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Unfiltered Podcast Episode 9

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On this Unfiltered Startup Idea Review episode, Rachel Sheppard (FI Global Marketing Manager), Mike Suprovici (FI Head of Portfolio Success), Ryan Micheletti (FI Head of Global Operations) and Dustin Betz (FI Content Editor) review startup ideas, and pull no punches. Together, they bring decades of startup experience, advising hundreds of early-stage companies. In the Unfiltered series, FI HQ team expertise comes through as raw and #unfiltered feedback on YOUR startup ideas at all stages of development.

Here is an overview of this #Unfiltered episode’s startup ideas:

  1. Savo (Cape Town): My company 'Dappleshades' wants to make paper-based sculptures as functional décor to help students and young couples enhance their living & working spaces, by bringing in patterns inspired by nature at affordable prices. We use waterjet cutting to mass-produce existing hand-cut designs at low cost.
  2. Henry (Fort Lauderdale): My company ‘Bye-thon’ is crowdsourcing and gamifying the tagging and removal of invasive species. We’re making a remotely controlled quadcopter tagging service that approved users can pilot from a desktop computer (just like playing a video game) to tag invasive animals with RFID trackers. Our customers are animal control and ecological stewardship orgs, and our trained users play in our gamified system by controlling the quadcopter drones remotely to tag invasive species in difficult terrain, helping expedite their removal by local biologists. Our first target species is pythons in the Florida Everglades, thus the name “Bye-Thon”
  3. Cecilie (Oslo): My company Lingal is disrupting language-learning with an AI chatbot for beginner to intermediate language-learners. Our chatbot fills a gap left open by apps that focus too heavily on rote memorization, thanks to our bot’s conversationality and its ability to easily shift between multiple languages when the user is stuck.
  4. John (St. Louis): My company Air Refueling Tanker Transport (“ART2”) fills a gap in the DoD's Air-to-Air Refueling (AAR) tanker fleet. Sought after by global militaries, our commercial AAR supports military tankers and crews during peacetime. As the nation’s only commercial AAR outlet, we deliver a civilian-to-military capability, support, and training needs in excess of ~200K hours annually. Our secret sauce is our 9 aircraft, 90K hours and 250 years of AAR knowhow.
  5. Clement (Montreal): My company (Tester) is building an online marketplace to help clinical researchers find test-subjects for trials. Currently, test subjects struggle to find research projects, which are too often listed on isolated university websites or even Craigslist, while researchers don’t attract enough applicants to actually be selective. We give researchers a central hub to list their trial opportunities, and a test subjects a central place to find them.
  6. Rhoda (St. Paul): My company (Piqued) is launching a geofencing app for young tech-savvy shoppers that solves the issue of lost purchasing opportunities via our sales alert system. For example, when an app user walks by a Target store, a notification would pop up on their phone, informing them about any ongoing sales.

The following includes a full transcript from this Founder Insights podcast episode – these transcripts are produced by a third-party natural language processing algorithm, and are not checked word-for-word by humans for complete accuracy—so, there may be some errors or typos!   

Rachel Sheppard  0:02 

Welcome to our ninth episode of unfiltered on the founder insights podcast. I'm Rachel Sheppard, Director of Global Marketing at Founder Institute, and I'm joined today on the line by Mike Suprovici, Managing Director of portfolio success at FI, Dustin Betz FI Content Editor, and Ryan Micheletti head of FI global operations. Mike, you want to introduce yourself?

 

Mike Suprovici  0:24 

Hello, everyone. as Rachel mentioned, my name is Mike and I lead the alumni success group here at the Founder Institute. And our role is to help the founder Institute alumni scale their business and we try to do that in any way that we can. Sometimes we do that via  one on one hands-on advice, other times we do it by running various programs such as Funding Lab to help raise your first round of financing, or your second and basically we do anything we can in our power to help alumni companies succeed.

 

Dustin Betz  0:55 

Hi, my name is Dustin Betz. I am the Content Editor at the Founder Institute. We help founders tell their stories, and get them out there and get some earned media. Ryan?

 

Ryan Micheletti  1:06 

Awesome. Hey, everyone, my name is Ryan Micheletti, head of operations for FI. I basically work with all the different director teams around the world that run our programs for us. So we have a program that runs 14 weeks in 180 cities around the world. And our job is to help you build enduring global companies.

 

Rachel Sheppard  1:28 

Awesome. Well, if you're interested in learning more about founder Institute, we're currently enrolling across six continents, you can find out more at fi.co/join/podcast. And today we're going to run through a few of the startup ideas we've received in the inbox@phi.co slash ideas. Thank you to everyone who has sent in their startup ideas, keep those submissions coming. And we're going to deliver our raw, honest feedback, a warning up front, as always, this feedback is going to be blunt, direct and unfiltered. Let's get started. So Sabo from Cape Town, says my company dapple shades wants to make paper based sculptures as functional decor to help students and young couples enhance their living and working spaces. By bringing in patterns inspired by nature at affordable prices. We use water jet cutting to mass produce existing hand cut designs at low cost.

 

Mike Suprovici  2:19 

So with companies like this, there's basically two ways you can go right? Like you can go by continuing to like develop your own sculptures and hope that that people get those or you kind of become like the tool or the platform that inspires others to basically build on top of that. And this is more like a philosophical question for you not what's right and what's wrong. And the question is really, like, how big do you want this to get? and for how long do you want to run this company? If you're going to be basically building sculptures and try to sell sculptures or trying to get other folks to basically use them in like an educational environment, that's probably not as large of a opportunity. And that's perfectly okay. It could be like a very nice comfortable, like potentially a comfortable small business. If you have enough customers, if you want to try to make this into a very large business that you know has lots of customers all over the world can generate lots of revenue and things like that. I encourage you think about how you can potentially scale this to basically enable more mass adoption versus kind of like a niche like educational background. Now, in order for you to do that, there's several ways you can do it. I mentioned previously, the idea of kind of a potential like a platform. However, even for a platform to work, you need some sort of a killer application. So if this is the use case of the educational environment that becomes kind of like the killer application for this product, then that's terrific. And hopefully that that inspires others to go ahead and use your tools and product to be able to deliver these at scale. Or, you know, you can partner with some other type of organization that already has several things that need to be basically mass produced at scale and they essentially kind of double The killer application for you, which attracts more people to, you know, launch things onto your product. But at the end of the day, it's kind of like a fundamental question, you know, how big do you want this to get? And that's going to determine where you take this. Yeah, very well said, Mike, this is Ryan, my first impression of this always comes down to scale, right. And if you decide you want this to be a large, globally scalable company, and you want this to be a platform, then that's great, right. But you know, you could certainly also make a good business and make money running this as as kind of like a custom scopes for business online. So again, there's no right or wrong way. It really just comes down to whatever it is that you want to do in your vision for this. Since Mike already spoke about that, I'd like to just kind of dive into the pitch a little bit. You know, I think it's kind of interesting using paper based sculptures as functional decor. There is some dissonance that I found in the pitch which made me think okay, like who is this person? What is the paper based sculpture and who's going to care about it? So for example, you start going off on paper based functional decor, helping students, young people. So right there, I kind of get the sense of Okay, this is for someone who's looking for something affordable, which later on you go on to say that you can mass produce these at a low cost. And so the question then, in my mind became, is this like a high quality sculpture where it's like, you know, could I reproduce like some famous sculptures in my living room, but but doing it through paper, in a way that's still very, like kind of classy and beautiful art, but it's also cheap to do instead of going out a game like marble statue? Is this really a supplement? Or is this kind of are you creating something that's kind of like a new piece of art? Be not that well versed in the sculpture community and trends in it? But I do think that by being able to massively scale this through some of the production methods that you mentioned, it does seem like this could become something That's very large. The potential is there maybe. And maybe it's just through the innovation of your mass production and manufacturing processes. And so I would like that to come out a little bit more in the forefront of the pitch. Is it just a cheaper version that's better? And you're kind of democratizing it allowing people to kind of make more sculptures, but still have it be as beautiful as other things? Or is this just kind of something else where it's, you know, it's a nice piece of art, but it's just less fun. It's less of a premium product, and therefore, it's also lower. So, you know, kind of why paper, like who really would find this valuable is something that I'd be curious to ask. But overall, I think this is something kind of interesting and unique. I haven't seen a lot of paper based scopes for companies and we see a lot of companies.

 

Rachel Sheppard  6:46 

Fantastic. Awesome. And next up is going to be Henry from Fort Lauderdale. Henry says my company by THON is crowdsourcing and gamifying the tagging and removal of invasive species. We're making your remotely controlled quadcopter tagging service that approved users can pilot from a desktop computer just like playing a video game. to tag invasive animals with RFID. trackers our customers are animal control and ecological stewardship orgs and our trained users play in our gamified system by controlling the quadcopter drones remotely to tag invasive species in difficult terrain, helping expedite their removal by local biologists. Our first target species is pythons in the Florida Everglades thus the name

 

Mike Suprovici  7:30 

Alright, well, that was a very long pitch. And just as a word of advice would be really good if you can get that into like a couple of sentences. Now I understand kind of why you want to say more stuff because that helps you get more information out but sometimes it's just not necessary, right? So if I were you, I would just like try to basically like, cut out like half of that pitch. You know, in regards to like the business. A lot of these kinds of custom archetypes that you have right now at least slated seem to be very challenging. To acquire, sometimes they're kind of like run by like governments. Other times, they're like, you know, private organizations as well. And so if you are going after like government type product, or you're trying to sell your product to like a government agency, you know, you're looking at like a year long sales cycle, RFP process potentially, and things like that. So just something to think about, that means that your cost of customer acquisition is going to be extremely high, which means that your pricing has to be very high. If you're going after kind of like the local wildlife removal service person on Yelp, which is essentially like a small business, then your pricing is going to change for that, right? Because obviously, it can't afford something like that. But the problem with that is that it's going to be still very difficult to acquire them, right because it's still need to like call them potentially, to close them and things like that, especially if you're trying to do like a drone unless you're like renting out the drone, which is a whole nother thing, right? And so it's probably gonna be a subset of those, honestly. That are going to want to do that they're going to be like the techie people that have like a business. And you really should kind of like focus on that and larger organization, maybe all the way up to like, I don't know, like the terminix, or whatever the wildlife removal service may be. So just think about that, when you do it. If it was possible for you to expand this out somehow, and go into like, higher production farms that have these kinds of issues or something like that, to where it's like an even bigger application of the drone like base like technology, then this could be possibly a very large business. Otherwise, it might be hard for you to find enough customers for something like this to basically generate like enough revenue on a consistent basis for you to basically build a very big business. Again, there's nothing wrong, just like the first caller, is that of you building like a smaller business, it's just that remember, it's going to take just as much time for you to build a small business as it takes for you to build a big business. And the risk reward ratio is actually not that different. Because if you think about it, at the end of the day, all businesses is a collection of people in contracts, and people are unpredictable. So, you know, a lot of people think that, oh, if I'm running a small business, it's a little bit less risky. And that's a little bit safer. It really is not that much safer than you trying to go for broke and build like a very large business. Because, again, there's just so many variables, it's just you're counting on people. And so the probability of you lose, you know, the business going out of business is very high, irrespective of how big you go after it. So oftentimes, it just makes sense to just go after a very big opportunity. So I challenge you to try to think bigger with this type of idea because the technology certainly has the potential to scale in a very wide array of markets.

 

Ryan Micheletti  10:44 

Yeah, for me, I mean, it's unclear, like what the business model is here. There's a lot of pretty big assumptions in the pitch and in what you're doing and I'm not entirely sure that the problem and the solution are really aligned. Like, is there a problem with pythons? You know, in the Everglades? Yes, there is undoubtedly, the solution you're making is to basically identify more of these these animals that are invasive, you know, assuming that people are somehow financially motivated to control these quad copters and spend time tracking and using RFID tags to find them. That's sort of debatable, you probably have to pay someone to do that, which makes this more expensive and also less scalable. But the bigger question I have is, like, is the problem that these you know, I'm just gonna call them forest rangers or biologists, right? The ones who are like trying to remove them? Is the problem really, that there's not enough of these animals to remove? Or is the problem that they don't have enough funding to do it at scale? Because what you're essentially doing is you're you're going to the biologist, and you're saying, Hey, here's like 1000 more pythons that we've been able to tag for you like now you can go and remove them. And I would imagine that they're probably Like some government agencies are overextended, underfunded, undermanned for the project that's in front of them where it's like, their issue might not be that they need to find more pythons, their issue is that they might not have enough of a budget to deal with the existing amount of pythons that they already have to try and remove. So I would dive in a little bit deeper. And I agree with Mike, I don't think that the biologist is really your customer archetype here. But the problem is this, right? This is definitely something where it's like, you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, you know, especially like with the Florida Everglades and the pythons, right, that, you know, if you were to pivot to say, like getting rid of mongoose on pineapple farms in Hawaii, right if let's just assume that that's like a more profitable business and they're willing to pay you to do that. You might not care about mongoose in Hawaii and pineapple farms, right? You probably care about the Florida Everglades and so you should never pivot On the purpose of your life and what you want to do, and so you got to ask yourself, are you going to pivot the business? So you focus on an area that that could potentially make money? Or are you still going to focus on the same area, you're just going to pivot on the type of solution that you're bringing to market? And so that's really just a question for you to answer.

 

Dustin Betz  13:19 

Couldn't agree more with your comments, Ryan, as well as a echoing something earlier that that Mike said, basically, I mean, I really think that the use case for this business here, it's going after invasive animals to tag them. I definitely think looking at an agricultural sector where there's an animal pest could be the paying customer that would actually support the technology that we're talking about here.

 

Rachel Sheppard  13:42 

Awesome. All right. Great feedback. Cecile from Oslo says my company lingo is disrupting language learning with an AI chatbot for beginner to intermediate language learners. Our chat bot fills a gap left open by apps that focus too heavily on remote memorization. Thanks to our bots calm versation ality, and its ability to easily shift between multiple languages when the user is stuck.

 

Mike Suprovici  14:05 

This is a pretty tough space, I would like to know like that you've been able to somehow verify that the AI is that good that it can actually have an entire conversation with you in a different language and interpret things right? You know, generally right now, it seems like and again, I could be proven wrong, that the AI itself is just not not as good. So you essentially almost have to kind of script a lot of this stuff. So you kind of have to kind of create like some very canned responses that the person can have. And you have to kind of interpret what they type in unless you essentially give them like these three options, and then you kind of have this conversation that way, right? In which case the experience might not be as good. And so language learning is is an important market. Duolingo is obviously doing pretty decent in it, but it's a really hard one to kind of get one Right, because after a certain point, a lot of these tools struggle until you get to like, kind of like the conversation piece. So in your pitch, I think it's imperative that you basically go in and talk about, what's your kind of like a little bit of your secret sauce here, so that people automatically don't bucket you in with like, Duolingo and all the other like apps that are in the app store that are doing pretty good, but not necessarily all of them are breaking out with the exception of maybe Duolingo. Right? And so they're going in between languages, and kind of threw me off because when someone's learning the language, like maybe they're, they're not trying to, like learn another one, but it could have meant just, you are trying to, like translate from one language to another. So just be very specific with that when it comes to your pitch. Yeah, you know, I would definitely start with one language because, you know, do I think throwing AI at this could help, right for from a chatbot perspective. Yeah, it certainly could. Right, but Like, you know, it's just such a buzzword these days that you really got to like, explain why, right? Why does using AI matter? And how does make a difference? And then the other thing, too is like, how do you know that a chatbot is really the best solution, right? Or is better than what's out there already? Right? Because you're comparing it to rote memorization. And I think that to a certain extent, that's been the standard because maybe it's effective. And like we you need to go out and prove and what users will pay you for is that we're 25% better or we'll help you learn the language like 50% faster, right and more effective because of our innovative chatbot. The assumption ism, you know whether or not AI would make it better, it's more about like, is an AI chat bot, really the best method and the fastest method? I think people are just looking for the fastest and easiest way to learn a language. And although like AI chat bot sounds like it could be a good solution. You're gonna want to prove that it's A much better solution to get people to pay you for it. Yeah, this is a great opportunity to basically start either creating your own studies working with researchers on these studies or citing various different studies and just talk about that right like it increases this type of learning by 25% like like Ryan said, and then you need like a why now and now, because of the advances in machine learning combined with XYZ other thing plus the adoption of premium paid apps or whatever the time is now to basically build this right and make this happen.

 

Rachel Sheppard  17:39 

Fantastic. Okay, next step is john from St. Louis. He says my company air refueling tanker transport or art to fills a gap in the D o DS air to air refueling tanker fleet. So after by global militaries are commercial AR supports military tankers and crews during peacetime As the nation's only commercial AR outlet, we deliver a civilian to military capability, support and training needs in excess of 200,000 hours annually. Our secret sauce is our nine aircraft, 90 k hours and 250 years of AR know how.

 

Mike Suprovici  18:20 

So I'm gonna default to Ryan because of his military background, the actual technology but for me, like on the pitch, it's really unclear kind of what what exactly you do. Are you like a refueling service essentially, that you're kind of like selling to the military where essentially you own the planes and you kind of like refuel a mid air or something like that. Is this like, autonomous refueling? What is it exactly that that you do? is really, really important, right to basically talk about it, it's like, and also kind of like, why that's better right now than what's currently available, but like it saves this much time. This much money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you really got to kind of talk a little bit more about what the actual solution is, I mean, because it could very well be like, basically just like a service business where essentially you have like the planes, you're kind of renting out time for that, or you have like an actual product that basically refuels planes better than anybody else. So just a thought on that. So, Brian, what are your thoughts? Yeah, well, I mean, I really love the concept here. And it sounds like you've been doing this for a while. So I think just kind of like, retooling the pitch a little bit can make it a little bit more clear. I mean, the privatization of the military is a real thing. Right. So I think you're actually writing a good trend here, which is that, you know, as the military expands to more of a contractor model, right, they're gonna need solutions that can interface with these private companies and private organizations. Right. And so I definitely see this as a big opportunity. It sounds like you've got kind of like, some defensive In the sense that you've got experience doing this, you're already doing this as well. You know, the question does you become like the America gas or for you know, military and private contractors where you can just go and refill or is this something where like, you can create more of a product around it. This is definitely something I would recommend going and trying to get like a grant through the the government, there's lots of different grant opportunities through like AF works and things like that. I'd also be interested in learning a little bit more about this. No, so if you have a deck, email it to me, my email is Ryan at f5. co, and I'll see if I can stack some resources on top of this. The key here though, is whether it's in your pitch or just in general, you know, do you want to be like a product business? Or do you want to be like a service business? With a product business? It can scale much faster because there's no relationship between the amount of people that you have, and the amount of customers that you have so for Apple like Google, right? There's no relationship between the amount of engineers that are at Google and the amount of people that use Google, right. Whereas if you're like a service business, there's essentially a direct relationship between the number of employees that you have, and the number of customers that you have. So now let's use real estate as an example, right? a real estate broker can only manage 30 or 40 clients, let's say a year, right. And so in order for that brokerage firm to scale, they need to add more real estate brokers, but that the ratio of one to 40 basically stays the same, right? And so when you're looking at this, so it's much more difficult to scale essentially, right? Because the people in the overhead kind of go up with time. And so there's the margin, essentially, even though you can optimize it around the edges is going to stay kind of the same. Whereas if it's like a product based business, right, that can scale, then there's no relationship there and therefore it can be infinitely more profitable and, you know, reach more people and less support and all that right. So those are two things that you probably want to just like think through as you kind of think about this offer.

 

Rachel Sheppard  22:06 

Fantastic. All right. Next up is Clemente from Montreal. My company tester is building an online marketplace to help clinical researchers find test subjects for trials. Currently test subjects struggle to find research projects, which are too often listed on isolated University websites or even Craigslist. While researchers don't attract enough applicants to actually be selective. We give researchers a central hub to list their trial opportunities and a test subjects a central place to find them.

 

Mike Suprovici  22:37 

This is actually pretty interesting. My mind immediately goes to how big is this market? You know, I like how you kind of talk about like the universities and websites obviously, that's alludes to a large market, but there's probably some data out there I would put that in the pitch. Because I don't know if this is like something where it's like okay, you can generate like $5 million a year doing this or this is like Get $50 million a year type of opportunity. And that's really the difference between something that's like venture scalable, that investors would be interested in, or just something that, you know, could become a really nice business for you and your friends and family. So, again, I think that if there is information out there, you definitely want to talk about the market size. And that's, that's the main thing I thought was missing. Yeah, also, think about like the frequency of this use case, and how that would work. Right? It's okay for it to be low frequency. You know, Airbnb is technically a low frequency. But how many researchers how often are they putting out like, requests for for testers on a regular basis? And what are the criteria for those testers and like being able to kind of like, match them and do they have to be close to that location is there like a location component to this as well? That's like important, like really thinking through like the dynamics of like the marketplace is really, really important. We'll take a look at that kind of like, what does the quality of the transaction look like? Right? Like, how much margin could there be in a transaction like this? Right? I know that researchers have several like a budget, but those budgets are capped. So it's unclear to me how much you can actually charge on their budget to basically make this happen. And so what does that look like? Right? Like, what do the unit economics kind of look like that. And for a marketplace, you kind of have to talk a little bit about that. I know this is like a pitch that's like a one minute pitch or whatever. But you kind of want to talk about like how you thought through like, the unit economics of the transactions in something like this, so that people can see that back to Ryan's point, just how big of an opportunity is right? Like it can make a case that the transaction quality is extremely high here. And there's a lot of people that want this and it can go like scalable Galway can be a very large business and it's very, very interesting.

 

Dustin Betz  24:59 

I think it's An interesting, you know, uvp might be on the actual tester side so that the subject side maybe thinking about like, what are the criteria that these researchers so the other side of the market need from their test subjects because yeah, there might be really specific ways maybe certain fields ways to kind of filter people that you're kind of unique offering would be for these test subjects who could be hard to find through your platform, you're going to be able to have access to those people in some way.

 

Rachel Sheppard  25:30 

Awesome. In our last one for the day is going to be from Rhoda Rhoda from St. Paul says my company Pete is launching a geo fencing app for young tech savvy shoppers that solve the issue of lost purchasing opportunity to see our sales alert system. For example, when an app user walks by a Target store a notification will pop up on their phone informing them about any ongoing sales.

 

Mike Suprovici  25:51 

So there are several companies that are doing this right and they're looking at this so in your case, because the market is relatively like sad Related, I think you need to kind of like mentioned some folks and kind of mentioned a little bit of differentiation in this. Also, is this basically like an SDK that goes into like the mobile app, or a library or whatever that goes into, like the local like, like a Macy's mobile app or Gabs mobile app or something like that? Or is this kind of like a central app where people just go and shop and they also have this kind of like location based component to it as well. So I think that that's really important to kind of think through when you position this right. So is this essentially like a consumer play where you're trying to get like as many people as you can to this app, and then getting the stores on board to basically advertise on it essentially, which is like, just very highly targeted? Or is this basically a SAS b2b play where you basically sell this as electron SDK, you put this into like the, you know, the stores mobile app, and then you are able to provide them with like, some form of analytics and they pay you for it. And so that that's really important. And you probably want to play along this kind of like depth of retail right now and just say, look, this actually helps drive people to the store because it lets them know things and blah, blah, blah. And I think that's also kind of important to think about. But the key here is just really like hone your pitch around like who the actual customer is for something like this. Because you know, the mall operator is fundamentally different than like the store operator a gap versus like it being like a consumer place it really like, like specialize on which one? Yeah, so one of my very first startups was very similar to this except that it had dealt with restaurants, rather than retail. And there's a couple issues right one was around like the go to market. Obviously, it's a little bit different going to a target and a local restaurant, but I'll just give you some kind of tips to help you avoid some pitfalls. So one is, this is something where because the market is saturated, and because Really, in order to stand out, you kind of need to prove a bunch of assumptions and actually make significant traction before you can really convince anyone to give you money. Whether it's a customer or an investor, you're gonna need someone on the team that's technical, that can code something to get you to the point where you can actually prove this through traction. And you don't necessarily need to have, you know, a tech solution to prove some of these assumptions. I think that there's ways to do it, you know, without building tech, but the problem is, like, even if you were to prove them out, right, investors are still going to want to put money behind something that's a little bit more proven. And so you actually have to get further along than other companies, arguably, in order to convince an investor to invest in this space, which by the way, has a ton of dead bodies and landmines written throughout it. Right. And so I would also go back and I would look at probably the thousand plus companies and I'm not even kidding you, most of them, probably Probably you won't be able to find their story online. But I guarantee you, as a person who has gone down this path, there are many of them. You want to find out what didn't work, and what you can do that's better. And I think, to something that we talked about a little bit earlier with a different company, maybe there's some kind of timing, you can make, like why now, like, you kind of mentioned a little bit like tech savvy shoppers or for young people, like, could you make the tick tock of retail, sales apps, right, versus like back at Back in my day, when we used to do this, we did it through Facebook. And so I think like, there could be something to that, like market timing and new technology. But at the end of the day, like this is something that you're going to really have to get some breakthrough traction, to leave the fears that investors have of investing in this space. 

Rachel Sheppard  29:49 

Fantastic. Awesome. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted ideas for today. We really appreciate it and we'll see you next time.

 

Mike Suprovici  29:56 

All right, everyone, goodbye.

*  *  *

Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $950M in funding, and building products people love across over 185 cities worldwide.

See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey

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