Startup pitch competition: Jason invests $25K | E1725

0:00Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of this week in startups. We've got another great founder university showcase for you today. What happens during this podcast is very simple. a couple of people pitch me their idea and they show me their product i use my spidey sense my unique ability to look into the soul of founders and find out they're going to succeed and then to think about my lps and if we should place a bet on this founder at this time and so we've done this uh three times this is the fourth episode and today i'm going to see two pitches and these These are people who went to Founder University.

0:38Founder University is a 12-week program we host. And at the end of the program, sometimes during it, don't just invest$25 ,000 into a company. This is sort of like what we call in the industry the friends and family round. Not everybody's got rich friends and family. I certainly did not. And the truth is, a great founder can come from anywhere. They don't necessarily have rich aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, brothers, or friends who can drop$25 ,000 into their crazy idea. But you know what? I got a money. I got a fund. I got 25 grand laying around. In fact, I got a couple of bricks sitting right here.

1:14So why not make some early bets? My whole career, Uber, Robinhood, Calm, it was based on placing tiny bets on incredible founders. And I am back to my roots and I am absolutely loving it. The most exciting part about all of this is i have decided that i'm losing my mind working from home if you love working from home no judgments i do like to ski during the season but put outside of going skiing i really want to see more people so i'm getting a storefront in san mateo area of the bay area if you see one take a picture of it and send it to me but i'm looking for a 2 000 to 10 000 square foot space where i can sit and i can hang out with my founder university founders meet new people and start placing small bets at a very high flip.

2:01And then I'm going to document it here on This Week in Startups so you can learn how venture capitalists think and you can meet these companies in year zero. A lot of times we write this 25K check and people can't even cash the check because they don't have a bank account and they're not incorporated. And so I say, great, get the bank account, get incorporated, get the bank account, and then we'll ship you the 25. All right. After the Founder University showcase here where somebody's going to get 25K, I'll do a couple ask Jason's with these founders, because I'm sure they got some questions for me, the world's greatest angel investor, and of course, the world's greatest moderator.

2:34It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Cash CashFly is a pure play CDN provider that makes CDN simple, effective, and secure. Deliver content faster than your competitors and get 10 terabytes free forever if you sign up at twist.cashfly.com. That's twist.c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com. And Quicknode gives blockchain developers unparalleled reliability and speed with access to unlimited endpoints across 18 chains and 35 networks.

3:27Get one month free by using code twist at go.quicknode.com slash twist. All right, Presh is here with me today. Presh came to work for me because he was a fan of this very podcast. asked and then he started following me around to all my events when he was what were you 19 or 20 years old at the time 20 yeah and i said uh press you seem like a really smart guy if i give you a job will you stop following me around and emailing me and he said yes and then he came to work for me and it's one of the great joys of my life is to have pressure on my team and to watch him grow into an incredible executive he's incredibly hard working and uh anytime i ask him to get something done it gets done before i finish my sentence and one of the things presha is working on is running founding university kelly is the other person who runs it with him and so let's just start with just a general uh overview of where we're at with founding university i understand we're starting our fifth cohort had hundreds of people apply and we've kind of tried to refine who should come to founding university.

4:35Maybe you describe the type of individuals and teams we're looking for. Yeah. So thanks, Jason. We're on our fifth cohort kicks off next week, actually, just crazy. So we are looking for a couple of things. So everyone is early in their startup and founder journey. So we're really looking for builders. So this can be you've built a product before you've tinkered on some sort of project on the side. It doesn't have to be a startup idea. It can literally be, you know, maybe you built landing pages for, um, your friend's company, um, or a family member. So you've built something, you've put it out in the world and now you want to experiment.

5:14You have your own idea or an MVP and you want to build a company and create massive value in the world. So that's what this 12 week program, um, you get to meet with, you know, builders of, you know, hundreds of builders that have created, you know, value of over a hundred million dollars, you know, different speakers. We also have a live session on Thursday. This is where you can connect with other peers in the program. So you can see what else, what everyone else is working on and just connect from there. And that's really inspiring. If you are with a group of people who are all building, it's kind of like being a musician or a painter or a filmmaker.

5:55or filmmakers go to Sundance, painters might go to some painting community where they have all their art studios together. And the energy builds. When you hang out with other people trying to build products, you say, oh, wow, this person really made a great advance between weeks three and five of the program. And you contact them and say, hey, how did you get your design leveled up? Or how are you doing your growth? And you just, you're part of a community. And now that community sticks together on a piece of software we're using called circle very nice slick piece of software that kind of combines wikis and message boards and slack together and so there's a thousand people in there who've gone to the previous cohorts and everybody's sharing what they're working on and building it's just a wonderful to be part of a community and then people also tell us the accountability of coming twice a week for an hour you only have to come to monday but most people come to monday and thursday for one hour it's after work it's it's typically six o 'clock pacific time is that right what time is it again six o 'clock pacific six p.m yep six o 'clock pacific so nine p.m eastern so you got to stay up late but a lot of people have jobs already you know they might be working at google or apple or facebook or wherever morgan stanley and that's okay we don't mind if you're working somewhere else and doing this at night and maybe we can help you make the jump into entrepreneurship so today a long way of saying we like to back builders designers ux developers obviously builders who can build product if you can't build a product you're just an idea person you got to go find some builders and say hey will you join me at founder university go to founder.university to apply um i think is founder are we closed now for five and people will be applying for six yeah we still have some rolling applications so you can apply if this comes out this week you can apply we might let a few of you in um but yeah the main next one is july end of july perfect and we're doing it four times a year we're going to do a quarterly this 12-week program don't forget to apply founder.university we'll send the founder university podcast where we do tactical talks search your podcast player for founder university okay that's enough of the plugs and explaining what founder university is but i am so excited about it i think we'll do a hundred or so of these founder university 25k checks per year and in each of our funds we're on launch fund four right now which you can participate in if you want to be an lp at launch.co slash four uh we'll probably get two or three hundred of these companies hopefully into that fund which would be five to seven point five million dollars of but i think we'll wind up being a 50 to 100 million dollar fund and these are really great bets for us to make because we can keep investing in these companies and grow our position from but 2.5 percent maybe to 10 percent in the winning companies maybe even more all right founders if you're a sass or services company that stores customer data in the cloud You need to be SOC 2 compliant from third parties in order to close big deals.

8:45And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly and easily. Vanta makes it so easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three to five months without Vanta. Well, they partner with over two dozen audit firms and they have been trained to file those SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. It's a total no-brainer for you. you're going to basically make it easier for your sales team to sell those big clients who need that SOC 2 compliance in order to engage with your product. Tons of my portfolio founders use and love Vanta.

9:17They all report back that they had an amazing experience. And that one major customer, right, that lighthouse customer, that whale in your system, listen, bottom line, you can't afford to lose sales for something silly like not having your SOC 2. Vanta also helps with GDPR compliance. And, you know, that's a big one. You got to get your GDPR in order because they take it pretty seriously over there. So here's the best part. Vanta wants to give you$1 ,000. All right, that's$10 hundies. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. So who do we have first, Fresh?

9:54All right, we've got Alexandra from Hum Hum. Alexandra, how are you doing? Doing great. How are you? Good to see you again. I am well. So I'll give you two or three minutes on the clock. What are we doing? Two minutes, producer Nick, or three? Two minutes, okay. All right, I'm Alexandra Balanzwag. I'm the founder and CEO of HumHum. Dating today is broken, and studies show that people using dating apps are more likely to be distressed, anxious, or depressed. 78 % of people experience emotional fatigue or burnout from dating. We saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between mental wellness and dating by making dating intrinsically rewarding, focusing on skill building, well-being, and connection.

10:31Meet Hum Hum, a community and dating app offering mindful guided dates, group events, and coaching online. Here's a glimpse inside a customer's date with Hum Hum. It was easy to sign up and book a date, and her date felt energizing for a few reasons. One, she felt connected to herself through the breath and the meditation that the facilitator guided. Hum Hum created a clear and kind container that reduced anxiety about the unknown. She and her date agreed to practice presence, curiosity, and kindness. About 10 minutes in, the facilitator left and they were offered a guided prompt, which invited them to explore their surrounding space.

11:05They were then sent timing cues for a really easeful and flowing conversation. And it just led to a more playful and meaningful experience. And after the date, both people decided that they wanted to stay connected. And so we put them in touch. And following the date, she booked a coaching session to help her integrate her experience. We make money by charging a subscription fee for dates and offering coaching and date add-ons. We ran a paid pilot experience to test group dates, one-on-one dates, and coaching. And people have been paying us and are returning before we've had technology built. We've grown a community of 7 ,000.

11:36The top 5 % of our customers have purchased 10 out of 12 months in 2022. We've been generating an average of 1 ,500 monthly revenue for the last nine months. And 370 people are pre-registered for the beta app launching this month. We've grown our existing community through referrals, affiliate marketing, content and performance marketing, and we're doubling down on what's worked. the bottoms up opportunity to serve unpartnered available people who are also into wellness in the us is a 500 million dollar market and in 2030 humum is a 100 million dollar top line business that scales from a tech enabled service to a sas platform we have an incredible founding team across product design wellness and engineering and we're raising two and a half million for an 18 month runway to operate and refine our beta bring our team on board and scale and fuel our go-to market it and thank you very much all right this is excellent what a great pitch and i remember meeting you during the program tell tell me what was the inspiration for you to create this more structured thoughtful approach to a first date and dating what was the inspiration here what what do you know that none of us know that led you to want to make this product i was i created this based on my own lived experience and also just from talking to a lot of people in my universe and what i realized is that people could be dating in and out for decades and so the process itself needs to feel generative and in fact right now it's just burning people out and so i wanted to create something that instead of putting all the emphasis on the outcome of what happens which leads to the burnout we put the emphasis on the process so that people feel like it's a good use of their time no matter what actually happens on the date so how do we make it more fueled with well-being and that really came from my own lived experience dating it's very interesting you know i am i've been married and with my wife for for 20 years now it's amazing over 20 just over 20 so i missed this whole wave of swipe right dating uh it does seem like and correct me if i'm wrong here we've accelerated the ability to sort through potential partners but now we've lost thoughtfulness and it am i correct that this has become dating has become too transactional not um thoughtful in some way and that people are as you're saying burnt out from just this just keeps right being left and right left and right left and right and then hookup culture i I guess is, is kind of inherent in that.

14:09So there's not as much, you know, I don't know if I would use the word serendipity, but there's not as much. It's just to the velocities to rate. Am I correct in assessing this, that the velocity of these apps is part of the problem? Yes. And I would say that with the velocity, it's like, it's actually nudging people to be like more impatient, more transactional, more frustrated. It's fueling the parts of themselves that actually make them feel worse about themselves versus when you're actually practicing curiosity, you feel good. That's actually supportive of connection. When you're practicing patience, you feel good about yourself.

14:47So like giving people an opportunity to like themselves in the process of dating versus doing the stuff that they don't like about themselves, like ghosting or, you know, chit chatting and then dropping off. Like people feel better when they like who they are, which then also gives them a better dating experience and also better success in making more meaningful connections. So you're totally right. Yeah, eHarmony was a company that tried to be thoughtful about dating, but it took a lot of upfront work and they get to fill out like a lot of questionnaires. It was also very expensive, but my understanding was it led to longer term matches.

15:23And I'm sure eHarmony is still there. It seemed like eHarmony, if you're looking for a spouse or to get married, was their pitch. Long-term relationships. And then, of course, there's the Tinder and Grinders and what I would maybe put into the hookup culture. Is this meant to sit somewhere between the two? If you were to think about the competitive landscape? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, what I've seen so far is that the people that are coming to Hum Hum are either looking for a long term relationship or in this space of what they're calling just open to what's unfolding. They don't have a strong of an agenda.

16:00And that's the agenda is what's leading to some of that burnout and transactionality. So it's like coming to it with the intention of, yes, I'd like to have a relationship. And we've seen this actually shift since the pandemic, that more people are wanting long-term commitment or just some form of relational consistency versus the hookup culture, which is not as satisfying. But there are apps that are centered on that. The role of the moderator, this facilitator, you called them, what is their qualification? Are they therapists, social workers, just really intuitive people? and who succeeds in that role?

16:41A lot of our facilitators have a background in meditation or yoga. Some of them do have like a social work background, but we distinguish between facilitators who run the dates and it's really someone who can just hold a thoughtful container and be kind of tuned in to the two people there and just take some training. And then we have coaches who are actually working with people one-on-one. Those people all have some kind of psych degree or social work degree that's fascinating do you have a playbook that you've developed uh in terms of training folks because it would seem to me that the secret sauce here is that facilitator and those coaches but that if i'm thinking about it honestly i don't know that a great coach for dating and relationships necessarily is a social worker or a therapist my own experience lived experience back to that term um is you know i've had friends in life who said you know like hey here's how you treat a partner and it's pretty good advice uh and you know i've wound up subsequently giving advice to people on how to maintain a positive relationship with uh somebody long term so i wonder if you started to develop your own proprietary playbook of what is working with this ice breaking moment and what you tell people to coach and maybe you could share one or two points of both what works in a facilitated environment with the other person and then what works in a coaching environment like what are the top one or two things that keep coming up that you have to coach people on or that work in the ice breaking a facilitated date?

18:20Yeah, we actually have a whole, for facilitation, we have more of a playbook for the coaching or trusting the expertise and the skill of the coach. But in coaching, some big themes are, am I ready to date? So this sense of readiness, people grappling with like, is it the right time for me? Maybe they came out of a divorce or a breakup or they're just not sure about themselves. So that's a big one. Another is just like confidence building, which is kind of in that same theme. So those are two big ones for coaching. And then also like communication, like how to tell people if you're interested or where you stand and how to have hard conversations.

18:58Those are topics that come up in coaching a lot. And then in the facilitation, we do have a very tight script pretty much that people stay on. So we have an icebreaker and we give people a roster. And usually from the icebreakers, it's something that probes people into something a little bit more meaningful um but isn't too hard to recall so you wouldn't you wouldn't want to like ask them something that took a while to think about so for example we could say like what's one thing you're feeling grateful for in your day which gives kind of a positive spin but it's easy enough to think about um and then for the qualities that we look for in a facilitator it's just a calm like kind of a calm presence an ability to be mindful about the cadence of their speech the ability to kind of read the room and get a sense of how like do people seem okay do they need anything um but we do have a pretty timed structure so it doesn't leave a lot of room for error and when i um when we screen people and kind of interview we have them do like a mock meditation a mock icebreaker so they run through the whole flow so we can kind of feel out how does it go fantastic how does it go you charge 35 bucks for a couple of dates a month 100 for maybe four dates and some coaching um of the people who sign up for this how many people say that's too expensive how many people just instantly sign up um it's kind of a mix a lot of people say we're undercharging and then some people say it's the sweet spot so right now for the beta we're doing um we're doing a three-month like trial for the beta and we're charging$33 a month so it's$99 for the three months and that seems to be um working for pricing would that fall into no-brainer yeah that would fall into no-brainer some people say they pay up to 200 something dollars for a couple dates a month it would seem to me that you're undercharging for the level of customization here and you're going to lose money if you have to pay these facilitators so i wonder if you're charging like uber pool prices for what is really like uber black service this feels like a very premium service uh and it should be maybe a 500 commitment or a 299 commitment soon when are you going to raise the prices do you think or are you i'm gonna see how this beta continues to go i think the good news is that our margins are really healthy because of the tech that we've built the facilitator only needs to be there for 15 minutes and then they go into the date so they can host four dates an hour and we pay them hourly and so they're good with our rates and the users are good paying so we have a really healthy margin even now still feels too low the good news is you can raise the prices i think two out of three people have to say this is too expensive for you to hit the right price um and if the if you don't if you're not willing to spend a hundred dollars a month on this then maybe you're not serious enough for it um and it would actually increase signaling that people have made this commitment because going on a date's a hundred dollars just having dinner or a couple of drinks in a major city's a hundred bucks so i don't do it to be exclusionary but i do think you need to have really healthy margin so you can invest in the business but really well done pressure any questions or thoughts thoughts here on you know having watch this company evolve where there are things that when you saw it evolving you said hey this is this is really going well and then and brought her here today to be on the podcast yeah um great job alexander on the presentation so something that stood out is you know um charging for customers this early on which you typically don't see in the founder university program and it's something we want to encourage of course because um that's kind of the clearest indicator if someone wants to use the product and so alexandra's ability to you know put out the product at a very early stage and you know everything was manual at the start but her ability to still connect and actually get paying customers was impressive and stood out so i think you know kudos to you getting the product out and actually getting paying customers yeah this is uh something paul graham says like do things that don't scale at the start because you want to learn and something that i say all the time program of course of my commentator fame you know something i always think about is uh how fearful founders are charging for their product but then how much better the feedback becomes when you do charge for the product and even founder university we came up with a little clever device and alexandra i'm curious of your feedback for this we said hey it's 500 to come to this 12-week program now we don't need 500 from founders and i've been very clear my whole career we don't make money off founders we i find it personally offensive but we said hey if you come to all 12 sessions uh which is just the monday sessions we'll give you the 500 back and it was an experiment but we saw over 90 well you tell me i've seen numbers 92 96 i don't know where we're running right now in terms of completion press but but what did we do in the last one yeah 90 last one yeah like 90 flat um the other ones um just natural drop off yeah yeah so we get over nine out of ten people complete the program and we keep the you know for the for the 10 to 20 people who don't we we make ten thousand dollars which is nothing for us um and if to be totally honest if somebody was like hey it's not for me i didn't get a good experience obviously we'd give them their 500 bucks back um we just wanted people to complete the program because accountability is uh you know one of the things that leads to success in life whether it's dating your weight your business whatever it is uh school education so how did you take that pricing when you saw it was it a turnoff was it intriguing was it a no-brainer it was a no-brainer super candid please it made a lot of sense to me it was like it's just putting skin in the game to actually commit to the program so it made a lot of sense and we've actually thought about doing that for events that we need people to actually commit to going to for the headcount and like to run a successful event we've thought about doing something like that so it resonated oh so if they if you do an in-person event it's a hundred dollars and if you come to the event and you complete the event we'll give you your we'll charge your hundred dollars back in the end you just have to fill out a survey card yeah exactly we haven't actually done it but we've thought about doing it i say do it and you know apologies to stripe for all these charge but uh you know it's uh i think it's like a very interesting device i wish my gym i don't belong to a gym but if there was a gym that charged you 500 a month but if you came four times they charged you back 400 uh and you only paid 100 for the gym so let's say some gym cost 100 bucks a month but they charge you 500 if you do four workouts a month you get a hundred dollars every time you do a workout this would be the gym i would join because i'd be like oh great i actually made it worthwhile and in fact having a trainer increases accountability because if you cancel they still charge you right and so i love these sort of concepts great job very very um intrigued i think you figured something out it's a bold thing most people are going to hate your idea they're going to criticize it they're going to tell you it's too complex it's not going to scale all this nonsense uh but what i will tell you is you have an intriguing idea and you understand your customers better than the people who are going to throw criticism at you so when you get that criticism write it down in a book and then turn the page and then do an interview with somebody who had a successful experience and found a long-term partner and write 10 pages of notes about that person alexandra really well done listen everybody when it comes to the blocking and tackling of running your startup, you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

26:53CDNs, aka content delivery networks, are the place where startups can really overcomplicate things. You don't need custom authentications or custom codes. Nope. If you're a startup, you need to just check out CashFly. It's a pure play CDN. And CDNs are literally all they do. So they're the best in the world at it. They've been doing it for over two decades. That's 20 years. CashFly makes CDN simple, effective, and secure. Let me say that one more time. Simple, secure, effective, effective, secure, simple, simple, effective, secure. You eventually are going to outgrow the smaller ones that are trying to give you too many discounts.

27:29You want the best of breed. So don't burn your startup credits using a CDN at one of those larger players. Let Cashfly handle it all for you. They will help you deliver your content faster than your competitors. You have to be fast if you want to compete whether it's videos your mobile app games content sass the faster you go with your delivery the more people use your products so go check out cashfly and twist listeners are going to get 10 terabytes free forever when you sign up at twist.cashfly.com that's twist.c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com 10 terabytes are waiting for you for free stop what you're doing pause the podcast go to twist.cashfly.com and get your 10 terabytes for free forever All right, next up, we've got Russell from Cyberfilm AI.

28:17All right, Russell, three, two, go. Okay, hi, I'm Russell, founder of Cyberfilm, and we build AI-powered tools to help filmmakers create movies. Today, it's impossible for a single person to make a great movie on their own. There's just too much tech and money and skill sets required, but how else are you going to build a portfolio and get discovered? To get our users started, we can generate clever titles for their premise or anything they're stuck on, helping them make their best work hundreds of times faster. But it's not just text. Once you're done writing your script, you can generate all the storyboards too.

28:53It's thousands of times faster and cheaper, especially for writers that can't draw. And not just any storyboards. Bold, beautiful cinematography driven by you with help from cyberfilm. Our app is like film school in a box without the tuition fee, letting you combine classic story archetypes in ways that's easy for AI to help plot out. You enter what you're know, and our custom AI helps for ideas with what you don't. Ask our users. They love and are already using many of the ideas in real scripts. We launched last week with over 70 new users signing up already and rave reviews from demo sessions with customers.

29:27We charge$40 as software as a service with charges for going over the allotted monthly credits. Now, there's a wide landscape of generative AI tools, many of which do text, image, and video, but we'll win because the ideas from our app are custom tailored by professional screenwriters tuning the AI and producing the best quality for the movie industry. We're going to market with a beachhead strategy, starting with text and images for movies, but adding video generation and TV episode formats later this year. We're already working on the next features for creating scene dialogue, comic books, and extensions for popular screenwriting software.

30:05And we think we can capture a third of the professional writers and video creators for over$500 million ARR in a few years. Our team is perfect for this with a combined AI product manager and a Hollywood screenwriter and assistant director. We've been making movies together using the latest technology for over 30 years, and we're brothers. So again, I'm Russell, the founder of Cyberfilm, and we build AI-powered tools to help filmmakers create movies. Oh, wow. This is absolutely fantastic. You have so many different components to putting together a film. People buy books on how to write a screenplay.

30:43People go to webinars and seminars to learn about dialogue and characters. And then, of course, people hire storyboarders and people to make storyboards. I think the storyboard is the most fascinating part for me because that is something that's a really significant blocker. i find this fascinating because anybody can use the english language now they don't need to understand three act plays they don't need to understand storyboards they don't understand arcs and beats and all this stuff you're just it's an educational tool but also a practical tool there there's there's such a wide group of people and you're charging 40 bucks a month so let me ask this um is the tool complete yet how complete is it because you're trying to tackle a lot of different pieces is storyboarding dialogue you know characters all this stuff so what's complete what's not yeah so this is the the mvp we consider it but it's complete enough that people love and already pay for it so it helps with something called a one pager it's kind of like the elevator pitch uh you know in movie land um and also um all the acts and the character sheets and what's called a beat sheet which is you know 10 things that happen per act the next big thing we need to do and want to do is the actual dialogue for the scripts, but that is much more detailed and user involved and can be up to 100 pages.

32:08But so we definitely want to add that next. And then the storyboards is something we're really proud of. And we'd love to add new templates so people could have, I'd like to make my own comic book or graphic novel, and maybe it's anime, Studio Ghibli style or Marvel Golden Era style. So lots of things that we can do this year what is the strongest most appealing aspect of this range of features and products that people respond to today i think you don't know yet it's okay no no i i've i've done tests with with 20 people from hollywood i think everybody come everyone we talk to says you know i don't need a movie idea generator i'm a screenwriter i've had six or seven ideas i've been sort of tumbling around workshopping for years, but I need help with, you know, I know the main character and act one, how it starts, how it ends.

33:02I'm really blocked on a villain to compliment the hero or act two midpoint to connect act one and three. So I think what people really respond to is connecting parts of the acts that are hard and coming up with complimentary characters to the one they already had in mind for villains and actually love interest. So one thing we found is it's kind of a stereotype that some men are bad at writing women. I'm sure the reverse is true. And so this helps people write more. Lived experience, of course. Exactly. Characters with depth. It's not easy. Yeah. Yeah. So what's interesting about that? That's interesting.

33:38So I was looking at it thinking, which feature we get people to sign up? So they see a feature, they sign up. What you gave me the answer to was what actually helps people in the industry, which is the blocker. so there is a story blocker that you fix for people so they hit a rut there's some blocker to completing and so i hate the name of your company but i wanted to workshop it with you live here um i felt the storyboarding part was the most interesting one now i i'm clearly wrong um but i wonder if when you get people to sign up if seeing the storyboards makes people click the most if the storyboard feature is really great and when you move it to the comic book and people are doing panels if that pulls people in but you told me something else you told me it was like these these blocking moments yeah and um i think revving on the name a little bit i was thinking a better name would just be storyboarder um and if you just called it storyboarder uh then people would say use storyboarder not cyber so actually in it's a it's an interesting point in um cohort for a founder university we we applied and went through it as simplyboard.ai and so we have that domain you can actually go to the website and check it out forget about domains i'm just thinking of a word like uber which was originally called uber tax and that's like hey can you drop the taxi or people called it the facebook not facebook i think you know don't worry about domains because you can always find a you know way to get get storyboard or storyboarder.co or storyboarder.io or storyboarder.ii just think about people saying it to each other and if it's story and we were to look at story unblocker or story finisher completer uh there might be something in completing your your screen glide so story finisher completing and you can just use a thesaurus to think about completing your film so complete films or com you know something in that range if we were to think about finishing uh fin is a term used in the movie industry right so there's some play on words here um so finish thesaurus let me just pull the word finish complete and conclude consummate finalize story finalizer um and um ending completion conclusion close closing final termination we don't like um but there's something there in what you said so i think keep revving on the name cyber film feels like 1980s blade runner which is my favorite genre don't get me wrong uh yeah i love the word cyber my handle online used to be cyber surfer um playing silver surfer but i think there's something more professional and a logo and a design that could level this up so you have all the ideas you have the tech you have the domain expertise i think everything's dialed in branding matters and the look and feel matters so i feel your mvp is still like a four out of ten in terms of design you got to clean that up make it a seven or eight out of ten seven and a half would be fine when you go into the seed stage funding um sort of schedule you know a process for your startup when you get there so you got up the design which is going to cost you somewhere between five hundred dollars and five thousand dollars of hiring a designer for 50 bucks an hour to just take certain screens and just make them look world-class and you don't need to reinvent the wheel here make it world-class as compared to the screenplay writing software that exists and there's a bunch of screenplay writing software i know that people pay 199$299 for collaborative software etc and so just make it better than that and make it look as good as modern sass software you know all the complaints about building apps on the blockchain it's slow it's less reliable there's no support if things go wrong listen it's an emerging technology we all know that well here's the good news quick node has solved all of this quick node gives blockchain developers unparalleled reliability and speed with access to unlimited endpoints across 18 chains and 35 networks.

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38:42Once again, that URL, write it down now, is go.quicknode.com slash TWIST. And make sure you use that promo code TWIST so they know we sent you. then there's the name and i think doing a branding session around the name forget about trying to get the domain just worry about an incredible word that when used in a sentence people could say did you build this in story border did you take an uber um did you tweet that something people can say in a sentence that really clicks in for you story boost or board buddy or simply board um so this is not by the way this is not your skill set yeah and that's okay it happens to be my skill set i'm really good at branding and other people but you know i'm not a developer or whatever so it's okay for people to everybody have your skills but you can start this process of learning and do we have a module on this and found a university on on branding and name creation of a company creation specifically that's a good so i'd like you to put that on your to-do list um and then i'll we can do a little session and maybe make a founder universal tactical talk of how to come up with a name and one of the things that we want to do is train people of what this looks like on a t-shirt a mug a pen um that's how i think about logo creation how does it look on a jacket a polo shirt a business card was the old thing you would think about but we're putting the logo and we've done this before you and i press when we did the founding university logo or the launch logo or whatever logo we're doing how does it look in the world natively but then there's how do people use it in conversation over a phone call if you have to say the name three times over a phone call and if people don't memorize it then you failed in your branding exercise so just i'm going to give you three top level things that we can start to put into this document brush number one can people use it as a verb can they use it yeah you know in common language in a conversation and everybody knows what it is um number two is it easy to spell it's it easy to understand over the phone when it's windy right um and so and then using the thesaurus and using rhyming and and the sort of length of it is another sort of thing people like cadence and people don't like three word names people don't like two word names one word names apple facebook spacex tesla google twitter i could go on and on but when you say cyber film you failed branding school name a brand that when you say it you have to say two words anybody have a leading brand we say is it that nike salesforce is two words and facebook well facebook is actually one word because there are there is a concept of a facebook as a physical device in schools that you could get the facebook and roll through it so while it is a compound word i guess is the the technical term it is in common usage one word so yes sales force is a two-word name and i would i would argue sales force is not a great brand name it's a great company despite the brand name microsoft

42:02xbox right just firefox chrome android com um robin hood i could keep going lift door deaf two words uh so it can happen i just went through off the top of my head 20 names and we found two that have the compound word so if you can avoid a compound word i think it's great uh but well done i really think that you're onto something i like the focus of it and what's great about it is you're not going to put one ai tool into this you're going to have 20 different tools you could leverage here there and there are going to be prompts and there are going to be things that you can customize here that nobody else will know what you're doing behind the hood you could say hey you know it turns out hannibal lecter darth vader these characters are just archetypal villains here's what they had in common and here's how they spoke and if you need dialogue being able to train it on doth freda on hannibal lector on iconic folks and then thinking about that language versus indiana jones luke skywalker han solo decker you know whatever character is a protagonist right and then you also have genres of filmmakers you have the tarantino versus frankenheimer versus uh you know ridley scott and uh obviously the dialogue uh from the facebook movie uh social matter you got sorkin dialogue you could literally take put filters on it and say make it more um make it make it uh more illustrative and um or make it more insider or make it more accessible right and if you look at success succession or you look at billions or shows like that they're very insider they use a lot of internal language and that stuff you could just program into the ai that people would see in the background you just have a slider that says this dialogue make it simpler this dialogue make it more flowery and make it more intense just really interesting that that's a use case people are responding to so we're building an ipad companion app and they said i'd love to have this on set and then click on a paragraph in the script and say make make this funnier you know rewrite this sure uh and so that's that's great yep but punch it up how punch it up uh in a stoner film kind of a way in a get him to the Greek tropical thunder inappropriate humor way in a Woody Allen clever you know New Yorker style like this is where my lord you know every day this product could get a little better and Chad CP24 sure people could go in there and try to do it but they don't have their storyboard there they don't have their screenplay in there they don't have their characters in there So what I like about the stickiness of this is people being able to just put many concepts in here, many projects, and say, I have an idea for a TV show.

45:19It's kind of like Columbo, but it's modern era. I have an idea for a short film. It is like this horror film Saw, but it has a sense of humor, like, you know, the 40-year-old virgin or some irreverent comedy, right? so and that equals screen whatever it is you know you can you can really have a lot of fun here and this is when you can tell press you've got a great idea so just training pressure up here when investors hear an idea and they either start criticizing all the problems in it or they start thinking about all the features um those two things could actually be signals and we saw that in both companies here press that's there's something here there's something here it's it's it's irritating people it's creating a little bit of irritation inside the oyster that could a pearl could come out of and the the irritation of the first one is like oh that's really manual and you know the irritation on this one might be like oh it takes the magic out of the creativity or whatever and anybody who has written screenplays or work there they're constantly looking for ideas they're going to the mall they're trying to overhear conversations they're they're reading source material from the 60s 70s 50s they're they're reading articles from old magazines just trying to find something to be inspired by right and i think that this tool just creates more inspiration and when people start coming up with the feature train for you um that is another incredible tell um russell that you're on to something and i get the sense when you show this to people they come up with 10 ideas and they throw them at you a lot of people say like wow, I'm actually kind of jealous.

47:03I didn't think of this first. Can I really use this? Is it going to take a writing credit from me? Or we say, we don't even tell people you use the app. We want to be very artist-friendly. It's your idea. It's your movie. Actually, the pandemic, we built our prototype and a lot of people were locked out of writer's rooms and coffee shops. So, they said, this is a fun way to bounce ideas off someone that I can trust. And they've read every book ever seen every movie ever like the ai has so um it's really resourceful okay awesome well done uh presh lets you and i deliberate here for a moment if uh presh if you look at these two companies yeah um i'm gonna ask you a series of questions and i want you to give me very quick answers i don't want you to this i want your gut reaction which company has more product velocity hum hum okay uh which product has more revenue potential

48:01hum hum okay actually um interesting i might switch that revenue potential to explain why explain why give me your thinking yeah okay so uh initially um i said hum hum because i was just thinking of dating apps and you know market cap of like tinder which is under match and uh bumble which is like a couple billion dollars so there's our there's already that existing market that is there um but we've seen we can we can realize those market caps because we see them we see those existing products in the marketplace and so hum hum is a product that is almost like an alternate but would really just take market share away from those existing companies which one will have more competition more competition hum hum i believe obviously there's many choices there there's no choices for i mean your choice is like i guess you chat gpt4 or you know one of these other genervais nobody's really put it together like this one and so uh i like both the companies but as we've said only pick one here so let me bring both the founders back thank you welcome back fresh which one is going to return the most money to our lps ultimately if you had to rank them which one is going to return the most money to our lps okay um i would pick cyberfilm okay to return the most money okay which one do you most want to not doing an explanation i can refer why uh they have less competition uh subscription business which one uh do you most want to invest in personally which one do you feel is uh the best bet uh for you yeah cyber film okay great um so i look at both of these and uh it's a pretty easy choice for me both the founders have a secret they got something they figured out both have product velocity uh both have very clever ideas both are very committed to their ideas they have a deep personal connection to the ideas that's enough for me to place a 25k bet on both companies congratulations to both of you uh we're going to send you 25k each okay any questions for me as we wrap up here we always have a little bit of time for some questions about startups if you have a question about your startup specifically startups in general the next phase of your company i'm excited to be in business with both of you and get on the cap table and be your first investors or amongst the first investors i assume questions for me or pressure um yeah my question was just around like different fundraising benchmarks like i've seen kind of a range for going at like a seed round or a series a like what are the revenue benchmarks i've seen it from like you know for series a like 200k to a million annual recurring i'm curious your thoughts on that classically series a investors were looking for one to three million dollars in revenue to do a series a or a founding team that is so exceptional has done it before they've sold a company before they've raised venture capital before they have some personal affinity to them and they'll do like the preemptive series a it's rare that that happens uh so you want to take your fundraising it's a great question by the way you want your fundraising process to be really based upon a reality not things that happen that are obscure edge events so people look at ftx and like he had no board and he raised billions of dollars and he was a criminal all that you know and all this stuff like ftx or there are no's these are not things for us to say are the average or to aspire towards you you really got to look at what what typically happens in the milestone based venture capital investing system in silicon valley and the milestone based system is what you uh inferred in your question hey how much revenue i need to have for a seed round uh you need to have promise product velocity a killer team a great presentation a large tam angels and seed funds will make investments based on those kind of things and if they see but a thousand dollars two thousand three thousand dollars a month and it's increasing double digits 20 a month month over month and they can talk to one or two customers who can't shut up about it and they see the product velocity that could be enough for somebody to write the 500k seed check even a million or 250 something in that range um if you go to a great accelerator launch accelerator tech stars or y-combinator or the three that you know most people i'm including ours in there so it's a little bit self-serving but those three tend to be incredible signals they get to the next 100k or so you put a little more uh and you you really start a formal fundraising process of meeting 200 investors let's say a couple hundred at a demo day and then trying to do between 100 and 200 actual meetings over 16 weeks which seems like a lot but you know if you can do five or ten meetings a week get one or two a day with angel seed funds that's really what it takes in today's market what's what it took in 2009 2010 but you both have real products that are real promising and there is this concept of social proof uh so having somebody like me this is not meant to be narcissistic in any way but people know my track record uh they know that i'm thoughtful and they see the questions i'm asking you here and they understand founder university and launch accelerator or serious programs they understand y combinator and tech stars or serious programs they understand ron conway as an investor or paul graham as an investor cyan bannister pair vc all these kind of early stage investors if you get those folks they're just a signal of quality so i consider them like little stamps in your passport and so there's a lot of different strategies on the margins at the end of the day startups are based upon a team building a product that delights a customer if you focus on that everything works out now there are fundraising tactics and strategies and they change depending on the market the market right now is looking for proof they're looking for revenue they're looking for customers as opposed to stories as opposed to momentum which is what we saw for five years or so from 2017 to you know the end of 2021 yeah those five years were based on momentum and you know how sexy the space was and the promise and the sizzle wasn't really based on the steak it's based on the sizzle right and we're back to what's on the plate is what i would say is a great way to think about it so it's a long answer um but i would say you're doing everything right by just obsessing one of those customers when i see a founder like you obsessing over the customers and obsessing over the product i didn't go too deep into teams here because we already know that information but you alluded to it i think in your slides you have some domain expertise you got some logos that people have worked at previously so the team the product the customers is what will make your your company successful and the right investors are going to ask you a lot of questions about those things so come prepared russell do you have a question for me as we wrap here yeah and first just thank you so much for the investment and to the whole team and i really enjoyed founder university i got a ton out of it so i want to come to the accelerator next and the two-day intensive in May.

55:28My question is, I follow your podcast. And a little while ago, when ChatGPT came out and image generators, you had some great episodes on generative AI. But then there were some ethical issues in the world. Stability.ai used watermarked images and started drawing pictures with that. And so we want to be an artist-friendly company. As you're thinking of all that, at one point you called it degenerate AI. if you're sort of ripping off artists, but do you think we could do it in a way that actually benefits artists and makes them happy to use our product? Yeah, so this is complicated. I had mentioned, hey, the style of Quentin Tarantino, the look and feel of Blade Runner.

56:14If you are, how this is executed is going to be super important. And so I think being thoughtful about, um you know how would aaron sorkin write the same dialogue uh aaron sorkin might want to create his own generative ai product like bloomberg has and so i think in the short term you there's a way to do this without trying to leverage their brands so how would you describe aaron sorkin's dialogue and then other people who are like aaron sorkin yep how would you describe that fast paced clippy clever smart sexy exciting um yeah all these words so instead of saying aaron sorkin and leveraging his ip and brand it maybe you have snappy because certainly he was inspired by some screenplay writers right or some dialogue writers so there's a way to do it without literally doing an Eminem song and releasing it or like this week we had the the weekend and the Drake song which is literally infringing on their IP and their in their names now if you said I want a song that's a fast rap song with a lot of rhymes in it um that moves at this specific cadence uh and you had a you know a speed of one to five and wouldn't take a genius to say well you know Biggie is a two and jay-z's a three and m &m's a five and every little wayne's a four whatever the the proper speed is so i would encourage you to do that and then if people wanted to upload a screenplay and say these that would be on them uh and that wouldn't be you creating a product based on all of you know quentin tarantino screenplays which would feel unfair to me so i like to use does this feel fair fair or unfair so you could say to somebody in our tool you could upload other screenplays of you know upload a screenplay and use this uh as a way to educate my chat gpt you know instance to educate my film um and you know that that would be a much better way to do it you You know, I would say.