do a low platform fee so that we do have MRR, but also do a usage-based fee. Is it$2 per thousand invites you send or whatever it may be so that people can justify the$99 or the$300 platform fee that they're spending every month. And then they can spend more on top of that if they're actually using the service, which we've seen up into the right numbers in terms of our monthly active users each month and how much they're using it. At this stage, I think charging a fee that is robust enough for you to keep growing and investing in the product cycle and keep building these adjacencies and features and the speed and reliability of the service, you know, while giving them so much value that they think you're stupid.

1:01:41Gotcha. This is the line, right? So like, I would look at something like Beehive is so inexpensive for us that I'm like, Beehive is a great deal. Squarespace is an incredible deal. I can't believe I'm paying hundreds of dollars a year to get that much value when I would think I should be paying hundreds a month. For Squarespace, it's beautiful. It's got all these features. That's true. But if you told me it was 500 a month or 500 a year, I'd be like, I would pay either. So that's why I become loyal to them. Something like Notion, Coda, and Slack at$8 to$15 per person per year, per month, I don't even think about that price.

1:02:20It's so low,$8, 15 or 30 is so low. I'm not even really considering it because I get so much value. And that's the Tim O 'Reilly give so much more that people don't even think about it. And I wouldn't over-index on, you seem to be so thoughtful that you might be, respectfully, Brian, over-indexing on the cheap people. If a third of your customers are not saying it's too expensive, then you're charging too little. So both of these things can be true that we're talking about here in terms of pricing. What I would be more interested in is what's the next adjacency, a bold adjacency you can add to this that, you know, really makes it impossible not to use this tool.

1:03:00So I am a fan of Kith, K-I-T-H, which makes, you know, does drop for Nick's gear sometimes. They do New Balance. There's a really incredible designer. I'm sure you've heard of them. Sure. And I would just pay, I told them like, can just charge me a hundred or 500 bucks a year to be part of a VIP program. And I kind of rolled my own VIP with them through DMs, but I was like, just let me pay you$100 a year. You put the drops for VIPs a day, two days before the regular drop. Let us buy what we want. And then you would have a subscription fee. So I was wondering, have you thought about charging to be part of a VIP program to get the calendar invites?

1:03:39In other words, making it a revenue stream. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's an interesting, interesting idea. That is exactly how some people have used the product. so we've got plenty of e-commerce brands that have these sort of vip lists uh if you will um and you know we integrate with mailchimp and clavio members pay though to be part of that i i assume they do i'm not entirely sure um what their what their business model is has a the cuts clothing company that makes like black t-shirts i like cuts has uh and i think maybe roan is the other one i like that makes black t-shirts um both of them i think have a$100 a year program where you get 20 % off each order.

1:04:17So when you hit$500, it pays for itself and you get free shipping. It's kind of like their own Amazon Prime. I think like helping people build that. I also like your affiliate link idea and integrating with the affiliate systems. That's a big business. We have an investment in a company called Genius Link that produces like those smart links that if somebody clicks on it in France, it goes to the right place to buy a piece of clothing in France. If they click it in Canada, it sends them to the right place It's all by IP, right? Yep. And then people can use those to make affiliates. I like affiliates.

1:04:47I like the idea of you maybe adding Klaviyo-like email features. I wonder if some of your customers can't afford Klaviyo and Klaviyo's, you know, margin is your opportunity to like make a freer version of, you know, some of the Klaviyo features. I don't know how they charge per record or HubSpot. So, you know, that's the other possibility with the business. I think when investors hear about your business, they're kind of like, oh, icky. Yeah. Oh no, genius. Yeah, right. Exactly. Oh, what can we add to it? It literally happens every time. It's like this very interesting journey that I went through as well.

1:05:22And it was interesting, even in our own venture firm, people were like, I don't want that. Yeah, exactly. I don't want it to be marketed to on my calendar. And if you switch it to membership, like I did in our discussion, it changes everybody's perception. I think the transactional side of things does that as well. So you can think like if I'm making a booking appointment at a nail salon or a tattoo parlor or a restaurant reservation or a flight or hotel, that stuff should be on my calendar, right? But it's not right now. We're just getting email and SMS reminders of those things. And so, you know, you can think of those highly personal transactions where you're making a booking.

1:05:56That should be on my calendar and I would totally like a thousand percent welcome that, right? And so we know that that's a big business and that's something that we want to go after. So many great ideas. The API is going to be a great long-term thing for you to do. I'm in love with your business. How can people find out more and become a customer or try the product? They can go to invitejet.com. And if you want to contact me, I'm brian at invitejet.com. My co-founder, Paul at invitejet.com. We are very open and personable. So give us a shout anytime. I'm going to test to my Founder University team.

1:06:32Let's get all the Founder University emails. Okay. Let's ask them if they want to be invited to sessions like this, like office hour sessions. Oh, yeah. And we'll test just sending an office hour session to them and putting it on their calendar for content. It could be interesting for our portfolio, et cetera. Like, hey, if you want to come, it's optional. Do people do it with their mailing list without asking for permission first? like if i had like 400 founders and i invited them to something i don't think they would get upset no like it depends like we're not we we we have a bunch of spam blocks in place right we've got stuff in place so that if you're using it for a b2b purpose and you're just booking time on people's calendars we're gonna know we're gonna stop you from that but we do have but if it's an intimate list like the one you were talking about we've actually got um a fund here in town triangle tweener fund, Scott Wingo, shout out, CEO of Spiffy.

1:07:25He uses it for his fund to send events and round up all these CEOs for events and investors and LPs in his fund for these events. He says, it's an amazing tool because it ends up right on their calendar. I don't have to send them an email with a button that says, add to calendar, and then they have to go through this flow. He doesn't mind doing it. Oh, no. And then people say yes or no. And then somebody on his team looks at that or looks at your back end and understands. You said the uptick in attendance has been great because of the use. I'm all in. All right, listen, continued success. Awesome.

1:08:01Keep the growth going. Sales solves everything. So you get that chart that's growing, but 10 % a month, you will be fundable indefinitely in your entrepreneurial career. You get between 10 % and 20 % month over month growth. You'll be fine. You got the 3%, 4%, 5 % churn. That's normal. and so if you can just grow the number, the revenue number, 10 % month over month, you'll be in great shape. It's lumpy right now, but 50 % is our number right now and yeah, we hope to keep it there. It would be great. It will be less lumpy when it's bigger numbers and you figure out your pricing. For sure. Great job.

1:08:34All right, everybody, this has been another incredible episode of This Week in Startups. For Lon Harris, for Alex Wilhelm, I'm Jason Calacanis. You can follow the docket thisweekinstartups.com slash docket and we will see you all next time on Monday. Bye-bye.