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

0:00 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 a hundred million dollar businesses. They get fifteen minutes and in it they start by telling us the one big number. Give us the pitch. And uh and shoot the shot. 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, uh 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. Alright, let's do it.

0:34 I feel like I can rule the world of nowhere be what I want to I'm putting my all in it like my day's off. On the road less travel, never look at it. Sam, what's up? We are Doing a new episode, do format. We're calling it

0:48 Shoot your shot and then we basically we Go from city to city. We invite founders from those cities to come and shoot the shot to come pitch us. We got business owners that are doing million dollars a year to hundred million dollar businesses that you're gonna see

1:02 in this batch of founders. What should we expect? Well the best part about this podcast, what the reason why people listen, the reason why even we even do it is we talk to like unique people. They tell us stuff that we don't normally see. And it's gonna range from like people who are like way established and like killing it all the way down to people who are just getting started. And

1:19 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, 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. Let's get the first founder in here. Who do we got? What's up, dude? There he comes. What's up, dog?

1:44 Alright, have a seat. So you got fifteen minutes, but take a take a time here. Excited to be here. What's your name? Ragov, okay. And your company is Pasha? That's right. Tasha. Okay.

1:56 Where are you from? I live in San Francisco. Okay. To be precise. Uh grew up in India and have been here for five years now. How old are you? I'm thirty two. Is this your first company? It is my first company. Um I did run a project before this where we were trying to build microwaven turbines, but everything that I've learnt

2:15 about Pasha has been at Pasha. Everything I've learned about building a business has been Primarily at part. Um shameless numbers guys. Okay. And so we ask everybody give us a a big, juicy, impressive or interesting number. Doesn't be that big, but interesting number that would hook us. Go ahead. So they're amongst

2:36 The one percent of robotics companies you have ever met. That are actually shipping a real product. In real homes. One thousand real world deployments. Okay. So one you're in the one percent of non bullshitt robotics companies. You've shipped a thousand robots. What do your robots do?

2:54 We are putting a private chef in every home. And we're doing that by building Cooking robots for homes. We thought that if Wamo and Tesla and Zooks 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.

3:12 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 sixty minutes of your time in the kitchen, that doesn't cost twenty five dollars. Prayer serving? Um and and where with alternatives. 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?

3:41 We are backed by Excel. How much did you raise? Uh eight million. Eight million dollars. And how long ago did you start it? We started the company Eight years ago.

3:50 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 five years ago. Is this the thing, by the way? This is the robot? Yeah, that's the robot. And it's uh it's could you give us like well 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. Fouche. I haven't eaten it. This is perfect.

4:15 And You know you need to look good, by the way can the I don't know if the camera should have already seen this. This looks amazing. So d way, wait. Did it come out like this? Uh we cooked using fresh ingredients, fresh olives, fresh garlic, fresh milk, fresh butter. Fresh pasta?

4:31 And if we put some fresh Parmesan cheese on top. And it was on Cook and Pusha. That machine did all this. Did all of this. How much does that cost? Fifteen hundred dollars, which is less than a month of takeout. For who

4:46 Uh for a family of four. Okay. Okay. I mean give a score here. I mean nine or ten. Yeah. This is very good. Yeah. As I said, thousand customers already use us. Um

4:57 Three times a week. Which is more than the oven. Because your numbers people, are M six retention Pete's DoorDash, HaloFresh, any other food service out there? Last month alone we clogged two million dollars in bookings. Uh we did that again.

5:17 Yeah. So walk me through this. So I the viewer uh the the listener won't know this, but the viewer will see what you did. But tell us. Can you can you grab a couple of the things in the back? It looks like basically there's ingredient

5:32 Containers. So here is a pan. It's a It's a pan that's dishwasher safe. There's a detachable

5:40 Studter. Detachable spatula. There are containers where you put ingredients. There is a drawer which is super cool, which has spices. There's space for oil and water.

5:52 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 Brosha?

6:09 Now we have our customers training pusher. We possibly have the world's largest culinary vision data set. For a cooking food. And we are taking the Tesla approach. Vemu spent five hundred thousand hours of supervised driving and twenty billion dollars in venture capital to crack

6:24 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 Axis out. Waiting wait, 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.

6:45 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. Back to the show. If a customer's that good at cooking, why do they even buy this? And how do they

7:04 How do they train your thing? Uh customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal. This can only cook one part meals for now. Oh yeah. One part meals. No, one pot. Have you seen the trend of one pot meals? No, I don't know. If you go to like Reddit or TikTok. There's like a whole like

7:21 It's a category of cooking called a one pot meal where you're just gonna put a bunch of stuff. So you're not gonna make cheeseburgers. So it's not going to do a stake. It's not going to flip burgers. It's not going to bake a cake.

7:34 Um Anything that requires uh spreading out, like pancakes. It's something it won't do. What are the what's the most popular two or three things that people cook with this? So the data changes as we change our Customer base, but

7:49 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 So not to be a hater, but basically is the robot just taking up the easiest part of cooking, which is just stirring? Um

8:11 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. Okay. It's taking away you monitoring the food because you know, an eight year old needs to know what charred onions look like.

8:28 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 z uh in the kitchen from sixty minutes to zero. It cuts down your time in the kitchen from sixty minutes to

8:42 Ten minutes. So the what's uh 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.

8:57 It's gonna be in everybody's home. Th that means it's this big m like get w get me excited about the big idea here. So ten 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 to be driving because they want to.

9:15 Uh, cooking is going the exact same way. Dodash 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. Wha okay, so how much revenue are you doing what's your like uh run rate right now?

9:46 So we did two million dollars in bookings last month. Fifteen hundred dollars. Why are you saying booking 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 wait list that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can. 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.

10:12 Uh all of that is just scaling with demand. This is awesome. What's the cur so the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things? Uh it's manufacturing, it's also operations. So um whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days Uh you always need to hand hold people. Something or the other can go wrong. Um and you need a service infrastructure

10:32 for people to have support if something goes wrong. Right. It's the same button like that Vemo has. Where'd you get the two 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 watch. Yeah. They gave us the cash already. There are

10:50 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. Second, Porsche is built for the camera. So a random nobody would get push a home.

11:08 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 followers. Guess what X is? I don't know. She went from eleven thousand to four fifty thousand. Followers.

11:25 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 Maddox Sean? Yeah. Yeah, I I've seen it'cause 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 t like throws it out. And it's huge though. Like I live in New York City.

11:48 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.

11:58 You can't use it'cause you don't have counter space, you mean? Or what do we have to do? 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.

12:13 Uh 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. 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 one cubic inches or smaller.

12:33 Okay, so you can put chicken in there cubed and then it cooked it. Yeah. 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.

12:50 Uh they're extremely proud in that. 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. Um you might have heard of this thing. It's called an atachaki. 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?

13:11 Uh. You guys have Belt. Create communities. Uh you with M FM and you with Hampton.

13:18 We feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for Pusha. How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow push? Let me uh say something really quick. I think people use the word community and audience differently. Okay.

13:32 So for example M FM is an audience. Meaning if we quit doing this the audience gonna go away. Sean owns a uh 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.

13:48 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. A 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 India? Uh yeah, maybe it's ninja, but like

14:09 Basically the air fryer in the last like five years had like a big renaissance. And actually it's a cream, too. Yeah, Cr 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.

14:23 the user can kind of figure out like create new things that rather than like the app only lets you do fourteen items, pick one of the fourteen. And so if you have some element of U G user generated cooking in this case. user generated recipes that they could share and they could kind of get props for from one another. I think that's the the key. And you have to find a you know a hub for them. Is it is it on Reddit, is it on Discord, is it on Facebook, is it on Instagram? How are you gonna get people to share this stuff? But I would study what the airfire

14:51 community did. I would study what the Ninja Creamy did. And I was trying to replicate as much as I could of The factors of that success. Yeah, like for example, I used to love this app called Aptive, if it's a fitness app. And they had a Facebook group.

15:03 And I was very active on the Facebook group. And we same with Peloton, I'm sure they have a Facebook group where you like talk about your favorite instructors or like has anyone tried this type of work out? Another one is Ladders, that's a another fitness app that they have 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 a 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, I might choose Facebook. If it was nerds, I would choose Reddit, whatever.

15:29 Facebook groups though I do think are are still the best. 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, this is for people who really value their time. Maybe it's a busy professional, the b 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.

15:51 We're gonna t 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 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 brutal like

16:09 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 wanna have a beachhead. You wanna have like an initial Persona that you're

16:23 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 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.

16:41 Because that'll change a lot of your marketing, a lot of your strategy. But my gut tells me You're not gonna have a customer acquisition problem. Right. I don't think that's ever gonna be the problem. A marketing team is like a total of one person. I don't think that's gonna be the issue. Your constraint is not gonna be getting people to buy. They gotta be does the thing actually work and can I get it in their house. Yeah, but it'll change your product strategy. Like if your product strategy is about

17:02 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 of the robot, different constraints on the manufacturing side. Versus if you were trying to make this this beautiful

17:21 Parmesan topped. impressive thing when friends come over, yeah, I cook this for the for the family. I was never able to do that before. Could it maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture. Right. I think community is important primarily because Um It's not growth necessarily the it drives, but but Over time, I think your cak

17:40 You know, your K factor just jumps up, people start talking about you. Second, engagement increases, and so retention increases. And if retention increases, So let's pause them. Of the best community builders in the world, how many of them use phrases like K factor, engagement, stickiness, and cack? Not this early, at least. None of them do you get magic first. Communities from s soul. You know what I mean? And so you gotta like have two different parts of your brain. There's Metric Sky.

18:07 Start a founder, r go raise money from Excel. And there's feelings guy. And there's feelings guy. There's soul guy. We're gonna do this because it's awesome. We're gonna do this because it's the right thing to do. We're gonna do this. And they eventually can but right now it's like Cool shit that eventually gets popular s 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 fifteen hundred people who are using this, get them to log into Facebook groups every single week to talk about to c either yeah, c 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 gonna be like, How do I get people to like like us more? You know what I mean? We just make up dumb stuff. Like we used to call this show the this episode the Denim Dungeon, just'cause I wore denim. Like do that silly stuff. It doesn't math, who cares? But you just do the stuff where you create lore. You can't create catchphrases. 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

19:10 Whether you or if you have someone else at your company ca 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 gotta wrap up. Yeah. Uh Ragav, thanks for coming. Yeah. Posha?

19:24 Mosha dot com. You got the URL. Good job. Amazing. Thank you so much for the time. All right, we appreciate you. God bless. All right, CD, thank you. Hey, 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.

19:45 Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a 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.

20:03 All right. We have another one. Who we got? Bring'em in. Yeah. What's good, boys.

20:14 Don't spend too much time in the uh the locker room. That's the problem. So I know you. So this is Nick. Let's do it. I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of'em. I was like I needed a midday break of Eating midday squares, but I don't do you know Nick well or not? I never. I don't I've just met him a second ago. Yeah, I've 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's you and your wife. I got two other partners, yeah. I got my shout out to my wife and my brother in law. So we didn't we did this.

20:49 We gotta 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 forty million dollars worth of That equates to about

21:03 Let's just call it roughly sixty bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in three hundred sixty five days a year for you to hit that number. So wow. Forty million in z in the last twelve months. Yeah. Yeah. Sixty of these bad boys every minute. Every every minute of the year. Every minute of the year, three years five 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 she Not paid, right? Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social and uh I think that's the th that's the beauty of like when you're when you're hustling and I and

21:35 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. 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 K Kardashians. I mean we were sending your product for years and years and years. No. In the influence the influencer strategy. So cool. Who who influences the influencers and then you actually influencing them is a lot easier. Find who the chefs are of celebrities. Yeah. There's a lot of chefs on on Instagram and TikTok that you can see who they're cooking for. Athletes and and other and you just DM them say, Hey, can I send you something? Yeah. What's special about the product. Well what is the product? Okay. So we started out as chocolate bars.

22:19 And uh crazy thing happened, you know, since we started this business in two thousand eighteen, chocolate went parabolic the cost of cocoa. And that means we lost like twenty seven percent of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it and sh chocolate. We were paying four thousand dollars a kilo for cocoa butter went up to thirty two thousand just to give you a cocoa crisis. Cocoa crisis. What what is there a cocoa 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.

22:53 Then There won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports. And then corruption kicks in though. And corruption usually takes about two years. I I I got stories. I went into the Ecuadorian forest. So like if we 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 Union economics kind of like I'm not comparing this to Tesla in any sense, but Build the product.

23:16 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. And you raise money or is this whole thing boot trapped? No, we raised money uh quasi equity and our government. So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in uh agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to get So you've raised twenty two million dollars. Yeah.

23:42 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. I can say this stuff. They got a cease and desist from someone being like you can't use the color orange. Or you know like stuff like orange. It was like a ridiculous. taking the disadvantage, they said, How can we turn this into an advantage?

24:12 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 disc track. They made a rap diss track. They made a music video of him and his wife. And it's like ridiculous, but it kinda works. 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. Who named it midday squares because it's perfect. Thank you, man. Um I I I think it was me and my wife brainstorming riffing. I shout out to Five Hour Energy. So I I listened to the podcast in Five 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. So like everybody's crowded into breakfast.

25:02 And nobody's really focused on the afternoon part. For adults. For adults. Yeah, specifically. So was this a form factor that already existed that people were already doing these like And a square. The dual layer square, yeah. What's the bottom?

25:17 A peanut butter base. Okay, peanut butter base, you got jelly on top. This is a P and J one. Um or this that's PPJ. This is also PPJ's strawberry. But you also have chocolate, right? And so that's the business. Chocolate's where it started. Where did the initial idea come from? You're just sitting around and why this? So my my cousin's um my cousin was super high up and smokers and he was just always

25:39 uh pushing me to get into this game, you know, and we would always rift 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 corn oil at the time, and refrigerated was growing. So like the refrigerated category of grocery stores, fastest growing uh section of a grocery store. So that's why you keep it seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. Like fresh pet at the pet section.

26:08 They're starting to put fridges in the category started to have a refrigerated Item. Item we were talking about this with vitamins, right? Like those liquid vitamins that you put in the fridge versus in the cabin. Oh wait, so go back. Your cousins at schmuck smuckers. Smuckers. Schmuck Orelio, by the way, that's my cousin. And he's like, You gotta 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 know there's chocolate's on the rise. There's not a ch 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. Yeah, a hundred percent. Um So basically it took about sixty grand.

26:48 Me and my partners basically put this together. We put in sixty 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 gotta 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. It was the first one on Facebook ads just'cause hey, we don't have a lot of capital, so we're not gonna be able to reserve this much money to burn there.

27:18 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.

27:30 I'm a contradict I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives for early business. At least early on. Yes. 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 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 gotta have a pre we have no followings.

27:52 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 Mm.

28:06 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 start getting interested, like what what like what the hell are you guys doing? You know, especially All of us? Okay, so it was like y uh pretty young guys are like

28:24 We don't know what the hell they were doing, but you're saying your friends, your own natural social network. Was like, what's going on? What why is Nick suddenly in this like lab wearing a hairnet, you know, testing different pictures. Yeah, because we all my wife was in fashion, my brother in law was like a gym buff going around colleges Uh and I had typically been in software my whole career prior to that. So so to see us with like hair nets Doing stuff was like 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 two thousand and eighteen.

28:59 We sold our product on our website for fifty cents. And there's two reasons, okay? So w w you could buy one square for fifty 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. So you had to get your credit card out, actually do a transaction.

29:17 And we hand delivered everything for five months. So it was all in Montreal. He's an animal. 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 You any chance you're gonna be in San Francisco on Monday? I'm like, Yeah, of course. He's like, Here it is. I'm like, Okay, perfect. I'm flying to London. It's the only way, man. You gotta 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.

29:52 I think I took a 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 Polaroids of ourselves. Okay. No meathead shit. Yeah. Complete like their customers. And we would take a Polaroid picture and we would show up to their house and and this always happened. Okay. So we would show up to the house and be like Wait.

30:19 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 oh. That's 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 wanna say a million four Then year two, let's call it three million. Then we did a big jump to like seven. Uh fourteen

30:48 Twenty Thirty. Forty. And now this year we're on track for about sixty. And you guys got into Costco. We j 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 gonna have to extend the time limit on Nick, just so you know.

31:14 So Costco They had seen the content brings in the action, okay? Brings in the action. So we get this meeting with Costco. And then brings in the action, baby. Gotta 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 to eye. We knew

31:39 That our second most searched term online was midday squares of Costco. Like we knew we were gonna hit this out of the park. D they didn't feel as confident. Confident in that aspect and we knew that the right price point was nineteen ninety nine for our twelve pack. Yeah. There was A disagreement that lasted about two and a half years.

31:56 Okay. Going back and forth. Gentlemen's disagreement. Yeah, like like just we just couldn't see either on the price and for the record. I'm not gonna state 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 two and a half years. Two and a half years. So during that won't you guys just kinda 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 road show.

32:29 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. And you gotta be in Costco for fourteen days. You mean like sample. Like sample it. 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 they're worthy of it and there's no guarantee you're gonna get Costco.

32:54 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. I'm like If we do the road show.

33:09 And we break the road show record. Like The most sales ever in fourteen days. Will you give us nineteen ninety nine? And we shook hands that day.

33:18 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 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 plan to say that no? No, it was impulsive. We were we're always looks at you during the meeting. It was like my wife looked at me and we but she was She I g I don't know. I guess you have nothing to lose at some point. Maybe marry to wild stallion. This is how it rolls how it goes sometimes I run away. So how much do I sell? Uh a hundred forty th uh

33:52 We can't put hundred sixty thousand in fourteen days. And how the records. Did you barely break it or did you No, we smashed the record. The closest record, I think, prior to that was subject. Yeah. And they made us a little bit. No, we rallied, man. We rallied. We rallied. Like We rallied. Okay, so first off Most founders don't spend fourteen like like we were doing full days, don't bad. 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. I've never heard of this. It sounds like we have some degeneracy to explore together. Yeah, I can tell by your technical. It was like the craziest rally of life and it wasn't fourteen days. We uh spent thirty six days straight in a Costco. So 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 you what was the showmanship that worked. Yeah.

34:49 Two things that I think are really takeaway. 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,'cause everyone hates rejection. You gotta be in those for twelve hours in a day. Like they open at eight and you're closing at nine, you know?

35:07 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're living in the cottage. Me, my wife, the 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. So I would just stand in front and yell out keywords.

35:30 Gluten free! Dive friendly! And y and and No, I swear on my life. So you're doing keywords as people are keywords. They bought like a like a white girl dictionary. 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 warehouse at one point, like we were so w 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 come and like you just start But the keywords are really key. So the keywords why are the keywords key? One Mm.

36:05 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 it. Discovered it while you were there, changed the packaging afterwards. Yes. What did you discover? Uh gluten free was a massive thing. Real chocolates huge at Costco. So I I I so I think the second thing, Sean, 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 ten years from now, what do you think's gonna happen? Are you gonna sell the company, gonna run it forever? What are you gonna do? All I know is that my dream was to make the NHL and I didn't make the NHL. And so no it didn't So now you're gonna buy a team. No, no, no. Uh only point five percent of companies make it past a hundred million dollars of revenue.

36:46 I 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 can help you with? One, having you here today. I I can't tell you how much this means to me. Uh you've been listening for a while. Dude, come on, you know we've met each other for like five years. Well, we met in club LTVS. So I used to host this thing for PCOM owners. He was in there. You probably were only doing like five, ten million of revenue. Five million at the time, but he had amazing energy.

37:10 I was rooting for you since then. So it's I'm not surprised that you're now at you know forty, fifty, sixty million. What would you like to see as a flavor? I mean, uh 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, PP and J. What's a flavor you 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.

37:35 This sounds weird'cause you'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?

37:52 where the story really pops because you know just I I like I didn't actually realize that the reason your stuff Tastes better and is better for you. It's'cause 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 kinda like when I've heard that type of stuff so much. I just assume they're stu they're shoving something else in there that I don't know. Or com o olive. Oh, then they're using some other thing. Who knows? And so

38:19 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 the fridge one, though. This one's P and D. Is your chocolate still your popular skew? These are no I mean uh number one by far. I'm gonna keep going with this. It seems like Did 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 A bad choice. A bad choice. Funny thing for me, I'm making a r a shameful choice.

38:47 Guess I don't feel ashamed of so congrats. Well thank you. All right, we appreciate it. Thanks for having us, man. I appreciate it. Dude, great to see you. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. So 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. I'm just all in on Mercury.

39:15 Why uh 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. Uh, 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.

39:38 Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members FDIC. Alright, g guess number three. Can we get up, dude? What's up, man. Mm.

39:51 All right. Introduce yourself, your name. What you do? What's the name of the company? Okay. Sounds good. Uh My name is Shrey and I'm the CEO of Daydream and we are adding a million dollars a month helping dentists automate back office tasks. 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, This is so smart. I think I tried to invest or something. I was like, This is

40:15 You know, 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. That's great. That means my Twitter's working. Yes, it's working. Oh there you go. I got you. All right. So you kinda already started with the big number. You say let's say it against lower 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 of d 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? Yeah 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 reimbursed from the insurance company, the doctor has to 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 her money to these insurance companies.

41:01 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 Tron's insurance is gonna cover. We submit the claim, we appeal to 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 they do. So it's like AI like negotiating with the insurance companies. Yeah, exactly. So we have AI. I calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims, AI submitting the claim. Approve this. Why not? Exactly. 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, I'm like, yo, you're spending a money, we're spending a lot of money. What if you just give us the data and an API? But this

41:49 Healthcare industry is so backwards. that they don't want to. The incentive's 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. Can you write 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 nine hundred and twenty six days old, uh two and a half years. About. About. Did you know who started that was the ramp CEO? Do you know his shtick? His shtick is like how many hours old today we're two thousand two hundred and forty three days old. Sorry. Nine hundred and twenty six days old.

42:19 That was the second part. Yeah. So we've raised eleven and a half million dollars to date. Um, by the end of this year we'll finish north of ten million in revenue. 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. 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

42:45 You know. when you run a service 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. Who came up with this name? Uh I did. My mom's uh practice her name is or 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 to the unpaid child workers out there. I see it. I see it now. Yeah, or uh you know, posting EOBs in a dental office in Philadelphia.

43:22 Uh, I'm twenty five. 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. You start thinking, what can AI do? What was the actual reason you sh like had the idea. Like it takes us to the epiphany of the idea. Yeah. And it's it's gonna get it's gonna get dark, but then it's gonna get positive, I promise. Okay. So I'm I'm forewarning. Thank you. Um my my mom, she's okay now, but she had gotten sick. And so I was I I had graduated Stanford. I was working at an AI startup, I was like over the moon. I was like, yo, I'm gonna dominate the world And then she gets sick, and so I I go home and I start running our practice.

43:56 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. Like I think when I grew up I kinda 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

44:13 and feel what my mom has felt for. fifteen years of her life and I was like This is just unacceptable. Like 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 N L P nerd. Like I always loved natural language processing and I had seen the field like Develop and so I was probably one of the first hundred people to have access to GPT three because I was

44:33 really into words. And so when I got in computer science, I got access to Venom into words. There's just like there's like this Venn diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity. With like gr h the circumstances in which you grew up and that you had the resources that you know Okay, perfect. So You know who else was working in their parents' dental office and then went on to do big things? Zuck?

44:54 Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Did he really know the story? Yeah, 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. 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. Um there's tens of us. How big I mean, I think we're gonna 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

45:26 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 seventy percent of the market are still independent guys like my mom. And

45:44 They feel like they have no other choice but to sell it to the big guy. I wanna 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. Let's go over the business model. So you said you save

46:01 Dentists you bring in ex additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed. You take a percentage of that. Is it w let's just take a a a thousand dollars for every thousand or a hundred dollars, every hundred dollars that comes in. What do you guys take? Th anywhere from two and a half to three and a half percent. Oh that's it. Okay. Yeah.

46:18 But how does that math work? So you said ten million of ARR, but you're saving d bringing in a million a month from debt to us twelve million a year. So how does that work? No, no, we're adding as Daydream as a business, we're adding one million in AR net new. And so we are processing 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. Gotcha. So you're like stripe on the back. Exactly. We're like all the billing and then The better the part where you guys are even better, you add that sort of ten percent, fifteen percent to their practice overall. How big's your team? Uh so we have about sixty people, but we have people on the billing team, the service delivery team. That's about fifty people. I think we only have about ten people in the office. So you're close to profitability.

47:03 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 kinda 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

47:14 I know that there are like a hundred fifty thousand dentists. We're The job's not done. Job's not even like we can't even be talking about the job. 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. Things are going great. You seem happy. What is bad?

47:30 This is a safe space. You can Tell us in the millions of people that are gonna listen to this. What's going bad? Everything it feels like. You know what I mean? 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

47:43 Our job is to take this service business and make it software market, 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, it's that part is

47:59 Do you have to pay crazy amounts of salary? No. Really people on the mission. Like you can get a job, you can have a career, you can have a mission. And like when I get people on the mission Jobs done, you know what I mean? Like everything else. I don't know what you mean. When you like their mission is like AGI cure cancer, and you're like

48:16 Back off is down to work. How is your mission winning out against the mission of these labs? There's no way. Yeah. Very fair. Very fair pushback. 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 era, Oklahoma. Yeah, great. You can like make AI SDRs m you can sell more AI slot to people in SF, or you could help the guy who you grew up to going for fifteen years. Awesome. And like that's the mission and like Yes, we we sell to dentists, right? But like to me this

48:42 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 w 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 kinda miss being able to go to the my guy, the person I've been going for fifteen years. Do 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?

49:08 So there's you know, a business you only f 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 kinda a little bit further away. You can keep punting it for 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 hundred fifty thousand dentist to kind of get the benefits of the offer? We're going after like Yeah. These guys aren't on LinkedIn. You've never met a dentist. So 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. Right.

49:38 And I just like I just comment for ten hours a week, just like Following Facebook groups. Um, we go to conferences. How do you make it an absolute no-brainer for a dentist to to take you on? 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? So for example, could you go to these dentists and just say, hey Daydream? We will take over this, you know, this costing of your business. But basically if you just said like we don't charge you a penny until we've made you

50:04 A hundred thousand dollars. The first hundred thousand we make you we take nothing and after that we take two and a half percent or something something like that where it's like, Oh, these guys are basically saying they're gonna make me an extra hundred thousand dollars. And for you onboarding that person, your actual cogs is not a hundred thousand dollars.

50:20 your cogs to onboard a dentist is probably very, very small. And so you will just use that as your acquisition like create an offer so good they would Be stupid to turn down. Yeah. Yeah, it's so hard'cause 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

50:37 But yeah, I mean that's oftentimes the the biggest thing that comes to mind is like how do we my well my dad is in this not this space, but he owns a um An old school small business. And if you were gonna like tell him like Like I made this post about him saying, like my dad makes, you know, this much money a year selling onions and his CRM is this notebook and filing cabinet. And he all these people were like, Use the CRM. He's like What the f is that? No.

50:57 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. It only has about two hundred fifty members, but we have someone offshore right now just adding them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um and then like friending them for my account. But like

51:18 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 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 twenty twenty one.

51:47 And like they're just trying to stay a Load and like not like be able to service their debt these days, to be honest. And I I I think like Yeah, we we've tried one or two, like fifty 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've we were just like, What if we just like stayed in the thing that like we're very good at for now and like

52:06 Yeah. And like we'll I hope we can work there, but like Do you have a community manager? You're looking for Yeah, which is smart that you do it. I would go super hard on c like owning and running a Facebook group and creating like You know, we um we're buddies with this guy named Tommy Mello, who has a garage door business. Oh, A1 garage. Yeah, and does uh I 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 uh services mastermind conference type of thing. And he was like

52:38 The ticket prices will pay for my s 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 one hundred percent 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 businesses better. How how many dentists are you onboarding every month? About fifty, like thirty to fifty. Thirty fifty. And so really the question is like how do you get that number to be one fifty? Yeah. So you start by saying, Well, what's working today?

53:09 Where do you get the fifty by now? Yeah, so we do like direct mail campaigns like this where we send out like Like a phone like what what's a direct mail you're not gonna throw away is like one with your face on it, right? Uh yeah, that's them. And so we have all these different options. This is a great idea. Who made this? What vendor? Like me me and the team again, we have like

53:28 Some of the smartest go to market people I I I've ever worked with. Um then we do we've done this one. Not really. No, we've just mostly doing at vibes. You're doing 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

53:54 Let's say I made vacuums. And I would go to Joe Sug or uh Joe Sugarman or David Ogilvy and I would say, Hey guys, I need um a bunch of people to buy this vacuum. So they would f uh pay us a database. uh to give them The addresses of a million housewives.

54:10 And they would come up, the copywriter would come up with this amazing like angle to to capture the housewife's 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, car 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 it was beautiful. And it was incredibly 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.

54:51 And you could get someone to help you with Uh this opening letter. And they could sell the shit out of these people. And it's all via direct response, long form copyrighting. You've sold me on this. Yeah. It's like this is like a twelfth grade English class. 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 gonna be able to like

55:14 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, and I 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 t frameworks for copywriting, one of the most simple one is Ada, attention, interest, desire, action. This is A.

55:34 You are that's the best attention grabbing headline you could possibly have. So you're kind of doing it. But you one hundred percent can improve this. When you have the f book a demo and get a free a get free AirPod. So that's another thing they would do is the Cracker Jack, you know, gift gift in the business. Yeah. They would do a thing where they would, you know, staple uh they would paper clip a dollar bill. Onto the mail onto a letter. And just by putting a like when you see a dollar, you're just what it 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

56:02 Every step of this work. So this is one of the tactics. Is this bringing in everybody right now, or No. I mean there's not a single dental podcast in America that I've not gone on to. Okay. Um just every single dental podcast, every dental conference. Sponsor or you just went on as a game. 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. Sometimes they probably think that you're like a freak. They're like, Who's this young charismatic guy at a dent? Like we've never seen this. Like you know, you probably stick out, right? Yeah. For better or for worse. In a good way. Yeah. Okay, listen, Joe Sugarman is the author. It's called The Cop uh The Ad Week Guide to Copywriting. Read that. And then read on Advertising by David Ogilvy. Read those this week and your mind will change.

56:45 Okay. And then I like the idea of the users conference too. the A one guy does this where they bring people together. Yeah, it's just like we're gonna teach everyone everyone's gonna we're we're just gonna be the meeting place for people to aggregate and share ideas on how to 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. 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.

57:10 Are there people on Instagram? Like I found that for every space. Like uh we invest 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 Autobody guy. And basically he had a fifty store chain. And so everybody who owned one wanted to own fifty, so therefore they liked listening and respected this guy.

57:28 And he was able to drive like crazy volume. I think this guy was making like twenty 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 gotta find it and figure out. How to get them on board with what you're doing.

57:42 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. You know, uh Amen, his wife is a dental. Oh really? Yeah, I know a few of them. Okay. Yeah, I I guess we just got our first influencers and our first guests at DreamCon, the the users conference. You got the copyrighted uh bug in you what's your killer like You were kill shot with your marketing meaning. Yeah, the average practice is leaving X dollars on the table.

58:10 Daydream captures ninety percent of that or whatever. What's what's your version of that? Like a one liner 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 collective by five percent. And decrease your median time to payment to ten days. That feels clunk clunky 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 recollection. 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

58:38 claims by five percent. So you'd be adding fifty thousand dollars. to their practice. Straight to the bottom line. Yeah. Fifty thousand dollars more in your pocket. And all your money in ten days. We fight the insurance companies.

58:50 And on average. We add fifty thousand dollars. Take home pay. For every single dentist that uses us. Right, or like on average, or whatever whatever the claim is. Yeah. You wanna massage that, like try to get down to like A one liner?

59:03 That's just like a a marketing kill shot. It's like If this is true Okay, I'm interested. Right. And it's just gotta be that juicy for them that if this is true.

59:12 We used to have one that I like it was like, Oh, like your Ferrari's waiting or something like that'cause 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 gotta like sorry, I've I like this is like very helpful. I should be writing this stuff down. It'll be recorded and you can rewatch it. Dude, thank you so much. You're the man. Yeah, sure. You guys are 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. We looked at the data. I think eighty, ninety percent of you guys are not subscribed who watch the episodes. What are you doing?

59:45 Subscribe so you can watch episode two. And do me a favor. Whether you're a listener, then you're gonna 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. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I'm putting my law in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back

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