# Warwick SMB Valuation Tool Project Kickoff *Recorded on Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 7:35 PM — Duration: 64:06* ## Summary ## Context & Objectives * Target the "Silver Tsunami" market where baby boomers are retiring and looking to sell cash-flowing small businesses. * Validate the demand for a low-friction, affordable SMB valuation tool (priced at ~$39) compared to expensive $5k+ professional appraisals. * Create a "lead magnet" to gather proprietary data on small businesses that can later be monetized through referrals to brokers, lenders, or exit planners. ## Deliverables * A 10–12 question quiz designed to provide a directional valuation based on industry, EBITDA, growth rate, and business size. * A polished, AI-augmented two-page valuation report including a "sale readiness" checklist and industry comparisons. * A high-converting landing page and a series of AI-generated video ads for Meta (Facebook/Instagram) to test market interest. ## Timeline & Milestones * **10-Day Goal:** Aiming to have the end-to-end MVP (quiz to paid report) functional and live within 10 days. * **Ad Experiment:** Run a 14-day marketing test with a ~$500 budget (approximately $50/day) to determine the cost per acquisition and lead quality. * **Review Session:** Reconvene after the initial ad run to analyze the "gray area" results and decide on further investment. ## Roles & Ownership * **David (Speaker 1):** Product lead and domain expert; responsible for defining the valuation inputs, industry multipliers, and report content. * **Jason & Nat (Speakers 0 & 7):** Technical execution; responsible for the database architecture, Replit hosting, payment integration, and cursor-based development. * **Gold (Speaker 6):** Creative lead; responsible for the AI-generated video ad harness and marketing content scripting. * **Anup & Sean (Speakers 2 & 5):** Marketing strategy and optimization; assisting with Meta ad trafficking and pixel tracking. ## Immediate Next Steps * David to provide a document outlining the specific quiz questions and the structured sections for the output report. * Jason and Nat to finalize the v0.1 prototype on Replit, ensuring it is connected to a domain and database for lead capture. * Gold to develop 10–20 variations of AI video hooks to test different messaging (e.g., "Get millions in your pocket" vs. "Sale readiness in 90 days"). * David to set up a poll for the final domain choice and initialize the Meta business page infrastructure. ## Transcript **Speaker 0** (0:00): Just **Speaker 0** (1:58): waiting. **Speaker 1** (3:32): Whoa, it's a party. **Speaker 0** (3:34): I guess so. What's up? **Speaker 1** (3:35): What's up, y'all? **Speaker 0** (3:37): All right, we got five people. Not bad. Not bad. **Speaker 2** (3:39): What's going on, guys? **Speaker 1** (3:40): Not much. Good to see you guys. **Speaker 0** (3:43): Yeah. All right, we can all get on a call. That's, that's a start. **Speaker 1** (3:47): All right, we got five. Mile's on one. Yeah. I, I... Listen, I appreciate you guys. Uh, I know I kind of took the reins on this. I was getting a little tired of inaction. **Speaker 0** (4:00): Yep. **Speaker 1** (4:00): Uh, I feel like our group is really, really good at, like, brainstorming and ideas and debating, but part of the issue is when you have twenty, thirty people- **Speaker 0** (4:08): Mm-hmm **Speaker 1** (4:08): -you know, everyone's like, "Okay, someone else will get something started." Uh, it's good we also have three notetakers. Um, so it's kind of hard to get the ball rolling. There is zero pressure from anyone in this group. I think one of the agenda items here is just sort of set, like, uh, what does go, no-go mean both for the group and for anyone individually. So, you know, we'll probably try to get something a little bit out the door, give everyone a little bit of time. You know, the commitment will never be that fast from any individual. We're talking maybe a couple hundred bucks and, **Speaker 1** (4:38): like, "Hey, can you give an hour a week?" type of thing. But that even of itself is, is something real, and, and hopefully we can, at a minimum, experiment with something really cool and, and maybe something good comes from it. **Speaker 0** (4:53): Cool. So David, I think my first question is, like, kind of this group here and what we're discussing going forward, is the plan just to be focused on the call, like, SMB valuation idea? Is that what everybody here imagines? **Speaker 1** (5:09): I believe so. **Speaker 0** (5:10): Okay. **Speaker 1** (5:11): And, and- **Speaker 0** (5:11): Good **Speaker 1** (5:12): ... this is the first thing any of us have done as part of this group- **Speaker 0** (5:15): Yep **Speaker 1** (5:15): ... and so I think we're gonna learn a ton. So I think the goal is to, like, explore this idea itself- **Speaker 0** (5:22): Yep **Speaker 1** (5:22): ... while also, like, learning, is this the right- **Speaker 0** (5:25): Yep **Speaker 1** (5:25): ... template? Should we have these sort of breakout pod sessions, threads, or should everything just be all- **Speaker 0** (5:32): Whatever it is, yeah **Speaker 1** (5:32): ... encumbered, you know, if everyone wants to throw in two thousand dollars? Which I think was Judes' original idea, and I saw a lot of kind of pushback or unwillingness to participate there. So I-- my gut tells me this will work better, let everyone opt into what they're interested in. **Speaker 0** (5:47): Yep. **Speaker 1** (5:47): But we'll see. **Speaker 0** (5:48): Yeah, I, I think that's good because if it just goes back to, like, a million different ideas with let's just say it's this five people, we won't do. At the same time, like, I'm still happy to, like, brainstorm other ideas inside of there.While still keeping like this pod and this thing just focused on like the SMB valuation idea, like that's what we're-- when we talk about it, that's what we're talking about. **Speaker 1** (6:13): That's the goal, and they're not mutually exclusive. You can join one, not all. **Speaker 0** (6:17): Okay. Um, I, I think, and then related to that, David, is could you just do a refresher of like why you see the value in it? I think all of us see it, but like you've had your journey. I know like bits and pieces of like the bakery and all that, but just like a couple of minutes of like your journey- **Speaker 1** (6:34): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (6:34): -and then like why this like just seems like a good idea based upon your domain expertise. **Speaker 1** (6:40): Sure. Yeah, I'll also try. I chatted about this for about forty-five minutes yesterday with Rishi, who has had a similar journey to me. **Speaker 0** (6:47): Okay. **Speaker 1** (6:47): He's done a lot in the e-rollups space. **Speaker 0** (6:50): Uh. **Speaker 1** (6:50): He's looking for companies to buy. And I think we, we aligned a lot on, on our experiences, our frustrations. **Speaker 0** (6:57): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (6:58): Um, this will likely be a bit of word salad because I don't have a concrete sort of- **Speaker 0** (7:04): That's fine. It's like I, I'm not looking for anybody to- **Speaker 1** (7:07): -proposal here. **Speaker 0** (7:07): Yeah. No pressure. **Speaker 1** (7:08): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (7:08): Polished. **Speaker 1** (7:09): I mean, you know, to, to go way back when, right, like, you know, I spent the last twelve years, uh, as a VC. **Speaker 0** (7:16): Yep. **Speaker 1** (7:17): And I spent probably more of those years than I care to admit getting very frustrated with the exact sort of industry that I was a part of in terms of sort of like the all or nothing approach, um, how they view businesses. And, and one of my constant takeaways is like how many really, really good businesses and opportunities are out there that are not meant for venture capital. I think we went down this path **Speaker 1** (7:47): of like everyone trying to venture capitalify every business. Like, hey, let's just give, you know, every decent business idea from CPG to veterinary companies to pure software like tens of millions of dollars and hope they can be multi-billion dollar. **Speaker 0** (8:03): And, and I'll just interject real quick. Nat and I, when we started what became Studio, it was originally a technology forward, you know, launch service for companies, kind of like a B2B maple, and we realized sixty days into we're like, "This is not venture backable. There's no real software behind this, and like we wanna do software and we wanna do a venture-backed company." So we pivoted and, you know, I, I, I completely hear you. **Speaker 1** (8:30): Yeah. And, and because we specifically at Alpaca, we dealt with a lot of like almost what I'd call like gray area businesses, not traditional SaaS companies. We did a lot of real estate technology, built world, did some vertically integrated service companies, you know, paints and valuation companies like Valery on the real estate side. So there was always constant discussion and debate around like whether this was venture backable or not. I would come across a lot of businesses, candidly, like one guy spun out of a like company called **Speaker 1** (9:01): Honey Homes, which like raised twenty million bucks. I'm like, I love this business from a value proposition. I hate this business from a this cannot scale quickly. This is not meant to be automated. **Speaker 0** (9:11): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (9:11): Uh, and so that was my lens. Separately, about eight months ago, and I'm not sure if everyone here is aware, but I wound up selling my stake in my own firm to my partner. **Speaker 0** (9:21): Okay. **Speaker 1** (9:22): And then part of that, um, signed a two-year agreement to stay on basically as like a board partner. And so one, I had a nice salary for two years. We took a check, but I also knew that was gonna run out. And so in thinking about what's next, I've started to basically retail on building out a portfolio, well building businesses, buying businesses of cash flowing businesses. Um, that's where one guy and I, you know, started working on that, and I've **Speaker 1** (9:52): probably looked at about... My personal funnel, yeah, I've probably looked at hundreds of businesses for sale to look at then, I don't know, let's call it thirty or forty what are called SIMs, which are basically like anything from a one-pager to a five-pager of like a sellable business to doing, I don't know, ten to twelve serious, you know, first calls with brokers and sellers, ultimately signed three LOIs to now close on one business. **Speaker 0** (10:22): Okay. **Speaker 1** (10:22): So I, I've seen this process from a variety of angles. **Speaker 0** (10:26): Mm-hmm. **Speaker 1** (10:26): As part of that, I tied both my hats together, and I got pretty deep intelligence on a company called SMB.co, which is basically trying to build a modern day biz buy sell, venture backable. **Speaker 0** (10:40): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (10:41): Uh, they-- One of the things that I loved is they were leading with this concept of like an immediate valuation, leading with the seller. Now, I don't think they were doing it the right way- **Speaker 0** (10:53): At SMB.co, and I'm assuming you've looked at Acquire. I've bought a thing off there before. Nat and I've spent... I think we sold something on there, right? We sold like a newsletter, right? Um, okay. **Speaker 1** (11:04): There you go. **Speaker 0** (11:04): Yeah. So like high level, I'm, I'm familiar-ish with the space, but nowhere near like you. **Speaker 1** (11:10): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (11:10): Yep. **Speaker 1** (11:11): And, and I, I think most of you are probably aware at least to some level of like just the trend of what we're seeing in the market right now based on demographics, right? And so on the seller side, right, you know, people call it the silver tsunami, which is based on age demographics, ten thousand baby boomers are retiring every single day. They have really good cash flowing businesses with no transition plans. Their kids don't want them. They purposely raised their kids to not have to be blue collar workers, **Speaker 1** (11:41): you know, production or anything, and wanted them to be doctors, lawyers, tech workers, ironically. Um, so they're good businesses, but also with tons of opportunity around technology, automation. I won't even say AI. We're talking like very- **Speaker 0** (11:57): Yeah **Speaker 1** (11:58): ... systematic stuff. Yeah. Systematizing, just, you know, spending time with the business, good business practices. Um, you also are now starting to seeAn increase in demand for these businesses, which means that flywheel is really starting. Now why is the demand there? One, the content and just the awareness that's going on in this industry. You know, people like Cody Sanchez, Walker Deibel, accelerators, and SBA loans. **Speaker 0** (12:24): Mosi's doing a lot of stuff, right? **Speaker 1** (12:27): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (12:27): Yeah. Okay. **Speaker 1** (12:28): You're also seeing like a lot more, what I'll just call people like us, who are thinking about, worried about, like transitions, right? Like, will my lawyer job be available in five years? Do I wanna work at a corporation, whether it's voluntary, involuntary, and people are just thinking about entrepreneurship in a way that what entrepreneurship has turned into, traditional venture-backed entrepreneurship is no longer either appealing or it's just not a viable path for them. **Speaker 0** (12:55): Yep. And that's a whole other discussion of how do venture-backed economics work when nothing is defensible, and a software that would be five million bucks- **Speaker 1** (13:04): Yes **Speaker 0** (13:04): ... you can do for five hundred bucks. Yeah. **Speaker 1** (13:06): Yes. **Speaker 0** (13:06): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (13:07): But, but I tell you all of that, one, to say that I've spent a lot of time thinking about different angles, so I won't go into all the ones that I don't think are the way to do it. Two, also the way of like, I think this market is in the midst of an explosion. **Speaker 0** (13:24): Yep. **Speaker 1** (13:24): And so there will be- **Speaker 3** (13:26): What market are you talking about? ETA specifically? **Speaker 1** (13:29): Um, it, it, that's a great question to ask, but I almost don't really have an answer. I, I'd say the market of the marketability, sellability services, the ecosystems of selling small businesses. Not, not just ETA. ETA is a small part of it. **Speaker 3** (13:47): Like you gotta think that people who are buying the companies like yourself, like you're buying into a company bakery. You're not familiar with how it works, but you know how to, how businesses are run and, and things like that. But you can use things, you can use help with software or automations or AI that can not only help you understand the business faster, but help you scale it quicker based on what's already working **Speaker 3** (14:17): and the gap between what's already there, what you know, and everything in between that you need to figure out. **Speaker 1** (14:24): Those two things are intricately tied, I agree. And just I think that then you're asking what is ETA? ETA is entrepreneurship traction for a reason. **Speaker 3** (14:32): Oh, okay. **Speaker 1** (14:33): Instead of starting a business, it's buying a good business and making it better. **Speaker 3** (14:37): Got it. Okay. **Speaker 1** (14:39): Right. **Speaker 3** (14:39): Which is like what I think that silver tsunami is really about, right? It's like people who are running these companies that are profitable, that can't hand them down to their lineage, and they need to figure something out, something to do, and there's a lot of people who want to create businesses. But at this point, startups, um, like, like you're talking about, like startups are starting to seem less fundable because they're almost like some service, uh, as a soft- software as a service is almost **Speaker 3** (15:09): becoming commoditized. So it's like normally people who are entrepreneurial and understand tech would wanna go into some kind of SaaS, and now I'm starting to look at it as people are getting nervous about what kind of, what the tech industry is gonna look like in five years. So like someone like yourself who's, who's intimately familiar with that kind of world, you're looking to go into more stable businesses that, that work, that run, that are already operational, so you don't have to go to zero to one. **Speaker 1** (15:38): Hundred percent. **Speaker 3** (15:39): So I think that that is exactly where that opportunity is. **Speaker 1** (15:42): So I, I think the opportunity is coming from both sides. Now, I actually don't think the business opportunity for me is actually on the buyer side. I think there's a fair amount of resources out there now to take care of that, and there's also a decent amount of resources like if you built a ten million dollar revenue, two million dollar EBITDA business and you're getting calls from private equity, like there's also a market for that. Where the opportunity to me is **Speaker 1** (16:12): the long tail. The 10X number of businesses that are a hundred thousand to maybe seven hundred and fifty thousand to a million of EBITDA cash flow, which could be a couple million of revenue, who are starting to hear like, "Wait, like someone would buy this business for millions of dollars? Like I could sell this business to a stranger?" Like is completely novel to some of these folks. But they're now starting to hear- **Speaker 3** (16:42): Yeah **Speaker 1** (16:42): ... pieces of it. **Speaker 3** (16:44): Right. **Speaker 0** (16:45): Yeah, and that, that's kind of- **Speaker 1** (16:47): That's how I look at the market is for, for me. **Speaker 0** (16:49): Yeah. And reading like the chats and just kind of like I follow all those people, the Cody Sanchez. Like I just find it fascinating from a distance, like not how saturated, but if you think of... let's just take one of these silver tsunami businesses. Five years ago, they were probably getting like zero calls, right? Are they now getting two calls, three calls, you know, from MBAs, former tech entrepreneurs, private equity rollout? Like how, how much volume are they starting to see? **Speaker 1** (17:19): It's all dependent on size. **Speaker 0** (17:20): Okay. **Speaker 1** (17:21): Um, if you are doing two million of EBITDA and more, you're flooded with calls. Flooded. If you're doing a million plus, it depends. You might not be getting any calls at all. You might be getting a couple. If you're doing under a million, you're probably really not getting many at all. **Speaker 0** (17:44): Okay. And how are people figuring out this business is two million EBITDA worth calling? Meaning like a business that's not on the market. **Speaker 1** (17:54): So inefficiently is the answer. There's, there's a bunch of data tools and softwares that are out there, and, and the, the reason... I mean, you say how are people figuring out? It's, this is almost all really being driven by private equity- **Speaker 0** (18:06): Oh, okay **Speaker 1** (18:08): Which is who pays for the software, who has ways for analyzing companies based on revenue growth, Google leads, right? Like- **Speaker 0** (18:14): Yeah. Ex- **Speaker 1** (18:17): If you're me by themselves looking for what we would call proprietary search, which is like just going out and cold calling and seeing who's... who maybe is willing to sell- **Speaker 0** (18:26): Yeah **Speaker 1** (18:27): ... typically the way that you would get there is if you have a thesis. So like, "Hey, my thesis is around HVAC, so I'm just gonna call every HVAC company in Florida." **Speaker 0** (18:36): Yep. Okay. And you eventually had a thesis around bakery and B2B and all that? **Speaker 1** (18:41): No. **Speaker 0** (18:41): Or no? No? Okay. **Speaker 1** (18:43): Definitely not. I did not have a thesis around bakery. I, I had a thesis around meaning- **Speaker 0** (18:48): Based on alternatives. **Speaker 1** (18:50): Well, my real filter was I wanted a business locally. So we're, we're already now into like South and Central Florida because I wanted to leverage my network. I wanted to be close to the business. I wanted a certain size, which for me was between half a million and a million and a half of cash flow, and ideally I wanted some level of recurring B2B revenue. It wasn't mandatory, but that's where I kept leaning. **Speaker 0** (19:14): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (19:15): And so I looked at, uh, a manufacturing facility in Tampa that produced kind of white label protein powders and supplements. I looked at a commercial plumbing company and ultimately honed in and am closing on a B2B bakery. **Speaker 0** (19:29): Okay. That makes sense. So a- as you're talking, something that I think is interesting to me as we think about, like, where could this thing go, and maybe I'm jumping ahead, feel free to reel me in, is like let's say this is successful, right? You have all these businesses, you know, just say ten thousand of them that are like, "Hey, you know what? Wow, I wanna find out how much my business is worth," and they pay fifty bucks, right? Or maybe it's free eventually. Like, that's actually very interesting proprietary data, right? Um, but I don't **Speaker 0** (19:59): know if that... 'Cause then you could say, "Hey, on the buy side, are you interested? Well, great, we can introduce you 'cause we've got the verified data here versus, you know, whatever you do before, the cold calling, the expensive software that maybe isn't even that accurate." Do you think that's a right insight, David, with what you've seen? **Speaker 1** (20:18): It... Yes. I, I think what is still TBD is understanding the quality of that data, which comes in a couple different forms. One is just how clean is the data that we're getting, right? Are we taking manually someone just inputting their two-year revenues? If so, I don't know how meaningful it is. If someone uploading full annual financial statements, different level of data. **Speaker 0** (20:44): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (20:44): The second thing is, what I don't know yet is who are our customer will be. Is it the curious person who's a plumber who's doing two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of revenue? Is it a retail store doing half a million bucks and they're just kind of curious, and for thirty-nine dollars late at night drunk one night they wanna click a few buttons and get a score? I don't know how valuable that data is. If it's someone doing four hundred **Speaker 1** (21:14): thousand dollars of EBITDA in a home service company and then wants to follow up by they have a one-year to sell timeline, so it's sort of like quality of lead. **Speaker 0** (21:24): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (21:24): So like I, I do a lot in the mortgage space and sort of in the real estate world, right? Like how much information you get and how close they are to a transaction determines the value of that. **Speaker 0** (21:36): Okay. **Speaker 3** (21:38): And David, is, is the idea... Like what, what... Sorry. Is, is the idea, um, s- small business owners who wanna know the value, current value of their business and get like a printable report? Is that like- **Speaker 1** (21:56): I think so **Speaker 3** (21:57): ... the goal then? **Speaker 1** (21:57): I, I think there's two aspects to this. I think one is just like the cheap thrill, give me a number. People love numbers. People want a valuation, but this is not like a certified form. I know you're not gonna be able to use it anywhere. The other part is where are you in the process? Like how sellable is your business? And then what are the next steps that you should be taking to really make your business sellable? And then of course, that's the opportunity I think Jason was hitting on is- **Speaker 0** (22:27): Yeah **Speaker 1** (22:28): ... we could start to chip away at being some type of provider across those services- **Speaker 0** (22:34): Yeah **Speaker 1** (22:34): ... whether through affiliate, direct, or otherwise. The, the analogy that I was using is like very easy to get a credit score. Then there is a whole add-on service to credit repair service. **Speaker 0** (22:45): And then, "Hey, get this credit card once your credit is good and all..." Yeah. I, I think if you have the data, there's, there's a lot. But I'll shut up. I know, Andrew, you've had your virtual hand raised. Nice haircut. **Speaker 2** (22:58): Thank you. Um, yeah, Goldberg, I, or, um, Nathaniel, I think Goldberg is in a coffee shop, which is nice. **Speaker 3** (23:06): Oh, it's him who's in a coffee shop. Surprised it wasn't me. **Speaker 2** (23:09): I was just... I was thinking the same thing. Um, one- **Speaker 3** (23:13): I'll have you know three hands on **Speaker 2** (23:14): ... very funny just seeing cameras, like gold looks converted down, and Jason, if you sit further back, your head gets larger and larger, which is a very funny like optical thing. Um, just, uh, just- **Speaker 3** (23:28): Well, I look great. **Speaker 2** (23:29): Yeah. And you- **Speaker 0** (23:29): You look beautiful, Matt **Speaker 2** (23:30): ... you're on mute. Um, Goldberg, I think like the thirty-nine dollar thing, 'cause I've also gone like SMB and I've had them reach out to different people. There's a business that I wanna buy, but I don't know how to reach out to people to like go ask them to buy it. So I have SMB do it to maybe like price it and get rejected, then me call to like do something afterwards. But my gut, right, feel like thirty-nine dollars is so cheap, you're not gonna get like someone who has an **Speaker 2** (24:01): accountant, right, for thirty-nine bucks. But like, if you built the... Like, instead of the business optimizer- **Speaker 4** (24:12): If you did it as like this is the business optimizer for landscapers, right? Like, we have... And you, you don't necessarily need to actually have the data. You can just say, "We have proprietary formulas to figure out your valuation." **Speaker 0** (24:27): So what- **Speaker 4** (24:28): And like if you build into a niche- **Speaker 0** (24:30): Go ahead **Speaker 4** (24:30): ... I think it just there's more value, 'cause $39 is just too cheap for anyone who actually could care. **Speaker 0** (24:40): So I'll kind of just- **Speaker 1** (24:41): Yeah. For real **Speaker 0** (24:41): ... do a quick rewind to like what David was saying about like the quality of lead, right? And it's like at first I think the thing we'll want is like, does anybody use this? Like, even if we get like okay quality leads, you can improve from there. Like, Matt would always use this analogy from his friend where it's like getting within striking distance, right? Where it's like, "Hey, that's a good start." But my, my thinking is like, yeah, $39 could get you low quality of leads, but the issue is even if it was, let's say, 390 bucks, **Speaker 0** (25:12): 10X larger, the number one thing that I think is gonna be a barrier to getting quality of lead is like time. Meaning like, hey, like we want people putting in good financials, writing good answers. Like, that takes time, right? If it's the, hey, you're drunk at night and like, you know, plug in a couple of things, like, you know, I don't know how quality that's gonna be. Or do we want something where it's like, well, yeah, make it super simple to get started with like four or five **Speaker 0** (25:42): answers, then be like, "Hey, we think your business could be in the range from like, you know, one to two and a half million. Do you wanna find out something more? And here's how to improve it." Then you put in your credit card at call it 390 bucks and it's like, well, get us all these documents and like that way you'll know. I, I, I don't know which is better, but that just is what's playing in my mind. **Speaker 4** (26:04): Oh, yeah. **Speaker 1** (26:04): Do you think that this is a good opportunity for AI and just have people like upload their balance sheet or s- or something, and you can, you can look through it and give them a little bit of- **Speaker 0** (26:15): Yes. Yes, but, um, first of all, not everyone has a balance sheet. You'd be amazed at how even companies that have hired a broker to sell, so you're already now talking all the way on the spectrum, they are ready to sell, how bad shape their financials are. Which to me is the opportunity. Yep. **Speaker 1** (26:34): I also, one thing I believe very strongly, you need to have a product. Maybe it's not the only product, but you need to have a product that is super simple, super quick. **Speaker 0** (26:48): Okay. **Speaker 1** (26:48): I shouldn't have to email my account to get a balance sheet to use this product. Now, I think part of the sale readiness is like, okay, you've input these numbers, you need to actually have financial statements. **Speaker 0** (27:00): Yep. **Speaker 1** (27:01): Right? **Speaker 4** (27:01): Well, all right. Let me, let me, let me ask, uh, I mean, this is another general question. Like, is there, is there some system that like could give us kind of a barometer? Like, even if we can't predict the weather, like can we get... take a barometric pres- uh, like pressure of what's going on to get some sort of like general signal? Like, if they want to point of sale, like just getting like, "Hey, what are your, what are your receipts like last like 20 days?" Something like that. Like, that they would have like at their fingertips and if they don't, like then- **Speaker 1** (27:30): What are you trying to solve for? **Speaker 4** (27:32): That's the question. Like, just, just understanding, I guess, like does the business look like it has any bit of potential at all? Or like if not, like are they worth talking to? 'Cause I think, I think Anup's... Uh, like I, I... Some, some of, like, some of like the things that I think Anup was trying to uncover with like can you get $37 from them? Is that even worth it? Is it worth talking to them? Um, I'm not sure. Like, I think there's certain, there's gonna **Speaker 4** (28:02): be certain things that like disqualify a business from talking to us. But whether they wanna spend money right away, uh, I'm- **Speaker 1** (28:09): What is it talking to them? I, I mean, my goal here is if you can, you know, take, um, Ben Collins, you know, four-minute are you neurodivergent quiz- **Speaker 4** (28:18): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (28:18): Yep **Speaker 1** (28:19): ... and say $9. Like, that's the analogy here. **Speaker 0** (28:22): Okay. So I did... For my wife, she has this burnout coaching business and I just built like a, you know, maybe five-minute, 15-question quiz that now has been sent out to like every account on the AICPA, and then that's like a funnel for her. So when I think about now hearing this, and I'll, I'll just kind of shoot what I think is an interesting like first product vision. The things we do after that, like that's hours of conversation. So is I think you want, number one, a real hook of like somebody looking **Speaker 0** (28:52): at this on a Facebook ad being like, "Holy shit, I could actually get millions of dollars in my pocket in the next 90 days." **Speaker 1** (29:00): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (29:00): Something like that, and they're like, "Oh my God." That like something they will click on, so now you've got the click. And then it's like some type of quiz. And David, this is where you have the domain expertise I have no clue of, like what are the like questions 80% of businesses can answer within call it, you know- **Speaker 1** (29:20): It's so easy **Speaker 0** (29:21): ... within five minutes that will give them some directional number of like, holy crap, you could have one to $3 million, mi- one to $3 million in your pocket. Well, to actually figure that out, you know, you need to answer more and pay for like, you know, whatever the bigger product is of 390 bucks. Which it's honestly, it's not about the $390 or whatever the price is, or $39, it's about getting them bought in of like, **Speaker 0** (29:51): oh wow, I'll actually spend the time to get you more data, right? It's all about time over money in this is what I think. Um, 'cause then you get all the interesting good stuff. And the analogy I put in the chat is, and maybe some of you guys have seen this from a venture or startup perspective, owner.com, who is fucking killing it for like restaurants, they basically just do like-A greater of like, "Hey, your website, your competition, all this sucks, we can solve **Speaker 0** (30:22): it for you." Like, yeah, your value is maybe two million dollars, but if you got all this information, this other stuff in better shape, it could be five million dollars. That might be the long-term product. But I think like the short-term product is just like, "Hey, wanna get millions in your pocket? Spend five minutes. Cool, it could be this. Wanna find out what the real value is? Give us this money and more time." **Speaker 1** (30:45): Yeah. And I think, let me... I'll come to you in a second, but I think we need to learn, and this is just optimization on messaging. **Speaker 0** (30:53): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (30:53): Like, is it the get evaluation? Is it get your company sale ready in ninety days? Like, what's the messaging- **Speaker 0** (30:59): Yeah, yeah. **Speaker 1** (31:01): -that really resonates? But to me, that's just optimization. **Speaker 2** (31:04): Yeah. I have, I have a, a silly idea combining like the three, three or four things we've talked about. What if we did this for free? If they connect out what all of their software stack is, and then we do it super connector style and sell those leads. **Speaker 1** (31:25): So I hate the second part of what you said, but I'll come back to that in a second. That-that's not the right way to monetize it to me. But I, I still love- **Speaker 2** (31:34): No, I'm just... I'm saying like do it for free in some ways. **Speaker 1** (31:37): Sorry about that. **Speaker 2** (31:37): Where as, as leads, where if we're in the world of collecting their data, right? I don't know what we could collect from them. It could be like their QuickBooks integration. It could be who they use for marketing, what vendors they use, who they use for Google listings, like whatever. Like, whatever they use to, to build the business. I think a SMB repo of that data would be super valuable in an AI world. Because right now, that is all black box. **Speaker 2** (32:10): Right? Like, and, and so you-- most of you working on my team, um- -more like the super connector is paying for warm introductions. I can imagine that if it's a s- you know, if they're using ABC marketing provider, XYZ marketing provider would be like, "Yo, I can fucking crush that. I pay you ten percent of..." You know, like where it's something like that, right? Where we are, are building this for free to get access to data. 'Cause the **Speaker 2** (32:40): thirty-nine dollars isn't worth a lot, but like repo- **Speaker 1** (32:43): So that's true. I... So, so I thought about it, and ultimately it just comes down to like how much faster can you go for free? Are you getting double the leads? If so, not worth it. Are you getting twenty X the leads because they're free? Maybe it's worth it. Now, I don't think it's just selling the data that is the most exciting part here. I think it's what's the... I think the data isn't gonna be as useful because of exactly what you said if it's free. You're gonna get, **Speaker 1** (33:14): you know, the guy who shovels snow, uh, you know, kind of putting it in and, and making the data pretty messy. But listen, if you're able to go ham on this, and if now you've turned into a, you know, hundreds of thousands of small businesses pipeline that you can then monetize in a variety of ways, that could be interesting. Ideally, the problem then is like you're gonna have costs, you're gonna have marketing. I don't think we're in the business of trying to really invest in out of pocket significantly. **Speaker 0** (33:43): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (33:44): Whereas if we can get a customer for ten, fifteen dollars and immediately turn it into thirty-nine, and then have value upside on top of that, it can grow. But doesn't stop us, by the way, from running an experiment, say, if we offered this for free, would it... How do the numbers change, both in terms of good to bad lead quality as well as- **Speaker 0** (34:04): Yeah, you just change the pricing and run an AB test. I think- **Speaker 2** (34:07): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (34:08): A-a-and I'm aligned with this. I think, David, what you're saying is like, somebody's kind of used this as content marketing and build an audience while getting some revenue in the door, right? Like, 'cause it's... If you can get a thousand businesses, great. You make thirty-nine bucks. Maybe it's a profit of twenty-five thousand. I mean, sure, whatever, not life-changing money, but it's like, well, now you've got a thousand businesses that you can build, you can do so much stuff with, right? Like that's, that's worth a lot. **Speaker 1** (34:35): And, and I think you're ready, you would then have a higher intent customer base. **Speaker 0** (34:42): Yeah. I agree. **Speaker 1** (34:43): Right? A much more willingness to pay. And I'm, I'm personally, and maybe this is just my background, I'm much more familiar with like director of new business than like selling third-party data. It's just not my world. So maybe that's why I'm a little uncomfortable. **Speaker 0** (34:57): I mean, I, I think that... I don't think the third-party data stuff is uninteresting. Anub, actually I think it probably could be really valuable. I think that along with, you know, selling services, becoming a broker, I mean, there's probably like five or ten, like that's in that bucket. I think the first step is just like, can we get a hundred people to pay something of money and give us good lead quality data? If you do that for a hundred, you can do that for a thousand, you do it for ten thousand and then life is good. You know? **Speaker 1** (35:27): Yeah. Agreed. To answer the question that you were hinting at before, which is like, what do we need here really? And I'm trying to take like a minimum viable information, right? Like of course, the more information you get, the better. But I think the way to do this is like, you remember you filled out your first LinkedIn page, it's like you give them such basic info. **Speaker 0** (35:46): Yes. **Speaker 1** (35:47): And then over time, your, your profile is forty percent complete. I think we can almost have that with like a, here's a rough estimate, but the more you give us, the better over time, but we won't lock you into paying. We only show you the report once you pay, right? You fill out some basic information, get you opted in. All we really need, in my opinion, to give you something is two or three years of revenue, two to three years of cash flow in an industry. **Speaker 0** (36:16): Okay.And ex-ex- yeah. And explain how that's enough, like, to give and, like, where industry matters and, like... I'm, I'm trying to find the right way to verbalize this. **Speaker 1** (36:31): Sure. **Speaker 0** (36:31): It is, uh, it's not NAI CS codes, but it's like, what is the database we would use to multiply- **Speaker 1** (36:39): Yeah **Speaker 0** (36:39): ... the revenue numbers by the industry to, like, weight it up or down? **Speaker 1** (36:43): Yeah. So at a very basic number, you're gonna take current year or trailing twelve months, EBITDA capital. **Speaker 0** (36:50): Yep. **Speaker 1** (36:51): And you're gonna multiply it by some type of multiple growth. **Speaker 0** (36:56): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (36:57): A different multiple for industry. And then we'll probably need to get, like, just some nuance of, like, an open field box that maybe plays into range of comments. It's that basic. **Speaker 0** (37:08): Okay. **Speaker 1** (37:09): And size. Size will impact multiple. **Speaker 0** (37:12): Yeah. But I gu- I guess in terms of industry, like, is it a free form box of somebody saying like, "Landscaping" or is it us, like, being like, "Hey, here are ten general industries that we know are good," and then there's an other, you know. And then from there, how do we know the multipliers for all those industry? That, that's like- **Speaker 1** (37:31): Well- **Speaker 0** (37:32): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (37:32): We could pull... We'll, we'll have to pull that data. **Speaker 0** (37:34): Okay. Okay. Cool. **Speaker 1** (37:36): Yeah. And it's, it's- **Speaker 3** (37:37): I wanna, I wanna interject something here real quick 'cause I've been, I've been looking at the different options that are available for, like, business valuation tools and stuff like that, and there's, there's some that are free, and then there's some that are, like, charging hundreds of dollars a month and targeting, like, advisors and brokers and stuff like that. **Speaker 1** (37:55): Yeah. **Speaker 3** (37:56): And, um, I was, I was just looking through a d- bunch of different ideas, and one that really popped out to me, um, is this, and this is, like, the elevator pitch, is being Zillow for small businesses. Owners connect their QuickBooks, get the valuations, and see what's driving their number up or down. On the back end, you connect high-intent owners with pe-people who have just learned their business is worth a million dollars and are thinking about their next move with brokers, exit planners, lenders, and insurance, insurance agents who pay for the introduction. **Speaker 3** (38:28): Um, two, two million-plus boomer-owned businesses are changing hands this decade, and most have never gotten an evaluation because it costs five K plus. You make it ninety-nine dollars, monetize the intent on the other side, and sell, um, resources to help them understand how to sell a business. **Speaker 1** (38:46): Which, which one were you quoting? It sounded like S&P dot com. **Speaker 3** (38:50): No, this, this is, this is our, like, our own vision where we could take the different ideas that I've seen out there, boil it up into one platform where you have the ability to give them cheaper valuations as the lead magnet. And then you, you have leads that you s- you sell to brokers, exit planners, lenders. You could take a cut similar to acquire.com or BizBuySell, and you become, um, a lead magnet, a marketplace, and **Speaker 3** (39:20): a resource for people who are looking to sell. **Speaker 1** (39:23): So this... If, if you... And, and this is kind of where I think there's a bunch of these free tools because they are all just, like, content or lead for the bigger business. **Speaker 3** (39:34): Yeah. Right. **Speaker 1** (39:34): So if you put up the S&P dot com valuation, which is why I also don't wanna play in that space, I think it's like we're not trying to sell you anything else. We're just gonna give you this, and you pay a very cheap number for it. **Speaker 3** (39:48): Yeah. You can almost modernize it. Unless you go deep, right? Like you're saying, like years of, of, um, data, but that's, that's more involved for the user to- **Speaker 1** (40:00): I also, I also wanna be very clear. There's gonna be plenty of competitors from all different forms here. **Speaker 3** (40:08): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (40:09): We're still all collectively scratching the surface because this is by definition a non-technical, older, non-online business. **Speaker 3** (40:20): Yep. **Speaker 1** (40:20): What, what do you think the time from, uh, seeing an ad for this on your meta ads to actually putting a credit card in would be for, for a customer? **Speaker 3** (40:30): Right. **Speaker 1** (40:31): My hope is that eighty percent of the customers, five minutes. **Speaker 0** (40:34): Yeah. So when, when Nat and I did Studio, we had a subscription app business, and then we had a hardware business, right? And they were two very, very different type of ad funnels, where the subscription business was an iOS app where somebody was signing up for a trial within five hours or a twenty-four minute window. Call it, like, on Facebook, that's a one-day window and then something like hardware, I mean, man, that could be ninety days, six months. Like, you wanna be that, like, five-minute window where somebody just **Speaker 0** (41:04): sees, like, a very clickbaity type ad of, like, something that makes them wanna get that number, put in the basic information. **Speaker 3** (41:12): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (41:12): Then it's like, "Hey, unlock all of it," you know, pay thirty-nine bucks and then, like, you know, take it from there. **Speaker 1** (41:21): And I, and I think, again, with AI, like, you can have, like, a really nicely designed two-page report that gets spit out, seventy-five percent of which is very similar across a bunch of companies, right? **Speaker 0** (41:34): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (41:34): And, like, things that you could do as next steps and why the multiple is what it is. **Speaker 0** (41:40): Yeah. Yep. Or even education, right? Like- **Speaker 3** (41:44): Is there gonna be any scraping that we need to do for certain industries to see how they compare to others in their industry, or is it just like- **Speaker 1** (41:53): You shouldn't have to. Most, most of it's an algorithm. **Speaker 0** (41:56): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (41:57): That doesn't need to change. Very basically- **Speaker 3** (42:02): Based, based on, based on their EBITDA. **Speaker 1** (42:05): EBITDA, growth rate, size, right? 'Cause you could take the same exact industry and same business that's doing three hundred K of EBITDA, and it will not have the same multiple as one that's doing a million EBITDA. The higher the EBITDA, the higher the multipleIt's counterintuitive. **Speaker 5** (42:25): Well, it's part of the growth rate. There's a lot of other things that go into that. **Speaker 1** (42:27): Of course, higher the growth. **Speaker 5** (42:29): Taking into customers, recurring-- I mean, I'm, I'm not trying to lecture Dave. I'm just kinda saying there's, there's- **Speaker 1** (42:35): So let's say... 'Cause people don't realize this. Let's say everything is apples to apples, same growth rate, same industry, same customer base. One does half a million dollars a year, one does two million dollars a year. The half a million could be valued at three X, the other one could be valued at five X. **Speaker 5** (42:50): Yeah. So that's why I think, Josh, your logic for going after the, the smaller one, even though it's riskier at some level, is if I can get it-- if I can double it, I actually can make double it forever. **Speaker 1** (43:00): It's called multiple expansion. **Speaker 5** (43:01): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (43:02): So I think the, um, the applications for AI, just to like break it down as I see it here, um, like we-- like I mentioned before, you could do-- you could use AI to help get the information from the, from the customer, either by chatting with them or by, uh, by like scanning through unstructured documents. And then there's-- you, you, and we kind of hinted this at, in, in the group chat, you can use AI to make user-generated content that might speak to the specific business owner. **Speaker 1** (43:32): Even though our, our, our solution is general, you can have that like, "Hey, are you running a plumbing company? Get, get an ad now." You know, you just target, target weird ads or any, any, any type of ad to the user, uh, that makes them get-- stop scrolling. And then, um, in the report, I mean, you wouldn't need AI for the report. Once the template is made, you can generate the report just with regular software, but AI can help you write the software. **Speaker 0** (44:01): Yeah. I think AI, you write the software- **Speaker 1** (44:04): Let's just, let's just say it for our note takers to get it all down there. That's, that's it. To go one step further, I think the biggest opportunities really here are really in marketing and conversion. **Speaker 0** (44:17): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (44:17): I consider those two things differently. So one is, how do you create a lot of contact very quickly to build out and close what we'll call level one customers? **Speaker 0** (44:28): Mm-hmm. **Speaker 1** (44:29): Right? How do we do this so we can get those sort of thousand, ten thousand, thirty-nine dollar payers? **Speaker 0** (44:34): Yep. **Speaker 1** (44:35): Now we have, let's call it thirty thousand businesses, ten thousand of which have actually paid us thirty-nine thousand. **Speaker 0** (44:42): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (44:42): How do we continue over time to now deliver in different formats, text, email, and so on and so forth, to convert people down the funnel to not only pay, but into whatever that next level is? **Speaker 0** (44:54): Yeah. Like to me, whether this thing is kind of like pass, fail is like, okay, inside of a week, can we spin up some creative, right? Call it, you know, ten to twenty different AI videos, you know, at fifty to a hundred dollars a day Facebook budget. A real- really, really slick like quiz that also has, you know, built in, um, whatchama call it, like payment processing that then ends up with just **Speaker 0** (45:25): a nice report at the end. And then you run it, and you basically see like, is this getting anywhere that's interesting? Meaning, hey, we spend five hundred bucks over the course of two weeks and we have nothing. Hey, maybe something isn't there at all. Maybe we need to fully rethink it. Or if there is something, then we do the next thing, right? Like I just... I think like nail that first step of like this lead magnet at thirty-nine bucks. Can we make that successful? If we can, there's a lot **Speaker 0** (45:55): of opportunity. **Speaker 1** (45:57): I think on the real-- you know, I've run a lot of these experiments, the answer is almost always... The result is always like gray area. **Speaker 0** (46:03): Totally. **Speaker 1** (46:03): Like it doesn't, it doesn't totally work and it doesn't totally fail. **Speaker 0** (46:07): Yep. **Speaker 1** (46:08): Which is probably good enough to like, okay, flip over one more card. **Speaker 0** (46:11): Yeah. Or, or it's like- **Speaker 1** (46:12): See you there. **Speaker 0** (46:13): Well, yeah, we're getting people at thirty-nine bucks, but we're, you know, customer acquisition cost is like forty-five, so it's like, you know- **Speaker 1** (46:20): Right **Speaker 0** (46:20): ... six dollars negative. Like, is it worth still doing? Well, yeah- **Speaker 1** (46:24): Right **Speaker 0** (46:24): ... if those leads are good all day fucking long, right? Like, you know. **Speaker 1** (46:29): Yep. **Speaker 5** (46:31): Yeah. So I know I'm coming in a little late here, but I, I just pulled the, the old, uh, ChatGPT app and said, "All right, I'm a boomer. What question am I gonna ask ChatGPT to figure out the value of my company?" And I'm saying, "Hey, what's the value of my landscaping company?" And of course, the first answer that we get is, yeah, two point five to four X EBITDA. So like I-- it sounds like, David, you're coming in from an angle of like, hey, you want this to be as simple as possible, but then there's a couple others, you know, that have come in saying like, "All right, can we scrape and pull, you know, all your competitors and show you what all that's going to be and **Speaker 5** (47:01): give you a little more information than just a quick valuation?" Like, what-- I guess where's the sweet spot outside of me just running that quickly and then saying, "All right, I'm gonna take three X like I made EBITDA over the last twelve months and know what my valuation is"? **Speaker 1** (47:14): Yeah. I, I think the reality is it's not gonna be that different. I think it's... A lot of it's gonna be in the messaging and the nuance, right? **Speaker 0** (47:23): It's the presentation. It's basically option one is, you know, the, the boomer going on Google or ChatGPT being like, "Hey, the same information they give us, what do you think my business is worth?" And they give an answer probably not too different than ours versus ours, you know, spits out a nice page, some charts, some graphs, you know, AI generates some good text. Like there's presentation to it. Plus, well, hey, if you pay thirty-nine bucks versus free, like that's just... It's gotta be worth **Speaker 0** (47:53): more, right? Like even though it's- **Speaker 1** (47:56): It's like, it's like functional health. **Speaker 0** (47:58): Sure. **Speaker 1** (47:58): I could go and sign up for Quest and go get all my labs and input into ChatGPT and get analysis, or I could pay the nice company that has a really cool design hundred and fifty bucks to go do the same exact thing. Now, that's sort of my cynical answer. The real answer is we're gonna get a little bit more data to try to hone in between that two and a half, four by taking into account industry growth rates, size, and some other issues. And then I think the key part of this is not just the valuation, it's the **Speaker 1** (48:29): business readiness. It'sHere's what steps that you can take in the next ninety days to increase that valuation and get your business ready to sell. And it could just be a checklist. **Speaker 0** (48:40): Yep. **Speaker 1** (48:40): Right? Maybe it's consecutive orders of- **Speaker 0** (48:43): So Function Health, for a second, David, is this-- it kind of goes to, um, to a little bit to a new point of the business model. 'Cause the business model for Function Health is actually the, the GolfNow business model, which they were a competitor of ours when I was doing, you know, ClubShare, club, the club, club software. GolfNow gives you golf tee times when nobody wants it. Function Health gives you, um, Quest **Speaker 0** (49:14): times when nobody wants them, and they sell it for less than Qui-Quest sells it if you went di-to them directly. **Speaker 1** (49:22): Really? **Speaker 0** (49:22): Yeah. Yeah. It's, and the, the test will-- the, the test will... And they bundle a lot of tests that you might not have gotten. But- **Speaker 1** (49:29): I just did this through my own doctor. I paid Quest twenty bucks and got way more labs. That's what I don't understand. **Speaker 0** (49:36): It might have been... I, I don't know, it might have been subsidized somehow by your health insurance. Mine, mine was, uh, maybe, may... Like, the... I don't know. Interesting. **Speaker 1** (49:46): Yeah. And maybe I don't know enough about Function. My, my point is, like, there's dozens or hundreds of thousands of companies that, like, are basically taking the basic, but the way that you package it, the UI, UX, the brand that gets attached- **Speaker 0** (50:00): Yeah **Speaker 1** (50:00): ... is part of the value of it sometimes. **Speaker 0** (50:02): Yeah, it's like when I was, you know, a, a kid, and you basically would have what I'd put together and then, you know, somebody else... Somebody else would maybe just have, like, a basic plain text written report versus, like, I'd do it on the computer and have nice graphics, all that stuff. Content's just as good. I might get the A, the other person might get the B just because, hey, it didn't look as nice. Like, it's a similar thing with this. **Speaker 1** (50:25): And so if I can... Yeah. What's up, Sean? **Speaker 5** (50:28): I was gonna say that the, um, the model that comes to mind, and I know this is kind of the antithesis of where we're trying to get to, David, is just that Crunchbase is, like, the, the prime example of a business that's been emailing me for the last five years of my business saying, "This is what we're calling you. This is what we think is happening in your business." There's always, like, a twenty percent, you know, error that's on it. And I, and I now need to pay twenty bucks a month to make sure that anyone else who's seeing that, you know, thinks it's all right. So I just, I just wonder if there is a little added value of... from, on the brand and the UI perspective of, like, **Speaker 5** (50:58): if I'm gonna come to your website, you know, you're a boomer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio, my hometown, and I get to go see first five other landscaping businesses from five other states that aren't nowhere in Illinois, does this then look like an expert that know what landscaping looks like where I live out there? You put a fake number or, or estimate number on all those other five businesses and then say, "Give you a couple more questions, you know, we're gonna give you your number as well." There's this little bit of scraping that just shows that we're experts in the space, that our AI **Speaker 5** (51:28): has actually gone and done, you know, across other people in your space before you get to just a, you know- **Speaker 1** (51:36): Yeah. I, I, I think that could work. My approach was a little bit different, but I think you're getting at the same thing where I think if we just actually show a couple of customer referrals that, of course, we'll make up, and, like, two sample reports. **Speaker 0** (51:52): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (51:52): Right? **Speaker 0** (51:53): Yep. **Speaker 1** (51:53): If you just see the Joe, Joe's Landscaping, uh, revenue, valuation, explanation, next steps, you'll put yourself in those shoes and be like, "Wow, I'm gonna have this playbook, this professional report in two minutes for thirty-nine dollars." **Speaker 0** (52:10): Totally. And that's, and that's where AI can at least customize it more to your... But, like, what it writes. Like, that's, like, two cents in tokens, right? Like, it's all about the presentation and polish- **Speaker 1** (52:22): Yep **Speaker 0** (52:22): ... and a person feeling like, "Wow, I got something that, like, you know, um, you know, an associate put together and spent a lot of money on," when it's like, no. Like, or time or whatever, you know? **Speaker 1** (52:34): Yeah. And so all... I know we're running low on time, and I appreciate everyone sitting here for an hour. My suggestion of, like... And I think, Jason, you and I are aligned. Like, what is the minimum viable experience here? **Speaker 0** (52:46): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (52:46): And so I, I think the first... There's, like, the first two things are just, like, kind of product and marketing. **Speaker 0** (52:54): Yep. **Speaker 1** (52:54): Now, product here and marketing, they're, they're connected, right? So first product is just how do we build the basic quiz and deliver that report? **Speaker 0** (53:04): Yep. **Speaker 1** (53:05): That with, with some level of accuracy and design. The second thing I think is the marketing, which is twofold. One is the website is up, right? Your website is where you want people to go to optimize for conversion. **Speaker 0** (53:18): Yep. **Speaker 1** (53:18): And then two, what is the external content marketing, paid or otherwise, to run a small experiment over a couple weeks to see if we can get that to go somewhere? **Speaker 0** (53:27): Totally. And I, I... Like, when I think about if there was a deadline of, like, let's say, "Hey, like, could we get this up and running in ten days?" The answer is yes, right? I know that's, that's an easy yes, but the question is, like, what gets you there? I, I think of it in three buckets very similarly, which is bucket one is probably from you, David, obviously with input from others, but, like, you have the domain expertise of, like, what are the inputs? Meaning, like, what, what are the inputs on the quiz that they need to **Speaker 0** (53:57): bring in, right? And then what does an output of a report look like in terms of content? Not design, right? Like, design is easy once you know what you're designing around. Like, once we have that, so that's, like, bucket one. Bucket two is then, you know, okay, build the actual product. And, like, I have in my head exactly how you would go do this, but it's like I wouldn't want to approach that until that first bucket is there because I would get half of it wrong, right? Like, I'm more educated from this call, but, like, the point isn't to be half **Speaker 0** (54:27): wrong. It's to be, uh, you know, not that wrong. So bucket one, inputs and outputs. Bucket two, the actual, like-Call like quiz product, the technical product. And then bucket three is just MVP marketing, which to me is, you know, some Facebook ads, a great website/landing page, right? And they, they may differ. The main domain may be one thing, and then the landing page may be a variation of that. It might just be directly to the quiz. Like, there's **Speaker 0** (54:58): a few different things there. I think if those three things are like set up, that's enough to basically just run the ads, look at the data, and come back in, you know, ten to fourteen days and be like, "Here's what we got, guys. What did, what did we learn?" You know? **Speaker 1** (55:15): It looks like... Yeah. I, I'd be curious, and maybe Ben, you're the best person to answer this. You heard those questions Jason just asked. My first instinct was, we can basically ask those questions to Claude, ChatGPT, whoever. And I feel like we tell them what we're trying to do here, what our goals are, like, it could probably help us build out that report. **Speaker 0** (55:34): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (55:34): From like a one where it's needed more content. **Speaker 6** (55:38): Yeah, totally. Like, the only, the only thing that's probably more, more set up ahead of time would be the, the content itself. Um, and putting that, putting that pipeline together, figuring out, like, what kind of scripting you want, what kind of models you want, if there's... You know, if you're, if you're gonna do any kind of editing or captions or those kind of things, all easy, but even more set up than the entire business itself. **Speaker 0** (56:07): Yep. **Speaker 7** (56:10): You might see in the chat I just created, uh, a v zero point one of this. But I sort of... I was trying to spending some time on this identifying what are the ten questions. It ended up being twelve, but they're relatively quick to fill in. I had a quick code, uh, session just now- **Speaker 1** (56:27): Love that **Speaker 7** (56:27): ... and created a version. **Speaker 0** (56:29): Yeah. **Speaker 7** (56:29): And then I used a PT model to create the report. So the report is a little bit longer. I'm working on trying to fix the formatting there. **Speaker 0** (56:36): Yeah. I- **Speaker 7** (56:36): But you get an idea. **Speaker 0** (56:37): Yeah. **Speaker 7** (56:37): Like this is, you know, whatever, seventy percent of the way there, right? But like, it's just a general idea. **Speaker 0** (56:42): Yeah. No, I literally just went through it. I'm like, I've got something. Like it's, it's not too different from what I imagined. **Speaker 1** (56:49): Yeah. I, I don't think any of this is complicated. **Speaker 0** (56:53): No. **Speaker 1** (56:53): I think ultimately it's, okay, just run and see if the thesis that there's value in the people who are in the Facebook, and a little bit of optimization, and then it's integrating all of the parts together. The marketing with the lead generation, the optimization, the right content, the right time. Um, I think for this experiment, we have most of what we need here. And so it sounds like step one or a couple of those first steps is like someone needs to figure out like the quiz. And that's both the questions and delivery of the **Speaker 1** (57:23): report. Someone's gonna need to figure out like the website, which will embed that closing report, and then someone's gonna need to figure out the external marketing. That's what we need for the initial. **Speaker 0** (57:34): Mm-hmm. **Speaker 1** (57:34): And then the infrastructure. Website, how do we host this? You know, is there a database capturing this? Do you need a Facebook page? All that stuff. **Speaker 0** (57:41): Yeah. I mean, that's straightforward stuff, right? Like that's- **Speaker 1** (57:45): Straightforward, but it just- **Speaker 0** (57:46): Somebody, somebody needs to own it. If nobody owns it and does it, it doesn't happen, right? Totally agree. **Speaker 1** (57:50): That's right. **Speaker 0** (57:51): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (57:51): So I guess that, that's sort of like... I don't know. Are we gonna get kicked off in a minute then or can we extend this? **Speaker 6** (57:56): Um, yeah, probably. It says seven minutes. Six minutes. **Speaker 1** (58:02): Okay. So maybe they gave us to maybe ten minutes. Um, do people wanna volunteer for stuff? I mean, I, I'm happy to probably be the best to spearhead the product release itself. **Speaker 0** (58:18): Like what, what the questions are and what the report should have? Like- **Speaker 1** (58:22): Yes. **Speaker 0** (58:23): Yeah. I'm, I'm happy to spearhead, and Nat, if you wanna help too 'cause you already put in Replit, like just building it, right? And that would include like, hey, the architecture of like it's hosted here, the database is here, you know, we need these APIs, like all of that. Um, I'm happy to spearhead that 'cause that's just what I'm doing day in, day out. Um. **Speaker 6** (58:47): I've got a harness for AI-generated video, so I can, I can do that. **Speaker 1** (58:54): Awesome. Yeah. The, and I don't know if anyone wants to sort of own or think about like just the third-party marketing. That's obviously a piece of it, so I don't know, like, Gold, if you're comfortable doing the whole thing, if you want a partner or something. **Speaker 6** (59:09): Yeah. I'd be, I'd be happy to partner something. You know, I haven't used Meta's marketing stack in, in a while. Like, but I think it'd be interesting to make, make, make some sort of, um, harness to talk to Meta's API and see what ads are working, you know, what videos are working, double down on that. I, I don't know if, I don't know if any of that needs to be in the MVP, um- **Speaker 0** (59:39): Yeah. I mean, I... In kind of like the main startup I'm on, like I have a plugin for like meta ads to like get the data out. But in terms of like trafficking them, running them, and all of that, like I, I do meta ads all the time. I think, you know, what's gonna matter the most is like when this gets built, it's like, okay, is there a pixel? Are we capturing the right events, you know? **Speaker 6** (59:59): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (60:00): So I, I... Gold, I could work with you on that. Basically, if you get me the creative, getting that into Meta and then us being able to measure it right from a technical standpoint isn't difficult. And then David, what, you know, before I would even build anything, right? Like it's basically just like, what are the questions we're asking? You know, what outside data sources do we need, um, to combine with that? And then ultimately, like what should be the sections of a report, **Speaker 0** (60:30): right? Like, and once again, I don't care about it being pretty. It literally could just be a Google Doc of like, here are the questions and here's like, you know, the sections of the report and what it looks like. Like-That's enough to have AI build something. **Speaker 1** (60:46): And there's, there's an integration, um, through Madness to use meta ads as well. So they've like- **Speaker 0** (60:52): Yeah **Speaker 1** (60:53): ... I, I, I don't know if Meta bought them or anything. **Speaker 0** (60:55): They did, yeah. **Speaker 1** (60:56): They did? **Speaker 2** (60:57): Yeah. **Speaker 1** (60:57): Okay. There's a direct integration there. But that, that could be used to, to do a lot more than- **Speaker 2** (61:04): I, I think, um, it's a free subscription to Madness and SimpleWeb. Uh, sorry, Madness has a free line to Facebook ads and a free subscription to SimpleWeb, which is otherwise very expensive. **Speaker 1** (61:19): So you could probably do work through there. I mean, in reality it's pretty easy to just like manually- **Speaker 0** (61:24): Yeah. I, I think right now there's not much to automate, and especially with it being like... What's gonna matter so much what I've learned with like Facebook ads is like you just clearly see like what's doing well and what's not, and you also just have to... I don't wanna seem be impatient, but it's like you'll know when something's a loser and you just kill it. So like, as great as AI is for like ads, I think like just with something new for your first like little bit, you wanna be in there and like there's no need to overcomplicate it. **Speaker 1** (61:52): Yeah. **Speaker 0** (61:53): If this thing becomes something and scale it, like then yeah, I mean, there's a million different things, like... **Speaker 1** (61:59): That makes sense. Yeah. Who... Once we have like some of these components, who's gonna actually build it in what? **Speaker 0** (62:09): So the way, I would tell you the way that I would build it, um, is I use Cursor over CloudCode, right? Um, not use Replit, which is kind of where I do development, like hosting and prototypes, right? I think that's great because it gives you the database out of the box, like the hosting. Like is that where I would host something long-term at scale? No. But like for the first bit- **Speaker 1** (62:34): Not really, yeah **Speaker 0** (62:35): ... you know, and I, I do that day in, day out. Like that's how I would do it and get it up. Like literally, David, once you have that document of like, "Here's the stuff," maybe I'd hop on a call with you for like 30 minutes. Like I can go to town in like few hours on something like... And you saw with Not, that was 10 minutes, so probably even quicker, right? It's just like to get it polished, like connected to a domain, all the ad tracking stuff, like- **Speaker 1** (63:01): Yep **Speaker 0** (63:01): ... within a day. **Speaker 1** (63:03): I th- I think we're gonna get kicked off in a minute. Maybe I could take this back to the thread here. The next question we'll need to answer is like when do we need to make any kind of commitment? 'Cause like we're the... I mean, we're probably talking about like, okay, what are we gonna invest as a whole group, maybe $500? **Speaker 0** (63:19): If, if out, right? Like- **Speaker 1** (63:21): Yeah. Right. But like at some point, you know, sort of who wants in, who wants out, you know? Once, if it works, it'll be... then everyone's gonna want in. You know what I mean? So- **Speaker 0** (63:31): The biggest- **Speaker 1** (63:32): We're gonna reward people. **Speaker 0** (63:34): Yeah. Did we get muted or kicked off or no? **Speaker 1** (63:37): No, I hear you. **Speaker 0** (63:38): Biggest- **Speaker 1** (63:38): You cannot. **Speaker 0** (63:39): Biggest expenditure is gonna be anything marketing related. Like code and hosting all that is like nothing. I'm like, I'll, I'll pay for that on my own Cursor and Replit for right now. I don't care. **Speaker 1** (63:48): Right. Yeah. **Speaker 0** (63:49): It's 50 bucks. It's, it's more- **Speaker 1** (63:51): And we're buying domains with alt box. **Speaker 0** (63:53): Yeah. I'm like- **Speaker 1** (63:53): I don't know if people saw the domains in the Telegram, but uh, maybe I'll put a poll up, see what people like. **Speaker 0** (63:59): I haven't- **Speaker 1** (63:59): What domains it's all about. **Speaker 0** (64:00): Yeah. I think I s... Okay. Oh my God.