3 strangers showed us how they made $8M, $10M, & $40M/year

Pitching the founders

0:00All 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 $100 million businesses. They get 15 minutes, and in it, they start by telling us the one big number. Give us the pitch and shoot the shot. They get to ask us 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.

0:33All right. Let's do it.

0:38All right. Sam, what's up? We are doing a new episode, new format. We're calling it Shoot Your Shot. Basically, we go from city to city. We invite founders from those cities to come and shoot their shot, to come pitch us. We got business owners that are doing $1 million a year to $100 million businesses that you're going to see in this batch of founders. What should we expect? Well, the best part about this podcast, the reason why people listen, the reason why we

1:08even do it is we talk to unique people. They tell us stuff that we don't normally see. And it's going to range from people who are way established and killing it all the way down to people who are just getting started. 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 listen to this podcast, it's founders, entrepreneurs, business owners. It's like an audition. It's like American Idol, but for business, I guess.

1:32All right. Let's do this. So shoot your shot. Let's get the first founder in here. Who do we got?

Meeting Raghav and Pasha

1:37What's up, dude? All right. Here he comes. What's up?

1:42What's up, dog? All right. Have a seat. So you got 15 minutes, but take your time here. Excited to be here. What's your name? Raghav. Raghav. Raghav. 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. Grew up in India and have been here for five years now. How old are you? I'm 32. Is this your first company? It is my first company. I did run a project before this where we were trying to build micro

2:12wind turbines, but everything that I've learned about Pasha has been at Pasha. Everything I've learned about building a business has been primarily at Pasha. So we have one rule, which is we are shameless numbers guys. Okay. And so we ask everybody, give us a big, juicy, impressive, or interesting number. It 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.

2:47Okay. So you're in the 1% of non-bullshitting robotics companies. You've shipped 1,000 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 Waymo and Tesla and Zoox 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? Takeout is expensive. Eating at, I mean, cooking at home takes forever. However, there's no way for you to eat food that is fresh, that's delicious, that doesn't

3:20take 60 minutes of your time in the kitchen, that doesn't cost $25 per serving, and we're the alternative. Dude, my diet right now is man kibble. You know what man kibble is? I know. It's three pounds of ground beef with rice that will last me for three or four days in soy sauce. So I'm on board with this. Did you raise funding? We are backed by Accel. How much did you raise? $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 parents' ground floor.

3:54This was back in India. It was still a project. We formalized the company about five years ago. Is this the thing, by the way? This is the robot? Yeah, that's the robot. And it's cooking. Can you give us like, 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 to- This looks good, by the way. I don't know if the camera should have already seen this. This looks amazing. So wait, wait. Did it come out like this? We cooked using fresh ingredients, fresh olives, fresh garlic, fresh milk, fresh butter,

4:29fresh pasta, and we put some fresh Parmesan cheese on top, and it was all cooked on pusha. That machine did all of this. How much does that cost? $1,500, which is less than a month of takeout.

4:44For who? For a family of four. Okay. Okay, and so what all- So this is, I mean, give it a score here. That's great. I mean, nine or ten. Yeah, this is very good. Yeah. As I said, thousand customers already use us three times a week, which is more than the oven. Because you're numbers, people, our M6 retention beats DoorDash. HelloFresh, any other food service out there. Last month alone, we clocked $2 million in bookings. We did that again this month. Sam's already finished this. That was great. It's supposed to just be a taste.

5:15Yeah.

5:17Okay. So walk me through this. So the viewer, the listener won't know this, but the viewer will see what you did. But tell us, because it looks just like a bowl of- 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 pan that's dishwasher safe. There's a detachable stirrer, detachable spatula. There are containers where you put ingredients. There is a drawer, which is super

5:48cool, which has spices. There's 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 Porsche. We possibly have the world's largest culinary vision data set for cooking food. And we are taking the Tesla approach. Waymo spent 500,000 hours of supervised driving and

6:22$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 robotaxes out.

Cooking with the robot

6:35Wait, so how does that work? Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. 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 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. Back to the show. If a customer is that good at cooking, why do they even buy this? And how do they train your thing?

7:06So customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal. This can only cook one-pot meals for now. Oh, yeah. One-pot meals. No, one-pot. Have you ever seen this trend of one-pot meals? No, I don't know. If you go to like Reddit or TikTok, 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 together. Yeah, I mean, 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. Anything that requires spreading out, like pancakes, is something it won't do.

7:41What's the most popular two or three things that people cook with this? So the data changes as we change our customer base, 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 a 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 out the easiest part of cooking, which is just stirring?

8:11The 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 eight-year-old needs to know what charred onions look like, what browned onions look like. So all the intelligence and all the babysitting is being taken away. It does not cut down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to zero. It cuts down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to 10 minutes.

8:43So 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. It's going to be in everybody's home. That means it's this big. Get me excited about the big idea here. So 10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'd 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

9:13to be driving because they want to. Cooking is going the exact same way. DoorDash 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. That's pretty cool. Okay. So how much revenue are you doing? What's your like run rate right now?

9:46So we did $2 million in bookings last month. And it's $1,500? Why are you saying bookings? Just because you don't have the devices yet? So it's pre-sale? So we have about a thousand units shipped on the field and a long pre-order waitlist that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can. So 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, all of that is just scaling with demand. This is awesome. So the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things?

10:17It's manufacturing. It's also operations. So whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days, you always need to handhold people. Something or the other can go wrong. And you need a service infrastructure for people to have support if something goes wrong. It's the same bottleneck that Waymo has. Where'd you get the $2 million in bookings? Is that just viral demos on social media, basically? Did you do anything to get customers? Or it's just people like the novelty people want to start? And did they give you the cash already?

10:48Yeah. They gave us the cash already. There are 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. 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 six weeks, she got X number of

11:18followers. 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 Porsche content and she started shooting Porsche content. Have you seen the Matic? Yes. Have you seen the Matic, Sean? Yeah. Yeah. I've seen it because of this exact reason. I own it. 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. I, this sounds awesome. My wife

11:50complains 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 because you don't have counter space you mean or whatever? Counter space. Okay. Yeah. So you're absolutely right. 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 miniaturized. That will fit in Manhattan apartments, but the version after that will actually replace the range in your home and cook four dishes at a time. So I got a question.

12:23This 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 one cubic inches or smaller. Okay. So you can put chicken in there cubed and then it cooks it. Yeah. Hey, what do your parents think? They're extremely proud that I was able to break out of the family business, which had nothing to do with tech. And I used my education well to actually make a big impact in the world. They're extremely proud and happy. They're supportive. They like it. Yeah. That's badass. What was your family business?

12:55My dad runs a food grain business. So they grind wheat. You might have heard of this thing. It's called an atachakki. 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. What do you need help with? You guys have built great communities. You with MFM and you with Hampton. We feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for Posha. How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow Posha? Let me say something really quick. I think people

13:29use the word community and audience differently. 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 brand that has a community. It has 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. 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. Good. The community is the chairs point at each other. So for example, to your question, what's that air

14:04fryer brand that went crazy? Like just like the- Ninja? Yeah, maybe it's Ninja, but like basically the air fryer in the last like five years had like a big renaissance. And actually- Or the Creamy did too. 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, user-generated cooking in this

14:35case, user-generated recipes that they could share and they could kind of get props for from one another, I think that's the key. And you have to find a hub for them. 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. Yeah. Like for example, I used to love this app called Aptiv. It was a fitness app and they had a Facebook group and I was very active on the Facebook group. And same with Peloton. I'm sure

15:06they 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 had this like community. 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 and what age they are, I might choose Facebook. If it was nerds, I would choose Reddit, whatever. Facebook groups. So I do think are still the best. I think the other question is, what's the bigger benefit you're attaching yourself to? So are people

15:37buying this fundamentally for time savings? So then you would say, well, this is for people who really value their time. Maybe it's a busy professional, the working mom, et cetera, et cetera. And you need to create metrics and success stories and attract that type of person, go to those influencers who are going to spout that kind of religion. Or is the religion about foodies? People who love food, but they've been limited by skill. I would love to cook risotto. I would love to eat risotto, but I don't know how to cook risotto. And that skill gap is getting bridged by this thing. And it lets me indulge my foodiness. And it's not about the time savings. It's not about

16:08brutal, 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 beachhead. 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 to scratch that your product is 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 is it? That's something I would kind of ask myself because that'll change a lot

16:42of your marketing, a lot of your strategy. But my gut tells me you're not going to have a customer acquisition problem. Right. I don't think that's ever going to be the problem. A 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. It's going to be, does this thing actually work and kind of get it in their house? Yeah, but it'll change your product strategy. Like if your product strategy is about utility, man kibble, like he wants health and he wants convenience. Yeah. 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

17:15of 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 family. I was never able to do that before. Maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture. Right. I think community is important primarily because 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

17:47increases. And if retention increases. So let's pause on. Of the best community builders in the world, how many of them use phrases like K factor, engagement, stickiness, and CAC? Not this early, at least. None of them do. You get magic first. Community is 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, startup 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. We're going to do this. And they eventually can, but right now it's like cool shit that eventually gets

18:20popular. 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 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 going to be like, how do we get people to like us more? You know what I mean? We just make up dumb stuff. Like we used to call this show there, this episode, the denim

18:51dungeon, just because I wore denim. Like do that silly stuff. It doesn't math. Who cares? But you just do this stuff where you create lore. 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, constantly. 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.

19:21Raghav, thanks for coming. Yeah. Posha. Posha.com. You got the URL. Good job. Amazing. Thank you so much for the time. All right. We appreciate you. God bless. All right. See you, dude. Thank you.

19:35Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Meeting Nick and Midday Squares

20:02All right. We have another one. Who we got? Bring them in.

20:07Yo. Yo. What's going on? What's going on, boys? Yeah, I brought you guys. What's good, boys? You sound like a hockey player.

20:14All right. We got- Well, I spent too much time in the locker room. That's the problem. So I know you. So this is Nick. What's doing? And I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of him. I was like, I needed a midday break of eating midday squares. But do you know Nick well or not? I never. I don't. I've just met him a second ago. I just lurk on X. Yes. Well, I have these in my office at Hampton because my co-founder's obsessed with them and I started eating them. They are awesome. I appreciate that. So you're Nick. I appreciate that. Midday Squares is your company. Sure is. That you and your wife do.

20:45I got two other partners. Yeah. I got a shout out to my wife and my brother-in-law. So we did this as- Oh, keep it all in the family. We got to talk about his wife. She's amazing. She's the beast. Okay. So before we start, we want you to start with the one big number. We basically sold $40 million worth of $2.49 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. Wow. $40 million this year. In the last 12 months. Yeah. Yeah.

21:1560 of these bad boys every minute, every minute of the year. Every minute of the year, 365 days a year. Including, if I'm not wrong, wasn't Kim Kardashian spotted with these in her bag? Is that true? Yeah, yeah. Not paid, right? Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social. And I think that's the beauty of when you're hustling and we make it a point to be in with all the chefs. And so we're not looking for the direct connection to celebrities. That's what everybody's doing. So we've made it a point over the last decade to become friends

21:46with chefs. And that's- So Chef K, shout out Chef K, who cooks for the Kardashians. I mean, we were sending our product for years and years and years. No. Influence the influencer strategy. Oh, cool. Who influences the influencers? And then you- Actually influencing them is a lot easier. But you find who the chefs are of celebrities? Yeah. There's a lot of chefs on Instagram and TikTok that you can see who they're cooking for. For athletes and others. And you just DM them and 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 a crazy thing happened. Since we started

22:22this business in 2018, 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. It went up to 32,000 just to give you perspective. Do you know there's like a cocoa- Crisis. Cocoa crisis? It's down now. Why was there the cocoa crisis? So it's the cycle that happens all the time, which is super interesting. It starts off with like a real mismatch in terms of weather will come in, disease will spread. Then there

22:54won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports. And then corruption kicks in though. And corruption usually takes about two years. 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 unit economics, kind of like I'm not comparing this to Tesla in any sense, but build the product, no gross margin. Nobody wanted to manufacture this thing. Then we went to a big kitchen and then we built a plant and we had finally reached profitability, everybody. And then we get smashed by this cocoa thing.

23:26Had you raised money or is this whole thing bootstrapped? No, no. We raised money through a quasi equity in our government. So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to give us- How much? In aggregate, have you raised? 22 million in total. So you've raised 22 million dollars. They like built their 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. So they got sued by whatever, Hershey, who I forget who it was. Hershey's- I can't confirm nor deny. I can say this stuff. They got a cease and desist from someone being like, you can't use

23:59the color orange or, 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. Recy's was like, hey, get off orange. 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. We 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. And they tell the story and they tell the story about their plant and 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

24:32y'all's strategy. But also you guys have a lot of like natural charisma and storytelling ability. Who named it Midday Squares? Because it's perfect. Thank you, man. I think it was me and my wife brainstorming, riffing. Shout out to Five Hour Energy. So I listened to the podcast in Five Hour Energy and 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. So like everybody's crowded into breakfast and nobody's really focused on the

25:04afternoon part. For adults. For adults. Yeah, specifically. And so was this a form factor that already existed that people were already doing these like kind of square, I don't even know what this is. It's half. It's a dual layer square. Yeah. What's the bottom? Peanut butter base. Okay. Peanut butter base. You got jelly on top. This is a PB&J one. Or this, that's PBJ. This is also PBJ strawberry, but you also have chocolate, right? And so you. Chocolate is 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, my cousin was super high up at Smucker's and he was just always pushing

25:40me to get into this gang, you know, and we would always riff back and forth. 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 kernel oil at the time and refrigerated was growing. So like the refrigerated category at grocery stores, fastest growing, uh, section of a grocery store. So that's why I keep it seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. Like fresh pet at the pet section. They're starting to put fridges in. So every category started to have a refrigerated item item. And we were talking about this

26:14with vitamins, right? Like those liquid vitamins that you put in the fridge versus in the cabin. Oh, wait, so go back. Your cousin's at Smucker's. Yeah. Shout out to Aurelio, 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 chocolates on the rise. There's not a refrigerated chocolate. Yep. You see a gap. You see an opportunity. Big time. 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, a hundred. Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, so basically it took about 60 grand. Me and my

26:49partners 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. That was constraint. Number one. And number two, it all had to be in our city. So we couldn't like just spray and pray. 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 seriously. That's dope. It was the first one on Facebook ads just because, 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. Or was it, I get the Montreal one, which is like, look, let's try to get people

27:22that 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 earned the right to go to other cities. I'm, I'm a contradict, I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives for early businesses. At least early on. Yes. So what'd you do to get Montreal on board? The content, man. It was, so this was the, and this is where the brilliance of 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. And so for the whole summer, we just started posting when you're making food products,

Scaling into Costco

27:57you 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. 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 they were doing, but you're saying your friends, your own natural social network was like, was like, what's going on? What, why is Nick suddenly in this like

28:31lab wearing a hairnet, you know, testing different pictures. Cause 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 hairnets doing stuff was like, okay. So you use content, you use story to get, to get it going. 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 for 50 cents. And there's two reasons.

29:04Okay. So you can buy one square for 50 cents. And the idea was it was all a content play. So we didn't want to actually make money, but we didn't want freebie people. So you had to get your credit card out actually do a transaction and we hand delivered everything for five 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 to, are you, you, any chance you're going to be in San

29:34Francisco? I'm like, yeah, of course. He's like, he's like, here it is. I'm like, okay, perfect. I'm flying in 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. 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

30:07Polaroids of ourselves. Okay. No, just meathead shit. Yeah. Complete like our customer. And we would take a Polaroid picture and we would show up to their house and this always happened. 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. 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, uh, year one, I want to say a million four,

30:40then year two, let's call it 3 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. We just like, we, we, we launched Costco Canada national. Costco U.S. 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.

31:11No, cause this is a crazy story. Whoever's next, go take a walk for a minute. 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. Let's go. Grab that action. So we, so we, we basically go to the first Costco meeting and everyone about to say Costco, shout out Costco, like super respectful. Like we weren't seeing eye tie. We knew that our second most searched term online was midday squares at Costco. Like we knew we were

31:43going 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. Gentleman's disagreement. Yeah. Like, like just, we just couldn't see eye out in the price. And for the record, they wanted it to be what? I'm not going to stay at that price. Yeah. Cause, cause they're a great partner and they want to be lower. And we just held our ground, you know, because this is. So two and a half years.

32:13Two and a half. So during that, weren't you guys just kind of like, God, let's just go into Costco. 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 roadshow. And the roadshow is like, everything's on consignment. You have to show up. You only get paid for what you sell at Costco and you got to be in Costco for 14 days. You mean like giving out samples? Physically. Like 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

32:44product. Somebody standing there. There you go. 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. So I was really rattled. Again, we, we didn't see eye to eye. It is the third time. And like, we're talking almost three years at this point in time. And so 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 roadshow and we break the roadshow record, like the most sales ever in 14 days, will you give us

33:15$19.99? And we shook hands that day. 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 this when the Swiffer came out. 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? No, it was impulsive. We were. Your wife looks at you during the meeting. Yeah. It was like my wife looked at me and we, but she was, she, I don't know. I guess you have nothing to lose at some point. Baby married a wild stallion. This is how it rolls, how it goes. Sometimes I run away.

33:48So how much did you guys sell? Uh, 140, uh, 100, we can't put it. 160,000 in 14 days. And how much of that 160 was your, was that, did you barely break it or did you? No, we smashed the record. The closest record, I think prior to that was sub. I saw their content. Yeah. And they made a story out of it. 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. Don't wag your figure, Randy. Dude, when he's saying we rallied, that goes perfectly with backstage. We were talking

34:20about, uh, nicotine pouches and he's like, Oh, I used to put it in my toes before ice hockey practice. I've never heard of this. It sounds like we have some degeneracy to explore. Yeah. I can tell by your tattoos. So for Costco, 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 spent 36 days straight into Costco. We had to do multiple Costco. So what's the trick when you're in the Costco, like kind of getting flagging people down? What'd you, what was the showmanship that worked? Yeah. Two things that I think are really takeaway. Most founders don't do the roadshow themselves.

34:54They leave it to a third party. That's mistake. Number one, like that's because everyone hates rejection and there's time. Like you're, you got to be in those for 12 hours in a day. Like they open at eight and you're closing at nine, you know? So most founders brush it off and just, they pay the service and they don't go every day. You don't understand. It was bananas. Okay. So you were just grinding. You're living in the Costco. Me and my wife, our whole team was in there. First thing is founders do it themselves. What's the second thing? The second thing is basically, while you're there, you want to be really methodical. So

35:27I would just stand in front and yell out keywords. Gluten free, die by the friendly. And, and, and no, I swear on my life. So you're doing keywords as people are. Keywords. You 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 like, it's a dog and pony show coming. Like you just start,

35:59but 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 a Costco, it is not this box. It is a specific box that went into Costco. Oh, you discovered it while you were there, changed the packaging afterwards. What'd you discover? Gluten free was a massive thing. Real chocolates, huge at Costco. So I, so I think the second thing, is like, don't just mindlessly be there while you're doing the roadshow. Be intentional about what you're doing. Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. What, um, it's okay. So 10 years from now,

36:32what do you think is going to happen? Are you going to sell the company? Are you 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. So now you're going to buy a team. No, no, no. Uh, only 0.5% of companies make it past a hundred million dollars of revenue. That's been my goal since the beginning. And I don't know what will happen after, but that's the goal. You're the shit, man. What's, uh, what's one thing we could help you with?

One, having me here today, I can't tell you how much this means to me. Uh, Have you been listening for a while? Dude, come on. You know, we've met each other for five years. Well, we met in Club LTV. So I used to host this thing for PECOM owners. He was in there. You

37:05probably were only doing like five, 10 million in revenue at the time. I was five million bucks at the time. Five 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. Keep on 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 was a fully different direction, let's not even say no bread, PB and J 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 it. It sounds weird. Cause

37:36you're doing content. It sounds weird. Cause 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 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 because it's real chocolate that's refrigerated. That's why there's no preservatives. Yeah. So it's one thing to say, no preservatives. Like, it's kind of like when I've heard that

38:10type of stuff so much, I just assume they're shoving something else in there that I don't know. Oh, no pommel 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 no bread PB&J. Is your chocolate still your popular skew? These are, no, I mean, this is number one by far. Dude, I would keep going with this. It seems like, dude, you know who's making a huge comeback is Uncrustables. But yours is like fresh and healthier than like, dude, an Uncrustable, like if I buy that for my kids, I know I'm making a bad choice.

38:42A bad choice for them. They're dope. Funny thing for me, I'm making a shameful choice. This I don't feel ashamed of. Yeah. So congrats. Well, thank you. All right. We appreciate you doing this. Thanks for having us, man. I appreciate it. Dude. Great to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase.

39:13I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal. And learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC.

Meeting Shreyas and Daydream

39:45All right. Guest number three. What's up, dude? What's up, man?

39:51All right. Introduce yourself, your name, what you do. What's the name of the company? Okay. Sounds good. My name is Shreyas and I'm the CEO of Daydream. And we are adding a million dollars a month helping dentists automate back office tasks. 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 know, I do these like cold outreach to invest off of no information, just like a Twitter bio or like two tweets.

40:21And that's what I think I did with you. 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 say, 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. 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 doctors over. And so the reality is in order to get reimbursed from the insurance company, the doctor has

40:52to do a bunch of administrative work and doctors hate it and they do a bad job. They lose money. My mom is a dentist. She's losing 10 to 15% of our money to these insurance companies. So I was like, what if I could automate this process of dealing with the insurance company? So verifying 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. 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. And 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.

41:24AI submitting the claim. An AI voice being like, hey, you did not approve this. Why not? Exactly. Here's why you should. Well, the funny thing is on their side, they also have AI. And so normally it's a war of attrition. It's like, they're going to, 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? 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. The incentive is not there. Yeah, the incentive is not there.

41:54And so we have to find all these creative ways to beat the system and make sure that our doctors and our patients get paid. Can you read off a few facts? So how old's the company? How much funding? And like this year's revenue? Yeah. So we're about 926 days old, two and a half years. About. About. Dude, you know who started that was the Ramp CEO? Do you know his shtick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His shtick is... Like how many hours old? Today we're 2,243 days old. Sorry. 926 days old. What was the second part? Yeah. So we've raised $11.5 million to date. By the end of this year, we'll finish north of $10 million in revenue.

42:26Wow. 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. So we actually bought this company and then we've just been improving their margin. Hubbic was their book of business when you bought it? Less than a million. And so really the goal was, you know, when you run a service business, 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.

42:57Who came up with this name? I did. My mom's practice, her name is, or the practice's name is Dream Smile. And so 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, no. I like to the unpaid child workers out there. Yeah, I see you. I see you. I've been there. Making shoes in the mines, wherever you're at. Yeah. Or, you know, posting EOBs in a dental office in Philadelphia. I told you. 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.

43:29And so that was there. Yep. Now you grow up, you start thinking, what can AI do? What was the actual reason you like had the idea? Take us to the epiphany of the idea. Yeah. And 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 forewarning. Thank you. My mom, she's okay now, but she had gotten sick. And so I was, I graduated Stanford. 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 go home and I start running our practice. And, you know, I go from like a hundred to suddenly being the most overqualified dental

43:59office manager in America. And that was when I realized how much money we were losing. 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 a 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 be, and like, you know, I've been spent, I've spent so much time, you know, I'm more of a, like a NLP nerd. Like 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 GPT-3 because I was

44:32really into words. And so when I got into computer science, I got access to GPT-3. Dude, there's this like Venn diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity with like the circumstances in which you grew up and that you had the resources that you, 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? You know the story? Yeah. No. 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.

45:03And he's like, okay, I guess I've kind of outgrown this. I should go do something else. Oh, that's awesome. And Michael Dell, underrated. His dad was an orthodontist, I believe. Yeah. Dr. Dell. Children of dentists. Yeah. It's a mafia. How big is it going to get? There's tens of us.

45:17How big? I mean, I think we're going to serve every dental practice in America. Like, are you wanting to be like a CEO of a publicly traded company? 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 to the big guy. I want to give them the third door, which is like, hey, if I handle this back office BS

45:51for 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.

Automating dental insurance claims

45:57So, let's go over the business model. So, you said you save dentists. You bring in additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed. You take a percentage of that. So, you said that basically, let's just take $1,000 or $100. Every $100 that comes in, what do you guys take? Anywhere from two and a half to three and a half percent. Oh, that's it. Okay. Yeah. But how does that math work? So, you said 10 million of ARR, but you're saving, bringing in a million a month from dentists. 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 ARR net new.

46:30And so, we're processing. But is it ARR? Yeah, ARR. So, 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. Gotcha. So, you're like Stripe on the backside. Exactly. We're like helping. All their billing and then the part where you guys are even better, you add that sort of 10%, 15% to their practice overall. How big is your team? 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.

47:02So, you're close to profitability. Yeah. And 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 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. 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.

47:35What's going bad? Everything. It feels like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I mean like, 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 and anthropic. Yeah. And I'm like, so yeah, that part is tough. Do 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 have a career. You can have a mission.

48:06And like, when I get people on the mission, job's done. You know what I mean? Like, everything else. No, 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 fair. Very fair pushback. I think it's like, to me, the dentists are the underdogs. The small business. The people who are like, you know, we're dealing with people in broken era. 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.

48:37Yeah, that's awesome. And like, that's the mission. And like, yes, we sell to dentists, right? 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 to for 15 years. 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?

49:08So there's, you know, a business you only fit, you only need to figure out the sort of six inches 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. 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 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 dentist? Exactly. How do I get the benefits that we offer?

We're going after like, you know, these guys aren't on LinkedIn. You've never met a dentist on LinkedIn. Well, how do they find you now? Honestly, word of mouth. We're in these like Facebook groups where there's like tens of thousands of dentists. Right. And I just like, I just comment for 10 hours a week, just like following these Facebook

49:41groups. We go to conferences. How do you make it an absolute no-brainer for a dentist to take you on? So 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? So 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. The first $100,000 we make you, we take nothing. And after that, we take two and a half percent or something like that, where it's like, oh, these guys are basically saying, they're going to make me an extra $100,000.

50:15And 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 acquisition. So like create an offer so good, they would be stupid to turn down. Yeah. Yeah. It's so hard because some, most people are like afraid of change management. Like that's what, like dentists are like, yeah, like maybe I am losing a little bit of money, but like, eh. Right. But yeah, I mean, that's oftentimes the biggest thing that comes to mind is like, how do we like- Well, my dad is in this, not this space, but he owns an old school small business. And if you were going to like tell him, like, like I made this post about him saying like,

50:49my dad makes, you know, this much money a year selling onions and his CRM is this notebook and filing cabinet. And all these people were like, use the CRM. He's like, what the f*** is that? No, no, I'm done. 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 make more money? So we've tried putting in offers for those other Facebook groups. And then we have started our own. It only is about 250 members, but we have someone offshore right now just adding them and then like friending them for my account. But like, yeah, like we need to like hypercharge it maybe.

51:19Can you buy one of those groups? We've tried. Sometimes they'll block you though if you do that. So you have to be careful because you might just be making the offer. You might get blocked. What about the private equity guys? So the private equity roll-ups 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 service their

51:50debt these days, to be honest. And I think like, yeah, 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 again, maybe this is like something that's bad. We were just like, what if we just like stayed in the thing that like we're very good at for now? And like, well, I hope we can work there. Do you have a community manager? You're looking at them? 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 were buddies with this guy named Tommy Mello, who has a garage door business.

52:22Oh, A1 Garage. Yeah, it does. 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. And so he actually created like a services mastermind conference type of thing. And he was like, the ticket prices will pay for 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

52:54where people share their tips and tricks on how they're making their lives easier, the business is better. How many dentists are you onboarding every month? About 50, like 30 to 50. 30, 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 the 50 right now? Yeah. So we do like direct mail campaigns like this, where we send out like, like a photo, like what's a direct mail you're not going to throw away? It's like one with your face on it, right? Oh, that's them. Yeah, that's them. And so we have all these different options. This is a great idea. Who made this? What vendor? Like you're looking at me.

53:26You did this? Like me and the team. Again, we have like some of the smartest go-to-market people I've ever worked with. This is so good. And then we've done this one. Have you studied like the old school direct marketers? Not really. You know, we've been mostly doing it 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. 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 Sugarman or David Ogilvie and

54:00I would say, hey guys, I need a bunch of people to buy this vacuum. So they would pay us a database to give them the addresses of a million housewives and they would come up, the copywriter would come up with this amazing like angle to capture the housewives attention. And they would write out this letter. They would type it out. They 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 and

54:34it 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 this opening letter and they could sell the shit out of these people. And it's all via direct response, long form copywriting. You've sold me on this. Yeah. It's like, this is like a 12th grade English class.

55:06Yeah. 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've studied them and do it today, find them and be like, Hey, I need you to acquire, you know, 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 copywriting, 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.

55:37So you're kind of doing it inadvertently, but you 100% can improve this. And you have the, 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 box. Yeah. They would do a thing where they would, you know, stay, they would paperclip 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? Yeah. And it just had a higher response rate. They figured out like all the different things that you can do to do this, to make every, every step of this work. So this is one of the tactics. Is this bringing in everybody right now? No, no. I mean, there's not a single dental podcast in America that I've not gone on to.

56:10Okay. Just every single dental podcast, every dental conference. Sponsor or you just went on as a guest? Sometimes sponsor, 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 conferences, like I think on any given like month, I'll probably be at like three or four, sometimes like twice a week. Dude, they probably think that you're like a freak. They're like, who's this young charismatic guy at a dentist? 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. Yeah. In a good way. Okay. Listen, Joe Sugarman is the author. It's called The Ad Week Guide to Copywriting. Read that and then read On Advertising by David Ogilvie.

56:43Read those this week and your mind will change. Okay. And then I like the idea of the users conference too. The A1 guy does this where they bring people together. Yeah. It's just like, we're going to teach everyone. Everyone's good. 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 just so you guys know, we have this, but regardless of if you use our software or not, this is like a great thing. Another question. Who influences the influencers? So 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 we invest in this company that was doing stuff

57:16with 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 liked listening 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

57:47feed is just dental influencers now. Yeah. I'm friends with one of them. One of my, you know, Eamon, 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 users conference. You got the copywriter bug in you. What's your killer, like your kill shot with your marketing? Meaning, you know, the average practice is leaving X dollars on the table. Daydream captures 90% of that or whatever. What's your version of that? Like a one-liner that immediately makes me realize how much money I'm missing out on if

58:18I'm not doing, not using you guys. We can improve your collections by 5% and decrease your median time to payment to 10 days. That feels clunk-lucky 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 to collection. I think about like how much money I made. 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. Yeah. $50,000 more in your pocket and all your money in 10 days.

58:48We 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 the claim is. Yeah. You want to massage that. Like try to get down to like a one-liner that's just like a marketing kill shot. 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's waiting or something like that, because that's how much you can buy. Like for some of these practices, we recover enough money to like pay for a car.

59:20Right. We just got to like, sorry, this is like very helpful. 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. Yeah, sure. Thank you guys for coming on. Great to meet you. All right.

Wrap up and next city

59:33That'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. We looked at the data, I think 80, 90% of you guys are not subscribed who watched the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode two. 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 do it. So let us know in the comments right now. All right, let's take a quick break.

1:00:11I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.