3 strangers showed us how they made $8M, $10M, & $40M/year Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 All right. Today we're playing Shoot Your Shot where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat, and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million-dollar businesses all the way up to hundred million dollar businesses. They get 15 minutes, and in it, they start by telling us the one big number, give us the pitch, and uh and shoot the shot.

00:16 They get to ask any questions that they want. >> We've done this in New York City. This time it's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube. Look us up on My First Million and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next.

00:31 All right, let's do it. All right, Sam, what's up? We are doing a new episode, new format. We're calling it Shoot Your Shot. And we basically we go from city to city. We invite founders from those cities to come and shoot their shot, to come pitch us. got business owners that are doing a million dollars a year to hundred million dollar businesses that you're going to see in this batch of founders.

01:00 What should we expect? >> Well, the best part about this podcast, what the reason why people listen, the reason why we even do it is we talk to like unique people. They tell us stuff that we don't normally see. And it's going to range from like people who are like way established and like killing it all the way down to people who are just getting started.

01:14 And we don't actually know who's coming. >> We don't know who's coming. This is blind to us. These are all people who listen to the podcast, right? people who who listen to this podcast, it's founders on entrepreneurs, business owners. It's like an audition. It's like American Idol but for business, I guess. All right, let's do this. So, shoot your shot.

01:31 Let's get the first founder in here. Who do we got? >> What's up, dude? >> Here he comes. What's up? >> What's up, dog? >> All right. Have a seat. So, you got 15 minutes, but take a take a time here. >> Excited to be here. >> What's your name? >> Ragav. >> Ragav. Okay. And your company is Pasha. >> That's right. Pasha. Okay. >> Where are you from? >> I live in San Francisco, the Bay Area to be precise.

01:56 Uh, grew up in India and we've been here for 5 years now. >> How old are you? >> I am 32. >> Is this your first company? >> It is my first company. Um, I did run a project before this where we were trying to build micro wind turbines. But everything that I've learned about Pasha has been at Posha. Everything I've learned about building a business has been primarily at Pasha.

02:17 So we have one rule which is we are uh shameless numbers guys. Okay. >> And so we ask everybody give us a a big juicy impressive or interesting number. Doesn't have to be that big but interesting number that would hook us. Go ahead. >> So we're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes in real kitchens with 1,000 real world deployments.

02:44 >> Okay. So, you're in the 1% of non-bullshitting robotics companies. You've shipped a thousand robots. What do your robots do? We are putting a private chef in every home. And we're doing that by building cooking robots for homes. We thought that if Whimo and Tesla and Zuks can use computer vision and AI to take you from point A to point B, why can we not use the same technology to cook a fresh meal for you?

03:07 Takeout is expensive. Eating at I mean, cooking at home takes forever. There's no way for you to eat food that is fresh, that's delicious, that doesn't take 60 minutes of your time in the kitchen, that doesn't cost $25 per serving. Um, and and where where the alternatives, >> dude, my diet right now is man kibble. You know what man kibble is? >> I know >> it's three lbs of ground beef with rice that will last me for three or four days and soy sauce.

03:34 So, I'm on board with this. Did you raise funding? >> We are backed by Excel. >> How much did you raise? >> Uh, 8 million. $8 million. And how long ago did you start it? >> We started the company eight years ago. This was right out of my, you know, parents ground floor. This was back in India. Uh, it was still a project. We formalized the company about 5 years ago.

03:57 >> Is this the thing by the way? This is the robot. >> Yeah, that's the robot. And it's uh it's >> Can you give us like what is there like a demo? Can it do something? Can it cook us something? >> So, what we did was we just cooked spaghetti alfredo with mushrooms. The food's ready. >> I haven't eaten it. This is perfect. >> And you know, you need >> This looks good.

04:13 By the way, can the I don't know if the cam camera should have already seen this. This looks amazing. So, did Wait, wait. Did it come out like this? We cooked using fresh ingredients. Fresh olives, fresh garlic, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh pasta, and then we put some fresh parmesan cheese on top and it was all cooked on pusha. >> That machine did all did all of this.

04:35 >> Y >> How much does that cost? >> $1,500, which is less than a month of takeout. Um we for >> uh for a family of four. >> Okay. >> Okay. And so what >> So this is I mean give it a score here. >> Great. I mean nine or 10. >> Yeah. This is very good. >> Yeah. As I said thousand customers already use us um three times a week which is more than the oven because you're numbers people.

04:58 Our M6 retention beats Door Dash, HelloFresh, any other food service out there. Last month alone we clocked $2 million in bookings. Uh, we did that again this week. >> Already finished this. >> That was great. >> It's supposed to just be a taste. >> Yeah. >> So, walk me through this. So, I the viewer uh the listener won't know this, but the viewer will see what you did.

05:22 But tell us because it looks just like a bowl of >> Can you Can you grab a couple of the things in the back? It looks like basically there's ingredient containers. So, here is a pan. It's a It's a pan that's dishwasher safe. There's a detachable stirer, detachable spatula. There are containers where you put ingredients. There is a drawer which is super cool which has spices.

05:47 There is space for oil and water. And most impressively, there's a camera that looks at change in color, texture, consistency, make sure it is mimicking a human chef's intelligence so food can be cooked perfectly. >> How did you train this? So in the early days we had chefs alone training Porsche. Now we have our customers training Porcha. We possibly have the world's largest culinary vision data set for cooking food.

06:11 And we are taking the Tesla approach. Veos spent 500,000 hours of supervised driving and $20 billion in venture capital to crack self-driving. Tesla did it a different way. Tesla said we'll release something that's useful to consumers. also use it to collect tons of data and then put robot taxis out. Wait. Wait. So, how does that work? >> Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool.

06:34 We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So, hundreds of episodes the team at HubSpot went through. They pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable uh ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys.

06:56 Back to the show. If a customer is that good at cooking, why do they even buy this? And how do they how do they train your thing? >> Uh, so customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal. >> This can only cook one pot meals for now. One pot meals. >> No, one pot. Have you seen this trend of one pot meals? If you go to like Reddit or Tik Tok, there's like a whole like it's a category of cooking called a one pot meal where you're just going to put a bunch of stuff.

07:22 >> I called that a crock-pot growing up. So you're not going to make cheeseburgers. So, it's not going to do a steak. It's not going to flip burgers. It's not going to bake a cake. Um, anything that requires uh spreading out like pancakes is something it won't do. >> What are what's the most popular two or three things that people cook with this? >> So, the data changes as we change our customer base.

07:44 But our Indian users cook a lot of paneer. Our Italian users would cook a lot of risotto and spaghetti because it's so hard to cook risotto at home because you have to continue to stir. Our Thai Vietnamese users would use it to cook Thai red curry, Thai green curry. >> So, not to be a hater, but basically is the robot just taking up the easiest part of cooking which is just stirring.

08:08 >> Um, the robot is taking away the stirring. It's taking away the regulation of heat. It's taking away you being there to add ingredients at the right time. >> It's taking away you monitoring the food because you know an 8-year-old needs to know what charred onions look like, what brown onions look like. So all the intelligence and all the babysitting is being taken away.

08:31 It does not cut down your time in the in the kitchen from 60 minutes to zero. >> It cuts down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to to 10 minutes. >> So what's give us two things. Give us the big idea. Meaning you said something like it's already used more than the oven. So do you have this sort of vision that like hey look our kitchens all come with these appliances, these three and now here comes number four.

08:53 It's going to be in everybody's home. That means it's this big of like get get me excited about the big idea here. >> So 10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'll only be going to cook because they want to. Same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to. They're only going to be driving because they want to.

09:12 Uh, cooking is going the exact same way. Door Dash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat or when you're ordering corporate lunches. Cooking will become a leisurely activity, something that you only do for joy, but not Monday through Friday when it's a chore. And we are the company that's building the future where every house will have a robot chef that cooks food for you so you don't have to.

09:38 >> That's pretty cool. What are Okay. So, how much revenue are you do? What's your like uh run rate right now? >> So, we did $2 million in bookings last month and >> $1,500. >> Why are you saying bookings? Just cuz you don't have the devices yet. So, it's pre-sale. >> So, we have about,000 units shipped on the field and a long pre-order weight list that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can.

09:58 >> So, we're we're making sure our manufacturers can scale with demand. We're making sure our recipe library can scale with demand. We're making sure reliability, supply chain, logistics, uh all of that is just scaling with demand. >> This is awesome. What's the current? So the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things. >> Uh it's manufacturing, it's also operations.

10:16 So um whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days, uh you always need to handhold people. Something or the other can go wrong. Um and you need a service infrastructure for people to have support if something goes wrong. >> Right. >> It's the same bottleneck that Whimo has. Where did you get the two million in bookings? Is that just viral demos on social media basically?

10:38 Did you do anything to get customers or it's just people like the novelty people want? >> And did they give you the cash already? >> Yeah, they give us the cash already. There are uh three ways that we drive demand. The first is organic word of mouth. Every paying customer gets us at least one more paying customer without us spending a single dollar on marketing.

10:58 Second, Porsche is built for the camera. So, a random nobody would get Porsche home, shoot content, post it online, and overnight they become internet celebrities. We had this creator who had 11,000 followers. Within 6 weeks, she got X number of followers. Guess what X is? >> I don't know. >> She went from 11,000 to 450,000 followers. And all that changed was that she was not shooting POSA content and she started shooting POSA content.

11:27 >> Have you seen the MADC? >> Yes. >> Have you seen the Madic, Sean? >> Yeah. Yeah, I've seen it because of this exact reason. Fancy >> Roomba. It's awesome. And it like there's like one viral moment. There's probably a few actually. One, it sucks up a sock and it like opens up its latch and it like throws it out. And it's huge though. Like I live in New York City.

11:43 I This sounds awesome. My wife complains about how much time it cooks and I'm like, "Dude, just make man kibble. It's fine." And I would definitely rather eat that. But that's huge. I can't use that in New York yet. >> You can't use it cuz you don't have counter space, you mean? Or what? >> Counter space. >> Okay. >> Yeah. So, you're absolutely right.

11:58 And the good thing is that the market is so huge that there are enough people with space to put this in their kitchen. We're working on the next version of Porsche that will be miniaturaturized uh that will fit in Manhattan apartments, but the version after that will actually replace the range in your home. >> Oh, that's interesting. >> And cook four dishes at a time.

12:19 >> So, I got a question. This can't cook meat, right? It cannot cook steak, but it can cook meat as long as the meat has been cubed and the size is 1 cubic inches or smaller. >> Okay. So, you can put chicken in there cubed and then it cooks it. >> Yep. Hey, what do your parents think? >> They're extremely proud that I was able to break out of the family business which was which had nothing to do with tech and I used my education well to actually make a big impact in the world.

12:48 Uh they're extremely proud and happy. >> They're supportive. They like it. >> Yeah, >> that's badass. What was your family business? >> Uh my dad runs a food grain business. So they grind wheat and you might have heard of this thing. It's called an artachi. >> Okay. They grind it. >> Yeah, they grind wheat and then they sell fresh flour. So fresh food has been something that's always been close to my heart from the very beginning.

13:07 >> What do you need help with? >> Um you guys have built great communities. Uh you with MFM and you with Hampton. We feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for Porsche. How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow Posh? >> Let me say something really quick. I think people use the word community and audience differently.

13:29 >> Okay, >> so for example, MFM is an audience, meaning if we quit doing this, the audience eventually is going to go away. >> Sean owns a a brand that has a community. It has a a community online where lots of his customers are talking and interacting, and that's a community. And I think you'd have to determine which of those two are you actually talking about.

13:49 >> Yeah. The best thing I heard of this is if everybody was together, which way would the chairs be pointing? So an audience is all the chairs point at the stage. The community is the chairs point at each other. So for example, to your question, what's that air fryer brand that went crazy like just like the >> Ninja? >> Uh yeah, maybe it's Ninja, but like basically the air fryer in the last like 5 years had like a big renaissance and actually did too.

14:10 Yeah, Ninja Creamy did too where there's a community of people that are sharing recipes and it works because I think a little bit more than yours, the user can kind of figure out like create new things that rather than like the app only lets you do 14 items, pick one of the 14. And so if you have some element of UGC, userenerated cooking in this case, a user generated recipes that they could share and they could kind of get props for from one another.

14:38 I think that's the the key and you have to find, you know, a hub for them. Was it is it on Reddit? Is it on Discord? Is it on Facebook? Is it on Instagram? How are you going to get people to share this stuff? But I would study what the air fryer community did. I would study what the Ninja Creamy did. And I would try to replicate as much as I could of the factors of that success.

14:55 >> Yeah. Like for example, I used to love this app called Aptive. It was a fitness app and they had a Facebook group and I was very active on the Facebook group and same with Pelaton. I'm sure they have a Facebook group where you like talk about your favorite instructors or like has anyone tried this type of workout? Another one is Ladders. That's another fitness app that they have this like community.

15:10 So that's their customers talking together. It's super valuable. And so what I would do is for every I would put like something in your when you ship it out like you just I don't know if it's like mostly moms I would and what age they are might choose Facebook. If it was nerds I would choose Reddit. Whatever. Facebook groups though I do think are are still the best.

15:29 >> I think the other question is what do you what's the bigger benefit you're attaching yourself to? So are people buying this fundamentally for time savings? So then you would say, well, is this for people who really value their time? Maybe it's a busy professional, the the working mom, etc., etc. And you need to create metrics and success stories and attract that type of person.

15:47 Go to those influencers who are going to spout that kind of religion. Or is the religion about foodies, people who love food that but they've been limited by skill. >> Okay, >> I would love to cook risoto. I would love to eat risotto, but I don't know how to cook risoto. And that skill gap is getting bridged by this thing. And it lets me indulge my foodiness.

16:01 And it's not about the time savings. M >> it's not about brutal like efficiency, utility, it's about enjoyment. And so I would try to figure out and the easy answer is going to be, oh, it's both. It's all. But in order to really get a community going, you want to have a beach head. You want to have like an initial persona that you're targeting. And really, it's like what's the happy ending, the dream outcome for that person, the kind of inner itch that they've been waiting waiting to scratch that your your product is

16:27 helping them do that. Your product's not the hero. It's the tool that the average person uses to become a hero themselves. And so which one which one is it? That's something I would kind of ask myself because that'll change a lot of your marketing, a lot of your strategy. >> But my gut tells me you're not going to have a customer acquisition problem, >> right?

16:45 >> I don't think that's ever going to be the problem. >> Your marketing team is like a total of one person. >> I don't think that's going to be the issue. Your constraint is not going to be getting people to buy. It's they're going to be does this thing actually work and can I get it in their house. >> Yeah. But it'll change your product strategy. Like if your product strategy about utility man kibble like he wants health and he wants convenience.

17:01 So he's willing to sacrifice presentation taste and other things maybe along the way but you would create a different product like you would literally have different pieces of the robot different constraints on the manufacturing side versus if you were trying to make this this beautiful parmesan topped impressive thing when friends come over. Yeah I cooked this for the for the family.

17:23 I was never able to do that before. maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture, >> right? I think community is important primarily because um it's not growth necessarily it drives but but over time I think your CAC comes down because you know your K factor just jumps up people start talking about you second engagement increases and so retention increases and if retention increases >> of the best community builders in the world how many of them use phrases like K factor engagement stickiness and CAC >> not this

17:54 early at least you get magic first >> communities from the soul, you know what I mean? And so you got to like have two different parts of your brain. There's metrics guy, start a founder, go raise money from Excel, >> and there's feelings guy. >> And there's feelings guy, there's soul guy. We're going to do this because it's awesome. We're going to do this because it's the right thing to do.

18:11 We're going to do this. >> And eventually cool. Yeah. >> But right now, it's like cool that eventually gets popular does not talk about K factor. It talks about silly. It talks about emotion. You know, these types of words, not K factor. Don't worry about that. Just get the 1500 people who are using this, get them to log into Facebook groups every single week to talk about to either Yeah.

18:30 to complain, to celebrate, to nerd out. And then you also need lore. So lore would be like for us it would be like no small boy stuff. Like we say these silly phrases where no nerds in a room are be like how do I get people to like like us more? You know what I mean? We just make up dumb stuff. This like we used to call this show this episode the denim dungeon just cuz I wore denim.

18:49 Like do that silly stuff that doesn't math. Who cares? But you just do the stuff where you create lore. or you create catchphrases, >> shared stories, >> a common bond, us versus the world. And that sounds silly when it comes to cooking, but like you could still do it, right? So you create this, you create lore and you repeat it constantly, constant.

19:05 And you have a face, whether you or if you have someone else at your company. You seem very charismatic. I think you could do it, but you have like every every cult needs shared language, rituals, and a leader. >> All right, we got to wrap up. Yeah. Uh, Ragav, thanks for coming. >> Yeah. POSA. >> POSA.com. You got the URL. Good job. Amazing. Thank you so much for the time.

19:26 >> All right, we appreciate you. God bless. >> All right, see you, dude. Thank you. >> All right, we have another one. Who we got? Bring them in. >> Yo, >> what's going on, boys? Here, I brought you guys. >> What's good, boys? I You sound like a hockey player. >> All right, we got >> spend too much time in the uh the locker room. That's the problem.

19:46 >> So, I know you. So, this is Nick. I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of them. I was like, I needed a midday break of eating midday squares. But do you know Nick well or no? >> I never I don't I've just met him a second ago. >> I just lurk on X. >> Yes. Well, I' I have these in my office at Hampton because my co-founder is obsessed with them and I started eating them.

20:08 They are awesome. >> I appreciate that. I appreciate that. >> Midday Squares is your company. >> Sure is. >> That's you and your wife. >> I got two other partners. Yeah. I got I got shout out to my wife and my brother-in-law. So, we didn't we did this >> all in the Got to talk about his wife. She's amazing. Uh >> she's the beast. >> Okay. So before we start, we want you to start with the one big number.

20:24 >> We basically sold $40 million worth of $249 chocolate bars. That equates to about, let's just call it roughly 60 bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in 365 days a year for you to hit that number. So >> wow. >> 40 million in the last 12 months. >> Yeah. >> 60 of these bad boys every minute. Every every minute of the year. >> Every minute of the year.

20:48 365 days a year. If I'm not wrong, wasn't Kim Kardashian spotted with with these in her bag? Is that true? >> Yeah. Yeah. She >> not paid, right? >> Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social. And uh I think that's the that's the beauty of like when you're when you're hustling and I and we make it a a point to be in with all the chefs. And so we're not looking for the direct connection to celebrities.

21:08 That's what everybody's doing. So we've made it a point over the last decade to become friends with chefs. And and that's so Chef K, shout out Chef K who cooks for the Kardashians. I mean, we were sending her product for years and years and years. >> No, >> the influence the influencer strategy. So cool. >> Who who influences the influencers and then you actually influencing them is a lot easier.

21:31 >> But you find who the chefs are of celebrities. >> There's a lot of chefs on on Instagram and Tik Tok that you can see who they're cooking for, >> athletes and and other chef >> and you just DM them say, "Hey, can I send you some?" >> Yeah. >> What's special about the product? >> Well, what is the product? Okay, so we started out as chocolate bars and uh crazy thing happened, you know, since we started this business in 2018.

21:50 Chocolate went parabolic. The cost of cocoa and that means we lost like 27% of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it and chocolate we were paying $4,000 a kilo for cocoa butter went up to 32,000 just to give you. >> So there's like a cocoa >> crisis. >> Cocoa crisis. What? What? Why is there Why was there the cocoa crisis? So, it's the cycle that happens all the time, which is super interesting.

22:13 It starts off with like a real mismatch in terms of weather will come in, disease will spread, then there won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports, and then corruption kicks in though. And corruption usually takes about 2 years. I I got stories. I went into the Ecuadorian forest, so like if you ever want to go there, we could go there. But basically, you know, when your back's against the wall, I remember we started this thing with like no UT in economics kind of like I'm not comparing this to Tesla in any sense, but

22:42 build the product, no gross margin, nobody wanted to manufacture this thing. Then we went to a big kitchen and then we built the plant and we had finally reached profitability everybody and then we get smashed by this coco thing. >> Did you raise money or is this whole thing bootstrapped? >> No, no, we raised money through quasi equity and our government.

22:58 So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to give >> How much in aggregate have you raised? >> 22 million in total. >> You raised $22 million. >> I built her own plant. >> Yeah. >> They're a great follow on social. In fact, I've stolen many things from your social strategy. So you guys, his wife in particular, they make this incredible content.

23:18 So they got sued by whatever Hershey, who I forget it was, Hershey. >> I can't confirm nor deny. They I can say this stuff. They got a cease from someone being like, "You can't use the color orange." you know, like stuff like that. It was orange. It was like a ridiculous. >> I'm sure we could all play two and two together. >> Yeah. Reese's uh was like, "Hey, get off Orange."

23:34 So, instead of just sort of taking the disadvantage, they said, "How can we turn this into an advantage?" And they came out with this campaign where they were making videos talking about how they're just this independent company. >> They actually made a diss track. >> They made a rap diss track. They made a music video. Him and his wife. And it's like ridiculous, but it kind of works.

23:51 And they tell the story. And they tell the story about their plant. And they tell the story about the they tell the story about the good things and the bad, which I think everybody only tells the good. And there's a lot to learn from y'all's strategy, but also you guys have a lot of like natural charisma and storytelling. >> Named it midday squares cuz it's perfect.

24:06 >> Thank you, man. Um I I I think it was me and my wife brainstorming, riffing. I shout out to 5-hour energy. So I I listened to the podcast in 5 hour energy and I he was so methodical about like I want my product to be what it is. And we were we really so the big gap that we saw was that the afternoon market's just as big as the morning breakfast market except it gets nearly no attention.

24:26 So like everybody's crowded into breakfast and nobody's really focused on the afternoon part >> for adults. >> For adults. Yeah. Specifically. >> And and so was this a form factor that already existed that people were already doing these like kind of square what? I don't even know what this is. It's half >> a dual layer square. Yeah. >> What's the bottom?

24:45 >> Uh peanut butter base. >> Okay. Peanut butter base. You got jelly on top. This is a PB&J one. >> Um or this that's PBJ. This is also PBJ strawberry. But you also have chocolate, right? And so >> that's where it started the business. >> Chocolate is where it started. Where did the initial idea come from? You're just sitting around and why this? >> So my my cousins um my cousin was super high up at Smuckers and he was just always uh pushing me to get into this gang, you know, and we would always riff back and forth.

25:11 And finally through a few of his friends and stuff, I started getting data and it was the data that like really sprung to me was chocolate was growing at a ridiculous rate. So chocolate that wasn't using palm kern oil at the time and refrigerated was growing. So like the refrigerated category of grocery stores fastest growing uh section of a grocery store.

25:31 So that's why you keep seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. like fresh pet at the pet section. They're starting to put fridges in the >> Oh, so every category started to have a refrigerated >> item. And we were talking about this with vitamins, right? Like those liquid vitamins that you put in the fridge versus in the cabinet. Oh, wait. So, go back.

25:47 Your cousins atmucker. >> Shout out by the way. That's my cousin. >> And he's like, you got to get into this jelly game. And you're and so you're studying the data. You notice this trend of refrigeration in different categories. So, you notice chocolate's on the rise. There's not a refrigerated chocolate. >> Yep. You see a gap, you see an opportunity >> big time.

26:06 >> Tell us how much money you you put in of your own money to do it. And then if you could remember each year's revenue leaving >> Oh, 100. Yeah, 100%. Um, so basically it took about 60 grand. Me and my partners basically put this together. We put in 60 grand. So we created a constraint. We couldn't use Facebook ads. We had to get to a million dollars of revenue and we couldn't use Facebook ads.

26:24 That was constraint number one. And number two, it all had to be in our city. So we couldn't like just spray and prey. We had to, we chose Montreal is where we came from. We're like, we got to get to a million dollars here and if we get here, then we can go to the next level where we can really start to take this serious. >> That's dope. >> It was the first one on Facebook ads just cuz hey, we don't have a lot of capital, so we're not going to be able to reserve this much money to burn there.

26:46 >> Or was it I get the Montreal one, which is like, look, let's try to get people that we can see, feel, and touch here to love it. Yep. >> Because if they don't really love it, we don't have it right yet before we earn the right to go to other cities. >> I'm I'm a contradict. I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives for early business >> at least early on.

27:04 >> Yes. >> So, what did you do to get Montreal on board? >> The content, man. It was So, this was and this is where the brilliance of my my wife and my brother-in-law. So, it was it was like really simple going out. None of us had social followings. That's a really important piece, right? Because a lot of people feel intimidated when they're getting into this thing like you got to have a pre we had no followings.

27:20 And so, for the whole summer, we just started posting. When you're making food products, you usually end up in really cool environments. You know, we were in labs with like food scientists and different manufacturing plants where we were testing stuff. And so we just all told each other like everybody when we're doing something, cameras on, tell people what you're doing, but don't reveal what you're doing.

27:40 Just show the environment. And people started getting interested like what what like what the hell are you guys doing? You know, especially all of us had not come from this industry. >> Okay. So it was like pretty young guys are like we don't know what the hell we were doing. You're saying your friends, your own natural social networking mind >> was like, "What's going on?

27:57 What? Why is Nick suddenly in this like lab wearing a hairet, you know, testing different?" >> Yeah, cuz we all, my wife was in fashion, my brother-in-law was like a gym buff going around colleges, and I had typically been in software my whole career prior to that. So, so to see us with like hairetss doing stuff was like, "Okay, >> so you use content, you use story to get to get it going."

28:17 >> Yeah. >> Tell us about the ramp. So, you start off year one, what'd you do? >> This is where the magic happened. Okay. So when we turned on the Jets in September, so September 2018, we sold our product on our website for0 50s and there was two reasons. Okay, so you could buy one square for 50 cents and the idea was uh it was all a content play. So we didn't want to actually make money, but we didn't want freebie people.

28:42 So you had to get your credit card out, actually do a transaction, and we handd delivered everything for 5 months. So it was all in Montreal. >> He's an animal. So we did. >> By the way, Nick's the only one who's not based in San Francisco doing this thing. He flew in for this, too. This guy is the ultimate hustler. >> Yeah. Ben messaged me. He's like, "You happen are you do you any chance you're going to be in San Francisco Monday?"

29:03 I'm like, "Yeah, of course." He's like He's like, "Here it is." I'm like, "Okay, perfect. I'm flying on Sunday. It's the only way, man. You got to make opportunity." Uh, so yeah. So we're we're we're getting in the car. We do deliveries for like five months. Here's where the magic happened on content. We would wake up in the morning every morning. And this I took I think I took do things that don't scale and we just went way too far with it.

29:23 So in the morning all of our orders would be ready and we would literally go on people's Instagram. So if you had a dog named Chuck, we'd be like, "Shout out Chuck." And we would wear these crazy outfits and we took Polaroids of ourselves. Okay. Just meatthead >> Yeah. Complete like customer. And we would take a Polaroid picture and we would show up to their house and and this always happened.

29:44 Okay. Okay. So, we would show up to the house and be like, "Wait, why are you doing the delivery?" And then we would do and so you would get to hang with the customer. We would get more content out of it. So, we'd be filming the whole experience. >> Oh my god. >> Then we would leave them the photo. Then they would post the We got to a million dollars in like four months.

29:58 Like it was like boom. >> Dude, that's sick. That is amazing. That is such a great story. >> Okay, so the number, tell us the numbers. So >> So okay, so year one, I want to say a million four. Then year two, let's call it three million. Then we did a big jump to like seven uh 14 22 30 40 and now this year we're on track for about 60. >> And you guys you guys got into Costco?

30:25 >> We like we we we launched Costco Canada National. Costco US is launching September 1st. >> How did you get into Costco? Not easy to do. Everyone wants to get into retail. >> This is a crazy story, too. Yeah, >> this is a crazy story. Okay, >> we're going to have to extend the time limit on Nick, just so you know. No, this is a crazy story. >> Whoever's next, go take a walk for a bit.

30:44 >> All right, so Costco, they had seen the content brings in the action. Okay, brings in the action. So we get this meeting with Costco. >> Content brings in the action, baby. >> Got to grab that action. So we so we we basically go to the first Costco meeting and everything I'm about to say Costco. Shout out Costco. Like super respectful. Like we weren't seeing eye tie.

31:03 We knew that our second most searched term online was Midday Squares of Costco. Like we knew we were going to hit this out of the park. They didn't feel as >> confident >> confident in that aspect. And we knew that the right price point was $19.99 for our 12-pack. There was a disagreement that lasted about two and a half years. Okay. Going back and forth, >> right?

31:26 >> Gentleman's disagreement. >> Yeah. Like like just we just couldn't see eye to eye in the price. And for the record, >> they wanted it to be what? >> I'm not going to state that price. Yeah. because because they're a great partner and they want to be lower and we just held our ground, you know, because this is >> said two and a half years. >> So during that, weren't you guys just kind of like, God, let's just go into Costco.

31:44 Let's do >> Okay, so this happened on the third meeting. This is where things it was the third meeting. We drove out to the head office for the third time. There's two ways to go into Costco. There's like you're in line or you could do a road show. And the road show is like everything's on consignment. You have to show up. You only get paid for what you sell at Costco.

32:01 And you got to be in Costco for 14 days. >> You mean like giving out sampling? >> Yeah. You're sampling. You're hustling. It's like the >> Oh, so that's what's happening when you walk into Costco. There's kind of a cool product. Somebody's standing there. They're taking a consignment bet on their product to prove to Costco that >> that they're worthy of it and there's no guarantee you're going to get Costco.

32:22 So, I was really rattled. Again, we we didn't see eye to eye. This is the third time and like we're talking almost three years at this point in time. And so I I looked at the buyer who we had started to develop actually a good relationship with him and I'm like, if we do the road show and we break the road show record, like the most sales ever in 14 days, will you give us 1999?

32:43 And we shook hands that day. >> What What made you want to do that bold statement? >> Our search on Google was so high for I knew. >> Yeah. But you knew that it's high for you, but you didn't know that it was how it compared to like the when the Swiffer came out. I don't know. >> You're correct. I don't know. There's just moments in life where you just >> Was that an impulsive thing or you planned to say that?

33:02 >> No, it was impulsive. We were we >> always looks at you during the meeting. You're like, >> it was like my wife looked at me and we but she was she I I don't know. I guess you have nothing to lose at some point. >> Baby married a wild stallion. This is how it how it goes. Sometimes I run away. So, how much did you guys sell? >> Uh 140 uh 100 We can't put 160,000 in 14 days.

33:22 And how broke the record to the 160 was your barely break it or did you >> No, we smashed the record. The closest record I think prior to that was sub was all content and they made us >> No, we rallied, man. We rallied. We rallied like we rallied. Okay, so first off, most founders don't spend 14 like like we were doing full days. Dude, when he's saying we rallied, that goes perfectly with backstage we were talking about uh nicotine pouches and he's like, "Oh, I used to put it in my toes before ice hockey practice."

33:51 I've never even heard of this. Okay, so it sounds like we have some degeneracy to explore together. >> Yeah, I could tell by your >> tattoos. You You put it between the toes and you just went for it. 14 days. >> It was like the craziest rally of life. And it wasn't 14 days. We uh spent 36 days straight in Costco. We had to do multiple Costco. So, >> what's the trick when you're in the Costco?

34:13 like kind of getting flagging people down. What you What What was the showmanship that worked? >> Yeah. Two things that I think are really take away. Most founders don't do the road show themselves. They leave it to a third party. That's mistake number one. Like that's >> Yeah. Cuz everyone hates rejection. >> And also time. Like you're you got to be in those for 12 hours in a day.

34:30 Like they open at 8 and you're closing at 9:00, you know? So most founders brush it off and just they pay the service and they don't go every day to you don't understand. It was bananas. >> Okay. So, you were just grinding. You were living in the castle. >> Me, my wife, our whole team was in there. >> The first thing is founders do it themselves. Um, the second thing is basically while you're there, you want to be really methodical.

34:55 So, I would just stand in front and yell out keywords, gluten-free, diabetic friendly, and and and No, I swear on my life. So, you're doing keywords as people are >> they bought like a like a white girl dictionary. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so you're throwing out like your keywords and it really works. >> Hispanic. >> Yes. No. I mean like so we would have so we would have this we would get so warehoused at one point like we were so out of our you start to hallucinate you're in there so long sometimes that we would just be

35:24 like it's a dog and pony show coming like you just start. But the keywords are really key. So the keywords why are the keywords key? One it we changed our box because of the keywords that work. So when you go to Costco it is not this box. It is a specific box that went into Costco. >> You discovered it while you were there. Change the packaging afterwards.

35:42 >> What did you discover? >> Uh gluten-free was a massive thing. Real chocolate's huge at Costco. So, I So, I think the second thing, Shan, is like don't just mindlessly be there while you're doing the road show. Be intentional about what you're doing. >> Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. What um so, okay, so 10 years from now, what do you think's going to happen?

36:00 Are you going to sell the company? Going to run forever? What are you going to do? All I know is that my dream was to make the NHL and I didn't make the NHL and so No. Did >> So now you're going to buy a team. >> No, no, no. Uh only.5% of companies make it past $100 million of revenue. I that's been my goal since the beginning and I don't know what will happen after, but that's the goal.

36:18 >> You're the man. What's uh what's one thing we could help you with? >> One, having here today, I I can't tell you how much this means to me. Uh you guys >> been listening for a while, >> dude. Come on. You know, we met each other what five years. >> Well, we met in Club LTV. I used to host this thing for ecom owners. He was in there. You probably were only doing like 5 10 million in revenue at the time.

36:36 >> 5 million at the time, but he had amazing energy. >> I was rooting for you since then. So, I'm not surprised that you're now at, you know, 40, 50, 60 million. >> Keeping going, man. Um, what would you like to see as a flavor? I mean, you guys actually consume the product. I would love to, even if it it was a fully different direction. Let's not even say no bread PB&J.

36:51 What's a flavor you'd like to see us do? >> That's a good question. I think what I would love to see, you told me three things today and I've known about your brand for four years that I didn't know. I think you got to this sounds weird because you're doing content. It sounds weird because you work on your packaging. I think there's actually still like a long way to go in terms of like being able to through whether my point of contact is just seeing the box, whether my point of contact is seeing something on social

37:16 from you or from a celebrity. How do you make it where the story really pops? because you know just I like I didn't actually realize that the reason your stuff tastes better and is better for you is cuz it's real chocolate that's refrigerated. That's why there's no preservatives. So it's one thing to say no preservatives. Like it's kind of like when I've heard that type of stuff so much I just assume they're stuff they're shoving something else in there that I don't know.

37:41 Oh no pal olive. Oh then they're using some other thing. Who knows? And so I think just saying like hey this is chocolate you keep in your fridge because it's in the fridge. But this isn't even chocolate though. >> This one's low PBJ. >> Is Is your chocolate still your popular skew? >> These are No, I mean uh >> this is now the most popular. >> Number one by far by >> Dude, I would keep going with this.

37:59 It seems like Dude, you know who's making a huge comeback is Uncrustables. >> But yours is like fresh and healthier than like dude Uncrustable. Like if I buy that for my kids, I know I'm making a >> a bad choice. >> A bad choice. >> For me, I'm making a a shameful choice. >> This I don't feel ashamed of. >> So congrats. >> Well, thank you. All right.

38:17 Thanks for having us, man. I appreciate it, >> dude. Great to see you. >> Thank you, man. >> Appreciate you flying in, too. >> All right, G guess guest number three. What's up, dude? >> What's up, man? >> All right, introduce yourself, your name, what you do, what's the name of the company? >> Okay, sounds good. Uh, my name is Traus and I'm the CEO of Daydream and we are adding a million dollars a month helping dentists automate back office tasks.

38:41 >> All right, dude. I've been DMing you. >> We've been DMing. We've been in the DMs together. >> Yeah, we've been in the DMs. I love the name of the company and then I saw you were doing something for dentists and I was like that's so smart. I think I tried to invest or something. I was like this is you I I do these like cold outreach to invest off of no information just like a Twitter bio or like two tweets and that's what I think I did with you.

39:01 >> That's great. That means my Twitter's working. >> Yes, it's working. >> There you go. I got you. >> All right. So, you kind of already started with the big number. You said let's say it again slower. So, you said so we're adding a million dollars a month in ARR every single month >> across a bunch of dentists. >> Yeah. Across a bunch. explain what you do though.

39:15 >> Yeah. So, basically what we do is I don't know if you've ever been to the dentist or a doctor and gotten a bill from the insurance company and been like, you know, what actually is this? Right. And that's because the insurance companies are trying to screw not only the patients over, but the doctor's over. And so, the reality is in order to get reimbured from the insurance company, the doctor has to do a bunch of administrative work >> and doctors hate it and they do a bad job.

39:34 They lose money. My mom is a dentist. She's losing 10 to 15% of her money to these insurance companies. So, I was like, what if I could automate this process of dealing with the insurance companies? So verify insurance to say, "Hey, this is what Sean's insurance is going to cover." We submit the claim. We appeal the denial because guess what? They love denying these claims.

39:49 And then we do all the bookkeeping when the money does come in. And in exchange, the doctors pay us a small percentage of every dollar they >> So it's like AI like negotiating with the >> insurance companies. Yeah. Exactly. So we have AI calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims, AI submitting the claims, >> and AI voice being like, "Hey, you did not approve this.

40:05 Why not? Here's why you should." Exactly. >> Well, the funny thing is on their side, they also have AI. And so there normally it's a war of attrition. It's like they're gonna you have to wait to hear the menu, then you have to say the number, then they didn't understand it, but it's like let's let my robot talk to your robot all day. >> Exactly. And you know what I always tell the insurance companies?

40:22 I'm like, yo, you're spending a lot of money, we're spending a lot of money. What if you just gave us the data in an API? But this healthcare industry is so backwards that they don't want to. >> Yeah. The incentive is not there. And so we have to find all these creative ways to beat the system and make sure that our doctors and our patients get paid.

40:38 >> Can you rattle off a few facts? So how old's the company? How much funding and uh like this year's revenue? >> Yeah. So, we're about 926 days old. Uh two and a half years about about >> you know who started that was the ramp CEO. Do you know his stick? >> His stickick is like how many hours old >> today? We're 2,243 days old. >> Sorry. >> 926 days old.

40:56 What was the second part? >> Yeah. So, we've raised 11.5 million to date. Um by the end of this year, we'll finish north of 10 million in revenue. Wow. Um and another underrated thing is so the way our business started was we actually went out and acquired an existing service business. So before you know people would be doing this work manually, right?

41:13 So we actually bought this company and then we've just been improving their margin. >> How big was their book of business when you bought it? >> Less than a million. Um and so really the goal was you know when you run a services business of of one day you run out of you either have to hire more humans, you become more unstable, quality goes down. And so we got them right at the perfect time when they were like, "Hey, I think we could grow, but we just don't have enough human talent."

41:35 >> Who came up with this name? >> Uh I did. My mom's uh practice, her name is the practice's name uh is Dream Smile. And so uh I grew up working my whole life in this practice. And I don't know if you've ever been an unpaid child worker, but like the first thing you're doing is like daydreaming like, "Oh, >> hello to the unpaid child workers out there."

41:52 >> Yeah, I see you. I see you. I've been there making shoes in the mines wherever you're at. >> Yeah. or uh you know posting EOBS in a dental office in Philadelphia. Uh I'm 25. >> Wow. So you were you're working in your mom's dental office. You were forced to do some of this work or you saw Debbie was doing this work. And so that was there. Yep. >> Now you grow up.

42:09 You start thinking what can AI do? What was the actual reason you you like had the idea? Give take us to the epiphany of the idea. >> Yeah. And it's it's going to get it's going to get dark, but then it's going to get positive. I promise. Okay. So I'm I'm forewarning. Um my my mom, she's okay now, but she had gotten sick. And so I was I I had graduated Stanford.

42:25 I was working at an AI startup. I was like over the moon. I was like, "Yo, I'm going to dominate the world." And then she gets sick. And so I I go home and I start running our practice. And you know, I go from like a hundred to suddenly being the most overqualified dental office manager in America. And that was when I realized how much money we were losing.

42:41 Like I think when I grew up, I kind of knew that it was a problem. >> But I was just I was just doing it. I was just ready to just like finish and go like go home. But then I saw it and I got to chance to see and feel what my mom has felt for 15 years of her life and I was like >> this is just unacceptable. >> It doesn't have to be this way. >> It doesn't have to.

42:58 And like you know I've been sp I've spent so much time you know I'm more of a like a NLP nerd like I I always loved natural language processing and I'd seen the field like develop and so I was probably one of the first hundred people to have access to GPT3 because I was really into words and so when I got into computer science I got access to >> this like there's like this vin diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity with like the circumstances in which you grew up and that you had the resources that

43:24 you ding ding ding ding. >> Yeah. It's like okay perfect. So, you know who else was working in their parents' dental office and then went on to do big things? >> Zuck. >> Mark Zuckerberg. >> Yeah. >> Did he really know this story? Yeah. His first project was like he set up like the IT system in his dad's office and like souped it up and like made it sick and he's like, "Okay, I guess I've kind of outgrown this.

43:43 I should go do something else." >> Oh, that's awesome. >> And Michael Dell, underrated. His dad was an orthodontist, I believe. Doc. Uh, yeah, Dr. Dell. >> Children of dentists. >> Yeah, it's a mafia. How big did it get? >> Um, >> there's tons of us. >> Uh, how big? I mean, I think we're going to serve every dental practice in America. >> Like, are you wanting to be like a a CEO of a publicly traded company?

44:02 >> Yeah, why not? I mean, I think like to me, like the opportunity here is today what we do is we help dentists bring money into their business, but soon we can store their money, we can help them spend their money, we can lend money to them. I don't know if you guys have, you know, these PE roll-ups. They're buying up all these like Taco Bells, dental practices, and you know, the truth is 70% of the market are still independent guys like my mom, and they feel like they have no other choice but to sell it to the big

44:24 guy. I want to give them the third door, which is like, hey, if I handle this back office BS for you, would you want to still be a dentist and own your practice? And they're like, heck yeah. That's the multi-billion dollar business here. >> So, let's go over the business model. So, you said you save dentists, you bring in ex additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed.

44:44 You take a percentage of that. So, you said that basically is let's just take $1,000. For every thou or $100, every $100 that comes in, what do you guys take? Anywhere from two and a half to three and a half%. >> Oh, that's it. Okay. >> Yeah. >> But how does that math work? So you said 10 million of AR, but you're saving bringing in a million a month from dentist.

45:02 That's 12 million a year. So how does that work? >> No. No. We're adding as Daydream as a business, we're adding 1 million in AR net new. And so we're processing. >> But is it a is it ARR? >> Yeah, ARR. So uh when we submit claims and we post the payments, which is like entering it in, we take a fee. So it's not just money we recover. It's every dollar going into the business we are helping them process.

45:22 >> Gotcha. You're like Stripe on the back side. >> Exactly. All their billing and then the better the part where you guys are even better. You add that sort of 10% 15% to their practice overall. >> How big is your team? >> Uh so we have about 60 people but we have people on the billing team the service delivery team that's about 50 people. I think we only have about 10 people in the office.

45:40 >> So you're close to profitability. >> Yeah. Um and I I think that's like you know we did raise venture capital and I think like I think it's nice to kind of have like we could like go for profitability or we could keep on growing. I think like we just want to do more. Like I I I know that there are like 150,000 dentists where the job's not done. Job's not even like we can't even be talking about the job.

45:57 We We haven't even You know what I mean? >> Job's not done. Is job even in the room with us right now? >> No, I can't even see him. >> So things are going great. You seem happy. What is bad? >> This is a safe space. You can tell us and the millions of people that are going to listen to this what's going bad. >> Everything it feels like. You know what I mean?

46:16 Like I I don't know. I mean like >> where where are the bottlenecks right now? I think again like hiring engineers again like this is like our job is to take this service business and make it software you know software experience there's so few people talented to do this like really weird work and you know we're competing against like open AI anthropic and I'm like so yeah it's that part is tough >> you have to pay crazy amounts of salary >> no I think we get really people on the mission like you can get a job you can

46:43 have a career you can have a mission and like when I get people on the mission job's done you know what I mean like everything I don't know what you mean when you like their mission is like AGI cure cancer and you're like back office dental work. How is your mission winning out against the mission of these labs? There's no way. >> I think it's like yeah very fairy fair push back.

47:01 I think it's like to me the dentists are the underdog the small business the people who are like you know we're dealing with people in broken arrow Oklahoma. Yeah great you can like make AI SDRs. You can sell more AI slop to people in SF or you could help the guy who you grew up to going for 15 years. Awesome. And like that's the mission. And like yes, we we sell to dentists, right?

47:18 But like to me this the story is so much more powerful which is like my mom knows who every one of her patients is going to prom with. She knows when their kids are sick. She knows she knows she knows more about them than she does about me, right? And like that's the experience of healthcare and like that's I think the mission that people get excited about is like hey like I kind of miss being able to go to my guy the person I've been going for 15 years.

47:38 You have a great pitch. He's got a he's got a he's got a really good ability. >> Yeah, you're great. Let's ask you a different question. What's not figured out yet in the business? So, there's, you know, a business you only you only need to figure out the sort of 6 ines in front of you as you're going. And there's might be some things you don't know yet, but it's kind of a little bit further away.

47:53 You can keep punting it until you get there. What's unfigured out? You know, like I think we're growing fast, but we could be growing faster. We we do creative go to market things, but we could always be doing more of them. >> So, how do I get more of that 150,000 dentists kind of get the benefits that we >> offer? We're going after like, you know, these guys aren't on LinkedIn.

48:09 You've never met a dentist. >> Well, how do they find you now? >> Um, honestly, word of mouth. We're in these like Facebook groups where there's like tens of thousands of dentists >> and I just like I just comment for 10 hours a week just like following these Facebook groups. Um, we go to conferences. >> How do you make it an absolute no-brainer for a dentist to to take you on?

48:26 So, today, how do you take all the friction out? The same way you're taking the friction out of the billing, how do you take the friction out of the onboarding? for example, could you go to these dentists and just say, "Hey, Daydream, we will take over this, you know, this cost center of your business." But basically, if you just said like, "We don't charge you a penny until we've made you $100,000.

48:42 The first 100,000 we make you, we take nothing and after that we take two and a half% or something something like that where it's like, oh, these guys are basically saying they're going to make me an extra $100,000." >> And for you onboarding that person, your actual COGS is not $100,000. Your COGS to onboard a dentist is probably very, very small. And so you will just use that as your acquis like create an offer so good they would be stupid to turn down.

49:07 >> Yeah. Yeah. It's so hard because some most people are like afraid of change management. Like that's what like dentists are like yo like maybe I'm losing a little bit of money but like h >> right. But yeah, I mean that's oftentimes the the biggest thing that comes to mind is like how do we >> well my dad is in this not this space but he owns um an old school small business and if you were going to like tell him like like I made this post about him saying like my dad makes you know this much money a year selling

49:29 onions and his CRM is this notebook and filing cabinet and he all these people were like use a CRM. He's like what the is that? No, no, I'm done. Uh and so I do understand like that pitch can be hard. Why don't you own a Facebook group that teaches dentist owners how to uh uh make more money? >> So, we've tried putting in offers for those other Facebook groups and then we have started our own.

49:49 It only has about 250 members, but we have someone offshore right now just adding them. >> Yeah. >> Um and then like friending them for my account, but like yeah, like we need to like hypercharge it maybe. >> Can you buy one of those groups? >> We've we've tried. >> Sometimes they'll block you though if you do that. So, you have to be careful because you might just in making the offer you might get blocked.

50:04 What about the private equity guys? So, the private equity rollups that are happening, they already own huge amounts. So in theory, you sell one, you get many, but maybe they built this in-house or they are really sensitive to margin and they don't want to do this. What have you found so far? >> I thought that they would be like a much more straightforward like very like logical, but many of them just like bought a bunch of practices in 2021 and like they're just trying to stay afloat and like not like be able to

50:27 service their debt these days to be honest. And I I I think like >> yeah, we we've tried one or two like 50 location groups, but those have been the hardest deployments. Those have been the most like demanding things. And and again, maybe this is like something that's bad. We we were just like, what if we just like stayed in the thing that like we're very good at for now and like >> and like we'll I hope we can work there, but like >> do you have a community manager?

50:49 >> You're looking at him. >> Yeah. Which is smart that you do it. I would go super hard on like owning and running a Facebook group and creating like you know, we u we're buddies with this guy named Tommy Melo who has a garage door business. >> A1 garage. >> Yeah. And he does uh I think maybe close to a billion in revenue. And now his job is he's trying to buy more service businesses to implement his playbook.

51:09 And so he actually created like a uh services mastermind conference type of thing. And he was like the ticket prices will pay for my my team, but the real thing was like if I can find a handful that I can buy, I would love that. And if I was you, I 100% would have a community manager, probably an ex dentist or something like that. And I would create like a community on Facebook groups where it would be all the best practices where people share their tips and tricks on how they're making their lives easier, their

51:36 businesses better. >> How many dentists are you onboarding every month? >> About 50. Like 30 to 50. >> 30 to 50. And so really the question is like how do you get that number to be 150? >> Yeah. >> So you start by saying, well, what's working today? Where do you get to 50 right now? >> Yeah. So we do like direct mail campaigns like this where we send out like like a f like what what's a direct mail you're not going to throw away?

51:55 It's like one with your face on it, right? Oh yeah. Uh yeah, that's them. And so we have all these different options. Yeah. Sorry. >> This is a great idea. Who made this? What vendor? >> Like you're looking at >> you did me and the team again. We have like some of the smartest go to market people I I've ever worked with. >> This is so good. >> Um and then we do we've done this one.

52:10 >> Have you studied like the old school direct marketers? >> Not really. No, we've mostly doing vibes. >> Yeah. You're doing direct response marketing. You should study the guys who basically cracked a single sales letter sent through the post. >> Do you know what he's talking about? >> That would make like millions of dollars. >> No. Sorry. >> Okay.

52:27 So, listen. Before the internet was the internet, it was copywriters, direct marketers. So, basically, let's say I made vacuums and I would go to Joe or Joe Sugarman or David Olgov and I would say, "Hey guys, I need um a bunch of people to buy this vacuum." So, they would uh pay us a database uh to give them the addresses of a million housewives and they would come up, the copyriter would come up with this amazing like angle to to capture the housewives attention and they would write out this letter.

52:55 They would type it out, they'd put it in an envelope, and they would send it to them. It says, "Here's all the reasons why you should buy this. Here's a little coupon. Tear it off. Write your checking information and put a check in there or whatever. Mail it back to me. That's a very arduous process." So, they got so freaking good at copywriting that every single word served a purpose.

53:11 And it was beautiful and it was incredibly effective. And then the internet came along and the best copywriters tended to be people who are a little bit on the fringes of like they would sell like how to pick up chicks or how to like these programs that were a little bit like fringy, but they were the best. And these guys still exist. And you could get someone to help you with uh this opening letter and they could sell the out of these people.

53:36 And it's all via direct response long form copyrightiting. >> You've sold me on this. Yeah. It's like this is like a 12th grade English class. Well done. I mean, what I love is that you're just doing the entrepreneurial thing, right? You're just stumbling around trying to figure things out as you go, but you're going to be able to like there are people who are masters at this, either the old school people or the people who have studied them and do it today.

53:56 Find them and be like, "Hey, I need you to acquire, you know, an here's a budget and I need you to acquire dentists at this this cost and see what they can do." >> By the way, this like one of the frameworks for copyrightiting, one of the most simple one is ADA, attention, interest, desire, action. This is a you are that's the best attention grabbing headline you could possibly have.

54:14 So you're kind of doing it inadvertently but you 100% can improve this >> and you have the free book a demo and get a free get free AirPods. So that's another thing they would do is the cracker jack you know gift gift in the >> they would do a thing where they would you know st they would paperclipip a dollar bill onto the mail onto a letter and just by putting a like when you see a dollar you're just what what is this and it just had a higher response rate.

54:36 figured out like all the different things that you can do to do this to make every every step of this work. So, this was one of the tactics. Is this bringing in everybody right now or? >> No. No. I mean, there's not a single dental podcast in America that I've not gone on to. Um, just every single dental podcast, every dental conference >> sponsor or you just went on as a guest?

54:52 >> Um, sometimes sponsors, sometimes I should go on as a guest. Again, the story is like very, you know, something that I think a lot of dentists can get behind. And then, uh, conferences like I think on any given like month, I'll probably be at like three or four something. They probably think that you're like a freak. They're like, "Who's this young charismatic guy at a dentist?"

55:08 Like, "We've never seen this." Like, you know, you probably stick out, right? >> Yeah. Like for better or for worse. >> In a good way. Okay. Listen, Joe Sugarman is the author. It's called the the ade guide to copyrightiting. Read that and then read on advertising by David Oglev. Read those this week and your mind will change. >> Okay. And then I like the idea of the users conference too.

55:25 The A1 guy does this where they bring people together. >> Yeah. just like we're going to teach everyone. Everyone's going to we're just going to be the meeting place for people to aggregate and share ideas on how they make their business better and hopefully and and just so you guys know we have this but regardless if you use our software or not this is like a great thing.

55:40 >> Another question who influences the influencer so who who do a lot of dentists listen to like trust today? Obviously you've been on a couple of podcasts. I don't know if podcasting is the main thing. Are there people on Instagram? Like I found that for every space like uh we invested in this company that was uh doing stuff with auto shops and it turns out there was just like a guy who was like the auto body guy and basically he had a 50 store chain and so everybody who owned one wanted to own 50 so therefore they

56:02 liked listen and respected this guy and he was able to drive like crazy volume. I think this guy was making like 20 million a year himself as like an auto mechanic influencer which is just shows kind of like there's always influence in every niche. You got to find it and figure out how to get them on board with what you're doing. Yeah, we've done like one or two, but like there are so many dental influencers because my whole feed is just dental influencers now.

56:27 >> Yeah, I'm friends with one of them. One, you know, Aean, his wife is a dental >> Oh, really? >> Yeah, I know a few of them. >> Okay. Yeah, I guess we just got our first influencers and our first guests at DreamCon, the the users conference. >> You got the copywriter uh bug in you. >> What what's your killer like your kill shot with your marketing?

56:43 Meaning, you know, the average practice is leaving X dollars on the table. Daydream captures 90% of that or whatever. What's what's your version of that? Like a oneliner that immediately makes me realize how much money I'm missing out on if I'm not doing not using you guys. >> We can improve your collections by 5%. And decrease your median time to payment to 10 days.

57:03 That feels clunkooky when I say it. >> Yeah. So, what does that mean in terms of like I'm a dentist. I don't think about my median time collection. I think about like how much money I made as if the average practice makes let's just use a million dollars a year >> and you're saying you increase their claims by 5%. So you'd be adding $50,000 to their practice straight to the bottom line.

57:23 >> Yeah. >> $50,000 more in your pocket and all your money in 10 days. >> We fight the insurance companies and on average we add $50,000 take-home pay for every single dentist that uses us, right? Or like on average or whatever whatever the claim is. You want to massage that like try to get down to like a oneliner that's just like a marketing kill shot.

57:42 It's like if this is true, okay, I'm interested, right? And it's just got to be that juicy for them that if this is true. We used to have one that I like it was like, oh, like your Ferrari is waiting or something like that cuz that's how much you can buy. Like for some of these practices, we recover enough money to like pay for a car, right? >> We just got to like Sorry, I like this is like very helpful.

58:01 I should be writing this stuff down. >> Well, it'll be recorded and you can rewatch it, dude. Thank you so much. You're the man. Thank you guys for coming on. >> Great to meet you. >> All right, that's the end of part one of Shoot Your Shot. We got three more founders coming up on the next episode. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, on Spotify.

58:17 We looked at the data. I think 80 90% of you guys are not subscribed who watch the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode 2. >> And do me a favor, whether you're a listener, then you're going to go to Spotify, or if you're a watcher, go to YouTube. Put in the comments the city that you want us to go to next. Right now, we're doing this in San Francisco. We've already done New York. we'll go somewhere next to it. So, let us know in the comments right